The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided to ban collaborations between every U.S. scientist it funds and many Chinese research institutions and their employees. The new policy abandons NSF’s earlier attempt to balance the potential risks and benefits of such collaborations. But it puts the agency in step with actions taken earlier this year by the much larger Department of Defense (DOD) and with congressional Republicans, who assert that any interactions with China threaten national security.
The new policy, posted on Wednesday and still being digested by university administrators, relies on lists of so-called restricted entities maintained by DOD and other federal agencies. The lists contain the names of hundreds of leading Chinese universities, national laboratories, and other research institutions. Any interactions with “the employees of such restricted entities” is taboo, the NSF policy notes. There are a handful of notable omissions, however, including Tsinghua University, which last week announced it had hired away the 2025 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Omar Yaghi, from the University of California, Berkeley.
Two years ago, NSF’s chief of research security described how the agency wanted to preserve some collaborations with China while mitigating the possibility of economic or military espionage of vital U.S. technologies. “We cannot continue to lead the world in science and innovation if we are fixated on achieving zero risk related to research security,” explained Rebecca Keiser, now NSF’s chief of staff, in unveiling a new metric, called Trusted Research Using Safeguards and Transparency (TRUST), to “assess grant proposals for potential national security risks.”
But TRUST now appears to be history with respect to China and other countries deemed to pose a threat to U.S. national security. “NSF has determined research security risk mitigation for NSF-funded projects involving these restricted entities is not sufficient,” the new policy reads.
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed an even broader prohibition on research collaborations with China as part of a sweeping reform of how the government manages trillions of dollars in grants and contracts, including research funding. The OMB rules, called Uniform Guidance, would prohibit collaborations with entire “countries of concern” as well as foreign entities of concern. China is the most prominent country on that list, which includes Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Such a prohibition would ban any collaborations between U.S.-funded scientists and Yaghi, for example.
Representative John Moolenaar (R–MI), chair of the Select Committee on China in the House of Representatives, called NSF’s move “commendable and commonsense” in a press release yesterday and urged other federal agencies to “follow the lead of the Pentagon and NSF.” But many scientists think it’s a bad idea that ignores the benefits for both sides from U.S.-Chinese collaborations.
“This NSF policy and the likely new OMB regulations are definitely not good for U.S. science. Very damaging!” says Stanford University physicist Peter Michelson, who last year organized a petition signed by hundreds of Stanford faculty protesting Moolenaar’s attempt to insert language further restricting collaborations with China into a bill that provided policy guidance to DOD. Moolenaar failed, but he continues to advocate for such legislation.
Longtime China watcher Denis Simon is even more distraught. “The NSF policy gives Moolenaar an open playing field to put anybody on the [banned] list, and I think that’s eventually what will happen,” says Simon, former executive vice chancellor of a joint venture between Duke and Wuhan universities called Duke Kunshan University.
NSF is inviting comments on its new policy at [email protected] and plans to spell out the final version in the next version of its instructions to grantees, which goes into effect on 1 October. Research advocates are hoping it will address many of their questions about the policy.
One of the biggest is the definition of a research collaboration. Does it include casual conversations at a conference about publicly available research, or joint authorship on a paper in which the authors worked independently? The National Institutes of Health and NASA, for example, appear to be limiting their grantees’ freedom to co-author papers with foreign scientists. “Co-authorship is not necessarily equivalent to collaboration,” notes Kevin Wozniak of COGR, a nonprofit consortium of universities that tracks federal research policy. “But the National Institutes of Health calls it a factor” in deciding whether an interaction crosses the line, he notes.
The picture may become clearer on 15 July, when Keiser and her counterparts from NIH and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science are scheduled to testify before Moolenaar’s committee. But Simon, who is part of a group at the nonprofit Quincy Institute that advocates for the benefits of international research collaborations, doesn’t expect NSF to alter its policy significantly in response to community reaction.
“NSF until now has been very responsible in assessing the pros and cons of any interaction with China,” Simon says. “But in the current political climate, that’s no longer a tenable position for a federal agency.”
Correction, 22 July, 10:35 a.m.: This story’s wording has been adjusted to note that the ban on collaboration covers many Chinese institutions, but not “almost all.”