The Pentagon says 30 universities cut ties to foreign labs. It hasn’t said which ties.

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon says it went “30-for-30.” Two months after ordering 30 American universities to audit their ties to Chinese, Russian and Iranian research institutions or risk their federal research money, the Department of War announced Monday that every one of them had “fully mitigated” the relationships it flagged. It did not say what those relationships were.

The audits produced “more than 80 termination-related actions” across the 30 schools, the department said, including terminated relationships with institutions on its watch list and “precautionary terminations involving entities not specifically identified on the list.” The release singled out seven universities that “went above and beyond”: Oklahoma State, Penn State, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of South Carolina, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin and Virginia Tech.

What the department released, and what it didn’t

The announcement leaves most of the basic facts out. It does not name the foreign institutions involved, describe the agreements that were ended, say whether any research projects or students were affected, or break down the 80-plus actions by university. It also does not say whether any school lost funding or was found to have had a problem beyond the ties flagged at the start.

Nor has the department published the list of 30. When it ordered the audits on Aug. 17, the Pentagon said only that it had sent “formal notifications to 30 domestic academic institutions.” Fox News published the names that day, citing a U.S. official. Besides the seven praised Monday, the list included Georgetown, MIT, Harvard, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, New York University, Emory, the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego, and the Universities of Illinois, Minnesota, Cincinnati and Delaware, along with several smaller schools.

How the audits worked

The August notifications told schools to review academic, financial and research collaborations with institutions named under Section 1286 of the fiscal 2019 defense authorization law and with “organizations associated with rebranded Confucius Institutes.” To keep eligibility for future federal research funding, each school had to audit those ties, assess the exposure of “sensitive or export-controlled research,” adopt mitigation plans “including the termination of problematic partnerships,” and report back by Aug. 31, according to the department.

The watch list itself was updated in July. The fiscal 2025 Section 1286 list, published July 23, names 130 academic and research institutions in China, Russia and Iran that the department says “engage in activities that increase the likelihood of U.S. government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated.” The full list is posted on the department’s research and engineering site.

“On notice”

Officials framed Monday’s results as both a success and a warning. “Institutions that fail to meet research security standards are on notice: taxpayer dollars will not support institutions whose partnerships put the American warfighter or the Nation’s technological advantage at risk,” said Emil Michael, the under secretary of war for research and engineering. Joseph Jewell, the assistant secretary for science and technology, praised the seven schools for going beyond “minimum compliance.”

The department said it will keep updating the list and will “assess universities that retain problematic relationships with entities on the list,” working with the Armed Services and Appropriations committees and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. It did not say whether more universities will be audited.

The “precautionary terminations” are the detail to watch. They mean some schools ended relationships with institutions that are not on the department’s list, and the release does not say which partners those were or why they were dropped.

The Inquisitor asked the Pentagon press office, Penn State, the University of Southern California, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Texas at Austin and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities for details of the terminated relationships and the audit process. They did not immediately respond Tuesday.

Photo: The Pentagon, looking northeast toward the Potomac River. Master Sgt. Ken Hammond/U.S. Air Force, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.