
DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins, right, speaks with Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu.
(Image credit – DOD)
DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins, right, speaks with Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu.
(Image credit – DOD)
For over three years, the Department of Defense has been responding to congressional direction aimed at securing the research it funds from potential exploitation by rival governments. While many federal agencies have stepped up their research security efforts, DOD’s moves have generally been more expansive, both because they extend to the protection of R&D geared toward military applications, and because Congress has given the department additional mandates.
Now, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is implementing a “Countering Foreign Influence Program” that involves assessing risks posed by researchers’ affiliations with foreign institutions, even for unclassified projects in fundamental research. While other science agencies have likewise expanded their use of disclosure policies to identify problematic conflicts of interest and time commitment, DARPA’s policy goes further by tying the review process to specific categories of foreign entities of concern.
Although DARPA stresses that projects deemed to carry high risk can still proceed with the appropriate approval, many stakeholders are seeking more clarity on the kinds of affiliations DARPA and other science agencies might deem problematic.
DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins announced the Countering Foreign Influence Program in a memorandum
The program’s reviews of funding applicants’ affiliations will cover all “senior/key personnel,” and the process places the most weight on their activities in the previous four years. In conjunction with the memo announcing the program, the agency released a “risk rubric”
If the project is assigned a “high” or “very high” rating, the applicant can propose risk-mitigation measures or alternate project personnel to reduce the rating to “low” or “moderate.” If the risk cannot be lowered to that level, the project can only proceed with approval from DARPA’s deputy director.
Factors that could lead to a very high risk rating include active affiliations with institutions the U.S. has placed export restrictions on, or participation in certain talent recruitment programs supported by foreign governments. Additional factors include whether the researcher is receiving funds from or has an active affiliation with entities connected to the governments of countries of concern.
An initial version
The FAQ also includes a question about why the policy applies to fundamental research, given that a 1985 presidential directive
In defining affiliations and funding sources deemed to carry risk, DARPA’s rubric broadly identifies governments and government-connected entities in countries that are a “strategic competitor” of the U.S., or that are a “country with a history of targeting U.S. technologies for unauthorized transfer,” a status abbreviated “CWHTUST.”
The rubric does not list strategic competitors or CWHTUSTs, though in similar contexts the U.S. government has often identified China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as top countries of concern. Congress has recently directed DOD to publicly identify talent recruitment programs and academic institutions that have engaged in various malicious practices or that take direction from military or intelligence agencies in countries of concern, but the department has not yet published such lists.
The U.S. government has generally objected to the Chinese government’s strategy of “military-civil fusion,” wherein civilian institutions in China are enlisted to support military goals to a far greater degree than is the case in democratic countries. Under a 2020 executive order
The DARPA rubric does contain specifics on a subset of institutions of concern, pointing to a 2020 executive order amended
The BIS “Entity List”
Over the past two years, BIS has added numerous institutions to the list, most based in China. These include companies and universities conducting R&D in areas such as supercomputing
Among the entities in other countries recently added to the list are various institutions implicated in missile programs in Iran and Pakistan, and chemical and biological weapons programs in Russia
The DARPA policy arrives at a time when many researchers are on edge due to the Justice Department’s high-profile prosecutions
At a meeting last month of the National Academies research security roundtable
“In addition to having a chilling effect on international collaborations potentially, [the guidance] also has increased the fear level, particularly for our principal investigators of Asian descent,” she said. Apparently referring to DARPA’s removed language about risk associated with friends and family abroad, she added, “Agencies are doing things among themselves, and the initial DARPA matrix, which fortunately was revised, had some things that caused a lot of fear.”
Kathryn Moler, dean of research at Stanford University, expressed a similar sentiment, saying, “There are definitely cases, not a small number, of people who are deciding not to engage in perfectly reasonable, helpful international collaborations because they just don’t want to take any risks right now.”
Responding to these concerns, Bindu Nair, director of DOD’s Basic Research Office, emphasized that DOD is still willing to support even risky international engagements, remarking:
What we’re asking for is honesty, so that it is not an individual researcher making a choice about whether or not they should engage with an individual in a different country, without knowing all the facts around it, and whether or not the Department of Defense, in my case, wants to fund that.
What we’re saying is disclose it to us, let us have that conversation with you. We take very seriously the guidance from [the White House] that says that when making those choices, there can be no ethnic or national or racial components.
Mike Lauer, head of extramural research for NIH, insisted that how the agency uses disclosed information today is “really the same way we’ve been doing it for many years,” saying it looks for “scientific overlap, budgetary overlap, commitment overlap, or significant financial conflicts of interest.” Rebecca Keiser, NSF’s chief research security officer, noted that NSF’s grant manual has a “very firm statement that disclosing international collaborations does not negatively impact the review of a proposal.”
Keiser did however identify a need for researchers to be able to distinguish between bona fide international collaborations versus potentially exploitative arrangements. She noted the 2019 JASON report