Congressional Investigation Reveals Federal Research Funding Underwrote China’s Expanding Nuclear Program

The United States unknowingly funneled research funding into China’s nuclear industry. On December 17, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a report revealing that over the past two years, the Department of Energy had funded research collaboration between American and Chinese scholars who are associated with Beijing’s military, including thousands of nuclear-related research projects and papers.

The report, which follows previous congressional investigations into U.S.-China academic ties, highlights the role of American higher education and research in fueling Beijing’s rapid military-build up and burgeoning nuclear program.

Shared Research Covered Nuclear Weapons Technology, Advanced Energy Technologies

The report notes that Department of Energy (DOE) financed more than 4,300 academic papers and experiments related to nuclear technologies written by American and Chinese scholars, working together, between June 2023 and June 2025. Roughly half of the papers listed have Chinese authors affiliated with military or industrial entities. These include China’s key state laboratories, which receive direction from the central government, entities responsible for cyberattacks and human rights abuses, several of China’s national defense universities, and firms identified by the Department of Defense as being part of China’s military defense industrial base.

The investigation follows a series of congressional inquiries into U.S.-Chinese academic collaborations fueling China’s military. In a report released last year, the same committees found that various federal agencies had directed hundreds of millions in research funding over the past decade to American scholars working with Chinese peers on research into hypersonic weapons, nuclear technology, and artificial intelligence.  

China’s Joint Research With the U.S. Is More Than Academic

Despite its nominally civilian status, China’s academic research ecosystem maintains a critical role in fueling Beijing’s ongoing military modernization efforts. Aiming to fulfill Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping’s desire to build a mechanized, technically savvy military by 2027, Beijing has poured resources into its science and technology pipeline while calling on all levels of government to accelerate the process of transforming civilian research into military technologies. These efforts have been coupled with Beijing’s overall reforms to its science funding and management process, which have increasingly prioritized applied research with the aim of aligning the country’s science funding to support its domestic defense industrial base.

These trends have partially driven China’s desire to strengthen scientific ties to the United States, both to maintain access to cutting-edge discoveries and cover shortfalls within its own domestic scientific sector. Despite concerns over Beijing’s record of academic espionage, the Biden administration renewed an academic agreement with China last December to allow scholars from both countries to collaborate on federally funded basic research — the type of work that China has long struggled to fund and that remains critical to developing emerging technologies.

The United States Must Curtail Sensitive Research Partnerships With China

While the number of papers discovered by the congressional investigation remains notable, they also reflect the incentives of Washington’s science funding grant process. In prioritizing publication metrics to maintain access to funding, American scholars were motivated to pursue partnerships with top Beijing-supported peers to land their work in academic journals. 

To combat this trend, both Congress and the Trump administration should enact stronger oversight of federal science funding flowing to strategic research sectors and reactivate programs such as the China Initiative, a Department of Justice effort to disrupt Chinese espionage networks within higher education. Moreover, the administration should ensure that any projects funded under the auspices of official U.S.-China research collaboration are immediately frozen with the intention of being canceled.

Jack Burnham is a senior research analyst in the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Jack and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow Jack on X @JackBurnham802. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.