Clarification of Definition of Foreign Country for Purposes of Malign Foreign Talent Recruitment Restriction

Floor Speech

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Mr. LUCAS. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 7686) to amend the Research and Development, Competition, and Innovation Act to clarify the definition of foreign country for purposes of malign foreign talent recruitment restriction, and for other purposes, as amended.

The Clerk read the title of the bill.

The text of the bill is as follows: H.R. 7686

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, SECTION 1. CLARIFICATION OF DEFINITION OF FOREIGN COUNTRY FOR PURPOSES OF MALIGN FOREIGN TALENT RECRUITMENT RESTRICTION.

Paragraph (4) of section 10638 of title VI of division B of the Research and Development, Competition, and Innovation Act is amended--

(1) by inserting ``of concern'' after ``foreign country'' each place such term appears;

(2) by striking ``means--'' and all that follows through ``any program, position, or activity'' and inserting ``means any program, position, or activity'';

(3) by striking subparagraph (B);

(4) by redesignating clauses (i) through (ix) as subparagraphs (A) through (I), respectively, and moving such subparagraphs, as so redesignated, two ems to the left;

(5) in the matter preceding subparagraph (A), as so redesignated, by striking ``directly provided'' and inserting ``whether directly or indirectly provided''; and

(6) in subparagraph (I), as so redesignated, by striking ``; and'' and inserting a period.

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Mr. LUCAS. 7686, the bill now under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be here today to support H.R. 7686, which helps strengthen our research security.

Research theft is one of the single greatest threats to our competitiveness as a nation. It takes our hard-won innovation and puts it to work for our adversaries, hurting our economy and our national security.

This is no idle threat either.

The Chinese Communist Party has made it clear that they intend to surpass us as the global leader in science and technology, and they have no qualms about using intellectual property theft, forced technology acquisition, and other illicit means to do so.

The CCP uses our intellectual property to advance their own research and keep them at the leading edge of new technologies. After acquiring our research, they use subsidies and regulations that benefit Chinese companies, making it difficult for U.S. companies to compete globally.

According to some estimates, this is costing our economy between $200 billion and $600 billion a year. The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has been proactive in our response to this threat and has passed multiple bills to protect American research.

When we passed the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, we included a number of provisions to halt the theft of U.S. innovation. We prohibited Federal funding for any school that hosts Confucius Institutes, which are designed to spread CCP propaganda to students and researchers. We gave universities better tools to protect sensitive research from cyber theft. We created a dedicated office on research security at the National Science Foundation to help detect and combat foreign influence and theft.

We banned participation in malign foreign talent programs. These programs recruit researchers and provide funding, travel, and other benefits in exchange for access to research and intellectual property. We prohibited all Federal agency personnel and any researcher receiving Federal funding from participating in these talent programs.

As the government, labs, and universities began to implement this prohibition, it became clear that our definition of malign foreign talent programs needed to be updated. H.R. 7686 provides a clear, comprehensive definition that ensures that we are covering efforts by foreign countries of concern like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. This clarification will make it easier for universities and Federal research agencies to identify and address threats to our taxpayer- funded research.

I thank Representative Garcia for his work on this important bill. Research theft is a broad threat that is difficult to extinguish, and it is challenging to protect our research while still maintaining helpful international scientific collaboration.

I appreciate Representative Garcia's efforts to walk that line and improve our tools to stop research theft. I encourage all of my colleagues to support this important bill.

Mr. MIKE GARCIA of California. Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Lucas and the entire committee for bringing this very important bipartisan bill to the floor.

It has now been 2 years since the CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law, providing a much-needed kick-start to America's lagging semiconductor industry as we compete with an accelerating Chinese Communist Party threat in China.

The CHIPS Act was a good bill that I supported, but as I said during the markup of this legislation, a bill is only as good as its implementation and only as good as Congress' oversight of its effectiveness. The CHIPS Act only works if the investments are available to American enterprises and not available to our foreign adversaries, like the CCP.

Following great oversight work by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, it became clear that complicated and confusing language in the CHIPS Act would allow China access to American-paid, American-funded research.

This lack of clarity would allow China to use malign foreign talent recruitment programs in our universities and other research labs to recruit researchers to access this data, effectively getting our constituents to fund breakthrough research for the Communist Party.

The Chinese Government has a nasty tendency of doing what I call rob, replicate, and replace. They take our intellectual property. They replicate it. They make it slightly better, slightly cheaper, and then replace it on the open market and compromise our technical advantages.

These researchers in these universities may often be ensnared by China without even knowingly being ensnared and can unwittingly hand our enemies an advantage in technological advancements.

In order to address this, Congresswoman Stevens and I introduced H.R. 7686, which updates and clarifies the definition of ``malign foreign talent recruitment programs'' to protect our national investments.

My bill is a simple, noncontroversial, bipartisan solution that ensures our taxpayer dollars and the research they fund are being protected from the CCP and their espionage behavior.

I thank Chairman Lucas and the entire committee, again, for their support on this legislation. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, as you have heard today, H.R. 7686 is smart policy that will protect taxpayer-funded research from being stolen and misused by our adversaries. We want to give our scientific agencies and universities every tool they need to protect critical research. This bill does that and helps us better implement the CHIPS and Science Act.

I thank Representative Garcia for his work on this issue, and I urge all of my colleagues to pass this important piece of legislation.

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