United States Research Protection Act

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of my bill, H.R. 1318, alongside Congressman Kennedy of Utah, the United States Research Protection Act. I certainly thank Mr. Kennedy for his bipartisan leadership on this exciting and important topic and, frankly, an essential topic.

In the 117th Congress, we got the CHIPS and Science Act done. It included a lot of provisions focused on improving research security. This landmark law also included a prohibition on Federal researchers' participation in foreign talent recruitment programs sponsored by adversaries of the United States seeking to undermine our Nation's competitiveness. This is a serious and very real topic.

By installing safeguards and creating informed practices for our agencies, institutions, and researchers to implement, the CHIPS and Science Act is continuing the innovation ecosystem necessary to win into the mid-21st century.

From my vantage point of serving on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee and the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, I certainly understand the risks. Many of us who are delving into these topics have really glommed on to the risks posed to our research enterprise from adversaries like China and Russia.

The committees that are enabling us to operate in a bipartisan way have also explored the methods used to circumvent the safeguards that our country has put into place, including going through third-party countries.

This is why we want to ensure our research institutions have the best interests in mind, the best talent going to them, American talent, doing very innovative things, but they need to have the necessary clarity to faithfully implement research security measures that the CHIPS and Science Act put into place to protect our national research assets.

H.R. 1318 clarifies--it is always nice to clarify in legislation--the definition of malign foreign talent recruitment program so that our beloved universities and research institutions can readily ensure that their faculty members are not affiliated with malign foreign talent.

The National Science Foundation affirmed that our amendment, this adjustment, would improve their ability to ensure institutional compliance because people want to follow the law. They need the guardrails, and they need the clarity of the law. So even minor differences in definitions can have large consequences and can make implementation difficult. So we have the chance, and this year we are eager to make this one right and to strengthen the United States and to strengthen our research enterprise.

We have got a good example in this bill of how to address gaps in policy and improve the efficiency of our agencies. In this case our academic stakeholders are the ones who came to us, and they said that we have a problem with a definition in a law that we wrote. So in a bipartisan and in an informed process we worked with these stakeholders, and we worked through the committee, the agency, and certainly the NSF, to fix this issue.

This is how improving efficiency and accountability at our agencies should be handled, with stakeholder consultation and congressional action.

This bipartisan bill passed the 118th Congress. The Senate didn't act, but we are going to encourage them in the 119th to act when we urge all of our colleagues in the House Chamber to support this bill once again.

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Ms. STEVENS. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time to speak on this bill, and I am prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, I thank, again, my colleague, Mr. Kennedy for his were very affirming and wonderful remarks on the importance of this legislation.

I think from what everyone can hear today, we have bipartisan technical improvement legislation that will only strengthen our Nation and our research enterprise.

Mr. Speaker, I urge everyone to vote ``yes'' on H.R. 1318, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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