GOPs Press Defense Secretary on Federal Funds to Colleges Tied to Beijing

A group of Republican lawmakers is pushing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on federal funds flowing to U.S. universities with ties to Beijing.

Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and 56 of his GOP colleagues sent a letter to Austin on July 25, asking the secretary why federal funds were going to schools that are linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

“We have learned that DoD [Department of Defense] has awarded funding with contractual periods extending beyond October 1, 2023, to some universities, including a number of major state universities,” the lawmakers wrote, adding that all these institutions are currently carrying a program or institute “directly or indirectly funded, or materially supported” by the communist regime of China.

The timeline mentioned refers to a law that will go into effect in 14 months, restricting grants to any U.S. academic institutions hosting Beijing-funded programs.

The 9-page letter spotlighted Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes (CI) on U.S. campuses, which Beijing once called “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda setup.” Given their longstanding and formal ties to the regime’s foreign influence operations, the presence of CIs has raised serious concerns about China’s attempts to infringe on academic freedom and illicit technology transfer on American campuses since the mid-2000s.

Opponents of the Confucius Institutes rally in front of the Toronto District School Board on Oct. 1, 2014. (Zhou Xing/Epoch Times)

The lawmakers noted the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a massive bill that funds the military, which banned federal grants to any academic institution that hosts a Confucius Institute and “pressured most American universities to close Confucius Institutes on their campuses.”

“Confucius Institutes, however, are far from meeting their demise on our university campuses,” the Republicans wrote, citing a June report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) that warns that China has rebranded its