News release
Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Santa Clarita, announced that his bipartisan bill, H.R. 7686, passed the House unanimously.
Co-led by Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Michigan, this legislation makes updates to the CHIPS and Science Act to clarify language that could have allowed the Chinese Communist Party to access taxpayer-funded research at U.S. universities, according to a news release from Garcia’s office.
“The CHIPS Act is only as strong as its defenses against foreign exploitation,” Garcia said in the release. “This bill eliminates confusing language in the CHIPS Act that could have allowed China to rob, replicate and replace our innovations with their own. It’s a direct, decisive move to ensure American taxpayer dollars aren’t funding our CCP adversaries. We can’t afford to be naive — this is about securing our competitive edge and protecting our nation’s intellectual property.”
Following extensive oversight by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee and the Select Committee on the CCP, it was discovered that foreign talent recruitment programs could be used by adversaries like China to secretly recruit unwitting researchers in the U.S. and gain access to sensitive data, the release said.
H.R. 7686 addresses this issue by clarifying the definition of “malign foreign talent recruitment programs” to prevent such exploitation, the release said.
