麻豆传媒映画

America has often created blue ribbon commissions to determine the causes of cataclysmic events like the 9/11 attack, JFK’s assassination, Pearl Harbor, Watergate, the Challenger explosion, and the 2008 “Great Recession.”

Another investigative commission, precipitated by an increasingly likely military conflict with China, may be closer than we care to imagine.

Despite our domestic political preoccupations, China’s People’s Liberation Army is preparing for conflict with the U.S. and has been actively engaging in hostile military acts against the Philippines and Japan, even as it has repeatedly violated Taiwan’s air and maritime space.

Admiral John Aquilino, Commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, that China’s increasingly aggressive actions, with Russian military support, have created “the most dangerous [situation] I’ve seen in 40 years in uniform.”

China, through its extensive financial ties with our research universities, has real-time access to what the U.S. Department of Education as “technological treasure troves, where leading and internationally competitive fields … are booming.”

Those technological treasure troves at our research universities may be assisting the CCP in its increasingly aggressive military posture against the U.S. and our allies.

FBI Director Christopher Wray and the bipartisan have repeatedly warned of China’s attempts to access America’s technological innovations developed at our research universities.

Despite these warnings, some of our most elite research universities continue to flaunt foreign funding .

Days ago, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland announced a with the University of Maryland (College Park) over UMD’s repeated failures to disclose ongoing research with Chinese tech companies in UMD’s applications for significant research grants from the U.S. Department of the Army and the National Science Foundation between 2015 and 2020.

Despite receiving hundreds of millions in annual taxpayer funding, UMD researchers failed to disclose their ongoing research funding from Huawei Technologies and Alibaba-owned Taobao Software, in violation of federal law.

UMD’s settlement agreement requires it to pay a mere $500,000 for its foreign funding disclosure failures – barely a parking ticket for UMD, given the size of its operations and the related federal grants it received.

The agreed-upon penalty only begins to offset the multi-year costs to taxpayers for the labor involved in the UMD investigation by attorneys and investigative personnel from multiple federal agencies.

Despite these disclosure failures, federal agencies have continued to award UMD grants and contracts with critical national security implications.

In 2024, UMD received more than million in federal grants and contracts, including a million grant from NSF for AI-related research, a million cooperative agreement with the , million from NASA to study sustainability technologies, and an additional million from NASA for collaborative research in Earth systems sciences.

In May 2024, the Department of Defense awarded UMD a contract worth up to to support the .

Why do UMD’s foreign funding disclosure failures matter?

Chinese companies such as Huawei and Taobao are subject to the CCP’s civil-military fusion policies, which require all Chinese companies to share all technologies that have potential military applications with China’s military-industrial complex.

Huawei is the world’s largest telecommunications company and poses a sufficiently serious national security risk to the U.S. that the Federal Communications Commission recently moved to Huawei from “playing any role in the [telecommunications] equipment authorization program.” In 2020, the FCC to U.S. communications networks, and in 2022, the FCC began .

Taobao Software is China’s largest online retail platform and is a strong competitor with U.S.-based retail and software platforms, including Amazon, Oracle, and Shopify.

According to UMD’s and , it was fully aware of its foreign funding disclosure obligations, even though it continues to “rel[y] on [principal investigator] certifications” of compliance with the federal government.

In other words, even after these disclosure failures, UMD continues to accept self-certification of compliance by principal investigators associated with UMD’s applications for federal grant awards.

The UMD investigation began in 2019 when the Education Department into UMD’s apparent foreign funding reporting failures.

UMD and other noncompliant research universities have no doubt been relieved that the UMD matter was allowed to languish until July 2024 - even though most of the relevant records had been provided by UMD to the Education Department and DOJ by 2020.

Ironically, other federal prosecutors may be skeptical about devoting so many years of tenacious investigative and prosecutorial resources for such a scant penalty.

John F. Kennedy’s senior thesis, “Why England Slept,” examined England’s pre-war refusal to both acknowledge and effectively address the rising Nazi menace.

For the U.S., it may or may not be too late to avoid the future need for the appointment of still another investigative commission to study a conflict with China in which the CCP’s military prowess was derived, in part, from federally funded research innovations at our universities.

Our political leadership should acknowledge and confront the odious role of some of our research universities in permitting the dangerous flow of America’s valuable research innovations to China, despite the CCP’s surging threat to America and our allies.