One subject of the investigative report, called “Containment Breach,” is the U.S. Department of Energy.
Released by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the hefty new report “reveals a deeply alarming problem,” which is that the DOE has “failed to ensure the security of its research and it put American taxpayers on the hook for funding the military rise of our nation’s foremost adversary,” says Congressman John Moolenaar, who chairs the Committee on the CCP (December 17, 2025).
“The department, which oversees critical research and technological innovation, allowed research collaborations that were exploited by China.”
Front-row access
The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Tom Cotton, adds: “For years, Communist China has had front-row access to critical dual-use technologies and those directly related to next-generation military aircraft, electronic warfare systems, and radar detection…. America’s adversaries should not have premier access to sensitive technologies that could compromise our national security.”
Between June 2023 and June 2025, some 4,350 research papers that relied on funding from the Department of Energy entailed collaboration with PRC organizations. And more than 2,000 publications entailed collaboration “with entities within China’s defense research and industrial base.”
One of the examples discussed in the hundred-page report: in 2023 “researchers at the Oak Ridge National Lab and the University of Tennessee” conducted work on electronic conductivity in partnersip with “a Chinese military company named China Electronic Technology Group Corporation.”
CETC is a state-owned defense conglomerate and one of the largest military-industrial enterprises in the world, comprising more than 500 subordinate research institutes, laboratories, and subsidiaries. The company was listed as a Chinese military company by the Department of Treasury in 2020 and the Pentagon in 2021.
This case study and many more like it in the report underscore a deeply troubling reality: U.S. government scientists—employed by the DOE and working at federally funded national laboratories—have coauthored research with Chinese entities at the very heart of the PRC’s military-industrial complex. They involve the joint development of technologies relevant to next-generation military aircraft, electronic warfare systems, radar deception techniques, and critical energy and aerospace infrastructure—alongside entities already restricted by multiple U.S. agencies for posing a threat to national security.
Some of the research surveyed by the report has contributed to the development of Chinese supercomputers which, obviously, can be used in a wide variety of applications, “including biomedical research, genetic analysis, aerospace research, quantum cryptography, electronic-warfare simulations, and counterspace operations—directly reinforcing China’s civil–military fusion strategy” (p. 50).
An Associated Press story on “Containment Breach” stresses how the partnerships with China have given the People’s Liberation Army “access to sensitive nuclear technology….”
A real threat
Congress’s report elaborates the deficiencies, or nonexistence, of DOE safeguards.
And rebuts those who, for example, naïvely suppose that “exposure to U.S. superiority will discourage the PRC,” a form of the nothing-to-worry-about argument that I hadn’t heard of before. “The PRC’s goal is not to compete on equal footing—it is to achieve technological self-reliance in strategic sectors while hollowing out the West’s comparative advantage. Believing they will ‘give up’ after seeing U.S. capabilities fundamentally misunderstands the Party’s long-term strategy of asymmetric acquisition, not fair competition” (p. 87).
In its own peculiar way, the Chinese Communist Party confirms that we have reason to be concerned. Invited to comment on the report, Liu Pengyu, a Chinese Embassy spokesman, was dismissive: “A handful of U.S. politicians are overstretching the concept of national security to obstruct normal scientific research exchanges, a move that wins no public support and is bound to fail.”
Also see:
CETC: General situation of party construction
“Party group of CETC implements earnestly the order of ‘enhancing and improving party construction and developing political core role of party organization in state-owned enterprise in the spirit of reform and innovation,’ issued by general secretary Xi Jinping, makes great efforts to explore effective path of transforming the unique advantage of party construction into developing and competing strength in state-owned enterprise. Holding tightly the core bond of people, CETC devotes to build the road and bridge combined with organic fusion and mutual promotion between party construction work and core work. According to the principles of ‘quantities, assessable, effective, and improvement-focused’, CETC carefully constructs pattern of quantization and effectiveness system of party construction, and promotes party construction keeping pace with state-owned enterprise reform.”
