Two senior Republican senators are demanding the Trump administration shut the door on Chinese nationals who have been visiting, working at, and remotely accessing America's 17 federally funded National Laboratories, facilities that house some of the country's most sensitive research. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah sent a letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright laying out Department of Energy data they say reveals a "systemic exposure" of the labs to an adversary nation.
The numbers in the letter are not trivial. During fiscal year 2025 alone, Chinese nationals made roughly 1,900 short-term visits and undertook approximately 1,300 long-term research assignments at the labs. The DOE employed 2,100 Chinese nationals over the same period. And Chinese nationals logged more than 5,000 remote accesses to National Laboratory facilities, all as the New York Post first reported.
Cotton chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Lee heads the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Together, they sit at the intersection of the two jurisdictions that matter most here, intelligence and energy research, and they are telling the administration that the current arrangement is indefensible.
This is not the first time Cotton and Lee have raised the alarm. Back in January, Cotton and Senate colleagues wrote to Wright urging him to bar Chinese nationals from American laboratories outright. In March 2025, Cotton and allies introduced the Guarding American Technology from Exploitation Act, the GATE Act, which would ban nationals of China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia from the labs entirely.
The legislative status of the GATE Act remains unclear. What is clear is that the senators felt compelled to write again, this time armed with fresh DOE data that, in their view, makes the case even harder to ignore.
Their letter to Wright laid out a series of pointed questions. How does the DOE account for China's National Intelligence Law, which requires Chinese citizens, wherever they live, to cooperate with Beijing's intelligence services? Why does the department continue to allow Chinese nationals into the labs? How sensitive is the technology those individuals can access? And what restrictions, if any, are actually in place?
The concern is not hypothetical. Beijing's National Intelligence Law, enacted in 2017, obligates all Chinese citizens and organizations to "support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence work." That statute does not carve out exceptions for scientists conducting research at American government facilities. Cotton and Lee argue this legal reality makes every Chinese national inside a National Laboratory a potential conduit for Beijing's intelligence apparatus, whether that individual intends it or not.
The senators did not hold back about the scope of what DOE data reveals. Cotton and Lee wrote that the figures "represent a systemic exposure of our National Labs, including the American scientists who work there and topics they are working on, to an adversary determined to defeat the United States."
"These facts reflect severe vulnerabilities at our nation's premier and most sensitive scientific environments."
They added that China "is our main competitor in research and development and the race for emerging tech, where it seeks to surpass the United States by stealing American intellectual property and technologies." The accusation is blunt: for decades, the United States has voluntarily handed adversary-nation scientists access to the crown jewels of its research infrastructure.
The broader picture underscores the point. The New York Post reported in March that during the Biden administration, citizens of adversarial countries, China, Iran, and Russia, made close to 30,000 trips to National Laboratories. That figure spans multiple fiscal years, but the sheer volume suggests the problem did not emerge overnight. It accumulated, trip by trip, assignment by assignment, remote login by remote login, across administrations that either did not notice or chose not to act.
The Chinese government's espionage operations on American soil have been well documented in recent years. A jury convicted a man who ran a secret Chinese police station in New York City, one of several such covert outposts identified by federal investigators. The reach of Beijing's intelligence collection extends well beyond traditional spy craft.
Energy Secretary Wright has previously acknowledged that the DOE operates the Unclassified Foreign National Access Program, known as UFNAP. Under that program, citizens of adversarial countries must undergo counterintelligence assessments and other vetting before they can access the labs. Wright has pointed to UFNAP as evidence that safeguards exist.
Cotton and Lee are plainly unconvinced. Their letter treats UFNAP not as a solution but as a fig leaf, a bureaucratic process that, whatever its design, has still resulted in thousands of Chinese nationals gaining access to facilities the senators describe as among America's most sensitive.
The DOE has not publicly responded to the latest letter. Whether Wright will answer the senators' specific questions, or take the more drastic step of restricting access, remains an open question. The senators have made clear they believe anything short of a full ban is inadequate.
Several unanswered questions hang over the issue. Which specific laboratories are most affected? What research areas have Chinese nationals accessed? Are the 2,100 Chinese nationals employed directly by the DOE, or do they work through contractors and grantees? Has UFNAP's counterintelligence vetting ever resulted in denials or revocations? The senators' letter demands answers. So far, the public has none.
The lab-access issue does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a much larger pattern of Chinese intelligence operations targeting American institutions, technology, and personnel.
The Five Eyes intelligence alliance has warned that Chinese operatives are recruiting Western officials through LinkedIn job postings, using professional networking platforms as front doors for espionage. The methods are sophisticated and persistent.
Federal prosecutors have brought cases that illustrate the range of Beijing's tactics. An American was charged with acting as an unregistered Chinese agent and allegedly attempted to place a contact inside the Trump administration. Separately, a Shanghai-based American mogul was accused of running a nonprofit network to sabotage U.S. AI infrastructure for China's benefit.
Each case follows the same logic: Beijing exploits openness. It uses legal immigration channels, academic exchanges, professional networks, and, if Cotton and Lee are right, federally funded research laboratories to gain access to information and technology that serve China's strategic ambitions.
The senators' letter frames the lab-access question as part of this broader threat. They argue that the DOE's mission, advancing American scientific leadership, protecting national security, and safeguarding critical technologies, "can't be achieved when it's undermined by thousands of Chinese nationals" entering the labs each year.
Critics of blanket bans will argue that restricting access by nationality risks chilling legitimate scientific collaboration and alienating talented researchers. That argument has carried weight in Washington for decades. It is the reason the labs remain open to foreign nationals from adversary states in the first place.
But Cotton and Lee are asking a different question: At what point does the risk outweigh the benefit? When an adversary government compels its citizens by law to cooperate with intelligence services, the usual assumptions about academic openness no longer apply. A Chinese physicist at a National Laboratory may have no desire to spy for Beijing. China's National Intelligence Law does not care.
The GATE Act, if it advances, would resolve the ambiguity by statute. It would bar nationals of five adversary nations from the labs entirely. Whether Congress has the appetite for that step, and whether the administration will act on its own in the meantime, will test how seriously Washington takes the counterintelligence threat that Cotton and Lee have outlined in increasingly urgent terms.
The recent history of national security legislation in the Senate suggests that urgency on paper does not always translate into action on the floor. The senators will need more than letters to close a door that has been propped open for decades.
When your adversary's own law turns every one of its citizens into a potential intelligence asset, leaving the front gate open is not collaboration. It is negligence.
