Republican lawmakers have introduced the GATE Act to shut foreign adversaries out of America's most sensitive research facilities, after years of warnings that thousands of Chinese nationals walked freely through the same labs developing cutting-edge military technology.
Rep. Pat Harrigan of North Carolina is leading the House effort, with Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas backing a companion bill in the Senate. The legislation would prohibit nationals from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba from accessing any of the 17 national laboratories run by the Department of Energy. It would also revoke security clearances already granted to covered foreign nationals, a provision that signals just how deep the existing exposure runs.
The bill, exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, requires both the DOE and the FBI to sign off before any covered foreign national sets foot inside a national lab. A narrow waiver process exists, but only the secretary of energy, consulting with the director of the DOE's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, can grant one, and only after determining that the benefits "outweigh the national security and economic risks to the United States." Congress must be notified within 30 days every time a waiver is issued.
The numbers behind the legislation are staggering. In fiscal year 2025 alone, roughly 1,900 Chinese nationals received short-term visits to national labs. Another 1,300 held long-term research assignments onsite. About 2,100 were formally employed at some facilities. All told, Chinese nationals accessed DOE facilities, physically and remotely, more than 5,000 times in that single fiscal year.
Those figures surfaced in a letter Cotton sent to the Department of Energy in late June, in which the senator expressed "serious concern" about the DOE's "continued practice of permitting foreign nationals from China to access facilities across the National Laboratory complex and work alongside American scientists."
And the problem did not start yesterday. A 2024 disclosure by the Senate Intelligence Committee, filed as part of Senate Bill 4443 in the 118th Congress, revealed that approximately 40,000 citizens of foreign countries, including more than 8,000 from China and Russia, were granted access to national labs in fiscal year 2023 alone. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa flagged at the time that at least several hundred Iranian nationals also gained entry to these sensitive sites.
Ernst went further, warning that China "has been actively recruiting scientists from National Labs to work on their own military programs and stealing our research using visiting students and scholars." Figures compiled by her office and reported by the New York Post showed that between September 2021 and August 2024, the Biden administration period, 28,028 Chinese nationals, 304 Iranians, and 1,608 Russians visited DOE laboratories. Nearly 30,000 trips to American research facilities by nationals of hostile governments, across just three years.
Harrigan framed the GATE Act as an overdue correction. He told the Washington Free Beacon:
"America's National Laboratories are home to some of the most sensitive and valuable research in the world, and the same countries working to steal American technology should not have routine access to the facilities developing it."
He added that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have spent years targeting American innovation to close the technological gap with the United States. The bill, Harrigan said, "puts a clear safeguard around critical American research while preserving access when our own counterintelligence professionals determine it serves the national interest."
Cotton was blunter. He told the Free Beacon:
"Scientists from our adversaries like Russia and China should be nowhere near our national laboratories. Foreign nationals in our country's most sensitive labs pose a clear threat to our national security and should end immediately."
The alarm bells have been ringing for years inside the national security establishment. Paul Dabbar, who served as undersecretary of energy for science from 2017 to 2021, warned after leaving office that the Chinese Communist Party had woven itself into the U.S. government's research and innovation efforts, stealing sensitive research that was then used to fuel Beijing's military projects.
Dabbar's warning, Ernst's disclosures, Cotton's petition, and now the GATE Act itself trace a clear arc: officials across multiple years and multiple roles have flagged the same vulnerability, and the federal government kept the doors open anyway. The DOE continued granting access. Foreign nationals from adversarial nations continued walking through.
The GATE Act's structure reflects a lesson learned from that failure. Rather than relying on the DOE to police itself, the bill forces the FBI into the clearance chain, requires a formal national-security finding for every waiver, and puts Congress on notice each time an exception is made. Previously granted clearances do not survive the bill's passage, they are revoked outright.
The five countries named in the legislation, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba, represent the most persistent state-level intelligence threats to the United States. The 17 DOE national laboratories they would be locked out of conduct research spanning nuclear weapons, energy technology, advanced computing, and materials science. These are not university lecture halls. They are the facilities where America develops and tests some of its most closely guarded capabilities.
Several questions remain unanswered. The bill's formal number has not been publicly assigned. No Democratic co-sponsors have been named, though the legislation is described as likely to draw bipartisan support. No committee hearing has been announced. And it remains unclear what specific incidents, if any, prompted the timing of the bill's introduction beyond the accumulating weight of the access statistics themselves.
But the core question the GATE Act poses is not complicated. For years, tens of thousands of nationals from countries actively working to steal American technology walked into the labs developing that technology, with federal permission. The only surprising part is that it took this long for Congress to try to lock the door.
