The House Select Committee on China and House Education and Workforce Committee on Thursday released a report detailing Harvard University’s troubling relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including entities linked to human rights abuses.
“The American people expect our nation’s leading universities to protect American research and innovation, and never advance the interests of our nation’s adversaries. Right now, Harvard is failing to deliver on that expectation,” said Select Committee Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI).
“From allowing violence against anti-China protestors to collaborating with entities linked to the PLA, Harvard has made serious mistakes and must act now to prevent more. It should use this investigation as a catalyst for significant reforms that end CCP influence on campus and prioritize secure American research,” he said.
“Harvard created an entity in a blatant attempt to get around federal foreign funding disclosure laws. That’s unacceptable, especially given Harvard’s history of failing to comply with these requirements,” said Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI).
“The American people deserve to know where foreign money is flowing on our college campuses. This investigation is the latest in a long list of reasons Congress should pass the DETERRENT Act and make sure universities follow the law,” Walberg said.
The Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act is a bill that would require institutions of higher learning to file annual disclosure reports with the Department of Education detailing gifts and contracts from foreign sources. The bill would completely ban contracts with foreign “countries of concern” unless the university obtains a waiver from the Department of Education.
Some universities and educational groups are strongly opposed to the DETERRENT Act because they believe it would interfere with scientific and academic collaboration between the U.S. and other countries, especially China, which has massive research and academic networks. They also worry that the stringent reporting requirements of the Act would be burdensome, and could expose scholars to harassment.
Moolenar and Walberg also urged passage of the Securing Innovation and Research from Adversaries (SIRA) Act, which would ban federally-funded research collaborations with entities of concern, prominently including those linked to the Chinese military.
Since China’s “military-civilian fusion strategy” puts most major universities and laboratories at the disposal of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the SIRA Act could effectively ban most federally-funded research programs from collaborating with China.
Academics and researchers chafe at the prospect of losing productive collaborations, but the House report – entitled Compromised Independence: CCP Influence at Harvard University – argued that it was a sacrifice worth making, because the Chinese Communist government has gained far too much influence over universities like Harvard.
The report documented how Harvard has allowed CCP officials to dispense propaganda on campus without rebuttal, and even allowed thugs to harass the few brave students who stood up to the Chinese Communists.
The report outlined “a system where deference to CCP interests overrides American economic, technological, and national security interests,” often with a careless attitude toward American laws and human rights standards.
“Harvard furthers the CCP’s interests across multiple domains, including the CCP’s technological and scientific aspirations,” the report said, highlighting “a series of research relationships between Harvard-affiliated researchers and researchers at universities linked to China’s defense research and industrial base.”
The report noted that many of the concerning relationships it discovered were “legal, operate with minimal transparency, and persist despite clear strategic risk to U.S. national security.”
“Harvard can take proactive measures to ensure its faculty, research, and institutional integrity do not further China’s defense research and industrial base. But it chooses not to,” the authors lamented, proposing legislation like the DETERRENT and SIRA Acts as the solution.
The House report offered copious evidence that Harvard knows its activities could further China’s interests at the expense of America’s – and it takes deliberate steps to evade the small amount of oversight and policing provided by current laws, such as creating “a third-party entity staffed by its own employees that appears to be designed to circumvent gift reporting requirements.”
The report noted that the Biden administration gave Harvard a clean bill of health in an investigation near the end of President Joe Biden’s term, but a subsequent review of the investigation in April 2025 raised “questions of veracity,” as the Department of Education found Harvard provided “incomplete and inaccurate disclosures” that were accepted by the previous administration. The April 2025 review “remains open” to this day.
The House committees said that when they asked Harvard for a simple list of its Chinese collaborators, Harvard stalled for months, claiming it was too “cumbersome” to respond. Committee investigators later found the relevant databases on their own, used its search functions to easily create the list of contributors, and found themselves with a spreadsheet that only contained 50 entries, which they appended to the report published on Thursday.
Along similar lines, the report observed that Harvard has a tendency to “miss” government warnings about sanctioned Chinese entities and individuals by performing very exact searches for their names in government databases, and giving up rather quickly when no matches are found.
“The university should implement robust, multilingual due diligence protocols capable of identifying transliteration variations, subsidiary relationships, and defense affiliations,” the House report recommended.