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Miami, FL — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) released a statement calling for meaningful guardrails to help protect critical research, intellectual property, and innovations after the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice dropped charges against a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who failed to disclose his affiliation with the People’s Republic of China. In May 2021, Rubio and his colleagues raised alarm at the Biden Administration’s planned amnesty program to allow U.S. academics to disclose past foreign funding without fear of prosecution for their disclosures.
 
“President Biden is telling U.S. research centers, corporations, and colleges not to worry about Chinese espionage,” Rubio said. “The Chinese Communist Party sees this, and it emboldens them to do even more. Steal more secrets. Steal more technology. Steal more American jobs. This dangerous behavior jeopardizes our national security.”
 
“This is not a new problem, yet too many in Washington continue to turn a blind eye to Beijing’s systematic campaign to undermine America,” Rubio continued. “We must do everything possible to protect taxpayer-funded research from theft, diversion, and ultimately weaponization against our own long-term national interests. That starts by prosecuting those who lie about their affiliations to the Chinese Communist Party, and it will require a new focus and a new approach.”
 
In May 2021, Rubio offered an amendment to the United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) that would have established a counterintelligence screening process to protect the United States against the Chinese Communist Party’s and other adversaries’ economic espionage and efforts to misappropriate America’s intellectual property, research and development, and innovation efforts. 
 
“What I want you to understand is that this is not a minor security threat,” Rubio said on the Senate floor in May. “This is the number one priority of Chinese intelligence. This is their number one priority. This is what all of their agencies and all of their government is geared towards doing.” 
 
Unfortunately, Senate Democrats voted in lockstep to kill the Rubio amendment. 
 
Rubio ultimately voted against USICA because it failed to address many of the most serious challenges facing the United States in its competition with the Chinese Communist Party. Rubio, who previously outlined a bipartisan path forward on China, has long advocated an industrial policy to counter Beijing and stronger actions to confront the CCP’s malicious activities.