EXCLUSIVE: Ed and Workforce Chairman calls on Senate to pass DETERRENT Act after "disturbing" reports of CCP espionage at Stanford

THE LOWDOWN:

• House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) said that reports of “disturbing” infiltration by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at Stanford University are a “clear example of why the Senate needs to act quickly and pass the DETERRENT Act.”

• The bill the Michigan Republican was referring to — the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act — is bipartisan legislation that forces increased transparency for donations to American universities from foreign sources.

• Walberg’s remarks follow a bombshell investigation in the Stanford Review which found that “the CCP is orchestrating a widespread intelligence-gathering campaign at Stanford.”

• The university, for its part, responded to the report by denying none of the claims of Chinese espionage on campus.

House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) said that reports of “disturbing” infiltration by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at Stanford University are a “clear example of why the Senate needs to act quickly and pass the DETERRENT Act.”

Walberg made the call while giving exclusive remarks to the Washington Reporter. The bill the Michigan Republican was referring to — the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act — is bipartisan legislation that forces increased transparency for donations to American universities from foreign sources.

“The reports of the CCP infiltrating Stanford University’s research are disturbing but not surprising — it is exactly the type of widespread espionage House Republicans have been warning about for years,” Walberg said.

“This is just one clear example of why the Senate needs to act quickly and pass the DETERRENT Act,” he continued. “We should be loud and clear: malign foreign influence remaining undetected is a danger to both students and U.S. national security.”

The DETERRENT Act that Walberg wants signed into law slashes the foreign gift reporting threshold for colleges and universities from $250,000 to $0 from countries of concern, punishes colleges that fail to report foreign gifts with potential loss of Title IV funding, and closes a series of reporting loopholes.

Walberg’s remarks follow a bombshell investigation in the Stanford Review which found that “the CCP is orchestrating a widespread intelligence-gathering campaign at Stanford.”

“In short, there are Chinese spies at Stanford,” the report read.

Stanford is “academic target number one” for the CCP, due to the communist plan to “unseat the US as the dominant force in frontier technologies.”

The university, for its part, responded to the report by denying none of the claims of Chinese espionage on campus.

Some on Stanford’s campus have taken the threat from China seriously. Matthew Turpin, Larry Diamond, and Matt Pottinger — all of whom are affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford — penned a response piece in the Review, arguing that the university “is well ahead of many of its peers in researching, understanding, and calling attention to the challenges.

“We have been doing the hard work of mounting a sophisticated response,” they wrote.