Congressional Testimony
Here's a look at documents involving congressional testimony and member statements
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Ex-Im Bank First VP Nominee Slade Testifies Before Senate Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs Committee
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 -- The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee released the following testimony by David Slade, President Trump's nominee to be first vice president and vice chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the U.S., from an Oct. 1, 2026, confirmation hearing:
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Thank you, Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Warren, and distinguished members of this Committee. I am very honored to be here today as President Trump's nominee to serve as the First Vice President and Vice Chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Thank you for the time many of you and your staff ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 -- The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee released the following testimony by David Slade, President Trump's nominee to be first vice president and vice chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the U.S., from an Oct. 1, 2026, confirmation hearing: * * * Thank you, Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Warren, and distinguished members of this Committee. I am very honored to be here today as President Trump's nominee to serve as the First Vice President and Vice Chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Thank you for the time many of you and your staffhave already spent with me in anticipation of this hearing.
I would also like to thank President Trump for the strategic priority he has placed on revitalizing American industry, for the central role he envisions for EXIM in delivering on that priority, and for the position he has asked me to serve as part of that strategic mission.
I am also immensely grateful to the President and Chairman of EXIM, Mr. John Jovanovic, for all his support, and for his great leadership of the Bank.
I'm pleased to say my son Tyler is here with me today, as are many of my EXIM colleagues, for whose support I am very grateful. My daughter Tara and my wife Marilyn unfortunately could not make it in person, but they are here with me in spirit.
Marilyn and I are New Englanders, and we met in high school in Beverly, Massachusetts, a town on the north shore of Boston. Incidentally, Marilyn's family are Italian immigrants who came to America in pursuit of a better life and the promise of the American Dream. Her grandparents worked in what was once a giant shoe factory in Beverly that employed thousands of hardworking people, giving Marilyn's family and so many others the opportunity to realize that Dream. But that factory is no longer in Beverly, a victim of offshoring, like too many other factories in too many other communities across America. This is a story I know all too well, and one of my many inspirations for ultimately working with the Export-Import Bank.
In retrospect, I think my journey to EXIM started for me as a child. For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by international affairs. I believe that's because I was born on a U.S. Army base in Germany, where my father was then serving. That fascination drove me to supplement my law degree from Harvard with a master's degree in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, thus preparing me for a career in international law and finance.
For more than three decades, I worked as an international finance attorney representing official credit agencies on complex infrastructure, manufacturing, mining, and energy projects all around the world. In what would become the first part of a 35-year career with EXIM, my very first client as a young partner at a major law firm was the Export-Import Bank, which I represented during all those decades on complex projects, all of which were central to the core mission of the Bank.
In 2019, I had the honor and privilege of being appointed as General Counsel of EXIM during the first Trump Administration. This was a difficult time for the Bank, as 2019 was the year when EXIM regained its Board quorum after a four-year lapse, and the year when it was last reauthorized.
On that note, I want to take a moment to thank Congress, especially many of the members of this Committee, for reauthorizing the Bank in 2019, and establishing the all-important China and Transformational Exports Program, CTEP which, as General Counsel, I had a key role in standing up for the Bank.
At the start of the second Trump administration, I had the opportunity to join the Transition Team for EXIM to help align the Bank's strategic priorities with President Trump's vision of revitalizing the American economy. Once Chairman Jovanovic was confirmed to serve at the helm of EXIM, I was honored that he asked me to stay at the Bank to continue implementing his four strategic priorities, namely: getting back to basics to make sure American companies of all sizes win around the world, unleashing American energy dominance with an all-of-the aboveapproach, strengthening American supply chain security, and ensuring America leads in the industries of the future, all to create and preserve well-paying U.S. jobs.
In short, I've had the privilege and opportunity to work with EXIM for 35 years, under six Presidents, half Republican and half Democrat. What I love about the Bank is that it is all about the mission, and my support for that mission has been the one constant theme throughout my entire career. I look forward to the opportunity, if confirmed, to support Chairman Jovanovic and help the Bank fully realize its potential to be a strong and effective tool for maintaining America's economic leadership, for strengthening our domestic industrial base, and for ensuring our nation remains the most prosperous and competitive country in the world, for decades to come.
Thank you again for considering my nomination, and I look forward to your questions.
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Original text here: https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/slade_testimony_10-1-26.pdf
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Thank you, Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Warren, and distinguished members of this Committee. I am very honored to be here today as President Trump's nominee to serve as the First Vice President and Vice Chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Thank you for the time many of you and your staff ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 -- The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee released the following testimony by David Slade, President Trump's nominee to be first vice president and vice chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the U.S., from an Oct. 1, 2026, confirmation hearing: * * * Thank you, Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Warren, and distinguished members of this Committee. I am very honored to be here today as President Trump's nominee to serve as the First Vice President and Vice Chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Thank you for the time many of you and your staffhave already spent with me in anticipation of this hearing.
I would also like to thank President Trump for the strategic priority he has placed on revitalizing American industry, for the central role he envisions for EXIM in delivering on that priority, and for the position he has asked me to serve as part of that strategic mission.
I am also immensely grateful to the President and Chairman of EXIM, Mr. John Jovanovic, for all his support, and for his great leadership of the Bank.
I'm pleased to say my son Tyler is here with me today, as are many of my EXIM colleagues, for whose support I am very grateful. My daughter Tara and my wife Marilyn unfortunately could not make it in person, but they are here with me in spirit.
Marilyn and I are New Englanders, and we met in high school in Beverly, Massachusetts, a town on the north shore of Boston. Incidentally, Marilyn's family are Italian immigrants who came to America in pursuit of a better life and the promise of the American Dream. Her grandparents worked in what was once a giant shoe factory in Beverly that employed thousands of hardworking people, giving Marilyn's family and so many others the opportunity to realize that Dream. But that factory is no longer in Beverly, a victim of offshoring, like too many other factories in too many other communities across America. This is a story I know all too well, and one of my many inspirations for ultimately working with the Export-Import Bank.
In retrospect, I think my journey to EXIM started for me as a child. For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by international affairs. I believe that's because I was born on a U.S. Army base in Germany, where my father was then serving. That fascination drove me to supplement my law degree from Harvard with a master's degree in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, thus preparing me for a career in international law and finance.
For more than three decades, I worked as an international finance attorney representing official credit agencies on complex infrastructure, manufacturing, mining, and energy projects all around the world. In what would become the first part of a 35-year career with EXIM, my very first client as a young partner at a major law firm was the Export-Import Bank, which I represented during all those decades on complex projects, all of which were central to the core mission of the Bank.
In 2019, I had the honor and privilege of being appointed as General Counsel of EXIM during the first Trump Administration. This was a difficult time for the Bank, as 2019 was the year when EXIM regained its Board quorum after a four-year lapse, and the year when it was last reauthorized.
On that note, I want to take a moment to thank Congress, especially many of the members of this Committee, for reauthorizing the Bank in 2019, and establishing the all-important China and Transformational Exports Program, CTEP which, as General Counsel, I had a key role in standing up for the Bank.
At the start of the second Trump administration, I had the opportunity to join the Transition Team for EXIM to help align the Bank's strategic priorities with President Trump's vision of revitalizing the American economy. Once Chairman Jovanovic was confirmed to serve at the helm of EXIM, I was honored that he asked me to stay at the Bank to continue implementing his four strategic priorities, namely: getting back to basics to make sure American companies of all sizes win around the world, unleashing American energy dominance with an all-of-the aboveapproach, strengthening American supply chain security, and ensuring America leads in the industries of the future, all to create and preserve well-paying U.S. jobs.
In short, I've had the privilege and opportunity to work with EXIM for 35 years, under six Presidents, half Republican and half Democrat. What I love about the Bank is that it is all about the mission, and my support for that mission has been the one constant theme throughout my entire career. I look forward to the opportunity, if confirmed, to support Chairman Jovanovic and help the Bank fully realize its potential to be a strong and effective tool for maintaining America's economic leadership, for strengthening our domestic industrial base, and for ensuring our nation remains the most prosperous and competitive country in the world, for decades to come.
Thank you again for considering my nomination, and I look forward to your questions.
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Original text here: https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/slade_testimony_10-1-26.pdf
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Trade & Development Nominee Wiggins Testifies Before Senate Banking Committee
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 -- The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee released the following testimony by Jeremy Wiggins, President Trump's nominee to be assistant secretary of the Treasury for international trade and development, from an Oct. 1, 2026, confirmation hearing:
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Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Warren, and Members of the Committee, I am honored to appear before you as the nominee to be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Trade and Development.
I am deeply grateful to President Trump for this opportunity to serve our country, and to Secretary Bessent ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 -- The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee released the following testimony by Jeremy Wiggins, President Trump's nominee to be assistant secretary of the Treasury for international trade and development, from an Oct. 1, 2026, confirmation hearing: * * * Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Warren, and Members of the Committee, I am honored to appear before you as the nominee to be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Trade and Development. I am deeply grateful to President Trump for this opportunity to serve our country, and to Secretary Bessentfor the confidence he has placed in me. I am also grateful to the Members and staff of this Committee who took the time to meet with me.
Those conversations were valuable, and if confirmed, I look forward to continuing them.
I want to begin by acknowledging my family. My parents, Cheryl and Mark, are here with me today. I would also like to recognize my sister, Jessica, and my grandparents, Patricia and Larry. Nothing I have done would be possible without them, and their love and support mean the world to me.
For the past year and a half, I have had the privilege of serving in Treasury's Office of International Affairs. Before joining Treasury, I spent my career in international markets: on the staff of the President's National Economic Council, as an Advisor to the President of the World Bank Group, and at two American financial institutions. Each of those roles prepared me for the position to which I have been nominated, and I am grateful to the mentors who gave me those opportunities.
More than eighty years ago, at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the Treasury Department helped design the international economic architecture that would define the postwar era. But the system has not kept pace with changing economic and strategic realities. Persistent global imbalances, unfair economic practices, and discriminatory measures aimed squarely against American firms have weakened our competitiveness and exposed vulnerabilities across our industrial base and critical supply chains.
Put simply, as Secretary Bessent has said, economic security is national security.
The international economic system needs real reform, and the office for which I have been nominated has a central role in delivering it.
Treasury's International Trade and Development portfolio carries the Department's responsibility for advancing American interests in international markets, trade, and development finance. The office represents the United States at the multilateral development banks, promotes private investment and economic growth abroad, oversees Treasury's technical assistance programs, and helps shape the Department's trade and investment policies.
If confirmed, three priorities would guide my work.
First, boosting U.S. growth globally. These efforts include expanding market access for American companies abroad, promoting U.S. exports, and confronting unfair and predatory economic practices.
Second, refocusing and reforming the multilateral development banks. These institutions are at their best when they are focused on their core mandate of raising growth and reducing poverty. This means promoting a stronger development agenda centered on broad-based growth, private investment, and core macroeconomic market-oriented reforms that lift productivity, growth, and ultimately, country self-reliance.
Third, using our economic tools to strengthen our ties with emerging economies.
The fastest-growing markets of the coming decades are choosing their partners.
The United States, with the deepest capital markets, the world's reserve currency, and the most dynamic private sector anywhere, should be the partner of choice.
Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before this Committee. I welcome your questions, and if confirmed, I look forward to working with you and your staff to deliver an economic policy that protects the interests of our Nation and its people.
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Original text here: https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wiggins_testimony_10-1-26.pdf
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Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Warren, and Members of the Committee, I am honored to appear before you as the nominee to be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Trade and Development.
I am deeply grateful to President Trump for this opportunity to serve our country, and to Secretary Bessent ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 -- The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee released the following testimony by Jeremy Wiggins, President Trump's nominee to be assistant secretary of the Treasury for international trade and development, from an Oct. 1, 2026, confirmation hearing: * * * Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Warren, and Members of the Committee, I am honored to appear before you as the nominee to be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Trade and Development. I am deeply grateful to President Trump for this opportunity to serve our country, and to Secretary Bessentfor the confidence he has placed in me. I am also grateful to the Members and staff of this Committee who took the time to meet with me.
Those conversations were valuable, and if confirmed, I look forward to continuing them.
I want to begin by acknowledging my family. My parents, Cheryl and Mark, are here with me today. I would also like to recognize my sister, Jessica, and my grandparents, Patricia and Larry. Nothing I have done would be possible without them, and their love and support mean the world to me.
For the past year and a half, I have had the privilege of serving in Treasury's Office of International Affairs. Before joining Treasury, I spent my career in international markets: on the staff of the President's National Economic Council, as an Advisor to the President of the World Bank Group, and at two American financial institutions. Each of those roles prepared me for the position to which I have been nominated, and I am grateful to the mentors who gave me those opportunities.
More than eighty years ago, at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the Treasury Department helped design the international economic architecture that would define the postwar era. But the system has not kept pace with changing economic and strategic realities. Persistent global imbalances, unfair economic practices, and discriminatory measures aimed squarely against American firms have weakened our competitiveness and exposed vulnerabilities across our industrial base and critical supply chains.
Put simply, as Secretary Bessent has said, economic security is national security.
The international economic system needs real reform, and the office for which I have been nominated has a central role in delivering it.
Treasury's International Trade and Development portfolio carries the Department's responsibility for advancing American interests in international markets, trade, and development finance. The office represents the United States at the multilateral development banks, promotes private investment and economic growth abroad, oversees Treasury's technical assistance programs, and helps shape the Department's trade and investment policies.
If confirmed, three priorities would guide my work.
First, boosting U.S. growth globally. These efforts include expanding market access for American companies abroad, promoting U.S. exports, and confronting unfair and predatory economic practices.
Second, refocusing and reforming the multilateral development banks. These institutions are at their best when they are focused on their core mandate of raising growth and reducing poverty. This means promoting a stronger development agenda centered on broad-based growth, private investment, and core macroeconomic market-oriented reforms that lift productivity, growth, and ultimately, country self-reliance.
Third, using our economic tools to strengthen our ties with emerging economies.
The fastest-growing markets of the coming decades are choosing their partners.
The United States, with the deepest capital markets, the world's reserve currency, and the most dynamic private sector anywhere, should be the partner of choice.
Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before this Committee. I welcome your questions, and if confirmed, I look forward to working with you and your staff to deliver an economic policy that protects the interests of our Nation and its people.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wiggins_testimony_10-1-26.pdf
American Enterprise Institute Visiting Research Fellow Franz Testifies Before House Science, Space & Technology Subcommittee
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight released the following testimony by Anemone Franz, visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race":
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Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, and esteemed members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight released the following testimony by Anemone Franz, visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race": * * * Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, and esteemed members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunityto testify today on strengthening the bioeconomy and governing high-risk biological research.
I am a Visiting Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame. My work focuses on dual-use research, biosecurity, and emerging technology governance.
The US has historically led in biotechnology, and advances in this field promise unprecedented benefits for human health and well-being, the economy, agriculture, manufacturing, and national security. Sustaining US leadership in this field requires two things: continued investment in biotechnology research and development and safeguards that keep pace with changes in the underlying technology.
In my testimony, I argue that investing in both biotechnology leadership and biosecurity is more urgent now than ever and propose measures that would strengthen security without slowing legitimate research.
Three actions would help close existing gaps:
1. Implement universal gene synthesis screening requirements. No binding federal requirement obliges synthesis providers to screen nucleic acid synthesis orders or verify customers. Congress should establish that requirement through legislation, such as the bipartisan Biosecurity Modernization and Innovation Act.
2. Fund pathogen-agnostic biosurveillance. Biosurveillance investment has historically surged after each crisis and contracted afterward, and most surveillance targets known diseases rather than novel threats. Congress should provide stable, multiyear funding for detection systems that do not depend on knowing the threat in advance.
3. Close gaps in federal research oversight. The July 2026 Policy for Stopping HighRisk Life Sciences Research does not reach the computational design of biological agents, and binds only institutions that receive federal funding. Statutory action is required to close these gaps.
Biotechnology's Opportunities and Emerging Risks
Biotechnologies have already transformed fields such as medicine, defense, and agriculture, and their impact will increase as the underlying technologies mature. However, the same research and technologies that produce these benefits also create risk. For example, research intended to understand dangerous pathogens to develop countermeasures can generate knowledge that could be misused to make those pathogens more lethal or transmissible. This "dual-use dilemma" makes it particularly difficult to safeguard biotechnologies without slowing beneficial research.
Biological threats are not new. In addition to natural outbreaks, instances of laboratory accidents and deliberate misuse of biological agents have been well documented.12 What has changed in recent years, however, is the pace of scientific and technological progress.
Together with falling costs, barriers that have historically made engineering biology difficult are eroding. AI, in particular, is changing what is possible in biotechnology while also introducing risks with little precedent. Advanced AI models could reduce the level of expertise required to manipulate and potentially weaponize biological agents. This concern has even been raised by the companies that are building these models.34
AI model capabilities are advancing fast and often outpace the safeguards meant to contain them. The July "Hugging Face incident" illustrates this problem. In this incident, several of OpenAI's models, operating under reduced safeguards during internal cybersecurity evaluations, circumvented the controls meant to restrain them and, coordinating through unauthorized channels, "compromised parts of OpenAI's internal research infrastructure and Hugging Face's systems."5
While much attention has focused on large language models, misuse risk is not limited to this model type. Biological AI models, trained on biological data rather than natural language, offer a different set of capabilities and risks. In a recent Science publication, researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute reported that they had trained such models to generate functional viral genomes from scratch.6 Sixteen of the sequences the models produced yielded viable, infectious viruses.7 The potential to design novel pathogens creates a new risk profile for two reasons. Because these pathogens may not resemble anything found in nature, they may not trigger existing safeguards. Furthermore, if optimized for their potential to cause harm, they may exceed the lethality or transmissibility of anything natural selection has produced.
These risks are substantial, but safeguards needed to address them have been identified, and most can be implemented without constraining the research on which the field's benefits depend. The recommendations that follow set out where federal effort would be most valuable.
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1 https://www.cdc.gov/anthrax/bioterrorism/index.html
2 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(23)00319-1/fulltext
3 https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026#biological-misuse-sep-26
4 https://openai.com/index/preparing-for-future-ai-capabilities-in-biology/
5 https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/
6 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657
7 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657
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Maintain US Biotechnology Leadership
The United States leads in biotechnology, but sustaining that position requires continued investment in the underlying research, the skilled workforce, and the manufacturing sector.
In its 2025 report, the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology warned that the biotechnology sector has not been treated with the same strategic urgency as semiconductors or artificial intelligence, even as competition with China has intensified.8 Federal research, regulation, manufacturing, and workforce development are each handled in isolation rather than as parts of one system, producing a landscape that is difficult to navigate.9 Supply chains are a further point of exposure. Feedstock additives, which are used in most biomanufacturing processes, are one example. Chinese suppliers account for nearly all global production, and a disruption in supply could bring dependent facilities to a standstill.10
Congress should ensure adequate funding for biotechnology research and development, invest in the technical workforce, coordinate these efforts across agencies, and reduce dependence on foreign suppliers for materials that have no domestic alternative.
Secure Access to Synthetic Nucleic Acids
Engineering a biological agent is a complex process requiring a series of steps and access to a range of materials. Some of those steps are difficult to avoid, and identifying and securing these chokepoints is an effective way to reduce risk. A particularly salient chokepoint is access to synthetic nucleic acids (DNA and RNA). Nucleic acids are a key ingredient for life sciences research. Researchers can order custom sequences from commercial providers. To date, no binding federal requirement obliges those providers to screen the sequences they are asked to synthesize or to verify their customers' legitimacy.
Safeguarding DNA synthesis has instead relied on industry-led voluntary screening, coordinated largely through the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, which represents a majority of global commercial synthesis capacity.11 The principal obstacle to stronger safeguards is therefore not industry resistance but the absence of standardized requirements.
Both the executive branch and Congress have moved to close this gap. Executive Order 14292 in May 2025 directed the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to incorporate enforcement mechanisms into the existing framework and to develop a strategy for achieving comprehensive screening in non-federally funded settings.12 Earlier this year, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced the Biosecurity Modernization and Innovation Act, which would require mandatory screening for all synthesis providers selling to US customers, establish conformity assessment systems with auditing and adversarial testing, and direct a government-wide assessment of biosecurity authorities to streamline oversight.13 Enacting it would be a significant step toward establishing these safeguards as a common standard.
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8 https://www.biotech.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/NSCEB-Full-Report-%E2%80%93Single-Pg-%E2%80%93-July-2026.pdf
9 https://www.biotech.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/NSCEB-Full-Report-%E2%80%93Single-Pg-%E2%80%93-July-2026.pdf
10 https://assets.carnegieendowment.org/files/Fluegel_Biomanufacturing.pdf
11 https://genesynthesisconsortium.org/
12 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/improving-the-safety-and-security-ofbiological-research/
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Uniform screening standards would strengthen, not disadvantage, domestic industry.
Providers meeting US security standards would gain a competitive advantage, while those unwilling to comply would lose access to the world's largest synthesis market.14 Because the requirements would apply to all providers serving US customers, including Chinese firms seeking access to that market, standards established here would function as global standards.
Prevent Biological Misuse of AI Models
Federal oversight of AI models with biological applications depends largely on voluntary commitments by industry and on conditions attached to federal funding, and it is applied unevenly across different classes of models.15 Frontier developers of large language models conduct biosecurity evaluations and implement mitigations, but no federal requirement obliges them to conduct these evaluations or to report their results.1617 Biological design tools receive considerably less scrutiny, despite posing risks that are arguably more consequential.18
Congress should close this gap without extending oversight further than the risk requires.
Only a narrow subset of models requires additional attention, and identifying that subset is the first step. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) conducts pre-deployment evaluations of frontier models, including for biological risk, but does so through voluntary agreements with developers.19 Congress should make these evaluations a requirement rather than a voluntary arrangement, and should fund and direct CAISI to define capabilities of concern for biological AI models.2021 The definitions should be revisited regularly as capabilities advance and should prioritize capabilities that could enable, accelerate, or simplify the creation of pathogens capable of causing a pandemic.2223 As evaluation methods developed for large language models do not transfer to models trained on biological data, distinct approaches will be needed. For models in that subset, evaluation should be required before deployment, and results should be linked to clearly communicated, pre-specified thresholds and corresponding mitigations.24 This includes withholding concerning data from training, restricting access to verified users through secure channels as appropriate, and government risk-benefit review.
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13 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/3741/text
14 https://www.precedenceresearch.com/dna-synthesismarket#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe%20market%20is%20highly%20competitive%2Cmarket%20in%20 the%20coming%20years
15 https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/2026-08/Belfer_Deterrence%20by%20Resilience_3.2_Digital%20Final.pdf
16 https://openai.com/index/preparing-for-future-ai-capabilities-in-biology/
17 https://www.anthropic.com/research/biorisk
18 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012975
19 https://www.nist.gov/caisi
20 https://www.csis.org/analysis/opportunities-strengthen-us-biosecurity-ai-enabled-bioterrorism-whatpolicymakers-should
21 https://democrats-energycommerce.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democratsenergycommerce.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/12.17.2025_oi-hearing_witnesstestimony_pannu.pdf
22 https://www.csis.org/analysis/opportunities-strengthen-us-biosecurity-ai-enabled-bioterrorism-whatpolicymakers-should
23 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012975
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Strengthen Dual-Use Research Governance
Working with dangerous pathogens entails a certain level of risk. The goal of oversight is not to eliminate that risk but to determine how much risk is acceptable, under what conditions, and who can make that judgment. That determination is difficult because of the dual-use dilemma, and because outcomes of an experiment can be difficult to know in advance. Only a narrow subset of work with dangerous pathogens warrants heightened scrutiny, while most pathogen research should proceed with standard safeguards.
Federal policy has made significant progress on dual-use research governance in recent years. In May 2025, Executive Order 14292 restricted federal support for dangerous gain-offunction research where adequate oversight was lacking, suspended other federally funded work of that kind pending a new framework, and directed stronger oversight, enforcement, and screening measures for high-risk research.25 That follow-on policy, the United States Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research, was released in July 2026 and applies to every institution and investigator receiving federal funds for life sciences research.26 The new policy abandons static pathogen lists in favor of a risk-based approach, prohibits rather than reviews seven categories of dangerous gain-of-function research, and establishes an independent review body for borderline cases.27
These policies could significantly strengthen oversight. The move to a risk-based approach is particularly valuable. List-based oversight covers only known threats. As biotechnology draws on components from multiple organisms, the species of origin has become an unreliable indicator of risk -- and as the Science study noted above shows, AI can help design viral genomes from scratch.2829 Lists are also slow to update, which is a serious limitation when the underlying technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace.
The policy does, however, place considerable weight on judgment. Investigators and institutions must now predict whether proposed work could produce significant negative societal consequences for public health, agriculture, the economy, national security, or the environment, and several of the policy's central terms are open to differing interpretation.30
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24 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012975
25 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/improving-the-safety-and-security-ofbiological-research/
26 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-for-Stopping-High-Risk-LifeSciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
27 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-for-Stopping-High-Risk-LifeSciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
28 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1089/hs.2022.0109
29 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657
30 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-forStopping-High-Risk-Life-Sciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
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Institutions must screen their entire life sciences portfolio, including non-federally funded work, and the funding and legal consequences attached to uncertain definitions may lead to overconservative interpretations to protect the institution.31 This may result in chilling effects on legitimate research.
This concern can be addressed by working closely with the people tasked with implementing the policy. Scientists and biosafety officers will need to apply these policies, and their cooperation will determine whether they function as intended. Implementation guidance should set out clearly how to identify research within the policy's scope and distinguish good-faith disagreement from deliberate concealment.
Two gaps in the current framework require legislative action. First, the policy does not cover purely computational research unless it involves an entity of concern.32 The policy directs OSTP to convene an interagency group to monitor developments at the intersection of biology and artificial intelligence. Given how quickly these tools are advancing, computational design of biological agents should also be brought under binding oversight.
Second, the policy reaches only federally funded research. Institutions without federal funding are encouraged, not required, to adopt equivalent procedures, and the policy itself notes that statutory action is needed to reach all US entities.33
Build Detection and Attribution Capacity
Detecting and identifying a novel biological threat as early as possible is crucial. Early detection makes it possible to develop and deploy countermeasures quickly and to contain a threat before it reaches catastrophic scale. After detection, investigators must determine whether the agent arose from a natural spillover, a laboratory accident, or a deliberate act. If it proves to have been engineered, investigators must trace its origins to a specific laboratory, country, or actor.
The COVID-19 origins debate illustrates the cost of being unable to answer these questions.
Nearly seven years after the virus was first detected, its origins remain contested. This uncertainty has eroded public trust, strained international relations, and left significant security questions unresolved. Detection and attribution capabilities cannot be built during a crisis. They must be established and maintained in advance to be available when needed.
To improve detection capabilities, three changes are particularly important. First, detection must be pathogen-agnostic. Most surveillance focuses on specific, known diseases and therefore may miss novel biological threats. Second, funding must be sustained.
Biosurveillance investment has historically surged after each crisis and contracted in its aftermath, leaving capacity to erode before the next threat emerges. Third, the United States should sustain and increase investment in monitoring capacity and genomic data-sharing infrastructure with international partners. Pathogens do not respect borders, and a serious biological threat may first appear outside the US. Detection capacity abroad therefore can provide crucial advance warning that domestic surveillance alone cannot.
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31 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-for-Stopping-High-Risk-LifeSciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
32 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-for-Stopping-High-Risk-LifeSciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
33 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-for-Stopping-High-Risk-LifeSciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
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Reliable attribution would strengthen biosecurity in several ways: It can deter actors who realize that their designs could be traced back to them, enable accountability through legal or diplomatic action, and inform outbreak response by revealing critical properties of the engineered pathogen.
Emerging technologies have the potential to advance attribution considerably, and machine learning approaches have produced promising results.34 There has been periodic interest in advancing these technologies. DARPA launched a Bio-Attribution Challenge earlier this year that aims to develop tools to determine the origins of engineered pathogens.35 However, competitions alone will not realize this technology's full potential. Sustained government investment and private-sector collaboration are needed.
Data is a further constraint. Current systems are trained largely on plasmids deposited in academic repositories, which offer limited accuracy when applied to pathogen genomes and exclude the Biosafety Level 3 and 4 laboratories that pose the greatest risk.36 Building adequate and secure training datasets, including from high-containment facilities, is a precondition for advancing attribution technologies.37
Technical capability alone is not sufficient for reliable attribution. A high-confidence finding is only as useful as the system that must act on it, and establishing consensus on what counts as evidence, how it is weighted, and how it informs decisions is as essential as the underlying science. Attribution will also rarely rest on a single source. A mechanism is needed to bring together the different forms of evidence, such as forensic analysis, epidemiological data, intelligence, and records held by commercial providers, into a single assessment. These capabilities take years to build and must be in place before they are needed. Congress has an essential role in establishing and sustaining that investment.
Conclusion
The United States does not have to choose between leading in biotechnology and governing it responsibly. Both, however, require active investment: in the research, workforce, and manufacturing capacity that sustain American leadership, and in safeguards targeted narrowly enough to address real risks without impeding legitimate science.
I would like to thank the Subcommittee for its leadership in addressing these critical questions, and I look forward to hearing your questions.
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34 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35032-8
35 https://www.darpa.mil/research/challenges/bioattribution?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=bio-attributionchallenge&utm_term=march-26&utm_content=bto-challenge-announcement
36 https://thebulletin.org/2025/12/tracing-engineered-biothreats-with-ai-forensics-five-steps-to-improveattribution/#post-heading
37 https://thebulletin.org/2025/12/tracing-engineered-biothreats-with-ai-forensics-five-steps-to-improveattribution/#post-heading
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Original text here: https://republicans-science.house.gov/_cache/files/6/5/65b43f59-8eff-4ec8-b306-81f87d4f3183/2DAD661FF8EBBC4C9E2B3AD6B6CD4283B0C3DA46220F74486721605225704C3F.anemone-franz-testimony.pdf
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Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, and esteemed members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight released the following testimony by Anemone Franz, visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race": * * * Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, and esteemed members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunityto testify today on strengthening the bioeconomy and governing high-risk biological research.
I am a Visiting Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame. My work focuses on dual-use research, biosecurity, and emerging technology governance.
The US has historically led in biotechnology, and advances in this field promise unprecedented benefits for human health and well-being, the economy, agriculture, manufacturing, and national security. Sustaining US leadership in this field requires two things: continued investment in biotechnology research and development and safeguards that keep pace with changes in the underlying technology.
In my testimony, I argue that investing in both biotechnology leadership and biosecurity is more urgent now than ever and propose measures that would strengthen security without slowing legitimate research.
Three actions would help close existing gaps:
1. Implement universal gene synthesis screening requirements. No binding federal requirement obliges synthesis providers to screen nucleic acid synthesis orders or verify customers. Congress should establish that requirement through legislation, such as the bipartisan Biosecurity Modernization and Innovation Act.
2. Fund pathogen-agnostic biosurveillance. Biosurveillance investment has historically surged after each crisis and contracted afterward, and most surveillance targets known diseases rather than novel threats. Congress should provide stable, multiyear funding for detection systems that do not depend on knowing the threat in advance.
3. Close gaps in federal research oversight. The July 2026 Policy for Stopping HighRisk Life Sciences Research does not reach the computational design of biological agents, and binds only institutions that receive federal funding. Statutory action is required to close these gaps.
Biotechnology's Opportunities and Emerging Risks
Biotechnologies have already transformed fields such as medicine, defense, and agriculture, and their impact will increase as the underlying technologies mature. However, the same research and technologies that produce these benefits also create risk. For example, research intended to understand dangerous pathogens to develop countermeasures can generate knowledge that could be misused to make those pathogens more lethal or transmissible. This "dual-use dilemma" makes it particularly difficult to safeguard biotechnologies without slowing beneficial research.
Biological threats are not new. In addition to natural outbreaks, instances of laboratory accidents and deliberate misuse of biological agents have been well documented.12 What has changed in recent years, however, is the pace of scientific and technological progress.
Together with falling costs, barriers that have historically made engineering biology difficult are eroding. AI, in particular, is changing what is possible in biotechnology while also introducing risks with little precedent. Advanced AI models could reduce the level of expertise required to manipulate and potentially weaponize biological agents. This concern has even been raised by the companies that are building these models.34
AI model capabilities are advancing fast and often outpace the safeguards meant to contain them. The July "Hugging Face incident" illustrates this problem. In this incident, several of OpenAI's models, operating under reduced safeguards during internal cybersecurity evaluations, circumvented the controls meant to restrain them and, coordinating through unauthorized channels, "compromised parts of OpenAI's internal research infrastructure and Hugging Face's systems."5
While much attention has focused on large language models, misuse risk is not limited to this model type. Biological AI models, trained on biological data rather than natural language, offer a different set of capabilities and risks. In a recent Science publication, researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute reported that they had trained such models to generate functional viral genomes from scratch.6 Sixteen of the sequences the models produced yielded viable, infectious viruses.7 The potential to design novel pathogens creates a new risk profile for two reasons. Because these pathogens may not resemble anything found in nature, they may not trigger existing safeguards. Furthermore, if optimized for their potential to cause harm, they may exceed the lethality or transmissibility of anything natural selection has produced.
These risks are substantial, but safeguards needed to address them have been identified, and most can be implemented without constraining the research on which the field's benefits depend. The recommendations that follow set out where federal effort would be most valuable.
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1 https://www.cdc.gov/anthrax/bioterrorism/index.html
2 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(23)00319-1/fulltext
3 https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026#biological-misuse-sep-26
4 https://openai.com/index/preparing-for-future-ai-capabilities-in-biology/
5 https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/
6 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657
7 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657
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Maintain US Biotechnology Leadership
The United States leads in biotechnology, but sustaining that position requires continued investment in the underlying research, the skilled workforce, and the manufacturing sector.
In its 2025 report, the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology warned that the biotechnology sector has not been treated with the same strategic urgency as semiconductors or artificial intelligence, even as competition with China has intensified.8 Federal research, regulation, manufacturing, and workforce development are each handled in isolation rather than as parts of one system, producing a landscape that is difficult to navigate.9 Supply chains are a further point of exposure. Feedstock additives, which are used in most biomanufacturing processes, are one example. Chinese suppliers account for nearly all global production, and a disruption in supply could bring dependent facilities to a standstill.10
Congress should ensure adequate funding for biotechnology research and development, invest in the technical workforce, coordinate these efforts across agencies, and reduce dependence on foreign suppliers for materials that have no domestic alternative.
Secure Access to Synthetic Nucleic Acids
Engineering a biological agent is a complex process requiring a series of steps and access to a range of materials. Some of those steps are difficult to avoid, and identifying and securing these chokepoints is an effective way to reduce risk. A particularly salient chokepoint is access to synthetic nucleic acids (DNA and RNA). Nucleic acids are a key ingredient for life sciences research. Researchers can order custom sequences from commercial providers. To date, no binding federal requirement obliges those providers to screen the sequences they are asked to synthesize or to verify their customers' legitimacy.
Safeguarding DNA synthesis has instead relied on industry-led voluntary screening, coordinated largely through the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, which represents a majority of global commercial synthesis capacity.11 The principal obstacle to stronger safeguards is therefore not industry resistance but the absence of standardized requirements.
Both the executive branch and Congress have moved to close this gap. Executive Order 14292 in May 2025 directed the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to incorporate enforcement mechanisms into the existing framework and to develop a strategy for achieving comprehensive screening in non-federally funded settings.12 Earlier this year, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced the Biosecurity Modernization and Innovation Act, which would require mandatory screening for all synthesis providers selling to US customers, establish conformity assessment systems with auditing and adversarial testing, and direct a government-wide assessment of biosecurity authorities to streamline oversight.13 Enacting it would be a significant step toward establishing these safeguards as a common standard.
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8 https://www.biotech.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/NSCEB-Full-Report-%E2%80%93Single-Pg-%E2%80%93-July-2026.pdf
9 https://www.biotech.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/NSCEB-Full-Report-%E2%80%93Single-Pg-%E2%80%93-July-2026.pdf
10 https://assets.carnegieendowment.org/files/Fluegel_Biomanufacturing.pdf
11 https://genesynthesisconsortium.org/
12 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/improving-the-safety-and-security-ofbiological-research/
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Uniform screening standards would strengthen, not disadvantage, domestic industry.
Providers meeting US security standards would gain a competitive advantage, while those unwilling to comply would lose access to the world's largest synthesis market.14 Because the requirements would apply to all providers serving US customers, including Chinese firms seeking access to that market, standards established here would function as global standards.
Prevent Biological Misuse of AI Models
Federal oversight of AI models with biological applications depends largely on voluntary commitments by industry and on conditions attached to federal funding, and it is applied unevenly across different classes of models.15 Frontier developers of large language models conduct biosecurity evaluations and implement mitigations, but no federal requirement obliges them to conduct these evaluations or to report their results.1617 Biological design tools receive considerably less scrutiny, despite posing risks that are arguably more consequential.18
Congress should close this gap without extending oversight further than the risk requires.
Only a narrow subset of models requires additional attention, and identifying that subset is the first step. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) conducts pre-deployment evaluations of frontier models, including for biological risk, but does so through voluntary agreements with developers.19 Congress should make these evaluations a requirement rather than a voluntary arrangement, and should fund and direct CAISI to define capabilities of concern for biological AI models.2021 The definitions should be revisited regularly as capabilities advance and should prioritize capabilities that could enable, accelerate, or simplify the creation of pathogens capable of causing a pandemic.2223 As evaluation methods developed for large language models do not transfer to models trained on biological data, distinct approaches will be needed. For models in that subset, evaluation should be required before deployment, and results should be linked to clearly communicated, pre-specified thresholds and corresponding mitigations.24 This includes withholding concerning data from training, restricting access to verified users through secure channels as appropriate, and government risk-benefit review.
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13 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/3741/text
14 https://www.precedenceresearch.com/dna-synthesismarket#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe%20market%20is%20highly%20competitive%2Cmarket%20in%20 the%20coming%20years
15 https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/2026-08/Belfer_Deterrence%20by%20Resilience_3.2_Digital%20Final.pdf
16 https://openai.com/index/preparing-for-future-ai-capabilities-in-biology/
17 https://www.anthropic.com/research/biorisk
18 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012975
19 https://www.nist.gov/caisi
20 https://www.csis.org/analysis/opportunities-strengthen-us-biosecurity-ai-enabled-bioterrorism-whatpolicymakers-should
21 https://democrats-energycommerce.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democratsenergycommerce.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/12.17.2025_oi-hearing_witnesstestimony_pannu.pdf
22 https://www.csis.org/analysis/opportunities-strengthen-us-biosecurity-ai-enabled-bioterrorism-whatpolicymakers-should
23 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012975
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Strengthen Dual-Use Research Governance
Working with dangerous pathogens entails a certain level of risk. The goal of oversight is not to eliminate that risk but to determine how much risk is acceptable, under what conditions, and who can make that judgment. That determination is difficult because of the dual-use dilemma, and because outcomes of an experiment can be difficult to know in advance. Only a narrow subset of work with dangerous pathogens warrants heightened scrutiny, while most pathogen research should proceed with standard safeguards.
Federal policy has made significant progress on dual-use research governance in recent years. In May 2025, Executive Order 14292 restricted federal support for dangerous gain-offunction research where adequate oversight was lacking, suspended other federally funded work of that kind pending a new framework, and directed stronger oversight, enforcement, and screening measures for high-risk research.25 That follow-on policy, the United States Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research, was released in July 2026 and applies to every institution and investigator receiving federal funds for life sciences research.26 The new policy abandons static pathogen lists in favor of a risk-based approach, prohibits rather than reviews seven categories of dangerous gain-of-function research, and establishes an independent review body for borderline cases.27
These policies could significantly strengthen oversight. The move to a risk-based approach is particularly valuable. List-based oversight covers only known threats. As biotechnology draws on components from multiple organisms, the species of origin has become an unreliable indicator of risk -- and as the Science study noted above shows, AI can help design viral genomes from scratch.2829 Lists are also slow to update, which is a serious limitation when the underlying technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace.
The policy does, however, place considerable weight on judgment. Investigators and institutions must now predict whether proposed work could produce significant negative societal consequences for public health, agriculture, the economy, national security, or the environment, and several of the policy's central terms are open to differing interpretation.30
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24 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012975
25 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/improving-the-safety-and-security-ofbiological-research/
26 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-for-Stopping-High-Risk-LifeSciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
27 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-for-Stopping-High-Risk-LifeSciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
28 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1089/hs.2022.0109
29 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657
30 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-forStopping-High-Risk-Life-Sciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
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Institutions must screen their entire life sciences portfolio, including non-federally funded work, and the funding and legal consequences attached to uncertain definitions may lead to overconservative interpretations to protect the institution.31 This may result in chilling effects on legitimate research.
This concern can be addressed by working closely with the people tasked with implementing the policy. Scientists and biosafety officers will need to apply these policies, and their cooperation will determine whether they function as intended. Implementation guidance should set out clearly how to identify research within the policy's scope and distinguish good-faith disagreement from deliberate concealment.
Two gaps in the current framework require legislative action. First, the policy does not cover purely computational research unless it involves an entity of concern.32 The policy directs OSTP to convene an interagency group to monitor developments at the intersection of biology and artificial intelligence. Given how quickly these tools are advancing, computational design of biological agents should also be brought under binding oversight.
Second, the policy reaches only federally funded research. Institutions without federal funding are encouraged, not required, to adopt equivalent procedures, and the policy itself notes that statutory action is needed to reach all US entities.33
Build Detection and Attribution Capacity
Detecting and identifying a novel biological threat as early as possible is crucial. Early detection makes it possible to develop and deploy countermeasures quickly and to contain a threat before it reaches catastrophic scale. After detection, investigators must determine whether the agent arose from a natural spillover, a laboratory accident, or a deliberate act. If it proves to have been engineered, investigators must trace its origins to a specific laboratory, country, or actor.
The COVID-19 origins debate illustrates the cost of being unable to answer these questions.
Nearly seven years after the virus was first detected, its origins remain contested. This uncertainty has eroded public trust, strained international relations, and left significant security questions unresolved. Detection and attribution capabilities cannot be built during a crisis. They must be established and maintained in advance to be available when needed.
To improve detection capabilities, three changes are particularly important. First, detection must be pathogen-agnostic. Most surveillance focuses on specific, known diseases and therefore may miss novel biological threats. Second, funding must be sustained.
Biosurveillance investment has historically surged after each crisis and contracted in its aftermath, leaving capacity to erode before the next threat emerges. Third, the United States should sustain and increase investment in monitoring capacity and genomic data-sharing infrastructure with international partners. Pathogens do not respect borders, and a serious biological threat may first appear outside the US. Detection capacity abroad therefore can provide crucial advance warning that domestic surveillance alone cannot.
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31 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-for-Stopping-High-Risk-LifeSciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
32 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-for-Stopping-High-Risk-LifeSciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
33 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/USG-Policy-for-Stopping-High-Risk-LifeSciences-Research_July-2026.pdf
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Reliable attribution would strengthen biosecurity in several ways: It can deter actors who realize that their designs could be traced back to them, enable accountability through legal or diplomatic action, and inform outbreak response by revealing critical properties of the engineered pathogen.
Emerging technologies have the potential to advance attribution considerably, and machine learning approaches have produced promising results.34 There has been periodic interest in advancing these technologies. DARPA launched a Bio-Attribution Challenge earlier this year that aims to develop tools to determine the origins of engineered pathogens.35 However, competitions alone will not realize this technology's full potential. Sustained government investment and private-sector collaboration are needed.
Data is a further constraint. Current systems are trained largely on plasmids deposited in academic repositories, which offer limited accuracy when applied to pathogen genomes and exclude the Biosafety Level 3 and 4 laboratories that pose the greatest risk.36 Building adequate and secure training datasets, including from high-containment facilities, is a precondition for advancing attribution technologies.37
Technical capability alone is not sufficient for reliable attribution. A high-confidence finding is only as useful as the system that must act on it, and establishing consensus on what counts as evidence, how it is weighted, and how it informs decisions is as essential as the underlying science. Attribution will also rarely rest on a single source. A mechanism is needed to bring together the different forms of evidence, such as forensic analysis, epidemiological data, intelligence, and records held by commercial providers, into a single assessment. These capabilities take years to build and must be in place before they are needed. Congress has an essential role in establishing and sustaining that investment.
Conclusion
The United States does not have to choose between leading in biotechnology and governing it responsibly. Both, however, require active investment: in the research, workforce, and manufacturing capacity that sustain American leadership, and in safeguards targeted narrowly enough to address real risks without impeding legitimate science.
I would like to thank the Subcommittee for its leadership in addressing these critical questions, and I look forward to hearing your questions.
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34 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35032-8
35 https://www.darpa.mil/research/challenges/bioattribution?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=bio-attributionchallenge&utm_term=march-26&utm_content=bto-challenge-announcement
36 https://thebulletin.org/2025/12/tracing-engineered-biothreats-with-ai-forensics-five-steps-to-improveattribution/#post-heading
37 https://thebulletin.org/2025/12/tracing-engineered-biothreats-with-ai-forensics-five-steps-to-improveattribution/#post-heading
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Original text here: https://republicans-science.house.gov/_cache/files/6/5/65b43f59-8eff-4ec8-b306-81f87d4f3183/2DAD661FF8EBBC4C9E2B3AD6B6CD4283B0C3DA46220F74486721605225704C3F.anemone-franz-testimony.pdf
Port Authority of New York & New Jersey Chief Security Officer Ehrie Testifies Before House Homeland Security Committee
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Homeland Security Committee released the following testimony by Greg Ehrie, chief security officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "25 Years Later: Evolutions in Federal, State, and Local Counterterrorism Efforts Since 9/11":
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Good Morning Chairman Garbarino and Members of the Committee, my name is Greg Ehrie and I am the Chief Security Officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Port Authority's security programs and preparedness efforts.
Port ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Homeland Security Committee released the following testimony by Greg Ehrie, chief security officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "25 Years Later: Evolutions in Federal, State, and Local Counterterrorism Efforts Since 9/11": * * * Good Morning Chairman Garbarino and Members of the Committee, my name is Greg Ehrie and I am the Chief Security Officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Port Authority's security programs and preparedness efforts. PortAuthority facilities have the unfortunate distinction of being targeted multiple times by terrorists. In 1993, a truck bomb exploded beneath the North Tower, killing 6 people and injuring more than 1,000.
On September 11, 2001, the Port Authority lost 84 personnel, 37 of which were Port Authority Police Officers. It remains the worst single-day loss of life of any police department in the United States. Since then, we have lost numerous officers due to 9/11 related illness and there are many who are still in the fight.
This tragic legacy has shaped the Port Authority's unwavering commitment to safety and security. This is evident as security accounts for roughly a quarter of both the agency's personnel and its operating budget. Furthermore, since 9/11, $1.8 billion dollars has been invested in capital projects to harden and strengthen our transportation facilities.
Twenty-five years later, the transportation sector continues to be an attractive target for terrorism. This threat is particularly acute for the Port Authority, given the scale and significance of the critical transportation infrastructure we operate, including the nation's largest airport system, the busiest bus terminal, and most traveled bridge in the world.
The Multi-Layered Security Approach
Since 9/11, the Port Authority has built a risk-based, multi-layered security program designed to protect its employees, customers, and transportation assets from asymmetric threats.
This approach includes:
* Risk and intelligence-informed assessments to identify threats, prioritize vulnerabilities, and guide capital security investments.
* Capital hardening and protective design programs, including tunnel hardening, bridge and structural strengthening, bollards and other vehicle-threat mitigation.
* Security technology, including an extensive CCTV system with enhanced analytics, access-control systems, perimeter intrusion detection, license plate readers, CBRN detection capabilities, drone detection, interoperable radio communications, and continuing evaluation of cutting-edge technologies.
* 24/7 security operations centers and trained contract security officers who provide an additional layer of observation, behavioral recognition, access control, and incident reporting.
* A highly trained police department of more than 2,100 officers, with high-visibility counterterrorism teams, Emergency Service Unit capabilities, and explosive-detection canine teams. PAPD also participates numerous federal, state, and local law-enforcement task forces, including the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces in New York and New Jersey.
* A dedicated Office of Emergency Management that leads incident coordination, training, and full-scale exercises with regional first responders using the Incident Command System and unified command principles.
* A robust cybersecurity program, including a 24/7 Cybersecurity Operations Center, recognizing that physical and cybersecurity are increasingly inseparable in modern transportation systems.
Additionally, we utilize the Department of Homeland Security SAFETY Act program as an independent third-party validation of security programs and technologies. Port Authority facilities and programs that have received SAFETY Act recognition include the World Trade Center, George Washington Bridge, LaGuardia Airport, and PATH.
Recent Regional Events and the 25th Anniversary of 9/11
This year served as an extraordinary real-world stress test for our security protocols, driven by a series of concurrent major events across the New York and New Jersey region. The simultaneous hosting of the FIFA World Cup, Sail 4th, and the America 250 celebrations successfully drew an influx of over 1.2 million additional visitors to the area.
Last week, we gathered to honor and commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11. This high-profile event was attended by Vice President Vance, the governors of New York and New Jersey, and several former United States presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, along with many other dignitaries. Flawless interagency coordination and unparalleled security measures ensured this historic event was among the most protected on record.
Success of these security operations demonstrates what twenty-five years of investment and partnership have produced: a security enterprise that is integrated, intelligence-driven, technologically advanced, and operationalized across jurisdictional boundaries.
How Congress Can Help
Congress has been an essential partner in building and sustaining our security capabilities. We respectfully ask Congress to maintain its support in several key areas.
* Increase federal funding of homeland security grant programs. The Transit Security Grant Program, Urban Area Security Initiative, Port Security Grant Program, and other federal funding have supported Port Authority counterterrorism programs, police training and equipment, emergency preparedness exercises, cybersecurity, access-control systems, facility hardening, and other critical security initiatives.
These investments allow state and local partners and transportation agencies to maintain capabilities that protect nationally significant infrastructure.
* Empower states to work with federal partners to perform advanced mitigation against malicious drones. Transportation agencies need timely solutions to support the appropriate response to unauthorized drones impeding transportation operations.
* Continue to support the DHS SAFETY Act program. Independent validation helps organizations measure security programs against best practices and promotes the adoption of effective anti-terrorism technologies and services.
* Protect and strengthen intelligence-sharing and joint task-force capabilities. The ability to move timely, actionable information across federal, state, local, and transportation partners remains one of the most consequential reforms of the post9/11 era.
Conclusion
Since 9/11, the Port Authority has achieved significant, measurable progress across every layer of our security enterprise. Our facilities are more resilient, our law enforcement capabilities are highly specialized, and Intelligence moves faster.
Technology provides tools that did not exist a generation ago. Most importantly, federal, state, and local agencies collaborate in ways that have become routine rather than exception.
On behalf of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, I thank the Committee and our Congressional delegation for their continued support of the programs and partnerships that help us protect our employees, our customers, our infrastructure, and the region we serve.
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Original text here: https://homeland.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/2026-09-16-HRG-Testimony.pdf
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Good Morning Chairman Garbarino and Members of the Committee, my name is Greg Ehrie and I am the Chief Security Officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Port Authority's security programs and preparedness efforts.
Port ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Homeland Security Committee released the following testimony by Greg Ehrie, chief security officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "25 Years Later: Evolutions in Federal, State, and Local Counterterrorism Efforts Since 9/11": * * * Good Morning Chairman Garbarino and Members of the Committee, my name is Greg Ehrie and I am the Chief Security Officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Port Authority's security programs and preparedness efforts. PortAuthority facilities have the unfortunate distinction of being targeted multiple times by terrorists. In 1993, a truck bomb exploded beneath the North Tower, killing 6 people and injuring more than 1,000.
On September 11, 2001, the Port Authority lost 84 personnel, 37 of which were Port Authority Police Officers. It remains the worst single-day loss of life of any police department in the United States. Since then, we have lost numerous officers due to 9/11 related illness and there are many who are still in the fight.
This tragic legacy has shaped the Port Authority's unwavering commitment to safety and security. This is evident as security accounts for roughly a quarter of both the agency's personnel and its operating budget. Furthermore, since 9/11, $1.8 billion dollars has been invested in capital projects to harden and strengthen our transportation facilities.
Twenty-five years later, the transportation sector continues to be an attractive target for terrorism. This threat is particularly acute for the Port Authority, given the scale and significance of the critical transportation infrastructure we operate, including the nation's largest airport system, the busiest bus terminal, and most traveled bridge in the world.
The Multi-Layered Security Approach
Since 9/11, the Port Authority has built a risk-based, multi-layered security program designed to protect its employees, customers, and transportation assets from asymmetric threats.
This approach includes:
* Risk and intelligence-informed assessments to identify threats, prioritize vulnerabilities, and guide capital security investments.
* Capital hardening and protective design programs, including tunnel hardening, bridge and structural strengthening, bollards and other vehicle-threat mitigation.
* Security technology, including an extensive CCTV system with enhanced analytics, access-control systems, perimeter intrusion detection, license plate readers, CBRN detection capabilities, drone detection, interoperable radio communications, and continuing evaluation of cutting-edge technologies.
* 24/7 security operations centers and trained contract security officers who provide an additional layer of observation, behavioral recognition, access control, and incident reporting.
* A highly trained police department of more than 2,100 officers, with high-visibility counterterrorism teams, Emergency Service Unit capabilities, and explosive-detection canine teams. PAPD also participates numerous federal, state, and local law-enforcement task forces, including the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces in New York and New Jersey.
* A dedicated Office of Emergency Management that leads incident coordination, training, and full-scale exercises with regional first responders using the Incident Command System and unified command principles.
* A robust cybersecurity program, including a 24/7 Cybersecurity Operations Center, recognizing that physical and cybersecurity are increasingly inseparable in modern transportation systems.
Additionally, we utilize the Department of Homeland Security SAFETY Act program as an independent third-party validation of security programs and technologies. Port Authority facilities and programs that have received SAFETY Act recognition include the World Trade Center, George Washington Bridge, LaGuardia Airport, and PATH.
Recent Regional Events and the 25th Anniversary of 9/11
This year served as an extraordinary real-world stress test for our security protocols, driven by a series of concurrent major events across the New York and New Jersey region. The simultaneous hosting of the FIFA World Cup, Sail 4th, and the America 250 celebrations successfully drew an influx of over 1.2 million additional visitors to the area.
Last week, we gathered to honor and commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11. This high-profile event was attended by Vice President Vance, the governors of New York and New Jersey, and several former United States presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, along with many other dignitaries. Flawless interagency coordination and unparalleled security measures ensured this historic event was among the most protected on record.
Success of these security operations demonstrates what twenty-five years of investment and partnership have produced: a security enterprise that is integrated, intelligence-driven, technologically advanced, and operationalized across jurisdictional boundaries.
How Congress Can Help
Congress has been an essential partner in building and sustaining our security capabilities. We respectfully ask Congress to maintain its support in several key areas.
* Increase federal funding of homeland security grant programs. The Transit Security Grant Program, Urban Area Security Initiative, Port Security Grant Program, and other federal funding have supported Port Authority counterterrorism programs, police training and equipment, emergency preparedness exercises, cybersecurity, access-control systems, facility hardening, and other critical security initiatives.
These investments allow state and local partners and transportation agencies to maintain capabilities that protect nationally significant infrastructure.
* Empower states to work with federal partners to perform advanced mitigation against malicious drones. Transportation agencies need timely solutions to support the appropriate response to unauthorized drones impeding transportation operations.
* Continue to support the DHS SAFETY Act program. Independent validation helps organizations measure security programs against best practices and promotes the adoption of effective anti-terrorism technologies and services.
* Protect and strengthen intelligence-sharing and joint task-force capabilities. The ability to move timely, actionable information across federal, state, local, and transportation partners remains one of the most consequential reforms of the post9/11 era.
Conclusion
Since 9/11, the Port Authority has achieved significant, measurable progress across every layer of our security enterprise. Our facilities are more resilient, our law enforcement capabilities are highly specialized, and Intelligence moves faster.
Technology provides tools that did not exist a generation ago. Most importantly, federal, state, and local agencies collaborate in ways that have become routine rather than exception.
On behalf of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, I thank the Committee and our Congressional delegation for their continued support of the programs and partnerships that help us protect our employees, our customers, our infrastructure, and the region we serve.
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Original text here: https://homeland.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/2026-09-16-HRG-Testimony.pdf
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Professor Gronvall Testifies Before House Science, Space & Technology Subcommittee
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight released the following testimony by Gigi Kwik Gronvall, professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race":
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Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, and Members of the Subcommittee:
Thank you for inviting me to participate in today's hearing and thank you for your attention to a topic of critical ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight released the following testimony by Gigi Kwik Gronvall, professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race": * * * Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, and Members of the Subcommittee: Thank you for inviting me to participate in today's hearing and thank you for your attention to a topic of criticalnational security importance.
My name is Gigi Kwik Gronvall. I am a Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where I co-direct the Health Security PhD track within the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. I would like to state for the record that the opinions expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Johns Hopkins University or the Johns Hopkins Health System.
My central message is that biotechnology security requires both protection and achievement. Safeguards such as gene-synthesis screening, AI biosecurity evaluations, and intellectual-property protections are important, but they cannot substitute for the scientific talent, research capacity, manufacturing infrastructure, and international relationships needed to detect threats and develop countermeasures. A country that protects its science while allowing its scientific capabilities to decline will not be secure.
My background is in immunology, with training and experience including Johns Hopkins and the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). I have served on advisory committees related to biosecurity for the Department of Defense, Department of State, and the NIH, and I was the science advisor to the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (2009-2010). I am currently the co-chair of the Safety and Security Advisory Committee for BioMADE, the DoD-sponsored public-private manufacturing innovation institute that brings together industry, universities, and government to strengthen US biomanufacturing capacity, workforce development, and national security. I helped write and testified in support of AB1963, California's gene synthesis screening legislation.(1) I have advised AI developers, including Anthropic, on biosecurity safeguards, participated in testing safeguards, and received compensation for that work. Neither Anthropic nor any other company contributed to or reviewed this testimony.
Why the US is falling behind in biotechnology and the life sciences
I am pleased this committee is addressing the April 2025 final report of the NSCEB, which concluded that biotechnology will be a defining strategic technology of the twenty-first century and warned that the US risks falling behind global competitors.(2) The picture the NSCEB report paints is one of US complacency about a technology that was born in the US, and in which the US was the unquestioned leader for many years. While many nations see biotechnology as a source of economic growth and prosperity, no country has invested more than the People's Republic of China, which has invested more than $100 billion in talent recruitment programs, government subsidies, research and development, as well as plans to translate research into products.(3-8) China's growth has led to sobering statistics for the US: Chinese researchers now publish more scientific papers than US researchers.
China graduates more PhDs in science and technology fields. China aims for its bioeconomy to "be at the forefront globally" by 2035 to eclipse the US altogether.(9) China's biotechnology investments have yielded world-class scientists and breathtaking innovation. But as the NSCEB report makes clear, not all its successes have come from fair competition.
Since the NSCEB report was released, US policy decisions have further weakened our biotechnology research enterprise, exacerbating an already significant national security vulnerability. Billions of research dollars have been suddenly cut, which were intended to further scientific and medical advances, as well as train students and postdoctoral fellows.
Clinical trials have been stopped. Offers were rescinded. Careers have been derailed. Even when decisions have been overturned after political pressure, the uncertainty lingered, delaying or stopping job offers and student training acceptances. And, research dollars are still not reaching researchers.(10-13)
While there have been news stories about the high-powered researchers who have been recruited to Canada, the EU, and other places including China, there are many more talented students from around the world choosing not to come to the US to study, and potential students in the US who now view the biological sciences as a too-precarious career option.(14,15) It should be noted that the US once was the best place for scientists around the world to work, and it was an absolute requirement to have US lab experience to succeed. But that is no longer the case. There are now many research institutions from which a student can embark on a productive career. As a result, these damaging blows to the US science ecosystem have only led talented scientists and would-be scientists from around the world to make reasonable choices to go elsewhere, and not contribute to US scientific advances.
Over the past several years, US policymakers have mostly reacted to China's rise by introducing ways to protect US research from being stolen. It is indeed important to protect IP and American innovation, and to make sure that CFIUS has relevant expertise to protect US interests in biotech and agricultural technologies (and avoid missteps like allowing BGI to acquire Complete Genomics in 2013, for example). But protection alone cannot preserve American leadership. US science must continue producing something worth protecting.
The US has faced a similar conflict between competitiveness and security before. In 1982, the CIA assessed that "virtually every Soviet military research project" - of which there were thousands, going back decades--benefited from US technical documents and hardware that were acquired through both legal and illegal means.(16) Predictably, there were calls to better protect research, classify information that Russians could use to develop missile guidance systems, cryptography or code-breaking, aerospace engineering, and nuclear weapons development. In an emergency committee formed by the National Academies known as the Corson Report after its chair, it was argued that rigorous, innovative science does not thrive in a classified environment, and that even with the risks, the US would be better off keeping science as open as possible, to practice "security by accomplishment." This became the basis for NSDD-189, which President Reagan signed in 1985, and which has been reaffirmed several times since.
The national security and economic stakes point to openness as being even more critical for the biological sciences. The study of biology occurs everywhere on the planet.
Infectious diseases famously do not recognize national borders. Other nations, not just China, are moving ahead quickly, and will form the biotechnology ecosystem without scientific collaborators from the US. If the US does not practice security by accomplishment, it will not protect the US. It will just mean that the US will not achieve what other nations will. It will mean that the US will be even more vulnerable.
Scientific discovery alone is not sufficient for biotechnology leadership. The United States must also be able to translate discoveries into products and manufacture them at scale.
Domestic biomanufacturing capacity, a skilled workforce, common standards, supply chains that are not entirely dependent upon China, and access to pilot-scale infrastructure are national security assets. Without them, American discoveries will be commercialized and manufactured elsewhere, leaving the US dependent on foreign suppliers for medicines, agricultural inputs, industrial chemicals, and other materials needed during a crisis. Organizations such as BioMADE help bridge the gap between laboratory discovery and commercial-scale production, incorporating safety and security into the development process. But there is much additional work to do to expand domestic biotechnologies, build the workforce needed, and develop a clearer regulatory framework for emerging biotechnology products.
Anthropic recently described five case studies of trained scientists who circumvented, or used intermediaries to circumvent, the company's geographic access restrictions.(17) There are many reasons scientists might use AI models, most of which are not nefarious, and it is not clear those scientists were intending to develop biological weapons. Still, the cases are instructive. Much of the current biosecurity debate focuses on whether AI could give a biological novice access to sophisticated capabilities. These cases instead involved trained scientists using AI to assist their work.
They illustrate a broader reality: advanced biological expertise exists around the world, and potentially harmful activity may evade an American provider's safeguards or never involve a monitored AI platform. Prevention measures remain important. AI developers should evaluate their models for biosecurity risks and have mechanisms to report credible threats.
Gene synthesis providers should screen their orders and have know-your-customer practices. But prevention alone cannot provide biological security. It is critical that the US maintain the scientific expertise needed to identify emerging threats, evaluate their significance, and develop effective countermeasures.
In addition to research funding, activities necessary for US science to advance have been cut or made much more difficult. These actions should be reversed. For example, scientific conferences are not only an important part of communicating science ahead of publications, they are also often integral to scientific innovation: Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier met at an American Society for Microbiology conference in Puerto Rico in 2011, and their subsequent collaboration produced the foundational CRISPR-Cas9 work for which they received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.(18) It has been increasingly difficult for scientific conferences to be held in the US, because of the challenges for international scientists to get visas to attend. But now, with incidents of scientists being denied entry or detained by US immigration officials, scientists are deciding not to attend conferences in the US.(19,20) US scientists increasingly do not have the funding to travel, either, to hear the latest scientific advances, or form the collaborations that will deliver future innovations and Nobel Prizes, or to take the next steps in what now is perceived to be an unwise career choice.
Visa challenges and denials were a major reason why the premier synthetic biology competition, the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, moved from Boston to Paris in 2022.(21) The competition originally grew out of a class at MIT, and the first competition had just 5 teams. Now there are over 400 teams from at least 50 countries. The competition has led to over 250 startup companies, and there are more than 86,000 iGEM alumni all over the world. Competitions like this - another is the Biodesign Competition, which is still based in New York City--are an important part of experiential learning in biotechnology, and they are a source of future innovation. The US should consider these competitions strategically.
US interests are also being harmed by detrimental research policies that are extremely vague, and which will make the most innocuous research legally risky. One example is the "United States Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research," which was released in July, 2026 in response to the May 2025 Executive Order "Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research."(22,23) This policy prohibits "dangerous gain of function research" or DGOF. However, the definitions are exceptionally broad and would prohibit, or create disabling legal uncertainty around, activities that are required for medical countermeasure development, public health surveillance, animal model development, and ordinary research posing minimal biosafety risk. The policy nods to the fact that medical countermeasure development overlaps with what is prohibited, but doesn't offer any path for acquiring an exception.
The policy also creates a category called "International Research of Concern" (IROC). Its language appears to prohibit federal support for any life sciences research conducted in a designated country of concern. It also subjects research in other countries to a vaguely defined assessment of whether local oversight meets US standards. These provisions could impair basic international activities including influenza surveillance, sample sharing, and outbreak investigation.
Even when policies included exceptions for beneficial research, many scientists actively avoided work that could be construed as "GOF"--a term that has become an unstable policy label.(24) In a news report about how these vague policy terms harm true preparedness, one virologist described being able to secure NIH funding for experiments that sounded "less GOF-like" but were also less informative about potential pandemic threats and how to defeat them. As he put it, "The next flu pandemic is brewing in nature, but we have very little means of stopping it, very little means of identifying what the most dangerous viruses are."(25)
I personally witnessed the chilling impact of previous iterations of these policies. At the 2025 Vaccine Congress in Kyoto, Japan, virologists from around the world gathered to discuss the latest scientific research about H5N1 influenza. Hualan Chen, a preeminent Chinese researcher, shed light on one mystery--how dairy cows were spreading H5N1 in the US. She conducted a large study demonstrating how infected cows transmitted the virus by drinking each other's milk, spreading the virus from mouth to teat.(26,27) Instead of getting this important information from researchers in China, US researchers who have the necessary expertise and facilities should have been able to investigate promptly how H5N1 spreads among cattle and which interventions could interrupt transmission.
Answering questions like these is essential to controlling the outbreak and reducing opportunities for the virus to evolve toward efficient human-to-human transmission. Yet at the conference, one US scientist after another described experiments that could resolve important questions about H5N1 preparedness and response, only to explain that the work could not proceed in the existing regulatory and funding environment.
That was before many research activities were outright prohibited. H5N1 preparedness has been further weakened through the May, 2025 cancellation of a major mRNA vaccine contract.(28)
The detrimental actions and policies I described are isolating US researchers and American research, internationally. Many nations see research on pathogens causing human disease as a priority in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-2. Rather than leading the world to maintain and develop safe, secure practices and biosafety norms, which US researchers are exceptionally well-poised to do, US scientists are being hamstrung, unable to lead and influence safety or security practices at the international level. Other nations' scientists will certainly take the lead in understanding important characteristics of emerging pathogens that could lead to better surveillance and better vaccines, and the international norms for research and safety will be set by them--not by US scientists. This will have serious negative implications for the US bioeconomy and international biosafety norms.
Ideally, any additional oversight for virology or any other kind of research should target activities that require the most safety oversight, and should not impose unnecessary burdens that either slow needed advances or encourage work-arounds. There should be clear regulatory lines so scientists know which research activities do/do not require additional oversight or reporting. Such a review should specifically engage many scientists and subdomain experts, as well as safety, security, and regulatory experts. The intent should be to ensure that the rules are clearly understood, effective, and durable. It should be noted that virology research, particularly in high containment, already has a significant amount of oversight.
Similarly, federal agencies should apply consistent definitions and retain specialized expertise necessary for their different missions. NIH, NSF, DOE, USDA, EPA, and DoD fund very different kinds of biological research, and implementing vague or inconsistent rules creates gaps and unnecessary restrictions. Congress should require coordinated implementation guidance, review and appeal mechanisms, and there should be regular evaluation of whether any restrictions are actually reducing risks or displacing valuable research.
Advances in the life sciences and the development of new biotechnologies are essential to American economic competitiveness, public health, and national security. Congress should prioritize NSCEB recommendations to sustain biotechnology R&D, expand domestic biomanufacturing infrastructure and workforce development, strengthen biological data resources, and harmonize federal regulation of biotechnology.
Recommendations:
I respectfully urge the Committee to consider the following actions:
1. Advance the NSCEB's biotechnology competitiveness recommendations.
Congress should require agencies to report on progress toward expanding domestic biomanufacturing capacity, pilot-scale infrastructure, workforce development, biological data resources, and regulatory coordination, including barriers that prevent American discoveries from being commercialized and manufactured domestically.
2. Require accounting and disclosure of undisbursed, appropriated research funds. Billions of dollars in federal research funding that Congress has appropriated -- including funds restored to NIH in early 2026 after being targeted for cuts -- have not reached researchers and institutions in a timely manner. This delay compounds the damage to the US biotechnology ecosystem. I urge the Committee to:
* Direct the responsible agencies to report to Congress, on a recurring basis, the amount of appropriated research funding that remains unobligated or unapportioned more than 60 days after enactment, and the specific reasons for any delay;
* Request that GAO continue and expand its review of the timeliness of apportionment and obligation of appropriated biomedical and life sciences research funding, building on its August 2025 finding, and report periodically to Congress on compliance with the Impoundment Control Act; and
* Make clear, through appropriate oversight action, that delayed or withheld disbursement of appropriated research funds carries the same real-world costs to American competitiveness and biosecurity as a formal funding cut, in lost researchers, canceled trials, and rescinded offers, regardless of the mechanism by which the funds are withheld.
3. I urge the Committee to call for the immediate suspension of the "United States Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research" and to temporarily use the 2024 United States Government Policy for Oversight of Dual Use Research of Concern and Pathogens with Enhanced Pandemic Potential while a better policy is developed. The 2024 policy was scheduled to take effect immediately before the May 2025 executive order directed that it be replaced. I do not offer it as an ideal solution. It and its P3CO-era predecessor shared a significant flaw: they required researchers and review panels to predict whether an experiment could reasonably be anticipated to produce consequential societal or public health harms. Such downstream consequences cannot be predicted reliably from a proposed genetic change or an isolated laboratory phenotype. Replication rate, host range, transmissibility, pathogenicity, and immune escape are distinct and complex characteristics, and a change in one does not necessarily predict a change in the others. Nevertheless, the 2024 policy provided a more workable interim framework and would not create the disabling ambiguity that now threatens valuable public health surveillance, animal model research, and medical countermeasure development.
* Require that a successor policy be developed with structured input from the regulated scientific community and independent outside experts.
The responsible agencies should conduct a formal, public process that includes a defined public comment period and structured technical consultation with practicing researchers, institutional biosafety officials, and non-governmental biosecurity experts, before issuing any successor to the current policy. This process should be transparent in its membership and methodology, and should not be limited to internal agency deliberation or a closed advisory process. The current policy's core defect is not simply that its definitions are vague, but that the policy was developed without meaningful input from the community expected to comply with it; a successor policy developed the same way will likely reproduce the same problems.
* Establish a defined exception pathway and appeal mechanism. Require that any successor policy include an explicit, expedited process for medical countermeasure development, public health surveillance, and animal model development to proceed with appropriate oversight rather than default prohibition, and that any "International Research of Concern" designations be subject to a published review standard and a formal right of appeal.
* Commission an independent evaluation of the policy's effects. Request that GAO or the National Academies conduct a biennial assessment of whether these restrictions are measurably reducing biosecurity risk or are instead displacing valuable research, driving it to less-transparent settings, or discouraging expertise the United States needs to detect and respond to emerging threats.
4. Hold a follow-up hearing within 12 months on implementation of the NSCEB's recommendations, with relevant agency leadership reporting on which recommendations have been adopted, which remain outstanding, and why.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify, and I would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.
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References:
1. AB 1963 - California Assembly (20212022) - Open States [Internet]. [cited 2022 Dec 19]. Available from: https://openstates.org/ca/bills/20212022/AB1963/
2. NSCEB. Charting the Future of Biotechnology [Internet]. [cited 2025 May 24]. Available from: https://www.biotech.senate.gov/final-report/chapters/
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24. Rasmussen AL, Gronvall GK, Lowen AC, Goodrum F, Alwine J, Andersen KG, et al. Virology--the path forward. Journal of Virology. 2024 Jan 3;0(0):e01791-23. doi:10.1128/jvi.01791-23
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27. Shi J, Kong H, Cui P, Deng G, Zeng X, Jiang Y, et al. H5N1 virus invades the mammary glands of dairy cattle through 'mouth-to-teat' transmission. Natl Sci Rev. 2025 Sep 1;12(9):nwaf262. doi:10.1093/nsr/nwaf262
28. Opinion | Jay Bhattacharya: Why the NIH is pivoting away from mRNA vaccines - The Washington Post [Internet]. [cited 2026 Jan 18]. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/12/nih-mrna-vaccines-jaybhattacharya/
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Original text here: https://republicans-science.house.gov/_cache/files/e/9/e9cdb4d1-6459-4e98-b328-26c8a9b3e805/9DCAA1BC5A8A8053DCAE4660AC7B37547AE6A4BC18035E5717FA1113CB732642.gigi-gronvall-testimony.pdf
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Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, and Members of the Subcommittee:
Thank you for inviting me to participate in today's hearing and thank you for your attention to a topic of critical ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight released the following testimony by Gigi Kwik Gronvall, professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race": * * * Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, and Members of the Subcommittee: Thank you for inviting me to participate in today's hearing and thank you for your attention to a topic of criticalnational security importance.
My name is Gigi Kwik Gronvall. I am a Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where I co-direct the Health Security PhD track within the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. I would like to state for the record that the opinions expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Johns Hopkins University or the Johns Hopkins Health System.
My central message is that biotechnology security requires both protection and achievement. Safeguards such as gene-synthesis screening, AI biosecurity evaluations, and intellectual-property protections are important, but they cannot substitute for the scientific talent, research capacity, manufacturing infrastructure, and international relationships needed to detect threats and develop countermeasures. A country that protects its science while allowing its scientific capabilities to decline will not be secure.
My background is in immunology, with training and experience including Johns Hopkins and the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). I have served on advisory committees related to biosecurity for the Department of Defense, Department of State, and the NIH, and I was the science advisor to the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (2009-2010). I am currently the co-chair of the Safety and Security Advisory Committee for BioMADE, the DoD-sponsored public-private manufacturing innovation institute that brings together industry, universities, and government to strengthen US biomanufacturing capacity, workforce development, and national security. I helped write and testified in support of AB1963, California's gene synthesis screening legislation.(1) I have advised AI developers, including Anthropic, on biosecurity safeguards, participated in testing safeguards, and received compensation for that work. Neither Anthropic nor any other company contributed to or reviewed this testimony.
Why the US is falling behind in biotechnology and the life sciences
I am pleased this committee is addressing the April 2025 final report of the NSCEB, which concluded that biotechnology will be a defining strategic technology of the twenty-first century and warned that the US risks falling behind global competitors.(2) The picture the NSCEB report paints is one of US complacency about a technology that was born in the US, and in which the US was the unquestioned leader for many years. While many nations see biotechnology as a source of economic growth and prosperity, no country has invested more than the People's Republic of China, which has invested more than $100 billion in talent recruitment programs, government subsidies, research and development, as well as plans to translate research into products.(3-8) China's growth has led to sobering statistics for the US: Chinese researchers now publish more scientific papers than US researchers.
China graduates more PhDs in science and technology fields. China aims for its bioeconomy to "be at the forefront globally" by 2035 to eclipse the US altogether.(9) China's biotechnology investments have yielded world-class scientists and breathtaking innovation. But as the NSCEB report makes clear, not all its successes have come from fair competition.
Since the NSCEB report was released, US policy decisions have further weakened our biotechnology research enterprise, exacerbating an already significant national security vulnerability. Billions of research dollars have been suddenly cut, which were intended to further scientific and medical advances, as well as train students and postdoctoral fellows.
Clinical trials have been stopped. Offers were rescinded. Careers have been derailed. Even when decisions have been overturned after political pressure, the uncertainty lingered, delaying or stopping job offers and student training acceptances. And, research dollars are still not reaching researchers.(10-13)
While there have been news stories about the high-powered researchers who have been recruited to Canada, the EU, and other places including China, there are many more talented students from around the world choosing not to come to the US to study, and potential students in the US who now view the biological sciences as a too-precarious career option.(14,15) It should be noted that the US once was the best place for scientists around the world to work, and it was an absolute requirement to have US lab experience to succeed. But that is no longer the case. There are now many research institutions from which a student can embark on a productive career. As a result, these damaging blows to the US science ecosystem have only led talented scientists and would-be scientists from around the world to make reasonable choices to go elsewhere, and not contribute to US scientific advances.
Over the past several years, US policymakers have mostly reacted to China's rise by introducing ways to protect US research from being stolen. It is indeed important to protect IP and American innovation, and to make sure that CFIUS has relevant expertise to protect US interests in biotech and agricultural technologies (and avoid missteps like allowing BGI to acquire Complete Genomics in 2013, for example). But protection alone cannot preserve American leadership. US science must continue producing something worth protecting.
The US has faced a similar conflict between competitiveness and security before. In 1982, the CIA assessed that "virtually every Soviet military research project" - of which there were thousands, going back decades--benefited from US technical documents and hardware that were acquired through both legal and illegal means.(16) Predictably, there were calls to better protect research, classify information that Russians could use to develop missile guidance systems, cryptography or code-breaking, aerospace engineering, and nuclear weapons development. In an emergency committee formed by the National Academies known as the Corson Report after its chair, it was argued that rigorous, innovative science does not thrive in a classified environment, and that even with the risks, the US would be better off keeping science as open as possible, to practice "security by accomplishment." This became the basis for NSDD-189, which President Reagan signed in 1985, and which has been reaffirmed several times since.
The national security and economic stakes point to openness as being even more critical for the biological sciences. The study of biology occurs everywhere on the planet.
Infectious diseases famously do not recognize national borders. Other nations, not just China, are moving ahead quickly, and will form the biotechnology ecosystem without scientific collaborators from the US. If the US does not practice security by accomplishment, it will not protect the US. It will just mean that the US will not achieve what other nations will. It will mean that the US will be even more vulnerable.
Scientific discovery alone is not sufficient for biotechnology leadership. The United States must also be able to translate discoveries into products and manufacture them at scale.
Domestic biomanufacturing capacity, a skilled workforce, common standards, supply chains that are not entirely dependent upon China, and access to pilot-scale infrastructure are national security assets. Without them, American discoveries will be commercialized and manufactured elsewhere, leaving the US dependent on foreign suppliers for medicines, agricultural inputs, industrial chemicals, and other materials needed during a crisis. Organizations such as BioMADE help bridge the gap between laboratory discovery and commercial-scale production, incorporating safety and security into the development process. But there is much additional work to do to expand domestic biotechnologies, build the workforce needed, and develop a clearer regulatory framework for emerging biotechnology products.
Anthropic recently described five case studies of trained scientists who circumvented, or used intermediaries to circumvent, the company's geographic access restrictions.(17) There are many reasons scientists might use AI models, most of which are not nefarious, and it is not clear those scientists were intending to develop biological weapons. Still, the cases are instructive. Much of the current biosecurity debate focuses on whether AI could give a biological novice access to sophisticated capabilities. These cases instead involved trained scientists using AI to assist their work.
They illustrate a broader reality: advanced biological expertise exists around the world, and potentially harmful activity may evade an American provider's safeguards or never involve a monitored AI platform. Prevention measures remain important. AI developers should evaluate their models for biosecurity risks and have mechanisms to report credible threats.
Gene synthesis providers should screen their orders and have know-your-customer practices. But prevention alone cannot provide biological security. It is critical that the US maintain the scientific expertise needed to identify emerging threats, evaluate their significance, and develop effective countermeasures.
In addition to research funding, activities necessary for US science to advance have been cut or made much more difficult. These actions should be reversed. For example, scientific conferences are not only an important part of communicating science ahead of publications, they are also often integral to scientific innovation: Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier met at an American Society for Microbiology conference in Puerto Rico in 2011, and their subsequent collaboration produced the foundational CRISPR-Cas9 work for which they received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.(18) It has been increasingly difficult for scientific conferences to be held in the US, because of the challenges for international scientists to get visas to attend. But now, with incidents of scientists being denied entry or detained by US immigration officials, scientists are deciding not to attend conferences in the US.(19,20) US scientists increasingly do not have the funding to travel, either, to hear the latest scientific advances, or form the collaborations that will deliver future innovations and Nobel Prizes, or to take the next steps in what now is perceived to be an unwise career choice.
Visa challenges and denials were a major reason why the premier synthetic biology competition, the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, moved from Boston to Paris in 2022.(21) The competition originally grew out of a class at MIT, and the first competition had just 5 teams. Now there are over 400 teams from at least 50 countries. The competition has led to over 250 startup companies, and there are more than 86,000 iGEM alumni all over the world. Competitions like this - another is the Biodesign Competition, which is still based in New York City--are an important part of experiential learning in biotechnology, and they are a source of future innovation. The US should consider these competitions strategically.
US interests are also being harmed by detrimental research policies that are extremely vague, and which will make the most innocuous research legally risky. One example is the "United States Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research," which was released in July, 2026 in response to the May 2025 Executive Order "Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research."(22,23) This policy prohibits "dangerous gain of function research" or DGOF. However, the definitions are exceptionally broad and would prohibit, or create disabling legal uncertainty around, activities that are required for medical countermeasure development, public health surveillance, animal model development, and ordinary research posing minimal biosafety risk. The policy nods to the fact that medical countermeasure development overlaps with what is prohibited, but doesn't offer any path for acquiring an exception.
The policy also creates a category called "International Research of Concern" (IROC). Its language appears to prohibit federal support for any life sciences research conducted in a designated country of concern. It also subjects research in other countries to a vaguely defined assessment of whether local oversight meets US standards. These provisions could impair basic international activities including influenza surveillance, sample sharing, and outbreak investigation.
Even when policies included exceptions for beneficial research, many scientists actively avoided work that could be construed as "GOF"--a term that has become an unstable policy label.(24) In a news report about how these vague policy terms harm true preparedness, one virologist described being able to secure NIH funding for experiments that sounded "less GOF-like" but were also less informative about potential pandemic threats and how to defeat them. As he put it, "The next flu pandemic is brewing in nature, but we have very little means of stopping it, very little means of identifying what the most dangerous viruses are."(25)
I personally witnessed the chilling impact of previous iterations of these policies. At the 2025 Vaccine Congress in Kyoto, Japan, virologists from around the world gathered to discuss the latest scientific research about H5N1 influenza. Hualan Chen, a preeminent Chinese researcher, shed light on one mystery--how dairy cows were spreading H5N1 in the US. She conducted a large study demonstrating how infected cows transmitted the virus by drinking each other's milk, spreading the virus from mouth to teat.(26,27) Instead of getting this important information from researchers in China, US researchers who have the necessary expertise and facilities should have been able to investigate promptly how H5N1 spreads among cattle and which interventions could interrupt transmission.
Answering questions like these is essential to controlling the outbreak and reducing opportunities for the virus to evolve toward efficient human-to-human transmission. Yet at the conference, one US scientist after another described experiments that could resolve important questions about H5N1 preparedness and response, only to explain that the work could not proceed in the existing regulatory and funding environment.
That was before many research activities were outright prohibited. H5N1 preparedness has been further weakened through the May, 2025 cancellation of a major mRNA vaccine contract.(28)
The detrimental actions and policies I described are isolating US researchers and American research, internationally. Many nations see research on pathogens causing human disease as a priority in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-2. Rather than leading the world to maintain and develop safe, secure practices and biosafety norms, which US researchers are exceptionally well-poised to do, US scientists are being hamstrung, unable to lead and influence safety or security practices at the international level. Other nations' scientists will certainly take the lead in understanding important characteristics of emerging pathogens that could lead to better surveillance and better vaccines, and the international norms for research and safety will be set by them--not by US scientists. This will have serious negative implications for the US bioeconomy and international biosafety norms.
Ideally, any additional oversight for virology or any other kind of research should target activities that require the most safety oversight, and should not impose unnecessary burdens that either slow needed advances or encourage work-arounds. There should be clear regulatory lines so scientists know which research activities do/do not require additional oversight or reporting. Such a review should specifically engage many scientists and subdomain experts, as well as safety, security, and regulatory experts. The intent should be to ensure that the rules are clearly understood, effective, and durable. It should be noted that virology research, particularly in high containment, already has a significant amount of oversight.
Similarly, federal agencies should apply consistent definitions and retain specialized expertise necessary for their different missions. NIH, NSF, DOE, USDA, EPA, and DoD fund very different kinds of biological research, and implementing vague or inconsistent rules creates gaps and unnecessary restrictions. Congress should require coordinated implementation guidance, review and appeal mechanisms, and there should be regular evaluation of whether any restrictions are actually reducing risks or displacing valuable research.
Advances in the life sciences and the development of new biotechnologies are essential to American economic competitiveness, public health, and national security. Congress should prioritize NSCEB recommendations to sustain biotechnology R&D, expand domestic biomanufacturing infrastructure and workforce development, strengthen biological data resources, and harmonize federal regulation of biotechnology.
Recommendations:
I respectfully urge the Committee to consider the following actions:
1. Advance the NSCEB's biotechnology competitiveness recommendations.
Congress should require agencies to report on progress toward expanding domestic biomanufacturing capacity, pilot-scale infrastructure, workforce development, biological data resources, and regulatory coordination, including barriers that prevent American discoveries from being commercialized and manufactured domestically.
2. Require accounting and disclosure of undisbursed, appropriated research funds. Billions of dollars in federal research funding that Congress has appropriated -- including funds restored to NIH in early 2026 after being targeted for cuts -- have not reached researchers and institutions in a timely manner. This delay compounds the damage to the US biotechnology ecosystem. I urge the Committee to:
* Direct the responsible agencies to report to Congress, on a recurring basis, the amount of appropriated research funding that remains unobligated or unapportioned more than 60 days after enactment, and the specific reasons for any delay;
* Request that GAO continue and expand its review of the timeliness of apportionment and obligation of appropriated biomedical and life sciences research funding, building on its August 2025 finding, and report periodically to Congress on compliance with the Impoundment Control Act; and
* Make clear, through appropriate oversight action, that delayed or withheld disbursement of appropriated research funds carries the same real-world costs to American competitiveness and biosecurity as a formal funding cut, in lost researchers, canceled trials, and rescinded offers, regardless of the mechanism by which the funds are withheld.
3. I urge the Committee to call for the immediate suspension of the "United States Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research" and to temporarily use the 2024 United States Government Policy for Oversight of Dual Use Research of Concern and Pathogens with Enhanced Pandemic Potential while a better policy is developed. The 2024 policy was scheduled to take effect immediately before the May 2025 executive order directed that it be replaced. I do not offer it as an ideal solution. It and its P3CO-era predecessor shared a significant flaw: they required researchers and review panels to predict whether an experiment could reasonably be anticipated to produce consequential societal or public health harms. Such downstream consequences cannot be predicted reliably from a proposed genetic change or an isolated laboratory phenotype. Replication rate, host range, transmissibility, pathogenicity, and immune escape are distinct and complex characteristics, and a change in one does not necessarily predict a change in the others. Nevertheless, the 2024 policy provided a more workable interim framework and would not create the disabling ambiguity that now threatens valuable public health surveillance, animal model research, and medical countermeasure development.
* Require that a successor policy be developed with structured input from the regulated scientific community and independent outside experts.
The responsible agencies should conduct a formal, public process that includes a defined public comment period and structured technical consultation with practicing researchers, institutional biosafety officials, and non-governmental biosecurity experts, before issuing any successor to the current policy. This process should be transparent in its membership and methodology, and should not be limited to internal agency deliberation or a closed advisory process. The current policy's core defect is not simply that its definitions are vague, but that the policy was developed without meaningful input from the community expected to comply with it; a successor policy developed the same way will likely reproduce the same problems.
* Establish a defined exception pathway and appeal mechanism. Require that any successor policy include an explicit, expedited process for medical countermeasure development, public health surveillance, and animal model development to proceed with appropriate oversight rather than default prohibition, and that any "International Research of Concern" designations be subject to a published review standard and a formal right of appeal.
* Commission an independent evaluation of the policy's effects. Request that GAO or the National Academies conduct a biennial assessment of whether these restrictions are measurably reducing biosecurity risk or are instead displacing valuable research, driving it to less-transparent settings, or discouraging expertise the United States needs to detect and respond to emerging threats.
4. Hold a follow-up hearing within 12 months on implementation of the NSCEB's recommendations, with relevant agency leadership reporting on which recommendations have been adopted, which remain outstanding, and why.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify, and I would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.
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References:
1. AB 1963 - California Assembly (20212022) - Open States [Internet]. [cited 2022 Dec 19]. Available from: https://openstates.org/ca/bills/20212022/AB1963/
2. NSCEB. Charting the Future of Biotechnology [Internet]. [cited 2025 May 24]. Available from: https://www.biotech.senate.gov/final-report/chapters/
3. Peter RM. Six biotech companies in South Korea you should know about. Labiotech.eu [Internet]. 2023 Jun 23 [cited 2025 Feb 5]. Available from: https://www.labiotech.eu/best-biotech/biotech-companies-south-korea-you-shouldknow-about/
4. The best countries for biotech according to the OECD [Internet]. [cited 2025 Feb 5]. Available from: https://www.labiotech.eu/best-biotech/top-biotech-countries/
5. Cornall J. UK invests pound sterling650M in life sciences. Labiotech.eu [Internet]. 2023 May 30 [cited 2025 Feb 5]. Available from: https://www.labiotech.eu/trends-news/uk-invests-lifesciences/
6. Michelle_Rozo_Testimony.pdf [Internet]. [cited 2025 Jan 18]. Available from: https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2024-02/Michelle_Rozo_Testimony.pdf
7. Mark Kazmierczak, Ryan Ritterson, Danielle Gardner, Rocco Casagrande, Thilo Hanemann, Daniel H. Rosen. China's Biotechnology Development: The Role of US and Other Foreign Engagement: A report prepared for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission [Internet]. Available from: https://www.uscc.gov/research/chinas-biotechnology-development-role-us-andother-foreign-engagement
8. Moore S. China's role in the global biotechnology sector and implications for U.S. policy. Brookings Institution [Internet]. Available from: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/chinas-role-in-the-global-biotechnology-sectorand-implications-for-us-policy/
9. Bioeconomy prominent on growth agenda [Internet]. [cited 2025 Jan 19]. Available from: https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/policywatch/202205/11/content_WS627b169ec6d 02e533532a879.html
10. Top researchers consider leaving U.S. amid funding cuts: "The science world is ending." PBS News [Internet]. 2025 Oct 29 [cited 2026 Sep 12]. Available from: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/top-researchers-consider-leaving-u-s-amidfunding-cuts-the-science-world-is-ending
11. POLITICO [Internet]. 2025 [cited 2025 Nov 30]. Top US researchers rush to relocate to Europe. Available from: https://www.politico.eu/article/european-research-councilfunding-us-researchers-relocation-europe/
12. AAMC [Internet]. [cited 2026 Sep 13]. Tracking NIH Awards in FY 2026. Available from: https://www.aamc.org/about-us/biomedical-research/publication/tracking-nihawards-fy-2026-1
13. House Members Send Bipartisan Letter to HHS on NIH Grant Delays - ASCO [Internet]. [cited 2026 Sep 13]. Available from: https://www.asco.org/news-initiatives/policynews-analysis/house-members-bipartisan-letter-hhs-nih-grant-delays
14. AAU [Internet]. [cited 2026 Sep 12]. Resources on American Researchers Leaving the United States. Available from: https://www.aau.edu/resource-library/resourcesamerican-researchers-leaving-united-states
15. Before the Exodus? Young Scientists and the Future of U.S. Science - Working Paper Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School [Internet]. [cited 2026 Sep 12]. Available from: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=69201
16. Soviet Acquisition of Militarily Significant Western Technology: an Update [Internet]. [cited 2025 Jan 26]. Available from: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000500561.pdf
17. Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic [Internet]. [cited 2026 Sep 11]. Available from: https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026
18. NobelPrize.org [Internet]. [cited 2025 May 2]. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020. Available from: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2020/summary/
19. Ledford H, Witze A. 'Anxiety is palpable': detention of researchers at US border spurs travel worries. Nature. 2025 Mar 24;640(8057):13-4. doi:10.1038/d41586-025-00859-w
20. International scientists rethink U.S. conference attendance [Internet]. [cited 2025 May 5]. Available from: https://www.science.org/content/article/international-scientistsrethink-us-conference-attendance
21. Baber S. The Tech [Internet]. [cited 2025 May 23]. Visa issues prevent several international students from attending iGEM Giant Jamboree. Available from: https://thetech.com/2018/11/08/igem-competition-students
22. Executive Office of the President US. Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research [Internet]. 2025 May [cited 2026 Sep 11]. Available from: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/improving-the-safety-andsecurity-of-biological-research/
23. Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs. Trump Administration Releases New Government-Wide Policy to End Dangerous High-Risk Research [Press Release] [Internet]. 2026 Jul [cited 2026 Sep 11]. Available from: https://www.hhs.gov/pressroom/stopping-high-risk-life-sciences-research.html
24. Rasmussen AL, Gronvall GK, Lowen AC, Goodrum F, Alwine J, Andersen KG, et al. Virology--the path forward. Journal of Virology. 2024 Jan 3;0(0):e01791-23. doi:10.1128/jvi.01791-23
25. Mueller B, Stolberg SG. Lab Leak Fight Casts Chill Over Virology Research. The New York Times [Internet]. 2023 Oct 16 [cited 2025 Sep 23]. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/covid-lab-leak-research.html
26. Dixit M. 'Milk-stealing' calves spread deadly bird flu virus among US cows, China study reveals. The Transmission [Internet]. 2025 Jul 16 [cited 2025 Oct 4]. Available from: https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2025/07/16/milk-stealing-calvesspread-deadly-bird-flu-virus-among-us-cows-china-study-reveals/
27. Shi J, Kong H, Cui P, Deng G, Zeng X, Jiang Y, et al. H5N1 virus invades the mammary glands of dairy cattle through 'mouth-to-teat' transmission. Natl Sci Rev. 2025 Sep 1;12(9):nwaf262. doi:10.1093/nsr/nwaf262
28. Opinion | Jay Bhattacharya: Why the NIH is pivoting away from mRNA vaccines - The Washington Post [Internet]. [cited 2026 Jan 18]. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/12/nih-mrna-vaccines-jaybhattacharya/
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Original text here: https://republicans-science.house.gov/_cache/files/e/9/e9cdb4d1-6459-4e98-b328-26c8a9b3e805/9DCAA1BC5A8A8053DCAE4660AC7B37547AE6A4BC18035E5717FA1113CB732642.gigi-gronvall-testimony.pdf
House Transportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee Chairman Ezell Issues Opening Remarks at Hearing on USCG
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- Rep. Mike Ezell, R-Mississippi, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, released the following opening remarks from a Sept. 16, 2026, heating entitled "Always Ready: A Day in the Life of a United States Coast Guard Member":
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Today, our subcommittee meets to highlight the extraordinary work the enlisted men and women of the Coast Guard do, day in and day out, to save lives at sea, interdict drugs and migrants, keep our maritime transportation system safe and reliable, and perform all of their other ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- Rep. Mike Ezell, R-Mississippi, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, released the following opening remarks from a Sept. 16, 2026, heating entitled "Always Ready: A Day in the Life of a United States Coast Guard Member": * * * Today, our subcommittee meets to highlight the extraordinary work the enlisted men and women of the Coast Guard do, day in and day out, to save lives at sea, interdict drugs and migrants, keep our maritime transportation system safe and reliable, and perform all of their otherprimary duties. I welcome our witnesses for this afternoon's hearing: Vice Admiral Nathan Moore, Deputy Commandant of the Coast Guard for Operations; and Master Chief Phillip Waldron, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard's record of achievement is a testament to the skill and bravery of its service members. Just last year, the Service saved 5,220 lives and assisted nearly 20,000 people. Also last year, the Coast Guard interdicted 511,000 pounds of drugs -- stopping 193 million potentially lethal doses from reaching our shores. These missions are carried out largely by the Coast Guard's enlisted workforce. We ask a lot of those enlisted service members who make up a significant majority of the Coast Guard's active duty military population.
Just before this hearing, Members of the Subcommittee had the opportunity to speak with four members of the Coast Guard enlisted workforce over lunch. Those men and women represented different specialties across the Service. I am sure I can speak for everyone on the Subcommittee when I tell you these are impressive individuals and we applaud their service.
Despite their remarkable achievements, the Coast Guard's workforce faces challenges in accessing adequate housing, education, and childcare. I had the privilege to travel this August with the Coast Guard. I went to New Orleans, Pascagoula, Pensacola, and Key West. To be quite frank, I was horrified to see how neglected our service members are. They live and work and protect communities across every corner of our nation, including in some of the most remote parts, where it can be difficult to develop infrastructure. Beyond that, we have boats that are beyond their planned service life, infrastructure dating back to World War II, and planes and helicopters which are way beyond their planned service life. We even have rescue swimmers who train in a recreational pool, because their own training facility suffered a catastrophic failure, and Coasties who do boat maintenance outdoors, uncovered in extreme heat.
This year, we were also reminded of the physical risk that comes with these missions by the death of a rescue swimmer in the line of duty and reports of potentially debilitating brain injuries among boat crews operating in heavy surf.
Vice Admiral Moore, I am sure you will agree that, as a nation, we owe our Coasties adequate living conditions, world-class training, proper working conditions, and, if they're injured on the job, the confidence that they will be taken care of.
While shoreside facilities have fallen into disrepair, impacting the readiness of the Service, I am hopeful the investments made in the One Big Beautiful Bill will begin to improve conditions. But true progress will only happen through annual appropriations at sustainable levels. Neither the budget request nor the Appropriations Committee provide that sustainable level. I am afraid that without continued investment at the levels needed, we will see a catastrophic failure of Coast Guard assets. I look forward to hearing from both of our witnesses how the Service is working to improve conditions for its workforce.
I am also glad to see the Coast Guard respond so quickly to the realization of brain injury risks among crew, but many questions remain. I am interested in hearing greater detail of the Coast Guard's response, and how you plan to restore the confidence of your operators.
Thank you again for joining us. I look forward to your testimony.
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Original text here: https://transportation.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=410258
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Today, our subcommittee meets to highlight the extraordinary work the enlisted men and women of the Coast Guard do, day in and day out, to save lives at sea, interdict drugs and migrants, keep our maritime transportation system safe and reliable, and perform all of their other ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- Rep. Mike Ezell, R-Mississippi, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, released the following opening remarks from a Sept. 16, 2026, heating entitled "Always Ready: A Day in the Life of a United States Coast Guard Member": * * * Today, our subcommittee meets to highlight the extraordinary work the enlisted men and women of the Coast Guard do, day in and day out, to save lives at sea, interdict drugs and migrants, keep our maritime transportation system safe and reliable, and perform all of their otherprimary duties. I welcome our witnesses for this afternoon's hearing: Vice Admiral Nathan Moore, Deputy Commandant of the Coast Guard for Operations; and Master Chief Phillip Waldron, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard's record of achievement is a testament to the skill and bravery of its service members. Just last year, the Service saved 5,220 lives and assisted nearly 20,000 people. Also last year, the Coast Guard interdicted 511,000 pounds of drugs -- stopping 193 million potentially lethal doses from reaching our shores. These missions are carried out largely by the Coast Guard's enlisted workforce. We ask a lot of those enlisted service members who make up a significant majority of the Coast Guard's active duty military population.
Just before this hearing, Members of the Subcommittee had the opportunity to speak with four members of the Coast Guard enlisted workforce over lunch. Those men and women represented different specialties across the Service. I am sure I can speak for everyone on the Subcommittee when I tell you these are impressive individuals and we applaud their service.
Despite their remarkable achievements, the Coast Guard's workforce faces challenges in accessing adequate housing, education, and childcare. I had the privilege to travel this August with the Coast Guard. I went to New Orleans, Pascagoula, Pensacola, and Key West. To be quite frank, I was horrified to see how neglected our service members are. They live and work and protect communities across every corner of our nation, including in some of the most remote parts, where it can be difficult to develop infrastructure. Beyond that, we have boats that are beyond their planned service life, infrastructure dating back to World War II, and planes and helicopters which are way beyond their planned service life. We even have rescue swimmers who train in a recreational pool, because their own training facility suffered a catastrophic failure, and Coasties who do boat maintenance outdoors, uncovered in extreme heat.
This year, we were also reminded of the physical risk that comes with these missions by the death of a rescue swimmer in the line of duty and reports of potentially debilitating brain injuries among boat crews operating in heavy surf.
Vice Admiral Moore, I am sure you will agree that, as a nation, we owe our Coasties adequate living conditions, world-class training, proper working conditions, and, if they're injured on the job, the confidence that they will be taken care of.
While shoreside facilities have fallen into disrepair, impacting the readiness of the Service, I am hopeful the investments made in the One Big Beautiful Bill will begin to improve conditions. But true progress will only happen through annual appropriations at sustainable levels. Neither the budget request nor the Appropriations Committee provide that sustainable level. I am afraid that without continued investment at the levels needed, we will see a catastrophic failure of Coast Guard assets. I look forward to hearing from both of our witnesses how the Service is working to improve conditions for its workforce.
I am also glad to see the Coast Guard respond so quickly to the realization of brain injury risks among crew, but many questions remain. I am interested in hearing greater detail of the Coast Guard's response, and how you plan to restore the confidence of your operators.
Thank you again for joining us. I look forward to your testimony.
* * *
Original text here: https://transportation.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=410258
House Science Committee Chairman Babin Issues Opening Statement at Hearing on Biotechnology Innovation
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, released the following opening statement from a Sept. 16, 2026, joint hearing with the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race":
* * *
Thank you, Chairman McCormick, for holding this hearing on an issue with significant implications for our country.
Today, we are here to address a field that is increasingly consequential to our national security, economic competitiveness, and ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, released the following opening statement from a Sept. 16, 2026, joint hearing with the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race": * * * Thank you, Chairman McCormick, for holding this hearing on an issue with significant implications for our country. Today, we are here to address a field that is increasingly consequential to our national security, economic competitiveness, andscientific leadership.
Biotechnology is a term that many of us hear frequently, but may not fully grasp just how many industries it touches. Biotechnology uses biological systems to develop products, processes, and solutions. As these technologies advance, the field is reaching into an expanding range of industries, including healthcare, agriculture, chemical manufacturing, fuel development, and even artificial intelligence.
Developments in biotechnology can provide tremendous benefits to our communities, industries, and economy. But these advances also present significant risks. Laboratory accidents, deliberate misuse, inadequate oversight, or the release of information or biological materials that could be used to harm the public pose serious threats to our national security and public health. Maintaining leadership in this field therefore requires not only sustained support for research and development, but also strong and effective safeguards.
In May 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14292, Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research, which strengthened federal oversight of high-risk biological research, particularly dangerous gain-of-function research. The order seeks to distinguish legitimate and beneficial biological research from activities that could pose unacceptable risks to public health or national security.
Not every country--or every company operating within it--shares the same concerns about biosafety and biosecurity. That is one reason Congress enacted the BIOSECURE Act last December. The Act establishes restrictions on federal procurement and contracting involving equipment, services, or other capabilities provided by identified biotechnology companies of concern. These actions are critical steps, but more work remains. We must continue developing policies, procedures, and oversight mechanisms that balance American leadership in biotechnology with the responsibility to protect our country from serious risks.
China is not standing still. The CCP is rapidly expanding its biotechnology capabilities. Its biomanufacturing capacity, research and development efforts, and workforce continue to grow. The United States must strengthen and expand our own capabilities--and move faster to stay ahead.
Biotechnology is one of the fastest-growing areas of scientific research and manufacturing. The United States must support this growth because it is critical to our economy, national security, and communities. We will only maintain our leadership in the face of strategic competition if we adopt policies that strengthen our domestic capabilities while protecting our research, resources, and people from bad actors.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about what more we can do to advance American biotechnology research, domestic biomanufacturing, supply chain security, and innovation while ensuring the United States remains competitive with China.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today and for sharing your knowledge and expertise. And thank you again, Chairman McCormick, for holding this hearing.
I yield back.
* * *
Original text here: https://science.house.gov/2026/9/opening-statement-of-chairman-brian-babin-at-balancing-biotechnology-innovation-and-biosecurity
* * *
Thank you, Chairman McCormick, for holding this hearing on an issue with significant implications for our country.
Today, we are here to address a field that is increasingly consequential to our national security, economic competitiveness, and ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, released the following opening statement from a Sept. 16, 2026, joint hearing with the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race": * * * Thank you, Chairman McCormick, for holding this hearing on an issue with significant implications for our country. Today, we are here to address a field that is increasingly consequential to our national security, economic competitiveness, andscientific leadership.
Biotechnology is a term that many of us hear frequently, but may not fully grasp just how many industries it touches. Biotechnology uses biological systems to develop products, processes, and solutions. As these technologies advance, the field is reaching into an expanding range of industries, including healthcare, agriculture, chemical manufacturing, fuel development, and even artificial intelligence.
Developments in biotechnology can provide tremendous benefits to our communities, industries, and economy. But these advances also present significant risks. Laboratory accidents, deliberate misuse, inadequate oversight, or the release of information or biological materials that could be used to harm the public pose serious threats to our national security and public health. Maintaining leadership in this field therefore requires not only sustained support for research and development, but also strong and effective safeguards.
In May 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14292, Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research, which strengthened federal oversight of high-risk biological research, particularly dangerous gain-of-function research. The order seeks to distinguish legitimate and beneficial biological research from activities that could pose unacceptable risks to public health or national security.
Not every country--or every company operating within it--shares the same concerns about biosafety and biosecurity. That is one reason Congress enacted the BIOSECURE Act last December. The Act establishes restrictions on federal procurement and contracting involving equipment, services, or other capabilities provided by identified biotechnology companies of concern. These actions are critical steps, but more work remains. We must continue developing policies, procedures, and oversight mechanisms that balance American leadership in biotechnology with the responsibility to protect our country from serious risks.
China is not standing still. The CCP is rapidly expanding its biotechnology capabilities. Its biomanufacturing capacity, research and development efforts, and workforce continue to grow. The United States must strengthen and expand our own capabilities--and move faster to stay ahead.
Biotechnology is one of the fastest-growing areas of scientific research and manufacturing. The United States must support this growth because it is critical to our economy, national security, and communities. We will only maintain our leadership in the face of strategic competition if we adopt policies that strengthen our domestic capabilities while protecting our research, resources, and people from bad actors.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about what more we can do to advance American biotechnology research, domestic biomanufacturing, supply chain security, and innovation while ensuring the United States remains competitive with China.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today and for sharing your knowledge and expertise. And thank you again, Chairman McCormick, for holding this hearing.
I yield back.
* * *
Original text here: https://science.house.gov/2026/9/opening-statement-of-chairman-brian-babin-at-balancing-biotechnology-innovation-and-biosecurity
Hoover Institution Bio-Strategies & Leadership Initiative Visiting Fellow Hodges Testifies Before House Science, Space & Technology Subcommittee
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight released the following testimony by Joshua Hodges, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution Bio-Strategies and Leadership Initiative, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race":
* * *
Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, Members of the Subcommittee -- thank you for convening a discussion that carries real implications for our security, our economic future, and, most importantly, for everyday ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight released the following testimony by Joshua Hodges, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution Bio-Strategies and Leadership Initiative, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race": * * * Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, Members of the Subcommittee -- thank you for convening a discussion that carries real implications for our security, our economic future, and, most importantly, for everydayAmericans.
I serve as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution's Bio-Strategies and Leadership Initiative.
As you are aware, in addition to my role with Hoover, I hold a range of public and private-sector roles, including as a Commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and in advisory capacities in the private sector, that expose me to a wide range of information and perspective on this and other strategic challenges. The views I express today are my own.
I have spent most of the last decade studying how China is working to overtake the United States in the technologies and industries it believes will define the current century -- often through asymmetric means. There is a military dimension to that effort, but it is not Beijing's principal weapon. China is pursuing a comprehensive, state-directed strategy to build levers of control over our data, the emerging economic corridors, and the manufacturing base of the future and it competes as an ecosystem, not as isolated firms. Biotechnology is squarely inside that campaign, pursued by a full-scope effort across research, data, manufacturing, talent, and finance.
In October 2025, Hoover released a report, Biosecurity Really: A Strategy for Victory, with the central premise that biosecurity is a solvable problem if we treat it as one. This report was released because advancing and securing biotechnology are linked together. The report itself offers nine recommendations -- a blueprint -- and members of the team have since identified clear metrics to measure our progress against them.
The same advances that create biological risk are also the only means of retiring it -- surveillance, vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments. In 2004, Biodefense for the 21st Century stockpiled enough smallpox vaccine for every American, vaccinated over 450,000 service members, and expanded the Strategic National Stockpile so that treatment packages could reach anywhere in the country within 12 hours. In recognition of the threat, the United States removed the value to an adversary of deploying such a weapon against Americans.
The problem we face today has advanced significantly since 9/11. As Biodefense for the 21st Century warned, preventing and controlling future biological-weapons threats will be even more challenging: the dispersion of technology, the application of artificial intelligence, and advances across biotechnology and the life sciences -- including the spread of expertise to create modified or novel organisms -- raise the prospect of new toxins, live agents, and biomodulators that would demand new detection methods, preventive measures, and treatments. These are not new problems; they have advanced. Current detection and intelligence efforts continue to struggle with the dual-use nature of biological technologies and infrastructure, and with the likelihood that adversaries will use denial and deception to conceal illicit activity. Novel tools and safeguards must be considered to address the rapid expansion of these technologies beyond our borders.
From Chatbots to Biological Weapon Pressure Cookers. The danger is escalating from question-and-answer to active assistance -- and the queries are coming from abroad. In just the past six months, biosecurity experts warned it was "disturbingly easy" to get chatbots to advise on making pathogens more dangerous; scientists and AI executives signed an open letter demanding new controls on DNA fabrication because AI can now speed the design of toxins and viruses; researchers reported using AI to build viruses not found in nature; and one leading AI lab announced it had blocked several attempts to use its models to weaponize pathogens.
Today's general-purpose chatbot is a reference tool that experts agree is unlikely, on its own, to help a lone actor invent a deadly pathogen. The newer, biology-specific models are a different machine -- closer to a pressure cooker if the status quo remains. Trained directly on the DNA of millions of species, Stanford and the Arc Institute's Evo2 has generated hundreds of thousands of novel viral genomes and yielded sixteen real, viable viruses -- harmless ones that infect only E. coli -- and its creators acknowledge that a version not deliberately constrained could, in principle, design a variant of a pathogen like smallpox.
Meanwhile the federal backstop meant to catch this -- mandatory screening of synthetic-DNA orders -- was suspended last year and has not been replaced. As my Hoover colleague Drew Endy told the Times, the net uplift today remains "modest," but that will change as models specialize in biology. This is the shape of a weapons race we can still get ahead of -- but only if we "leapfrog ahead... and secure biology" now, rather than wait to be surprised.
The instinct, when a technology can be turned to harm, is to slow it down or wall it off. History has repeatedly shown that approach stunts innovation. In 1865 Britain's Locomotive Act -- "Red Flag Act -- required a man to walk sixty yards ahead of every motorcar waving a red flag, at four miles per hour; Britain eased the flag in 1878 but kept the broader regime until 1896, and handed the early automobile industry to France, Germany, and the United States.
Contrast piped gas: as the United States modernized it spread into American homes offering a variety of benefits despite the danger being real. The US did not rip gas out of the walls. We required a cheap, universal safeguard -- odorization -- so a leak announces itself. The technology kept scaling; the standard made it safe. We have never made a transformative technology safe by refusing to build it; we have made it safe by building the standard alongside it. Verifiable screening of synthetic-DNA orders is the odorant of our age.
In its 2025 Annual Report to Congress, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reached a similar conclusion: we urged Congress to make building a resilient bioeconomy industrial base -- and unlocking biology as a general-purpose technology before the decade's end -- a strategic national objective. Securing biology and leading it are two sides of the same coin. The Commission warned that we are on a path to depend on our principal strategic competitor, China, for the very tools our biodefense will rely on.
I returned from China a little over a month ago as part of a U.S. delegation. Comparing my takeaways with those of private-sector executives and other experts who have made similar trips recently -- each of us there on different business -- the standout point was unmistakable: China feels confident, and it is content to have us remain right where we are.
Today, the United States is still in the lead in some aspects of biotechnology, but our remaining lead has a rapidly dwindling shelf life. We hold the economic fundamentals -- innovation, capital markets, productivity -- and we are losing on coordination and speed. This is not a challenge we can afford to ignore.
The position we are in is the product of a deliberate strategy on China's side and institutional neglect on ours. For too long the United States treated biology as a pharmaceutical lane with a bioweapons problem, at best, and as a compliance file at worst -- not as a strategic domain to be owned. We did not arrive here in the last two years, or because of any single budget cycle. The crossover has been building for over two decades, and it is only now beginning to show.
In 2020, China passed the United States in the total number of clinical trials, and in 2023 in trials for novel medicines -- figures my Hoover colleague Drew Endy presented to the Senate Commerce Committee this July. In 2025, roughly a third of the pharmaceutical industry's global licensing spend went to sourcing new medicines from Chinese companies. Barron's reported this week that China's biotech industry has become as much a challenger to America's technological leadership as China's artificial intelligence upstarts, backed by US investors.
A useful way to see where we stand is the U.S.-China Biomedical Competitiveness Scorecard published this June. It found China leading on clinical trials, manufacturing, and supply chains, and the United States still leading on technology transfer, talent, and finance. That is the honest picture, and it matches what I have increasingly seen across Hoover, the Commission, and private-sector engagement: our lead is in the laboratory, not on the factory floor. Recent evidence suggests that China is on track to bring online more new industrial biomanufacturing capacity than the rest of the world combined.
This massive leap forward is due to a mindset aimed at driving forward. They have built an ecosystem designed to make them the world leader -- their regulation and infrastructure, coupled with China's speed to approve and its tailor-made manufacturing base, together compress the design-build-test-learn cycle in biotechnology in ways that capital alone cannot answer.
Multiple federally funded commissions, the academic community, and the private sector have independently reached the same conclusion and roughly the same deadline -- the next 19 months to three years is the time for swift action to avoid losing long-term U.S. leadership and opportunity.
The competition is simple to state and hard to execute: the United States must invest more smartly, build better, and deploy faster if we wish to compete and win on biotechnology. China is taking an "Operation Warp Speed"-like approach for all of biotechnology. What is our approach? Where is it situated? Who owns it?
The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) concluded in April 2025 that "to remain competitive, the United States must take swift action in the next three years." Hoover's independent BSL report, released in October of last year, set an even tighter clock: begin every Stage 1 action "within one thousand days." And the private sector sees the same window from the economic side -- one joint assessment projects the U.S. bioeconomy, excluding healthcare, will nearly double to roughly $400 billion within that timeframe.
America's advantages are real and structural. What is missing is not capability -- it is the clear intent and the architecture to match the speed at which modern biology now moves.
The United States lacks a full-scale effort equal to the importance and the timeframe it faces. For the sake of time, I will not list the full slate of recommendations across the NSCEB, the Commission, and Hoover; here are a few worth highlighting today that would meaningfully extend the window -- now measured in months (19), not years -- to maintain U.S. economic and scientific leadership.
First, biological intelligence. The United States still lacks a coordinated, real-time capability to see biological threats -- natural, accidental, or deliberate -- as they emerge. We invented technical intelligence for the nuclear and space age; we have not built its equivalent for the biological one. Nucleic-acid synthesis screening, which this Subcommittee has advanced through H.R. 3029, is one leading edge of that capability, but much more is needed. This is not regulation for its own sake -- it is how we know what biological threats are likely to arrive, and when and where. We cannot secure what we cannot see.
Second, supply chains. Our exposure to risk is not only toxins and pathogens; risks run through supply chains. The concentration of active pharmaceutical ingredients and precursor chemicals in a small number of overseas suppliers, principally in China, is a strategic vulnerability that does not require an adversary to build a weapon. It only requires them to close a valve. The remedy is redundancy -- and the tools to build it, including decentralized, agile biomanufacturing platforms, already exist in early commercial form. What they need is deliberate federal investment and a predictable regulatory runway.
Third, measurement. We cannot secure, scale, or win what we cannot measure. Before we choose metrics, we have to define what victory looks like; then we have to be able to make the tools and implement the processes to measure it. Today the country has no dedicated national capability for biological measurement of the kind we long ago built for physics and for materials.
The Commission's 2025 Annual Report ranked establishing that capability -- a Biological Measurement Laboratory at NIST -- among its most urgent recommendations. The bipartisan SCALE Biology Act, introduced in this chamber in May, would build it. Paired with Chairman McCormick's workforce legislation and the Cloud LAB Act, the United States could create and sustain a world-leading, integrated technology, metrology, and employment stack for the future bioeconomy. The clock is ticking.
Fourth, innovation leadership. Let me be direct: China's edge is not in the underlying science -- American platforms in gene editing, mRNA, and AI-driven discovery remain the global standard. China's edge is speed of deployment and a tolerance for ambiguity; its first-in-human approval timelines are now a fraction of ours. The greatest risk to American leadership is not that we lose the science. It is that fragmented, slow-moving federal oversight makes us forfeit ground we never needed to give up.
That is why the legislative architecture before Congress this year matters. H.R. 3029 builds the technical foundation -- voluntary, standards-based, industry-informed. The Senate's S. 3741 builds the enforceable floor beneath it, and directs the cross-agency accounting of fragmented biosecurity authorities that the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology has called for and that mirrors the consolidation the Commission urged in its 2025 report. These are not competing approaches; they are sequential ones, and I would urge the Subcommittee to treat them that way.
Beyond Hoover's prior recommendations, I would add two more recommendations, and one gap Congress should address. First, on U.S. investment in China's bio-ecosystem. If we are serious about the scenario before us, we should finish the job on outbound investment. According to recent reporting, roughly a third of global drug-licensing spend is now flowing to Chinese firms; American pension dollars should not be helping finance a takeover of the very industry we are trying to protect. Adding biotechnology to our outbound-investment rules is a logical next step to securing American competitiveness in this growing market -- and our future safety.
Second, on tax treatment. The 48D credit is semiconductor-focused. A 2025 Commission recommendation urged Congress to consider similar credits for other strategic sectors -- quantum computing, biotechnology, advanced materials -- to build resilience across the technology stack. Congress should explore extending 48D beyond semiconductors.
The gap Congress should address. H.R. 1 moved on several fronts vital to closing critical vulnerabilities -- tax credits for domestic onshoring, energy-resilience restrictions on foreign entities, and resources for critical-minerals investment are essential. But the law created no standalone mechanism for coordinated R&D, supplier integration, and procurement, and it did not address the biotechnology window or the strategic competition and its impact on the future U.S. economy. Biotechnology will help determine the next generation of medicine, enable space exploration, and much else; Congress should fold it into its wider strategic agenda.
Two closing points. First, money alone will not solve this; what matters is spending what we allocate where it will have the most impact. Redirecting even a fraction of our application-focused research toward the foundational science, tooling, and measurement that everything else is built on would do more for American leadership than a larger check spent the same old way.
Second, the prize is not only defensive. Unlocking biology as a general-purpose technology could add as much as a third to our national economy -- growing the American bioeconomy, economy-wide, from roughly one trillion dollars toward ten over the next twenty years. This is one of the rare national-security investments that pays for itself. The global biotechnology market size calculated $2.45 trillion in 2025, grew to USD 2.79 trillion in 2026, and is projected to reach around USD 9.06 trillion by 2035.
I will close with an image that stays with me. China holds a standing monthly meeting whose only purpose is to find what is slowing its biotech firms down, and to remove whatever is in the way. Its cities compete against one another to host the next company. Meanwhile, we are still deciding what department or agency has responsibility -- or whether we want to be in the game.
The assets to win this competition are already in American hands. What remains is the discipline to organize them -- and the seriousness to match a competitor who is very serious indeed.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
* * *
Original text here: https://republicans-science.house.gov/_cache/files/6/7/67b3bbc3-895e-453e-adf0-2051fbf9e1da/68741545402CBD657A5E2723F69BE807667F7C790749C8CC31EA012A9041911D.joshua-hodges-testimony.pdf
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Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, Members of the Subcommittee -- thank you for convening a discussion that carries real implications for our security, our economic future, and, most importantly, for everyday ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 -- The House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight released the following testimony by Joshua Hodges, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution Bio-Strategies and Leadership Initiative, from a Sept. 16, 2026, hearing entitled "Balancing Biotechnology Innovation and Biosecurity: Securing U.S. Leadership in a Global Race": * * * Chairman McCormick, Ranking Member Sykes, Members of the Subcommittee -- thank you for convening a discussion that carries real implications for our security, our economic future, and, most importantly, for everydayAmericans.
I serve as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution's Bio-Strategies and Leadership Initiative.
As you are aware, in addition to my role with Hoover, I hold a range of public and private-sector roles, including as a Commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and in advisory capacities in the private sector, that expose me to a wide range of information and perspective on this and other strategic challenges. The views I express today are my own.
I have spent most of the last decade studying how China is working to overtake the United States in the technologies and industries it believes will define the current century -- often through asymmetric means. There is a military dimension to that effort, but it is not Beijing's principal weapon. China is pursuing a comprehensive, state-directed strategy to build levers of control over our data, the emerging economic corridors, and the manufacturing base of the future and it competes as an ecosystem, not as isolated firms. Biotechnology is squarely inside that campaign, pursued by a full-scope effort across research, data, manufacturing, talent, and finance.
In October 2025, Hoover released a report, Biosecurity Really: A Strategy for Victory, with the central premise that biosecurity is a solvable problem if we treat it as one. This report was released because advancing and securing biotechnology are linked together. The report itself offers nine recommendations -- a blueprint -- and members of the team have since identified clear metrics to measure our progress against them.
The same advances that create biological risk are also the only means of retiring it -- surveillance, vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments. In 2004, Biodefense for the 21st Century stockpiled enough smallpox vaccine for every American, vaccinated over 450,000 service members, and expanded the Strategic National Stockpile so that treatment packages could reach anywhere in the country within 12 hours. In recognition of the threat, the United States removed the value to an adversary of deploying such a weapon against Americans.
The problem we face today has advanced significantly since 9/11. As Biodefense for the 21st Century warned, preventing and controlling future biological-weapons threats will be even more challenging: the dispersion of technology, the application of artificial intelligence, and advances across biotechnology and the life sciences -- including the spread of expertise to create modified or novel organisms -- raise the prospect of new toxins, live agents, and biomodulators that would demand new detection methods, preventive measures, and treatments. These are not new problems; they have advanced. Current detection and intelligence efforts continue to struggle with the dual-use nature of biological technologies and infrastructure, and with the likelihood that adversaries will use denial and deception to conceal illicit activity. Novel tools and safeguards must be considered to address the rapid expansion of these technologies beyond our borders.
From Chatbots to Biological Weapon Pressure Cookers. The danger is escalating from question-and-answer to active assistance -- and the queries are coming from abroad. In just the past six months, biosecurity experts warned it was "disturbingly easy" to get chatbots to advise on making pathogens more dangerous; scientists and AI executives signed an open letter demanding new controls on DNA fabrication because AI can now speed the design of toxins and viruses; researchers reported using AI to build viruses not found in nature; and one leading AI lab announced it had blocked several attempts to use its models to weaponize pathogens.
Today's general-purpose chatbot is a reference tool that experts agree is unlikely, on its own, to help a lone actor invent a deadly pathogen. The newer, biology-specific models are a different machine -- closer to a pressure cooker if the status quo remains. Trained directly on the DNA of millions of species, Stanford and the Arc Institute's Evo2 has generated hundreds of thousands of novel viral genomes and yielded sixteen real, viable viruses -- harmless ones that infect only E. coli -- and its creators acknowledge that a version not deliberately constrained could, in principle, design a variant of a pathogen like smallpox.
Meanwhile the federal backstop meant to catch this -- mandatory screening of synthetic-DNA orders -- was suspended last year and has not been replaced. As my Hoover colleague Drew Endy told the Times, the net uplift today remains "modest," but that will change as models specialize in biology. This is the shape of a weapons race we can still get ahead of -- but only if we "leapfrog ahead... and secure biology" now, rather than wait to be surprised.
The instinct, when a technology can be turned to harm, is to slow it down or wall it off. History has repeatedly shown that approach stunts innovation. In 1865 Britain's Locomotive Act -- "Red Flag Act -- required a man to walk sixty yards ahead of every motorcar waving a red flag, at four miles per hour; Britain eased the flag in 1878 but kept the broader regime until 1896, and handed the early automobile industry to France, Germany, and the United States.
Contrast piped gas: as the United States modernized it spread into American homes offering a variety of benefits despite the danger being real. The US did not rip gas out of the walls. We required a cheap, universal safeguard -- odorization -- so a leak announces itself. The technology kept scaling; the standard made it safe. We have never made a transformative technology safe by refusing to build it; we have made it safe by building the standard alongside it. Verifiable screening of synthetic-DNA orders is the odorant of our age.
In its 2025 Annual Report to Congress, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reached a similar conclusion: we urged Congress to make building a resilient bioeconomy industrial base -- and unlocking biology as a general-purpose technology before the decade's end -- a strategic national objective. Securing biology and leading it are two sides of the same coin. The Commission warned that we are on a path to depend on our principal strategic competitor, China, for the very tools our biodefense will rely on.
I returned from China a little over a month ago as part of a U.S. delegation. Comparing my takeaways with those of private-sector executives and other experts who have made similar trips recently -- each of us there on different business -- the standout point was unmistakable: China feels confident, and it is content to have us remain right where we are.
Today, the United States is still in the lead in some aspects of biotechnology, but our remaining lead has a rapidly dwindling shelf life. We hold the economic fundamentals -- innovation, capital markets, productivity -- and we are losing on coordination and speed. This is not a challenge we can afford to ignore.
The position we are in is the product of a deliberate strategy on China's side and institutional neglect on ours. For too long the United States treated biology as a pharmaceutical lane with a bioweapons problem, at best, and as a compliance file at worst -- not as a strategic domain to be owned. We did not arrive here in the last two years, or because of any single budget cycle. The crossover has been building for over two decades, and it is only now beginning to show.
In 2020, China passed the United States in the total number of clinical trials, and in 2023 in trials for novel medicines -- figures my Hoover colleague Drew Endy presented to the Senate Commerce Committee this July. In 2025, roughly a third of the pharmaceutical industry's global licensing spend went to sourcing new medicines from Chinese companies. Barron's reported this week that China's biotech industry has become as much a challenger to America's technological leadership as China's artificial intelligence upstarts, backed by US investors.
A useful way to see where we stand is the U.S.-China Biomedical Competitiveness Scorecard published this June. It found China leading on clinical trials, manufacturing, and supply chains, and the United States still leading on technology transfer, talent, and finance. That is the honest picture, and it matches what I have increasingly seen across Hoover, the Commission, and private-sector engagement: our lead is in the laboratory, not on the factory floor. Recent evidence suggests that China is on track to bring online more new industrial biomanufacturing capacity than the rest of the world combined.
This massive leap forward is due to a mindset aimed at driving forward. They have built an ecosystem designed to make them the world leader -- their regulation and infrastructure, coupled with China's speed to approve and its tailor-made manufacturing base, together compress the design-build-test-learn cycle in biotechnology in ways that capital alone cannot answer.
Multiple federally funded commissions, the academic community, and the private sector have independently reached the same conclusion and roughly the same deadline -- the next 19 months to three years is the time for swift action to avoid losing long-term U.S. leadership and opportunity.
The competition is simple to state and hard to execute: the United States must invest more smartly, build better, and deploy faster if we wish to compete and win on biotechnology. China is taking an "Operation Warp Speed"-like approach for all of biotechnology. What is our approach? Where is it situated? Who owns it?
The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) concluded in April 2025 that "to remain competitive, the United States must take swift action in the next three years." Hoover's independent BSL report, released in October of last year, set an even tighter clock: begin every Stage 1 action "within one thousand days." And the private sector sees the same window from the economic side -- one joint assessment projects the U.S. bioeconomy, excluding healthcare, will nearly double to roughly $400 billion within that timeframe.
America's advantages are real and structural. What is missing is not capability -- it is the clear intent and the architecture to match the speed at which modern biology now moves.
The United States lacks a full-scale effort equal to the importance and the timeframe it faces. For the sake of time, I will not list the full slate of recommendations across the NSCEB, the Commission, and Hoover; here are a few worth highlighting today that would meaningfully extend the window -- now measured in months (19), not years -- to maintain U.S. economic and scientific leadership.
First, biological intelligence. The United States still lacks a coordinated, real-time capability to see biological threats -- natural, accidental, or deliberate -- as they emerge. We invented technical intelligence for the nuclear and space age; we have not built its equivalent for the biological one. Nucleic-acid synthesis screening, which this Subcommittee has advanced through H.R. 3029, is one leading edge of that capability, but much more is needed. This is not regulation for its own sake -- it is how we know what biological threats are likely to arrive, and when and where. We cannot secure what we cannot see.
Second, supply chains. Our exposure to risk is not only toxins and pathogens; risks run through supply chains. The concentration of active pharmaceutical ingredients and precursor chemicals in a small number of overseas suppliers, principally in China, is a strategic vulnerability that does not require an adversary to build a weapon. It only requires them to close a valve. The remedy is redundancy -- and the tools to build it, including decentralized, agile biomanufacturing platforms, already exist in early commercial form. What they need is deliberate federal investment and a predictable regulatory runway.
Third, measurement. We cannot secure, scale, or win what we cannot measure. Before we choose metrics, we have to define what victory looks like; then we have to be able to make the tools and implement the processes to measure it. Today the country has no dedicated national capability for biological measurement of the kind we long ago built for physics and for materials.
The Commission's 2025 Annual Report ranked establishing that capability -- a Biological Measurement Laboratory at NIST -- among its most urgent recommendations. The bipartisan SCALE Biology Act, introduced in this chamber in May, would build it. Paired with Chairman McCormick's workforce legislation and the Cloud LAB Act, the United States could create and sustain a world-leading, integrated technology, metrology, and employment stack for the future bioeconomy. The clock is ticking.
Fourth, innovation leadership. Let me be direct: China's edge is not in the underlying science -- American platforms in gene editing, mRNA, and AI-driven discovery remain the global standard. China's edge is speed of deployment and a tolerance for ambiguity; its first-in-human approval timelines are now a fraction of ours. The greatest risk to American leadership is not that we lose the science. It is that fragmented, slow-moving federal oversight makes us forfeit ground we never needed to give up.
That is why the legislative architecture before Congress this year matters. H.R. 3029 builds the technical foundation -- voluntary, standards-based, industry-informed. The Senate's S. 3741 builds the enforceable floor beneath it, and directs the cross-agency accounting of fragmented biosecurity authorities that the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology has called for and that mirrors the consolidation the Commission urged in its 2025 report. These are not competing approaches; they are sequential ones, and I would urge the Subcommittee to treat them that way.
Beyond Hoover's prior recommendations, I would add two more recommendations, and one gap Congress should address. First, on U.S. investment in China's bio-ecosystem. If we are serious about the scenario before us, we should finish the job on outbound investment. According to recent reporting, roughly a third of global drug-licensing spend is now flowing to Chinese firms; American pension dollars should not be helping finance a takeover of the very industry we are trying to protect. Adding biotechnology to our outbound-investment rules is a logical next step to securing American competitiveness in this growing market -- and our future safety.
Second, on tax treatment. The 48D credit is semiconductor-focused. A 2025 Commission recommendation urged Congress to consider similar credits for other strategic sectors -- quantum computing, biotechnology, advanced materials -- to build resilience across the technology stack. Congress should explore extending 48D beyond semiconductors.
The gap Congress should address. H.R. 1 moved on several fronts vital to closing critical vulnerabilities -- tax credits for domestic onshoring, energy-resilience restrictions on foreign entities, and resources for critical-minerals investment are essential. But the law created no standalone mechanism for coordinated R&D, supplier integration, and procurement, and it did not address the biotechnology window or the strategic competition and its impact on the future U.S. economy. Biotechnology will help determine the next generation of medicine, enable space exploration, and much else; Congress should fold it into its wider strategic agenda.
Two closing points. First, money alone will not solve this; what matters is spending what we allocate where it will have the most impact. Redirecting even a fraction of our application-focused research toward the foundational science, tooling, and measurement that everything else is built on would do more for American leadership than a larger check spent the same old way.
Second, the prize is not only defensive. Unlocking biology as a general-purpose technology could add as much as a third to our national economy -- growing the American bioeconomy, economy-wide, from roughly one trillion dollars toward ten over the next twenty years. This is one of the rare national-security investments that pays for itself. The global biotechnology market size calculated $2.45 trillion in 2025, grew to USD 2.79 trillion in 2026, and is projected to reach around USD 9.06 trillion by 2035.
I will close with an image that stays with me. China holds a standing monthly meeting whose only purpose is to find what is slowing its biotech firms down, and to remove whatever is in the way. Its cities compete against one another to host the next company. Meanwhile, we are still deciding what department or agency has responsibility -- or whether we want to be in the game.
The assets to win this competition are already in American hands. What remains is the discipline to organize them -- and the seriousness to match a competitor who is very serious indeed.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
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Original text here: https://republicans-science.house.gov/_cache/files/6/7/67b3bbc3-895e-453e-adf0-2051fbf9e1da/68741545402CBD657A5E2723F69BE807667F7C790749C8CC31EA012A9041911D.joshua-hodges-testimony.pdf