Eleven House Republicans are demanding the Biden administration investigate China's ties to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a U.S. weapons and nuclear research site.
Their demand came in a Tuesday letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Arati Prabhakar, the Washington Examiner reported.
The letter, spearheaded by Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., expressed "serious concerns" about a report detailing how China is recruiting scientists from the research laboratory to bring knowledge to their country to build missiles and drones.
"The Chinese Communist Party, particularly under [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, explicitly aims to become the dominant world superpower in the next decade, and they aim to do it through technology," Waltz told the Examiner.
Waltz said the Chinese government is "rapidly passing us in those areas because they are stealing their way to the top — and a key avenue for which they are stealing their way to the top is through our research labs."
Officials are concerned that U.S. taxpayers are effectively funding scientists who are taking their expertise to build China's war machine.
"China is playing a game that we are not prepared for, and we need to really begin to mobilize," Strider Technologies' Greg Levesque, who wrote "The Los Alamos Club" report, told NBC News.
The Strider Technologies intelligence report found at least 154 Chinese scientists worked on government-sponsored research at the national laboratory over the past two decades and then did that work back in China.
Los Alamos is where the U.S. built the atomic bomb dropped in World War II.
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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