Trump’s Pentagon is blackmailing universities into terminating their foreign research partnerships.
The Department of Defense told thirty unnamed American universities on Monday that they have until August 31 to audit every collaboration they have with a “foreign entity of concern” and report what they find, or lose eligibility for federal research grants. The list of “concerns” covers 130 academic and research institutions in China, Russia, and Iran, plus any entity tied to a “rebranded Confucius Institute.” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Science and Technology Joseph Jewell called universities “critical partners” whose research investments must be “protected from foreign exploitation.” Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said the department has “zero tolerance” for academic partnerships that “compromise our national security.”
Let me tell you who lives in those words.
A graduate student on a research stipend at any one of those thirty institutions is in her fifth year of a PhD program in materials science. Her tuition is paid by a federal grant. Her health insurance comes through the same grant. Her advisor’s lab employs two postdocs, three other grad students, and a lab tech who keeps the equipment calibrated. Down the hall, an adjunct who teaches two sections of introductory biology gets paid roughly three thousand dollars a course, sometimes less. The university hospital two miles from campus is the largest employer in the county. The coffee shop across the street from the lab counts the grad students as its morning regulars. The school district counts them as parents.
The Pentagon is putting all of that on a fourteen-day clock.
That is what “audit every collaboration” and “report your findings” and “implement mitigation plans including terminating problematic partnerships” means at street level. It means the university either cuts the partnerships the Defense Department objects to, or the federal grant money stops. If the federal grant money stops, the grad student does not get paid next semester. If the grad student does not get paid, the lab tech gets laid off. The coffee shop starts missing its regulars. The adjunct never had health insurance through the university to begin with, but if the department shrinks to save the grant relationship, her two sections get consolidated and she gets a non-renewal letter in October.
You have lived in a college town. You know what a research university does to the economy of a midsized American city, and you know what happens to that economy when the money gets pulled.
Now let me tell you who is doing the pulling.
Assistant Secretary Jewell made his statement on behalf of the Defense Department. Under Secretary Michael made his. The directive cites Section 1286 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, a list of 130 institutions in China, Russia, and Iran that the Pentagon itself maintains and updates at its discretion. The fiscal 2025 NDAA, passed in December 2024, requires annual reviews of research grants for compliance with research-security policies. So the architecture is not new. What is new is the threat: lose your eligibility for every federal research dollar, or comply with what we tell you to comply with, in fourteen days, on a list we will not show you in advance.
The defense contractors are paying attention. Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, L3Harris, Boeing, Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton — every one of them has a research office that competes for university partnerships. Every one of them profits when civilian competition for that same talent and grant money is forced out. The Pentagon does not write checks to universities because it loves education. It writes checks because the research the universities produce is useful to the arsenal. When the universities are told they may only work with researchers the Pentagon approves, in fields the Pentagon names, on a schedule the Pentagon sets, the universities are being told what kind of work they are allowed to do. The defense contractors do not have to outbid civilian partners at the grant table anymore. The Defense Department is doing the bidding for them.
I want to be plain about the real concern being used to justify this, because there is a real concern. Over the past decade, federal prosecutors have brought cases against researchers at MIT, Harvard, Emory, the University of Kansas, and elsewhere for undisclosed foreign funding, unreported affiliations, and, in a smaller number of cases, theft of federally funded intellectual property. Some of those cases resulted in convictions. The Department of Justice’s “China Initiative” was bipartisan — it started under President Trump in his first term and ran under President Biden until 2022 — and it left a record of real misconduct prosecuted and a record of careers damaged by overreach. Both records are part of the story.
None of that justifies this directive. Real concerns justify careful disclosure, graduated review, and case-by-case prosecution of the specific individuals and institutions the evidence supports. Real concerns do not justify naming no one, giving fourteen days, calling everything “problematic,” and threatening to cut off every federal research dollar to institutions that do not comply on the Pentagon’s schedule.
I want to say something about the people the directive puts in the worst position, because they are the people the language of this directive is built to keep invisible. International graduate students from China, India, Iran, and a dozen other countries are working in American labs right now. They pay tuition. They pay rent. They drive the research that wins the grants the Defense Department says it wants to protect. Some of them are on visas that will not survive a politically convenient accusation of “undisclosed foreign ties.” A grad student from Hefei working on superconductors in a lab in Atlanta or Berkeley or Boston is not a security threat. She is the reason American physics has led the world for three generations. Tell the universities they have fourteen days to audit her out, and you do not protect the arsenal. You hand the next breakthrough to the country she goes home to.
The Office of Management and Budget has been drafting the architecture of this leverage since at least July. The administration has spent the better part of two years pressuring Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and others over antisemitism, foreign student visas, and racial preferences in admissions. Federal funding, accreditation, tax-exempt status, and immigration enforcement are all in the kit. The directive this week is the same playbook aimed at research itself: use the federal leverage to coerce political compliance from institutions the administration has decided are out of step.
The Pentagon should name the thirty institutions it has told to comply. It should say which collaborations it considers problematic and why. It should give each institution a fair process to respond before it cuts off grant eligibility. It should give the graduate students, the postdocs, the lab techs, the adjuncts, the hospital workers, the baristas, the landlords, and the school districts enough lead time to plan their lives. It should not announce a shakedown dressed up as a security review.
The men and women who run those thirty universities have until August 31 to comply or refuse. They will know who they are by the time you read this. The communities around them should know too. If the universities fold without telling the public what they were told to do and what the cost will be, the people who lose their jobs and their research and their grants and their coffee shop customers will not get a hearing. If the universities speak up, if the boards, the presidents, the faculty senates, the grad student unions, and the local papers say out loud what is on the table, the country has a chance to decide whether this is the kind of government it wants.
The young men and women in those labs right now, the ones who chose to do their science in this country, who chose to stay after their PhDs, who are raising their kids in the school districts around the research campuses, those are the people whose paychecks, visas, and careers are being put on a fourteen-day clock. Somebody in those university administrations ought to find the spine to tell them what is happening before it happens to them.