The DOJ abandoned a Trump-era anti-CCP initiative over uncorroborated reports of racial bias, the probe found.
Numerous federal agencies have failed to understand, acknowledge, or develop a plan to combat the Chinese Community Party’s “political warfare,” according to a new report from the House Oversight Committee.
The committee released a 300-page report on Thursday, obtained exclusively by National Review, detailing the findings of its months-long investigation into how 25 sectors of the federal government have – or have not – worked to push back on China’s political warfare. As part of its investigation, the committee received briefings from 23 federal agencies and held three separate hearings on “Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Warfare.”
The Committee scored each agency on several metrics, including strategy, knowledge and expertise; transparency and outreach to the American people; and collaboration with relevant partners and stakeholders.
The investigation found that no whole-of-government strategy existed to address the CCP’s threat and that most agencies’ solutions and policies either “ignored, placated, or only weakly addressed the PRC’s political warfare.”
Among the most poorly-rated agencies was the Department of Justice, which the report claims has “insufficient expertise, initiative and rigor” to address the CCP’s threat to America.
“There is a dangerous inconsistency between what DOJ says about the CCP threat and the actions DOJ takes to curtail CCP unrestricted warfare,” the report reads. “The resulting morass of mixed signals regarding the threat posed by the CCP leaves DOJ attorneys without the requisite knowledge and agency to enforce federal national security laws to combat CCP political warfare.”
“This reality appears, in part, to be the result of united front influence operations seeking to compromise DOJ itself through elite capture,” it adds.
The committee received a briefing from the DOJ on April 22, during which the National Security Division (NSD) categorized the threat from the PRC as “increasingly brazen and damaging,” and said DOJ has no higher priority than opposing this threat. Yet the briefing revealed that the DOJ lacks CCP-centric trainings and expertise.
Instead, the DOJ takes a learn-on-the-job approach to training personnel how to recognize, investigate, and prosecute illicit actions tied to the CCP warfare tactics. The committee argues that approach “lacks both the requisite urgency and necessary expertise to confront what DOJ itself characterizes as a serious threat.”
The committee notes that the Biden administration shuttered the only federal program designed to enforce U.S. laws to hold the CCP accountable for its political warfare tactics.
The Trump administration launched the China Initiative in 2018 to address national-security priorities including identifying trade secret theft, applying national-security laws to agents advancing the CCP’s agenda, and evaluating whether additional authorities were required to protect national assets from CCP economic aggression.
But in February 2022, the Biden administration ended the program “after receiving uncorroborated claims of racial bias,” the report says.
“Despite finding no evidence of racial motivation in a single prosecution brought under the initiative, DOJ was persuaded by these unsubstantiated allegations and ceased prosecutions under it, resulting in a ‘wholesale abandonment of a national security initiative,’” the committee writes.
Asked by the committee, the DOJ would not say whether it had investigated the origins of the unverified claims of racial bias. The report notes that the CCP and its proxies have sought to advance the idea that criticizing the CCP is racist; General Rob Spalding, former Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council told the committee that social issues surrounding race are “precisely the type of American vulnerability that [the CCP] is eager to exploit.”
Meanwhile, the committee raises concerns that the program that replaced the China Initiative, “Strategy for Countering Nation-State Threats,” distributes resources across several foreign threats — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — rather than focusing specifically on the unique threats posed by the CCP.
The report raises concerns that stretch far beyond just the DOJ.
“The CCP is successfully infiltrating and influencing communities and critical sectors across this nation and the Biden-Harris Administration is asleep at the wheel,” committee chairman James Comer said in a statement to National Review. “It is past time for federal agencies to take this threat seriously and fulfill their responsibilities to the American people.”
The committee argues the Department of Transportation has “demonstrated limited appreciation for the threat the CCP poses to critical infrastructure.” For example, when the committee asked the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) about Chinese-manufactured container cranes in U.S. ports, MARAD said there is no such thing as a spy crane. MARAD told the committee that it is normal for modems and other equipment installed in Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. (ZPMC) container cranes in the United States to transmit data back to China because the equipment was made in China, raising a point of concern for the committee.
Additionally, the report found the U.S. Department of Education “does not understand or have a strategy to protect American and Chinese students on U.S. campuses from CCP proxy group harassment and stifling of free speech,” including from groups such as Confucius Institutes and Chinese Students and Scholars Associations. It also argues the department’s “limited knowledge cannot adequately monitor CCP funding of higher institutions.”
It finds the National Science Foundation (NSF) has refused to categorize China as a unique threat despite acknowledging that the CCP is responsible for the majority of all research security issues involving federally funded research.
The committee also sounded alarm that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration recently congratulated the CCP for obtaining the first samples of lunar rocks from the far side of the moon. While the agency said the discovery was “an important step in humanity’s work to understand and explore the lunar surface,” Oversight questions why NASA would not instead be “openly and consistently acknowledging that the United States is in a space race with the PRC.
The USDA allegedly fails to adequately monitor the CCP’s strategic purchasing of U.S. farmland near U.S. military bases, according to the report, while the EPA “is pushing a green energy agenda, which the CCP influences and exploits through trade associations, nonprofits, and non-governmental organizations while EPA does nothing to stop such influence operations.”
The Consumer Product Safety Commission “does not fulfill its duty to inform and educate Americans of the risks associated with products made in China, which are disproportionately harmful to American consumers.”
Meanwhile, the Department of the Treasury is “dangerously reticent to confront or even acknowledge the CCP’s economic warfare.”
The report lays out a set of recommendations for federal agencies, including the implementation of a government-wide strategy to defend America from China’s “unrestricted warfare.”
According to the committee, a successful strategy would feature four components: acknowledgment of and transparent communication about CCP political warfare; rejection of country agnostic and foreign malign influence- focused approaches and embracing of targeted strategies; fostering the depth of knowledge needed to defeat unrestricted warfare; and engaging the American people about the CCP threat and providing resources when appropriate that thwart CCP ambitions.
“The foundational step federal officials must take to implement this shift is simple but powerful: honestly acknowledge the nature of this communist regime and the cold war it is waging against the United States,” the report concludes.