The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing this week to investigate the presence and potential risks of foreign nationals at the Department of Energy’s critical research laboratories.
The risk of potential espionage or intellectual property theft at the national labs has been an area of concern for lawmakers, especially Republicans, over the past several years. They have been particularly uneasy about foreign nationals working at DOE from “countries of risk,” which includes Russia, China and Iran.
Indeed, lawmakers acted on the perceived threat by approving a provision in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act prohibiting citizens or “agents” of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea from accessing nonpublic areas of the Department of Energy’s national security labs. The law covers Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.
In a House hearing last week, directors of the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore labs testified that there are still dozens of foreign nationals, particularly from China, working there.
