The National Science Foundation is one of several US funding agencies that has punished researchers for not disclosing foreign financial ties.Credit: B Christopher/Alamy
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has for the first time released figures on actions taken against researchers who have been found to violate rules regarding the disclosure of foreign ties. Since 2018, the agency has reassigned suspended or terminated grants, forced institutions to return funds or barred researchers from applying for future funding in 16 to 20 cases where rules weren’t followed, according to Rebecca Keiser, the agency’s first chief of research security strategy and policy.
All of these were cases in which the NSF’s Office of Inspector General, an independent body responsible for oversight of the agency and its grantees, had investigated and made recommendations on how to handle sanctions. They were considered rule violations, but not criminal activity. The Inspector General also referred an undisclosed number of criminal cases involving fraud and nondisclosure to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Additionally, in the past two months, seven universities have also contacted the NSF directly with information on faculty who may have violated rules.
“We’re only starting to understand these issues,” says Keiser, who was appointed to the position in March to tackle foreign interference. All but two of the cases involved ties to China, although a majority of the scientists in cases referred by the Inspector General are US citizens and are not ethnically Chinese.
Most of the cases involve “very well-known academics,” who appear to have been offered money or status because of their accomplishments in their fields, Keiser adds.
Among the 16 to 20 non-criminal cases referred by the Inspector General are some grantees who spent several months a year outside the US, strongly indicating an undisclosed affiliation. Or they received outside support for research that appears to be covered by an NSF grant, a practice known as ‘double dipping’.
A lot of the university-reported cases are not being referred to the Inspector General; some only require clarifying details with universities about potential funding overlaps, Keiser says.
To protect the privacy of individuals affected, she declined to offer details about the researchers or the specific issues and actions taken in each case. She says that some investigations have resulted in universities terminating employment of researchers for not disclosing foreign ties, but NSF doesn’t know how often this has happened.
Caught By Surprise
For the past several years US funding agencies have been on high alert about the influence of foreign governments in federally funded basic research. The fear is that US intellectual property, including basic research, is being pilfered.
So NSF, the US National Institutes of Health and other funders have been actively pushing universities and scientists to disclose ties, and the FBI has been actively seeking out undisclosed or inappropriate connections. Many scientists with financial ties in China have come under scrutiny, particularly those involved in China’s Thousand Talents programme, a talent recruitment programme sponsored by the Chinese government. The FBI dragnet has resulted in many researchers being fired, and at least one high-profile arrest, that of Harvard chemist, Charles Leiber. In June, the NIH said that 189 researchers may have violated grant or institutional rules regarding research integrity, with 93% having support from China.
Rebecca Keiser is the NSF's first appointed Chief of Research Security Strategy and Policy, a position designed to deal with foreign interference in research.Credit: NG Images/Alamy
The estimates from Keiser represent the first accounting of investigations involving NSF grantees to date. Although the numbers are much lower than for the NIH, Kei Koizumi, a former Senior Advisor on Science Policy at the American Association of Science in Washington DC, says that they are reasonable given the comparatively smaller annual budget of the NSF. Heather Pierce, regulatory counsel at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington DC, adds that the difference make sense given the focus on intellectual property theft as an area of concern. “The research funded by NSF includes some fields that may appear less likely to have commercialization potential,” she says.
Calls for more transparency
Some scientists say that the NSF’s approach is getting stricter. “The rules are changing,” says Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist at Stanford University who was US Secretary of Energy under US President Barack Obama.
But Rita Colwell, a microbiologist and former head of the NSF says that these rules have existed and been followed for decades – it might be that researchers today aren't aware and need more education. “It’s staggering to me that there would be wilful non-reporting,” she says. “We did not have to deal with that.”
Many have called for more transparency surrounding the investigations. Jeremy Wu, a member of the Board of Directors of the Committee of 100, a group of prominent Chinese Americans that works to advance US–China relations, says that NSF or its Inspector General should release more information, such as the number of individuals under scrutiny. Wu worries that investigations into foreign influence might unfairly target researchers with any ties to China. He says it’s not clear if researchers are being judged on the merits of each individual case or are being targeted as a group. Without more details, it’s hard to know whether punishments are appropriate, he says.
Keiser says the Inspector General spends “months and months” doing due diligence on non-criminal cases before making recommendations to NSF. And it has told the agency that it doesn’t want the public to jump to conclusions about the scale of problems by revealing the number of people under investigation. But the office has requested more staff and funding because its workload has increased by 20% to 30% over the past two years. A “significant” part of that increase is because of foreign-interference investigations, Keiser says. The Office of Inspector General did not respond to questions by the time this story was ready for publication.
Keiser says that the NSF will continue to try being as diligent as possible in enforcing policies and do everything it can to inform researchers and universities about disclosure. “We in the government should do even more to communicate these issues,” she says.
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