Two Republican senators have formally demanded that the Department of Energy account for — and curtail — Chinese nationals' access to the 17 federally funded national laboratories, citing internal figures that put Chinese participation in fiscal year 2025 at roughly 5,400 visits, assignments and staff positions combined.

In a June 23 letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Mike Lee of Utah wrote that Chinese nationals made approximately 1,900 short-term visits and undertook about 1,300 long-term research assignments at the labs during fiscal 2025. A further 2,100 Chinese nationals were employed by the department over the same period, according to DOE data the senators cited. Chinese nationals also remotely accessed lab facilities more than 5,000 times that year.

"These facts reflect severe vulnerabilities at our nation's premier and most sensitive scientific environments," Cotton and Lee wrote. "China is our main competitor in research and development and the race for emerging tech, where it seeks to surpass the United States by stealing American intellectual property and technologies."

The senators, who chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources respectively, framed the numbers as systemic rather than incidental.

"These numbers are not small, nor are they incidental. They represent a systemic exposure of our National Labs, including the American scientists who work there and topics they are working on, to an adversary determined to defeat the United States," they wrote.

What DOE says its vetting covers

Wright has previously stated that under the Energy Department's Unclassified Foreign National Access Program (UFNAP), citizens of adversarial countries must undergo counterintelligence assessments and additional vetting before accessing the laboratories. The senators' letter questions whether that regime is adequate, given the scale of access.

Cotton and Lee asked specifically how DOE accounts for China's National Intelligence Law, which they noted requires Chinese citizens to cooperate with Beijing's intelligence services regardless of where they live. They also demanded answers on why the department admits Chinese nationals at all, how sensitive the accessible technologies are, and what restrictions apply.

"The Department's mission is to advance American scientific leadership, protect national security, and safeguard critical technologies," the letter concluded. "This mission can't be achieved when it's undermined by thousands of Chinese nationals infiltrating the National Labs each year."

A longer campaign

The June letter is not the pair's first move on the issue. Cotton and Lee previously wrote to Wright in January urging him to bar Chinese nationals from American laboratories outright. In March 2025 they introduced the Guarding American Technology from Exploitation (GATE) Act, legislation that would block Chinese, Cuban, Iranian, North Korean and Russian nationals from the national labs altogether.

The new letter also builds on reporting from March, when previously released data showed that citizens of adversarial countries — chiefly China, Iran and Russia — made close to 30,000 trips to the sensitive research installations during the Biden administration.

What's measured and what's asserted

The access figures — 1,900 short-term visits, 1,300 long-term assignments, 2,100 employees and more than 5,000 remote accesses — come from DOE data and represent measured counts for fiscal 2025. The claim that this access translates into intelligence collection or intellectual property theft is an assertion by the two senators, not a finding documented in the data they cited. The letter does not detail specific incidents of theft, and no estimate appears in the record of how much of the accessed work involved export-controlled or otherwise sensitive technology versus unclassified basic research.

For lab managers and university research administrators, the practical stakes are concrete. If DOE tightens UFNAP or Congress passes the GATE Act, foreign-national visitor agreements, remote collaboration protocols and staffing plans across the 17-lab complex would need reworking — potentially affecting international partnerships that currently route through the national lab system. The senators' January letter and the GATE Act suggest that legislative pressure will persist regardless of how Wright responds, and any DOE reply will set the parameters for the next round of access-policy decisions.