The US Department of Defense has given 30 American research universities until the end of the month to audit — and potentially terminate — partnerships with universities and military training institutions in what it calls “foreign entities of concern.” Non-compliance risks funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Research Laboratory. For research-intensive departments that depend on those three agencies, the exposure is existential: the DoD itself notes that losses could close entire academic research groups or departments.

The order, published by the department the Trump administration now calls the Department of War, does not name the foreign entities it targets. But the DoD published a list last month identifying 130 universities and research institutes in China, Russia and Iran that it claims have wrongly appropriated US-funded technologies. Those claims remain assertions from the department; the order itself does not present evidence tied to the 30 audited institutions.

The order also covers “organizations associated with rebranded Confucius Institutes” — cultural programmes linked to US universities since 2004.

For R&D managers at the affected institutions, the immediate task is a compliance sprint with a hard deadline: inventory international collaborations, assess which fall under the audit's scope, and decide which to unwind before month's end. The financial stakes are concentrated in three of the largest basic-research funders in the US system, so labs with multi-year DoD grants will need to map subawards, personnel exchanges and materials transfers against the audit criteria.

Which institutions are affected

The 30 targets include Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University and Johns Hopkins University. The DoD has not explained its selection criteria. Since taking office last year, the second Trump administration has clashed with prominent universities over antisemitism and diversity, equity and inclusion policies — disputes that have coincided with funding actions.

Harvard has drawn particular pressure. The administration has cut or delayed government grants to its departments while fighting the university in court. On 13 August, a Republican-majority House of Representatives committee issued a report claiming Harvard received over $630 million from Chinese sources. The report also noted that the university created a nonprofit, Harvard Global, to accept overseas grants that Harvard itself is not legally permitted to receive. The report is a congressional committee's investigation, not a judicial finding; Harvard did not respond when Physics World contacted affected universities about the DoD order.

What the DoD says

The department frames the audit as protecting “American taxpayer-funded research investments from unauthorized technology transfer, intellectual property theft and adversarial exploitation,” and says the process will let it “better anticipate emerging threats, adapt to evolving adversarial tactics and maintain America's position as a global leader in innovation.”

Emil Michael, the DoD's undersecretary of war for research and engineering, put it more bluntly: “The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security. Institutions that receive funding from American taxpayers must uphold the highest standards of research security, and these mandated audits will ensure accountability across the board.”

Beijing's response

China's embassy in Washington said it opposes what it calls the politicization of normal scientific, educational and academic exchanges. “The US side should abandon the Cold War mentality and foster an open, fair, and non-discriminatory environment for educational, scientific, and people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States,” the embassy said in a statement.

The audit order lands as the Trump administration prepares to host President Xi Jinping in the US late next month — a timing that adds a diplomatic dimension to what is, for the 30 universities involved, a compliance deadline measured in weeks rather than months.