Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Monday her office is reviewing more than 120 overseas biological laboratories that received U.S. taxpayer funding, targeting programs that may have conducted dangerous gain-of-function research.
The labs span more than 30 countries. More than 40 are in Ukraine, where ODNI officials warned they could “be at risk of compromise” given the ongoing war with Russia.
Gabbard told The New York Post her team is going “to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain and what research is being conducted to end dangerous gain-of-function research that threatens the health and wellbeing of the American people and the world.”
The investigation comes under a Trump executive order banning federal funding for gain-of-function experiments in China, Iran, and other countries that lack adequate oversight. Such research can increase the transmissibility or lethality of pathogens.
The announcement puts a direct spotlight on the Biden administration’s 2022 denials. On March 9 of that year, the administration issued a statement calling claims about U.S. chemical or biological labs in Ukraine “disinformation.” The statement dismissed those accounts as Chinese and Russian propaganda.
One day earlier, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland told Congress Ukraine had “biological research facilities” the U.S. was concerned Russia might seize.
ODNI officials said the Biden-era denials were part of an “Information Resilience” strategy designed to “shape the public narrative” and minimize U.S. ties to the overseas programs.
“The prior administration bankrolled dangerous Gain-of-Function research and foreign biolabs with American tax dollars, then deliberately hid it from the American people,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said. “The era of lies and betrayal is over.”
Gabbard named former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci by name, saying he and other officials “lied to the American people about the existence of these U.S.-funded and supported biolabs and threatened those who attempted to expose the truth.”
Federal spending on overseas pathogen research topped $1.4 billion between 2014 and 2023. The Pentagon’s inspector general previously said it could not account for how many enhanced potential pandemic pathogens were studied abroad with that money.
NIH separately found that U.S.-funded bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology violated grant terms by making viruses 10,000 times more infectious, though officials have denied that work caused COVID-19.
ODNI said clinical trials now underway at labs under review are raising “significant, ethical, financial and security concerns.”
Several of the labs received funding through the Defense Department’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program, a Cold War-era effort to secure and destroy weapons of mass destruction that has since expanded to include biological research.
