The Biden administration funneled $18 million in U.S. tax dollars — approximately $4 million of which Republican Sen. Joni Ernst’s staff found buried or absent from the federal government’s funding database — to causes in Communist China.
The majority of the payments were funneled through the U.S. Departments of State and Health and Human Services to various Chinese entities and China-based projects for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility trainings (including some at the U.S. consulate), “art billboards,” a bicycle parking cover, pro-LGBT events, various climate change initiatives, and rat research and reported on USAspending.gov.
Buried in that federal spending database, however, is more of Americans’ hard-earned money that the National Institutes of Health handed to at least one Chinese university.
In one example, the NIH grant database and USAspending.gov show Peking University in Beijing raked in approximately $4.8 million in U.S. tax dollars from 2021 to 2024. A cursory search shows that the only project grant Peking University received U.S. funding for between 2021 and 2024 was a “China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study.” Ernst’s office, however, uncovered another $1.08 million to Peking researchers concealed as a subaward under a grant to the University of Southern California for sensors designed to provide imaging of “neuromodulators” that “regulate addiction attention, cognition, mood, memory, motivation, sleep and more through their influence on brain circuits.” The subaward’s purpose and amount are not associated with the university’s profile on USAspending.gov.
An April 2023 Government Accountability Office audit confirmed that projects and programs in China often receive American funding through subawards but noted the “full extent of these subawards is unknown because of limitations in the completeness and accuracy of subaward data reported in government systems.”
“Limitations in subaward data is a government-wide issue and not unique to U.S. funding to entities in China,” the report added.
This isn’t the first time NIH handed taxpayer dollars to China. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the lab believed to be the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic, covertly received $1.4 million in taxpayer funds to study coronaviruses, routed in part through the U.S Agency for International Development (USAID) and EcoHealth Alliance via subawards. The deliberate attempt to avoid the funding reporting requirements mandated by U.S. law earned both WIV and EcoHealth Alliance suspension and disbarment, which made them ineligible for future subsidization.
While the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) made an effort to rein in the flow of federal funds to China, Ernst and Chairwoman of House Republican Leadership Elise Stefanik want to take the waste and fraud prevention further by introducing the Tracking Receipts to Adversarial Countries for Knowledge of Spending (TRACKS) Act: a bill that would ensure U.S. spending on foreign adversaries like China is publicly available to scrutinize and potentially cease.
Ernst told The Federalist in a statement that she believes “Americans should never send a cent to China,” but “you cannot stop what you cannot see.”
“I am exposing every single tax dollar sent overseas to scrutinize and halt all wasteful spending. DOGE already canceled nearly $2 million Biden was sending to Beijing,” Ernst continued.
Stefanik also pledged that the legislation “will ensure hardworking taxpayer dollars are not funding our adversaries including Communist China as they work against American interests.”
“The days of poor stewardship over American dollars under the Biden Administration are long gone as House Republicans join President Trump in his efforts of rooting out government waste, fraud, and abuse,” she said in a statement to The Federalist.
The bill, if passed, mandates implementation “not later than 90 days after the date of enactment.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
