Rep. Gooden Introduces Bill to Re-establish Trump-Era Program Targeting Chinese Espionage

Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) introduced a bill on March 7 to re-establish the China Initiative—a Trump-era program that aimed at countering economic espionage, intellectual property theft, and other threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Legislationpdf)—called the Protect America’s Innovation and Economic Security from CCP Act—is intended to reinstate the China Initiative program, which was terminated by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) in February 2022.

“President Biden has once again put far-left activists ahead of our national security by canceling a DOJ program designed to prevent spying by the CCP on U.S. intellectual property and academic institutions,” Gooden shared his thoughts with The Epoch Times, Tuesday.

“This soft-on-China approach is emboldening the CCP, and Congress can no longer stand by while President Biden behaves like a puppet of Beijing.”

Gooden’s bill would see the program renamed the CCP Initiative and centered on the issues it was intended to address. “identifying and prosecuting those engaged in trade secret theft, hacking, and economic espionage.” The goal is to also “protecting the critical infrastructure in the United States against external threats through foreign direct investment and supply chain compromises.”

China Initiative was launched under the former president Donald Trump. The 2018 election of Jeff Sessions, then-attorney général. announced Combating poverty is the goal of this initiative “the deliberate, systematic, and calculated threats posed, in particular, by the communist regime in China, which is notorious around the world for intellectual property theft.”

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly 80 percent all of U.S. economic espionage accusations are based on theft that benefits China. the DOJ. Biden was inaugurated in 2021. The DOJ brought charges against 15 cases relating to China-related spying under the Initiative. Chinese intelligence officers, businesspeopleAnd researchers.

Christopher Wray, the FBI’s director, stated that the FBI opened new counterintelligence cases against China every twelve hours and had more than 2000 investigations to investigate the attempted theft of technology and information by the Chinese regime. “​​There is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation, and our economic security than China,” Wray said It was at that time.

The civil rights community has expressed growing concern that the program is encouraging. “a narrative of intolerance and bias,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen Last February, Olsen stated. Olsen claimed the concern expressed by academics and scientists about how the department prosecuted fraud cases that involved research grants. “lead to a chilling atmosphere for scientists and scholars” threatening long-term economic and academic development in the United States.

The DOJ replaced The initiative will use a wider strategy, but it is based on a different approach to tackling threats “from a range of hostile nation-states,” Nevertheless, the department “will continue to prioritize” Olsen spoke out against threats coming from CCP.

The China Initiative was not established for the first-time in the United States. Last month, Sen. Rick Scott (Republican from Florida) was the latest to make this happen. announced “five national security focused bills to hold Communist China accountable and better protect American families.”

A bill is included in the packagepdf) that would “codify the China Initiative and reinstate its effort to prevent spying by the Chinese Communist Party on U.S. intellectual property and U.S. academic institutions.” This legislation was supported by Marco Rubio (R. Fla.) and Senator Bill Hagerty.

Mimi Nguyen Lin contributed to this article.