Rogers is the “data wrangler” at BillTrack50. He previously worked on policy in several government departments.
This month IssueVoter and BillTrack50 take a look at the BIOSECURE Act, a significant escalation in efforts to restrict Chinese influence in America's biotechnology sector.
The bipartisan legislation, passed by the House of Representatives in September and spearheaded by Reps. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), aims to protect American patient data and prevent federal funds from flowing to biotechnology companies deemed to pose national security risks.
Key Provisions
At its core, the BIOSECURE Act seeks to create a firewall between federal agencies and certain biotechnology companies. Under the legislation, federal agencies would be barred from contracting with designated "biotechnology companies of concern" or providing grants and loans to entities that use their services.
This prohibition extends to organizations that maintain contracts with these companies, creating a ripple effect throughout the biotechnology supply chain.
The bill takes direct aim at five Chinese companies: BGI, MGI, Complete Genomics, WuXi AppTec,and WuXi Biologics. Beyond these specific designations, it establishes a framework for identifying additional companies as security risks, particularly those controlled by "foreign adversaries" including China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and Cuba.
Weaponizing Our Genome
Supporters of the BIOSECURE Act, with Wenstrup at the forefront, paint a concerning picture of vulnerable national security and compromised patient privacy.
As Krishnamoorthi dramatically frames the issue: "As Americans have their blood drawn or take other medical tests each day, few have any idea that their personal genetic information could be going to biotech companies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and other adversaries that would weaponize our own genomes against us."
The military connections between Chinese biotech firms and the People's Liberation Army have raised additional red flags. These relationships reportedly extend beyond mere collaboration to include joint research projects and shared genetic collection sites. The fact that WuXi AppTec derives over 60 percent of its revenue from the U.S. market has intensified concerns about American dependency on potentially compromised supply chains.
Perhaps most alarming to supporters is China's legal framework requiring companies to share data with the government upon request. This mandate creates a direct pipeline for sensitive genetic information about American citizens to flow into the hands of Chinese authorities.
Opposition and Concerns
Yet the legislation has drawn significant criticism, even from unexpected quarters. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), known for his tough stance on China, has emerged as a prominent critic. In his forceful opposition to the bill, McGovern argues: "Naming specific companies will create a 'whack-a-mole' situation where entities can change their name and reincorporate to evade sanctions. ... [I]t's totally wrong to call out specific companies without any formal investigation or interagency process —that might be how they do things in the PRC, but this is the United States of America where we ought to have a thorough, independent investigation."
Company Responses
Health care technology executives have added their voices to the chorus of concern. At the Clinical Trial Supply West Coast 2024 conference, Umar Hayat of Gladius Therapeutics offered a stark warning:"This seems more like politics rather than about a security threat. ... [I]f you want to play politics, play politics in other industries like automotive, electronics or telecommunications. Don't play politics in health care where so many people are in dire need. Let science evolve and advance — wherever it comes from."
BGI has mounted a vigorous defense against the allegations, emphasizing that it maintains no direct patient services in the United States and therefore has no access to Americans' personal data. The company has clarified that its Covid-19 PCR testing analyzes only viral RNA, not patient DNA, and stressed its status as a privately owned entity independent from Chinese government control. BGI likens its gene bank operations to those of U.S. national laboratories, suggesting that fears about its activities may be overblown.
Broader Implications
The BIOSECURE Act represents more than a simple regulatory change; it signals a fundamental shift in how the United States approaches biotechnology in the context of national security. This transformation raises complex questions about the future of international scientific collaboration at a time when global cooperation has proven crucial for addressing health challenges.
The legislation could trigger a significant reorganization of pharmaceutical supply chains, with countries like Ireland and India potentially emerging as alternative manufacturing locations. However, this restructuring comes with its own set of challenges and uncertainties.
Innovation in the biotechnology sector could face headwinds as restrictions on collaboration with Chinese firms affect the development pipeline for new treatments. The legislation also adds another layer of complexity to U.S.-China relations, potentially complicating ongoing dialogue in other areas.
Looking Ahead
As the BIOSECURE Act moves to the Senate with strong bipartisan support, its passage could mark a watershed moment in U.S. biotechnology policy. Policymakers face the delicate task of balancing legitimate national security concerns with the benefits of international scientific collaboration and market competition.
The debate over this legislation reflects deeper questions facing the biotechnology sector about the relationship between national security and scientific progress. How nations protect sensitive genetic data while maintaining scientific openness, and the role of national security considerations in health care innovation, will likely shape the future of global biotechnology development for years to come.
The answers to these questions will determine not just the future of U.S.-China relations in biotechnology, but the pace and direction of medical innovation in an increasingly interconnected world.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.