So a congressman just asked the University of Washington a very simple question: why are your researchers co-authoring papers with the Beijing Institute of Technology — a school run by the Chinese Communist Party’s military-industrial complex — while collecting $50 million in federal research grants funded by American taxpayers?

Apparently nobody at UW thought this was a problem until someone in Congress started reading the fine print. Whoops!

Rep. John Moolenaar, the Michigan Republican who chairs the Select Committee on China, fired off a letter demanding answers after discovering that a UW scholar had been collaborating with China’s Beijing Institute of Technology on research into “autonomous vehicle AI models.” For those of you who don’t speak Pentagon, that’s self-driving military technology. The kind of stuff you build drones and unmanned weapons systems with.

But sure, we’re told it’s just “academic collaboration.” Nothing to see here, folks.

Moolenaar didn’t stop at Washington state. He also flagged Texas A&M, which scooped up $17 million from the same SECURE initiative — that’s the National Science Foundation program supposedly designed to protect American research from foreign exploitation. Texas A&M professors were busy collaborating with Chinese counterparts on GPS technology, robotics, and metallic nanostructures. You know, the kind of innocent stuff that has absolutely zero military applications. (We’re being sarcastic, in case that wasn’t obvious.)

“Institutions entrusted with U.S. taxpayer dollars should not simultaneously enable foreign adversaries to access and exploit sensitive research,” Moolenaar wrote. Which sounds like something that shouldn’t need to be said out loud, and yet here we are.

The University of Washington’s response was the kind of corporate nothing-burger that makes your eyes glaze over. Spokesman Victor Balta told reporters that UW “takes research security and integrity very seriously” and “directs significant effort and resources toward being leaders in research security and integrity.”

Oh, wonderful. They take it “very seriously.” They’re “leaders” in it. That’s reassuring. Meanwhile, their researchers are literally publishing joint papers with a university controlled by the People’s Liberation Army. But they’ve got a committee on it, so we should all relax.

Texas A&M wasn’t much better. They confirmed they “significantly strengthened” their research security framework back in 2022, which is bureaucrat-speak for “we got caught and wrote a new policy manual that nobody reads.”

Here’s what drives us absolutely crazy about this. American parents are taking out second mortgages and draining their retirement accounts to send their kids to schools like UW. Tuition at the University of Washington runs about $12,000 a year for in-state students and north of $40,000 for out-of-state. And while Mom and Dad are clipping coupons to pay that bill, the university is funneling federally funded research straight to the Chinese military.

Your kid’s tuition subsidizes the labs. Your tax dollars fund the grants. And the research ends up in Beijing. What a deal!

Moolenaar asked the National Science Foundation to pause funding to both universities pending a review. The NSF responded that it’s “working directly with and will respond directly to the Committee.” Translation: they’re going to schedule a meeting to discuss scheduling another meeting about potentially forming a subcommittee to review the situation. Don’t hold your breath.

This isn’t even a new problem. The University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University both had to cut ties with Chinese entities just last year after similar concerns surfaced. It’s a pattern. American universities take federal money with one hand and shake hands with the CCP with the other, and then act shocked — absolutely shocked — when someone points it out.

We’ve spent decades watching China systematically infiltrate American research institutions. They send students and scholars to our best universities, gain access to cutting-edge research, and funnel it back to a regime that is actively building a military designed to challenge the United States. And our response has been to hand them $50 million research grants and hope they pinky-promise not to share the results with the People’s Liberation Army.

Pop quiz: if a congressman hadn’t asked questions, how long would this have continued? Another year? Five years? Until someone at the Beijing Institute of Technology published a paper titled “How We Used American Research to Build a Better Weapons System”?

The universities will tell you this is about “academic freedom” and “international collaboration” and all sorts of lovely-sounding phrases that look great on a brochure. But academic freedom doesn’t mean giving a hostile foreign government a backstage pass to your most sensitive research programs while the American taxpayer foots the bill.

Moolenaar is right to demand answers. And the NSF should yank every dollar until these schools can prove — not promise, prove — that their research isn’t ending up in the hands of the Chinese military.

Because right now, the only people getting a good return on their investment in American higher education are the communists in Beijing.