(DCNF)—The U.S. Intelligence Community has awarded more than a dozen sensitive defense grants to researchers affiliated with institutions connected to the Chinese government and its military, according to a report exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Since 2017, at least 14 U.S. defense research projects supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) — which is tasked by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) with investing in “high-risk, high-payoff research programs” — have included investigators simultaneously affiliated with Chinese national laboratories, state surveillance entities, military units and nuclear weapons development institutions, according to the report published by Parallax Advanced Research, a nonprofit funded by U.S. federal, state and municipal governments. Participants in at least two of the IARPA projects cited in the report conducted similar research during the same period with Chinese government-tied institutions, raising serious concerns about U.S. defense technology transfer to a hostile foreign power.
“These studies reveal a deliberate effort by China’s intelligence and public security apparatus, alongside military-affiliated entities, to extract lessons, methodologies, and technical knowledge from IARPA-funded programs,” the report warns. “This includes attempts to reverse-engineer research outputs, replicate experimental designs, and adapt [U.S. Intelligence Community] technologies for use in China’s mass surveillance apparatus and strategic military capabilities.”
Researchers with ties to adversarial nations, like China, should be prohibited from collaborating on U.S. intelligence and defense research, the report’s co-author, L.J. Eads, director of research intelligence at Parallax, told the DCNF.
“What I found most concerning was the sheer number of IARPA funded projects that IARPA itself describes as having clear Intelligence Community value that have involved — and in some cases continue to involve — Chinese institutions and companies, including personnel directly tied to the [People’s Liberation Army],” said Eads.
ODNI and IARPA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
‘Grave National Security Threats’
In one 2024 case study highlighted in the report, the lead investigator for IARPA’s BRIAR Program was allegedly found to have “a long history” of simultaneous collaboration with Chinese institutions connected to China’s military as well as U.S. government-sanctioned researchers.
IARPA’s ongoing BRIAR Program aims to produce detection and tracking software for individuals by “extracting biometric signatures from the whole-body (e.g., gait and/or body shape) and face,” according to IARPA, and supports U.S. counterterrorism, military force protection, and border security.
The lead investigator for the $11 million BRIAR Program is a Michigan State University faculty member, who has simultaneously collaborated on Chinese government-funded projects with a number of institutions including “Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), in China, on similar gait research,” according to the report.
SUSTech has “documented partnerships across China’s defense research ecosystem,” the report states, citing a threat assessment from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is a think tank partially funded by that nation’s Department of Defense.
Additionally, the lead investigator for IARPA’s BRIAR Program has also allegedly collaborated on research with the deputy director of China’s liaison office in Hong Kong, according to the report. The U.S. Treasury Department added that deputy director to its “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons” list, which flags entities “controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, targeted countries,” resulting in their assets being blocked, according to the U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC).
China’s research sectors have “deep entanglements” with U.S. intelligence defense programs, and “present grave national security threats,” former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Cella told the DCNF after reviewing Parallax’s findings.
“[I]t is critical to the U.S. and its Free World allies to do a deep-dive self-assessment and begin the process of de-risking, and in some sectors, de-coupling,” said Cella, who now serves as director of the Michigan-China Economic and Security Review Group.
A Michigan State University spokesperson declined to answer questions related to the report’s findings and referred the DCNF to the school’s policy on academic conflicts of interest and disclosure requirements.
‘Intelligence Applications’
In another case study highlighted in Parallax’s report, datasets from IARPA’s BABEL Program were used by PLA researchers, U.S. and Chinese academics to conduct experiments for a 2018 publication concerning speech recognition technologies.
Operating under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, the PLA “focuses squarely on overcoming the United States through a whole-of-nation mobilization effort,” and aims to achieve “‘strategic counterbalance’ against the United States in the nuclear and other strategic domains” by 2027, according to the Department of Defense.
The BABEL Program aims to support the U.S. intelligence community by developing technologies capable of generating a “speech transcription system for any new language within one week,” according to IARPA.
Despite its value to the U.S. intelligence community, the 2018 publication included a researcher from PLA Unit 62315, who “concurrently filed a related patent in China “with other members of the same unit,” Parallax’s report found.
“Although extensive searches of Chinese-language sources did not yield public information on the internal mission or structure of PLA Unit 62315, its role using IARPA-provided datasets, combined with the concurrent filing of a related patent by the same unit, demonstrates a clear PLA interest in advancing speech recognition and acoustic modeling capabilities,” the report states.
‘Security Problem’
The report also flags a 2023 IARPA-funded publication that included a researcher from the China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP).
Subordinate to China’s Central Military Commission, CAEP is “the technology complex responsible for the research, development and testing of China’s nuclear weapons” and is on the Entity List, according to the U.S. Federal Register.
The Entity List identifies persons likely involved in “activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States,” and, consequently, prohibits certain items, like semiconductors, from being exported to those entities, according to the federal government.
The 2023 publication involving the CAEP researcher was connected to IARPA’s LogiQ Program, which “aims to advance quantum computing” in order to solve problems “of interest to the Intelligence Community and the U.S. Government as a whole,” according to IARPA.
CAEP’s involvement in IARPA’s LogiQ program “means sensitive U.S. quantum error correction innovations may have been exposed to [China’s] nuclear and quantum military ecosystem,” the report warns.
“This report only scratches the surface of a much larger and more serious research security problem,” Eads told the DCNF.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.