Examining Biosecurity at the Intersection of AI and Biology
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House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations U.S. House of Representatives
Follow its sittingsSpeaker 2
At the beginning of this congress, energy and commerce Democrats introduced 23 amendments to the committee oversight plan in order to commit to actual oversight over Secretary Kennedy and HHS. Republicans said these amendments were unnecessary. They have given Secretary Kennedy the green light to carry out his ideological agenda undeterred. I understand the importance of examining biosecurity and AI, and appreciate the witnesses with their testimony. But how can we address AI threats of tomorrow if Republican leadership refuses to address the public health crises of today?
And how can we take seriously any bipartisan effort to talk about AI risk when the president has issued an executive order seeking to punish states that put up guardrails? History has shown that it is not a matter of if there will be another pandemic, but when. It does not matter if it is a natural virus or a virus created by AI. Every day that congressional Republicans enable president Trump and secretary Kennedy's recklessness, we are less prepared for the next pandemic threat. It is an abdication of this committee's leadership and extremely dangerous for Americans across the country, and the health of the American people is going to continue to suffer until the dangerous, unqualified, and anti-science officials in this administration are held accountable.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Speaker 1
Thank you. The chair now, thank you. The chair now recognizes the chairman of the full committee, Mr. Guthrie, for five minutes for an opening statement.
Speaker 3
Thank you, Chairman Joyce. Thank you for holding this hearing to examine biosecurity at the intersection of AI and biology. I am hopeful about the potential for medical breakthroughs because of advancements in AI in the biological sciences. There are incredible benefits for innovative medicines and public health preparedness on the horizon. At the same time, scientists, AI company executives, and national security experts are expressing concerns about the increasing risk of misusing AI to develop dangerous biological weapons or novel pathogens.
The pace of advancements in AI and biotechnology in recent years is staggering. The barriers that once constrain biological weapons development are lowered with widespread accessibility to gene editing and open source AI biological tools. While it is difficult to say how much time we have left to mitigate the risks of an intentional or unintentional AI-enabled biothreat, it is not too late to act. Today, we will explore the opportunities, risks, and adequacy of the current safeguards. As we have these discussions, it is important that any efforts to limit the risk of AI-enabled biotechnology do not limit American innovation in these fields.
To win the race for AI, American AI innovators must lead the way in developing cutting-edge products while taking steps to acknowledge and mitigate biosecurity risk in their products. Some are already taking such steps. Additionally, the Trump administration has implemented important measures to prioritize AI innovation and biosecurity. For example, the Improving Safety and Security of Biological Research executive order from last May is intended to strengthen oversight and accountability of life sciences research while ensuring US remains a global leader in biotechnology. In addition, the administration's AI action plan, as well as other executive actions, are preparing for the novel risk of AI-enabled biothreats.
In particular, the recently announced Genesys mission aims to unleash AI and biotechnology innovation, including detecting and encountering biological threats. I look forward to discussing this emerging issue and examining ways we continue to improve America's biosecurity infrastructure to keep up with the evolving technological landscape. I wanna thank our witnesses for being here today. I look forward to hearing your testimony, and I will yield back.
Speaker 1
Thank you. The chair recognizes the ranking member of the full committee, Mister Palone, for five minutes for an opening statement.
Speaker 4
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I cannot play along with whatever alternate reality exists in this hearing room for the Republicans today. In this very room earlier this year, Democrats fought for over 24 hours to try to prevent Republicans from taking health insurance away from millions of Americans and driving more hospitals to close across the country. And across the street in the capital, Republicans are teeing up a vote on a so-called health care bill this afternoon that does nothing to make people healthier or make health insurance more affordable. In fact, their legislation does nothing to prevent health care costs from skyrocketing for 20,000,000 Americans and about 4,000,000 Americans from losing their health care altogether.
And over at the Department of Health and Human Services, a block away, Secretary Kennedy is making us less prepared for a pandemic by putting out misinformation about lifesaving vaccines, and Americans will die as a result of Kennedy's dangerous repeated misinformation. Now today, this hearing is focused on biosecurity and pandemic threats, and how AI might enable bad actors to develop bioweapons. I have very real concerns about these threats, but we can't ignore the immediate threat that the Trump administration or Secretary Kennedy have made us less safe and prepared across the board. And I simply have a hard time understanding why Republicans in the majority can hold an oversight hearing on hypothetical future threats from AI but can't hold a hearing on current public health threats such as the measles outbreak that's going on right now in at least 13 states. And across HHS, experts and scientists are being replaced by ideologues and quacks, frankly.
Secretary Kennedy and his followers are personally demanding public health agencies abandon longstanding evidence-based recommendations on the safety of vaccines, and demanding the HHS leadership to follow his anti-vaccine will. Now we have an FDA who's being led by unqualified antivaxxers who are doing everything they can to scare people about the proven safety of vaccines, and scaring off any drug manufacturer that we might rely on to develop treatments and new vaccines. And the CDC is increasingly led and advised by individuals lacking public health experience, who reject settled science and embrace an ideology of reducing vaccine access, including for newborn babies. DOGE and Donald Trump's director of the National Institutes of Health froze or canceled thousands of grants, including funding for research on viruses, pandemic prevention, and vaccines. And this research is essential to finding the cures and treatments of the future, to fight life-threatening diseases and viruses.
And finally, while we're going to talk about the risks that AI might generate if used by a bad actor to create bioweapons, President Trump issued an executive order just last week that threatens to sue and withhold funds from states that have put in place crucial guardrails for AI. The president's action is not only illegal, but it will increase the risk of AI, including biosecurity risk, at a time when the use of AI is rapidly expanding. Now unless committee Republicans join us in demanding even the most basic accountability from this administration, nothing will stop this president and Secretary Kennedy from doing whatever they want regardless of what laws we pass. And under the Trump administration, our pandemic preparedness and public health systems have been decimated, and it's time for real oversight and accountability in this committee. This hearing is simply incomplete without testimony from Secretary Kennedy.
We can't address this threat without hearing directly from the HHS Secretary. So pursuant to clause 2(k)(6) of House Rule 11, I move the Committee on Energy and Commerce issue a subpoena to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to testify before this committee. Mister chairman, that is my motion. Chairman, can I ask for a roll call on my motion?
Speaker 1
Mister ranking member, votes have been called. Can we address that when we reconvene? We're going to adjourn, and we will reconvene five minutes after the last vote has been cast.
Speaker 4
When do you plan to call the vote? And can you assure us it doesn't conflict with that?
Speaker 1
Reconvene and address that issue at the completion of this morning's voting session.
Speaker 1
Mhmm. The committee will come to order prior to recessing for floor votes. The ranking member has made a motion. The committee will hold this motion in abeyance until approximately 30 minutes after floor debate begins on H R 6703. The chairman and the ranking member of the full committee made this agreement to postpone consideration of the ranking member's motion until that point.
Thank you. We have concluded members' opening statements. The chair would like to remind members that pursuant to the committee rules, all members' written opening statements will be made part of the record. We wanna thank the witnesses for being here today and for taking time out of your schedules to testify before the subcommittee. You will have the opportunity to give an opening statement, followed by a round of questions from members.
Our witnesses today are doctor Jazi Panu, assistant professor at the department of environmental health and engineering from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Doctor James Diggins, vice president of policy and biosecurity, Twist Bioscience Corporation. Matthew McKnight, general manager, Ginkgo Biosecurity, Ginkgo Bioworks. And doctor Fiona Havvers, former lead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Respiratory Virus Hospitalization Surveillance Network team. We appreciate all of you being here, and I look forward to hearing from you.
You are aware that the committee is holding an oversight hearing, and when doing so, has a practice of taking the testimony under oath. Do you have an objection to testifying under oath? Seeing no objections, we will proceed. The chair advises that you're entitled to be advised by counsel pursuant to the house rules. Do you desire to be advised by counsel during your testimony today?
Seeing none, please rise. Raise your right hand. Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? So help you, God. Seeing the witnesses answered in the affirmative, you are now sworn in under oath and subject to penalty set forth in title 18, section 1001 of The United States code.
With that, we will now recognize Doctor Panu for five minutes to give an opening statement. Mike.
Speaker 6
Mhmm. Chairman Joyce, ranking member Clark, chairman Guthrie, ranking member Polonge, and distinguished members of the subcommittee. Thank you for the chance to speak with you today. My name is Jasi Punew, and I'm an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. I'm also a board-certified internal medicine physician.
I first want to commend you all for your attention to how we can improve our ability to prevent, detect, and respond to future biological events, including pandemics. Building our capacity to do this will protect the public by reducing the chance of these biological events, whether they come from a natural source, a lab accident, or the deliberate use of a biological weapon. AI has already been used to solve challenging biology research problems, and is continuing to advance rapidly. It holds great promise in the areas of biosecurity and biodefense. For example, AI could be used to improve pathogen surveillance and even provide early indicators of outbreaks, making it possible to contain them before they spread.
It could be used to optimize medical countermeasure supply chains, both at the design stage for a countermeasure, as well as manufacturing and distribution. These promising advances may not arise by default due to a lack of incentives in the private market, and the government should consider these defense forward applications of AI to strengthen our resilience to biological threats. But to fully realize the benefits of AI, we should also anticipate and navigate its potentially serious risks, such as those that could cause loss of life and societal disruption. Researchers who monitor these risks have noted a few key areas. Large language models and AI agents can provide bad actors with biology knowledge, including bioweapons-related knowledge.
They can also help users write code and carry out tasks in the digital realm. This is referred to in the field as AI uplift. Frontier AI companies in the US are now working with the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation, previously the US AI Safety Institute under the prior administration, to test their models for these risks and to develop safeguards. Biological AI models, those models that are trained on biological data such as sequence and structured data, pose a different set of challenges. These models are used by experts, such as life sciences researchers.
A small subset of these models have capabilities that could be misused, such as the prediction and design of the properties of pandemic pathogens. In general, skill barriers to the use of these AI systems are falling as tools become easier to use and are integrated. These are among the important risks that Congress will need to address. I recommend Congress take three steps. First, Congress should empower Casey to define the narrow set of biological AI models that could pose societal-level harms if misused.
Currently, the research community is attempting to define the scope of these models in an ad hoc fashion, with limited government input, and an authoritative assessment of this would provide developers with much-needed clarity. Second, Congress should task OSTP to develop a considered biological data security framework. Recently, over 100 leading researchers endorsed a statement that a narrow subset of biological data, such as pandemic pathogen data, could be misused using AI and should not be available for anonymous access as it sometimes currently is. The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology also called for similar security controls on sensitive biological data. Third, Congress should develop and pass legislation for universal gene synthesis screening that secures the digital-to-physical barrier in a way that supports this industry and U.
S. Competitiveness. In addition to these measures, the subcommittee has an important oversight role and should direct the NIH to ensure that AI-enabled research is appropriately addressed in its ongoing biosafety oversight modernization initiative. If taken now, these measures will help protect the public from future biological threats. In gender, trust in science, and enables society to fully harness the benefits of AI-enabled biological research.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify. I look forward to your questions.
Speaker 1
Thank you. We will now recognize Doctor Diggins for his five minutes to give an opening statement.
Speaker 5
Morning, Chairman Joyce, Ranking Member Clark, members of the subcommittee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. So my name is James Diggins. I lead policy, biosecurity, and trade compliance at Twist Bioscience. Twist is a synthetic DNA manufacturer.
We're based in the United States. We have facilities outside San Francisco in California and outside Portland in Oregon. To understand what we do, imagine a bridge between the digital and the physical worlds. Our customers send us text files that contain sequences of a's, g's, t's, and c's representing the individual chemical bases of DNA. Using a unique silicon-based manufacturing process, we turn that digital code into actual strands of DNA in a tube.
That DNA powers incredible breakthroughs, from developing new antibody therapeutics to creating bacteria that can serve as fertilizers to improve the efficiency of food production. But with this capability comes responsibility. In 2006, a journalist from The Guardian ordered a small piece of the smallpox virus to his home, exposing a gap in security. That incident was a wake-up call to the nascent DNA synthesis industry, which worked closely with the US government to build the biosecurity screening framework that we still use today. When Twist receives an order, we first verify the customer, ensuring that there are legitimate scientists shipping to a legitimate physical address.
Second, we screen the sequence. We use computational methods to reverse engineer what that DNA does, checking to see if it matches any known pathogens or toxins. If we see a risk, we investigate further, and may ultimately deny the order. In some very rare cases, we may notify law enforcement. While these screening practices ensure responsible use today, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence is creating a new set of challenges that I think we've heard here today.
It's important, though, to distinguish between the two types of AI affecting our field. There are large language models. The chatbots we all have known and experienced. The risk here is these models lower the barrier to entry. As my colleague, doctor Pano, described, the frontier labs are taking this threat seriously and implementing model guardrails.
But there's a second, more complex category, biological design models. So these are not chatbots. They're sophisticated engineering tools designed to create entirely new proteins to solve scientific problems. Recent models can design novel proteins that bind tightly to nearly any specific target. Tools like these are usually made available publicly as open source, empowering a broad scientific user community.
And while these models offer incredible opportunity for nearly every biotech sector, including health, energy, and agriculture, they also create a security gap. The tools rarely have built-in guardrails and could be used to design harmful proteins that do not look like anything currently found in nature. Because our biosecurity systems screen for known threats, in the future, a completely novel AI-designed threat might slip through. But rest assured, industry has not been sitting still. We recently collaborated with Microsoft to test this concern.
We asked, can today's AI models design toxins to evade our screens? The good news is that, as of now, the answer is no. To make a functional toxin, the models still had to use significant amounts of known sequence, which our screening systems detected. But these tools are improving every day, and we don't believe that the safety margin will last for very long. So we've taken action.
We've worked with NIST over the past 18 months to develop standards on how to measure screening system accuracy. We also established the sequence biosecurity risk consortium to bring industry and academia together to define risks from specific biological components, rather than just species. And finally, we've worked on the nuclear threat initiative on tools to help our customers using these design models to communicate their legitimate intent. While industry is building defenses, we need the federal government to act decisively to sustain this American leadership both in synthetic DNA manufacturing and in global biosecurity. First, Congress should make gene synthesis screening nonnegotiable.
While many responsible companies screen voluntarily, it needs to be a uniform practice adopted by every provider. Federal funds should only be used to purchase synthetic DNA from providers that meet these federally mandated standards, and NIST should be funded to continue its important standards work in this area. Second, we need to shift from screening sequences to screening functions. The best protection against AI-designed threats is an AI-designed defense. We need the federal government to invest in developing the datasets and models that can predict if a novel protein structure is capable of causing harm.
And third, this defense must be global. The DNA synthesis supply chain is deeply international. If we only provide these defensive tools to American companies, bad actors will simply order from overseas providers who lack these resources. This still leaves Americans vulnerable. Twist is proud to support the incredible work of our customers, and we look forward to supporting the efforts of the subcommittee to ensure the responsible use of biotechnology.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
Speaker 1
Thank you. The chair now recognizes Mister McKnight for your five minutes for an opening statement.
Speaker 7
Chairman Joyce, ranking member Clark, thank you for your time today, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I started my career as a Marine Corps intelligence officer. Today, I lead a business building defensive capabilities at the cutting edge of biotechnology. My core message today is that the missing component of our national security infrastructure is actually our ability to do large-scale detection of biothreats. Today, we call that persistent biothreat detection, biothreat radar.
In essence, what we're doing is we're picking up biothreat chatter much earlier than you would otherwise be able to detect it. Had this been placed as an example in 2019, we likely would have been able to find this the SARS CoV-2 virus long before it was reported officially in January 2020. We really should not be in a situation as The United States of America where we're reliant on patient zero showing up in a hospital or, like in 2019, a foreign scientist leaking information outside of their rule set. That's simply systems that are not under American control. When we say we're deploying biothreat radar at scale, what we're really doing is measuring places where biothreats emerge, like airports, community, wastewater, hospitals.
And in the future, as we expand, you can look at border borders, high threat laboratories, and other locations that are of high risk. All of this enables the rapid response, the early response that we all seek. But I think it's also important, as you think about where we are, to frame this very tactical answer in the bigger picture. For the last 125 years, we've gone through major technological transformations, chemistry, physics, computing. Those technical transformations have changed how geopolitical power works on the planet.
That is actually the moment we are in with biology today. And by those forces of economic competition alone, we know that nations, groups, and individuals globally will seek to push the cutting edge of really unimaginable biotechnology. That is mostly a very good thing. But, also, just like those periods of history, we are in a moment where we have to accept the reality that adversaries and others will seek to explore the weaponization of these capabilities. President Trump was exactly right to identify the risk of bioweapons in his speech to the United Nations in September.
But right now, today, our primary biosecurity approach and most of the conversation is really around what restrictions will we place on our best scientists and our best research institutions. Obviously, restrictions, as my colleagues have pointed out, are responsible, and we need to do them. But at the end of the day, what that is not, is not the same thing as making a proactive plan to stop biosecurity threats. There are two reasons for this. For one, biology is by definition borderless.
It's similar to cyber, the way is the way to understand it. It is vast. It is distributed, and there's no single choke point. This means that bioinnovations and risk will happen globally. It won't just happen on our shores, and just restricting our own scientists won't solve the problem.
Related, restrictions will actually slow our ability to build countermeasures if we are slowing our ability to do innovation. So instead, from my perspective, to stop those threats, we need to create a large-scale, persistent, pervasive detection system for biothreats via genomic sequencing. Genomic sequencing is the foundational technology of biothreat radar. And, obviously, detection systems in national security are not new concepts for us. The United States has global detection systems run by our own American security institutions across chemical, nuclear, and cyber.
We look for threat attribution, where something came from. We seek to gain early warning in every major category. Biothreat radar is the detection system for the bio category. It's the most definitive way for us to confirm the precise identity of pathogens and inform the origin of the threat. Those are the two things you need for rapid response, and perhaps most importantly, especially over the arc of time, credible deterrence of threats.
The framework for this persistent biothreat detection system started during the pandemic, and we have been very fortunate to work across administrations, with HHS and CDC, over a number of years to continue to expand the concept. Most recently, president Trump's administration called for a significant expansion of biothreat radar at HHS and CDC as well as the Department of War. Additionally, the state department, more recently along with HHS and CDC, has been working on bilateral negotiations with nations incorporating biothreat radar as a piece of those expansionary programs. Each of these biothreat radar programs should be expanded to ensure America, its allies, have trusted, transparent, and sovereign capabilities for biothreat detection. Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to the discussion.
Speaker 1
Thank you. The chair now recognizes Doctor Havers for her five minutes for an opening statement.
Speaker 8
Chairman Joyce, ranking member Clark, and members of the subcommittee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify in biosecurity at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biology. My name is Fiona Habers, I'm a physician who served for 13 years as a medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before resigning in June 2025. My work focused on respiratory pathogens, including novel influenza viruses and SARS CoV-2. I worked on multiple emergency outbreak responses, including deployments to China during the avian influenza A H7 and H9 outbreak until Liberia during the Ebola epidemic.
In early 2020, I joined the CDC COVID-19 emergency response, where I led national seroprevalence studies and later a surveillance network that monitored COVID-19 in RSV hospitalizations. I am also a practicing physician and served as a frontline health care worker during the 2009 H1N1 influenza and the COVID-19 pandemics. We will almost certainly experience additional pandemics in our lifetime. As we've heard from the other witnesses, the risk is even greater as artificial intelligence and other new technologies lower the barriers to creating pathogens with pandemic potential. Core elements of pandemic preparedness are the same whether a pathogen originates in a laboratory or emerges from a zoonotic source.
Regardless of how or where the next pandemic begins, America must be ready to respond. Despite the lessons of COVID-19, I believe The United States is now less capable of responding to emerging pathogens regardless of their origin than it was at the outset of the pandemic in 2020. My testimony focuses on three ways this administration has weakened pandemic preparedness. Staffing and funding cuts that undermine public health infrastructure, a departure from evidence-based vaccine policy that has eroded trust and federal guidance, and reductions in scientific research funding that have stifled innovation. A robust public health response depends on strong public health institutions.
Since this administration began, thousands of CDC experts have been fired, forced out, or have resigned or retired early. Multiple programs have been eliminated, including some that protect frontline workers, and communication staff essential for crisis messaging have been fired. As a result, CDC's ability to rapidly mobilize during emergencies has been weakened. State and local public health departments have also been weakened by efforts to claw back federal funding intended to modernize surveillance and build capacity, while withdrawal from the World Health Organization has reduced our ability to detect and monitor novel pathogens abroad, together reducing visibility into emerging threats and impairing pandemic response. Beyond weakening public health infrastructure, this administration has also undermined vaccines, one of our most critical tools in any pandemic.
Operation Warp Speed demonstrated what is possible when academia, government, and industry work together. However, this administration has undermined confidence in vaccines and moved away from evidence-based recommendations. On 06/09/2025, Secretary Kennedy dismissed all members of the advisory committee on immunization practices, a decision that led directly to my resignation one week later. At that point, I no longer had confidence that CDC data, including data I was scheduled to present to that committee, would be evaluated objectively or with scientific rigor. And I was unwilling to lend scientific credibility to a process likely to promote dangerous misinformation about vaccines.
Those concerns have since been borne out. Longstanding evidence-based review processes have been abandoned. Transparency has declined, and misleading information has been presented in public meetings. ACIP has issued harmful recommendations, including ending routine hepatitis B vaccination at birth, an action opposed by major medical organizations, and one that will likely result in preventable illnesses and deaths in American children. The erosion of trust in CDC vaccine guidance has serious consequences.
Clinicians face fragmented recommendations. The public is increasingly confused. And in a future pandemic, this loss of confidence will say cost lives. It may also weaken disease surveillance if state and local health partners hesitate to share data with federal agencies they no longer trust. Scientific innovation critical to preparedness has also been undermined.
Cuts to mRNA research, including funding for an avian influenza AH5N1 vaccine, along with reduced NIH funding and regulatory instability at the FDA, threaten the development of countermeasures we will need when the next pandemic emerges. In closing, I want to speak briefly as a physician. In May 2020, I watched patients die in overcrowded ICUs while carrying my N95 mask in a brown paper bag during PPE shortages, and I isolated from my family to protect them from a virus we barely understood. I felt profound relief when I was vaccinated in early 2021. The next pandemic, whether it originates in a laboratory or from a zoonotic source, could be far worse than COVID-19.
Biosecurity and pandemic preparedness are bipartisan issues. I urge this committee to exercise its oversight authority to halt the destruction of our public health and scientific institutions, restore evidence-based leadership, and ensure that The United States is prepared for the next pandemic. Thank you.
Speaker 1
I thank you for your testimony, and we will now move to the questioning. I will begin and recognize myself for 5 minutes. Doctor Pano, in your testimony, you describe biological AI models and the threat of their misuse as raising the ceiling of harm. Would you agree that while the capabilities and potential risks of these models are difficult to measure, proactive steps to safeguard against their misuse are necessary before another major threat emerges?
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question, Chairman. Yes. I do agree that proactive measures are necessary. Think that biological AI models that could pose societal risk are a small subset of overall AI-enabled biology research. That small subset needs to be better defined and scoped, and oversight should be conducted for those models.
Speaker 1
Given the rapid advancements that we're seeing in AI and synthetic biology, how urgent is it to be proactive and conduct oversight and mitigate risks as a part of any overarching strategy, actually, to protect the medical safety of all Americans?
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. I think that the rapid pace of AI advances does warrant proactive oversight of this technology for risks that can be anticipated. I think society has had a challenging time exactly predicting how and when AI will advance. And so, rather than relying on guesswork or prediction, we should have methods for evaluating capability advancement.
Speaker 1
Thank you. Mister McKnight, recent reports have indicated that China is collecting large amounts of biological data both from its own population and from abroad. This data could be used to develop AI programs with some of the concerning capabilities that we have discussed here this morning. Let's hone in on that. What types of biological data do you think are the most vulnerable to being misused when paired with AI?
Speaker 7
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We appreciate the question. The way we think about biological data and the threat that it poses is, if you think about the entire planet, the vast majority of biological data is the code that doctor Jiggins talked about. All of the living things on the planet are coded in DNA. Today, to a first-order approximation, we monitor very little of it.
If you think about the corollaries with cybersecurity or with any other type of security where we're looking at any adversarial threat constantly, persistently, pervasively, the challenge is when you take that diversity of information and then you combine it with AI tools, the threat frontier of what could be made changes dramatically. And until we are able to defend by using the same AI tools that we use to create new models and flip them around to interpret data coming out of the environment, whether it's natural or man-made, we are going to be essentially blind in detecting this brand new, amazing number of threats that could be invented over the next 1 to 50 years. And I think it's very important we recognize the scale of the challenge that is facing us.
Speaker 1
Doctor Diggins, are the DNA synthesis screening regulations that are currently in place adequate to protect against malicious actors seeking to create a bioweapon?
Speaker 5
Thank you for the question, Mr. Chairman. We don't feel they are. Their current regulations focus on acquisition and possession of cultures, you know, live species, viruses, things like that. There's very little direct regulation of the synthesis industry itself, and we feel that mandating these screening practices is an important route to help spread the broad adoption and global uniformity of these practices.
Speaker 1
And follow-up, Doctor Diggins. Do you see a pathway where an AI-generated sequence designed to evade sequence screening algorithms is able to bypass the current safeguards?
Speaker 5
So the work we've done with Microsoft, I think, has shown that the current generation of models is not sufficiently good at doing that. But we certainly see the capability of these models improving in the next two to three years, that's not an unlikely scenario.
Speaker 1
Elaborate on that. Do you see where advances in biologic design models can lead to sequences that can totally evade any attempts at detection? Is that a possibility?
Speaker 5
On the individual protein function level, yes. So thinking like something like a toxin, redesigning that, I think there's a good chance in the next two.
Speaker 1
Three years where you might see proteins where we wouldn't be able to detect. In my final few seconds here, in your testimony, you stated that you screen requests for genetic material and that you, at Twist, have denied some of those requests. How frequently has that occurred in the last six months, a year?
Speaker 5
It is extremely infrequent, which I think we should all find comforting. It's happened maybe a dozen times over the ten years that I've been at Twist.
Speaker 1
And have you seen that change since you've been at Twist? You said that that's a relatively small number over a 10 year time span. Have you seen in recent years an increased number of requests that you have had to deny?
Speaker 1
I thank you. My time has expired. I yield now to the ranking member for her 5 minutes of questioning.
Speaker 2
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Republicans on this subcommittee have spent this year burying their heads in the sand as Secretary Kennedy and President Trump decimate this country's ability to prepare for and respond to future pandemics. America needs to prepare to respond to all health threats, whether it's a virus that jumps from an animal to a human, or a bioweapon designed using AI by malicious actors targeting Americans. Instead, because of the lies being told by president Trump and secretary Kennedy, we are becoming more vulnerable to diseases like measles that are preventable and have been practically eliminated from the United States. Doctor Habers, you resigned from the CDC in protest of Secretary Kennedy's unscientific attacks on vaccines, our best defense in the event of a biological threat.
HHS has yet to respond to multiple requests from Democrats related to these dangerous policies. Because Republicans have refused to conduct oversight of Secretary Kennedy's reckless behavior, can you please walk us through what you saw happening at the CDC that led to your resignation?
Speaker 8
So the advisory committee on immunization practices plays a critical role in establishing evidence-based, science-based vaccine policy for 340,000,000 Americans. With Kennedy, with secretary Kennedy firing that committee and replacing them with people who are ideologically driven, who are not qualified, and who have an anti vaccine standpoint, I knew that this committee would be weaponized to further spread anti vaccine propaganda. We see falling vaccination rates in the population. We would see an increase in vaccine preventable deaths, and we'll see knee diseases like measles running rampant throughout the population. All of this has happened.
Think since I resigned in June, we've seen a CDC director resign for refusing to rubber stamp in advance recommendations coming out of this committee. We've seen a lot further loss of expertise and further undermining of CDC's reputation. The fact that Secretary Kennedy hijacked a CDC website and put up information linking vaccines to autism on an official government document was a gut punch to everyone who's ever worked at CDC. That was done without scientific review or scientific clearance. And actions like this have undermined CDC's credibility with state and local health partners, with medical professional societies, and with the public.
Speaker 2
So hold on. Let me shortly after you resign, you said that if Secretary Kennedy's undermining of vaccines, quote, isn't stopped and his policies aren't reversed, quote, immediately, a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases, end quote. What consequences will Secretary Kennedy's crusade against vaccines have for Americans, including if we are faced with a pandemic emergency?
Speaker 8
So the erosion of confidence in vaccines and the decades of misinformation that Secretary Kennedy and others have been spreading has led to diminished vaccination coverage. We are already seeing pediatric measles deaths. We also saw 280 American children die of influenza last year, the vast majority of whom were unvaccinated. That's the worst highest level of pediatric death since the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. We're about to enter a flu vaccine, you know, probably a fairly bad flu season, and we have tens of thousands of older Americans who die of influenza every year.
If vaccination rates drop, confidence is further eroded, and fewer Americans are vaccinated, we will see an increase in unnecessary deaths. In addition, if we have a pandemic and a safe and effective vaccine is developed and is developed quickly and rolled out, I think up the lack of confidence in vaccines will mean that uptake will be lower than it could be, and people will die unnecessarily.
Speaker 2
So when Secretary Kennedy took office, he claimed that he would bring with him radical transparency. But this administration and Secretary Kennedy's HHS has refused to answer questions from Congress, repeatedly misled the public about what decisions are being made that affect the nation's health, and what evidence, if any, supports these decisions. Doctor Havers, in your testimony, you offer some dire warnings about the consequences of the actions being taken by this administration. I have real concerns that unqualified anti-science individuals continue to be elevated across HHS, including at the FDA, CDC, and NIH. Since Secretary Kennedy has not been transparent, let me ask you instead.
Is this administration relying on qualified people to make decisions on how to protect the health of Americans?
Speaker 8
Absolutely not. The administration has placed numerous political appointees into agencies like CDC where they're promoting anti-vaccine ideology and are making decisions that are not based on science and that are not based on evidence, and that is leading to dangerous policies that will cost American lives.
Speaker 2
Thank you, Doctor Habers. Congressional Republicans have let the Trump administration gut HHS unimpeded. It's deeply disturbing that Republicans have let the chaos unleashed by this administration, which doctor Habers just described, go unchecked. Thank you, Doctor Habers, for your years of service and for standing up for the health of the American people. With that, I yield back.
Speaker 1
The gentleman that yields the chair now recognizes the chairman of the full committee for his 5 minutes of questioning.
Speaker 3
Thank you. So doctor Punew, what are the current barriers to bioterrorism, and how might they be lowered by advances in AI and synthetic biology?
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question, chairman. There are a few different ways that these barriers could be lowered that the field is tracking. One that I mentioned previously is large language models providing expert biology knowledge to users that don't otherwise have that knowledge. That's referred to as uplift, the frontier models that frontier AI companies that develop those models are working on implementing safeguards for that. The other way that the barriers are being reduced is the expertise needed to use biological AI models to design novel pathogens or toxins.
There is also the barrier of the digital-to-physical divide, which is something that gene synthesis screening addresses. Those are protocols that prevent delivery of those pathogens or toxins to users, and policies to ensure gene synthesis screening is mandatory would be beneficial there.
Speaker 3
Okay. Thank you. So doctor Mister McKnight, to my knowledge, an AI-enabled biological threat has not been developed. Can you tell me how easy it would be to use AI-enabled technology to create a biological threat?
Speaker 7
I think the important thing is that our adversaries or groups that seek to do harm understand the impact that biology has had and does have on societies. So the incentive, as we increase capabilities to create novel pathogens or modify natural pathogens, the incentives to use those capabilities to reduce the economic, political, and social will of America, as we've evidenced through the results of the pandemic, continue to increase attendant with the technical capabilities to do so. Unless we take and create a significant deterrence architecture, which we have done in other domains, the idea that those have the advantage of using those capabilities is real. And what I mean by that is today, if somebody were to do something, we have an inability to detect that and do an attribution of where it came from. So there's an inability for us to truly, with unity, hold somebody accountable for using these capabilities.
And then secondarily, with our response infrastructure, unless we continue to invest in our response infrastructure, they will see an opportunity to impact our nation. So the two things, detection so that we can find who did it, and response so that we can show it won't work, are the two critical things to mitigate what is a really expansive area of innovation that is hard to, to our point previously, hard to regulate every piece of it, especially when the actors that seek to use these technologies are outside of our regulatory sphere.
Speaker 3
Thank you for that. It's just amazing what can be done, isn't it? It's scary, and it's also exciting in terms of what can be done to be helpful with it. So, doctor Diggins, what steps are you talking about, exciting area of DNA synthesis. What steps could be taken in DNA synthesis operations that would make it harder for a threat actor to obtain dangerous DNA?
Speaker 5
Thank you for the question, Mr. Chairman. So, we first would be mandating synthesis screening as a uniform practice across all providers in the country and restricting federal R and D funds so that we capture international providers as well. What you don't wanna do is drive the customer base to use international companies who intentionally don't screen their order systems. The second would be to begin to build datasets and models that can predict when an arbitrary protein sequence can create some form of harm. Right now, much of our defenses are built around looking for known pathogens and toxins.
And these AI biodesign models allow us to kind of step back from that and to generalize the idea of how does a protein cause harm, and we're not very good at that right now. And so this is, I think, a really important role the federal government can play to develop those datasets and models that can generalize that detection response.
Speaker 3
Okay. Thank you. And, mister McKnight, how do we protect sensitive biological datasets while supporting open scientific research?
Speaker 7
Thank you for the question. This is a very critical one. The reality is, today, we need to generate more biological data first. Protection is a critical component of it. But without the amount of data we need to focus on developing good solutions to counteract adversarial development, we are actually in an imbalance of data protection today.
But then varies directly to the question, we need to treat biological data with the same privacy restrictions that we treat our most sensitive data both in the national security community on the intelligence side, and also, as it relates to human privacy.
Speaker 1
The gentleman yields. The chair now recognizes a ranking member of the committee, Mr. Palon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Before we move.
Speaker 4
To my questions, I just wanted to, again, say that this hearing is incomplete without testimony from Secretary Kennedy. I don't think we can address this threat without hearing directly from the HHS Secretary. So pursuant to clause 2(k)(6) of House Rule 11, I move that the committee on Energy and Commerce issue a subpoena to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to testify before the committee.
Speaker 1
The motion is not debatable. There has been a motion to table the motion for the subpoena. All those in favor of.
Speaker 1
For a roll call. The gentleman asked for a roll call vote, and the clerk will record the call.
Speaker 10
Mister Balderson, votes aye. Mister Palmer, Mister Palmer votes aye. Mister Crenshaw, Mister Crenshaw votes aye. Mister Weber, Mister Weber votes aye. Mister Allen, Mister Allen votes aye.
Mister Fulcher, Fulcher votes aye. Missus Harshberger, Missus Harshberger votes aye. Mister Ruley, Mister Ruley votes aye. Mister Guthrie? Mister Guthrie votes.
Miss Clark? Miss Clark votes no. Mister Get? Mister Get votes no. Mister Tonko?
Mister Tonko votes no. Mr Han? Mister Han votes no. Miss Fletcher? Miss Fletcher votes no.
Miss Acacia Cortez? Miss Acacia Cortez votes no. Mister Mullin? Mister Mullin votes no. Mister Palon?
Mister Pologne votes no. Chairman Joyce, chairman Joyce votes aye.
Speaker 1
The ayes have it, and the motion to table is agreed to. The committee will now resume the hearing. Mister Palone is recognized for his five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 4
Thank you. First, doctor Habers, I wanna thank you for your years of service at the CDC, and your work as a physician on the front lines of multiple disease outbreaks and pandemics. I am incredibly concerned that the Trump administration is putting the health of Americans at risk by cutting health care coverage, refusing to practice real science, and spreading misinformation and disinformation, particularly about vaccines. So let me ask you, doctor Habers, is the country at risk of diseases that we had beaten back, measles, polio, chickenpox, coming back again due to the actions of this administration?
Speaker 4
And as you explained in your testimony, you resigned from the CDC in protest to Secretary Kennedy firing all the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices or ACIP. So, doctor Habers, what impact do the decisions of ACIP have on our country's ability to prevent or respond to public health threats, and what do you think the consequences of the current ACIP decisions will be on the country's health?
Speaker 8
Historically, this committee was very important, that there was once immunization scheduled for the United States. It was there were transparent processes where all liaison organizations, for example, at the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American College of Physicians, would weigh in, give scientific input. There was a rigorous scientific evidence-based process that occurred before any vote. So this vaccine schedule was trusted universally by clinicians. What we're seeing happening now with firing of ACIP and the replacement by an ideologically driven committee is that we're seeing not only critical recommendations being taken away, but we're also seeing clinicians being confused, state and local health departments and organizations are coming up with their own vaccine schedules, and this has done incredible damage to the CDC's reputation.
Trusted partners are now saying we cannot trust the CDC because of what this committee has done. Furthermore, doing things like removing the universal hepatitis B birth dose recommendation, which has been in place for more than 30 years and was credited with basically eliminating pediatric hepatitis B in infants and children in the United States. They voted to remove that recommendation. That is gonna cost children lives. Like, that will kill, we’re gonna see preventable deaths occurring.
So not only has this administration taken a sledgehammer to CDC's credibility, but they are making decisions that are gonna lead directly to an increase in vaccine preventable deaths, while making it much harder for frontline health care workers, such as pediatricians, to have conversations about what vaccine should be recommended, why they're recommending something that CDC no longer recommends. Because they are doing what is based on science, what is based on evidence, and CDC is no longer issuing recommendations that are based on science.
Speaker 4
Well, during the first Trump administration, operation Wharfspeed brought together government research institutions and drug manufacturers to quickly develop, manufacture, and deploy COVID-19 vaccines. It was a huge achievement. And I'm worried that if we tried the same thing today, we would not have willing partners in industry and appropriately resourced research and public health workforce or a public even willing to take whatever treatment or vaccine is developed. So, doctor Habers, if we suddenly found ourselves dealing with a new pandemic threat, man made or from nature, are we better off or worse off than we were before COVID-19 because of the actions of the Trump administration?
Speaker 4
And if there were a lot of hard-earned lessons from COVID-19, I mean, I think that we all saw it. It seems like the Trump administration has hell bent on ignoring the lessons from COVID nineteen and erasing any progress in science and public health. So my last question is, what are the top things that you think the government should be doing to keep Americans healthy and safe that the Trump administration is not currently doing?
Speaker 8
Well, this administration needs to move back to policies that are driven by science and not ideology. It needs to invest in public health infrastructure, strengthen local, state, and local health departments as well as CDC, and stop attacking experts for science for making decisions based on science. I think we are definitely, I mean, they're also, as we're hearing, we need to invest heavily in science, not cut NIH grants that could lead to novel innovations that could protect us in the next pandemic. FDA needs to have be returned to having a standard regulatory process so that industry and other partners will see the United States as an environment where they can develop novel therapies and then have a sort of standard process that if they meet certain benchmarks, they know it can get approved. I think having an ideologically driven HHS leadership means that whole environment has been upended.
I think we're losing scientists to go abroad. I think innovation and other things will, you know, scientific innovation and research is being ground to a hold. And we are lacking our public health infrastructure that will allow us to respond to pandemics has been significantly weakened in this administration.
Speaker 1
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The gentleman yields. The chair now recognizes the vice chairman of the committee, Mr. Balderson, for his five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 11
Thank you, mister chairman, and thank you all for being here today. My first question is for Doctor Diggins. Thank you, sir, for being here. What are AI-enabled biological threats, and how do they differ from traditional biological threats?
Speaker 5
Thank you for the question. So, what we have seen is a rapid rise in the ability to engineer naturally occurring sequences using AI models, so to change the underlying protein sequence that defines the structure and function of a protein. And as these models get more sophisticated, the need to adhere to protein sequences that are found in nature diminishes. And so what that essentially means is that you can start to reproduce functions that might be capable of causing some kind of harm, but not reuse any of the sequences from nature that we rely on to detect threat in our odor stream. And so that really that divergence between things we understand from nature and biological function, those things historically have always been tightly coupled, and AI models are allowing those to begin to drift apart.
Speaker 5
Not to the degree that we cannot detect it still. So right now, can be asked to, for example, change the sequence of a toxin to try and maintain the structure, change the sequence. But they're unable to do so in a way that doesn't reuse some of the sequence from the original protein, and so our system still detected.
Speaker 11
Okay. Thank you very much. My next question is for Mr. McKnight. Mister McKnight, thank you for being here today. How is AI altering the traditional biological threat landscape for both state and non-state actors?
Speaker 7
Thank you for the question. I think there's an interesting way to understand what's happening that we've seen in other domains, and I use the cyber domain. Generally, we don't classify something as a domain of operations. And remember, have a military background until we as humans are able to access it with engineering. So we added space as a domain when we truly became accessible via modern rocketry.
Same thing back in the 1890s with the oceans. Once we had coal-fired shipping, it became accessible. So with biology, I think the way to conceptualize the landscape of your question is it is now a domain in which humans can interact with it with engineering capabilities. And that fundamentally changes how we think about the opportunities as we generate new engineering tools to create anything out of a foundation of nature, but it also changes how we must think about the scale of investment in defense. It's like, when we move cyber from the IT department into cyber command.
It's a fundamental reorientation. And the way to think about that is, I think, really how we need to be scaling the investment that we're making as a country with the new capabilities of compute, AI, plus our knowledge of biology. That creates a surface that we really will continue to be behind until we reframe fundamentally how we are monitoring and responding to those new capabilities.
Speaker 11
Okay. Thank you very much. My next question is for Doctor Panu. Thank you for being here. What specific biological capabilities could AI make more accessible or feasible for actors who previously lacked the expertise to create or modify pathogens?
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question, Vice Chairman. Overall, as you've heard multiple times today, there is incredible promise that comes from some of the AI-enabled biological research that's being done. And with that great promise, there will be new capabilities. In terms of biological AI models, there are models that are used, for example, to predict the properties of pandemic pathogens or to modify those properties. I think it's for those models, that narrow subset, that there are particular concerns that if misused, they could pose suicidal level harms.
Speaker 11
Thank you. And, doctor, digging us back to you, and we have 40 seconds. Could AI meaningfully reduce the knowledge historically required to carry out advanced genetic engineering?
Speaker 5
Thank you for the question. I think on the design side, yes. Not necessarily on the physical construction and testing.
Speaker 11
Okay. If so, what risks and benefits could this have? A lot. Many. Thank you.
Mister chairman, I yield back.
Speaker 1
The gentleman yields. The chair now recognizes representative to get her five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 12
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We can all agree that a strong public health and biodefense system is critical to keep Americans safe. But as doctor Haver so eloquently stated in her opening statement and then in questioning, because of this administration's dangerous denial of science and also their irresponsible budget cuts to the agencies responsible for biodefense, early detection and addressing it is in even worse shape than it was when we had the pandemic in 2020. And let's just go back to this measles outbreak that we have. 168 South Carolinians are in quarantine, and many of them might spend Christmas that way.
Of 135 confirmed cases in the outbreak, 127 of the people are known to be unvaccinated. And one of them, only one, was fully vaccinated against measles. We've had nearly 2000 measles cases nationwide this year, the most since 1992. Meaning, we have erased almost 30 years of progress in just eleven months, and we're likely going to lose our measles elimination status. Let that sink in.
Doctor. Havers, what has led to this?
Speaker 8
A number of things have led to this, but I think the most important one is that decades of anti-vaccine misinformation spread by Secretary Kennedy and others have led to declining measles vaccination rates in the population and a loss of herd immunity, meaning that once measles is introduced into a community, it can spread unchecked. Once it is spreading, it is very hard to contain. It's one of the most infectious pathogens that we have. So I think, but in this setting, in this administration, it has failed to control these outbreaks. Public local public health needed for contact tracing and response are inadequately funded.
Communications coming out of the CDC have been mixed. And, you know, we have a health secretary that is, on one hand, saying yes, why I support vaccination during an outbreak, but then is putting false information linking vaccines and autism on an official CDC website. I am not surprised we have not been in this administration, we have not been able.
Speaker 12
And let's talk about that. Earlier this year, the administration cut $11,400,000,000 for the state and local public health people that you're saying are the ones that have to track this. Is that right?
Speaker 12
And a lot of that was restored to blue states after they sued in court, but others are still out billions of dollars meant for public health. How does that impact our preparedness to take on an emerging biological threat?
Speaker 8
Well, think that weakening state and local public health departments means that we are unable to, we will not have the resources on the ground to respond to a threat. I also think that there's a risk that in this environment where federal funding is cut to weaker state areas that have weaker state and local health departments, we'll see greater disparities and greater harm and greater negative impacts of a potential pandemic in, for example, red states that don't have a strong local health department. Which
Speaker 12
is crazy. That's crazy. Now, mister chairman, as you know, I'm the ranking member of the health subcommittee. And on February 19, March 7, April 1, September 3, 4, 10, 17, 18, and December 12. I requested hearings on behalf of my subcommittee to no avail on this.
The health subcommittee, in the midst of this breakout and crisis, has not met since September. And the health subcommittee has only met nine times this Congress, between hearings and markups. And I think this is because the majority is afraid of bringing our FK Jr. In, as Mr. Pologne moved that we do.
I just want to put in the record a sampling of the devastation of our public health agencies and capabilities that RFK Junior has provided, over in no particular order. Testifying to Congress that he had no awareness of Doge's activities that devastated research, either lying about his involvement or allowing an unauthorized entity to run amok in his own department without his knowledge. Firing the new CDC director, Susan Monarez, within weeks of her confirmation and forcing the resignation of multiple other CDC senior leaders like doctor. Haver sitting right here today, completely destabilizing our nation's public health agency, removing all members of ACIP, and installing compromised, unqualified loyalists, leading to the end of an evidence-based recommendation for universal hepatitis B vaccination, cutting U. S.
Support for mRNA research, which is what helped us get the COVID vaccine. I could go on, but my time is ending. This is why, Mr. Chairman, early in the New Year, January, I demand that we have a hearing in the House subcommittee with RFK junior so he can come and talk to us about how he's going to reverse these dangerous policies that he's instituted. I yield back.
Speaker 1
General lady yields. The chair now recognizes Doctor Harshberger for her five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 13
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today. I'll start with Doctor Panu. Are there early warning indicators, whether they're digital, biological, or supply chain, that could help identify AI-enabled biological misuse? Because you talked about that digital-to-physical barrier.
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. I think that supporting that kind of capability would be very important. I can't say that I'm personally aware of the existence of something that is robust and addresses all the points that you raised, but we should certainly invest in having such capabilities. Okay. Thank you.
Speaker 5
I would echo that answer. I'm not aware of any capability that exists now, but I think it's important that we build it.
Speaker 7
Yes. One of the key capabilities that we work on is when you take a sample with biothreat radar from an airport or from a community or from a threat location. You bring it and you do DNA sequencing with it, and the DNA sequencing data comes off the sequencer. Mhmm. And then we have a set of tools that we're constantly developing with cutting-edge machine learning AI to analyze that DNA and tell you what's in it.
What different types of pathogens are there? Are there new things that you have not seen? And one of the very specific tools that we work on that was developed in conjunction with IRPA, the intelligence community's DARPA, is a tool that actually looks and algorithmically scores to identify if something has been genetically engineered or not. To give you a sense of could this be, could this have been made or designed with different types of tools? And those are the types of things we really need.
When you invest in biothreat radar, you're investing in those types of capabilities as part of a system that will continue to evolve.
Speaker 13
Well, this goes into my next question. Are export controls effective at restricting adversarial access to certain AI models, biological data, software, automated lab equipment? Mister McKnight?
Speaker 7
I think there's two important parts to that question. As it relates to export controls, like we look at every other area of technology, it's certainly not my core area of expertise, but it is something that very much merits continued Mhmm. Review. The other side that I worry more about is because of, what I mentioned in my opening remarks. Right?
Biology is borderless. We know because it is distributed, it can be done. And I think doctor Jagan and I talk a lot about the DNA, even the DNA synthesis screening topic. Well, adversaries aren't going to follow our rules. You can make DNA in a garage or in your own lab.
So there's other ways to get around if you look to do, you look for nefarious purposes. So unless we are aggressively investing in our own innovation.
Speaker 7
Adversaries outside or other places outside of the country will, they don't need our exports. They will build their own capabilities that will outpace what we do.
Speaker 13
Well, that's what doctor Degan said about two reputable companies that make synthetic DNA. That's a little bit frightful. And, mister McKnight, you said that we need a large-scale system to detect biothreats. So which nations are we working with on these bio threats?
Speaker 7
Yeah. Yes. I think this, thank you for that question. I think, when we talk about the concept of biothreat detection or bio radar, as I mentioned, this was a concept started during the pandemic and has continued over multiple different administrations. The president's budget calls for biothreat radar expansion at the CDC and HHS today.
That is absolutely critical. But, also, at the State Department, what is going on is in the process of negotiating a set of new bilateral MOUs with our friends and allies around the world. They are incorporating the concept of biothreat radar in partnership with HHS CDC to deploy that in a similar way in countries that are partners with us. So then you can see how that develops a system where there's a US built and partnered technical system for verification of biothreats, on a bilateral and then multilateral basis with our partners. And that's being worked on by the state department today. Just two weeks ago, they announced the first of those, during the MOU with Rwanda, with the announcement of the DRC-Rwanda peace agreement.
Speaker 13
Good. I've got like 40 seconds left. But I guess doctor Diggins, doctor Panu, is it possible for scientists to put, like, a watermark or a distinctive genetic signature in a modified virus to show where it came from?
Speaker 5
There are mechanisms for doing that. However, there are also mechanisms for removing those watermarks. And so the idea that they're persistent is difficult to ensure.
Speaker 6
Doctor. Fanu? I second that comment exactly. I think the other challenge is once you have a virus that's out in nature, we don't know whether those watermarks persist over time.
Speaker 13
Yeah. So it's not that accurate, is what you're saying. Okay. Thank you to the witnesses, and I'll yield back, sir.
Speaker 1
The general lady yields. The chair now recognizes Mr. Tonko for his five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 14
Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's been very concerning to watch this administration's relentless attacks on science and the abandonment of scientific integrity in our federal health agencies. Decisions about health care must be free of political interference and based on science, not extreme ideology. So, doctor Habers, according to your testimony and other public statements, you resigned from the CDC in large part due to what you perceived as its loss of scientific credibility. In what ways has Secretary Kennedy undermined CDC's scientific credibility, and what are the consequences of that for Americans' health?
Speaker 8
Secretary Kennedy has undermined CDC's scientific credibility, in large part as I've mentioned, by now using CDC as a mouthpiece for the anti-vaccine movement. They're putting false information on the CDC websites. They're curtailing communications coming out of CDC and using vaccine policy meetings that used to have the highest standard of scientific rigor to now promote false information and calling into question the safety and efficacy of well established vaccine recommendations. As I state and local health partners are saying they can no longer trust CDC guidance, I think if we had another pandemic, CDC's ability to lead a coordinated federal response when we've lost the trust of the medical community, we've squashed scientific innovation and taken away tools that would be most useful for us in the next pandemic, including mRNA vaccines. And state and local health partners no longer trust us.
We are not an ability like, the US no longer has an ability to have an effective federal response given what this administration has done.
Speaker 14
Thank you. And Secretary Kennedy is destroying the guardrails once in place to ensure that health policies are justified by scientific evidence. For example, secretary Kennedy announced a change in the COVID-19 vaccine scheduled for children and pregnant people without any input from CDC subject matter experts. And at meetings of the advisory committee on immunization practices, Secretary Kennedy's handpicked members have made vaccine recommendations that would take vaccines away from millions of Americans, even though there is no science to support those given decisions. Secretary was able to get away with these changes by undermining career experts at the CDC and installing ideological allies to rubber stamp his agenda.
So when Secretary Kennedy ignores career scientists and only listens to his own allies, what is the effect on CDC's credibility and scientific integrity?
Speaker 8
I mean, it has been destroyed in a few short months. I loved working at the CDC. The career that I had there was incredible because I was able to do nonpartisan work that was based on science and evidence. The fact that people like me are now saying you can no longer trust recommendations coming out of the CDC is shocking. I never thought I would be in a position to say something like this.
And the amount of damage that this administration has done to federal scientific and public health agencies and their reputation and their credibility across the country, in multiple communities, including the medical community and the scientific community and around the globe, is really heartbreaking, honestly.
Speaker 14
Well, we've not only seen Secretary Kennedy ignore experts, but we've also seen him retaliate against civil servants who challenge his anti-vaccine agenda. For example, he pushed President Trump to fire CDC director Susan Menaris after she refused to sign off on ACIP's vaccine recommendations without first reviewing the evidence. And Jenna Norton, a program official at NIH, has been put on indefinite leave for speaking out against the administration's harm. So doctor Hammers, what effect does secretary Kennedy's retaliatory campaign against scientists have on the integrity of their work?
Speaker 8
Well, I think the administration has driven out, very like, many high level experts from this administration. People are resigning because I resigned because I did not wanna be lending my scientific reputation to an agency that I no longer feel is using evidence and science to make policy. And I think that the loss of expertise at CDC, NIH, FDA, and the undercutting of science-based policy across the administration, I think, is having untold effects. We do not have the expertise at these agencies to lead us through another pandemic, for example.
Speaker 14
Let me ask our other witnesses. Do you agree that it is dangerous when administration officials retaliate against scientists who disagree with harmful policies? Start with Doctor Panten. Just a simple yes or no.
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. I think that retaliation is challenging to be the recipient of.
Speaker 5
I think in this domain, having science lead on the policy front is important.
Speaker 7
I think these are incredibly multi, complex, and multifaceted topics that have a lot of dynamics in them.
Speaker 1
The gentleman yields. The chair now recognizes mister Palmer for his five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 15
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this important hearing. Multiple experts, Dr Panama, have argued that the real challenge is not gene editing itself, but how we manage its dual use per potential in a targeted, risk proportionate way. In your view, what specific features should a modern risk-tiered oversight system include, especially for AI-enabled gene editing? We close the gaps around defined high-risk work while avoiding unnecessary burdens on routine, low-risk research in universities and startups.
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. I agree with the sentiments you express in terms of needing targeted oversight that's tiered, where there's a focus on the highest consequence risks for oversight, and that enables lower-risk research to proceed unencumbered. I think the best way to do that is to provide clear definitions and scoping for what constitutes the highest risk research, so that researchers have that clarity and that they're able to proceed with doing other types of research easily.
Speaker 15
This question is both for doctor Panel and doctor Diggins. Could you explain the difference between the varying types of AI models such as general purpose large language models or LLMs that power generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and biodesign tools such as AlphaFold or EVO one and EVO two.
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. Overall, I think many of us here are familiar with using LLMs and the knowledge that they can provide when queried. Next, further advancements are reasoning models, which can do multiple steps of reasoning and address complex problems. AI agents can allow users to conduct tasks, and all of these models can also assist users in writing code. On the biological AI model side, those can allow us to understand biology, whether it's proteins or genetic sequences.
And overall, what the research community is hoping to move towards is the integration of AI agents, LLMs, with biological AI models to enable fully autonomous science.
Speaker 5
Maybe I'll add to what my colleague, who has said that the way we think about guardrails for these two classes of models is very different. So on the LLM side, you're looking for what kinds of knowledge you want to prevent the transfer. On the biodesign models, we don't have a good sense of what kinds of individual functions or questions people are asking these models that we want to control. And so I think that speaks broadly to a set of knowledge that we need to work on developing at the individual biological component level of what kinds of risk do we want to identify and control.
Speaker 15
This is for Doctor Deggins and Mister McKnight. How accessible are AI tools that could meaningfully lower barriers to engineering pathogens or designing harmful biological constructs?
Speaker 5
Quite accessible in terms of their public availability. Many of them can be technically complex to use, and so the skill set required to use them may be fairly sophisticated. However, there's a lot of effort underway to rightly bring that down, to broaden the audience for these tools among the scientific community.
Speaker 7
Yes. Maybe I'll combine the answer to that with a build on the previous one. I think if we as a country, the thing that we should be setting as almost the spec that we expect to be able to deliver and measuring is how fast can we go from detecting a biological threat, natural or human caused, somewhere on the planet to a countermeasure. And that takes a set of steps where we are monitoring globally, persistently, pervasively using these AI tools that we're talking about to interpret that data in real time and rapidly, to enable design of countermeasure or intervention, whether that be policy or otherwise. Our real-time test was about nine months during COVID.
There's the hundred day mission, but I think our North Star with these modern tools should be something closer to maybe it takes 20 years, but we should be thinking about doing that in minutes and hours. Mhmm. Like we do with cybersecurity, not days, months, or years.
Speaker 15
Well, it's been said that we weren't, you know, we wouldn't, we were, we're not prepared for another COVID event. We were not prepared for the first COVID event. What can this do to help us prepare for the second COVID-19 event?
Speaker 7
Yeah. I think that that's a fair thing that we all lived through. There was, we dropped the ball. We couldn't develop a diagnostic test at the beginning of the pandemic, and it took us a long time to respond. If you do prepare via both our public health and national security institutions, detection capabilities that can rapidly inform what types of tests to make, what types of interventions to create, that infrastructure can collapse the amount of time.
And that's something that doesn't exist today. No matter what, we need to invest to create that. It didn't exist at the beginning either.
Speaker 1
The gentleman yields. The chair now recognizes Miss Treyhan for her five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 16
Thank you, mister chairman, and thank you to all the witnesses here today. Doctor Habers, you testified that we will almost certainly face future pandemics, and that despite the lessons of COVID-19, The United States is now less prepared to respond than we were in 2020. Since January, more than 1,450 research grants have been terminated, cutting over $750,000,000 in funding in the name of government efficiency. Researchers say that this has wasted years of taxpayer-funded work and forced critical studies to just shut down. Some of those terminated grants include projects to improve recruitment for Alzheimer's clinical trials, increased vaccine uptake, study in utero exposure to contaminants and drinking water, prevent sexually transmitted infections with common antibiotics.
Test flu and COVID vaccine reminder tests. Prevent HIV transmission and train HIV researchers and public health professionals. Support early career scientists, and train the next generation of pediatric researchers. I mean, these cuts are creating a lost generation of scientists, shrinking graduate and postdoctoral training programs, blocking young researchers from securing funding to start labs or launch studies, and pushing some to just leave the country altogether. You've testified that changes to the CDC have made us less safe.
Do cuts to critical research and the disruption of our health care and public health workforce pipelines make us any safer?
Speaker 8
No. They do not. And I think that we've heard from the other witnesses that we need to have all the tools we possibly have to combat pandemic threats, including those generated or coming from AI. And all of these cuts that you listed, and the fact that we are hamstringing ourselves in terms of scientific innovation in this country under this administration, means that we will not have those tools available to us in the next pandemic.
Speaker 16
Thanks. I mean, this isn't a temporary disruption. It is a long term brain drain that weakens our public health preparedness, our research capacity, and just the stability of our national scientific enterprise. On that note, I do wanna turn to the reauthorization of the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act, or PAPA. In the years since COVID-19, Congress has failed to reauthorize PAPA in a meaningful way, leaving core preparedness programs in limbo.
Programs like the hospital preparedness program, public health emergency preparedness grants, and the strategic national stockpile currently lack clear reauthorization despite being foundational to our national response capacity. Doctor. Havers, as Congress considers reauthorizing PAPA, what specific priorities should guide that effort to ensure that we strengthen our preparedness, especially in light of emerging technologies like AI, rather than repeat the vulnerabilities that we saw in 2020. As
Speaker 8
Has been mentioned, we were not as well prepared for the 2020 pandemic, for the COVID pandemic in 2020, as we could have been. And I think that there were gaps that were identified, including in sort of data modernization, in laboratory testing capabilities, in rapid deployment of medical countermeasures, adequacy of PPE, and other protections for frontline health care workers. And we were successful in rapidly deploying a vaccine, but it still took a year. And I think that investing in basic public health infrastructure, strengthening surveillance systems, improving data modernization, are all things that are gonna be critical going forward. And what a lot of the funding cuts that have happened have decreased is basic sort of on the ground surveillance systems.
We, I mean, I ran COVID NET at CDC. And the last four years, we've put a lot of time and money and energy into speeding up data collection and transfer to continue to be able to produce high quality data. That was a system that was set up very quickly. We started collecting data in March 2020, but that was on the back of FluServNet, which was an emerging infections program, a very strong surveillance system. So if you have strong existing infrastructure and a strong public health workforce and an appropriate investment in public health and in science, we will be much better prepared to rapidly respond and fill in those gaps.
And I think, so I would encourage, you know, strong funding of state and local public health, strong funding of CDC, restoring grants to NIH, and not having ideologically driven decisions being made about grants. For example, the mRNA vaccine funding that has been pulled. That has vastly weakened our pandemic preparedness for the next pathogen. Those mRNA vaccines are one of the most promising technologies for us to be able to rapidly deploy a vaccine if another novel pathogen came along. Yet Secretary Kennedy has an unscientific antipathy towards mRNA vaccines and yanked $500,000,000 of funding.
That has left us worst prepared.
Speaker 16
Thank you so much. I'll submit my last question in writing, but I appreciate your thoroughness. I yield back.
Speaker 1
General lady yields. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Idaho, Mister Fulcher, for his five minutes of questions.
Speaker 17
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mister McKnight, question regarding a security concern, and I you've touched on this, but I'd like to try to go just a little bit deeper. We're seeing reports about autonomous agents, not just chatbots, but systems that can act on their own, hacking databases or stealing data, maybe even running a lab. Theory is that with that kind of a tool, terrorists really, all they really need is AI that can generate a weaponized sequence and ship it to a terrorist accomplice. Are we at that point where an AI agent can bridge that gap and help a bad actor develop a bioweapon?
Speaker 7
Thank you for your question. I think we've pieces of this have been covered.
Speaker 7
We can go once every, but I think the idea that human language models, LLMs, have real risk of uplift of somebody who doesn't have the same scientific capacity maybe as a, you know, scientist from a leading institution and biodesign tools. I think we all are worried about what will become of those capabilities, and are watching them carefully. But part of the frontier of this technology is accelerating so exponentially fast that we have to recognize that things that are being developed outside of our control create risks that we are less aware of, or may not be aware of unless we increase our collection and monitoring of those efforts. I think very specifically the important point here, and this goes to the focus on monitoring like we do in other domains like cyber or nuclear, is that there's still a barrier to the wet lab, like doctor Panu mentioned. There that is, you have to go from digital bits and bytes to DNA to make something.
And so monitoring not just the highest risk labs, but where this work is done in irresponsible ways, perhaps around the world, is a very important piece. I will say one last component of this that is critical to the core of the question. You know, what we experienced with the SARS CoV two pandemic, you know, essentially, the lesson that I'm very worried about our adversaries have learned is how vulnerable we are and how our inability to do truly until five years later perhaps and get consensus around attribution of where it came from, whether it was natural or not. That, forget the controversy around it. It's an intelligence failure.
It's a failure of our ability to do attribution on the scale of any large intelligence failure in the past. And what that means is the threats of the future, even if they came from an actor, nation state or a terrorist, they don't have to be AI generated and manufactured. It can be something natural found, layered with misinformation, disinformation that fundamentally tears it our political, economic, and social fabric. So we have to figure out what system allows us to detect, respond rapidly because, actually, some of those, like, less, like, headline or sci fi nefarious threats may be the more likely application from somebody that seeks to do ill.
Speaker 17
You're confirming some of our concerns. I wanna shift to Doctor Panu. And, you know, we've touched on this as well, so forgive the repetitiveness, but I want to take maybe a different angle here. In an attempt to close the door on this, president Trump had the executive order back in May. And looking at the gene synthesis, if you've done this in the section of the president and CEO, the gene synthesis section, can you say what specific parts of that order are actually going to stop these threats or have the best chance of stopping these threats?
Can they stop that threat if implemented? And just as a follow-up, what else should we be in congress be doing about this?
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. Overall, I'm glad that you mentioned the executive order from May. I think that's an important initiative. There are a couple of things that I would want to highlight. The gene synthesis provisions do call on Congress to proceed with a legislative effort to make gene synthesis screening mandatory across the US.
That's something that Congress could advance. The other provisions on clearly defining what is dangerous gain of function research. Those policies have yet to be released from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, so Congress could ask for an update as to those, and where they currently stand.
Speaker 17
Thank you for that. Mister Diggins, I have actually three questions for you, and, obviously, I don't have time to do them. So I'm gonna submit those in writing, and just thank you all for participating today. Mister chairman, I yield back.
Speaker 1
The gentleman yields. The chair now recognizes Miss Fletcher for her five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 18
Thank you, mister chairman, and thank you to ranking member Clark for holding this hearing today. Thank you to our witnesses for your testimony, for being here. As several of my colleagues have mentioned already, many of us are fearful because the actions that we've seen from President Trump and this administration make us less prepared in the event of a pandemic and that public health crisis as we've discussed today. This year, Secretary Kennedy, as everyone here knows, has fired thousands of scientists and civil servants who work to keep us safe from disease, who protect us from harmful products, and who carry out critical research to advance new cures. He has sown distrust in dedicated scientists and public servants and replaced them with quacks who deny the efficacy of modern medicine and vaccines.
And he has systematically destroyed the pipeline for biomedical research, including emergency response measures to protect us from the next pandemic. Since January, the Trump administration has terminated at least 1,229 NIH research grants totaling nearly 500,000,000. A few examples of those terminated projects include a project that would enhance vaccine delivery in hospitalized children, a project studying proteins that could promote resilience to Alzheimer's, projects bringing us closer to vaccines for diseases without cures like HIV. And in my home, in Houston, where we have the largest medical complex in the world, and where researchers are conducting this cutting-edge medical research. They are saving lives.
Research done in Houston saved lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research being done right now in Houston will save lives during the next pandemic. And the Trump administration's policies and actions are putting that work at risk. So, doctor Havers, I wanna ask you, how has Secretary Kennedy's reckless termination of NIH grants affected our preparedness posture?
Speaker 8
Well, I think what we've seen from this administration is, as has been mentioned, massive funding cuts, pulling back from grants, but also an introduction of ideology into who is getting grants. As I mentioned, the mRNA vaccine research that was being, that was not based on science. I do think that it has a chilling effect on science, the scientific community in the United States overall. I think that the pipeline of new research is being cut off, including, you know, young researchers entering their careers. We are not gonna get talent from abroad coming to the United States to improve scientific innovation.
And I think that industry is gonna flee the United States because it is no longer a stable place where innovative scientific research is supported. So I think that this is gonna have long lasting cuts, and as I'm and we will end up with fewer tools to combat emerging threats going forward.
Speaker 18
Thank you, Doctor Habers. In March 2020, doctor Peter Hotez, who is one of my constituents, and is the codirector of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, told the house committee on science, space, and technology that I served on at the time that we will be fighting the COVID-19 pandemic with one hand tied behind our backs at that time because we failed to invest time and resources into vaccine research. And at great cost, we pulled through the pandemic, as we've talked about earlier today. But we are once again tying our hands behind our backs as the Trump administration makes devastating cuts to NIH research grant funding that will jeopardize so much of this work that we've been doing. And, doctor Diggins, your company sounded the alarm on federal research disruption in a filing with the SEC on 11/17/25.
The company stated, and I'm quoting, that the administration's halt on certain federal research grants may negatively impact our industry, and, end quote, and that the, quote, prolonged reductions in such funding could slow innovation. Doctor Diggids, could you expand on this and explain how disruptions to federal research funding could slow innovation?
Speaker 5
So as a member of the biotech supply chain, you know, we are proud to support the research that's going on supported by many of these brands. And so, the reduction in that overall spending certainly impacts the biotech supply chain in ways that can hold back technology development or productization.
Speaker 18
Thank you, Doctor Jenkins. I think that, for all of us, the pauses in funding for grants and at institutions that do critical medical research is really undoing decades of work. And this country has invested in that research and invested in this system to lead the world. And so we really need to reassert our jurisdiction here. I do believe we need to bring Secretary Kennedy in before the committee, and we need to make sure that we're protecting our medical research and our scientific research more broadly.
So thank you all for your testimony and for sharing your observations and your perspectives with us. And, mister chairman, I will yield back.
Speaker 1
General lady yields. The chair now recognizes a gentleman from Alabama, Mr. Palmer, for his five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 9
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Doctor Pan, in your written testimony, you pointed out that there are a lot of areas in regard to biosecurity and biodefense. But you said they're under-incentivized by the private markets. What incentives are needed for biosecurity and biodefense?
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. I think, generally, pandemic preparedness has been underincentivized by the private market because pandemics are difficult to predict, and they don't represent a reliable customer segment essentially for the private market. And so that's where government needs to step in and provide appropriate incentives for that, and that would include supporting the development of some of the approaches we've heard today, including methods for detection, methods for response, platform technologies to enable our countermeasures development. All of those would be needed.
Speaker 9
Shouldn't you also be anticipating that, the weaponization of biologics?
Speaker 6
I thank you for the question. I personally hope that I never need to anticipate that, but I think anticipating risks is an important part of what we do to protect the American people. And so thinking about ways we can prevent those risks from occurring is an important component of, shouldn't we?
Speaker 9
No one wants to anticipate. Yes. No one wants to conceive that any nation would be so heinous toward another nation that they would unleash a biological weapon. But shouldn't we be investing in that type of defense?
Speaker 6
Yes. I believe it's a bipartisan issue to improve our biosecurity preparedness, and that is prevention of accidental, deliberate, and natural threats.
Speaker 9
You said something, you had something else in your written testimony that raised some concerns for me. You said Frontier AI companies can voluntarily report their safety evaluations to US Center for AI standards and innovation. I mean, it's illegal to conduct, biological, operate a biological lab. It's, it surprised me to think that there's no law, no mandate to require people to report their safety evaluations.
Speaker 6
That's correct. A legislative proposal would be needed in order to ensure that. Currently, it is voluntary to the US Casey, and they set standards, but no requirements.
Speaker 9
But this should not just be a US issue. Shouldn't be an international issue.
Speaker 9
Do you know of any cases where something bad happened, or there was a safety evaluation that determined a bad outcome that was not reported?
Speaker 6
I think what I am more concerned about are models in companies that do not conduct any evaluations, where we really lack clarity as to the capabilities of those models. So I'd like to see more investment internationally in government capabilities for evaluations.
Speaker 9
Safety testing. Doctor. Diggins, you made a statement about a researcher that somehow wound up carrying a smallpox sample to his home. And, mister McKnight, you made a comment about biological lady agents could be produced in your garage, both of which is illegal. Is that something that we need to address?
I mean, you can't operate a lab outside a secure location, and that is an international law. So do you know of instances where people are using artificial intelligence to produce proteins that could be a problem? Or any protein for that matter. Either one of you, both of you, can respond.
Speaker 5
Thank you for the question. The smallpox issue occurred in 2006, before the industry had really thought through a lot of these security-related concerns. That wouldn't happen today. Okay. There you're correct that there are very few regulations that control the physical possession of individual sequences, proteins, not whole genomes, not whole organisms, but individual sequences.
Speaker 9
Quickly, because I have one last thing I'm gonna ask Doctor Panet. Go ahead.
Speaker 7
I just address the larger question of bioweapons. The reality is every time we have taken a base science and turned it into an engineerable discipline, chemistry, physics, computing, those have been used in human conflict. It would be the anomaly in human history at the frontier of engineered biology that over fifty years, some actor, nation state, or individual or group doesn't try.
Speaker 9
to do it. Well, I'll just say this for all three of you. Was gonna address it, Doctor Panna, because she mentioned it in her written testimony. We need recommendations for what this subcommittee, what this committee needs to do to bring before Congress. With that, Mister Chairman, I yield back.
Speaker 1
The gentleman yields. The chair now recognizes Mr. Mullen for his five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 19
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you all for being here today to discuss this critically important topic. I am proud that companies in my California district are demonstrating leadership in this space, including Twist Bioscience, represented here today by Dr. Diggins. Doctor Diggins, thank you for being here. So AI is already beginning to change how biotechnology research is done. Capabilities that once required large labs and highly controlled environments are increasingly accessible through shared models, platforms, and cloud-based tools.
Two of the most innovative sectors in the US today are AI and biotech. They can anticipate, lead, and respond to changes across the market in ways that the government cannot. However, there certainly may be a role for Congress to play in setting better national biosecurity standards so that companies are working on an equal playing field, and we are prioritizing the health and safety of Americans from future threats. So doctor Diggins, in your testimony, I was watching from my office. You discussed some of the steps that your company, Twist Bioscience, and other responsible DNA synthesis companies take to manage risk and prevent malicious actors from acquiring potentially harmful sequences.
Twist screening practices are in part tied to the federal select agent list. Is that correct? What I'm concerned about is what happens when being on the list doesn't tell us much. If harmful biological functions can eventually be designed without resembling known pathogens, how should policymakers think about screening standards in a world where function matters more than the sequence itself?
Speaker 5
Thank you, Congressman, for the question. I think this is really a key sort of paradigm shift that, I would hope that congress will think through, is the move from enumerating lists of well known, well characterized wild, you know, viruses and bacterial pathogens that occur in nature to generalized concepts of if I have a biological system that I want to defend, what kinds of harm am I trying to defend against? And then once you've enumerated those, then you can start, you know, enumerating defenses against and capabilities for detecting that harm.
Speaker 19
So if you could just amplify what are some of the steps you think Congress could take to ensure responsible companies in this space are not at a disadvantage to those that don't conduct rigorous screening of clients and requested sequences? The industry has worked quite hard over the past.
Speaker 5
Ten years to make screening systems more, lower costs, and widely available. So we think that it's reasonable now to mandate screening within The United States and also to restrict federal funds spent on synthetic DNA even with international providers only to companies that have these processes in place as verified by third parties, which is not currently something that's widely available.
Speaker 19
Thank you for that. As these tools become more capable and more widely available, we need to ensure that they're being used for beneficial research to find new cures to diseases and to save lives, and not to make it easier for bad actors to reengineer viruses or build bioweapons. So, doctor, Panu, this committee has spent a lot of time discussing guardrails for AI models. Could you describe the current ecosystem for AI models used in biotechnology? Specifically, who is building these models, and who has access to them?
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. Largely for models that are used for life sciences research, those are being developed by US academics and other leading academics globally, as well as nonprofit and industry research organizations. In terms of guardrails, the guardrail ecosystem for large language models and agents is more mature. It's a couple of years ahead of biological AI models. The safeguards for the biology models are more nascent, and investment is needed there to develop safeguards.
Speaker 19
Great. Thank you for that. And can you just briefly speak to the role that Casey and NIST can play in establishing safeguards for biological AI models? Do they currently have the authorities, tools they need to effectively serve that role, or are there gaps that we should all be aware of?
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. I think that Casey is doing incredibly important work in terms of working with Frontier AI companies, having those voluntary agreements where they can guide companies with regard to safeguards development. The Casey needs to be enabled to be able to do that on the biology model side. They need to be empowered by congress to do so in terms of being given the authority, for example, to define the set of biological AI models that do pose harms, and that clarity would also help industry in terms of knowing where they can focus their efforts, where they need to attend to safeguards.
Speaker 19
Excellent. Thank you for that. Thank you all for being here. With that, I yield back my time.
Speaker 20
Thank you. I think a lot of the good questions have been asked, so this might feel repetitive. Doctor. Diggins, when a lab rejects a dangerous order, is that information shared with anyone? Any federal requirements that would compel you to share that with anyone at all, or is it just voluntary?
Speaker 5
Thank you for the question. Right now, that information, there are two possible routes for sharing. One is through the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, which is an industry consortium of synthesis companies. And the second would be direct to law enforcement. There is no requirement for when that information is shared if an order is denied, and so it's up to company discretion.
Speaker 5
There are certainly two or four available to share that information. Yes.
Speaker 20
FBI. Okay. So FBI is a composite. So you it they've it's tracking, but there's no would you think it's useful for us to consider legislation that would compel sharing of that?
Speaker 5
I think it's useful if we were able to set standards around when that threshold would be reached. The problem is that a lot of this information is highly specific from order to order, and can differ in the kinds of threat assessments you might think would lie behind the order.
Speaker 20
Is there, I mean, does that association you mentioned earlier, is it established? Again, they're the experts on what might seem, you know, threatening or suspicious. You know, is there something that you can give us that would help us understand how to take a scalpel to that problem correctly?
Speaker 5
We, I think your question is a really important one, and we've been working with NIST to try and develop standards around customer screening. Yep. That would try and call out exactly as you would suggest, you know, what would red flags be that should trigger these kinds of reporting.
Speaker 20
Right. Because, I mean, you already your company's at a disadvantage if, you know, you're doing it voluntarily while others just sell to whoever. Right? The it does require that an extra administrative burden on the good actors.
Speaker 5
That's right. Yeah. Right now, there's a pretty strong economic incentive not to screen, because it's just a cost. And so, right. Federal mandates for those practices would be important to making them uniformly adopted.
Speaker 20
Okay. For mister McKnight, we've talked a lot about AI is can be used for all sorts of scary things. What about assist? What about?
Speaker 20
What about assisting industry leaders and researchers in identifying biosecurity risks? In other words, you know, how can we use AI for good?
Speaker 7
Thank you for the question. This builds on the conversation we were having about select agent lists and then the new incredible diversity of threats. The same way the biodesign tools that we're talking about can create new proteins and give kind of lessons on how to create new medicines. Those same tools can be turned around, and is why we need to be on the cutting edge of those tools, and take a DNA sequence, which is why biothreat radar really needs to be built on sequencing, because you get the whole amount of data that you need to look at. It's not just one thing you're testing for.
They can be turned around to automate the process of interpreting a sample that you're looking at. And then the development roadmap that is funded through these programs is to use AI to go from sequence detection to what the function is, like doctor Diggins is talking about. And some of the best cutting edge work on the AI for good is why we have to stay at the cutting edge of these biodesign tools, is because when you flip them around and use them for detection and characterization of threats, you can get ahead of this, like, kind of ever perpetual build something new. Can you figure out what it is? Build something new.
Can you figure out what it is?
Speaker 20
So that and going back to mister Dickens, digging in a little bit more on the screening process. You receive orders domestically and internationally. Is there a difference in how you screen those?
Speaker 5
No. They all go through the same screening process. There's a difference in how we interpret the outcome. So some orders might be subject to US export controls.
Speaker 20
Okay. Okay. So there are some, if it's an international order, there are some of, like you said, US export controls, there are at least some restrictions in place.
Speaker 20
Under federal law. I wanna follow up. And for doctor Panu, in my last thirty seconds, I'm trying to play clean up on all the questions that haven't been asked. Are clinical researchers trained in responsible lab conduct related to AI biorisks? Do we have, like, a curriculum for that?
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. There isn't currently a curriculum for that, but I do believe there's interest, so that would be important to advance.
Speaker 1
The gentleman yields. The chair now recognizes the general lady from New York, Miss Ocasio-Cortez, for her five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 21
Thank you, Mister Chair and Ranking Member Clark, and I want to thank our witnesses for offering all of their expertise today. Now this is the seventh hearing we've had this year on the threats of AI. Yet our congress has passed zero pieces of legislation to address the many legitimate concerns that have been raised regarding this issue. And, in fact, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress this year are actually pushing the opposite. Instead of legislation regarding artificial intelligence, they have been trying multiple times to pass legislation that would actually end any regulation or rulemaking, particularly on the state level, to limit any oversight of AI at all. And because Republicans couldn't pass their ten year ban on state AI regulations, Trump then went around, and skirted congress with his own executive order trying to ban states from imposing any AI regulations at all, not just on biological activity, but, you know, through children's safety, through all sorts of different measures.
And, in fact, this is happening as AI chatbots are causing children to take their own lives, as AI data centers are skyrocketing electricity costs and polluting local communities, and as an overwhelming majority of Americans now worry that AI will take their jobs and leave them permanently unemployed. Doctor Havers, as a public health expert, is it safe to say that there are public health consequences of failing to regulate AI?
Speaker 8
Absolutely. I mean, we've heard from these three witnesses of the threat that failing to regulate AI has for generating novel emerging pathogenic threats that could cause the next pandemic. I mean, I think in addition, there are a lot of concerns in the public health community about patient data privacy. Mhmm. Also think that AI can be used to spread misinformation about, you know, treatments and vaccines, for example.
And I think failing to regulate AI if it's not done at the federal level, I think states probably do need to be empowered to protect their own patients, like, their, you know, people living in their jurisdiction's privacy and help prevent them from, yeah. You know? The death from.
Speaker 21
And so we have, as an expert witness testified today, you have stating and are stating on as well as several others, that there are real public health consequences for the continued failure of regulating or there being congressional action in the AI space. And so it begs the question, why is the federal government trying to prevent any state regulation of AI and protect the American people? And I think it's pretty plain to say that it's because this is a story of corruption. AI giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft have poured millions of dollars into Donald Trump's privately funded White House ballroom. Tech CEOs have been on Capitol Hill in recent weeks to talk with Speaker Johnson, who is conveniently getting a nearly $30,000,000,000 data center built in his state.
And lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have disclosed stock purchases of top AI companies. In fact, four US senators have purchased stocks while they were negotiating a massive deregulation of the industry. And on top of that, AI industry executives and investors are working to raise 100,000,000 to influence the upcoming midterm elections. And the reason that these AI tech giants are lobbying for a state level ban, for a ban on state level regulations, is because they know that they don't want to fight these regulations in all 50 states. It's far more expensive to lobby 50 states' statehouses than it is to try to centralize your operations and lobby in Congress and the president of the United States and the White House.
So that's what's going on here. And it is very important that the American people understand that President Trump's executive order to try to prevent any of this action to protect people is endangering their lives. It is endangering public health, and it is endangering the integrity of our public institutions. And with that, I yield back.
Speaker 1
The general lady yields. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Florida, Doctor Dunn, for his five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 22
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I actually have some firsthand knowledge of defensive biological warfare. When I was in the army, I was stationed at Fort Detrick, home to the headquarters for USAMRID. I worked on infectious diseases, sepsis, and developing defenses against pathogens. As soon as I was appointed to the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, I began working on the Biosecure Act.
The Biosecure Act aims to restrict US federal agencies from working with biotechnology firms deemed to be a risk to national security, primarily those linked to the Chinese Communist Party, and protecting the US from inadvertently crippling our own biotech industry. As you know, the Chinese Communist Party is already advancing biotechnology in ways previously known only from fiction and movies. But for everyone who's joining us today, let me be clear. This threat is very real. It's made up of our worst nightmares.
No longer is a genetically modified army or bioweapon capable of targeting specific populations, some sort of far-off imaginary threat. It's here today. It's being developed at an alarmingly fast rate by our most advanced adversary. I have no problem stating that the Chinese Communist Party is morally depraved and actively committing abject crimes against humanity. Case in point, in June, the FBI arrested two nationals from China for conspiracy to smuggle an agro-terrorism weapon into the United States.
And events like this raise concerning questions about how vulnerable the United States is to a biological attack. If we lose our edge in this critical sector, the framework and guardrails will be written by someone else, not us. Mister McKnight, let me start by saying I look forward to working with this group of experts outside this hearing as well as inside this hearing, because we do need to advance not only Biosecure but Papa. But mister Ignite, can you tell us what new capabilities AI will give China in advancing its own biomedical research? And how grim does the world look in the event China beats us in the biosecurity and AI sectors?
Speaker 7
Well, thank you for your question, and I look forward to working with the outside of this hearing as well. I share the significant concerns that you raise over adversary nations, in particular, the Chinese Communist Party. I think just at a start point, we should really truly remember biology is power, but really, biology, like other technical domains before it, is geopolitical power, and nation states realize that. And we would be remiss to forget that’s the context here. Our adversaries certainly do not.
China has made it very clear in their own public documentation that they see the biological domain as the strategic commanding heights of power. That's direct from their literature. The select committee identified that, and I think it's very important we recognize the stakes of the game, that they are playing. As it relates to the specific capabilities, I think this is why we need to recognize that we cannot only regulate and focus on our own industry because there are things we do not control. And the bigger picture is how do we build a holistic defense strategy and a biosecurity strategy on a global scale for what we can predict will come in the next 1, 5, 10, and 50 years over the course of this biological engineering revolution.
Speaker 22
There's a lot of threats out there. Doctor Panu, smallpox was declared eradicated decades ago, but advances in technology and biology are elevating the risk of bioterror threat again. Tools that accelerate gene design, modeling, and synthesis are widely available, and national security experts have warned us that they may recreate these bioweapons from yesterday. I'm concerned that smallpox could easily be recreated by our enemies. From your perspective, how credible is the threat?
And is the federal government prepared to address that threat?
Speaker 6
Thank you for the question. I think the reemergence of smallpox would be a catastrophe, and it should be something that we work to prevent. I think threats like that are a national security issue, and there is a congressionally mandated office called the office of pandemic preparedness and response that congress could consider further resourcing and making sure that office has a seat on the National Security Council, given the severity of the threats that you described.
Speaker 22
Thanks very much. You know, my time's about expiring. But I wanna say I can use your help with the FileSecure Act and with the pop up pandemic. It all has its preparedness, which has to be renewed. And, so, I thank you for your help in advance.
And, mister chairman, I yield back.
Speaker 1
The gentleman yields. The chair now recognizes Miss Baragon for her five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 23
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I hear my Republican colleague expressed concern if China beats us in biosecurity. Doctor Havers, is health care a biosecurity issue?
Speaker 8
Absolutely. I mean, when peep if there was another pandemic as we saw in when the COVID nineteen pandemic started in 2020, hospitals were rapidly overwhelmed. We were setting up field hospitals in Central Park. There was I personally experienced in the Atlanta VA overwhelmed ICUs, lack of PPE. Our health care system is strained to the breaking point.
We have health care worker shortages across the country. I think hospitals are closing. Every year during respiratory virus season, when we see spikes in hospitalizations of influenza, COVID, and RSV, hospitals get full. You add another pathogen on top of that, and we will not be able to handle it. And I think that, also people not being able to access health care on a regular basis because we lack universal health care, I think, also puts us at greater risk for, like, more mortality, more deaths than are necessary if a novel pathogen were to emerge and cause another pandemic.
Speaker 23
Well, thank you, doctor. And that's what's so befuddling about the hearing today. It's that I serve on the health care subcommittee. I waved on to this hearing because we haven't had a hearing since September. And the concern of China beating us on biosecurity is a real one, but that includes making sure Americans have access to health care.
It's making sure that the congress, including Republicans who are so deathly afraid of this president, stand up and speak out on the dismantling of the infrastructure of our health-care system. Just today, Republicans are pushing a health care plan on the floor that lets the Affordable Care Act tax credits expire, which means millions of Americans will not have access to health insurance. I think this directly weakens our ability to stop the spread of disease. Now we had four courageous Republicans join Democrats in saying Americans should have insurance, and we should extend these tax credits. And so I wanna continue to call on the speaker to bring this bill up immediately for a vote.
Doctor Havers, I want to talk a little bit more about health coverage. When people can afford health insurance, they're more likely to seek preventive care. They're more likely to get vaccinated and see the doctor when they feel sick. If Republicans fail to extend the Affordable Care Act tax premium credits, 20,000,000 Americans will see their premiums double, and over 4,000,000 will lose coverage entirely because the costs are too high. If people cannot afford care and they delay treatment, how does that affect the spread of a virus?
Speaker 8
What we will see is we'll see people presenting much sicker than they would have otherwise been. I think if people delay care, don't have access to preventive care, access to lifesaving vaccines like the influenza and the COVID-19 vaccines, people will be less vaccinated. So we will see thousands more people potentially ending up in the hospital when they could have had a mild illness and stayed at home. I think that's just sort of dealing with the current viruses. But I think, in general, if people don't have access to preventive care, when they are infected with a novel pathogen, for example, they are far more likely to have bad outcomes.
The people that are continuing to die of COVID-19 now are people with underlying medical conditions, generally, and it has the greatest impact on older adults, very young children, and those with underlying medical conditions. The sicker you are, if you aren't able to access regular health care, the more vulnerable you are to a pandemic threat. This pandemic was far worse than the 2009 pandemic that we had with H1N1 because there was no population level immunity among older adults. We're the ones that are most vulnerable to severe outcomes. And this is why we saw more than a million Americans die from COVID-19.
I think having a robust health care system where all people have access to treating underlying medical conditions that will, you know, mitigate or make them less likely to have severe outcomes if there was a novel pathogen, is, I think, very important. But just even deploying vaccines if they become available is really challenging to do if you have no primary health care provider, if you have a weakened health care infrastructure, and if people aren't able to get treatment in the setting of a pandemic because hospitals are overwhelmed and we don't have enough nurses, doctors, and other hospital staff to provide care.
Speaker 23
And then quickly, are you concerned at all about the current assault on vaccines making them less affordable?
Speaker 8
Absolutely. I mean, I think that there's a lot of ways that could play out. I do think that one of the things that this committee, the ACIP committee, if they do not recommend a vaccine, and they change it and they don't say it's shared clinical decision making, then it doesn't necessarily have to be covered.
Speaker 1
The chair now recognizes a general lady from Washington, Doctor Schreyer, for her five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 24
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to our witnesses. We're here to discuss the biosecurity risks of the intersection of AI and biology. And while the potential for a bad actor to use AI to design a virus that is as miserable as Ebola and as contagious as measles is terrifying. The most serious biosecurity threats facing the US right now are not theoretical.
Measles is already here. It is already killing children, and it does not require AI to spread quickly. All it requires is some gaps in vaccination, a plane flight.
Speaker 24
Grocery store. It is one of the most contagious diseases out there. It is entirely vaccine-preventable, and no child should have to suffer or die from it. Doctor. Havers, what does the ongoing measles outbreak tell us about the consequences when vaccination uptake drops, particularly for children or people who are immunocompromised?
Speaker 8
No. That's a great question. I mean, the fact that measles has been, we've had continuous outbreaks of measles since the last 11 months, indicates how important herd immunity is. Certain vaccines are so extremely effective that if everyone in the population is vaccinated, the disease will not be able to spread widely through the community. This is maintaining herd immunity for diseases such as measles, where we have an effective vaccine.
It protects not only infants too young to be vaccinated, people are immunocompromised, the vaccines don't work, but it protects the entire community. When we've had decades of misinformation and false information about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and what we're seeing is we're losing herd immunity in settings for pathogens like measles where herd immunity is critical to
Speaker 24
Because of misinformation spread for decades by RFK Jr. And others, yes. Like him, sowing doubt. I'm wondering, just as you think about the landscape, and I've asked this to some of your former colleagues, what are some of the other vaccine-preventable diseases that you are worried might reemerge if this trend of sowing misinformation and scaring parents and dropping vaccination rates continues?
Speaker 8
I mean, as possible, we'll see the return of polio, for example. But I think what we're already seeing are diseases like Haemophilus influenza B and pneumococcal meningitis, which, as any pediatrician that trained in the 80s, they got very good at doing spinal taps on babies because this is a frequent presentation of devastating invasive bacterial infections. Effective vaccines have basically eliminated those diseases in children in America. But I think young pediatricians now are going to have to get a lot better at doing spinal taps, because they are seeing a huge number of unvaccinated children, so they can't rule that out. So even if they don't have that disease, they get more testing.
But also we're going to see an increase in pediatric dust because of those diseases.
Speaker 24
And I trained in the 90s and still did a lot of spinal taps. And I just wanna connect some dots between a link there. When kids get these bacterial illnesses, Hib, pneumococcus, then they need antibiotics. And we already have a problem in this country with antibiotic resistance. And I just want to point out that there are more consequences.
You know, one is babies dying of these things, but the other is that antibiotics that we use to treat them may not work. We just came through one in a century pandemic, and you would think that would have brought our country together, made us more interested in preparedness, and more excited about mRNA vaccines. HHS, under the guidance of RFK Junior, just cut almost 600,000,000 from mRNA research. We just had the first case in the country of H5N5 flu, and the patient died of it. And this is exactly why we need mRNA vaccines, which have brought us that COVID vaccine in record time.
I think the fastest before that was four years, and we got it in a year, in less than a year. What are the implications of this? Should, for example, h5n5 or h even h5n1, start moving, like, person to person transmission?
Speaker 8
Well, we know that, I mean, H5N5, the case that you mentioned, was the first time that virus had ever been detected in a human in the world, not just in the United States. And so that's just a new virus that we have in the last, you month or two. But H5N1 is a well-known pandemic threat, and it is mutating fast. We have the ability to create a stockpile of h five n one vaccines should this blow up. That would mean that frontline health care workers would have immediate access to lifesaving vaccines, so they would not be putting their lives at the same level of risk that they are taking care of patients when this blows up and efficient human to human trends happens and we have a pandemic.
But yanking the funding from that and from mRNA vaccines, again, takes away one of the strongest tools we have for responding quickly and rolling out a vaccine quickly, you know, as quickly as possible. Days and weeks matter at the beginning of a pandemic.
Speaker 24
Thank you. And I just want the country to remember the early days of COVID, when you were describing what you did, and doctors taking care of patients and nurses were dying because of that exposure. We need the vaccines. We need the mRNA research. Thank you, and I yield back.
Speaker 1
The general lady yields. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Weber, for his five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 25
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mister McNight, I'm gonna come to you. In your written testimony, you note that the US has a critical need to implement systems that allow the US to monitor and respond to biological threats to our way of life. When implementing biological intelligence capabilities and a deployable biothreat radar, how do you or how do we ensure that those systems are not compromised by adversarial nations? So are they gonna have enough technology to get into those, bring them down, potentially?
What thoughts? What are your thoughts?
Speaker 7
Yeah. I think that this is a really important question, and thank you for asking. There are three layers to how to think about it. First and foremost, the reason to build our own sovereign capabilities versus relying only on cooperation, which we should do to get data from others, is that we can control the end-to-end systems, the chain of custody of data, just like we do in other domains, with Five Eyes or with NATO or with our allies. So part of owning your own detection capabilities is being able to secure it.
I think the second piece of that is collecting enough data that you know and understand when there are anomalies. Today, even our current systems are easily, much more easily corrupted in the sense that we don't have a lot of baseline data to understand where changes are. There's a lesson that we've learned from cybersecurity over and over again. And I think the last piece of this question around how do we make sure that these systems are secure is truly treating it. When we were early on developing the concept of biological intelligence, BioN, it was a set of former advisers from the national security community in different places that said, this is the technical collection discipline for bio.
Like, we have signals intelligence or measurement and signals intelligence or imagery intelligence. And then so you treat it with the same care that you do to other collection domains. And when you do those things, we've built many years of infrastructure to secure the data and collection.
Speaker 25
Yeah. And that's the business you're in, and I know you're good at it. But I'm thinking, in addition, given the number of scientific experts working in US universities and labs, laboratories from countries outside the US, how do we safeguard this research from bad actors? What are the clues? What are the notes?
What do you have put in place so that you can track those very people that may be here with not good intentions?
Speaker 7
Yes. Certainly, that piece of it is not mine, but I was I spent a number of years as a marine corps intelligence officer. I think two things. Con or, any inability to analyze a problem is worse when there's a gray area. So the more information we have, in this case, biological intelligence, is additive to the second piece, which is we absolutely need an effort, which starts with what doctor Penney was talking about.
Training of good scientists who are sitting next to people who might be doing things that are not correct, all the way through to integrating with other sources of law enforcement and intelligence to make sure that we are staying ahead of people who might seek to do ill. We have to do that domestically, but the bigger issue, the big missing gap is that we recognize because biology doesn't have borders, that this activity is gonna take place outside of our country, and we need, I would say, a 100x plus increased investment in time and attention, and certainly, yes, resources to ensure we are looking outside our borders for threats as they develop.
Speaker 25
So have you given the concern that AI-enabled biothreats could diminish our system or render medical countermeasures absolutely obsolete? Because, I don't know, this stuff, as you know, goes so quickly. Things just keep go faster and faster. Early detection is what's needed. It's essential, and we have to have it to stay safe.
Have you seen I know you were in the marine. How long have you been in the Marines?
Speaker 25
Okay. Well, thank you for that. Thank you. Have you seen the Trump administration actually engaged to take, to be able to prevent an AI-enabled bio threat from ever occurring, or is that a possibility? Is there a way to prevent it from ever occurring, and what's the Trump administration?
Speaker 7
My general position on bio threats of the future is that it is much more like cyber, they will occur. Bio, and so we need to be able to do what you are saying, rapid detection all the way through to rapid countermeasure development. The Trump administration, building on previous efforts and frameworks, has launched this concept of biothreat radar and has asked for funding for HHS CDC to reallocate towards expanding detection programs. The State Department is also doing the same thing under the moniker of Biothreat Radar.
Speaker 1
Gentleman yields. The chair now recognizes Mr. Achenklaus for his five minutes of questioning.
Speaker 26
Thank you, chair. I appreciate the opportunity to weigh in on this important discussion. United States and peoples around the world indeed face emerging bio threats and appreciate the testimony of the witnesses here, particularly, mister McKnight, who I'm proud to say is a constituent. And, Massachusetts is certainly proud to have Ginkgo Bioworks, founded and operating out of our state. And I served on the select committee on China last term.
I've got significant concerns about biology as the sixth domain of human conflict, and the Chinese Communist Party's willingness to weaponize that domain. I tend to agree with mister McKnight that any domain that can be weaponized in the field of human conflict ultimately will be. Yet, regrettably, I believe the biggest threat to global health right now is not coming from the Chinese Communist Party. It is the reality that the United States secretary of health and human services does not believe in the germ theory of disease. He has repeatedly, over the course of his career, said that the germ theory of disease, which might be the single best-supported scientific theory of biology of the last 200 years, is spurious.
He favors what's called terrain theory, which is the concept that your body gets sick because of an imbalance of humors within your body, and microbes take root in your tissues to clean out the bad stuff. We are trying to prepare for a future in 2050 of pathogens, both accidental, natural, intentional, with leadership that believes in a theory that would have been out of date in the 1850s before the United States civil war. It is an embarrassment to the American public. Doctor Havers, you had to work in an environment created by this kind of quackery and conspiracy. Could you speak about the culture it creates among scientific experts at CDC, at NIH, at FDA, when the leadership of HHS rejects foundational science?
Speaker 8
I mean, it makes it impossible to work. And I think that that's why we've seen such a loss of expertise at all these federal agencies, either voluntary, you know, in large part voluntary because they could not tolerate being under a leadership where that espouses regularly espouses unscientific nonsense, frankly. And I think that as you know, these are nonpartisan agencies. Like, CDC historically has only had one political appointee, and people have worked under multiple administrations without interference. See, people in these agencies care about science and care about data, but it is incredibly demoralizing when you see the agency you've dedicated your career to weaponized to spread unscientific and dangerous theories.
Speaker 8
Absolutely not. No. Of course not. I mean, we need to have people that actually know what the science is and understand basic science and leadership.
Speaker 26
Now Mister Smith has gone from running Doge Healthcare to the State Department to run global health. When he was at HHS for the US Health and Human Services, and I wanna build on the theme from the gentle lady from New York here of corruption, mister Smith had a private firm, Main Street Health, whose biggest investors were the biggest health insurance corporations in America, all the biggest, customers and providers of health insurance under Medicare Advantage. He then was put in charge of Medicare through Dodge and proceeded to increase reimbursements for his own investors and cut the regulations of these Medicare Advantage organizations. Rewarded for that behavior, he is now running US global health at the State Department. Do you think our allies and people overseas can have confidence that Mister Smith is gonna execute in the interest of global health or in the interests of his investors?
Speaker 8
I don't know, I don't have personal knowledge of Mister Smith's dealings, but I will say that the scientific credibility of the US abroad has been incredibly damaged. People are looking at horror at what has been done at NIH, FDA, CDC. I do think that we do not have the leadership in place that has the integrity and the best interests of the American people at heart at the moment.
Speaker 26
Do you think it would help our credibility if Congress would do oversight of RFK, of Mister Smith, and of the other chieftains of US Health Care right now?
Speaker 8
I think so. I mean, I think it's very much needed. I mean, for example, Secretary Kennedy has basically run Rush Shot.
Speaker 1
Seeing that there are no further members wishing to ask questions, I would like to thank our witnesses. Thank you for your time. Thank you for the delay because of the votes that occurred today and for being with us here today. We are at a critical intersection, and your expertise will help form policy as we move forward. We know these issues need to be addressed, and this committee is willing to do that.
Pursuant to the committee roles, I would remind members that they have 10 business days to submit the additional questions for the record. And I ask the witnesses to submit their responses within 10 business days upon receipt of the questions. Members should submit their questions by the close of business on Tuesday, January 6. Without objection, the subcommittee is adjourned.
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