Pump the brakes

A group of more than 150 professors from Stanford University signed an open letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland last week asking that he get rid of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) “China Initiative” which was started by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

While acknowledging that it is important for the U.S. to address concerns of intellectual property theft and economic espionage, the Stanford educators wrote in their letter that the program has since “deviated significantly from its claimed mission.”

The professors stated that the China initiative is “harming the United States’ research and technology competitiveness and it is fueling biases that, in turn, raise concerns about racial profiling.”

They pointed out that the program disproportionately targets researchers with Chinese origins, choosing to investigate them not based on evidence, but simply for having a connection to China.