The U.S. government secretly funded more than 120 biolabs across 30 countries, including more than 40 sites in Ukraine, according to declassified intelligence released Friday by DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who says the program was deliberately hidden from the American public.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a formal press release Friday confirming decades of U.S. taxpayer funding for a global network of biological laboratories. Director Tulsi Gabbard said the evidence had been "knowingly withheld from the American people," and that those who raised questions about the program were accused of being "foreign assets and traitors to America." Clinical trials conducted at the facilities raised "significant ethical, financial and security concerns," the release states. Newsweek and WMAL independently confirmed the disclosure the same day.
The three principal funding channels, according to the DNI disclosure, were the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, originally built around Cold War-era programs to secure Soviet-era biological threats, along with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and USAID. Together they funded research on some of the world's most dangerous pathogens: tuberculosis, Ebola, SARS, swine fever, Newcastle disease, and pathogenic avian flu. Some facilities conducted gain-of-function experiments, a class of research that genetically modifies organisms to study enhanced transmissibility, with what Gabbard described as "little visibility or oversight."
More than a third of the identified laboratories sit inside Ukraine. That was not a surprise to everyone inside the intelligence world: IC assessments had previously warned, though not publicly, that U.S.-funded facilities in Ukraine likely housed dangerous pathogens and remained vulnerable to Russian attack, seizure, or damage. Some sites operated under what the disclosure describes as "especially dangerous pathogen certification," holding repositories that included SARS and Ebola strains alongside American-funded studies on pathogenic avian flu.
With the war still active and front lines shifting, the status of those sites is not an abstract concern. Whether any facility has been compromised, and what any foreign force may have encountered at labs near contested territory, is among the specific questions Gabbard's new directives order the Intelligence Community to answer.
Directives and Open Questions
Gabbard issued new IC collection directives ordering a full geographic and biological inventory of all remaining U.S.-funded lab sites abroad, including what pathogens each holds and what research continues. The directives also call for terminating any remaining gain-of-function work at foreign facilities receiving American funding, in line with President Trump's May 2025 executive order banning federal dollars for that class of research abroad without rigorous U.S. oversight.
The accountability question remains wide open. The DNI release describes the concealment as deliberate but names no specific officials who authorized the program's decades-long expansion across multiple administrations, and representatives for past administrations had not commented by Friday evening. Whether congressional intelligence committees were ever fully briefed on the network's scope is also unresolved. No formal response from Capitol Hill had been issued.
The investigation Gabbard launched is now on the record. The next disclosures, specifically the named agencies and officials behind each contract, the full pathogen inventory, and the congressional notification record, will determine whether anyone in authority is held responsible. The public has now been told it was kept in the dark. The question of who kept it there, and whether they face any consequence, is only beginning to be asked.
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