President Trump has a long list of vital foreign policy challenges on his plate these days. His energy, time and focus are rightly dedicated to the crises that dominate the attention of world leaders and our international media.
There is, however, another dangerous threat to the United States, one that lurks below the surface: China’s ongoing and accelerating use of biological weapons that could lead to significant loss of life and major disruption to our way of life.
For decades, the United States has viewed biological threats through the lens of public health—a matter of "consequence management" to be handled after the first patient arrives in the emergency room. But in an era of rapid genomic engineering and adversarial persistence from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), treating a biological strike like a natural outbreak is a recipe for strategic defeat.
We must recognize that the nature of the threat has fundamentally changed. Our adversaries no longer view biological agents merely as weapons of mass destruction, but as tools of "intelligent warfare." If we are to protect the North American continent, we must shift our posture from reacting to pathogens to denying their impact through early Indicators and Warning (I&W).
The CCP’s 14th Five-Year Plan and its National Defense Strategy make one thing clear: Beijing intends to dominate the global bioeconomy and the "bio-foundry" of the future. Through its Military-Civil Fusion strategy, the CCP is systematically blurring the lines between medical research and offensive capability. They are investing billions in synthetic biology, massive genomic data collection—often harvested from unsuspecting global populations—and AI-driven pathogen enhancement.
The 2025 ODNI Annual Threat Assessment describes China as the “most comprehensive and robust” competitor to the U.S. in biotechnology. The most recent 2026 ODNI Annual Threat Assessment warned, “Beijing is investing heavily in collecting health and genetic data at scale” as AI and advanced technologies help build weapons design for battlefield advantage. Recent Defense Intelligence reports highlight a sobering reality: China is now the world’s best-equipped biosecurity threat actor. Their goal is not just to match our capabilities, but to create "leap-ahead" biological advantages that can bypass traditional medical countermeasures. Whether through engineered pathogens with no natural signatures or the subtle sabotage of our agricultural and pharmaceutical supply chains, the threat is persistent, hybrid, and largely invisible to our current sensors.
The United States made meaningful progress during the first Trump administration with the release of the 2018 National Biodefense Strategy, which elevated biological threats as a national security priority; however, during the Biden administration that momentum did not translate into sustained operational capability. The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) warned the U.S. is “falling behind.” In 2025 the NSCEB published 49 recommendations, a document that elevates biotech as a defense capability and a strategic domain of national power that must be coordinated, scaled, and defended like energy, nuclear, or AI.
The United States currently lacks a scalable, defense-grade capability to detect, characterize, and attribute biological attacks in real-time. Our current federal surveillance architectures are fragmented, heavily siloed, and optimized for retrospective reporting. In a crisis, the hours lost to administrative friction and "data silos" are hours the adversary uses to achieve strategic surprise.
Agencies and healthcare institutions often refuse to share sensitive data due to valid regulatory concerns and security risks. This "data divide" is our greatest vulnerability. To gain decision advantage, we must transition security-proven architectures from the federal healthcare ecosystem directly into the national security domain. We need a system that doesn't just collect data but surfaces anomalous activity during the opening hours of an event—before a local outbreak becomes a national catastrophe.
The Biological Defense Surveillance Network (BIONET) represents the necessary evolution of our national defense. Designed to meet the rigorous requirements of the December 2025 JPEO-CBRND request for genomic sequencing workflows. BIONET moves beyond the failed model of centralized databases that are vulnerable to cyber-attack and administrative gridlock. BIONET essentially translates the NSCEB recommendations into operational reality by delivering what current policy frameworks lack: a unified, real-time early warning system capable of detecting adversarial biological activity at speed and scale.
The Department of War and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) have a narrow window to act. By utilizing established FDA Medical Counter-Measure contract vehicles, the administration can fund a 24-month prototype and pilot of BIONET. This is a low-risk, high-velocity pathway to validate the integration and governance needed for a permanent program of record.
The choice before us is stark. We can continue to rely on a reactive, public-health-first model that cedes the initiative to our adversaries, or we can build a proactive defense that turns biological data into a strategic asset. We must strip the veil of anonymity from biological threats. The technology to provide our leaders with time-sensitive warnings exists today.
President Trump and his administration have clearly demonstrated a remarkable capacity to manage a broad range of high-priority issues simultaneously. This threat from China can and should be acted on now to block their aggressive moves to attack us on this front.
Dr. Vahan Simonyan has held senior scientific and technical leadership roles across the U.S. federal government, including serving as a Senior Scientist in genetics and Director of R&D Bioinformatics at the FDA. He developed FDA Hive which serves as a regulatory analytics platform used to evaluate life saving products such as CRISPR-based therapies, oncology and T-cell treatments, pathogen detection and vaccine safety. A professor at George Washington University, he has an MS in Physical Organic Chemistry and Ph.Ds in Quantum Physics and Mathematics.
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