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The Pentagon has notified 30 American universities that they have until Aug. 31 to review their research funding and partnerships with foreign institutions the government considers a security risk, or lose access to future federal research dollars.

Getting into it: The announcement was made by the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, which is running the review process. Each notified school has to go through every identified foreign collaboration, figure out if any restricted or export-limited work was left open, and put mitigation plans in place, up to and including cutting off partnerships.

In a statement, Emil Michael, under secretary of war for research and engineering, said, “The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security. Institutions that receive funding from American taxpayers must uphold the highest standards of research security, and these mandated audits will ensure accountability across the board.”

The Pentagon did not release the names of the schools, but a US official gave the list to DefenseScoop. It includes Harvard, MIT, Georgetown, Cornell, Duke, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Penn State, Stony Brook, and Berkeley, along with UCLA, UC San Diego, USC, Texas at Austin, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Minnesota, Cincinnati, South Carolina, Delaware, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Emory, Virginia Tech, Worcester Polytechnic, Illinois Institute of Technology, Bryant, Drake, Oklahoma State, Northeastern State in Tahlequah, Portland State, and Southern Illinois at Carbondale.

The foreign institutions at issue come from a list built under Section 1286 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which set up the Pentagon’s process for flagging overseas organizations it thinks are siphoning off American research. The current version names 130 academic and research bodies in China, Russia, and Iran, including 88 in mainland China, and the designation hits the whole school, not just one lab or one professor. Starting in fiscal 2026, Pentagon money cannot go to fundamental research involving any listed organization, its equipment, or its employees. The audits also cover ties to outfits the Pentagon says are rebranded Confucius Institutes, the Chinese language and culture programs that once numbered around 100 on American campuses before federal funding restrictions drove nearly all of them to close.

This all comes after the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released a report four days earlier accusing Harvard of failing to vet its Chinese research relationships, saying researchers tied to Harvard put their names on more than 140 publications with scholars at institutions including the National University of Defense Technology, and that the school took in more than $600 million from China under Section 117 gift disclosures, more than any other American university.

As of now, there’s been no comment from the Chinese, Russian, or Iranian governments.