Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is pressing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to immediately ban non-U.S. citizens from accessing U.S. military computer systems.
In a letter sent to Hegseth on Wednesday, Cotton praises the Pentagon chief’s “ongoing actions” to eliminate Chinese engineers’ access to Department of Defense (DOD) systems, while pushing him to immediately change current Pentagon policy that allows some non-U.S. citizens to access the military’s systems.
“Foreign persons should never be allowed to access DoD systems, regardless of whether a U.S. citizen is supervising,” Cotton writes. “The Department, particularly the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, has the authority to immediately make these policy changes. I urge you to do so now.”
Hegseth last month signaled he agreed with Cotton’s thinking after the senator in a separate letter pointed to a ProPublica investigation that revealed Microsoft, which has a contract with the Pentagon to maintain its computer systems, was using engineers in China for such work with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel.
“Spot on Senator. Agree fully. Our team is already looking into this ASAP,” Hegseth wrote in a July 18 post to the social platform X that included the image of Cotton’s letter. “Foreign engineers — from any country, including of course China — should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems.”
In addition to urging an immediate policy change, Cotton also plans to offer language to the annual defense authorization bill that would codify Hegseth’s potential actions into law.
“Congress must prohibit non-U.S. citizens from accessing DoD systems under any circumstances and mandate DoD to revise its policies to comply with this prohibition,” the letter says.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking member, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), also wrote a letter to Hegseth last month raising similar concerns with the Microsoft contract and what the Pentagon was doing to mitigate cybersecurity risks.
Cotton further requested a Pentagon briefing by Sept. 5 “about any vulnerabilities that have been discovered in the Department’s cloud contracts and software services and any mitigating actions.”
Cotton, a China hawk, in recent weeks has been sounding the alarm over Beijing’s potential access to Pentagon systems, including through DOD contracts, in a bid to limit potential cybersecurity issues.
After the ProPublica report, Hegseth announced that China “will no longer have any involvement whatsoever in our cloud services, effective immediately.” He also signed a memo ordering a two-week review of the Pentagon’s digital systems “to make sure what we uncovered isn’t happening anywhere else across the DOD.”
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