The Department of War has officially branded China-friendly Confucius Institutes at American universities as threats to U.S. national security, Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday.
“Let this be a lesson to any country trying to steal our hard-earned inventions or turn our young people against their own country. We’re done with that; no more; and never again,” Hegseth said in a video announcement.
As The Federalist previously reported, Confucius Institutes are “public educational and cultural promotion programs” that are bankrolled “and arranged currently by the Chinese International Education Foundation, a shady organization affiliated with the [Chinese Communist Party] CCP.” While billing themselves as centers of cultural exchange on U.S. college campuses, these institutes have been scrutinized as front groups seeking to advance CCP propaganda and espionage efforts.
While Congress has taken action in recent years to shutter U.S.-based Confucius Institutes, Hegseth seemingly referenced past reports that “they came back disguised in new forms.” The secretary of war compared the reemergence of these “Chinese government-backed propaganda cultural programs” to the Pentagon bureaucracy’s attempts to retain DEI ideology by simply “rebrand[ing]” it under a different name.
In addition to including these Confucius “sleeper organizations” on the Department of War’s “list of institutions that threaten our national security,” Hegseth said that “80 new propaganda cells across 30 universities had popped up using different names and different charters but with the same mission: to steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students.” All of those cells, the secretary said, have been “systematically dismantled” over the past two months.
According to The Washington Times, “U.S. universities and research institutes that engage in any collaboration with the listed entities will lose all defense funding. The list is called the 1286 list after the section of the 2019 law requiring the restrictions.” A Pentagon official reportedly told the outlet that the crackdown on Confucius Institutes was part of a recent agency audit of 30 universities and their purported connections to any organizations on the 1286 list.
Among the 30 schools included in the audit were Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown University, and others.
Hegseth concluded his video announcement encouraging U.S. colleges to “stay vigilant” and not to “allow these influences to come back in.”
The War Department has designated Confucius Institutes as a threat to our national security. pic.twitter.com/bvMTUBwGei
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) October 23, 2026
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics and RealClearHealth. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood