The Biden administration called it Russian propaganda.
Now Tulsi Gabbard has the receipts – and there are 120 of them.
What she found inside those labs is something Biden's team buried under four years of official denials.
Biden Swore There Were No US Biolabs in Ukraine Then His Own Undersecretary Contradicted Him
The denial was emphatic and official.
On March 9, 2022, Biden's State Department issued a written statement dismissing any claim of US-owned or US-operated biological laboratories in Ukraine as "Chinese and Russian propaganda."
That statement landed one day after Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland told a Senate hearing that Ukraine had "biological research facilities" the US government was "quite concerned" Russian troops might seize.
Trump's ODNI later confirmed that Biden's blanket denials were part of a coordinated strategy – officially labeled "Information Resilience" – designed to manage public perception and suppress any connection between the administration and the labs it was funding.
Fauci Funded Gain of Function Research That Made Wuhan Viruses 10000 Times More Infectious
The 120 labs now under Tulsi Gabbard's review include more than 40 in Ukraine alone, which ODNI officials noted could "be at risk of compromise" due to Russia's war.
The rest are spread across more than 30 countries, many funded through the Pentagon's Cooperative Threat Reduction Program – originally designed to dispose of Soviet-era weapons of mass destruction after the Cold War.
Clinical trials currently underway at these facilities are raising what ODNI described as "significant, ethical, financial and security concerns."
The Defense Department's own watchdog found it could not determine how many experiments with enhanced pandemic pathogens had been conducted in China or other foreign nations – despite more than $1.4 billion in US funding for such research between 2014 and 2023.
Sen. Joni Ernst had already documented roughly $50 million making its way to Chinese labs specifically, and the Pentagon could not account for what research that money bought.
The NIH's own records show that US-funded bat coronavirus experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology violated grant terms between 2014 and 2021 – making viruses 10,000 times more infectious than their natural state.
Dr. Anthony Fauci knew exactly what that kind of research risked.
In a 2012 paper published in mBio, Fauci described the precise scenario that unfolded with COVID-19: a scientist conducting gain-of-function experiments becomes infected, triggers a pandemic, and the world is left asking whether the research should have existed at all.
His written answer: the benefits outweigh the risks.
COVID killed more than a million Americans.
ODNI Biolab Investigation Now Covers 30 Countries and Requires Accounting for Every Pathogen
Gabbard told the New York Post her team is going "to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain and what 'research' is being conducted to end dangerous gain-of-function research that threatens the health and wellbeing of the American people and the world."
Under her new guidance, the entire US Intelligence Community will review all research at every US-funded biolab worldwide – including facilities conducting gain-of-function experiments that could increase viral transmissibility.
For decades, the money trail was deliberately obscured: federal dollars moved from agencies to grant recipients, then down to subcontractors and foreign facilities, with no requirement that anyone in Washington account for what the research produced.
Biden didn't just leave that system intact – his team spent four years calling anyone who noticed it a Russian propagandist.
Pete Hegseth was direct: "The prior administration bankrolled dangerous Gain-of-Function research and foreign biolabs with American tax dollars, then deliberately hid it from the American people."
Trump signed an executive order last May banning all federal funding for gain-of-function research in China, Iran, and other nations without proper oversight – citing SARS-CoV-2 as proof that dangerous pathogens "can leak out innocently, stupidly and incompetently, but innocently and half destroy the world."
The program Gabbard is now auditing ran for decades with no public accounting.
In 2022, Tulsi Gabbard warned publicly that US-funded biolabs in Ukraine could release deadly pathogens if breached – and Mitt Romney called her a treasonous liar spreading Russian propaganda.
Now Gabbard is DNI, and she just opened a federal investigation into 120 of those labs.
Sources:
- Josh Christenson, "DNI Tulsi Gabbard probes US funding to more than 120 biolabs abroad," New York Post, May 11, 2026.
- Pete Hegseth, Statement on ODNI biolab investigation, Department of Defense, May 2026.
- Anthony S. Fauci, "Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward," mBio, October 2012.
- Sen. Joni Ernst, Statement on DOD IG gain-of-function audit findings, 2024.
