Malign Foreign Talent Recruitment Programs (MFTRP) — certification & prohibitions

Under CHIPS Act §10632, federal research awards may not be made to any covered individual who is a party to a Malign Foreign Talent Recruitment Program (MFTRP) as defined in §10638, and institutions must certify per award that no covered individuals are participating in such a program. Federal science-funding agencies (NIH, NSF, DOE, DoD) have rolled out the certification requirement across 2024–2025.

The statutory definition

Under §10638, an MFTRP is a program, position, or activity that both:

1. Involves the individual receiving compensation, in cash or in kind, from a foreign country of concern or an entity based in or acting on behalf of such a country; and
2. Includes one or more of the following enumerated features:
   • The individual is required to recruit trainees, students, or researchers to the foreign entity.
   • The individual is required to establish a laboratory, entity, or company in the foreign country.
   • The individual is required to transfer intellectual property owned by the U.S. entity to the foreign entity.
   • The individual is required to omit acknowledgment of the U.S. institution or the federal award.
   • The individual is required to not disclose the participation to the U.S. institution or funder.
   • Certain other statutorily enumerated features (see §10638 for full text).

The definition is deliberately specific. Participation in a foreign talent program, in itself, is not automatically an MFTRP — the enumerated features are what convert an ordinary international engagement into a prohibited one.

Who has to certify — and to what

The certification is per award. The institution certifies that, to the best of its knowledge, no covered individual on the award is a party to an MFTRP. "Covered individuals" tracks the sponsor's senior/key-personnel designation plus any additional persons the institution's process brings into scope.

How institutions verify

In practice, institutions collect an attestation from each covered individual and layer that attestation against sources that can corroborate or contradict it — publications acknowledging foreign support, disclosed foreign appointments, external directories of talent-program rosters where available. The AOR's certification is only as strong as this verification layer. This is where enforcement cases have most often been made: not on the researcher's attestation, but on what could have been seen and was not.

Interaction with the disclosure standard

MFTRP certification and the Common Forms disclosure standard are complementary. The disclosure standard requires the researcher to declare all outside support and appointments. MFTRP requires the institution to certify — as a separate act — that none of what was disclosed (or should have been) meets the statutory definition of a malign program.

What institutions should do now

1. Define "covered individuals" for each award class. Not every agency's certification uses the same scope; document your institution's operational definition.
2. Build a per-award certification workflow, not an annual one. The certification is a submission-time gate.
3. Verify against sources the researcher cannot control. Publications, sponsor-acknowledged affiliations, and Section 117 foreign contract filings.
4. Document the review, not just the outcome. When a certification is later questioned, the institution needs to show what it looked at, not only what it concluded.
5. Escalate ambiguous cases. Not every foreign engagement is an MFTRP; the ones that are not should be documented as reviewed and cleared.