After the controversial Biosecure Act failed to make the cut in a key defense spending bill last year, the Senate endorsed a new iteration of the legislation Thursday.
But this time around, the bill—which still needs to pass muster in the House of Representatives and go before the president to become law—seems to have adopted a softer tone.
Late this week, the Senate voted in favor of new China biotech competition legislation introduced as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for the upcoming fiscal year.
The bipartisan amendment—drafted by Sens. Bill Hagerty, R–Tenn., and Gary Peters, D-Mich.—seeks to prevent companies reliant on federal contracts and funding from working with certain Chinese biotechs of concern. The bill would also prevent select Chinese companies from accessing U.S. government funding themselves.
The amendment defines companies of concern as including those that are an extension of the Chinese military as well as firms that answer to a “foreign adversary” or otherwise pose a national security risk to the U.S., according to the bill’s text.
Unlike the previous version of the legislation, which singled out five Chinese life sciences companies by name, the new draft points to a 2021 list of “Chinese military companies” from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
That list (PDF) does include BGI Group from the original roster of targeted companies, but notably, it omits prominent contracting outfits WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics, which faced scrutiny under the previous incarnation of the China competition proposal.
The WuXi companies were quick to challenge their characterization in the original Biosecure Act, and concerns mounted last year that a crackdown on certain Chinese companies would hamstring a U.S. industry highly reliant on outsourcing manufacturing and research through such channels.
Despite their omission from the amendment, the stock prices of WuXi Biologics and WuXi AppTec dropped around 7.6% and 5.9%, respectively, during Friday's trading in Hong Kong.
Looking ahead, the draft legislation calls on the director of the OMB to publish a formal list of companies of concern within a year—if and when the act is passed.
While more steps remain for Biosecure’s successor bill to become law, it’s notable that the Senate tucked the amendment into the National Defense Authorization Act, considering that the defense budget bill has passed every year for decades, according to Stat News.
To become official, an identical bill must be endorsed by the House and then signed by President Donald Trump, Bloomberg noted on Thursday.
When Haggerty initially submitted his China-targeting amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act this summer, analysts at Jefferies noted in August that the updated proposal “applies a general tone, with no specific Chinese CDMOs mentioned.”
The analysts highlighted the “softening tone” of the draft legislation, arguing that the previous—and more directly adversarial—version of Biosecure failed to pass through the Senate in 2024 due to industry pushback fueled by a desire for cost flexibility.
Biosecure was ultimately omitted from last year’s National Defense Authorization Act vote, which had been seen as the best path for the legislation to become law. Members of the House of Representatives had overwhelmingly voted in favor of the bill in September 2024.
The bill’s evolution comes as Trump seeks to promote U.S. pharma manufacturing and—to a smaller extent—R&D through a mix of tariffs and drug pricing reform efforts.
While multiple countries and territories have forged relatively agreeable deals with the U.S. in the wake of Trump’s trade policy maneuvering, the situation between the U.S. and China has remained particularly fraught in 2025.
As those trade tensions play out, some industry experts have also flagged the rapid ascent of China’s R&D output, cautioning that the U.S. could cede its biopharma supremacy if it doesn’t continue to incentivize and promote domestic research and development efforts.