BREAKING: DNI Tulsi Gabbard Exposes US Government Funding of More Than 120 Biolabs in Over…

Outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a tranche of formerly classified documents on June 12 that confirm the United States government has been funding more than 120 biological laboratories in over 30 countries around the world, including more than 40 laboratories and health sites in Ukraine.

The disclosure, described by Gabbard’s office as the product of months of searching through intelligence community holdings and files, reveals a global biological research infrastructure funded by American taxpayers that had been, in the words of the DNI press release, knowingly withheld from the American people.

The announcement came through an official ODNI press release and was simultaneously amplified by Gabbard on her official social media accounts.

There, she stated she was releasing never-before-seen intelligence revealing new evidence of past U.S. government funding for the biolabs network.

The timing of the release, just days before Gabbard’s departure from the DNI position, gave the disclosure the character of a parting act of transparency.

It was an intelligence chief using her final days in office to ensure information she had uncovered could not be quietly buried once her tenure ended.

The scale of the network described in the newly declassified documents is staggering.

More than 120 laboratories spread across more than 30 countries received American government funding, a program so geographically dispersed that the phrase “global biological research network” understates both its reach and its complexity.

Officials from Gabbard’s office said the intelligence review identified funding connections across a wide range of agencies and funding mechanisms.

Those connections reflected years of American investment in overseas biological research justified under national security, public health, and scientific cooperation rationales, but never subjected to meaningful public disclosure.

The Ukraine component of the network has attracted the most immediate attention.

That is due both to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict and to the original controversy over American biolabs that erupted during the early months of Russia’s 2022 invasion.

At that time, Russian officials claimed American biological weapons were being developed on Ukrainian territory, an accusation American officials dismissed as disinformation.

The newly declassified intelligence establishes that American-funded biological research was indeed taking place in Ukraine and that intelligence community officials had previously warned internally that the facilities posed a security risk.

One specific warning cited in the DNI’s press release concerned a U.S.-funded biolab in Ukraine that the intelligence community concluded likely housed dangerous pathogens and remained vulnerable to longstanding threats of Russian attack, seizure, or damage.

That warning, produced by the intelligence community, was not disclosed to the public and did not appear to have prompted any mitigation effort in the years before Russia’s full-scale invasion began.

The Central Reference Laboratory at the Ukrainian Research Anti-Plague Institute in Odesa, one of the identified facilities, received more than $3.4 million in U.S. funding, according to documents in the release.

The nature of the research conducted at the funded labs is the most alarming element of the disclosure.

Gabbard’s office stated plainly that many of the U.S. government-funded biolabs are currently or have previously engaged in research using hazardous and highly contagious pathogens.

In some cases, according to the release, that research included dangerous gain-of-function experiments with very little visibility or oversight.

Gain-of-function research, which involves genetically altering organisms to study or enhance their capabilities, became a household term during the debate over the origins of COVID-19.

That debate intensified after evidence emerged that American funding had gone to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for research on coronaviruses.

The Ukraine labs’ documented research included analysis of the threat posed by African Swine Fever, molecular characterization of avian influenza strains, and work related to the diagnosis and prevention of other dangerous pathogens.

Anthrax, tuberculosis, and swine fever were among the pathogens documented in the facilities, particularly those in Ukraine.

The combination of dangerous pathogens, minimal oversight, and proximity to an active war zone formed the core of the DNI’s security concern.

President Trump’s response to the broader problem of unregulated gain-of-function research preceded the Gabbard disclosure by more than a year.

On May 25, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14292, which ended federal funding for gain-of-function research around the world and directed agencies to examine funding streams associated with biological research involving pathogens that could become more transmissible, virulent, or dangerous.

That executive order set the investigative framework within which Gabbard’s office identified the 120-lab network.

The disclosures released on June 12 are explicitly tied to the Trump administration’s effort to bring transparency to a program that had operated without public accountability for years.

The political history of the American biolab disclosure is contested and complicated.

When Tucker Carlson first raised the existence of American-funded biolabs in Ukraine during the early weeks of Russia’s 2022 invasion, the story was immediately characterized by much of the mainstream media and official Washington as Russian disinformation being amplified by domestic bad actors.

Democratic officials, intelligence community spokespeople, and major news organizations all pushed back aggressively against the framing, with some explicitly stating that claims about American biolabs in Ukraine were false.

Gabbard herself was accused at the time of spreading that disinformation for raising questions about the labs in a congressional hearing.

The DNI’s declassified release now places the person once accused of spreading disinformation in the position of having confirmed the basic factual premise that her critics called false.

The labs existed. They received American funding. They conducted research on dangerous pathogens. The intelligence community had warned internally about their vulnerability.

All of that is now in the official public record in the form of declassified government documents.

The political implications of that reversal will be debated for some time.

Mitt Romney, the former Republican senator from Utah who was among those who took the most public positions against Gabbard and others who raised questions about the Ukraine biolabs, has not commented publicly on the disclosure.

Conservative commentators have noted pointedly that Romney and others who accused Gabbard of spreading Russian propaganda owe her and the American public an acknowledgment that their characterizations were wrong.

The disclosure also arrives at a moment when the intelligence community’s credibility on matters of biological research and its origins has been significantly damaged by the extended controversy over COVID-19’s origins.

The intelligence community spent years resisting full public engagement with the hypothesis that COVID-19 may have originated from a laboratory accident in Wuhan.

That position has progressively softened as evidence accumulated and as the lab leak hypothesis has been assessed as plausible, if still unconfirmed, by multiple American intelligence agencies.

Against that backdrop, the revelation that a worldwide network of American-funded biolabs operated with little public disclosure and minimal oversight reads as consistent with a pattern of institutional behavior rather than as an anomaly.

The countries in which the 120-plus labs operated have not all been named in the publicly available portion of the Gabbard release, with some details remaining classified pending further review.

The review that identified the network is described as ongoing, with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence continuing to work with federal agencies to determine the full scope of research conducted at the facilities.

The 120-lab figure represents preliminary findings, meaning the ultimate total could be higher as the review is completed.

Congressional response to the disclosure began immediately on June 12.

Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee signaled interest in holding hearings on the biolab network, with particular focus on the Ukraine facilities and the nature of the research conducted there.

The administration’s request for more robust oversight mechanisms for overseas biological research programs, already built into Executive Order 14292, may now have the congressional support to be formalized in statute.

The timing of the release so close to Gabbard’s departure from the DNI position added another layer of significance.

Gabbard, who has long believed the American public has been systematically denied information about the activities of its own government, used the platform and authority of the nation’s top intelligence officer to ensure the biolab disclosure became part of the permanent public record before she left.

Whether her successor takes up the thread she pulled or allows the review to quietly wind down will be one of the first significant intelligence decisions of the post-Gabbard era.

For Americans who have spent years wondering whether their government was fully transparent about the biological research it funded overseas, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the answer arrived in the form of 120 labs, more than 30 countries, dangerous pathogens, gain-of-function experiments, and an official intelligence community warning about vulnerability that was never shared with the public.