Judicial Watch on Monday filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Department of War seeking records related to biodefense and gain-of-function funding proposals submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Biological Technologies Office prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after DARPA failed to respond to a November 7, 2025 FOIA request.
The request seeks all biodefense and gain-of-function funding proposals submitted to DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office before December 2019. The office, launched in 2014, has stated its programs “push the leading edge of science” and may present ethical, legal, or social dilemmas tied to emerging biological technologies.
The lawsuit references a 2018 grant proposal known as DEFUSE, led by EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was submitted to DARPA under its PREEMPT program. According to prior Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee disclosures, the proposal aimed to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus to create a novel chimeric virus similar to COVID-19.
Sen. Rand Paul, then the committee’s ranking member, previously wrote that “at least 15 federal agencies knew from the beginning of the pandemic that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were seeking federal funding in 2018 to create a virus genetically very similar if not identical to COVID-19.”
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “Gain-of-function proposals likely were active in the Defense Department’s pipeline prior to the pandemic. Our lawsuit intends to find out what these proposals entailed.”
Read the Judicial Watch Press Release
