The legal watchdog organization, Judicial Watch, is suing the Defense Department seeking gain-of-function proposals that may have been active in the department’s pipeline before the Covid-19 pandemic reached the U.S.

Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Defense for records on funding proposals submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office.

That office was launched in 2014 with DARPA, claiming the office’s programs “push the leading edge of science” and “will sometimes be society’s first encounter with the ethical, legal, or social dilemmas that can be raised by new biological technologies.”

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee announced in April 2024 that it had sent letters to several agencies requesting: “[I]nformation on their knowledge and involvement regarding the DEFUSE project, a 2018 grant proposal led by EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who was then the ranking member of the committee, wrote: “[A]t 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.”