A bipartisan bill advancing through the House of Representatives would direct the U.S. Department of State to significantly deepen cooperation with NATO allies and major non-NATO partners on biodefense, biosecurity, and biotechnology, and would require the development of formal strategies to identify and close gaps in current international biological threat preparedness. The legislation arrives at a moment of striking tension: many of the gaps the bill seeks to address have been created or deepened by the same administration that would be tasked with implementing it.
H.R. 7653, the Biodefense Diplomacy Enhancement Act, was introduced on February 23, 2026, by Rep. Keith Self (R-TX-3) and Rep. William Keating (D-MA-9), and was ordered reported out of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on March 26, 2026, by a unanimous vote of 46-0. The Congressional Budget Office released its cost estimate for the bill on April 17, 2026, finding that implementation would cost less than $500,000 over the 2026-2031 period, a relatively modest price tag for legislation with potentially broad national security implications.
What the Bill Would Require
The legislation tasks the Secretary of State, acting through the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, with pursuing enhanced biodefense cooperation within NATO and with countries designated as major non-NATO allies. Specifically, the bill directs the State Department to advocate for stronger biodefense policy development within NATO, including in biotechnology, biosurveillance, and medical countermeasures; pursue potential revisions to NATO’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Defence Policy to better address biological threats; strengthen NATO interoperability in detection, attribution, emergency response, and recovery in the event of a weaponized biological attack; coordinate with allied and partner nations on export control policies for dual-use biotechnology items; and collaborate with partners on enforcement of the Biological Weapons Convention.
The bill also requires the State Department to develop two formal strategies: a “NATO Biodefense Strategy” and an “International Biotechnology, Biosecurity, and Biodefense Cooperation Strategy.” Both documents must be submitted to Congress in unclassified form, with the option for a classified annex, within 270 days of enactment. The Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security would also be required to brief the relevant House and Senate committees within 90 days of enactment on significant global developments in biotechnology and biosecurity affecting U.S. national security.
Filling Gaps the Current Administration Has Helped Create
The bill’s core purpose is gap assessment: inventorying current U.S.-NATO cooperation on biological threats, identifying strategic planning and deployment shortfalls, and recommending concrete steps to address them. The international strategy component would similarly map opportunities for new bilateral or multilateral commitments, assess the feasibility of coordinating biotechnology export controls beyond existing regimes like the Wassenaar Arrangement and the Australia Group, and evaluate how existing State Department nonproliferation and related programs could be better leveraged for biosecurity purposes.
Since January 2025, the Trump-Vance administration has dismantled USAID, cut annual global health spending by nearly 70%, withdrawn from the World Health Organization, and gutted CDC and NIH budgets in ways that public health and biosecurity experts warn will cause lasting damage to U.S. outbreak detection and response capacity. The administration’s “America First Global Health Strategy,” unveiled in September 2025, reframed global health engagement around bilateral transactional priorities while signaling the end of multilateral commitments that for decades served as the first line of defense against emerging biological threats.
Those cuts have direct biosecurity consequences. For decades, U.S. investments in overseas laboratory networks, surveillance systems, health workforce training, and supply chain infrastructure worked to create early warning capacity. That architecture has been substantially dismantled. Fragile health systems abroad that fail to catch outbreaks early mean that cross-border threats spread unchecked and the likelihood that dangerous pathogens reach American shores increases. More than 110 CEOs and board chairs of U.S. biopharma and life sciences companies warned in an open letter that the administration’s proposed reductions to NIH, NSF, and other key science agencies would have a “catastrophic effect on the advancement of biomedical and biotechnology capabilities in the United States,” including in the development of medical countermeasures essential for biodefense.
Bolstering Biodefense Coordination
The bill’s unanimous committee passage signals rare bipartisan consensus on the urgency of biological threat preparedness as a diplomatic priority. By institutionalizing biodefense as a formal priority within NATO and with key non-NATO partners, and by requiring the State Department to develop written strategies and brief Congress on a defined timeline, the legislation would embed biological threat cooperation more deeply into U.S. foreign policy architecture than current arrangements provide.
Sources and further reading:
H.R. 7653, Biodefense Diplomacy Enhancement Act — Congressional Budget Office
H.R. 7653 Bill Text and Legislative History — Congress.gov
Biomedical Leaders Warn of ‘Catastrophic’ Fallout from Trump-Vance Research Cuts — Global Biodefense