About this Article

Neill Reid (inr[at]stsci.edu)

Published August 27, 2026

The U.S. Congress recently discussed enforcement of the Wolf Amendment (Section 1340 of Public Law 112-10) that prohibits NASA from using government funds to support bilateral activities involving the government of the People’s Republic of China and China-affiliated organizations.

These restrictions apply to investigators based in the People’s Republic of China irrespective of their nationality; they do not apply to Chinese nationals working in other countries.

Those discussions have led to consequences for STScI’s support of Hubble, Webb, Roman, and MAST:

1. STScI has implemented geographical location restrictions that prevent China-based users from accessing the Roman Research Nexus, TIKE, and JWebbinar science platforms. VPNs will not allow users to circumvent this block. All data holdings in MAST remain open access, but China-based users will not have access to compute resources available from our science platforms. Please plan your data access and research activities accordingly.
2. Hubble and Webb proposals that involve only investigators from institutions based in the United States and the People’s Republic of China are defined as bilateral cooperative projects. As such, they remain eligible to be reviewed by the Telescope Allocation Committee (TAC) and awarded telescope time. However, from Webb Cycle 6 and Hubble Cycle 35 forward, accepted bilateral cooperative programs are no longer eligible for grant funding. Further details are provided in the Key Policies section of the JWST Cycle 6 Call for Proposals.