UPDATE: On Dec. 18, President Donald Trump signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act of 2026, which includes a provision instructing to the Director of National Intelligence, in coordination with the heads of intelligence agencies, to conduct a declassification review of COVID origins intelligence and to publicly release intelligence information.
Original story:
For nearly six years, the fight to see what U.S. spy agencies really know about COVID-19’s origins has played out in courtrooms, long FOIA queues and heavily redacted PDFs.
Now, it’s written into a defense bill.
Tucked deep inside the sprawling National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 is a short, but charged provision: “Declassification of intelligence and additional transparency measures relating to the COVID–19 pandemic.”
The key language of the bill – which is set for votes in the House and Senate this week – mandates the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) jointly to conduct a declassification review with the heads of federal intelligence agencies on two main fronts: intelligence about coronavirus research in Chinese labs, including information about those who funded it and what’s known about risky “gain-of-function” work performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and intelligence on Beijing’s control of information about the pandemic, including how Chinese officials may have blocked, delayed or shaped early narratives about the pandemic’s origins and early spread.
The declassification review must be performed within 180 days of the bill’s passage. Afterward, the DNI must “release publicly the intelligence products” identified for disclosure, with only those redactions needed to protect intelligence sources and methods – and that are agreed upon by the agency where the intelligence originated. The DNI also must submit an unredacted version of the declassified intelligence products to congressional intelligence committees.
Finding out what the Intelligence Community knows about how the pandemic started could help shape everything from how laboratories are regulated to how risky virology research is overseen – and how seriously governments take the possibility that the next outbreak might start behind the locked doors of a research lab. Disclosing such information publicly could help policymakers determine what guardrails should be built to stop the next pandemic from happening, some biosecurity experts have said.
For years, watchdogs and newsrooms have chased the intelligence community’s paper trail on the pandemic, seeking cables, genomic analyses, early-warning reports and internal deliberations among a wish-list of secret documents. They’ve submitted FOIA requests with nearly every major intelligence agency, then followed those requests into federal court when agencies responded with delays, denials or pages full of redactions.
Even when Congress approved the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 – ordering the DNI to declassify information about possible links between the WIV and the start of the pandemic – the public got little more than a thin ODNI summary outlining where each intelligence agency stood on the issue. The report had them falling into two camps, with most agencies backing a natural origins hypothesis and others favoring a scenario that SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that caused the pandemic – escaped from a lab. But the underlying evidence, assessments, analysts’ emails and technical analyses have mostly remained hidden from the public.
Now, with the pending defense authorization bill, Congress is poised to try a second time, demanding that intelligence agencies come clean to the public on what they know about the beginnings of a pandemic that killed more than 20 million people worldwide, according to some estimates.
Declassifying the raw record
The operative language on declassifying COVID origins intelligence is contained more than 2,200-pages into the bill, within the section that sets the rules and marching orders for the U.S. Intelligence Community, and where Congress signs off on spy budgets, artificial intelligence policies and whistleblower protections.
This fall, intelligence committees in both the House and the Senate produced respective intelligence authorization bills that hammered out much of the language that now populates that section tucked deep into the defense bill. One of the main differences between the two initial versions was the House proposal contained a provision to ensure that the scope of declassified intelligence included “the possibility of zoonotic origins of COVID-19” – a clause that survived in the final compromised language heading to floor votes.
What didn’t survive was a requirement in the Senate version for the DNI to declassify “the names of researchers who conducted research into coronaviruses, as well as their current locations of employment.”
The compromise version that’s now set for adoption also tightens the requirement to publicly release intelligence agencies’ classified products, rather than a report about them, as was initially called for by the Senate bill. That means that Congress is no longer asking for another polished summary, but telling the intelligence community to go back to the raw record and decide what can be declassified.
To date, the only full-blown assessment by a U.S. intelligence element to surface publicly came earlier this year, when U.S. Right To Know pried loose a five-year-old genomic assessment of SARS-CoV-2 prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence.
Obtained through a FOIA lawsuit, the June 2020 analysis took the form of a technical slide presentation prepared by three government scientists who walked through the virus’ genetic characteristics and laid out the WIV’s research capabilities to conclude it was plausible that SARS-CoV-2 was “a lab-engineered virus” that “escaped from containment.”
That view never appeared in the ODNI’s public report under the 2023 law, which leaned on agency confidence levels and downplayed the idea that SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered. It lived instead in a classified channel, seen by some policymakers but not by the public whose lives were upended by the virus.
The latest declassification requirement is, in many ways, a response to that gap between what exists on paper and what people outside the system are allowed to see.
It’s also not the only part of the bill that looks ahead to lessons from the pandemic. Another provision instructs the national intelligence director to establish a policy to “streamlin(e) the declassification or downgrading and sharing of intelligence information relating to biotechnological developments and threats,” including efforts by foreign adversaries to weaponize biological research. Aimed at future pandemics and bio-threats, it echoes the COVID clause – that Congress wants less of this intelligence kept secret from policymakers and the public.
Getting to see the evidence
Six years after the first cases in Wuhan, the origins of COVID remain unconfirmed. Although the Trump administration created a flashy webpage on the White House website earlier this year titled, “Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID,” it has released no substantial new evidence proving that the virus emerged from a laboratory, and the official position from the Intelligence Community remains that COVID-19’s origin is uncertain and contested. Some agencies still lean toward a natural spillover, others toward a lab incident, and several sit in the middle by expressing low confidence in their own assessments.
But the question is no longer just which hypothesis wins. It’s whether the public ever gets to see the evidence and debates that shaped those internal judgments. Such information could be helpful to form new policies that could prevent the next pandemic, some experts say.
Of the more than 200 public-records requests U.S. Right to Know has filed over the past six years on this subject, dozens remain open with U.S. intelligence agencies. Several requests have resulted in lawsuits against the FBI, CIA, DIA, ODNI and the Department of Energy. Even when judges order those agencies to hand over documents, many of the records arrive buried under redactions.
As of last week — seven months after requesting the DIA’s “latest assessment” on the origins of COVID — the agency has coughed up just 12 pages. It first claimed no such records existed. Only after a lawsuit did it turn over those 12 pages, 11 of which are so heavily redacted that almost nothing of substance can be read.
