“The framework is the caseload,” a senior official said. “We govern by charging people.”
WASHINGTON—The Department of Justice on Tuesday established a permanent Office of Pandemic-Era Accountability, a standing prosecutorial unit dedicated to indicting the virologists associated with the lab-leak theory, and designated the office’s existence as the federal government’s official biosafety policy going forward.
The move formalizes a wave of indictments, subpoenas, and debarments that have hit scientists affiliated with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since April. Where previous administrations proposed rules governing dangerous pathogen research, officials said, the new office would instead continue charging the people who conducted it.
“The public has been asking for a comprehensive national strategy on gain-of-function research,” said one Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the strategy is a filing cabinet. “This is it. The strategy is the filing cabinet.”
How the Lab-Leak Prosecutions Became the Rulebook
The Office of Pandemic-Era Accountability will operate out of a converted records annex and is authorized to pursue what its charter describes as “every remaining holdover from the prior era,” a category officials confirmed has no defined endpoint. A 31-page founding memo lists forty-one names, a laminated flowchart, and no proposed regulations.
Asked which specific experiments the office would now permit or prohibit going forward, a spokesperson said the office does not do that. “We don’t write down what’s allowed,” the spokesperson said. “We find out what someone did and then we decide. That’s the framework. The framework is retroactive.”
The distinction matters, officials explained, because a written rule can be followed, whereas an indictment cannot be prepared for. “A guideline tells a scientist how to stay compliant,” said a second official, who requested anonymity to describe the enforcement philosophy candidly. “We prefer they find out afterward. It keeps the deterrent fresh.”
The Office That Replaces the Policy
The executive order issued last year directing federal agencies to draft new gain-of-function rules by the end of the summer, and a national tracking strategy by the end of the year, was quietly reclassified Tuesday as “achieved.” Officials noted that no rules were written and no tracking system was built, and said the reclassification reflected a decision to count the prosecutions as the deliverable.
“People keep asking where the biosafety policy is,” the first official said. “It’s in Detroit. It’s in a courtroom in Detroit. The policy is a docket number.” Officials said the lab-leak prosecutions were expected to expand along the same lines as the administration’s other accountability initiatives, with the docket “growing indefinitely, which we consider the metric of success.”
The office’s founding charter contains a single stated goal, a spokesperson confirmed, printed on its cover page in full: to ensure that the scientists responsible are held accountable. Asked whether the office would take any step to prevent a future pandemic, the spokesperson said that fell outside its mandate. “That would be policy,” the spokesperson said. “We’re accountability. Different building.”
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