/// Who We Are ///
Built By People Who Have Seen The Threat Firsthand
ABI's leaders spent their careers tracking how predatory states move on America's critical technologies. They ran the assessments and briefed the decisions that followed. This is not secondhand. The patterns they watched for years are now visible in the medicines Americans depend on. ABI brings together leaders from intelligence, defense, diplomacy, and public health, alongside the partners who can document the threat in the open. Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Ambassador to China Gary Locke and former House Financial Services Chairman Patrick McHenry serve as Senior Advisors.
/// Leadership ///
Executive Director
Jennifer A. Crook
Executive Director, American Biosecurity Initiative
Jennifer Crook is a retired CIA clandestine operations officer. Over more than 25 years across the U.S. Intelligence Community, foreign governments, congressional oversight, and the defense and homeland security sectors, she led intelligence operations, threat assessments, and strategic planning. She worked where the country's gravest threats are confronted, arming policy-makers with the clear, factual intelligence those choices demand.
For the last decade of her career, she led Agency China-focused work on threats to U.S. emerging technology, intellectual property, supply chains, and data. As Chief of Targeting and Data Exploitation, she built the Agency's first combined risk identification and data science program, integrating advanced analytics into threat mapping alongside the FBI, NSA, the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, and foreign intelligence partners to protect U.S. critical infrastructure.
Her decision to lead ABI comes from a conviction that U.S. national security depends on the availability, safety, and continued innovation of American medicine. The patterns she tracked for years, including state-directed acquisition, compelled data sharing, intellectual property theft, and military-civil fusion, are now visible across the medicines Americans depend on. The national security community has not organized around this problem. ABI exists to change that, and she leads it because she has spent her career on the front lines of this threat and knows what is at stake.
/// Senior Advisors ///
They Have Made These Decisions Before
ABI's senior advisors have run the agencies and written the laws that determine whether America discovers its own medicines and where it makes them. They joined because they reached ABI's conclusion on their own. The surest protection for America's medicine supply is a stronger America, built at home and extended through trusted allies.
Gary Locke
Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Ambassador to China
Gary Locke governed Washington State from 1997 to 2005, led the Commerce Department from 2009 to 2011, and represented the United States in Beijing from 2011 to 2014. At Commerce he ran export controls and trade enforcement, the policies that decide which American technology travels and where it lands. In Beijing he watched a national biotechnology strategy take shape from inside the country pursuing it. That gives him standing on the question ABI exists to answer, which is how America competes without walling itself off.
“I saw firsthand how seriously China takes biotechnology and medicine. The United States needs to be just as serious. We should be strengthening what America does best — discovering new medicines, bringing them to patients, and making more of them here at home.”
Patrick McHenry
Former Chairman, House Financial Services Committee
Patrick McHenry represented North Carolina's 10th District for twenty years and chaired the House Financial Services Committee, where capital formation was his subject. American medicine moves along a chain that runs from federal research through private investment to a patient, and the investment link is the one policy breaks most easily. He knows how that chain is built and what severs it.
“America leads the world in discovering medicines because our system lets capital and science find each other. That advantage took decades to build, and protecting it requires a strategy that lasts longer than any one Congress or administration.”
ABI is assembling leaders from government, finance, health care, intelligence, trade, manufacturing, and national security. What binds them is a shared reading of the pressure on American medicine and a commitment to an answer that builds American capacity rather than retreating from the world.
Anyone interested in joining as an advisor can use the form below.
/// What We Stand For ///
We Compete By Building Strength
Five principles guide every position the American Biosecurity Initiative takes. Two objectives focus the work. They hold one line. The threat is real. Broad, indiscriminate restriction is the wrong tool. The work that matters is rebuilding American strength.
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01
Clearly Communicate Threats, Foreign and Domestic
The challenge comes from two directions. Predatory statecraft abroad and policy erosion at home both weaken American biosecurity. Sanitizing either produces bad policy or surrenders the strongest argument available.
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02
Do No Harm to Domestic Capacity. Unleash the Private Market.
No policy should weaken America's ability to research, develop, or make its own medicines. The private market carries discovery to patients. Protect the capital, research base, and talent the ecosystem runs on.
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03
Solidify Leadership Through Trusted Networks
Domestic capability is the foundation. Trusted partners, shared standards, and redundancy across allied networks make it durable. American presence carries American standards.
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04
Protect the U.S. Workforce and Retain the Best and Brightest
The scientific workforce is one of the country's most durable advantages. Screening people by ethnicity or national origin treats that advantage as a threat and hands adversaries a recruiting argument.
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05
Value and Invest in Medicine as a National Security Asset
America funds its defense assets through public investment paired with private capital. Medicine has not been treated as one of them. Price controls drain the development side of that partnership and leave the country exposed to adversaries who control the supply Americans depend on. A country that cannot secure its own medicines has surrendered its own defense.
The Two Objectives
Stop penalizing domestic capacity
Defend American presence in global markets
/// Partners ///
Who We Work With
ABI partners with think tanks, research organizations, and academic institutions that study the threat and shape the policy response. Their analysis grounds our work and their independence strengthens it.
Research Institutions and Think Tanks
Independent analysis of supply chains, biosecurity, and strategic competition.
Universities and Academic Centers
The scientific and policy research base that keeps ABI's case anchored in evidence.
Professional and Industry Associations
Organizations that represent the workforce and the sectors at the center of American biosecurity.
We are expanding this network. Organizations that share the analysis are invited to join it.
/// Join the Effort ///
Add Your Name
Interested in advising ABI, or in partnering as an organization? Tell us who you are and we will be in touch.