Our picksThe Case for a National Security Budget | Google to Limit Targeted Political Ads | Weaponized Ticks, and more

‘Remain in Mexico’ policy faces internal critiques at House hearing (Tanvi Mistra, Roll Call)
Migration Protection Protocols spurs human rights violations, an asylum officer told Homeland Security panel

The Case for a National Security Budget (Brett Rosenberg and Jake Sullivan, Foreign Affairs)
Why a Better American Foreign Policy Requires a New Way of Paying for It

U.S. Senate Panel Sees a Standard Grant Application as Defense against Foreign Influence (Jeffrey Mervis, Science)
The university administrators who have long advocated for a standard grant application process across the U.S. government say it would save time and money. Today, an influential Senate panel offered another reason: to prevent the fruits of government-funded research from falling into the wrong hands.
How to deal with China’s transformation into a technological superpower is a front-burner issue for national policymakers. A new report by the intelligence panel of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs says federal research agencies have been tardy in responding to China’s aggressive moves, which are exemplified by its decadelong effort to recruit world-class scientists working in U.S. labs.

Trump Administration’s Failure to Follow Through on Huawei Ban Worries China Hawks (Joseph Marks, Washington Post)
The Trump administration’s failure to follow through on a key promise to punish Huawei is spiking fears among cybersecurity hawks.
The administration just issued a third three-month delay in blocking U.S. companies from doing business with the Chinese telecom firm. And those who support the administration’s get-tough argument worry it might abandon the plan entirely.
Experts are concerned the delay could signal to Beijing that the United States — which has banned Huawei from its own 5G networks and from government systems — is unwilling to take more decisive action to punish Chinese spying and theft of U.S. companies’ intellectual property.

House Orders Pentagon to Say If It Weaponized Ticks and Released Them (John M. Donnelly, Roll Call)
The order requires the agency to say if it experimented with insects for use as a biological weapon between 1950 and 1975

Google to Limit Targeted Political Ads as Silicon Valley Grapples with 2020 (Zach Montellaro, Politico)
The policy is set to go into effect in the U.S. on Jan. 6, the company announced.

The Most Lethal Terrorist Groups in the World (Dominic Dudley, Forbes)
The number of deaths from terrorism fell again in 2018, the fourth year in a row that has happened. In 2018, 15,952 people lost their lives in terrorist attacks according to the latest Global Terrorism Index, released by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) today.
That is a large number, but it is less than half what it was at its peak in 2014, when 32,685 people lost their lives.
However, some of them are at least less deadly now than in the recent past. Deaths attributed to Islamic State, for example, declined 69% in 2018 to 1,328 and the number of attacks by the fundamentalist group fell by 63%. Two years earlier, in 2016, Islamic State had been responsible for more than 9,000 deaths.