H.R. 3029: To amend the Research and Development, Competition, and Innovation Act to support nucleic acid screening, and for other purposes.

H.R. 3029 would put the federal government's standards lab to work on one basic question: how do you reliably spot dangerous synthetic DNA and RNA orders before they are filled?

The bill gives that job to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST. Instead of creating a new criminal penalty or outright ban, it funds research on how screening systems should work in practice—how accurate they are, how secure their databases are, and how labs and vendors can tell whether a screening tool is actually doing its job.

It also explicitly adds AI-related risk to NIST's biology standards work. That means the bill treats artificial intelligence as part of the biosecurity challenge, not a separate debate happening somewhere else.

The practical change is a federal push for common rules and testing, so the companies and institutions screening synthetic nucleic acid orders are not each improvising on their own.

To do that, NIST would have to convene a consortium that includes industry, universities, nonprofits, and customers. That group would update best practices for procurement screening and create roadmaps for the research NIST is supposed to carry out.

Congress would get a report within 18 months of the consortium's first meeting. The bill authorizes $5 million a year from 2027 through 2031—$25 million total—for standards, measurement research, and implementation guidance rather than direct enforcement.