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Last verified: September 5, 2026. The Department of Energy does not publish rule changes affecting foreign national access in the Federal Register — DOE Order 142.3 is an internal DOE directive, not a notice-and-comment regulation, and the Sensitive and Other Designated Countries List (SCL) it relies on is not itself a single public document. This page explains what the current order (DOE O 142.3C, approved March 31, 2026) requires, what “sensitive country” actually triggers for a visiting researcher or a subcontract, and where the pieces of the list that are public can be checked directly.
What the Sensitive and Other Designated Countries List actually is
DOE Order 142.3C defines the SCL as a list “DOE developed, maintained, and utilized in support of DOE policies and procedures guiding Departmental interactions with foreign nationals,” used primarily to flag when a foreign national’s access request needs additional internal review. It is not one document with one URL. It is assembled from three legally distinct pieces, and only two of those three are published anywhere a research office can check without a DOE point of contact:
- State Sponsors of Terrorism (SST) — the U.S. Department of State’s public list, currently Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria, published at state.gov/state-sponsors-of-terrorism.
- Countries of Risk (COR) — determined by DOE’s Under Secretary for Science in consultation with the Under Secretary of Energy, the Under Secretary for Nuclear Security, and the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, informed by the Director of National Intelligence’s Worldwide Threat Assessment. DOE publishes this list at energy.gov/science/office-science-laboratory-policy-research-security.
- Other Designated Countries — countries DOE adds to the SCL for reasons other than a COR or SST designation. The order does not point to a public list for this category; it is maintained internally by DOE’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation together with the Cognizant Secretarial Officers.
A fourth category, Covered Foreign Nations (CFN) — the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the Islamic Republic of Iran — is defined directly in the order itself, not on the SCL, and carries the strictest rule of all four categories.
What each category triggers
The order applies whichever category carries the most restrictions when a foreign national has more than one country affiliation. The differences are not cosmetic — they change who can approve the request, how long an approval can run, and in one case whether approval is possible at all.
| Category | What triggers it | Access duration cap | Approval / extra requirements |
|---|---|---|---|
| Covered Foreign Nation (CFN) | Citizen or agent of the PRC, Russia, DPRK, or Iran | Absolutely prohibited at national-security laboratories (Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia), nuclear-weapons-production facilities, and naval-nuclear-propulsion sites | No internal administrative approval can override this. Only a case-by-case waiver from the Secretary of Energy (or, for NNSA sites, the NNSA Administrator) with written certification to the congressional defense committees, under FY2025 NDAA §3112(c), can permit access |
| State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) | National of a country on the State Department’s SST list | 2 years continuous | Final approval limited to the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, or an Under Secretary for non-LPR nationals; mandatory indices check before access begins |
| Country of Risk (COR) | National of a country on DOE’s published Countries-of-Risk list | 2 years continuous if the access also reaches an S&T Risk Matrix-restricted technology; otherwise the standard review applies | Enhanced review and specialized vetting by DOE’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, but only when the requested technology is on the current S&T Risk Matrix; a COR national may not host another SCL national |
| Other Designated Country | Country DOE has separately added to the SCL | 2 years continuous | Cannot serve as the direct supervisor of a cleared contractor employee absent a waiver from the cognizant DOE element |
| Non-Sensitive Country National | Not on the SCL, not COR, not SST | 4 years continuous (the standard cap) | Standard access-request review; no enhanced vetting requirement from this order alone |
Every duration figure above is a maximum for a single continuous approval, not a guarantee — an access request is still capped by the foreign national’s actual lawful immigration status, whichever is shorter (DOE O 142.3C §4, and Attachment 1 §3, current version).
The approval process for a visiting researcher
A DOE foreign national access request has to be entered into the Foreign Access Central Tracking System (FACTS) and approved before access starts — not applied for retroactively. The specific steps and paperwork scale with which category above applies:
- Every request needs the technology or information to be accessed, the physical area involved, a justification tied to a specific DOE/NNSA program, and proposed start/end dates within the duration caps above.
- Non-SST, non-COR foreign nationals doing research at a laboratory must also submit a curriculum vitae covering every employment activity back to age 18, with no time gaps over the past 10 years, plus a signed certification that the CV is complete and accurate.
- SST- or COR-affiliated individuals additionally require a Supplemental Foreign National Access Questionnaire entered into FACTS, and a mandatory indices check valid for two years from completion.
- Lead time is real and category-dependent. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s published guidance for its own FNAP process asks for SCL-affiliated requests 60 calendar days before the desired appointment or visit date, versus roughly 21 calendar days for a non-SCL foreign national visitor once documents are submitted — and DOE’s own order separately recommends submitting an enhanced-review COR request 45 days ahead of the start date, since indices checks are part of that review. A visiting appointment planned around a semester start date, not the DOE approval timeline, is the single most common way these requests miss their own start date.
- The foreign national cannot begin the work while the request is pending. The University of Georgia’s sponsored-programs office states this plainly in its own DOE guidance: participation cannot start until the access determination is made, which is why research offices push this review to the front of onboarding rather than treating it as paperwork that can catch up later.
- Approved access is not permanent. It runs against the 2-year or 4-year caps above and is reassessed at each renewal against whatever the S&T Risk Matrix says at that later date — not the matrix in effect when the original approval was granted.
How this flows down to a subcontract
DOE Order 142.3C’s Contractor Requirements Document (CRD) is explicit that the obligation does not stop at the prime: “Regardless of the performer of the work, the contractor is responsible for complying with the requirements of this CRD. The contractor is responsible for flowing down the requirements of this CRD to subcontractors at any tier to the extent necessary to ensure the contractor’s compliance with the requirements.” In practice this means a subaward or subcontract under a DOE prime award needs the CRD’s foreign-national-access requirements written into its own terms whenever a subrecipient’s personnel could touch DOE sites, information, or technology — the prime institution’s compliance depends on the sub actually doing the same access-request review, not merely promising to.
This is a different requirement from DOE’s research-security training rule
DOE O 142.3 governs access — whether a specific foreign national may reach a specific DOE site, dataset, or technology, and for how long. It is separate from the DOE Research Security Training Requirement (Policy Flash PF 2025-04 / FAL 2025-02), which requires “covered individuals” named on a DOE R&D financial-assistance application to complete research-security training in the 12 months before that application is submitted. A foreign national who is a covered individual on a DOE R&D grant application can be subject to both: the training certification under PF 2025-04 for the application itself, and, separately, a DOE O 142.3 access approval if their role also requires reaching a DOE site or DOE-held information or technology. Completing one does not satisfy the other, and neither this order nor DOE’s PF 2025-04 summary states that either requirement substitutes for the other.
Where each of these requirements is written down
| Requirement | Authority | Where to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Foreign national access approval process, category-by-category rules, subcontractor flow-down | DOE Order 142.3C, “Unclassified Foreign National Access Program,” approved 3-31-2026 | DOE Order 142.3C (energy.gov) |
| Countries of Risk designation | DOE Office of Science, informed by the Director of National Intelligence’s Worldwide Threat Assessment | energy.gov/science/office-science-laboratory-policy-research-security |
| State Sponsors of Terrorism designation | U.S. Department of State | state.gov/state-sponsors-of-terrorism |
| Covered Foreign Nation prohibition on admittance | FY2025 National Defense Authorization Act, Public Law 118-159, §3112(c) (December 23, 2024) | DOE O 142.3C §4.n implements this statute directly — see the order above |
| DOE Research Security Training Requirement (separate from access approval) | DOE Policy Flash PF 2025-04 / Financial Assistance Letter FAL 2025-02 | CASRAI: DOE Research Security Training Requirement |
What this page cannot tell you
Three things decide your specific case, and none of them are answerable from a general page, because DOE does not publish the full picture in one place and reviews requests individually:
- Which category your visiting researcher’s country falls into today. The Other Designated Countries portion of the SCL has no public URL, and even the published COR and SST lists can change without a Federal Register notice or any advance public announcement — DOE revised this entire order (142.3B to 142.3C) on March 31, 2026, and a prior revision happened in 2022.
- Whether your specific access request touches a Science and Technology Risk Matrix-restricted area. That matrix is what turns a routine Country-of-Risk request into an enhanced-review one, and it is not reproduced in the order itself.
- Whether your project qualifies for one of the order’s narrow exemptions — information already public or broadly shared in the scientific community, or work under a named international collaboration agreement (the order lists DUNE/LBNF, PIP-II, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory as examples) — which can remove the access-request requirement entirely for that specific information.
Checking this against the current guidance
The category your researcher’s country falls into, and whether your specific technology sits on the current S&T Risk Matrix, both depend on facts this page cannot resolve in general terms.
It searches CASRAI’s indexed corpus of research-administration guidance and cites the passage behind each claim, so you can open the source and check it rather than take its word — and it says so when the corpus does not cover something instead of guessing. Two questions a day are free while you are signed out, no account and no card. Everything CASRAI publishes stays free to read. Your first free question is the one in that link; save the second for the part that depends on your own facts — which SCL category your visitor’s country actually falls into today, or whether your project qualifies for the international-collaboration exemption above.
Frequently asked questions
When a visiting researcher needs both a DOE Order 142.3 access approval and a separate export-control (ITAR/EAR) deemed-export review, do the two run as one process or two, and which has to clear first?
DOE O 142.3 does not itself say. It governs access to DOE sites, information, and technology; a deemed-export determination under the ITAR or EAR is a separate legal question about releasing controlled technology to a foreign national (see CASRAI’s guide to “U.S. person” status and foreign national access in export-controlled research), run by regulations DOE O 142.3 doesn’t reference or fold in. In practice the two reviews commonly run in parallel starting at the proposal stage, but the order gives no sequencing rule, and which office owns coordinating them — the sponsored-programs office, export control office, or the DOE program manager — is an institutional policy question this page can’t answer for every institution.
Does a DOE Order 142.3 access approval satisfy the DOE Research Security Training Requirement, or are they two separate things?
They are two separate requirements that can both apply to the same person. DOE O 142.3 governs whether a foreign national may access a DOE site, information, or technology, reviewed and approved through FACTS. The DOE Research Security Training Requirement (PF 2025-04 / FAL 2025-02) is a training-completion certification tied to naming a “covered individual” on a DOE R&D financial-assistance application. A foreign national who is both a covered individual on the application and someone who needs site or technology access can be subject to both requirements at once; completing one is not documented anywhere as satisfying the other.
Is DOE’s Sensitive Country List published in the Federal Register?
No. DOE Order 142.3 is an internal Departmental directive, not a notice-and-comment regulation, so it and the Sensitive and Other Designated Countries List it relies on are not Federal Register documents. Two of the three components behind the SCL are separately public — the State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list and DOE’s own published Countries-of-Risk list — but the Other Designated Countries component and the SCL as a single combined list are not published at any public URL DOE’s own order references.
What happens if a foreign national on a DOE-funded subaward is from a Covered Foreign Nation?
Citizens or agents of the four Covered Foreign Nations (PRC, Russia, DPRK, Iran) are absolutely barred from national-security laboratories, nuclear-weapons-production facilities, and naval-nuclear-propulsion sites, regardless of internal DOE approval — this is a statutory prohibition under the FY2025 NDAA, not a matter DOE’s own administrative process can waive. The only path around it is a case-by-case waiver from the Secretary of Energy or the NNSA Administrator, which requires written certification to the congressional defense committees before it takes effect.
Does the subcontractor flow-down requirement apply no matter how far down the chain a subaward sits?
Yes, to the extent necessary for the prime contractor to stay in compliance. DOE O 142.3C’s Contractor Requirements Document states the prime “is responsible for flowing down the requirements of this CRD to subcontractors at any tier” — it does not cap the flow-down at a single tier, so a sub-subaward with foreign-national access exposure still needs the same requirements written into its terms.
Sources
- DOE Order 142.3C, “Unclassified Foreign National Access Program,” approved March 31, 2026 — energy.gov/documents/foreign-national-access-program
- DOE Office of Science, Countries of Risk — energy.gov/science/office-science-laboratory-policy-research-security
- U.S. Department of State, State Sponsors of Terrorism — state.gov/state-sponsors-of-terrorism
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Foreign National Access Program FAQs — securityandemergencyservices.lbl.gov
- University of Georgia Office of Research, Department of Energy Foreign National Approval — research.uga.edu
