The Justice Department is ending a Trump-era initiative to counter national-security threats from China after it led to a series of failed prosecutions of academics that sowed broad distrust in the higher-education community.

The agency will set a high bar for cases alleging that U.S. scientists lied to the federal agencies that fund their research about their ties to China, Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen said in a Wednesday briefing with reporters. He said the department would now pursue only...

The Justice Department is ending a Trump-era initiative to counter national-security threats from China after it led to a series of failed prosecutions of academics that sowed broad distrust in the higher-education community.

The agency will set a high bar for cases alleging that U.S. scientists lied to the federal agencies that fund their research about their ties to China, Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen said in a Wednesday briefing with reporters. He said the department would now pursue only instances where prosecutors perceive clear criminal misconduct with clear connections to U.S. national- or economic-security interests.

Mr. Olsen also said prosecutors would focus on cases in which the Justice Department saw reason to protect sensitive U.S. information; protect U.S. institutions that are “vital to economic security,” including research institutions and critical infrastructure; and defend “democratic values and institutions against authoritarian regimes,” which he said would go beyond China to include Russia, Iran and North Korea.

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The previous cases brought under the 2018 program known as the “China Initiative” were based on real, serious concerns, Mr. Olsen said, adding that he didn’t find any evidence of prejudice influencing the agency’s decisions. However, he said that “fundamentally, I do not think that the initiative is the best approach in light of the threat landscape that we see.”

The initiative covered a range of national-security concerns related to the Chinese government, but part of it drew criticism from Asian Americans and civil-rights groups that said it potentially fueled racism and cast American scientists with ties to China as spies. Some high-profile prosecutions collapsed, and many academics criticized cases that they said treated paperwork violations as criminal acts.

In the first such case to go before a jury, a federal judge in September acquitted a University of Tennessee, Knoxville professor, Anming Hu. Mr. Hu had been accused of hiding his China ties when applying for research grants to work on a National Aeronautics and Space Administration project. The judge said that the rules governing the research awards were confusing and that prosecutors had provided no evidence that the professor intended to deceive NASA.

“By grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric, we helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country—or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familiar ties to China differently,” Mr. Olsen is expected to say in a speech later Wednesday, according to his prepared remarks.

The changes are also part of a broader shift within the Justice Department to look beyond criminal prosecutions and better address what U.S. officials describe as some of the nation’s most pressing national-security threats.

Last week, for example, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a speech that federal prosecutors and investigators would look for ways to disrupt cybercrimes before they happen, instead of waiting to charge perpetrators afterward. Those efforts, she said, would include seizing servers used to carry out attacks or providing a type of key to help victims whose data is encrypted during an attack.

In speaking to reporters, Mr. Olsen said he expected the department to continue bringing some of the types of cases that had been brought under the China Initiative. He pointed in particular to a 2020 case in which prosecutors had also charged a group of people who allegedly harassed and threatened a New Jersey couple to return to China.

The more controversial part of the effort involved cases against roughly two dozen academics charged since 2019 with allegedly lying to the U.S. government about their China affiliations.

Some of those cases have resulted in convictions, including of Harvard chemistry professor Charles Lieber, who was found guilty in December of lying about his participation in the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents program aimed at wooing foreign experts. But prosecutors have dropped others after problems with their evidence, including in January against Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen.

Prosecutors dropped charges in January against MIT professor Gang Chen, who said that authorities had miscalculated in part over unfamiliarity with research methods.

Photo: Kayana Szymczak for The Wall Street Journal

Prosecutors filed only one new such case since Mr. Hu’s acquittal after his trial—against a civilian professor at the Air War College on Maxwell Air Force Base who pleaded guilty in October to lying about his relationship with a government official in China.

In January, a senior FBI official,

Patrick Shiflett, told a group of physicists at the American Physical Society that while the FBI remained concerned about threats to the security of U.S. research emanating from China, the agency was taking stock of the recent court losses. He said the Federal Bureau of Investigation was adjusting its strategy to emphasize regulatory solutions rather than criminal ones to counter those concerns.

“We also recognize that the prosecutions that don’t end in convictions make the research community really question the FBI’s actions and really erodes the trust that we have,” Mr. Shiflett, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences, said at an online conference. “The FBI cannot succeed if the research community won’t listen to the threat messaging.”

Write to Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com