President Donald Trump and his administration are making the right move by targeting the funding that universities receive from foreign nations. For too long, foreign actors have influenced our higher education to protect their interests and influence America from within our own borders without much oversight.
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) published their findings last month that American universities have received foreign funding in just the last four years equal to the foreign funding they received in the previous 40 years altogether. From the period of 2021 to 2024, universities received nearly $29 billion.
The countries that contributed the largest foreign donations to American universities during this time were Germany at $3.3 billion, China at $2.3 billion, and Qatar at $2 billion. Harvard University received the most foreign funding at $3.2 billion with Cornell and Carnegie Mellon following at approximately $2.8 billion each.
The overall amount of foreign funding that these universities receive is potentially much higher. Institutions of higher learning have typically failed to report the total amount of foreign contributions they receive despite federal law mandating this responsibility.
In September, the National Association of Scholars published a report that universities did not disclose at least $1 billion received as foreign contributions. The group found that this unreported funding was “more likely to come from authoritarian countries, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.”
In Trump’s first term, his administration discovered approximately $6.5 billion in undisclosed foreign funding to universities. The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations additionally published a report in 2019 finding that 70% of schools that were required by law to report the foreign contributions that they received did not report their funding from China. This is breaking the law.
Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 mandates institutions of higher learning to “disclose semiannually to the U.S. Department of Education any gifts received from and contracts with a foreign source that, alone or combined, are valued at $250,000 or more in a calendar year.”
The reason for this law is to prevent or at least expose when foreign actors attempt to influence America’s universities and as a result our nation’s students. This has unfortunately been known to happen.
The Education Department (ED) is currently investigating “alleged connections between foreign malign actors and student groups on campus.” The Free Press reported that the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force was “scrutinizing connections between both student groups and faculty who have ties to universities such as Birzeit in the West Bank, which Israeli officials have previously accused of having ties to Hamas.”
Harvard University even had a research partnership with Birzeit University that was just recently paused.
In recent decades, China has provided funding to universities as well as K-12 schools to create so-called “Confucius Institutes” to teach students about Chinese language and culture. These Confucius Institutes were widely criticized as promoting propaganda to U.S. students in favor of the Chinese Communist Party. Universities often did not report funding for these programs.
As a result of universities inappropriately hiding foreign contributions, Trump and his administration have taken swift action to ensure universities properly follow the law going forward.
Trump signed an executive order in April that mandates universities to follow the law and timely disclose the foreign funding that they receive. Institutions that refuse to comply will potentially have their federal grants revoked. The White House explained that “only about 300 of the approximately 6,000 U.S. institutions” self-report their amount of foreign funding each year.
The Trump administration is rightfully taking this issue seriously.
ED opened an investigation into the University of Pennsylvania last week “after a review of the university’s foreign reports revealed inaccurate and incomplete disclosures.” The department is claiming that the university “failed to disclose any foreign funding until February of 2019.” This is following announcements in April that ED is looking into Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley for similar reasons.
The American people have a right to know when foreign nations are attempting to influence our country from within for the benefit of their own interests. Universities have not abided by the law and should suffer the consequences of hiding foreign influence from the public.
The Trump administration is making the right call by enforcing the law that has already been statute for decades and by holding universities that previously refused accountable.
Casey Ryan is a writer and investigative reporter at Defending Education.
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