Trump Executive Order Targets Foreign Funding in Higher Ed

The Trump administration is curbing foreign influence on campus. In an April 23 executive order, the White House directed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to require universities to report the source and purpose of non-domestic gifts, subjecting those that fail to comply to potential audits and investigations. The order, which comes after years of university noncompliance with federal law, will bring foreign funding out of the shadows.

The directive is a full-circle moment for the president. In Donald Trump’s first term, his administration found that several elite universities had collectively failed to report more than $6.5 billion in foreign funding from adversaries including China and Qatar. But even after those bombshell findings, schools continued to underreport non-domestic funding.

Last year, after filing more than 100 public records requests and comparing the information with universities’ disclosures, I found that universities had failed to report at least $1 billion in foreign funding during the Biden administration. And that’s likely the tip of the iceberg: my review covered only 70 mostly public institutions.

The new executive order empowers the White House to hold these noncompliant universities accountable. While the Higher Education Act requires colleges annually to report foreign gifts, grants, and contracts worth at least $250,000, the law did not include adequate enforcement mechanisms, such as audits and fines. Even when universities do disclose foreign gifts, current law does not require the Department of Education to disclose donor names or universities to report consistently a gift’s purpose. This information is important, because it allows us to identify, say, gifts that were nominally sent from the Cayman Islands but actually came from China. The new executive order suggests that the administration will make this information readily available going forward.

Now, the White House, Congress, and states need to act to cement this progress. First, the executive branch should restore the foreign-gift database, discontinued in the Biden administration’s final months, to enhance public awareness of universities’ funding. Congress should pass the DETERRENT Act, which lowers universities’ foreign-funding reporting threshold to $50,000 and creates a penalty structure for those that fail to comply. The bill has already passed the House, and the president would almost certainly sign it.

Finally, states should pass their own foreign-funds disclosure laws. Federal enforcement often varies with the president’s partisan affiliation. States shouldn’t rely on the political whims of the executive branch to ensure that their universities are free of malign foreign influence. State lawmakers can take matters into their own hands and pass straightforward legislation to protect their students from non-domestic actors.

American universities have allowed foreign influence to fester for too long. Trump’s executive order—and coordinated action from Congress and the states—will help restore their independence.

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