US Universities Don't Like Unmasking Their Foreign Donors. A New Trump Order Aims To Make Them.
For decades, federal law has required U.S. universities to disclose the sources of large foreign donations to the federal government. But the Biden administration sparsely enforced the law, allowing foreign nationals from adversarial countries to funnel cash to top American schools and stay anonymous.
In some cases, it's unclear whether the schools themselves are keeping close track of the foreign money they accept. In early February, the Washington Free Beacon filed state records requests with 11 public universities for the identities of foreign donors that gave the schools more than $20,000 in the past two years. Some, like the University of California, Los Angeles and University of Michigan, said it would take months of searching or more than $1,500 in fees to provide an answer.
That won't fly with President Donald Trump, who last week signed an executive order outlining more robust enforcement of the Higher Education Act of 1965's foreign donor disclosure requirements. In some cases, it already appears to be spurring action. Another recipient of the Free Beacon's records requests, the University of California, Berkeley, for weeks did not respond. On Friday, shortly after Trump signed the order and launched a foreign funding investigation into the school, it sent a list of major foreign donors from 2023 and 2024.
Trump's order calls on Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to "take appropriate steps to reverse or rescind any actions by the prior administration that permit higher education institutions to maintain improper secrecy regarding their foreign funding," a reference to the Biden administration's unusual policies that shielded foreign donors. Historically, the Department of Education disclosed foreign donor names in a public database. During the Biden administration, it stopped publishing names, instead only releasing the countries where each donation came from.
Such a policy is easy for foreign donors to exploit. From 2021 to 2025, U.S. universities raked in nearly a billion dollars from mystery donors in offshore tax havens like Bermuda, Guernsey, and the Cayman Islands, the Free Beacon reported. In some cases, the money actually came from China, as shown through state-level disclosures that include donors' names. At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, a $3 million gift from a donor in the Cayman Islands actually came from E-House Enterprise Holdings, a Chinese real estate company with a listed address in Hong Kong.
The Trump administration's foreign funding enforcement fight, then, could bring startling revelations regarding the size and scope of U.S. higher education funding that has come from China, Qatar, Russia, and other adversarial nations. It comes as lawmakers and watchdog groups raise concerns about the influence of foreign money and its link to rising extremism, terrorism support, and anti-Semitism on college campuses—as well as the potential for intellectual property theft and espionage activities by countries like China.
"Universities have failed to comply with foreign gift reporting requirements for too long," said Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of watchdog group Americans for Public Trust (APT). "This Executive Order sends a strong message that the era of noncompliance is over. American higher education is one of our most valuable assets and this order helps protect it from foreign influences and bad actors seeking to further anti-American agendas."
Colleges have reported receiving more than $60 billion in foreign funding since the federal disclosure law went into effect, according to APT. But the names of many of these contributors, particularly those who gave during the Biden administration, remain a mystery—and schools have fought to keep it this way.
In addition to Michigan, UCLA, and Berkeley, the Free Beacon in February requested foreign donor disclosures from the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Virginia, Eastern Michigan University, Arizona State University, and the University of Minnesota.
UCLA and UCSB said it would take at least three months to respond. Michigan said it would take 30 hours of work and $1,550. Penn State rejected the request. Eastern Michigan sent a list of foreign contractors but said "no public records exist matching your request for foreign donor information." Virginia directed the Free Beacon to the federal government's database, which does not include names for most of the school's foreign donations.
Arizona State, for its part, did not respond. Neither did Berkeley—until late Friday evening, hours after the Trump administration launched its foreign funding probe into the school. The subsequent list of donors Berkeley provided includes at least three Chinese nationals or entities. Among them is Duane Ziping Kuang, the founding managing partner of China-based venture capital firm Qiming Venture Partners, an early investor in ByteDance. He contributed $75,000 to Berkeley's business school between 2023 and 2024, according to the list.
Minnesota, which has for years maintained a relationship with the Chinese Communist Party-controlled Sun Yat-sen University, also provided a list. It's not always clear, however, if such disclosures are complete.
In 2019, the Trump administration probed six universities over foreign donors. It found that they failed to report more than $1.3 billion in foreign funds, including contracts with the CCP, funding from a Chinese company to develop "crowd surveillance" technology, and partnerships with the U.S.-blacklisted Russian company Kaspersky.
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