President Trump recently signed an executive order to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” Education Secretary Linda McMahon is now responsible for carrying out this order while managing the Department of Education’s core funding programs, which President Trump stated would not be affected by the order.
ED’s downsizing is already underway. The Trump administration initiated a reduction in force earlier this month, reducing its staffing by 50 percent or roughly 2,000 workers. With President Trump’s new order, ED must now review all of its programs and determine which programs and responsibilities should be ended and, for those that remain, identify other federal departments or agencies that could manage them.
Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently described the Department as a “middleman,” since its work involves distributing funding to states and school districts or managing postsecondary education grants and loans. However, Secretary McMahon and her team also oversee a national security program.
Under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, American colleges and universities must disclose foreign gifts and contracts totaling more than $250,000 to the Department of Education. In 2021, NSI fellow and former senior Department of Education official Dan Currell published a six-part series on the SCIF blog detailing the history of lax compliance and enforcement of Section 117 disclosures and the national security risks related to foreign influence in higher education.
To summarize, a bipartisan Senate investigation in 2019 exposed widespread noncompliance by colleges and universities, which the Chinese government had exploited. For example, the senators found that ED had last issued guidance to colleges and universities in 2004. Under the leadership of Secretary DeVos, ED stepped up enforcement by the end of the Trump administration. As a result, institutions disclosed $6.5 billion in previously unreported money.
However, after President Biden entered office, ED took no public action to investigate or enforce Section 117 disclosure rules. In 2024, the House Appropriations Committee included language in the report accompanying ED’s funding bill requiring information about ED’s limited enforcement of the law. The report also urged the Department to “modernize its College Foreign Gift and Contract Report website to allow disclosed information to be individually identified and compared and searchable and sortable by date received, type, date filed, and country of origin.” Instead, the Biden administration shut the website down.
ED has neglected to enforce this law at a time when it has become increasingly clear that foreign adversaries, including the Chinese government, have exploited American postsecondary education and the research enterprise. For example, a 2024 House report, “CCP on the Quad,” detailed extensive links between U.S. government-funded research and researchers at American colleges and universities working with researchers tied to the Chinese government. The report pointed to lax enforcement and compliance with disclosure rules as exacerbating the problem: “These undisclosed foreign gifts—likely hundreds of millions, if not billions in total—give PRC entities troubling influence without transparency and contribute to building the research relationships that pose risks to U.S. national security.”
Given this track record, it has become clear that the Department of Education should not be responsible for managing a national security program. Currell, who worked on Section 117 enforcement at the Department of Education, told me that "ED has no natural home for this kind of work. It's a domestic policy agency, and Section 117 is fundamentally about foreign influence and interference. If you search the ED org chart for a good place to put 117 enforcement, you won't find one. Most recently, it was housed in Federal Student Aid. That's as good a place as any - but Federal Student Aid has nothing whatsoever to do with foreign interference, and not surprisingly they did nothing to enforce the law."
Amending the law to transfer Section 117 enforcement authorities to the Department of Justice would improve national security and restore transparency and academic integrity on campus. Unlike the ED, the DOJ has a national security division and staff with the expertise and motivation to enforce laws that have implications for national security. Beyond this critical change for national security, a congressional reauthorization to transfer legal authorities from ED to another department would help the Trump administration enforce his new executive order.
The Department of Education has had nearly 40 years to enforce Section 117. It’s long past time to transfer this authority to a department that is prepared to enforce the law and hold colleges and universities accountable.
