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DOGE Should Improve Transparency About Foreign Payments to Colleges

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DOGE Should Improve Transparency About Foreign Payments to Colleges

February 20, 2025

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Here's a simple recommendation for the Department of Government Efficiency staff now working at the Department of Education: build a functional website dashboard of foreign payments to colleges and universities to expose foreign influence on American campuses.

Federal law requires American colleges and universities to disclose foreign payments totalling $250,000 or more to the U.S. Department of Education. But neither the Department of Education or Congress has done much to enforce this law over the past four decades (besides a short period of improved enforcement and public reporting at the end of the last Trump administration).

Between 2020 and 2024, the Department published an online website dashboard to help the public track payments to colleges and universities. But this well-intentioned effort had limitations, as we pointed out a few years ago. While Congress came close to strengthening disclosure rules and giving the federal government more power to enforce the law, the Biden administration actually chose to reduce enforcement. The Department apparently took no action to enforce Section 117 disclosures under former Secretary Cardona. The Biden administration even reduced the limited transparency of existing disclosures. Last summer, the Department of Education announced that it had eliminated the online dashboard: “As of June 2024, the former online data search and file repository at sites.ed.gov/foreigngifts have been decommissioned, and all of the spreadsheet data files hosted on that site have been migrated to this page.”

All that remains is a site where users can download Excel files with current and past databases of disclosed payments. The latest file, uploaded last October, includes a single sheet with more than 100,000 rows. As a result, anyone curious about gifts or contracts disclosed by a specific institution will need to be familiar with Excel formulas to make any sense of the data.

Why does the lack of transparency matter? Over the past six years, a series of congressional investigations and nonpartisan watchdog reviews have revealed that foreign adversaries, and in particular the People’s Republic of China, have been exploiting the openness of American postsecondary education and the lax security of the U.S. research enterprise.

In September, a joint investigation by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Education and Workforce Committee revealed that “hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. federal research funding over the last decade has contributed to China’s technological advancements and military modernization.” The Committees cited lax enforcement of disclosure rules of foreign payments to colleges and universities as a key contributing factor.

In 2024, the House Appropriations Committee’s report accompanying the funding bill for the education included language requiring the Department of Education to report to Congress how it was enforcing the transparency law and take steps to improve its public dashboard. Specifically, the Committee wrote:

The Department is urged 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. The Department is urged to implement technical improvements to its public database, including improving upload functionality by allowing institutions to batch upload one file with all required information. The Department is further encouraged to publish a database users guide, including information on how to edit an entry and how to report errors.

Instead, the Biden administration deleted the website.

Now, the Trump administration and the technology experts at DOGE have an opportunity to answer this congressional requirement. Former Secretary Betsy DeVos increased enforcement of the law during the last Trump administration, which resulted in more than $6 billion in previously unreported disclosures. Secretary Linda McMahon will likely reprioritize it once she’s confirmed. But the DOGE team doesn’t need to wait. It’s not hard to imagine DOGE quickly creating a website dashboard to improve transparency about previously filed disclosures and to improve how data is collected from colleges and universities moving forward.

Just as USAspending.gov is now being used by the public to identify questionable federal expenditures, a functional Section 117 dashboard would allow the public to see whether colleges and universities are taking payments from foreign sources. In this way, a little more sunlight could improve national security and limit foreign influence on campus.


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