Today, I submitted a written testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. Click here to download a full PDF of the testimony.
Chairman Aderholt, Ranking Member DeLauro, and members of the Subcommittee:
My name is Robert Bellafiore. I am Managing Director for Policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank focused on promoting innovation, strengthening governance, and advancing national security. I write to urge the Subcommittee to direct the Department of Education (ED) to provide guidance to Congress on how to transfer legal authority for oversight of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 from ED to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires US colleges and universities to disclose foreign gifts or contracts totalling $250,000 or more. I also recommend that the Subcommittee include report language requiring ED to improve public transparency of foreign contributions disclosures by rebuilding and modernizing the Section 117 website and dashboard, so that users can easily review the data on foreign contributions.
For decades, weak enforcement of Section 117 has made the US research enterprise susceptible to influence from foreign adversaries. Reform has been urgently needed in recent years, as my colleagues and I have discussed, including in previous testimonies. Now, President Trump’s efforts to eliminate ED call into question Section 117’s continued enforcement, such as it is. Whether ED should exist, and what should happen to its many functions, are beyond the scope of my testimony. However, proper enforcement of Section 117 is essential to protecting US research; therefore, regardless of ED’s future, this enforcement should continue within some department of the federal government.
Enforcement of Section 117 has been consistently lax. A 2019 Senate investigation concluded that ED had not updated its guidance for Section 117 disclosure since 2004, noting that “foreign government spending on US schools is effectively a black hole, as there is a lack of reporting detailing the various sources of foreign government funding.” A 2024 House report documented close ties between US government-funded research and scholars affiliated with the Chinese government. The report highlighted the weak compliance with and enforcement of rules on the disclosure of foreign payments: “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.”
Enforcement of Section 117 briefly improved during the first Trump administration, causing institutions to disclose $6.5 billion in previously unreported money. However, this was only a temporary improvement. Last year, the House Appropriations Committee included language in the report accompanying ED’s funding bill urging ED 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.
In light of ED’s long-term failure to enforce Section 117, as well as ED’s uncertain future, effective enforcement of Section 117 is a task that should no longer be assigned to ED. However, given the national security justifications for tracking foreign money in US higher education, Section 117 enforcement must not end if and when ED is eliminated.
Therefore, the Subcommittee should direct ED to submit a report to the Committee that 1) describes what resources ED has for managing oversight of Section 117 and 2) presents a plan to Congress with guidance on the transfer of legal authority for Section 117 enforcement to another department, such as DOJ. Unlike ED, DOJ already has a national security division, meaning that even if ED continues to exist, DOJ will still be a more appropriate home for Section 117 enforcement.
Second, the Committee should include report language requiring ED to improve public transparency of foreign contributions disclosures by rebuilding and modernizing its public dashboard. Before it was shut down by the Biden administration, the website did not allow users to easily analyze foreign contributions to postsecondary institutions. Simply restoring the previous dashboard, with its limited functionality, would already be an improvement over the status quo, but more should be done to make it useful to the public. A public dashboard that provided basic functions such as calculating total contributions reported by year, institution, type, and country of origin would improve the public’s understanding of foreign influence in American higher education. Rebuilding the website thus offers an opportunity to modernize it and improve Americans’ ability to understand the foreign money entering their colleges and universities.
