by WorldTribune Staff, March 13, 2026 Real World News

American universities will soon be required to publicly disclose all sources of foreign funding, the Department of Education said.

While not publicly reported, it is well known that communist China is the source of a high percentage of the foreign funds being pumped into U.S. universities.

Harvard University receives $634 million in foreign funding with almost all of the gifts and contracts coming from China.

Currently, even members of Congress don’t have access to the identities of the foreign funders.

The Education Department’s enforcement is “long overdue,” Nicholas Eftimiades, a professor at Penn State University and author of “Chinese Espionage Operations and Tactics” wrote in a post to LinkedIn.

“The most disturbing part is not the Academy’s corruption and hidden donations,” Eftimiades noted.

“It’s the funding of technology development by Chinese companies on the entities list. The Congress needs to force this ruling on the NGOs and prohibit them from acting as a front for Chinese money going to develop key technologies at U.S. universities.”

Currently, the identities of foreign donors are not made public, which the senior department official said violates the law.

Previous administrations allowed universities to mark certain funding sources on their records as exempt from disclosure in public records requests.

“Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires higher education institutions to report gifts and contracts valued at $250,000 or more to the Department of Education, to make them available for public inspection,” The Daily Signal reported on March 9, citing a senior Education Department official.

The Biden-Harris regime did not prioritize enforcing Section 117 or monitoring potential foreign influence at American universities, an Education Department official said.

“The department, for years, has actually provided a way for universities to not disclose this information to the public,” the Education Department official told the Daily Signal. “We’re done with that business. We’re not doing that. The law says we have to make available these records for public inspection. We’re going to do it.”

“One of the premier research universities in the United States received more than $7 million from counterparties of concern in China that also appeared on a U.S. government watch list,” the Daily Signal’s report said.

The Education Department said it intends to provide notice to universities and allow for public comment on the new requirement to disclose the funding sources. The department said it plans to make the information available for public inspection by early to mid-summer.

“That’s the part the universities do not want to see happen,” the official said. “They’ve spent years trying to make it not happen.”

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  New law makes universities reveal sources of mainly Chinese foreign funding, WorldTribune.com