The Biden administration is reportedly planning to roll back Trump-era investigations into U.S. universities’ foreign donations, a move that is likely to trigger a congressional response as Republicans prepare a China-focused legislative onslaught.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported yesterday on the Department of Education’s plans to wind down investigations into all remaining inquiries into the sources of foreign funding in higher education. Department officials, according to the report, have informed trade groups representing universities of the plan. In one letter to the department in August, Terry Hartle, an executive with the American Council of Education, referenced that the department had conveyed that it “plans to close the outstanding section 117 investigations that remain open,” referring to the legislative provision on foreign funds that requires universities to disclose foreign gifts of $250,000 or more.
The American Council on Education had asked the incoming Biden administration, in a letter addressed to Biden in November 2020, to review and potentially terminate the Section 117 investigations, which it characterized as “politically motivated.”
Unsurprisingly, Beijing’s influence is front of mind for the administration’s critics. Universities’ self-reporting of foreign gifts has declined significantly during the Biden administration. After Department of Education records showed that universities reported only a bit over $4 million in foreign gifts throughout part of 2021, compared with over $1.5 billion between July 2020 and January 2021, Representative Mike Gallagher expressed concern that the administration “may have relaxed its enforcement standards” and “thrown the Chinese Communist Party an important lifeline.”
Responding to the Chronicle’s request for comment, the Department of Education said that it would not comment on open investigations.
News of this policy is very likely to invite a Republican legislative response. With the GOP poised to make major gains in the upcoming midterm elections, the party’s congressional leaders are preparing legislation for the next Congress, when there’s a possibility that their party will set the agenda and possibly plan investigations.
Representative Jim Banks, a leading congressional China hawk who also chairs the Republican Study Committee, told National Review in a statement that the “toothless” current law that only requires colleges to disclose foreign gifts is insufficient enough. “Yet merely tracking foreign influence efforts is too much for the Biden administration,” he continued.
Banks’s RSC will likely be one major contributor to GOP legislative efforts on countering Beijing, and the Indiana Republican is the author of a bill that would reduce the reporting requirement to $50,000 from the current $250,000, expand the definition of “foreign source,” and involve the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. in foreign-donor oversight, granting the power to block certain transactions.
While the administration is reportedly phasing out all foreign gifts investigations, the Chronicle noted that it is likely to propose new regulations on securing sensitive research. That’s a much narrower approach, though.
Hartle, the higher-education lobbyist, wrote in the August letter that university leaders were “pleased to learn” about the decision to roll back the investigations. It’s definitely an outcome with which the industry can be happy.