Biden’s Indifference to Foreign Influence is Affecting the Education Department Too

There are a host of shady dealings between President Joe Biden and foreign interests—at least according to a 300-page impeachment report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees on August 19. These committees allege that Biden committed “impeachable offenses” by using his public positions to obtain financial benefits from foreign sources. While Biden’s personal corruption is an insult to voters’ trust, Americans should be even more concerned that his apparent tolerance for foreign influence extends into the policies of his administration.

Look no further than the attitude of the Department of Education (ED) toward university foreign gift regulations.

The ED is supposed to make sure universities are reporting foreign gifts of at least $250,000 annually, as required by Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. This requirement is an important backstop against foreign influence in our educational institutions: it prevents adversarial governments like China and Russia from exercising their influence in the dark. Especially in the aftermath of the October 7 protests, where college and university administrators were reluctant to discipline protesters—many of whom were lucrative international students from countries that donate large sums of money to American universities—Americans deserve to know how much foreign sources sway university decisions.

Yet in recent months, the ED has steadily wound down its foreign funds transparency efforts. The ED’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) gave the public only two days’ notice before it quietly closed its interactive data portal in late June. This portal was first created after the Trump administration found several universities avoided disclosing more than $6.5 billion, primarily from adversarial countries like China. According to Paul Moore, who previously served as Chief Investigative Counsel for the ED, Congress and the media “almost certainly” would not have discovered extensive ties between the University of Pennsylvania and China after establishing the Penn Biden Center in 2017, without the portal.

A “contract change” prompted the portal’s closure. Throughout July, I made several attempts to get more specific answers, but in the process, I discovered something even worse.

After receiving automated responses to inquiries, I called the ED, where a representative referred me to the FSA. Yet an FSA representative stated that the office did not have a specialist with whom I could speak to concerning Section 117. In an August 16 email, FSA confirmed that the “Department of Education’s [sic] Section 117 efforts are not handled within our offices.” In other words, the Foreign Funds Reporting Team, whose contact information is displayed on the FSA website, appears to be a complete fiction. As far as I can tell, nobody in Biden’s ED is actually making sure colleges and universities are in compliance with the law.

The removal of the publicly accessible portal is one of many instances where the ED has scaled back foreign funds transparency efforts. The Biden administration prematurely closed investigations into several prominent universities while in office. The ED relaxed punishment for universities which received foreign funds through pass-through non-educational entities, such as university foundations. This update coincidentally occurred a week after it was discovered that the Texas A&M University System avoided reporting $100 million from Russia and Qatar received by affiliated non-educational entities.

Even though the Biden ED appears to be asleep at the wheel, there are others taking action to improve foreign funds transparency. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) recently released its own foreign funds database. It includes information already reported to the ED, and relying on public records requests, the NAS database goes beyond what the ED provides by consistently showing donor names, a gift’s purpose, and amounts less than the federally mandated $250,000 for more than 70 universities and affiliated state agencies.

Last year, Congress also introduced the Deterrent Act, which would strengthen reporting requirements for colleges and universities. It is particularly important that federal lawmakers take interest in providing complete foreign funds data because state-specific public records exemptions and costs impede obtaining comprehensive information through the public records system. Only improved federal regulation can ensure that both private and public universities disclose all important foreign funding details, including donor names and the purpose of each gift.

The shocking details of Biden’s personal corruption by foreign interest should be a wake-up call: Americans need to take foreign influence in our top institutions more seriously. And that starts with improving transparency and accountability for the billions of dollars that flow from foreign countries into our universities.

Image designed by Jared Gould using Joe Biden by Gage Skidmore on Wikimedia Commons, U.S. Department of Education by Ken Lund on Flickr, and blindfold by Piotr Marcinski on Adobe Stock: Asset ID#: 40867226