Feds: Colleges ‘massively’ underreport foreign funding

A scathing report from the Trump administration on Tuesday concluded that top U. S. universities have “massively underreported” funding they accept from China, Russia and other nations described as “foreign adversaries.”

The Education Department released the report amid its effort to enforce a 1986 law requiring U. S. universities to disclose gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more from foreign sources. After going decades with little federal oversight, the law has become a priority for the Trump administration amid concerns over economic espionage and trade secret theft from abroad.

The department’s findings are primarily based on investigations it has opened at 12 schools, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Georgetown universities. Federal officials began investigating the schools amid suspicion that they had failed to report millions of dollars in gifts and contracts from sources in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

According to early findings in the report, most of the 12 schools have had financial dealings with Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that someU.S. officials say is a threat tonational security, and at least one had ties directly to the Chinese Communist Party. Others had deals with the Russian government and institutions in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The report did not identify which universities were connected to those entities. Since coming under federal scrutiny, the 12 schools disclosed a combined $6.5 billion in foreign funding that was previously unreported, the department said.

The Association ofAmerican Universities, which represents research universities, said the report is “less a serious security assessment than it is a partisan and politically driven attack on America’s leading research universities.”