The Trump administration has cracked down on universities that don’t report large-scale foreign contributions, and Berkeley, California, the latest target, following a review by the University of California’s Department of Education’s Foreign Funding Disclosures, found it to be “incomplete or inaccurate.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Friday ordered the agency’s legal team to control enforcement of laws requiring schools to disclose foreign gifts or contracts worth more than $250,000.
“The Biden Harris administration has turned a blind eye to the university’s legal obligations by stealing surveillance and allowing foreign gifts to be poured onto American campuses. Despite widespread failures in compliance, the investigation into new Section 117 was not launched for four years,” McMahon said in a statement. “I have great confidence in my Advisory Bureau to fully investigate these issues. They will begin by thoroughly examining the obvious failures of UC Berkeley, which fully and accurately discloses significant funds received from foreign sources.”
Yale claimed Hamas bound the student group status after “hindering anti-Semitism.”
President Donald Trump will sign an executive order to reduce the size and scope of the education sector, along with undergraduate children who will sign his version at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on March 20th (Getty).
The investigation comes amid growing scrutiny by Trump on foreign influences in higher education in the United States.
This week, Trump signed stricter rules for executive orders on how universities report foreign funds, instructing the education sector to rescind past policies that universities “budget details about foreign funds” and to disclose in full where the money came from.
The Ministry of Education said the issue attracted attention after reports surfaced in 2023 that Berkeley failed to report the hundreds of millions of dollars it received from China.
Even before Trump’s engagement, Harvard understood that there was a real problem with the anti-Semitism side, experts say.
Tour the University of California, Berkeley campus before the start of the new semester, which will take place in Berkeley, California on June 8, 2023 (Reuters/Carlos Barrier/File Photo)
In response to a federal investigation at the time, Berkeley showed that it had long-term financial ties with foreign government-controlled entities without reporting the $220 million it received, but in a news release it said it “misunderstands its legal obligation to disclose its funding.”
A spokesman for the education department told Fox News Digital that it launched a record request to Harvard last week for foreign funding.
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This week’s White House fact sheet cited the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigative reports. Nearly $6 billion in foreign gifts and contracts have flowed into universities for decades, indicating that there is often little surveillance. Federal officials say only a small portion of the country’s roughly 6,000 agencies report such funds.
“President Trump is ending the secrets surrounding foreign funding in higher education to protect the market for students, research and ideas,” the fact sheet reads.
Jamie Joseph is a US political reporter for Fox News Digital, covering transgender and cultural issues, the departments of education, health and welfare, and state legislative development.
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