House Passes Bill to Tighten University Reporting Requirements for Foreign Gifts

A Republican-led bill to strengthen foreign gift reporting requirements for higher education institutions passed the House in a 241-169 vote on Thursday, with 31 Democrats supporting it. The bill now heads to the Senate.

The Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions, or DETERRENT Act, would amend the Higher Education Act to lower the current foreign gift reporting threshold for colleges and universities from $250,000 to $50,000, with a $0 threshold for “countries of concern” including China and Russia.

In addition to lowering institutional foreign gift reporting requirements, the DETERRENT Act would require institutions to secure a waiver from the Department of Education before entering into a contract with any country of concern and introduce new foreign gift reporting requirements for individual faculty and staff members. The bill would also require institutions to annually report their investments with countries of concern and foreign entities of concern. These “investment disclosure reports” would be published on a publicly searchable database. Institutions that fail to comply with the reporting requirements could be fined or lose access to federal financial aid programs for students.

House Republicans first introduced the DETERRENT Act in 2023, when it passed the House but failed to make progress in the Senate. The latest version of the bill has 21 cosponsors, two of whom are Democrats.

“The lack of transparency around foreign relationships with our nation’s universities should concern every American as we see stolen research, antisemitic propaganda, and academic censorship,” said bill cosponsor and House Education and Workforce Committee Chair Tim Walberg (R-MI) in an online statement. “We should be loud and clear; no American university should be helping the Chinese Communist Party or other entities continue to threaten U.S. national security.”

During a House floor debate on Tuesday, House Education and Workforce Committee Ranking Member Bobby Scott (D-VA) rose in opposition to the bill, citing particular concerns about the foreign gift reporting requirement for faculty.

“Present law already requires reporting of any gift large enough to exert any influence over a university,” Scott said. “This bill requires reporting of gifts of any value — that is a cup of coffee or a donut — from people who are from so-called ‘countries of concern,’ and requires the Department of Education to process all of those reports. The same Department of Education that just lost half of its staff. If the problem is millions of dollars in reported gifts, requiring the reporting of free donuts cannot be the answer.”

University groups such as the Association of American Universities have also opposed the bill, stating it will have a chilling effect on international research collaboration. In a letter to House representatives sent earlier this month, AAU President Barbara Snyder wrote that the bill “will not effectively address U.S. national and research security concerns” and would instead “needlessly divert important university resources away from more effective methods of safeguarding and securing research.”

Requiring institutions to apply for and obtain a waiver before entering into any contract with countries of concern such as China would “slow down and require unprecedented approval by the Department of Education for all contracted academic research collaborations and all student academic exchanges or joint cultural and education programs” regardless of their risk to national security or connection to critical technologies, Snyder wrote.

Such a requirement would also create a significant workload for the Department of Education, which “lacks the expertise necessary to assess national security risks associated with scientific research and related partnerships,” Snyder said, especially in light of recent staff cuts at the department. Snyder also argued that the bill is unnecessary as Congress and federal agencies have already taken multiple steps to address research security concerns since the DETERRENT Act was last considered in 2023.

“The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense all have announced or already begun implementing new processes to consider risk factors prior to awarding a grant,” Snyder wrote in her letter. “If a risk is identified, mitigation measures are added to the conditions of the award. The DETERRENT Act piles on additional requirements that are likely to conflict, duplicate, and create confusion with existing requirements.”

Republicans on the House Education Committee have disputed accusations the bill duplicates existing requirements, releasing a factsheet that says the bill “would give the American public the ability to also hold schools accountable with transparent, available data” in a manner unlike existing laws.