Trump Administration Targets UC Berkeley Over Foreign Funds Disclosure

The Trump administration is amping up its focus on foreign funding in American universities, with UC Berkeley now squarely in the spotlight. The Department of Education has flagged the California institution for allegedly incomplete or inaccurate disclosures of foreign gifts. Apparently, the numbers didn’t quite add up, and now the feds are digging deeper.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that her agency is resuming tight control over the law that requires schools to report foreign gifts or contracts valued at $250,000 or more. She criticized the previous administration for, as she put it, turning a blind eye to these disclosures and letting foreign money "pour onto American campuses." According to McMahon, not only did oversight lag, but investigations into these issues were also shut down early. She says her legal team will begin with a thorough look at UC Berkeley’s "apparent failure" to report significant foreign funding.

This is all coming as Trump himself signed an executive order this week, demanding colleges come clean about who’s really footing the bill. The Department of Education says the issue gained urgency after reports in 2023 that Berkeley failed to report hundreds of millions of dollars it received from China. It's not exactly pocket change, and someone in the accounting department must've really missed the memo—or a few zeroes.

Berkeley, in response to a federal inquiry, admitted it didn’t report $220 million in foreign funds and had been building ongoing financial ties with government-controlled organizations overseas. The university chalked this up to a "misunderstanding" of its legal obligations. That’s one expensive misunderstanding.

The administration isn’t stopping at Berkeley. Last week, the Education Department kicked off a records request into Harvard for similar reasons. A recent White House report noted that nearly $60 billion in foreign gifts and contracts have flowed into U.S. universities over the decades, with only a sliver of the nation’s institutions actually reporting these funds as required.

The official White House statement says President Trump "is ending secrecy surrounding foreign funding in higher education to protect students, research, and the marketplace of ideas." With so much money flying under the radar, it seems like transparency just became the hottest trend on campus.