New HE foreign funding portal beset by critical data gaps

The much-heralded foreign funding portal, which the US Department of Education claims gives “unprecedented visibility” into the international donations flowing into US colleges and universities and enhances national security, is severely compromised by critical data gaps, according to an expert.

In an exclusive interview with University World News, Michael Bass, a Florida- and Toronto-based certified public accountant with years of experience examining university and college donations, said it has “become impossible” to know the sources and purposes of donations because the portal system, established in 2020, does not require that foreign contracts and donations (FCDs) be listed with stop and start dates, purpose and donor names, as the previous reporting system did.

Last week, the Department of Education (DoE) released the latest foreign funding disclosures, reporting that in 2025, American colleges and universities received US$5.2 billion in reportable contracts and gifts, up from US$4.5 billion in 2024.

The disclosure, required by both the Higher Education Act (1986) and the DETERRENT (Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions) Act (2025), is intended, said Senator Bill Cassidy MD (R-LA), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, to “increase the necessary transparency, accountability, and clarity to foreign gift reporting requirements for colleges and universities in the US”.

According to the DoE, since 1986, when the government began requiring colleges and universities to report on foreign contracts and donations, American higher education institutions have received a total of US$67.6 billion from foreign sources.

The latest version of the foreign funding reporting portal “includes 11 additional data elements – a 61% increase in data points made available to the public”, the department’s press release said.

“Thanks to the Trump Administration’s new accountability portal, the American people have unprecedented visibility into the foreign dollars flowing into our colleges and universities – including funding from countries and entities that are involved in activities that threaten America’s national security.

“This marks a new era of transparency for the American people and streamlined compliance for colleges and universities, making it easier than ever for institutions to meet their legal obligations,” said US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we remain firmly committed to ensuring that universities uphold their legal and ethical obligations to disclose the true origins of their foreign relationships. This transparency is essential not only to preserving the integrity of academic research but also to ensure the security and resilience of our nation,” she stated.

However, according to Bass, since 2020, when the government opened the foreign funding portal – which, unlike the previous reporting regimen, did not require that FCDs be listed with stop and start dates, purpose and donor names – “it has become impossible to know the sources and purposes of these donations”.

Despite McMahon’s claims, Bass said, in 2025, some US$5 billion was donated to US colleges and universities, which brought the undated, untraceable donations since 2020 to US$35 billion.

“The government has no paper trail as to the purpose of these monies,” said Bass, who in 2022 dealt directly with the US House of Representatives’ Workforce and Education Subcommittee to examine the lack of dates on all funding being reported by colleges.

As well, Bass discovered misallocations in which donations reported as coming from Côte d’Ivoire were actually coming from Qatar, which led to the US government reissuing a report on FCDs for the first time.

According to Bass, since 2020, the US$67.6 billion in total foreign funding disclosures include US$3.4 billion from Qatar, US$2.5 billion from China, US$2.45 billion from Switzerland and US$2.45 billion from Saudi Arabia. Other significant donor countries are Canada (US$2.2 billion), Japan (US$2 billion), France (US$1.17 billion) and Australia (US$603 million).

Over the same period, according to the DoE’s press release, Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received approximately US$1 billion, respectively, in 2025, while Stanford University received more than US$775 million.

Last year, Harvard University received US$205.6 million, which brought its total FCDs to US$4.2 billion since the portal system was established. Other institutions that have received large amounts of foreign funds in 2025 are Columbia University (US$132 million), Princeton University (US$4.6 million) and Georgetown University (US$57.9 million), said Bass.

No identifying information

According to Bass, between 1986 and 2014, colleges and universities reported donations, gifts and contracts to the Department of Education, listing the donor/contractor, the purpose of the donation or contract and, for contracts, the start and end dates of the contract, these last two being standard practice of accountants.

However, explained Bass, colleges and universities were often delinquent in providing this information, so in the first year of the portal [launched in 2020 but including data dating back to 2014] there was a huge cleanup of the data.

“But, for some reason, after that cleanup was done, even though colleges and universities were supposed to keep the information they reported current, the government no longer required that colleges and universities report on the purposes for which the monies were being given, and, if contracts, the start and end date. Indeed, there were not even fields on the portal to input this information.

“What we got, beginning in the 2015 report, therefore, were figures from some colleges and universities for donations or contracts with no identifying information that would allow, either, normal accounting analysis, say, value-for-money.

“More importantly, one of the main purposes for giving this information to the government and making it public is to shine a light on money transfers to allow for the monitoring of the influence that money brings.

“Obscuring the donors, purpose and start-end dates of contracts, was something colleges and universities lobbied for, ostensibly so that donors could remain anonymous if they so wished, which prevented this analysis.

“The report the government issued is like having a big pile of data with absolutely no way of sorting it into any meaningful way,” he stated.

Worse, said Bass, is that in the first portal published on 23 September 2020, the US government removed the dates that had previously been reported.

“Now it's [the FCDs are] just thrown into one huge bucket with no addresses; basically, the dates are the addresses. You just see an amount, but you don’t know when it came in or what sort of thing it was for.”

Net decreases

In 2022, when Bass noticed the government’s omission of dates from the database, he (and the Network Contagion Research Institute, an NGO based at Rutgers University in New Jersey, for which he was conducting an analysis of links between foreign donations and the likelihood of antisemitic acts on America’s campuses) contacted the DoE with their concerns about how the missing data prevented meaningful research.

“We had a call with the people at the education and workforce group who were handling it, and we wrote emails. I sent separate private emails to them, mentioning the importance of dates.

“I told them that this must be the largest financial database in the world that does not have dates on transactions. They did not respond and did not correct the problems with the database,” said Bass.

In the report issued in 2025, an additional problem with the data released by the government was that net decreases are recorded by a number of major donor countries, as reported by colleges and universities. For example, based on simple year-over-year addition between 2014 and 2019, there were US$2.7 billion in donations that were dated, said Bass.

“We do not know how many undated donations there may have been,” said Bass. “The 2020 report records Qatar donating US$513.6 billion to American universities and colleges. However, the report issued in 2025 puts that figure at US$468 million; similar changes occur for other years.”

The 2020 report indicated that China’s FCD for 2014 was US$130 million. By contrast, the 2025 report has a different figure for 2014, US$91 million, with no explanation of the reason for the change. Similar anomalies occur every year for China and a number of other countries, said Bass.

These reductions mean that instead of Qatar donating US$2.749 billion, it is recorded as donating US$2.7 billion – a reduction of almost US$66 million, with no explanation.

“Some adjustment is normal, as mistakes in reporting are corrected or donations/projects that should have been reported but were not are added, though these last would, of course, increase the figures for any one year,” said Bass.

“What isn’t normal is to see a wholesale drop of these magnitudes. And since we don’t have any explanation in the reports for either increases per year or decreases – since we cannot disaggregate what’s in the bucket – we cannot explain what has happened.”

Anomalies related to institutions

The same problem can be found in the part of the foreign funding portal report that details FCDs to individual colleges and universities.

There are dozens of instances when the cumulative FCDs reported last week are less than what was reported in previous reports – again with no explanation as to why the figures changed. Among the universities that have such anomalies are Harvard and MIT.

“Especially because colleges and universities had not been reporting donations and contracts, some correction is to be expected. But how can something from 2016 or 2017 be there and now disappear?”

Bass said: “No college ever gets money and then gives it back to the nation it came from. There could be increases (from corrections), but there should not be a decrease. That's a major issue in the logic of this.”

Additionally, Bass noted that certain colleges and universities that had been reported on earlier portals are no longer there.

“You can have suspicions about things, but when you actually see a college that has received money disappear completely … that’s very strange, because that can't happen. That can't happen at all, and it happens repeatedly with Harvard.

“It’s possible that such changes are legitimate. But because we don’t know what the money was originally for and the dates, we cannot be sure. The data in the report cannot give us an answer. But one thing is sure: no college or university will ever give money back unless it was misallocated by the administration.”