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The Education Department is investigating whether the University of California at Berkeley has properly reported its foreign funding, another step in the Trump administration's campaign to increase federal oversight on college campuses across the country.
In its announcement Friday, the department said a review of UC-Berkeley's disclosures suggested they could be "incomplete or inaccurate," and it cited 2023 media reports that the university had not reported "hundreds of millions of dollars" in foreign government funding.
The department did not name specific foreign governments, but the Daily Beast reported in 2023 that UC-Berkeley had not disclosed a $220 million investment for a joint campus in China, which drew scrutiny from GOP lawmakers at the time.
Friday's announcement is the latest action by the administration in its weeks-long crusade to bring its conservative agenda to higher education. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Education Department to scrutinize universities' foreign funding, which he said was mishandled by the Biden administration. The order sparked the funding review at UC-Berkeley. Harvard University is also facing a similar probe of its foreign gifts.
In a statement Friday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon echoed Trump, saying the previous administration had "turned a blind eye to colleges and universities' legal obligations by deprioritizing oversight and allowing foreign gifts to pour onto American campuses."
UC-Berkeley did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday. The university denied the government's accusations to the Associated Press on Friday.
At issue is Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires federally funded universities to disclose any foreign gifts of $250,000 or more each year.
In May 2023, the Daily Beast first reported that UC-Berkeley had not disclosed a $220 million investment from the Chinese city of Shenzhen to build a joint research campus for collaboration between Berkeley and Tsinghua University on emerging technologies in the fields of energy, medicine and data science. At the time, a UC-Berkeley spokesperson told the Daily Beast that the school had not declared the investment because the campus in China was not finished.
Still, the reporting raised questions in Washington about the funding.
Scrutiny of the ties between American universities and China has intensified as Chinese academics and students say they have been unfairly targeted by U.S. border officials even during the Biden administration, and as frictions between the United States and China have emerged on multiple fronts, from economic competition to territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
In July 2023, the Republican-led House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent UC-Berkeley officials a letter saying they had "grave concern" about the joint institute's potential work with dual-use technologies, which have civilian and military uses.
The lawmakers said the institute's work threatened U.S. national security and raised "many red flags." They wrote that the Chinese Communist Party "abuses seemingly innocuous research collaborations like the one between Berkeley and Tsinghua to advance PRC science and technology goals at the expense of the United States." The letter, signed by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin) and Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina), asked UC-Berkeley officials to produce documents related to the investment and answer a list of questions about the joint institute's work.
The Biden administration's education officials also sent a letter in 2023 to UC-Berkeley to address the funding allegations, according to the Education Department's Friday news release. In responses at the time, UC-Berkeley acknowledged that it had not reported significant government funding properly and "detailed its multiyear effort to cultivate a close relationship with and secure financial commitments from foreign government-controlled entities," according to the Education Department.
The university's responses that year, the department said, showed a "fundamental misunderstanding" of reporting protocols under Section 117.
Now under the Trump administration, the department said it will begin requesting records from UC-Berkeley in the new investigation.
In its record request to Harvard University on April 17, Education Department officials asked for a list of all of the Massachusetts institution's researchers, students and faculty who are affiliated with foreign governments or foreign universities from January 2010 until now. The department also requested their addresses and information about their work.
The Education Department said it was requesting the materials because it had also found "incomplete and inaccurate disclosures" from Harvard, though it again did not disclose what they were and did not mention any specific foreign gifts.
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