VIA EMAIL: Hagerty, Cotton, Blackburn, Scott Introduce Bill to Protect American Universities from Foreign Influence.
WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) has joined Tom Cotton (R-AR), along with Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Tim Scott (R-SC), to introduce the Foreign Funding Accountability Act, which seeks to combat malign foreign influence in American colleges and universities by strengthening Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. Full text of the bill may be found here.
“As a strategic adversary seeking to overtake the United States, the Chinese Communist Party is going to extraordinary lengths to exert malign influence over America’s free and open society, including our higher education system. By increasing transparency, closing loopholes, and imposing new civil penalties in U.S. law, this important legislation seeks to prevent the CCP and its intermediaries from hiding in the shadows to buy control and influence within our higher education, to manipulate what American students are taught about China, and to steal intellectual property from our nation’s researchers,” said Hagerty.
“The Chinese Communist Party has made consistent attempts to infiltrate American colleges and universities. Our bill will close donation loopholes, barring the CCP and other foreign agents from donating millions, or even billions, to levy influence and steal American intellectual property,” said Cotton.
“Communist China has infiltrated American colleges and universities. It is imperative we cut off Beijing’s access to funnel money in exchange for influence in higher education. Our children’s education should not be available for purchase by the CCP,” said Blackburn.
“Attempts by the Chinese Communist Party and other bad actors to infiltrate the American education system is a blatant example of foreign competitors trying to maintain and expand their global power to our detriment,” said Scott. “By holding institutions of higher education accountable for foreign donations we are taking necessary steps to promote transparency, protect our intellectual property, and ensure our country’s future leaders get a quality education.”
Specifically, this legislation would:
Require the disclosure of full names of foreign donating entities—individual, institutional, or otherwise
Require the disclosure of the specific purposes of foreign gift-transactions
Close the loophole allowing gifting by registered foreign agents
Close the loophole exempting in-kind gifts from counting towards the disclosure minimum
Clarify that foreign gifts to university foundations are not exempt from disclosure
Lower the minimum reporting threshold for disclosure in terms of dollar amount—from $250,000 to $25,000
Levy a graduated civil penalty structure against institutions willfully, and repeatedly violating Section 117
Full text of the bill is here.