WASHINGTON — The Department of Education launched an investigation of the University of California, Berkeley, Friday for allegedly running afoul of federal law by failing to report hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign funding — including from China, according to senior administration officials.
UC Berkeley raked in $220 million from Chinese government officials to build a joint Tsinghua-Berkeley Institute in the city of Shenzhen — but never reported the payment despite its price tag exceeding the $250,000 mandatory disclosure threshold of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act.
Those payments were previously revealed as part of a House committee investigation in 2023 — but a senior Education Department official told reporters Friday that “hundreds of millions of dollars” will now be combed through.
The investigation, which follows an executive order from President Trump authorizing the move, will also uncover whether significant US technologies were transferred to Chinese state-linked entities as part of the arrangement.
“They’ll have 30 days to respond with the records that we requested, and so we hope to have quite a volume of records and we’ll be able to verify the degree to which UC-Berkeley is or is not compliant after our examination of those records,” an Education Department official told reporters.
Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor in Berkeley’s public affairs office, said in a statement responding to the probe: “Over the course of the last two years, UC Berkeley has been cooperating with federal inquiries regarding [Section] 117 reporting issues, and will continue to do so”
The first Trump administration opened at least 19 civil probes of universities over foreign funding, but many of those investigations languished during the Biden administration.
At least nine schools had pending cases closed by 2022, a senior department official said.
One investigation resulted in the conviction of Harvard University chemistry professor Charles Lieber for lying about his ties to a Chinese-run recruitment program that he was paid $50,000 per month to stand up as a “strategic scientist” for the Wuhan Institute of Technology between 2012 to 2015.
The initial Trump probes followed a bipartisan Senate report that showed many US universities weren’t complying with Section 117 disclosures, opening up “a black hole” of foreign funds to some of the nation’s most prestigious research institutions.
Top US universities already receive up to $55 billion annually from the federal government in grants, the senior official noted, and the findings of the 45th presidency included another $6.5 billion in foreign funding that was never reported to DOE.
“The vast majority of universities were not in compliance and it got into some discussion about bad actors,” the official told reporters, noting the “vulnerability of technology transfers, including technology that was being funded by federal taxpayer dollars through various federal agencies.”
The official also highlighted the laxity of current requirements for receiving foreign funds, with earlier probes pointing to funds taken from Russia, Iran and other nations that “aren’t particularly friendly.”
The Treasury Department will cooperate with the investigation into UC Berkeley and throw its teams of auditor and analysts at the financial records to determine the scope of any wrongdoing.
“We’re going to have a lot more help this time, which is wonderful, and I think that that will enable us to we can actually under the law, we can go after the universities,” the senior official added.
“On the other hand, I will say from some of our experience before in the previous administration that was not always [the case], sometimes we got the middle finger.”
The probe comes on the heels of other funding investigations into Ivy League institutions for allowing antisemitism to explode on campus following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
“The Biden-Harris Administration turned a blind eye to colleges and universities’ legal obligations by deprioritizing oversight and allowing foreign gifts to pour onto American campuses,” said Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a statement.
“Despite widespread compliance failures, no new Section 117 investigations were initiated for four years, and ongoing investigations were closed prematurely,” she added.
“I have great confidence in my Office of General Counsel to investigate these matters fully, and they will begin by thoroughly examining UC Berkeley’s apparent failure to fully and accurately disclose significant funding received from foreign sources.”