On July 29, 2026, Defending Education (DE) submitted a comment to Federal Student Aid at the U.S. Department of Education supporting renewal of the Foreign Gifts and Contracts Disclosures collection. This collection carries out Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires colleges and universities to report foreign gifts and contracts worth $250,000 or more from a single foreign source. It is one of the only tools the federal government has to bring foreign funding of American higher education into public view.
Federal Student Aid is moving these reports to a new, easier-to-use portal at foreignfundinghighered.gov, and DE supports the move. The comment argues that the reporting burden on colleges is modest and that any changes should keep the full scope Congress wrote into the law. Because Section 117 has only limited enforcement tools, the reports themselves do most of the work of holding colleges accountable.
DE urges the Department to renew the collection and to explain how it will catch colleges that fail to file, file late, or file incomplete reports.
Read the full comment below:
