By Meredith Asbury and Kritika Agarwal
Senators are currently considering a bill that – if passed and signed into law – would hamper scientific progress in the United States, effectively ending all academic engagement with China, and potentially exposing professors to discrimination and attacks.
The DETERRENT Act, which passed the House last year, is now under Senate consideration. If passed into law, it would seriously harm American interests by cutting off all opportunities for academic collaboration with China and by severely chilling collaboration with other countries, thus isolating the United States from the global science community. It could threaten student exchanges, language instruction, and non-sensitive research partnerships with China or other countries of concern.
The DETERRENT Act would also force faculty members at American universities to report small monetary gifts (including personal gifts) from any foreign entity or individual (including family members) to their institution; institutions would then have to make that information publicly available on their website. This information would invite fishing expeditions from activists via open-records requests and put targets on the backs of scholars whose work, views, or associations – whether with China or with close partners such as Canada or Israel – are deemed by others to be politically unacceptable.
Current Foreign Gift and Contract Reporting Requirements
Currently, Section 117 of the Higher Education Act governs how institutions of higher education in the United States report foreign gifts and contracts to the federal government. Section 117 requires U.S. colleges and universities that participate in federal student aid programs to report foreign gifts and contracts totaling at least $250,000 in a calendar year to the Department of Education. Institutions must file these reports twice a year, and the law directs the department to make the disclosures available for public inspection.
For decades, the Department of Education offered limited formal guidance to universities on how they should comply with the reporting requirements under Section 117. Despite the lack of clear guidance, in recent years, colleges and universities have worked hard to comply with Section 117 requirements and fully report their foreign gifts and contracts. The department recently created a new public dashboard to make Section 117 data more accessible. Despite its significant shortcomings, the dashboard is a step toward greater transparency.
What the DETERRENT Act Will Do
The DETERRENT Act, however, would go far beyond existing Section 117 reporting requirements by expanding the authority of the Department of Education to restrict American universities from engaging in any activities with countries of concern.
Among its more reasonable changes, the DETERRENT Act would lower the reporting threshold from $250,000 to $50,000 for funding from most foreign countries and to $0 for countries of concern, including China. It would also require institutions to file disclosures annually instead of twice per year.
More problematically, however, the DETERRENT Act would:
- Require academic institutions to apply for and obtain a waiver from the secretary of education before entering into any contract with a country of concern or a foreign entity of concern.
- Compel faculty and staff at certain institutions to individually report any foreign gift valued at more than $480 and any contract over $5,000 to a publicly available and searchable database. While the database would withhold the names of individual faculty and staff, interested parties could still obtain those names via the Freedom of Information Act.
Proponents of the bill suggest that it would improve transparency regarding foreign sources of funding and curb antisemitism on college campuses by exposing institutions that accept funds from foreign actors that spread anti-Jewish hatred. Others have argued that the DETERRENT Act would curb influence of foreign adversaries, including China, on U.S. colleges and universities.
However, these advocates ignore that the bill largely duplicates robust disclosure and research security requirements already in place. In fact, members of the public can already visit the Department of Education’s Section 117 dashboard to see where universities are receiving foreign funds from and how much. While the DETERRENT Act would lower the reporting threshold, transparency already exists.
Using the existing public dashboard, critics can already see which universities have accepted funds from foreign countries, and which countries those funds came from (for example, China, Russia, Qatar, Israel, Canada, the United Kingdom, etc.). This information is available because the universities disclosed it to the government, and because the government then made it available to the public.
Instead of further improving transparency, the DETERRENT Act would unleash new mandates that will decimate academic collaborations with top scientists not only in China, but in other countries as well, weakening U.S. scientific and diplomatic leadership.
By requiring universities to receive a waiver from the secretary of education before entering into any contract with China, the DETERRENT Act would effectively put an end to foreign language studies, cultural arts programs, student exchanges, and routine, non-sensitive research, including in fields that have nothing to do with U.S. national or economic security – exactly the kinds of ties that build U.S. influence, understanding, soft power, and expertise over time.
Aside from adding significant new administrative burdens on U.S. scientists – time taken away from conducting their research – the act’s extensive reporting requirements would also invite harassment of individual faculty by turning their legitimate foreign ties – including with U.S. allies – into fodder for political attacks by outside organizations, including anti-Israel groups.
The DETERRENT Act also fails to address the one reform that would greatly improve the transparency that both universities and critics seek regarding foreign gifts: mandating that the Department of Education enhance its public dashboard to allow the data they provide on foreign gifts and contracts to be disaggregated and searchable by date and year.
At the moment, dashboard users can search and find total contributions made to an institution from a particular country over the course of several years. What they cannot see is whether those contributions have stopped or been curtailed. For instance, the dashboard still shows many universities that have cut or curtailed ties with Qatar and Russia in recent years as accepting gifts from those countries. If we really desire transparency, Congress should address this major problem with the existing Department of Education dashboard.
Ultimately, the DETERRENT Act represents an example of gross government overreach. It hands new powers to the Department of Education – which the administration is actively trying to close – that impinge upon the privacy of researchers contributing to America’s scientific enterprise and which will ultimately impede American science.
Some Plausible Scenarios
Here are some plausible, everyday scenarios of what could happen If the DETERRENT Act goes into effect:
- A university cancels a joint U.S.–China performing arts exchange program focused on classical Chinese dance and traditional music because it is required to obtain a waiver from the secretary of education before moving forward with the program. Faced with the prospect of federal review and uncertainty about whether the program will be allowed to proceed, the university decides that even a non-political performing arts exchange is too risky and administratively burdensome to pursue, depriving students and faculty of one of the few remaining opportunities for direct cultural engagement between the two countries.
- Scholars studying China in a history department at a U.S. institution have annually participated in a joint workshop with faculty at a Chinese university to study ancient regional architecture and digital preservation techniques, including site visits supported by modest travel funding from the Chinese partner. University administrators decide to cancel the longstanding program after concluding that even routine support for faculty travel and research activities could trigger review and approval by the Department of Education. Over time, graduate students who once relied on these collaborations for dissertation research and language immersion begin shifting away from China-focused scholarship altogether, shrinking the pipeline of U.S. experts with deep cultural, linguistic, and historical knowledge of China – the very expertise our diplomats, businesses, and security agencies rely upon.
- A U.S. faculty member receives a gift exceeding $480 to cover travel to an academic conference in Israel where they are presenting their research on trauma medicine and emergency response practices. The faculty member is required to publicly disclose these funds pursuant to the DETERRENT Act. Activists are able to narrow down who attended the conference, circulate the professor’s name online, and organize protests targeting his classes and public events. This professor and other colleagues decide it’s no longer worth pursuing legitimate engagements with Israeli institutions out of concern that public disclosure requirements will expose them to harassment, intimidation, and/or reputational attacks.
- A U.S.-based faculty member from Canada receives an inheritance exceeding $480 from family abroad. The DETERRENT Act requires the faculty member to disclose the inheritance to the university and, if questioned, to release the information publicly. The faculty member determines that the risks associated with disclosing private financial information to the public are too great and decides to take an offer and move her lab to a top Canadian research university to avoid this government overreach.
These aren’t edge‑case hypotheticals; they are the kinds of decisions university leaders and faculty researchers would face every day under the DETERRENT Act.
The Senate Must Reject the DETERRENT Act
The DETERRENT Act asks lawmakers to accept a false choice: that the only way to protect our campuses from malign foreign influence is to wall them off from the world and subject scholars to sweeping surveillance and suspicion.
In reality, our strength lies in open but secure engagement – clear rules, risk-based decision making, targeted enforcement against genuine bad actors, and a vibrant research ecosystem that continues to attract talent and partners from every corner of the globe.
The Senate should reject the DETERRENT Act; cutting off all forms of collaboration with China would both damage American science and diminish our ability to understand and effectively engage with our closest global competitor.
Meredith Asbury is associate vice president for government relations and public policy; Kritika Agarwal is assistant vice president for communications at AAU.