Our country has plenty of enemies. But many of them are from within.
And now a federal investigation exposes a Democrat plot to aid America’s enemies.
Education Department Targets UC Berkeley’s Hidden Foreign Cash
The Department of Education has launched a sweeping investigation into the University of California, Berkeley, for allegedly flouting federal law by failing to report hundreds of millions in foreign funding, including a massive $220 million from Chinese government officials.
The probe, announced Friday, centers on Berkeley’s unreported deal to establish the Tsinghua-Berkeley Institute in Shenzhen, a payment that far exceeded the $250,000 disclosure threshold mandated by Section 117 of the Higher Education Act.
Senior administration officials revealed the inquiry will also scrutinize whether U.S. technologies were improperly transferred to Chinese state-linked entities, raising national security concerns.
“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.
The investigation builds on a 2023 House committee probe that first exposed Berkeley’s financial ties to China, signaling a renewed push to hold universities accountable for transparency.
Trump-Era Probes Revived to Protect American Interests
The inquiry marks a revival of aggressive oversight initiated during the first Trump administration, which launched 19 civil probes into universities over undisclosed foreign funds. Many of those cases stalled under the Biden administration, with at least nine schools seeing their investigations quietly closed by 2022, according to a senior department official.
The earlier efforts uncovered a staggering $6.5 billion in unreported foreign funding across U.S. universities, despite their receiving up to $55 billion annually in federal grants.
“The vast majority of universities were not in compliance and it got into some discussion about bad actors,” the official said, pointing to the “vulnerability of technology transfers, including technology that was being funded by federal taxpayer dollars through various federal agencies.”
A bipartisan Senate report had previously warned of a “black hole” of foreign funds flowing into elite institutions, with some accepting money from adversarial nations like Russia and Iran.
The Berkeley probe, bolstered by Treasury Department auditors, aims to close these gaps. “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 stated, contrasting past resistance when “sometimes we got the middle finger.”
High Stakes as Berkeley Faces Accountability
The investigation’s scope extends beyond financial transparency, touching on broader issues of national security and academic integrity.
A prior Trump-era probe led to the conviction of Harvard professor Charles Lieber for concealing his role as a $50,000-per-month “strategic scientist” for China’s Wuhan Institute of Technology from 2012 to 2015.
The current scrutiny of Berkeley follows heightened federal attention to universities, including Ivy League schools facing probes for unchecked antisemitism on campus after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
As the Education Department demands Berkeley’s financial records, the probe points to a commitment to safeguarding American innovation and taxpayer dollars from foreign influence.
With the Treasury Department’s analytical muscle behind it, the investigation promises to expose the full extent of Berkeley’s compliance failures, reinforcing the need for vigilance in protecting U.S. higher education from external agendas.
