Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Education Department From Publishing Foreign University Donor Names

By yourNEWS Media Newsroom

A federal judge has temporarily stopped the Trump administration from publishing the identities of foreign donors and contract counterparties reported by some of the nation’s largest research universities, setting up a legal fight over how far the government can go in making foreign funding disclosures public.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan of the District of Columbia issued a temporary restraining order Oct. 1 preventing the Department of Education from releasing identifying information that universities say they submitted after receiving written assurances that the information would remain confidential.

The department had planned to make the names public Oct. 2 as part of a broader effort to increase transparency surrounding billions of dollars in foreign gifts and contracts flowing to American colleges and universities. The release had already been postponed several times during the summer while the government and higher-education organizations disputed the legality of disclosure.

The Association of American Universities filed the lawsuit hours before the order was issued. The organization represents 69 leading research universities, including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. The case is Association of American Universities v. U.S. Department of Education.

Chutkan, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama and later presided over the federal election-interference criminal case brought against President Donald Trump, concluded that the universities had shown sufficient likelihood of success on their Administrative Procedure Act claim to justify temporarily preserving the status quo.

“Here, Defendants threaten to imminently publish the names of donors who have hitherto remained anonymous for every internet user to see in posterity,” Chutkan wrote.

“Once published, the information will likely never escape the public eye.”

She also wrote that disclosure “may produce downstream harms to the safety of donors who live in politically repressive countries.”

Chutkan determined that publication could cause irreparable harm because the identities could not realistically be made private again once released online. She also found that the universities were likely to succeed on their argument that the department acted arbitrarily when it changed a longstanding confidentiality policy without adequately accounting for the assurances previously given to schools.

The temporary order remains in effect through Oct. 29 unless Chutkan extends it. The government is scheduled to respond to the Association of American Universities’ request for a preliminary injunction by Oct. 13, with the association’s reply due Oct. 20.

The ruling does not prevent the government from enforcing federal foreign-funding disclosure requirements themselves.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires colleges and universities receiving federal financial assistance to report qualifying gifts and contracts involving foreign sources when their value reaches at least $250,000 during a calendar year.

The Department of Education announced in February that American universities disclosed more than 8,300 reportable foreign transactions valued at more than $5.2 billion during 2025 alone.

The department said universities have reported approximately $67.6 billion in foreign funding since Section 117 was added to federal law in 1986, with most of the disclosed money reported since 2019.

That distinction is important to the current lawsuit.

The $5.2 billion figure released by the department refers to reportable foreign gifts and contracts disclosed for 2025. The contested identities at issue in the lawsuit encompass foreign-source information collected from universities beginning in 2020, when the department expanded its reporting system to require names and addresses of foreign sources.

Section 117 defines foreign sources broadly. They can include foreign governments, foreign companies and other legal entities, non-U.S. individuals and agents acting on behalf of those sources.

Universities do not dispute that they must provide qualifying foreign-funding information to the federal government. The lawsuit instead focuses on whether the department can publicly disclose names and other identifying information that schools contend they supplied because officials told them it would be used for compliance purposes rather than publication.

The Association of American Universities says the department gave institutions written assurances for approximately six years that donor identities collected through the reporting system would remain confidential.

In April 2026, according to the association, the department announced plans to begin releasing names and addresses of foreign donors. AAU contends that the reversal exceeds the department’s authority under Section 117, violates the Administrative Procedure Act and conflicts with protections under the First Amendment, the Trade Secrets Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

The Education Department takes a substantially different position.

Federal officials argue that Section 117 requires meaningful public transparency concerning foreign money entering institutions that receive U.S. taxpayer support and that identifying the sources of the money is necessary to understand potential foreign influence.

The government had already made public 92 foreign entities before Chutkan issued the latest order.

On July 15, the department published what it called “Funding of Universities from Foreign Entities on US Government Lists,” linking 92 foreign entities to specific university transactions. The current restraining order does not require the department to remove that previously released information and does not cover those 92 entities.

The department had originally planned to release names from earlier reporting cycles in July but repeatedly delayed that publication before setting Oct. 2 as the latest deadline.

Trump administration officials say the information could reveal relationships extending well beyond conventional overseas philanthropy.

“This would be a foreign government; this could be a foreign military; this could be a foreign business,” an Education Department official told the New York Post — “or an enterprise connected to a university, that’s connected to Chinese intelligence or the PLA.”

The official argued that opposition to releasing the identities is “a pretext to prevent public transparency” about foreign enterprises allegedly “funneling billions of dollars to lead US universities mainly to do two things”: steal intellectual property and, in the case of some funding originating in Arab countries, “change what’s taught on US campuses” by financing “anti-Zionist, anti-Western ideology.”

Those are administration allegations about the possible purposes behind some foreign funding, not findings made by Chutkan or proof that the foreign sources covered by the blocked disclosure engaged in espionage or improper ideological influence.

Education Department spokeswoman Ellen Keast similarly criticized the court order, saying it protects universities that have been “cashing multi-million-dollar checks from malign foreign actors that fund centers and faculty who promote anti-Western ideologies and support partnerships that are designed to export sensitive technology to geopolitical adversaries.”

The department has made national security a central part of its renewed Section 117 enforcement campaign.

In February, the agency said Harvard University had reported more than $610 million from counterparties located in countries the federal government classifies as countries of concern since 1986. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported more than $490 million, New York University more than $462 million, Stanford University more than $418 million and Yale University more than $400 million, according to department data.

The department has also opened compliance investigations into universities it says may have filed inaccurate, incomplete or late foreign-funding reports.

Current investigations include Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Duke University and the University of North Dakota, according to Education Department records.

Harvard came under federal scrutiny in April 2025 after the department said a review uncovered incomplete and inaccurate foreign financial disclosures. The department said at the time that universities accepting federal money had a legal obligation to accurately disclose their relationships with foreign sources.

The universities challenging the latest disclosure policy say they support those reporting and national-security requirements but contend that publicly identifying private donors is a separate issue.

AAU argues that federal authorities already possess the identifying information and therefore can investigate suspicious transactions, sanctions violations, foreign-government activity or other national-security concerns without posting the identities of every foreign donor on the internet.

The organization also says some individuals living abroad could face retaliation in their home countries if their donations to U.S. institutions become public.

“America’s research universities fully support transparency about foreign gifts and contracts,” AAU said following the ruling, while arguing that Congress did not direct the government to disclose private donors’ personal information publicly.

The legal dispute turns in part on the precise meaning of Section 117’s public-disclosure provisions.

The statute provides that certain foreign gift and contract reports are public records available for inspection. The department says that requirement supports greater transparency about the identities behind reportable transactions.

AAU argues that Congress did not specifically direct the department to publish private donor names and addresses and that the government itself historically treated the identifying information collected beginning in 2020 as confidential compliance data.

A 2023 Education Department letter to Congress confirms that the agency began requiring institutions to provide foreign-source names and addresses when it changed its reporting system in June 2020. Before then, institutions were not universally required to identify each foreign source in Section 117 filings.

The court has not issued a final ruling on which interpretation is correct.

Chutkan’s temporary restraining order does not permanently prohibit disclosure, invalidate Section 117 or decide the ultimate merits of AAU’s lawsuit. Its immediate effect is to prevent the government from releasing the contested identities while she considers whether a preliminary injunction should remain in force as the case proceeds.

Reuters reported that Chutkan found the planned reversal was likely arbitrary under federal administrative law because the department had previously assured universities that the information would remain confidential.

The case now pits two competing transparency arguments against each other.

The Trump administration says Americans have a right to know which foreign governments, corporations, institutions and individuals are providing large amounts of money to federally supported universities, particularly when those relationships could touch sensitive research, intellectual property or geopolitical interests.

The universities say federal officials should investigate genuine security threats but should not retroactively publish information collected under confidentiality assurances, particularly when the data can include private individuals who have not been accused of wrongdoing.

For at least the next several weeks, the names that had been scheduled for publication will remain confidential while the federal court determines whether the Education Department may proceed with its broader disclosure policy.