When the U.S. Department of Education flipped the switch on its rebuilt foreign-funding disclosure portal at ForeignFundingHigherEd.gov on January 2, 2026, the database revealed a finding that surprised even longtime critics of foreign influence on American campuses: Qatar, a Gulf monarchy with a population smaller than Houston, had become the single largest foreign financier of U.S. higher education by a wide margin — and its spending was accelerating, not winding down.
According to Department of Education disclosure data reviewed by The Investigative Journal, Qatar reported $1.2 billion in gifts and contracts to U.S. colleges in 2025, a more than threefold jump from the $396 million it disclosed in 2024. The 2025 total alone represented roughly 20 percent of all foreign money flowing to American universities under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, and it pushed Qatar’s cumulative reported total above $6.6 billion since the database’s earliest entries — more than the United Kingdom, Germany, China or Saudi Arabia.
The surge has come at a politically charged moment. Qatar is widely reported to host Hamas’s senior political leadership, including officials who fled to Doha after the October 7, 2023 attacks. Congressional investigators have spent the past two years examining whether Qatari money has shaped academic environments, faculty hiring, and even contractual restrictions on speech. And the Trump administration, citing those concerns, has now built an enforcement architecture that did not exist a year ago — a new portal, a new Executive Order, a new interagency partnership with the State Department, and four open Section 117 investigations.
A New Portal Built for Enforcement
The disclosure infrastructure now in place is the product of Executive Order 14282, “Transparency Regarding Foreign Influence at American Universities,” which President Trump signed on April 23, 2025. The order directed the Department of Education to overhaul Section 117 reporting, conduct compliance audits, and coordinate enforcement with other federal agencies. Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, codified at 20 U.S.C. § 1011f, requires institutions receiving federal financial assistance to disclose foreign-source gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more on a biannual basis.
For more than a decade, the law went largely unenforced. The Department’s December 2025 announcement bluntly described the Biden administration’s stewardship: “The current reporting portal has not been meaningfully updated since the first Trump Administration. The Biden Administration did not make it a priority to enforce Section 117 or monitor potential foreign influence at American colleges and universities.”
The new portal, beta-tested over three days by the University of Texas at Austin, MD Anderson, the University of Texas Medical Branch, the University of Southern California, Pepperdine University, Purdue University, Indiana University, Washington University and the University of Arizona, went live on January 2, 2026. It permits bulk uploads, generates executive-summary visualizations, and — critically — makes the underlying data available for public inspection in a way the previous interface did not.
Within weeks of launch, the database showed approximately $62.4 billion in disclosed foreign gifts and contracts, drawn from 555 institutions and stretching back to 1981. The Department has acknowledged the aggregate is incomplete — which is precisely why four ongoing investigations target Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley “amid reports of inaccurate and untimely foreign funding disclosures.” Section 117(f) authorizes civil action, recovery of enforcement costs, and — under the Department’s longstanding interpretation — termination of Title IV eligibility, including Pell Grants and Direct Loans.
Follow the Money: Where Qatari Dollars Land
Department of Education filings reviewed by TIJ show that Qatari money has not been distributed evenly across U.S. higher education. It has concentrated overwhelmingly in a small group of universities that operate branch campuses inside Education City, the 12-square-kilometer academic park in Doha financed and administered by the Qatar Foundation, a state-backed entity chaired by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the mother of the current emir.
The five largest cumulative recipients of Qatari funds, according to Department of Education disclosures aggregated by Inside Higher Ed, are:
- Cornell University — $2.3 billion, primarily for Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, the first American medical school established outside the United States;
- Carnegie Mellon University — $1.0 billion, for its branch campus offering computer science, business and information systems degrees in Doha;
- Texas A&M University — $993 million, despite the university’s 2024 announcement that it would close its Qatar engineering campus;
- Georgetown University — $971 million, anchored by its School of Foreign Service in Qatar;
- Northwestern University — $734 million, supporting Northwestern University in Qatar’s journalism and communication programs.
The 2025 spike reflects the renewal of long-term operating agreements with the Qatar Foundation. Carnegie Mellon disclosed a $936 million contract in May 2025 alone. Cornell reported a $163 million contract in January 2025; the institution had previously disclosed an even larger restricted contract — described in Department records as roughly $1.1 billion — covering the 2026-2032 award period for Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar. Texas A&M reported a $24 million wind-down deal that same month. Arizona State and Harvard each filed contracts exceeding $1 million in 2025, while Duke University and Bard College disclosed combinations of gifts and contracts in the high six figures.
Qatar’s funding mechanism — typically a long-duration operating agreement between the Qatar Foundation and the U.S. parent institution — has drawn scrutiny precisely because it sits outside the simple “gift” framework Section 117 was originally designed to capture. The contracts purchase the rights to the American university’s brand, accreditation, and faculty for delivery on Qatari soil. They also impose obligations on the U.S. institution that extend into the institution’s domestic conduct.
Speech Clauses, Lawsuits, and Hamas’s Hosts
Documents obtained by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce during a closed-door August 5, 2025 interview with Northwestern University President Michael Schill show that Northwestern’s contract with the Qatar Foundation contains language requiring that “NU, NU-Q, and their respective employees, students, faculty, families, contractors and agents, shall be subject to the applicable laws and regulations of the State of Qatar, and shall respect the cultural, religious and social customs of the State of Qatar.” Committee staff have characterized that provision as a de facto bar on criticism of the Qatari government, given that Qatari law criminalizes insulting the emir and certain forms of political speech.
The same House interview revealed that anti-Semitism training offered at Northwestern’s Evanston campus is not extended to Northwestern Qatar, and that approximately 90 percent of the $737 million Qatar has provided since 2008 covers direct operating costs of the Doha campus. Investigators also pressed Schill on emails sent by Qatar Foundation staffers to Northwestern Qatar’s dean two weeks after the October 7 Hamas attack, providing talking points on Qatar’s “diplomatic role and mediation efforts in Palestine/Gaza and Afghanistan — along with reactions from international politicians.”
The contractual entanglement has also surfaced in federal court. In Canaan v. Carnegie Mellon University, a former CMU architecture student sued the institution alleging it tolerated a hostile environment for Jewish students. After CMU resisted producing records of its Qatar relationship, U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Pennsylvania ordered the university to turn over discovery on its nearly $1 billion in Qatari funding. The court’s February 2026 ruling concluded that “Qatar and its affiliates could be a source of antisemitic influence upon CMU” and that a reasonable jury could find the university’s reliance on Qatari funding affected how it handled civil-rights complaints. The ruling marked the first time a federal court ordered a major U.S. university to disclose internal records about its Qatar relationship over the institution’s objection.
Georgetown, which receives roughly $971 million from Qatar through its School of Foreign Service in Qatar, has Sheikh Abdulla Bin Ali Al-Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, on its Board of Directors. Reporting on the relationship indicates Qatari-affiliated officials have access to programmatic decisions touching the Walsh School of Foreign Service, though Georgetown disputes characterizations of undue influence.
Enforcement Catches Up to the Disclosures
For two decades, Section 117 was a paper tiger. The statute required disclosure but provided little practical mechanism to compel it. That changed on February 20, 2026, when the Departments of Education and State entered an interagency agreement under which the State Department, “in coordination with and at the direction of” the Department of Education, will administer Section 117’s biannual reporting and collection provisions and pursue enforcement through civil investigations.
Legal analysts have noted that the partnership tilts the balance of power toward enforcement. The Department of State carries an investigative posture and a foreign-policy lens that the Department of Education traditionally has lacked. Pairing the two agencies allows the federal government to treat Section 117 less as a regulatory checkbox and more as a national-security disclosure regime.
The cost of noncompliance is now measurable. Beyond civil actions and recoupment of investigation expenses, an institution found to be persistently noncompliant can face termination of Title IV eligibility — a potentially existential consequence for any university dependent on federal student aid. The four open investigations at Harvard, Penn, Michigan and Berkeley are the early test cases for what the Department has signaled will be a sustained enforcement posture.
Qatar, for its part, shows no signs of retrenchment. The 2025 disclosure spike coincides with expanded Qatari lobbying registrations in Washington and intensified outreach to American podcasters, lawmakers and cultural figures accepting government-sponsored Doha junkets. Qatar Foundation officials maintain that the funding supports legitimate academic partnerships.
What Remains Unknown
Even with the new portal, significant blind spots persist. Section 117 captures only gifts and contracts at or above the $250,000 reporting threshold, leaving smaller transfers — including grants, fellowships, and project-specific subawards — outside its reach. Anonymous gifts are not disclosed by name of source. Indirect funding flows, in which Qatari-aligned foundations route grants through third-country intermediaries before reaching U.S. institutions, may not be captured at all. The Department’s own filings note that historical disclosures are “incomplete” and that the open investigations at Harvard, Penn, Michigan and Berkeley are the first attempt to determine the scale of underreporting.
It also remains unclear how aggressively the State Department will pursue enforcement under the new interagency framework, and whether universities will challenge Section 117 actions on First Amendment, academic freedom, or administrative-procedure grounds. The Carnegie Mellon discovery order will be one of the first opportunities for the public to read internal university communications about a Qatar relationship under judicial supervision.
What is no longer in dispute is the scale. A single Gulf monarchy is now the largest disclosed foreign funder of American higher education, its contributions are accelerating, and the contracts that channel its money increasingly include obligations that reach back into the United States. Whether that constitutes legitimate academic globalization or something closer to influence purchase is a question the Department of Education, the Department of State, and the federal courts are now — for the first time in the law’s history — equipped to examine on the public record.