The Senate Has Stalled the DETERRENT Act for Over a Year. Here's Who Benefits.

The Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions Act — known by its compressed acronym as the DETERRENT Act — would do three things. It would lower the Higher Education Act Section 117 reporting threshold for foreign gifts to U.S. universities from $250,000 to $50,000. It would impose a zero-dollar threshold — meaning every dollar must be reported — for gifts originating from governments or entities in "countries of concern," defined in the statute as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. And it would require disclosure of foreign contracts held by university faculty and administrators, closing a gap that the current statute leaves open.

The bill passed the House on March 27, 2024, by a vote of 246 to 170, with 31 Democrats joining all voting Republicans in support. That was the 118th Congress. The Senate did not take it up.

In the 119th Congress, the bill was reintroduced by Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-WA). It passed the House again in December 2025 — this time by 227 to 196, a roughly similar bipartisan margin. It was referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. It has not received a committee hearing. It has not been reported out. It is where it has been for more than sixteen months: in a Senate committee, waiting.

The question of why is the story.

What Section 117 Does and Doesn't Do

The Higher Education Act Section 117, first enacted in 1986, requires institutions receiving Title IV federal funding to disclose gifts from and contracts with foreign sources above certain thresholds. The current threshold is $250,000 per year from a single foreign source. Below that figure, no disclosure is required.

The statute has, since its enactment, been among the least-enforced transparency requirements in federal law. A Government Accountability Office report from 2019 found that compliance was sporadic and that the Department of Education had not conducted a substantive enforcement audit of Section 117 reports in more than a decade. The report flagged that the Department's internal procedures for reviewing submitted reports for completeness were informal, inconsistent, and in many cases non-existent.

The Trump administration's first term brought the first systematic enforcement push. In 2020, a Department of Education investigation identified approximately $6.5 billion in previously unreported foreign gifts and contracts at major research universities. The investigation covered gifts from donors in China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other countries. Many of the unreported gifts were in the $50,000-to-$250,000 range — below the statutory threshold that had, until the investigation, been understood as a bright-line exemption. The investigation clarified that the $250,000 figure was a per-source annual threshold, not a per-gift floor — an interpretation that, if applied retrospectively, implicated far more universities than had previously been reporting.

The Biden administration, in 2021, rescinded the 2020 enforcement guidance and replaced it with a narrower framework that reduced the enforcement backlog. Universities welcomed the change. The organized critics of Section 117 enforcement — predominantly higher-education associations including the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities — argued that the 2020 framework had been administratively unworkable and had interpreted the statute beyond its text.

The DETERRENT Act is Congress's attempt to re-codify, by statute, the position the Department of Education took in 2020, and to extend it. A $50,000 threshold would have captured most of the gifts identified in the 2020 investigation. A zero-dollar threshold for countries of concern would capture all of them.

What the Senate Stall Looks Like

The Senate HELP Committee has held one hearing on foreign funding at universities since the DETERRENT Act was introduced. That hearing, in March 2025, focused on national security implications of Chinese government-affiliated research partnerships. The committee chair, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), opened the hearing with a statement of concern about inappropriate foreign influence on American research. The ranking member, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), endorsed the DETERRENT Act by name in his opening statement and asked the committee to schedule a markup.

No markup was scheduled.

In the year since the hearing, the committee's public schedule has included markups on five other pieces of higher-education legislation — including a bill updating the Pell Grant formula, a bill on student-loan servicer reporting, and a bill on postsecondary outcomes data collection. The DETERRENT Act has not appeared on any of those agendas.

A spokesperson for Sanders told Inside Higher Ed in mid-2025 that the committee's position was "open to the bill, but focused on other priorities." The spokesperson did not identify the other priorities that had consumed the committee's markup capacity. Inside Higher Ed's reporting noted that the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities had collectively met with Senate HELP committee staff at least six times in 2025 to lobby against the bill.

The lobbying position of the higher-education associations is consistent across public statements. A $50,000 threshold, they argue, would generate a volume of disclosures that would overwhelm university compliance offices and the Department of Education's processing capacity. A zero-dollar threshold for countries of concern would be "unworkable in practice" — a phrase that recurs in an American Council on Education letter from April 2025. The letter does not argue that the underlying transparency goal is wrong. It argues that the statutory mechanism is administratively infeasible.

The counter-argument, made most consistently by the Committee on the Present Danger: China and by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is that administrative infeasibility is a feature, not a bug. The current $250,000 threshold is infeasibility in the opposite direction — a level so high that most foreign gifts fall below it and escape reporting entirely. An operationally burdensome $50,000 threshold would force universities to build the compliance systems that would make Section 117 function as the statute's drafters appear to have intended.

The CLASS Act — The K-12 Parallel

The DETERRENT Act addresses higher education. Its K-12 analogue is the CLASS Act, H.R. 1005, introduced in February 2025 by Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI). The CLASS Act would extend Section 117–style reporting to K-12 private schools receiving federal funding, imposing a $50,000 foreign gift reporting threshold on every covered institution.

The CLASS Act passed the House on December 4, 2025, by a vote of 242 to 176. It was referred to the Senate HELP Committee on December 5, 2025. The committee has not scheduled a hearing or a markup.

The policy premise of the CLASS Act is that Chinese government-affiliated Confucius Institutes, which were largely shut down at the university level following a 2020 Department of Education enforcement action, have migrated downward to K-12 programs. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has published a series of pieces developing this premise. The most recent, on April 6, argued that the K-12 sector has no reporting requirement comparable to Section 117 — which is true — and that closing that gap requires a federal statute. An earlier March 23, 2026 FDD piece named specific Texas Islamic K-12 academies as examples of the pattern FDD argues the CLASS Act would address. The Texas schools named in the piece are privately funded, not federally funded, and would not fall under the statute as currently drafted — a scope question that the next-generation of the bill, if and when it comes, may attempt to address.

The CLASS Act's current Senate stall is structurally identical to the DETERRENT Act's. The bill is in committee. The committee has not acted. The bill's sponsors are not positioned to force floor action. The bill's opponents — including the National Association of Independent Schools and several K-12 advocacy organizations — are actively lobbying against markup.

The Pattern: Two Bills, Same Chokepoint

The DETERRENT Act and the CLASS Act are two different bills addressing two different sectors. They are not directly connected. But the procedural pattern they share is identical: House passage on a bipartisan margin, referral to the Senate HELP committee, organized opposition from the affected-sector lobbies, and indefinite committee inaction.

This is not an accident of scheduling. It is a statement about where the Senate HELP committee's priorities actually sit. The committee has time and capacity for Pell Grant and student-loan legislation, which has identifiable constituencies in every state. The committee has less time for foreign-gift transparency legislation, which has an identifiable constituency in no state — because the universities and private schools that would be subject to new disclosure requirements are a concentrated, organized, and well-resourced opponent, while the beneficiaries of increased transparency are diffuse and unorganized.

This is the classic concentrated-costs, diffuse-benefits problem that political scientists have identified as the signature obstacle to regulatory transparency legislation. The costs of compliance fall on a small number of identifiable institutions. The benefits — a clearer picture of foreign funding flows into American education — accrue to the general public, which does not lobby.

What the Numbers Say

The public record of foreign gifts to U.S. universities has expanded meaningfully since the 2020 enforcement push. Current Section 117 reports, aggregated by the Department of Education, show approximately $1.8 billion in gifts and contracts reported in fiscal year 2024 from donors identified by the universities as foreign. That figure includes gifts from individual donors, research-contract payments, tuition-sponsorship arrangements, and other forms of foreign funding.

Of that $1.8 billion, approximately 37 percent came from sources in China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The remainder came from sources in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Japan, and other OECD countries. The FY2024 total reflects only gifts above the $250,000 threshold. Gifts below that threshold are not captured by the current statute.

Extrapolating from the 2020 investigation — which identified approximately $6.5 billion in unreported gifts across a multi-year review period — the annual volume of sub-$250,000 foreign gifts likely runs in the multiple hundreds of millions of dollars. The DETERRENT Act would bring those gifts into the public record.

Whether that is a material policy improvement is a question on which reasonable observers disagree. The higher-education associations argue that most sub-$250,000 gifts are routine — scholarships, research grants, cultural-exchange funding — and that aggregating them in a disclosure database would produce noise rather than signal. The DETERRENT Act's sponsors argue that the only way to know whether the sub-threshold gifts contain signal is to aggregate and review them.

Neither side's argument can be fully tested until the statute is enacted. That is the nature of a transparency bill: its value is disclosed only after it is passed.

Why It Matters

Two bipartisan House-passed bills on foreign funding transparency are sitting in the same Senate committee, untouched. The policy case against them has been articulated — administrative burden, unclear signal-to-noise, disproportionate compliance costs. The policy case for them has been articulated — the existing statute is underinclusive, the $6.5 billion 2020 investigation number suggests the gap is material, the K-12 sector has no comparable reporting mechanism at all.

What has not been articulated, on the public record, is a substantive reason the Senate has not taken the bills up for markup. The implicit reason — that the affected-sector lobbies oppose them, and that the Senate committee has chosen to respect that opposition by inaction — is not the kind of reason that is announced publicly. It is the kind of reason that is revealed through a sixteen-month absence from the committee agenda.

This is how a transparency bill dies quietly. Not by a vote against it. Not by a visible procedural kill. By being set aside for other priorities, indefinitely, until the political window for the underlying issue closes and the bill can be allowed to expire with the Congress.

The DETERRENT Act has been through that cycle once already, in the 118th Congress. The CLASS Act is now in its first cycle. Unless the Senate HELP committee markets up one or both bills before the 119th Congress adjourns, the cycle repeats.

The public deserves to know which senators support that outcome and which do not. That information is not currently on the record.

Until it is, the story of foreign funding transparency in American education is the story of a policy that passed the House twice and has never reached the Senate floor.

VALOR Institute's report on the dark-money think-tank pipeline documents the domestic-side funding architecture that the foreign-gift disclosure gap leaves uncovered — the same foundations and donor-advised funds that shape university research agendas on the other side of the ledger.