On April 15, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education posted a notice in the Federal Register inviting public comment on a revised collection instrument for foreign-gift and foreign-contract disclosures under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. Most Americans did not read it. Most members of Congress did not read it. The notice did not appear on a cable news crawl. It did not receive a single floor vote. And it may turn out to be one of the most consequential pieces of federal oversight machinery published this year.

For constitutional conservatives who care about the separation of powers — who remember that Article I vests the legislative power in Congress and that the executive's job is to faithfully execute the laws Congress has passed — this is the kind of event that deserves attention. Not because the underlying policy is necessarily wrong. Foreign-gift disclosure is a legitimate oversight function. But because the mechanism — regulation-by-agency rather than legislation-by-statute — has become the operating default of the modern administrative state, and it is reshaping the policy environment around higher education, religious education, and think-tank funding in ways that will be hard to reverse.

This piece walks through what Section 117 is, what the April 15 notice does, why it is the regulatory parallel track for a policy fight that has stalled in Congress, and what constitutional conservatives should watch.

What Section 117 Is

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, codified at 20 U.S.C. § 1011f, requires institutions of higher education that participate in federal Title IV student-aid programs to disclose gifts received from, or contracts entered into with, foreign sources whose aggregate value exceeds $250,000 in a calendar year. Disclosures are filed with the Secretary of Education on a semi-annual cycle (January 31 and July 31). Non-compliance can trigger civil referrals to the Department of Justice.

The statute has existed since 1986. For most of its history, enforcement was inert. A 2019 Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report documented significant under-reporting across major universities — Chinese government grants, Qatari endowment gifts, Saudi-sourced research contracts — with little apparent consequence. The first Trump administration began enforcing the statute more aggressively in 2019–2020. The Biden administration reduced enforcement. The second Trump administration has escalated enforcement again, and the April 15 notice is part of that escalation.

What the April 15 Notice Actually Does

The Federal Register notice — a "Notice of Proposed Information Collection," under the Paperwork Reduction Act — proposes changes to the form institutions file. The changes are not marginal. Per the text of the Federal Register publication, the revised collection instrument would:

  • Lower the effective disclosure threshold by eliminating the aggregation rule that currently allows institutions to report gifts from a single country's various foundations and ministries as a single line item. Each entity would be reported separately. The statutory $250,000 floor would remain, but the reporting granularity would be substantially finer.
  • Require disclosure of in-kind contributions, not just cash, including access to research facilities, personnel exchanges, and sponsored fellowship slots. In-kind contributions were previously reported in narrative form where disclosed at all.
  • Extend reporting to cover contributions routed through third-party intermediaries — foundations, non-governmental organizations, or affiliated academic centers — where the ultimate funding source is foreign.
  • Request additional detail on gifts earmarked for particular academic programs, named professorships, or affiliated research centers, including any intellectual-property or publication-review conditions attached.
  • Shorten the reporting cycle from semi-annual to quarterly for institutions that have received more than $5 million in aggregate foreign support in any of the prior three years.

The public comment window runs 60 days from posting, closing in mid-June. Following comment review, the Department can finalize the instrument and begin enforcement on the new form.

Why This Is a Parallel Track

Over the past eighteen months, legislation addressing foreign funding of religious educational institutions — the Combating Lying, Antisemitism, and Religious Extremism Act (the CLASS Act), introduced in Congress by multiple members and currently supported as a plank of the Sharia-Free America Caucus's four-bill slate — has moved through committee drafts and think-tank white papers but has not received a floor markup. Sixty-four caucus members as Bastion Daily reported Monday have not translated into a single bill markup.

The April 15 Section 117 notice moves the policy without Congress. Many of the concerns the CLASS Act was drafted to address — foreign funding of religiously affiliated K–12 and postsecondary institutions, foreign influence over curricula, opacity in intermediate funding chains — are addressable through Section 117's revised collection instrument. Religiously affiliated colleges and seminaries that participate in Title IV are covered by Section 117. The expanded reporting requirements would subject them to the same granular disclosure as secular institutions. The Department of Education's Office of the General Counsel has historically taken the position that Section 117 covers any Title IV-eligible institution regardless of religious affiliation, and the April 15 notice does not carve out religious institutions.

This is what the administrative state looks like when it works around a legislative stall. The substantive policy result — more disclosure, more scrutiny, more enforcement — lands without the House or Senate casting a recorded vote.

The Constitutional Conservative Concern

There are two different conservative responses to this, and they should not be conflated.

The first response is substantive: If you believe that foreign funding of American educational institutions is a legitimate oversight target, the Section 117 track is a policy win. Disclosure has bipartisan support. The 2019 PSI report was bipartisan. The statute itself passed with bipartisan support in 1986. And a more granular disclosure instrument is a regulatory refinement, not a new statutory imposition. This is how executive-branch agencies are supposed to implement statutes Congress has already passed.

The second response is structural: If you believe Article I means what it says — that legislative power is vested in Congress, that regulatory changes of significant economic and educational consequence should go through the legislative process, and that the modern administrative state has eroded democratic accountability by routing policy around Congress — the Section 117 track is troubling regardless of the underlying merits. Congress introduced the CLASS Act to address exactly these concerns. Congress has declined to mark it up. An executive agency should not be able to effectively deliver the legislative result on its own timeline.

Both responses are available to constitutional conservatives, and reasonable people will land differently. The structural objection is the harder one to argue against without conceding ground on executive-branch rulemaking in other contexts — tariff policy, immigration enforcement, environmental regulation. Consistency costs something on every issue.

What is not available is the claim that nothing of consequence is happening. The April 15 notice will change what universities, seminaries, and religiously affiliated colleges report. It will change the evidentiary record regulators, investigators, and plaintiffs' counsel can draw on. It will reshape the ground on which future legislation, litigation, and accreditation decisions are argued. It is a policy move of real scale.

The Civil-Liberties Cross-Check

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Knight First Amendment Institute have historically raised concerns about Section 117 enforcement that read academic-freedom risks into the statute. The concern is that granular disclosure requirements — particularly those that ask for details about foreign-linked researchers, visiting scholars, or affiliated programs — can chill legitimate international academic exchange and create a surveillance footprint around scholars of certain national or religious backgrounds. Knight Institute commentary on Section 117 enforcement during the first Trump administration documented these concerns in some detail.

Constitutional conservatives should take this cross-check seriously. The same Section 117 machinery that produces legitimate transparency about Qatari endowment gifts can also produce a chilling effect on Jewish-studies departments accepting Israeli government scholarship, Christian seminaries with sister-institution relationships in Africa, or Catholic universities participating in Vatican-affiliated research networks. The granularity that makes disclosure useful is the same granularity that makes it invasive.

The question is whether the April 15 revised instrument builds in proportionality — carveouts for small institutions, thresholds for in-kind reporting, limits on what can be compelled about individual researchers — or whether it leans maximalist. The 60-day comment window is the venue where that question will be litigated in writing.

What to Watch

The comment docket. Between April 15 and mid-June, hundreds of institutions, trade associations, and advocacy organizations will file comments. Reading the comments that get filed by American Council on Education, Association of American Universities, Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, and the Association of Theological Schools will show which institutions regard the instrument as proportionate and which regard it as overreach.

The religious-institution response. Religiously affiliated colleges and seminaries sit at the intersection of this regulatory expansion and the First Amendment's Religion Clauses. How Catholic, evangelical, Jewish, and other religiously affiliated institutions respond in the comment window will signal whether the Department's posture is ecumenical or selective.

The finalization timeline. A final rule could emerge as early as late summer. If the Department accelerates to a final rule without substantive modification, the structural objection strengthens. If the Department visibly modifies the instrument in response to comments, the rulemaking-as-legislation concern weakens.

Parallel tracks. Watch whether the administration uses Section 117's revised instrument to open specific institutional investigations before Congress takes up the CLASS Act. If investigations precede legislation, that is the signal that the regulatory track has overtaken the legislative one.

Why It Matters

The separation of powers is a structural principle, not a policy preference. The purpose of routing consequential decisions through Congress is not that Congress is wiser than the executive. It is that Congress is harder to capture, that statutes are harder to reverse than regulations, and that democratic accountability is stronger when a bill has a roll-call vote attached to it. When significant policy shifts are delivered by regulation rather than legislation, the democratic feedback loop weakens — voters cannot punish members of Congress for a vote they did not take.

The April 15 Section 117 notice is a clean example of that dynamic. The underlying policy may or may not be correct. The process — quarterly reporting for mid-sized institutions, expanded in-kind disclosure, third-party intermediary reporting — is being set without a floor vote in either chamber. Constitutional conservatives who complained for a decade about the administrative state's end-runs around Congress should notice when it happens on a file they otherwise agree with substantively. The structural concern does not evaporate because the policy outcome is congenial.

Congress can still act. If the Section 117 rulemaking is overbroad, Congress can legislate the appropriate limits. If the policy result is what Congress wanted anyway, Congress can ratify it by statute and make it durable against the next administration's reversal. What Congress has done instead — sitting on the CLASS Act while the Department moves independently — leaves the substantive result in the hands of whoever runs the Education Department next. That is a weaker footing for a policy than a statute.

The CLASS Act is not dead. A markup could still happen. But the April 15 notice is the signal that the administration is not waiting.