On Jan. 2, the Department of Education officially launched its new and improved portal for universities to report foreign funding.

In an earlier update, the department noted, the “current reporting portal had not been meaningfully updated since the first Trump administration.”

This new portal is intended to make it easier for higher ed institutions to report foreign funding, resulting in more timely and accurate disclosures.

Before launching the system, the department conducted extensive beta testing with several universities to solicit feedback, identify any bugs and ensure institutional familiarity with the portal’s reporting features

Congress first required U.S. universities to publicly report certain foreign gifts and contracts in 1986.

Under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, institutions must report foreign gifts and contracts totaling $250,000 or more in a calendar year. Responsibility for enforcing compliance, collecting disclosures, and disseminating the data was placed with the Department of Education.

For more than 30 years, however, the department made little effort to enforce Section 117.

That changed in 2019, when the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

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