A federal judge blocked the Education Department from releasing names of foreign donors to Ivy League schools, stalling a transparency push the administration says exposes malign influence.
In Washington on Thursday, D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a temporary restraining order that stops the Education Department from publishing a confidential list of foreign sources of funding tied to Harvard, Columbia and other top U.S. universities. The New York Post reported the five-page order freezes release for 28 days while Chutkan considers a longer injunction.
The Association of American Universities sued earlier the same day. The group represents at least 69 major research campuses and moved fast to keep the donor names out of public view. At stake is a push by the Trump administration to show who has been wiring money into elite higher education.
Foreign donors have given up to $5.2 billion to the universities since 2020. Education Department officials say so-called non-natural person entities, governments, businesses, and other organizations rather than private individuals, account for the vast majority of that total.
Federal law already requires the reports. Section 117 of the Higher Education Act orders U.S. universities to tell the Education Department about contracts with, or gifts from, foreign sources that exceed $250,000. In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive action to toughen enforcement of that rule. The same month, department officials opened a probe of the University of California-Berkeley over funding received from China.
The department wanted to publish the full list of foreign donors. Universities and their trade group answered with a lawsuit instead of a public ledger.
Education Department spokeswoman Ellen Keast said the ruling would stop the administration from revealing schools 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.”
Keast did not soften the point.
"Now, the ‘premier’ association for American research universities is suing because it is hellbent on avoiding public accountability after decades of insatiable greed and disregard for the national interest."
She added that Americans deserve transparency about the billions flowing from overseas to U.S. campuses, and that the department will fight the AAU in court to deliver it. That stance fits a wider pattern of the administration pressing institutions when it believes the public is being kept in the dark, including when Trump directed a review of Fed renovation overruns and called for accountability at the central bank.
An Education Department official described the kinds of names on the withheld list in blunt terms. The official said a donor “would be a foreign government; this could be a foreign military; this could be a foreign business, could be any of those things,” or “an enterprise connected to a university, that’s connected to Chinese intelligence or the PLA [People’s Liberation Army].”
The same official called the lawsuit a pretext to block public transparency about enterprises funneling billions of dollars into leading U.S. universities for two main purposes: to steal intellectual property, and, with gifts also coming from Arab countries, to change what is taught on American campuses.
“And so they’re funding the anti-Zionist, anti-Western ideology that is really not only dividing campuses but dividing the country,” the official said.
Those are serious charges. They go to national security, research theft, and the political climate students actually face. They also explain why the department treated the donor file as more than a paperwork dispute.
Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, framed the harm differently. In the order, she wrote that the government threatened to publish names of donors who had remained anonymous “for every internet user to see in posterity.”
"Once published, the information will likely never escape the public eye. Indeed, the disclosure may produce downstream harms to the safety of donors who live in politically repressive countries."
She found that disclosure of the confidential information could “constitute irreparable harm,” and that revealing the names would likely violate the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal statute that sets basic rules for how agencies make and announce decisions. The restraining order holds for 28 days while she weighs a further block.
Court fights have become a recurring feature of this term, and this freeze lands alongside other losses that have tested the administration’s patience with the bench, much as Trump has voiced regret over Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett after repeated setbacks elsewhere.
The AAU hailed the decision. The association said that if the Trump administration succeeded, it “would chill the lawful generosity that supports scholarships, research, and teaching on campuses across the country.” It also argued that donors gave money based on assurances their privacy would be guarded, and that the department had been obtaining identities of individual donors since 2020 during the first Trump administration.
Harvard and Columbia sit at the center of the withheld list, with the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and the broader AAU roster also in the picture. These are campuses that market global prestige, court overseas partnerships, and still ask American families to support tuition at record levels.
They also sit inside a political season in which foreign leverage and border enforcement keep colliding. Voters already watching how the Supreme Court lets Trump keep deporting illegal immigrants to third countries can connect the dots: who enters the country, and who funds the institutions that shape the next generation, are not separate questions.
Section 117 was written so the public would not have to guess. Gifts above $250,000 from foreign sources were supposed to be reported. The department’s April probe of Berkeley over China money showed the enforcement turn was already underway before this week’s clash in D.C. federal court.
Now a temporary restraining order puts the names back behind the curtain. The universities keep the cash flow. The public keeps the blackout. And the Education Department is left arguing in court for the basic right to show taxpayers which foreign governments, firms, and networks have been underwriting elite American higher education.
Transparency fights rarely stay confined to one agency. The same White House that wants foreign donor files in daylight has also kept CNN off Trump’s travel press pool in a separate dispute over access and message control, proof that information battles are now routine governing terrain.
Keast’s bottom line remains the administration’s public case: Americans should know about the billions moving from overseas onto U.S. campuses, and the department intends to keep pressing that claim. The AAU’s bottom line is the opposite: publish the names, it warns, and lawful giving for scholarships and research will suffer.
One side wants sunlight on foreign money. The other wants a judge to keep the shades drawn. For now, the shades stay down.
When universities take billions from overseas and then race to court to hide the donors, taxpayers should not have to apologize for wanting the names.