As millions of dollars in foreign donations to American research institutions from countries like China continue to be uncovered, lawmakers say the practice endangers national security and are pushing for legislation that would require universities to disclose donations from adversarial countries that pose a threat to the U.S.

Last week, a report from The Washington Free Beacon revealed that the University of California, Berkeley “received donations from a blacklisted Chinese research university, Chinese Communist Party officials, and a Beijing state-owned chemical company.” The donations included $60,000 from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2023, which was added to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s sanction list a year later for “acquiring and attempting to acquire U.S.-origin items in support of advancing China's quantum technology capabilities, which has serious ramifications for U.S. national security given the military applications of quantum technologies.”

Also in 2023, Berkeley received a $336,000 donation from Vincent Cheung Sai Sing, a member of an advisory body to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That same year, Berkeley got a $160,000 donation from the Glorious Sun Group, whose chairman, Charles Yeung, was a member of a CCP-affiliated committee. Another $75,000 came from Duane Ziping Kuang, the managing partner of the China-based venture capital firm Qiming Venture Partners.

These latest discoveries are barely the tip of the iceberg of the hundreds of millions of dollars that have flowed into Berkeley from Xi Jinping’s communist regime. Li Ka-shing, the billionaire founder of CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong conglomerate, “donated $5.7 million to Berkeley’s biological sciences division in 2023,” which Berkeley deceptively reported as coming from Canada. That same year, the university failed to report to the government $220 million that the university received from China to build a joint Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, which the Trump administration is now investigating.

Multiple other universities also appear to be hiding the origins of donations, some of which have been shown to have originated in China. As the Beacon reported in February, almost a billion dollars have come flooding into American universities over the past four years from “mystery donors in offshore tax havens.” The donations include “over $600 million from donors in Bermuda, $280 million from Guernsey, $25 million from the British Virgin Islands, $25 million from the Bahamas, $17.5 million from [the] Cayman Islands, and $11 million from the island of Jersey.”

Lawmakers like Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas), who serves on the House Select Committee on the CCP, say that American universities have been receiving vast amounts of money from U.S. adversaries such as China for decades, which the communist country has leveraged in order to steal intellectual property.

“When you look at UC Berkeley, [there’s] well over half a million dollars … that we see from that report. But frankly, if you go back to 1981 until now, about $57 billion [has] flow[ed] in from adversarial countries around the world into our research institutions,” he pointed out during “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Tuesday. “Well, that’s concerning, because when China and other adversaries have their money in our universities, particularly in our research institutions, what happens is they have access to those systems, to [that] data. They get the intellectual property resulting from a lot of that research. They get their people over here to be part of that research. And so we see the hands and the tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party all over the place. And unfortunately, colleges and universities that are looking for funding sources sometimes turn a blind eye to the reality of what’s happening [on] their own campuses as a result of the desire to chase the money.”

Moran went on to emphasize that massive foreign donations to universities “absolutely is a national security issue.”

“That’s why Congress passed the Deterrent Act earlier this year to strengthen Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which is the requirement for educational institutions to report donations over $250,000,” he continued. “But the Deterrent Act goes further. It says, ‘Hey, we’re going to move that to $50,000 for any foreign investment into our higher education system, and we’re going to move it to zero dollars.’ If you get anything above zero dollars from a foreign entity of concern, you have to report that.”

“And oh by the way, there [aren’t] any good teeth in Section 117 right now,” Moran added. “The Deterrent Act adds those teeth and says if you don’t follow the reporting requirements, if you’re not transparent, then there [are] going to be fines and potentially loss of Title IV funding for those colleges and universities that do not report those things in a timely manner and in a full manner, which has been happening.”

The Deterrent Act passed out of the House in March and is currently awaiting a vote in the Senate.