Trump’s Bureaucratic Purge Renders GOP’s College Foreign Gift Bill Unenforceable

President Donald Trump and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or U.S. DOGE Service, have spent the first months of his presidency shredding the federal bureaucracy and purging thousands of civil service workers, grinding parts of government to a standstill.

That dysfunction is sabotaging Republican priorities too—the latest being a GOP-backed bill that would impose stricter requirements on colleges’ reporting of foreign gifts and contracts to the federal government.

Republicans have presented the bill as crucial to preserving national security, a step to halt pernicious foreign influence worming through America’s campuses. Rep. Tim Walberg, chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, called the legislation “vital” after the House passed it Thursday.

In reality, the bill would be likely impossible to enforce because of the government paralysis his party engineered.

The policy bind is as follows:

Republicans’ bill, the Deterrent Act, would alter Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires colleges to report to the U.S. Department of Education all foreign gifts and contracts totaling $250,000 or more in a calendar year.

The Deterrent Act would lower that threshold to $50,000, and would mandate that colleges flag for the Education Department any amount of funding from a “country of concern,” like China and Russia.

This shift would create more work for colleges, requiring them to be newly responsible for reporting a broadened trove of data. The American Council on Education, or ACE, the country’s top higher education lobby, wrote in a letter to Hill leaders this week that it’s “unclear how additional and often burdensome reporting will help to address national security concerns.”

And while colleges try to understand the new mandates, the agency that would oversee a theoretical expansion of Section 117, the Education Department, has lost about half of its staff, gutted by Trump’s and Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s layoffs and buyouts.

After one employee departure, eleven people are left on the Education Department’s team that directly managed Section 117 during the Biden administration, according to New America’s review of the agency’s organizational charts. That team, called the Clery Group, is part of the Office of Federal Student Aid. That office has experienced major staff reductions under Trump.

Staff from other offices who were essential to Section 117 enforcement were also cut. The Trump administration axed almost all of the employees in the Office of the General Counsel. That office provided regular legal input on Section 117, but it also needed to respond to questions from intelligence agencies on the subject because other staff lacked necessary security clearances, according to two former Education Department employees.

The Education Department has also just never supervised Section 117 particularly well, which its internal watchdog, the Inspector General, highlighted in a report last month.

The department does “not have any monitoring plans, policies, or procedures in place for its oversight of Section 117 reporting,” the Inspector General’s office wrote in the report.

Colleges would almost certainly have questions about the complex new processes the Deterrent Act would introduce. It would, for instance, force institutions to seek an Education Department waiver before they enter into a contract with a “country of concern.”

How could an Education Department cut down to size—one currently without “monitoring plans, policies, or procedures” around Section 117—be prepared to guide Republicans’ expansion of the law?

Trump could try to punt Section 117 enforcement to another federal agency, however, the Higher Education Act requires colleges to report their data to the Education Secretary and so would require Congress to sign off.

As education experts have widely noted, the department is the federal agency best equipped to carry out some of its most essential duties. It seems unlikely that Section 117, already one of the Education Department’s less-organized efforts, would receive the necessary care from another agency.

Republicans have thus far loudly defended Trump and DOGE, characterizing their chainsaw to the federal government as slicing off necessary bloat.

But more policy examples like Section 117 will start to emerge, in which the Trump administration’s crusade to dismantle the Education Department will undermine Republican interests. If the GOP wants more scrutiny on colleges foreign money, then they need to advocate to restore the Education Department’s staff—their own priorities, but more pressingly, the lives and well-being of students the agency serves—depend on it.