Harvard University has taken in more foreign money than any other American college, with more than $630 million flowing from Chinese entities alone, drawing scrutiny from Capitol Hill and the Justice Department over the Ivy League school’s financial entanglement with Beijing.
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Sen. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, is calling for a government investigation into how Chinese money is flowing into American universities, Fox News reported Monday. The Trump administration overhauled the Department of Education’s online reporting portal, and the updated data show Harvard leading every other U.S. institution in foreign funding received.
Cotton said he is concerned that transactions with sanctioned Chinese entities may have gone unreported. “I encourage additional scrutiny of financial ties between American universities and Communist China,” he said.
According to Cotton, federally funded universities have accepted more than $6.8 billion from Communist China since the portal relaunched in January, including over $300 million from sanctioned entities. Harvard alone has received more than $630 million from Chinese sources, Cotton wrote, including roughly $418,000 from organizations tied to foreign talent recruitment programs and nearly $420,000 from entities allegedly linked to unauthorized military advancements, the kind of ties national security hawks have warned for years could give Beijing a back door into American research.
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Cotton has separately warned that Communist China has long been working to displace the United States as the world’s dominant superpower, a warning that puts Harvard’s funding totals in a starker light. His concerns echo a 2019 report from the Clarion Project, cited by Breitbart News, which found American colleges and universities had accepted billions of dollars from foreign entities, including adversarial states, with little of the transparency lawmakers are now demanding.
The revelations coincide with a new Justice Department civil rights investigation into whether Harvard’s China-based financial aid programs discriminate against American citizen students, in potential violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, universities must self-report foreign gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more. Harvard’s own disclosures show it has taken in nearly $4.5 billion in foreign funding overall, with China its single largest source at more than $630 million, figures that raise fresh doubts about how closely the school’s finances have actually been policed.
In 2025, the Chinese Communist government condemned the United States after the Trump administration ended Harvard’s international student program, which critics say had been widely abused. Around the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department would revoke visas from Chinese students with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, part of a wider crackdown on channels Beijing has used to gain influence inside elite American institutions.
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