WASHINGTON — A federal judge blocked the Education Department on Thursday from releasing a list of foreign donors to Harvard, Columbia and other top US universities — ruling that the disclosure of the confidential information could “constitute irreparable harm.”
DC US District Judge Tanya Chutkan slapped the temporary restraining order on the Trump administration as it was seeking to publish a list of all foreign donors who have given up to $5.2 billion to the universities since 2020.
So-called non-natural person entities accounted for the vast majority of the $5.2 billion, officials noted, rather than individual donors.
“This would be a foreign government; this could be a foreign military; this could be a foreign business, could be any of those things,” an Education Department official said of the list, or “an enterprise connected to a university, that’s connected to Chinese intelligence or the PLA [People’s Liberation Army].”
“Here, Defendants threaten to imminently publish the names of donors who have hitherto remained anonymous for every internet user to see in posterity,” wrote Chutkan in the five-page order.
“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,” added Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.
Revealing the names of the foreign donors, the judge ruled, would likely violate the Administrative Procedure Act as a result.
The order will remain in place for the next 28 days, while Chutkan mulls a more temporary injunction against publishing the names.
The Association of American Universities, which brought the suit against the Department of Education earlier Thursday, argued that donors contributed based on “assurances” that their privacy would be guarded.
The association represents at least 69 top research universities in the US, including the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University and others.
An Education Department spokeswoman claimed that the ruling would halt 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.”
“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,” added spokeswoman Ellen Keast. “Americans deserve transparency about the billions flowing from overseas to U.S. campuses, and we will fight AAU in court to deliver it.”
The AAU hailed the ruling in a statement, saying if the Trump administration succeeded it “would chill the lawful generosity that supports scholarships, research, and teaching on campuses across the country.”
In April 2025, Education Department officials launched a probe of the University of California-Berkeley over funding it received from China.
President Trump the same month signed an executive action to strengthen enforcement of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act.
The law forces US universities to report contracts with or gifts from foreign sources that exceed to $250,000 to the Education Department — but the AAU objected, claiming that the department had been obtaining the identities of individual donors since 2020 during the first Trump administration.
“It’s a pretext to prevent public transparency about the enterprises that are funneling billions of dollars to lead US universities mainly to do two things,” the official said. “The first is to steal intellectual property … and the second thing, … these gifts are also coming from Arab countries … to change what’s taught on US 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 added.
