Penn will disclose foreign gifts and contracts through a government portal to comply with the Department of Education’s new requirement for universities receiving federal funding.
The portal — launched on Jan. 2 — aims to promote compliance with Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires post-secondary institutions to report foreign gifts and contracts that total $250,000 or more. According to the Education Department, the new system is intended to replace an older platform that has “not been meaningfully updated since the first Trump administration.”
An Office of Research Services spokesperson wrote that the University “fully intends to comply with the new requirements” and is “working on doing so now,” in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian. The spokesperson added that the first reporting cycle will occur in February.
The new reporting portal includes features designed to improve disclosure, such as the ability to upload documents in bulk, create visualizations of executive summaries, and tools to assist institutions in drafting and reviewing reports. The system was beta tested by nine universities before its January launch.
In May 2025, the Department of Education opened an investigation into Penn’s foreign funding records after a review of the University’s financial reports revealed “inaccurate” and “incomplete” disclosures.
In a statement to the DP, an Education Department spokesperson wrote that there have been “no updates” to the status of the University's ongoing investigation.
The federal government cracked down on the enforcement of Section 117 during 1968 Wharton graduate and President Donald Trump's first administration, when it opened several investigations into universities’ foreign funding disclosures. Under former Penn professor Joe Biden's presidency, the Education Department did not launch any similar investigations.
Matt Hartley, a professor at Penn’s Graduate School of Education, wrote to the DP that the foreign funding portal primarily centralizes information that universities are already required to report.
“The portal was clearly created because there was a sense that the federal government needed more data on how foreign governments might be influencing universities,” Hartley wrote.
Since January 2025, the Trump administration has renewed enforcement efforts and initiated Section 117 investigations into several elite institutions, including Penn and Harvard University.
