Feds should improve safeguards against foreign entities stealing intellectual property from colleges, watchdog says

Higher Ed Dive

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf

June 15, 2022

Dive Brief:

• Federal agencies should beef up protocols for identifying colleges at high risk of inadvertently sharing technology, research and other sensitive information with foreign entities, a Congressional watchdog said in a report Tuesday. 

• The Government Accountability Office developed eight similar recommendations for the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the FBI. They suggest the agencies regularly evaluate factors that place universities at risk and share their evaluations with appropriate government offices.

• Tuesday’s report is a public, pared-down iteration of one released in March, which the GAO confirmed will not be released. The private version of the report discusses how federal departments coordinate and share information about potential leaks in higher education to foreign countries.

Dive Insight:

Policymakers across the political spectrum have grown increasingly concerned about foreign meddling in U.S. affairs, particularly from China.

In higher ed, this has partially manifested as a federal crackdown on foreign gifts and donations made to colleges.

The Trump administration began a campaign based on Section 117, a previously obscure portion of the Higher Education Act that requires colleges to report foreign gifts and contracts totaling $250,000 or more in a year. Under former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Education mandated an extensive new checklist to report these transactions and opened investigations into more than a dozen high-profile universities’ practices, some of which have not been resolved publicly.

Federal officials have also feared foreign entities are trying to steal American research and technology, which prompted the Trump administration to create the China Initiative through the U.S. Department of Justice. The China Initiative intended to counter Beijing’s theft of intellectual property.

The Justice Department ended the program in February, following criticism it stoked racial profiling, particularly of Chinese scholars.

The GAO report says 2 million foreign students and scholars studied at U.S. colleges in 2019 and often contribute to research, which hostile foreign entities are targeting.

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