Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

26. Trade · Notable · Contested — excluded from counts

Compel the closure of all Confucius Institutes in the U.S.

Attempted

790 26. Trade · from “The Case for Fair Trade”

“Compel the closure of all Confucius Institutes in the U.S., which serve as propaganda arms of the CCP.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The only allowlisted count of the object in the window, and it is not a count of zero: the Education Department, answering a comment in its Workforce Pell final rule, states that "as of 2023, according to the Government Accountability Office, there were fewer than five Confucius Institutes still active within the United States". Almost all of the closures happened before the evidence window, under the Defense funding limitation of 2021; a handful remain, and no instrument in 2025-2026 compels them to close.

  2. Attempted

    DoD's final DFARS rule took effect the day it published, requiring every offeror to represent that it does not host a Confucius Institute or holds a waiver. It implements sections 1044 and 1045 of the FY2024 NDAA - a tightened definition of "Confucius Institute" and a sunset of the waiver authority on 2026-10-01 - amending a limitation in force since section 1062 of the FY2021 NDAA and in regulation since an interim rule of 2023. The mechanism therefore predates the evidence window; what this administration added is the narrower definition and the coming end of waivers, and neither closes an Institute.

  3. Attempted

    The House passed H.R. 881, the DHS Restrictions on Confucius Institutes and Chinese Entities of Concern Act, 266-153 (Roll no. 120), which would extend to Department of Homeland Security funding the same leverage the FY2021 NDAA applied to Defense funding. It was received in the Senate on 2025-05-08, referred to Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and has had no further action; its Senate companion, S. 1694, is in the same committee. One chamber is `attempted` on the Requires-Congress ladder, and funding leverage is in any case not the same thing as compelled closure.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

attempted rather than partial is a boundary call and is flagged in .scratch/research-phase/spot-checks.md. The argument for partial is that a funding-leverage mechanism is in force and is the mechanism by which most Confucius Institutes did close. The argument that won is that the mechanism was in place before 2025-01-20, so under ADR 0003 it is not what this administration did, and neither instrument in the window closes an Institute.

pre_satisfied was considered and rejected. The flag means this specific ask was already satisfied before the window; “fewer than five still active” is not “all closed”, and the Quote asks for all of them.

Three Federal Register documents in the whole window contain the phrase “Confucius Institute”: the DFARS rule, its 2025-08-28 correction, and the Education Department rule quoted above.

The GAO report has now been opened (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06), and it does not move the item. It is China: With Nearly All U.S. Confucius Institutes Closed, Some Schools Sought Alternative Language Support, GAO-24-105981, published and released 2023-10-30 — https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-105981, with the full report at https://www.gao.gov/assets/d24105981.pdf. Its finding: “The number of Confucius Institutes at U.S. universities and colleges declined since 2019, from about 100 to fewer than five”, from a survey of almost 100 schools conducted in January 2023, with more than 60 per cent of the 74 respondents citing potential loss of or ineligibility for federal funding — the FY 2019 and FY 2021 NDAA limitations — as contributing “to a great extent” to the decision to close. Three things follow. It is pre-window (2023-10-30), so it cannot be Evidence under the date gate and is recorded here instead. It confirms the Education Department’s second-hand figure exactly, so the 2026-05-19 event’s note is sound. And it is not a count of zero: “fewer than five” still active, which is what keeps this at attempted rather than done.

No later GAO count exists. gao.gov/search is a JavaScript shell that returns no prose to an agent, but gao.gov/products/<id> and gao.gov/assets/<id>.pdf open on the full-headers rung, and GAO’s own U.S.–China Relations topic page carries GAO-24-105981 as its only Confucius Institute product. Two searches scoped to gao.gov returned nothing newer.

Action
abolish
Object
Confucius Institutes in the United States
ID
2090