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

11. Department of Education · Minor

Investigate and refer Section 117 violators to DOJ

Partially done

356 11. Department of Education

“Investigate postsecondary institutions that fail to honor their Section 117 obligations and make appropriate referrals to DOJ.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The referral route now exists as a written procedure, which is not the same as a referral. An Interagency Agreement between the Department of Education and the Department of State, executed under 31 U.S.C. 1535 and published on ed.gov, moves the administration of Section 117 to State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs while leaving the decision with ED, and it sets out the referral mechanism in terms: "Execution of Section 117's Enforcement provisions through the initiation of civil investigations including when it appears that an IHE has failed to comply with the requirements of Section 117, a memo may be sent from DOS to ED to ask the Attorney General to initiate a civil action to compel compliance by the noncompliant IHE, pursuant to the provisions of 20 U.S.C. § 1011f(f)(1)", with a parallel provision at 1011f(f)(2) for recovering the full costs of obtaining compliance. Each is routed as a memo from State to ED, which "will then request approval/disapproval from the Attorney General to use the authorities". Still `partial`: the agreement builds the channel and records no traffic through it. No Department of Justice announcement in the window concerns Section 117, and neither department has announced a referral of Harvard, UC Berkeley, Penn or Michigan.

  2. Partially done

    Three more institutional investigations followed — UC Berkeley (2025-04-25), the University of Pennsylvania (2025-05-08) and the University of Michigan (2025-07-15), all opened by the Office of the General Counsel on the same finding of inaccurate or untimely disclosures. The referral half of the ask is unevidenced: Executive Order 14282 §2(d) tells the Secretary to "seek enforcement through appropriate action by the Attorney General", but no Department of Justice announcement in the window concerns Section 117 (a title search of the justice.gov press API for "Section 117", "1011f" and "foreign gift" returns nothing in the window), and the Department has announced no referral.

  3. Partially done

    The investigative half of the ask is being done. The Department sent a records request to Harvard University "after a review of the university's foreign reports revealed incomplete and inaccurate disclosures", the first Section 117 action of the window.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Also read: the UPenn investigation (2025-05-08) and the UC Berkeley notice of investigation, announced in the same release that returned enforcement to the Office of the General Counsel (2025-04-25).
  • Negative search on the referral limb: Justice Department press releases with titles containing “Section 117” (0 records), “1011f” (0), “foreign gift” (0) and “foreign funding” (1 record, 2025-12-29, an unrelated terrorism-financing prosecution).

Checked 2026-09-06. The Status did not change; a document earlier searches could not see is now cited. The open question was whether the DOJ Civil Division’s FCA settlement lists and ED’s Office of General Counsel pages held anything. The document that mattered was on ed.gov all along, behind two obstacles that between them hid it from three earlier searches.

Obstacle one: ed.gov’s usual search box does not search. It returns a full page for any query, and the page’s text is identical — 8,098 characters — for “case processing manual”, “Title IX” and a nonsense term alike. A negative taken from it is worthless. The site’s full-text search does work: it returns query-specific results, and a nonsense term returns “There are no results matching your search terms.” That is what found this agreement.

Obstacle two: the PDF has no text layer. Its eight pages carry no readable text, so they were read as images.

The agreement’s scope is worth stating precisely, because it is easy to over-read: it is ED and State, not ED and DOJ, and its subject is who administers Section 117 reporting, public inspection and investigation. The Attorney General appears only as the officer whose approval is sought before the enforcement authorities at 20 U.S.C. 1011f(f) are used. It is the plumbing for a referral, cited here as such.

Also read at the same time and not used for this item: the Fact Sheet: Department of Education and Department of Justice Civil Rights Partnership (created 2026-06-15), an ED-DOJ interagency agreement under the same Economy Act authority. It concerns civil rights enforcement in schools under Titles VI and IX and Section 504, names Section 117 nowhere, and belongs with this Chapter’s Title VI asks rather than here.

Action
other
Object
Postsecondary institutions violating HEA Section 117
ID
896