DETERRENT Act

This bill rewrites the foreign-money rules for colleges and universities under the Higher Education Act. It lowers the reporting trigger for foreign gifts and contracts to $50,000 per foreign source in a calendar year, and requires schools to report any gift from a foreign country or entity of concern no matter how small. Congress bars institutions from entering contracts with a foreign country of concern or a foreign entity of concern, allowing only one-year waivers the Secretary of Education may grant. Reports must be posted in a public, searchable federal database and shared, unredacted, with the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, and the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, Commerce, Homeland Security, and Energy, plus the NSF and NIH. Large research institutions and Title VI recipients must require their faculty and staff to disclose foreign gifts and contracts. Private institutions holding more than $6 billion in assets and more than $250 million in investments tied to a foreign country or entity of concern must report those investments each year. The Secretary investigates violations and refers them to the Attorney General, who sues to compel compliance; institutions that lose face fines and pay the government's enforcement costs. An institution that loses three separate civil actions loses eligibility for federal student aid for at least two years. A foreign country of concern is defined by cross-reference to the covered nations in 10 U.S.C. 4872 and any additional country the Secretary designates.

At least 57 organizations named this measure in a lobbying filing. A floor, not a total: they were counted by the client name on 237 quarterly reports filed by 4 lobbying firms and by 55 organizations lobbying for themselves in 2025 Q1, 2025 Q2, 2025 Q3, 2025 Q4, 2026 Q1, 2026 Q2 and 2026 Q3. An organization that lobbied this measure without naming it is not counted here.

31 of those filings did not cite this bill by number. They named a short title it shares with its Senate companion, S 1296, so the reference belongs to the pair rather than to one chamber’s vehicle.

The filings record that lobbying was reported on the measure. The form has no per-bill dollar figure and no field for a position, so nothing here says how much was spent or which side an organization took.

5 of them, in no ranking: Dartmouth College; Boston University; The University of North Carolina System; Stanford University; Jewish Federations of North America. Listed as filed, in the order the filings were read, and 52 others are not shown. These are not the largest, the earliest or the most active: we keep five names per measure, and the filings give no ranking.

From the LD-2 quarterly lobbying filings published at lda.gov by the Senate Office of Public Records. Read for 2025 Q1, 2025 Q2, 2025 Q3, 2025 Q4, 2026 Q1, 2026 Q2 and 2026 Q3. Our copy holds 24 fewer filings for 2025 Q1, 39 fewer filings for 2025 Q2, 42 fewer filings for 2025 Q3, 33 fewer filings for 2025 Q4, 28 fewer filings for 2026 Q1, 48 fewer filings for 2026 Q2 and 218 fewer filings for 2026 Q3 than the Senate's register counts, so those quarters are the filings we could read rather than every one filed. 2026 Q4 is still inside its filing window, so that quarter is only the filings posted so far.