Education Department Investigating UC Berkeley For Improper Reporting On China Ties

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s Education Department is investigating the University of California at Berkeley for allegedly failing to properly report hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign funding, The Daily Wire has learned.

The Education Department sent a notice of investigation and records requests to UC Berkeley on Friday, senior Education Department officials shared Friday morning. The notification came amid widespread media reports that Berkeley has received a substantial amount of money from foreign governments, the official said, specifically China.

These substantial amounts of money have not been reported to the department as required by law under Section 117’s Foreign Funding Disclosure Requirements for Universities, one official shared. The department is concerned about the university’s deep involvements with Chinese entities, particularly how it has shared the development and transfer of important technologies with China.

“They’ll have 30 days to respond with the records that we requested,” an Education Department official said, “and so we hope to have quite a volume of records and we’ll be able to verify the degree to which UC Berkeley is or is not compliant after our examination of those records.”

Close-up of metalwork on Sather Gate, the iconic entrance gate to the campus of UC Berkeley in downtown Berkeley, California, October 9, 2018. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

“Over the course of the last two years, UC Berkeley has been cooperating with federal inquiries regarding 117 reporting issues, and will continue to do so,” a spokesman for UC Berkeley said on Friday. The univeristy declined to comment further.