Judge Tanya Chutkan / Wikimedia CommonsA federal judge in Washington, D.C., has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from publicly releasing the names of foreign donors and contract counterparties tied to some of America’s most prominent universities.DC US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the Obama appointee who presided over the federal election case against President Trump, issued a temporary restraining order barring the Department of Education from releasing a list of foreign donors tied to as much as $5.2 billion in gifts and contracts reported by the schools since 2020.The Department of Education announced in February that universities disclosed more than $5.2 billion in reportable foreign gifts and contracts during 2025 alone, involving more than 8,300 transactions. The agency said universities have reported a cumulative $67.6 billion in foreign funding since Section 117 was added to federal law in 1986.Section 117 of the Higher Education Act already requires schools that take federal money to report foreign gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more.The department began collecting individual donor names in 2020, during President Trump’s first term, while telling the schools the names would stay confidential.In June 2026, the department reversed course. It has already published 92 “counterparties of concern.” Friday was supposed to be the day the rest of the list went public.According to the New York Post, Chutkan ruled that disclosure of the information could “constitute irreparable harm.”In her five-page order in Association of American Universities v. U.S. Department of Education, Chutkan wrote that the department “threaten[s] to imminently publish the names of donors who have hitherto remained anonymous for every internet user to see in posterity.”She added: “Once published, the information will likely never escape the public eye.” The Obama judge also fretted that naming the donors “may produce downstream harms to the safety of donors who live in politically repressive countries.”The order stays in place for 28 days while she weighs a longer injunction. Reuters reported the suit was filed Thursday by the Association of American Universities, the trade group for 69 research universities, including Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.That is the same secrecy regime The Gateway Pundit has been documenting for years. In July, TGP reported that Harvard tops the nation in foreign cash, including money from Communist China, after Sen. Tom Cotton demanded a probe into the haul.In October 2025, TGP reported that American universities had taken more than $60 billion in foreign gifts and contracts, with Harvard, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Penn, MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Georgetown and Columbia alone accounting for more than $20 billion, cash that buys influence, shapes research and opens the door to hostile governments.Education Department officials told the New York Post the money is not coming from kindly alumni abroad.“This would be a foreign government; this could be a foreign military; this could be a foreign business,” one official said — “or an enterprise connected to a university, that’s connected to Chinese intelligence or the PLA.”The same official said the secrecy fight is “a pretext to prevent public transparency” about enterprises “funneling billions of dollars to lead US universities mainly to do two things”: steal intellectual property, and — in the case of gifts from Arab countries — “change what’s taught on US campuses” by funding “anti-Zionist, anti-Western ideology.”Department spokeswoman Ellen Keast did not mince words. She said the ruling protects schools that have been “cashing multi-million-dollar checks from malign foreign actors that fund centers and faculty who promote anti-Western ideologies and support partnerships that are designed to export sensitive technology to geopolitical adversaries.”The post Obama Judge Tanya Chutkan Blocks Trump Education Department From Naming Foreign Donors Who Dumped Billions Into Harvard, Columbia, and Other Elite Campuses appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.