Foreign governments are spending billions to shape what Americans learn and believe. Most of it happens out of public view.

I want to share a story about how money from a foreign government made its way to a school just a few blocks from me, and how a report released this week revealed that the problem is far bigger and more dangerous than we imagined.

In 2024, it was revealed that PS 261, a public school in Brooklyn, had a map of the Middle East that excluded Israel. It turns out that PS 261 had an Arab Culture Arts program that was partly funded by the Qatar Foundation, which is the Qatari royal family’s American charitable arm.

This week, we learned just how widely Qatari money has been spread when the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) revealed that Qatar, which has provided refuge for Hamas and financing for Islamist terrorists, had poured more than $400 billion into the U.S. since 2010. According to The Free Press, the FDD report found:

• “Qatar has spent the equivalent of about $1.2 million for every Qatari citizen to enmesh the country’s interests in nearly every corner of American life, from schools and colleges to the defense and energy industries to hospitals and disaster relief.”

None of this has been found to be illegal, yet it is indisputable that Qatar is using its ample resources to buy influence across America and to shape the views of the American people. And Qatar is just one of many countries doing the same thing.

• The House Ways and Means Committee is now investigating the possibility that Chinese money is flowing into U.S. nonprofits protesting the expansion of data centers.
• This year, radical influencers on the left and right, most notably Hasan Piker and Candace Owens, were invited by the Cuban and Russian governments to visit their countries, with state media gleefully reporting on their every word about how bad America is and how Americans are being told lies about the wonderful regimes led by the Cuban communist party and Vladimir Putin.
• The Department of Education recently put its disclosure data back online and the numbers are startling. American colleges and universities have reported roughly $68 billion in foreign gifts and contracts since the 1980s. The largest donors are not our friends, countries like Canada or Great Britain. They are countries whose values and goals are often diametrically opposed to ours, like China and Qatar. In fact, Qatar alone accounted for about one in five foreign dollars flowing to American universities last year.

It should not be controversial to say that the government of Qatar, or any government whose values run against our own, should not be able to spend billions of dollars quietly shaping what American children are taught and what American adults come to believe on the important issues facing our country. A free country has every right to know who is paying, how much, and for what. Right now, in too many cases, we simply do not know.

The encouraging part is that the people raising the alarm do not fall along the usual lines. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have both pushed for tougher disclosure. Georgia just became the first state to require K-12 schools to reveal foreign funding, and that effort was led by a Democrat. This is one of those rare issues where the dividing line is not left against right but transparency against secrecy.

Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, who as Executive Director of FDD oversaw the Qatar report, has spent his career following exactly this kind of money. He will join us on June 15 to walk through what the Qatar findings actually show and what responsible leaders can do about them. I hope you will register and bring your questions.