Midnight TRO Blocks the Education Department From Publishing Universities' Foreign Donor Names

Midnight TRO Blocks the Education Department From Publishing Universities' Foreign Donor Names

On Thursday night, Oct. 1, 2026 — "close to midnight" — Judge Tanya Chutkan (D.D.C.) issued a temporary restraining order barring the Education Department from publishing the names of individual foreign donors to U.S. universities. The release had been scheduled for Friday, Oct. 2, as part of the administration's effort to scrutinize foreign funding of universities under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which Trump's April 2025 executive order directed be enforced.

The plaintiff: the Association of American Universities, which represents 69 research universities including Columbia, Penn and Yale. AAU says its members supplied individual donor names and addresses beginning in 2020 — beyond what the statute requires, which is aggregate country-level reporting — because the department promised the information would not be made public.

Chutkan's key line: "Defendants threaten to imminently publish the names of donors who have hitherto remained anonymous for every internet user to see in posterity... Once published, the information will likely never escape the public eye." She found AAU likely to succeed on its claim that the department's decision to publish information it had previously promised to keep secret was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act¹. The TRO remains in place for 28 days while she considers a longer-term injunction.

The administration's response, via Education Department spokesperson Ellen Keast: the lawsuit is an attempt to avoid accountability for universities "cashing multi-million-dollar checks from malign foreign actors," adding "Americans deserve transparency about the billions flowing from overseas to US campuses, and we will fight AAU in court to deliver it."

Why it matters: a court halted an executive disclosure offensive on legitimacy grounds — a broken confidentiality promise and APA arbitrariness — rather than the merits of transparency itself, while the underlying Section 117 enforcement push continues (the department had already published the identities of 92 "counterparties of concern" in July). Case: Association of American Universities v. US Department of Education, No. 1:26-cv-03438 (D.D.C.).