House committees say Harvard built a 'Harvard Global' entity to route Chinese government money around federal disclosure rules

Two House committees released a report on August 13, 2026, alleging that Harvard University built a parallel funding entity called "Harvard Global" to route Chinese government money around U.S. foreign funding disclosure rules. The report, titled "Compromised Independence: CCP Influence at Harvard University," was published jointly by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Education and Workforce Committee after an investigation that the committees say drew on thousands of pages of Harvard documents, Chinese government records, and transcribed interviews with Harvard personnel.

Select Committee Chairman John Moolenaar said the investigation found Harvard "failing to deliver on" the basic expectation that federally funded American research is conducted free of foreign adversary compromise. He cited two specific allegations: that Harvard "collaborated with entities linked to the PLA," referring to the People's Liberation Army, China's military, and that the university tolerated "violence against anti-China protestors" on its campus. Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg alleged that Harvard "created an entity in a blatant attempt to get around federal foreign funding disclosure laws."

That entity is Harvard Global. According to the committee report, Harvard Global's website previously described itself as a conduit for transactions where the university was "unable to accept the sponsor's terms due to legal or financial reasons." The committees argue that language shows Harvard Global was designed to absorb funding Harvard could not accept under standard federal disclosure. Harvard removed that language from the website after the committees sent the institution a draft of the report, according to the committee's press release.

The report also details a 2023 executive education seminar at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health that the committees say was attended by personnel from a Chinese paramilitary organization sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department. The press release does not name the organization; the underlying committee report PDF does. Separately, the report cites a senior Harvard compliance official who initially hedged when asked whether China's treatment of Uyghurs constitutes a genocide, then later said in writing that the official "do[es] not dispute the assertion that the Chinese Government is engaged in genocide against the Uyghurs." A different lead compliance official refused to categorically rule out future research collaborations with the Chinese military, according to the report.

The committees' policy prescriptions target the rules themselves. They want Congress to pass the DETERRENT Act and the Securing Innovation and Research from Adversaries (SIRA) Act, both of which would tighten how U.S. universities accept and disclose foreign funding. They are also pressing Harvard to restructure its research security and due-diligence operations. The two bills are pending. Whether they advance will depend on how much political weight the Harvard allegations can carry, and on whether the committees can point to a second university where the same disclosure gap allegedly exists.

As of the report's release, Harvard had not issued a public institutional response. The most serious claims — that Harvard Global operated as a disclosure workaround, that T.H. Chan hosted sanctioned paramilitary personnel, and that Harvard allowed campus violence against critics of Beijing — are currently one-sided assertions drawn from the committees' own investigation. The committees say they are referring the report to the Department of Justice and the Department of Education. Harvard's reply, when it comes, will determine whether "Compromised Independence" reads in two years as a documented case of institutional failure or as a partisan committee's overreach.