Written Testimony
Chairman Hefner, and members of the committee, on behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, thank you for the opportunity to testify.
Qatar is on a spending spree in the American higher education system. In 2024, Qatar was among the top five foreign donors to American colleges and universities, besting deep-pocketed donors like China and Saudi Arabia.
With approximately 11 percent of the world’s natural gas reserves and only 330,000 citizens, Qatar’s has ample wealth to spend on buying prestige and influence. Doha’s wallet is a major source of soft power that it leverages to whitewash its reputation and advance its interests abroad.
According to federal disclosure data, colleges and universities have accepted $6.25 billion from Qatar since 2001. However, Qatar’s total spending likely exceed that figure. There are two reasons to speculate: first, academic institutions that accept tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign governments routinely fail to comply with their federal disclosure requirements. The previous Trump administration opened investigations into a dozen universities, uncovering $6.5 billion of undisclosed foreign funds, including from Qatar. Compounding this challenge is the historically lax enforcement of reporting requirements.
Second, Qatar has often sought to cover its tracks. As Texas legislators might remember, Qatar previously filed a lawsuit to prevent the state of Texas from disclosing funding records for Texas A&M University. A Texas judge eventually ordered that the funding documents be made public, revealing almost half-a-billion dollars in Qatari grants and contracts.
Qatar enjoys a close bilateral partnership with the United States. But Qatar’s wealth enables it to play both sides. While parading as a friend, Doha has simultaneously sponsored a range of extremist groups, including Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar is a major exporter of Islamist ideology, which it amplifies on the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera network. By pumping money into the American higher education system and across the United States, Qatar avoids scrutiny as it advances hostile ideologies.
For example, Georgetown University’s Doha campus hosted a conference on “the future of Gaza” in September 2024 that featured a former Al Jazeera executive who applauded Hamas’s October 7 massacre. He previously delivered a 10-minute eulogy for Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the late Muslim Brotherhood-aligned cleric who famously endorsed suicide bombings against Israelis.
By accepting substantial funding from Qatar, colleges and universities are less reliant on traditional alumni donor bases. This reduces the need for schools to engage with their alumni networks. That becomes an acute problem regarding campus antisemitism insofar as school administrators will likely be responsive to Qatar — a country that held Israel solely responsible for the war in Gaza, failed to hold Hamas accountable, and has consistently backed Islamists against the West.