Qatar’s Classroom Money Machine Faces a Reckoning as Its American Arm Shuts Down

Qatar Foundation International, QFI, a nonprofit accused of funneling money into American classrooms for close to two decades, announced earlier this summer that it was shuttering operations. The move came less than two weeks after the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, ISGAP, published a 54-page report accusing the group of having run a soft-power campaign inside American schools since 2009.Titled “Institutional Capture,” the report says the foundation spent more than $65 million spread across more than 220 programs between 2009 and 2025, touching K-12 schools, universities, teacher-training initiatives and federally funded education centers around the country.The timing underscores a broader tension.Qatar has emerged as one of the Trump administration’s closest partners in the region, mediating hostage and ceasefire talks involving Hamas and hosting a major American air base, even as lawmakers from both parties raise alarms over the same government’s money moving through American classrooms.ISGAP called the shutdown a vindication of its work, yet was quick to point out that one organization’s exit does not settle the larger question hanging over Washington: How much of American education, from elementary reading lists to Ivy League endowments, has been quietly financed by the government of Qatar?The group’s own statement on the closure argued that the networks and funding mechanisms that it spent years mapping are still very active.Someone who tracks Qatar Foundation’s programming from outside the United States agrees that Doha’s broader education spending shows no sign of slowing.“The Qatar Foundation continues operating and funding similar programs across the US from Doha,” the executive director at the American Center for South Yemen Studies, Fernando Carvajal, tells The New York Sun. “The US is a top priority for programs like this; the ISGAP report was not a strong enough reason for Qatar to outright end its programs here.”What closed, in Mr. Carvajal’s telling was a single institutional vehicle. He argues Doha is likely to lean less on formal organizations like QFI and more on direct relationships with individual university decision-makers, mirroring the personal rapport between President Trump and the Qatari emir, Sheik Tamim.Mr. Carvajal also notes that federal funding cuts have left American universities newly receptive to outside money, widening the opening for that kind of direct approach just as one visible channel closes.From College Endowments To Sixth-Grade Reading ListsThe Institutional Capture findings represent only a fraction of a far more extensive effort that researchers have been watching for over a decade.ISGAP’s “Follow the Money” project, running since 2012, estimates Qatar’s giving to American higher education — including funding it says went unreported for years — at tens of billions of dollars. That’s larger than the $8.8 billion Qatar has quietly given to American universities through Section 117-disclosed gifts and contracts since 2001, per Education Department data published in February. What set the newest report apart was its reach below the college level. A curriculum program incubated at Brown University, called Choices, distributed teaching materials to more than 8,000 schools and roughly a million students with support from Qatar Foundation International, according to coverage of the findings.The program was discontinued last year. Earlier ISGA Presearch found that some Qatari-funded classroom materials misrepresented Israel’s capital on maps, and a QFI-sponsored program at a Brooklyn public school displayed a poster of the Middle East with Israel erased entirely.The digital format of that curriculum is itself a concern.“The Choices program at Brown, paid for by Qatar Foundation International, reached over eight thousand schools and more than a million students,” the fellow for defense and strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, Hussein Mansour, tells the Sun.“It was a digital curriculum, meaning it could be updated in real time without school board review, without parental notification. Without the kind of public scrutiny that applies to traditional textbooks. When a foreign government with Qatar’s record of funding Hamas, hosting the Muslim Brotherhood and operating Al Jazeera is connected to a curriculum that shapes how American children understand the Middle East, that is not cultural exchange.”Administrators, Mr. Mansour argues, owe it to families to check who is actually funding the materials before adopting them, and parents have every right to know if a foreign government helped shape what their kids are studying.He points to China’s Confucius Institutes, largely shut down under public pressure, as a precedent, though he argues Qatar’s case is distinct because Doha is a nominal American ally rather than a rival power, which he contends has allowed its funding to operate with comparatively little scrutiny. Lawmakers Split Over How Serious The Threat IsThe ISGAP report has scrambled the usual partisan lines on Capitol Hill. Representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, said the findings show why Congress must protect school curricula from outside interference and demand accountability from schools and universities.Representative Kevin Kiley, an independent from California who chairs the House subcommittee on early childhood, elementary and secondary education, has said he intends to work with ISGAP to shield academic institutions from foreign agendas.Not everyone, however, treats the findings as settled.A former director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2024 that she had seen no evidence Qatar funded the pro-Palestinian campus protests that followed the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. Her comment was amplified later by critics who say ISGAP itself has drawn a substantial share of its funding from the Israeli government, according to an investigation by Drop Site News.Mr. Mansour, for one, rejects the notion that disclosure fixes should single out Doha. The DETERRENT Act, which would tighten Section 117 disclosure rules for foreign gifts to universities, is the right starting point, he tells the Sun, because it closes what he calls the most obvious void: Universities currently must disclose how much foreign money they receive but not the contract terms governing what the donor gets in return.He notes that the bill’s strictest zero-dollar threshold currently applies only to designated countries of concern such as China and Russia, not to Qatar, which is an American ally. However, he says the mechanism it establishes could be extended later.“Congress should also require universities that receive federal research funding to certify that their foreign contracts do not give foreign states or their entities access to governance, intellectual property or credentialing authority,” he says.“We regulate foreign investment in critical infrastructure such as ports, telecommunications and defense industries through CFIUS. Universities like Georgetown and Northwestern train our diplomats, intelligence officers and journalists. There is no principled reason to treat them as less strategically significant.”Mr. Mansour points out that the graduates of those universities go on to staff the State Department, the intelligence agencies and the newsrooms that shape how Americans understand the world.The DETERRENT Act passed the House on a bipartisan vote in March of last year but stalled in the Senate, where, as of this spring, it had drawn no Democratic co-sponsors, leaving it short of the votes needed to clear a filibuster.Doha has long maintained that its role in the region, including as a mediator in hostage and ceasefire talks involving Hamas, is coordinated with Western governments and is not evidence of any allegiance to the extremist group.Qatari officials and the Qatar Foundation have also repeatedly rejected the broader influence allegations, pledging that their funding supports educational access, research and development and cross-cultural exchange rather than any ideological agenda.The county’s leaders also highlight that Doha is one of Washington’s largest non-NATO allies and hosts Al Udeid, the largest American military installation in the Middle East. To Doha’s critics, however, that is exactly the problem: A government this close to American diplomacy and defense shouldn’t get a pass on the classroom funding most parents never think to ask about — access that would normally draw scrutiny is instead moving forward largely unchecked.Parents and school administrators need to stop trusting the name printed on a curriculum’s cover and start asking who is behind it, according to ISGAP’s founder and executive director, Charles Asher Small.In the case of the Choices program, he continues, a name as respected as Brown University concealed years of undisclosed Qatari involvement.“The Choices Program precedent is the template. It is an ostensibly neutral curriculum reaching more than 8,000 schools and over a million students, injecting specific and targeted changes over time, quietly discontinued after our report, with no explanation and no assurance that similar campaigns are not running elsewhere,” Mr. Small says. “Opacity is itself the red flag. Legitimate language education does not need proxy structures.”

Qatar’s Classroom Money Machine Faces a Reckoning as Its American Arm Shuts Down

Qatar’s Classroom Money Machine Faces a Reckoning as Its American Arm Shuts Down

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