H.R. 1018 — INSTRUCT Act of 2025

This section provides the short title of the Act as the “Instructing Noteworthy Steps toward Transparency to Rout and Undo Calamitous Transactions Act of 2025” or the “INSTRUCT Act of 2025.”

This section revises the foreign gifts and contracts disclosure requirements for institutions of higher education under 20 U.S.C. § 1011f by requiring the Secretary of Education to make all disclosure reports public records open to inspection and copying during business hours and, not later than 30 days after receiving a compliant report, to transmit an unredacted copy of the report, including the name and address of any disclosed foreign source, to 11 federal officials: the Directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Intelligence, and Central Intelligence Agency; the Secretaries of State, Defense, Commerce, Homeland Security, and Energy; the Attorney General; and the Directors of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. This section also requires the Secretary, not later than 90 days after enactment, to send those same officials any section 117 reports received before enactment and any report, document, or other record generated by the Department of Education in an investigation of an institution’s compliance with section 117 that was initiated before enactment. (Thus, the provision applies the new interagency sharing requirement retroactively to existing reports and pending investigations.) This section further directs the Comptroller General, not later than 180 days after enactment, to begin a Government Accountability Office study on ways to improve coordination among federal agencies in implementing and enforcing section 117, including increasing information sharing, increasing compliance rates, and establishing enforcement processes, and requires a public report to Congress on the study’s results not later than 3 years after enactment.