How the Influence Tracker Is Built

Sources

• DOJ Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) bulk data. Three files from the Justice Department's FARA bulk data page: foreign principals (17,766 rows, all countries), registrant documents (153,847 rows) and registrants (7,089 rows). MEF's copy was pulled October 6, 2026; the newest document in it is stamped October 5, 2026. Coverage runs from the first DOJ records in the 1940s to that date. Document links point to DOJ's own server, efile.fara.gov. Background: DOJ FARA unit.
• US Department of Education, Section 117 foreign gifts and contracts. The release complete through September 30, 2026 (142,535 transactions, $75,943,341,974), from foreignfundinghighered.gov. Our total matches the sum of the release file.
• Map boundaries. Natural Earth 1:10m admin-0 countries, public domain, simplified and projected (Equal Earth) by MEF. Shading does not imply a position on any border.

DOJ and ED records are works of the US government and carry no copyright. No commercial data sets, no scraped profiles and no third-party scoring are used.

Foreign Agents

Scope. Principals whose DOJ country is one of: Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Yemen, People's Democratic Republic of (1967 to 1990). These are the strings DOJ uses; we show each country separately and use DOJ's own country tag.

Principals. 1,319 principals. We combine two DOJ spellings of a principal only when they differ in letter case, spacing, punctuation, "&" versus "and", or a leading "The". No fuzzy matching; a ministry and an embassy of the same state stay separate. Spellings that differ in words remain separate pages, and each page lists the variants it combines. Because name variants of the same principal are merged, a country's principal count can be lower than a raw count of names in the DOJ data.

Active. A principal is active when at least one registrant lists it with no termination date and that registrant is itself active in the registrants file, as of October 6, 2026.

Documents. DOJ tags only principal-level documents with a country: Exhibit AB (principal details and the agreement), informational materials, dissemination reports, and Exhibits C and D. Those are the filings counted and listed on principal and country pages. Registration statements, supplemental statements, amendments and short-form statements cover all of a registrant's clients and carry no country; registrant pages list the ones dated while a Middle East principal was registered with that registrant, as context rather than as Middle East filings. Short-form statements name individual employees; we show the document, not the name. Older paper-era records that DOJ marks as held at its public office have no online copy and are labeled as such.

Legal framing. A FARA registration is a disclosure that an agent acts for a foreign principal. It proves a relationship, not a violation. Where a principal shows no active registration, the page says "no active registration appears in DOJ bulk data as of" the pull date; reliance on statutory exemptions is not visible in the data.

Ranking

Rankings use counts: active principals, active registrants, new principal registrations since 2017, and principal-level filings over the past 12 months or since 2017. The DOJ bulk files carry no dollar field. Payments appear only inside scanned or typed PDF filings, in different formats, and we cannot source a reliable dollar figure to each document at scale, so this edition ranks by counts only. Counts measure reporting behaviour, not the volume of lobbying or the money behind it: one large contract can generate fewer filings than a small advertising account that files every placement. Informational-materials filings, for example, are frequent for principals that run advertising campaigns.

University Foreign Money

One release only. ED publishes each Section 117 release as a cumulative file of every report on record. Releases overlap, so amounts are never summed across releases; every figure here comes from the single release complete through September 30, 2026.

Year. Each transaction is placed in the year of its receipt date or, for contracts without one, its contract start date (142,286 rows). Where neither is reported, we use the year the institution submitted the report (249 rows). 17 rows carry a year before 1980 or after 2026 (including future contract dates); they count in all-years totals and appear in year-range views only when the full range is selected. The current year is partial.

Amounts are as reported by institutions and include multi-year contracts at their stated value. ED does not verify them. Gifts and contracts are combined. Source names are withheld for most rows, so this section reports donor countries, not donors.

Middle East default. The chart opens on: Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen. Use the Countries menu to add or remove any country, or choose all.

Embedding. The Embed button gives an iframe for the current view (view, countries and years). The embedded chart carries the source line and a link back to this page.

Legal framing. 20 U.S.C. 1011f imposes a reporting duty; enforcement is a civil action by the Attorney General under 1011f(f), and the statute does not prohibit the gift. Section 117 records money, not conditions.

Country Names

Institutions type the donor country themselves. ED's file uses 199 distinct strings; we group the synonyms below and leave every other string as filed (with "And", "Of" and "The" in lower case). The full mapping is also in the build's data snapshot. Names with no map shape (British West Indies, French Guiana, Not reported, Tokelau, United Nations, West Indies) appear in the table, chart and line views but not on the map.

Limits

• MEF tallies are unaudited. Open the linked DOJ document or ED file before citing a figure.
• DOJ principal names are not standardized across registrants, so one government can appear under several names (an embassy, a ministry, an agency). Country totals add these together; principal rankings do not.
• Country tags are DOJ's. A principal based in one country but working for interests elsewhere carries the DOJ tag.
• Section 117 covers only reported transactions of $250,000 or more a year per source, as filed; institutions file late, revise reports and sometimes duplicate entries across campuses.
• The current calendar year is partial in both sources.

Updates and Reuse

DOJ rebuilds its FARA bulk files daily; MEF's data lake copies them weekly. ED issues new Section 117 releases every few months. This edition was built 2026-10-06 15:15 UTC and is regenerated from a frozen data snapshot with one command, so every figure on the site can be traced to the snapshot and its source file.

Quote figures with the source and date given under each table, for example "DOJ FARA bulk data, pulled October 6, 2026" or "ED Section 117 release complete through September 30, 2026". Questions and corrections: info@meforum.org.