Section 117 requires American universities to disclose foreign gifts and contracts — but for most of the record, not who they came from. Computed from the federal file: 97 percent of the 62 billion disclosed dollars carry no source name, because the statute asks only for a country. The anonymity is not evasion; it is the design. What the law collects, what it hides, the 2019 enforcement spike, and what the DETERRENT Act fight would actually change.
Since 1981 American universities have disclosed 62 billion dollars in foreign gifts and contracts under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act — 117,152 transactions at 528 institutions. A reading of the federal ledger: who received it, which countries and governments sent it, how it concentrates at the top, and what the disclosure regime does and does not reveal.
Federal money funds research, that research becomes patents, and some patents become products. Four datasets follow the path — NIH and NSF grants, USPTO patents (whose Bayh-Dole government-interest statements disclose the funding behind them), and FDA approvals — joined on institution, inventor, and the government-interest clause.
A guide to mapping the federal research enterprise from data — joining NSF awards, NIH grants, and ORI misconduct findings on institution and investigator so the flow of federal science money and its oversight come together in one view. Covers the two funding pillars, the misconduct accountability layer, the join-key normalization problem, and a Python workflow that aggregates funding and lines findings up against grants.
Whether a given college is worth it can be answered school by school — and now program by program — by joining two federal datasets: NCES IPEDS, the mandatory census of what every college charges and graduates, with the College Scorecard’s record of debt and post-enrollment earnings. A guide to the UnitID/OPEID join, the CIP program layer, and a worked earnings-to-debt value ratio.
The National Science Foundation funds roughly a quarter of all federally supported basic research at US colleges and universities, and every grant it makes leaves a public record — the award number, the institution, the principal investigator, the program and directorate, the title and abstract, and the obligated dollars. This guide covers the merit-review system behind the awards, the directorate structure, the searchable abstract corpus, and a Python workflow against the open NSF Awards API.
The National Center for Education Statistics Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System collects annual data from every Title IV-eligible institution in the United States — 6,000 colleges and universities reporting enrollment, graduation rates, tuition, faculty salaries, financial aid, and institutional finances — making IPEDS the most comprehensive federal database of US higher education.
The HHS Office of Research Integrity maintains the authoritative federal database of research misconduct findings — every case where a PHS-funded researcher has been found to have fabricated data, falsified results, or committed plagiarism, with findings covering hundreds of scientists at major research universities and medical centers.
Grants.gov is the federal government unified portal for grant opportunities — listing every competitive federal grant, cooperative agreement, and other financial assistance opportunity from 26 grant-making agencies, covering $500 billion+ in annual awards to universities, state and local governments, nonprofits, and businesses across every federal program area.
The NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools database covers every NIH-funded research project since 1985 — 500,000+ active and historical grants totaling over $50 billion per year, spanning every disease area, institution, and principal investigator in US biomedical research.
SAIPE produces annual model-based poverty estimates for all 3,100+ counties and 13,000+ school districts — the only single-year official source at that geography. It drives ~$17B in annual Title I-A education funding and the $3.5B CDBG formula. The model combines ACS, IRS EITC filers, SNAP counts, and CPS via small area estimation. The Census API exposes county and school-district poverty rates and median household income back to 1989 via a single endpoint.
The USPTO holds ~3M active registered trademarks, with ~650,000 new applications per year at peak. Federal registration provides nationwide constructive notice, ® usage rights, US Customs blocking of infringing imports, and incontestability after 5 years. The 45 Nice Classification classes span all goods and services. Bulk XML data at bulkdata.uspto.gov and the USPTO Trademark JSON API enable filing trend analysis; China accounts for ~25% of foreign USPTO filings.
The NSF funds ~25% of all federally funded basic research at US universities (excluding life sciences) with a $9B+ annual budget across 8 directorates. Here is the proposal review process (dual merit criteria: intellectual merit AND broader impacts; funding rates 17–25% by directorate; ~40,000–50,000 proposals/year), the CAREER award ($500k/5 years, highly competitive), the Graduate Research Fellowship GRFP ($37k/year, ~2,000 awards from 12,000+ applicants), the NSF Awards API (api.nsf.gov, 600,000+ awards searchable), National AI Research Institutes ($200M+), the 2023 immediate open-access mandate stricter than NIH's, EPSCoR geographic equity program, and a Python Awards API CAREER grant analysis by directorate and institution.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is the only nationally representative, continuing assessment of US student achievement — covering reading, math, science, and more for 4th, 8th, and 12th graders. Here is the 0–500 scale and NAGB achievement levels, the COVID-era learning loss evidence (largest reading decline in 30 years), state comparison methodology, the plausible values estimation approach, NAEP Data Explorer API access, and the White–Black achievement gap trend since 1992.
The USPTO publishes bulk patent grant data (4M+ grants since 1976) and applications (since 2001), with PatentsView as the canonical research dataset — disambiguated inventor and assignee records, CPC classification codes, citation networks, and prosecution history via PEDS. Here is the three patent types, continuation and evergreening strategy, Alice Corp and IPR quality controversies, PatentsView API, BigQuery public data, and a Python snippet for ranking top AI patent holders by CPC subclass.
FDAAA 801 requires registration of all applicable clinical trials before enrollment and results submission within 12 months of completion — but 50%+ of trials still fail to report results. Here is the full NCT schema, how to access the AACT PostgreSQL mirror from Duke/CTTI, how to detect publication bias using the results reporting gap, and how the GLP-1 agonist trial explosion looks in the data.
The College Scorecard links IPEDS enrollment data to federal loan records and IRS earnings data — publishing median earnings, debt, repayment rates, and completion rates for every institution and field of study. Here is the data structure, how to use the API, and what the earnings-debt gap reveals about for-profit colleges and high-debt programs.