Controversy-Plagued Penn Biden Center Now Buried by University

About a year after citizen Joe Biden was out of the vice presidency, his new endeavor was a Washington think tank called the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. That organization would end up becoming the focus of investigations for what federal sources said was hundreds of millions in foreign donations and for housing classified government documents.

Now, after Biden’s presidency, the think tank—affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and the former employer of future Secretary of State Antony Blinken—seems almost nonexistent, with no publicly available information on staffing or initiatives.

Even before Biden was elected president in 2020, questions about the think tank’s foreign funding emerged and only intensified after he took office. And during the Biden presidency, the Justice Department opened a special counsel investigation into Biden’s retention and storing of classified documents from his time as a senator and vice president and found the Penn Biden Center was among the locations where documents were kept. 

After those controversies, and in the middle of the 2024 presidential election, the Penn Biden Center became part of Penn Washington, which was established in June 2024. The university describes Penn Washington as a center to strengthen ties between policymakers and the university’s academic community, while expanding Washington, D.C.-focused programs for students. The move seemed to bury the center within an umbrella entity, watchdogs say. 

“The Penn Biden Center was opened with a lot of fanfare during the first Trump administration,” Pete Flaherty, president of the National Legal and Policy Center, a watchdog group that has monitored foreign funding of the Penn Biden Center, told The Daily Signal. “It appears what used to be the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement has been erased from history like the old Soviet empire.”

A University of Pennsylvania spokesperson referred The Daily Signal to the Penn Washington initiatives page, which includes the Penn Biden Center and says that the center “serves as a hub for in-depth analysis and dialogue on diplomacy, international relations, and global challenges, leveraging the expertise of Penn’s faculty and global network.” 

“We are currently hiring a new director of global programs at Penn Washington who will oversee the activities of the Penn Biden Center,” the university spokesperson told The Daily Signal. 

Flaherty suspects the rebranding of the Penn Biden Center was a response to the negative publicity in recent years. 

“There has been scrutiny over the foreign funding, and Biden is not the same attractive figure he was four years ago,” Flaherty said. “It could just be a typical Washington story. Once he is not of help to them any longer, UPenn is ready to cast him aside.”

While foreign dollars didn’t necessarily go to the Penn Biden Center, foreign contributions to the university in general skyrocketed after the center was opened, according to both the Department of Education and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. 

A university spokesperson previously told other news outlets in 2023 that the Penn Biden Center did not solicit contributions. The spokesperson said that only unsolicited and modest contributions came in, and they were from American donors. Critics have said the contributions were “co-mingled” with the university’s general operations budget, suggesting that other funds that were not direct donations to the Penn Biden Center could have been made available to it.

The UPenn spokesperson whom The Daily Signal contacted on Wednesday answered “no” to the question of whether the presence of the Penn Biden Center attracted foreign donations. The spokesperson also said the Penn Biden Center was not minimized as a result of investigations from the House Oversight Committee and the Department of Education. 

A January 2023 fact-check analysis by Newsweek noted, “In the case of UPenn, if the donor had not stated that the Penn Biden Center be a recipient, the money would not go directly to it. Without this additional information, we can’t establish if the increase in funding following the opening of the Penn Biden Center would have benefited it. Furthermore, while the value of donations from China between 2017 and 2020 is not insubstantial, it is a fraction of UPenn’s total revenues and gift endowment.”

In May, the Department of Education opened an investigation into foreign funding at the university. 

“According to UPenn’s disclosure reports, foreign gifts and contracts received by UPenn through 2017 were valued at approximately $358 million dollars. After the establishment of the Penn Biden Center in 2018, foreign financial influence grew dramatically, totaling approximately $2.3 billion by 2025—a 542% increase in reportable foreign funding since 2018,” wrote Paul Moore, chief investigative counsel and assistant general counsel at the Department of Education, in a 10-page May 8 letter to UPenn President J. Larry Jameson.

“Found within the 2,042 foreign funding disclosures submitted since 2019, UPenn frequently masked the identity of foreign donors who had engaged in particularly large qualifying transactions with UPenn (a practice known as ‘anonymizing’ donors, now explicitly disallowed by the department),” the letter continued. 

The letter added that disclosure reports from UPenn between February 2019 and June 2020 show about $80 million from anonymous foreign sources, which the department described as “extremely large.” A footnote in the letter noted: “According to the foreign funding disclosures that UPenn submitted to the Department, 39 of those transactions, valued at approximately $31 million, were from Chinese sources.”

Chinese and other foreign contributions to the university tripled after the establishment of the Penn Biden Center and continued to increase after Biden became president, according to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. 

Even after Biden dropped out of the presidential race, the Penn Biden Center continued to have a website, at least into September 2024, according to the Wayback Machine archives. The website also previously listed staff and initiatives. Now, the Penn Biden web address redirects to Penn Washington. 

“It would appear that the Penn Biden Center has quietly changed the name of their site, which has the effect—if not the intent—of distancing it from former President Joe Biden as he battles a new round of scandals over the autopen following the ignominy of improper storage of classified documents at the center in 2023,” said Sarah Lee, director of communications and external relations for the Capital Research Center, a think tank that investigates nonprofits. 

Lee has researched and written about the Penn Biden Center’s funding. 

“Penn has also been grappling with funding cuts under the new Trump administration, apologizing for violations of Title IX, and dodging allegations of an influx of monetary gifts from China following the establishment of the [Penn Biden] center in 2018,” Lee said. “It’s too early to say if that distance will be permanent. Still, it’s certainly interesting from a PR perspective and probably a smart, short-term move by the University of Pennsylvania.”

Title IX is the law that prevents discrimination by sex at federally funded schools and that created separate sports programs for women and men. The university apologized for violating it by allowing men to compete in women’s sports.

From 2017 through 2021, mostly coinciding with the early years of the Penn Biden Center, the University of Pennsylvania paid Biden $900,000 to be a Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor, giving speeches and lectures, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. 

The Daily Signal visited the location for Penn Washington at about 2 p.m. and about an hour later on Monday at 101 Constitution Ave., N.W., in Washington, D.C., near Capitol Hill. The building’s other tenants include businesses, unions, and nonprofit organizations. Security personnel checked the Penn Washington location and found no one was in. 

The Daily Signal reached out to the Office of Joe and Jill Biden for comment for this story, but did not get a response by publication time. The Daily Signal also reached the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware for comment. The institute referred questions to the Bidens’ office. 

Blinken did not have public contact information, but The Daily Signal reached out to WestExec, a consulting firm he co-founded, for comment but did not get a response by publication time.

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