I don't see the point. Even if there is organized bias, what can Congress legally do about it?
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Something similar to their targeted of US Univerities/Colledes for anti-semitism and for being "woke." Trump has threatened the Harvard endowment, its ability to enrol foreign students, federal research funding, among others.
The Trump admin was very creative when it came to Harvard and figured out many different pressure points to push all at once. Don't expect it to be too simple. The guys running this have thought about avoiding the easy dismissal: https://www.ortecfinance.com/en/about-ortec-finance/news-and...
Just look at how the recent flag burning EO was worded in order to get around 1A concerns.
As a charity they are tax exempt - that could be revoked. The US government could declare them to be a foreign influence operation and require them to register as foreign agents. They could add a requirement that everyone on Wikipedia must declare who they are before editing. They could restrict various pages from being displayed in the US. They could even block or even cease the domain if they wanted to play hardball.
Do not underestimate the levers of pressure that could be deployed here.
Not a lawyer tho, and it seems that even with a majority getting something like that through congress would be very difficult.
Then should we remove the 501c3 status of every church, mosque, temple, etc in the U.S. because they are biased towards not just the existence of a god, but the existence of their particular version of god?
The Wikimedia Foundation does not depend on US government funding and even if the US somehow made life difficult for donors, they are sitting on a substantial endowment fund that can float them for a long time.
And at some point, if the harassment gets to be too much, Wikimedia can just up and leave. There's no reason that the Wikimedia Foundation needs to be headquartered in San Francisco, it could just as easily be in Oslo or Paris. That's a huge advantage that Harvard didn't have.
If Trump wants Wikipedia gone he'll just sue them or open an investigation that never needs to ever go before a judge. Then in return for dropping the suit/investigation all they need to do is make sure that a friend of MAGA sits on the board and can make sure that certain edits get approved and others don't.
People who are surprised by this or still assuming that he can't/won't do something because of the law or norms or "but then the Democrats will do X" need to wake the fuck up.
These people are going to do whatever the fuck they want under whatever justification they can cook up, and they don't fear any repercussions because they are not planning to turn over their new-found power to anyone else.
> The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.
Based on the track record of the Trump administration, it is unwise to take any of their official letters at face value. This House committee may claim it really wants what is best for American citizens -- and they might actually believe it themselves -- but the dominant motivation has little to do with foreign influence. Rather, I think their primary motivation is to suppress or intimidate dissenters.
If the committee decided that it wanted to systematically investigate foreign influence, that would be a different matter. The differential targeting is quite telling.
About me (in case you want to know my leanings, so you can take them into account): I do not support this letter nor the current administration. That said, I didn't categorically reject the whole idea right away. I read the letter and thought about it. I'm not necessarily opposed to requiring private organizations do certain kinds of foreign actor tracking and reporting, but it has to be done legally and applied fairly.
Finally, I refuse to call this "politics as usual". Yes, sadly, committee investigations are often used as PR stunts. Both parties have done it. What is happening here is orders of magnitude worse to the extent it undermines freedom of speech and attempts to subvert another information source.
[1]: https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...
>> The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.
Wikipedia is not subsidized by us tax dollars.