The construction of Double-First Class universities is the necessary means to realize the power of higher education, the financial expenditure is the foundation and pillar of the construction performance improvement, and the modernization of financial governance system is the key to improve the construction performance of Double-First Class universities. Based on the dispute caused by the effectiveness of the support plan for key universities, this paper used the unbalanced panel data of 156 universities from 1994 to 2019, adopted the method of Staggered DID, and used the indicators such as QS ranking, examinee satisfaction ranking, number of high-level disciplines and research fund scale to test the promotion effect of special expenditure of key universities on the construction of “Double-First Class”. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) the “211 Project” and “985 Project” had significantly improved the reputation of domestic key universities, but since then there had been performance stagnation. Under the incentive of “Double-First Class Project”, the performance of key universities had improved in terms of reputation, student satisfaction and fund scale, and there was a “superposition effect” between projects; (2) compared with other special projects, “211 Project” had a significant incentive role in the construction of top-level disciplines and first-class disciplines; (3) there was a phenomenon of “performance incentive decline” in the construction of key universities and it even showed that the special fund had negative effects. And the introduction of new special funds could effectively improve the performance; (4) key university construction projects still play an important role in improving the discipline level of top universities, rather than showing “funding saturation”, which indicates that there is still a gap between the top universities in China and those in the world. The conclusion of this paper has enlightenment on the construction of “Double-First Class”.