A significant portion of the money bankrolling the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank behind the sweeping Project 2025 initiative to reshape the federal government if former president Donald Trump is reelected — comes from a growing network of shadowy charity groups run by the nation’s top financial firms that use a legal carve-out to keep their ultrawealthy donors hidden.
These groups, called donor-advised funds, have donated more than $18 million to the Heritage Foundation since 2020, according to a new Lever analysis and research by the Institute for Policy Studies — and the amount is increasing.
In total, donor-advised funds held nearly $230 billion in assets in 2022, $52 billion of which was donated to nonprofits including the Heritage Foundation. Such funds now make up seven of the top ten public charities in the country. What’s more, they have been found to distribute money to anti-government and hate groups at more than three times the rate of other charitable sources, according to a study published this May.
The rapid rise of donor-advised funds — charitable investment accounts run by finance giants like Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, and Vanguard — signals a new stage in the dark-money takeover of the political system. Wall Street is now helping the nation’s elite funnel vast amounts of cash to extremist causes with zero transparency or tax repercussions — and it’s spending millions lobbying Congress to keep it that way.
While private foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation are required to disclose all of their charitable donations and the recipients, wealthy philanthropists who want anonymity — and a tax break — can instead donate to a…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Katya Schwenk
