By Katya Schwenk, Helen Santoro, Freddy Brewster at The Lever
July 18, 2024 (editor@levernews.com)
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 shared exclusively with The Lever — 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 10 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 donor-advised fund.
Once money is in a donor-advised fund, the original donor can send it to any charity of their choosing, but the ultimate source of the money, and the amount, is completely obscured. It’s an appealing design for those wishing to avoid public scrutiny.
While the Heritage Foundation — like other nonprofits — does not have to publicly disclose its individual private donors, routing the money through a donor-advised fund provides donors an additional layer of anonymity, as well as unique tax benefits. And since financial firms like Fidelity and Vanguard that manage the funds also score tax benefits from the arrangement, they have an incentive to promote these funds to their wealthy clients.
Unlike politically active dark money nonprofits — 501(c)(4)s — donor-advised funds cannot contribute directly to campaigns or politicians. But increasingly, they are part of a larger network of dark money where the lines between charity and political causes are becoming blurred.
Donor-advised funds can contribute to the Heritage Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit. The Heritage Foundation can then funnel money toward political campaigns through its separate “sister” dark money arm, Heritage Action for America.
“The joint presence of a 501(c)(4) organization and an affiliated charity has become an increasingly common phenomenon that makes the ability to ‘follow the money’ and separate charitable from political that much more difficult,” said Brian Mittendorf, an accounting professor at Ohio State University and co-author on the study on donor-advised funds and hate groups.
From 2020 to 2022, the Heritage Foundation received around $14 million in donations from donor-advised funds, according to an analysis set to be published by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, and shared exclusively with The Lever. Contributions from these funds made up six percent of the foundation’s total donations and were second only to donations from private foundations such as the Adolph Coors Foundation, the beer titan’s family charity, which is a Heritage donor.
