A survey of some context.
As a series, an earlier version of this article was originally published by the Capital Research Center on June 24, 2025.
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- Philanthropy has been getting bigger.
- Big Philanthropy has been getting more liberal and progressive, overwhelmingly so in the policy- and advocacy-oriented context.
- Relatedly, it houses and funds a democratically unaccountable and monoculturally progressive managerial elite.
- It’s been getting more politicized and more partisan.
- It’s always had a tenuous place in America’s social contract.
- It doesn’t much appreciate the additional scrutiny to which it’s being subject once again.
- If you’re a taxpayer, you contribute to the pool of funds that incentivizes its growth and maintenance.
- The conservative and progressive populist reaction against Big Philanthropy is not going to go away.
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The populist reaction against Big Philanthropy occurs within a broader, including historical, context. Philanthropy overall has grown significantly in recent decades. Big Philanthropy has also become increasingly liberal and progressive, overwhelmingly so in the policy- and advocacy-oriented areas. It houses and funds a democratically unaccountable, monoculturally progressive elite and has become more politicized—and more partisan.
Big Philanthropy has always had a tenuous place in America’s social contract. U.S. taxpayers contribute to the pool of funds that incentivizes its growth and maintenance, and the conservative and progressive populist reaction against it is not going to go away.
1. Philanthropy has been getting bigger.
Approximately 150,000 entities have the Internal Revenue Code status of a private foundation, according to CauseIQ. Collectively, they employ almost 32,000 people and annually earn more than $159 billion in revenue. FoundationMark estimates all private-foundation assets totaled more than $1.6 trillion at the end of 2024—up 21.6 percent from almost $1.3 trillion at the end of 2020 and 176.5 percent from just less than $581 billion at the end of 2010, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Private-foundation grants and expenses have thus also been increasing, appreciably. As shown in Figure 2, FoundationMark estimates their grants and expenses totaled more than $117 billion as of the end of 2024—up 34.3 percent from over $87 billion at the end of 2020 and 182.2 percent from over $41 billion at the end of 2010.
In February 2025, using publicly available tax-filing data collected by CauseIQ, The Chronicle of Philanthropy identified 277 private foundations and 69 community foundations that had $500 million or more in assets. Collectively, according to the Chronicle, these 346 philanthropies held more than $900 billion in assets and top-heavily accounted for roughly 55 percent of all grant dollars awarded.
The top 25 foundations in the Chronicle’s February list are in the table below. The Gates Foundation is at the top of the February list, followed by the Lilly Endowment. In May, however, new Lilly Endowment tax filings showed its $79.9 billion assets as of the end of 2024 surpassed those assets of Gates’ $77.2 billion at the end of 2024. The Lilly Endowment’s assets have grown mostly because of stock it holds in Eli Lilly & Co., the value of which has greatly increased as the result of wildly successful weight-loss and diabetes drugs.
Two of the foundations in the Chronicle’s February list’s top 25 are community foundations: the $10.36 billion Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the $4.53 billion Chicago Community Trust.
The assets of these top 25 foundations collectively total $328.93 billion. The next two foundations on the list are private foundations—the $4.23 billion Knight Foundation and the $4.10 billon Carnegie Corporation of New York. So the total assets of just the top 25 private foundations would be $322.37 billion, which would be an again top-heavy 20 percent of assets held by all 150,000 private foundations.
2. Big Philanthropy has been getting more liberal and progressive, overwhelmingly so in the policy- and advocacy-oriented context.
Any categorization by ideology assumes the risk of subjectivity. Given this caveat, it is fair to observe that none of these top 25 private foundations could fairly be characterized as solidly conservative—certainly nowhere close to representing or even reflecting the ascendent populist conservatism that’s given rise to the current aggressive policy reaction against Big Philanthropy.
The Lilly Endowment, which some may think describable as conservative, actually now publicly considers its own philosophy as “conservatively progressive,” and its grantmaking portfolio seems increasingly to reflect the noun in that phrase. Similarly, while the Walton Family Foundation has historically substantially supported school choice and charter schools, its giving increasingly includes environmental protection and related advocacy. And as for John Arnold, he once tweeted, accurately, “I’ve now been called the next Koch brother by the far left press and the next George Soros by the far right. I’m an equal opportunity special interest pot stirrer.”
For conservative-foundation comparison, the Diana Davis Spenser Foundation is 112th on the Chronicle’s February 2025 list with $1.36 billion in assets, the Daniels Fund is 117th with $1.36 billion in assets, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is 165th with $987.07 million in assets, the Charles Koch Foundation is 215th with $748.22 million, the Sarah Scaife Foundation is 272nd with $610.29 million, and the Smith Richardson Foundation is 309th with $546.2 million.
To make a meaningful further comparison of policy- and advocacy-oriented philanthropy in particular, my colleague Michael Watson and I found that in 2014 the reported revenues of 1,450 selected policy- and advocacy-oriented public charities totaled approximately $9.6 billion, up from about $6.2 billion in 2006, as reported in the Capital Research Center’s (CRC’s) 2018 The Flow of Funding to Conservative and Liberal Political Campaigns, Independent Groups, and Traditional Public Policy Organizations Before and After Citizens United.
The groups for this analysis were selected from the grant-recipient lists of 12 major private foundations, six of them right-leaning and six left-leaning. There were 372 right-leaning recipients and 1,078 left-leaning ones. The right-leaning groups’ revenues totaled just less than $2.2 billion in 2014, up 71 percent from $1.3 billion in 2006. But the left-leaning groups’ revenues totaled more than $7.4 billion in 2014, up 50 percent from $4.9 billion in 2006.
In 2020, Watson and Shane Devine revisited the question in a follow-up report for CRC, similarly comparing support of and right- and left-leaning public charities. According to what were then the more recently reported figures (from either 2017 or 2018), their study found that 298 selected right-leaning groups’ revenues totaled just more than $2.2 billion, roughly the same as the conservative total in 2014, and 906 left-leaning groups’ revenues totaled almost $8.1 billion, up 9.65 percent from 2014.
As shown in Figure 3, in 2006, right-leaning policy- and advocacy-oriented charities received 20.5 percent and liberal ones received 79.5 percent of donations. In subsequent years, this ratio remained relatively stable. In 2014, conservative policy groups received 22.7 percent and liberal ones received 77.3 percent of total policy-oriented donations, and in 2017 or 2018, conservative groups received 21.5 percent and liberal ones received 78.5 percent. Policy-oriented philanthropy skews overwhelmingly to the left.
3. Relatedly, it houses and funds a democratically unaccountable and monoculturally progressive managerial elite.
James Burnham criticized the “new class” in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, Daniel Bell spoke of the “knowledge class,” Theda Skocpol described the withdrawal of elites from cross-class organizations to those of a nonprofit overclass, and many others have observed what’s now generally called the “managerial elite.” All of their criticisms apply quite directly to those who are employed by and administer democratically unaccountable and monoculturally progressive Big Philanthropy. To those who’ve been paying attention, they’ve actually done so for quite a while, and increasingly.
“Overall, the shift of the center of gravity from local chapter-based member associations and church congregations to foundations, foundation-funded nonprofits, and universities represents a transfer of civic and cultural influence away from ordinary people upward to the managerial elite,” Michael Lind writes in his 2020 book The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite.
Many of today’s so-called community organizations are not so much grass roots as AstroTurf (an artificial grass). A contemporary community activist is likely to be a university graduate and likely as well to be rich or supported by affluent overclass parents, because of the reliance of nonprofits on unpaid interns and staffers with low salaries. Success in the nonprofit sector frequently depends not on mobilizing ordinary citizens but on getting grants from the program officers of a small number of billionaire-endowed foundations in a few big cities, many of them named for old or new business tycoons, like Ford, Rockefeller, Gates, and Bloomberg. Such “community activists” have more in common with nineteenth-century missionaries sent out to save the “natives” from themselves than with members of local communities who headed local chapters of national volunteer federations in the past.
Earlier this year, in a contribution entitled “How Philanthropy Made and Unmade Liberalism” to Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberalism Since the 1960s, Temple University history Professor Lila Corwin Berman tough-mindedly critiques what she calls professional-class liberalism’s “philanthropic governance.” “A bevy of anti-regulatory, pro-market, and state-shrinking measures endorsed across party lines from the 1970s through the 1990s smoothed the way for the rise of philanthropic governance,” by Berman’s anti-neoliberal assessment.
Together, they directed public funds and plaudits toward private foundations and other philanthropic bodies.
By the final decades of the twentieth century, the logic and structure of philanthropy had permeated every realm of American power, from domestic and foreign policies to corporate practices to grassroots politics. In other words, no domain of American power operated bereft of the capital and logic of philanthropy. This fact served to lash together disparate political actors from the left and the right, who no matter their policy divisions all conceded to—and often lauded—philanthropic governance.
To those who may perhaps be paying closer attention in the wake of the 2024 election, there have been healthily negative appraisals on both the left and right of the practical and political effects of “The Groups” of philanthropically funded entities that exercise an inordinate amount of influence over candidates and policymakers. The Groups, these analyses either imply or say, would do better to be more cognizant of and responsive to the wishes of common, non-overclass citizens who have few avenues to effectively express themselves other than electorally.
More recently, my Giving Review co-editor William A. Schambra notes that everyday’ers practice their own philanthropy very much differently than Big Philanthropy. Jason Lewis has complementarily noted that they are very much alienated from a distant Big Philanthropy that now clumsily and tardily seeks to enlist them in defense of its activities against populist policy proposals to rein in its power and prestige and cut back on some of its privileges and prerogatives.
4. It’s been getting more politicized, as well—partisan, even.
Donald Trump’s initial political ascendancy in 2016 cannot fairly be considered a product, or even an indirect beneficiary, of conservative philanthropy. Conservative donors of all types, in fact, were caught embarrassingly flat-footed by his rise. The populist sentiment expressed in Trump’s first candidacy and presidency was a challenge to both them and conservatism’s very understanding of itself. It likely will take decades to work out, and conservative donors will play a part in this, including in the political context.
Since 2016, liberal donors—including the largest private foundations in Big Philanthropy—have sought to produce and may actually have produced successful political results for Trump’s opponents. In her now famous postmortem on the 2020 election in Time, Molly Ball describes a “shadow campaign” conducted by liberal and progressive activists and organizers, who held urgent Zoom meetings for hours a day to avert “the potential for a November meltdown.” These meetings included “representatives of donors and foundations.” Ball later noted that the Voter Participation Center (VPC) sent 15 million vote-by-mail applications to “people in key states.” CRC’s Parker Thayer reports that, for the 2020 election VPC “leveraged connections with billionaire private foundations, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother, and foreign billionaires with a history of breaking U.S. election law to raise $190 million for the Everybody Votes campaign and register 5.1 million people.”
VPC, which was founded as Women’s Voices Women’s Vote in 2003, is officially a tax-exempt, charitable entity. According to Sasha Issenberg’s 2012 The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, however, this status is a thin veil for partisan political organizing: “Even though the group was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats,” including by means of financial support from private, purportedly “charitable” foundations.
In 2020, the tax-exempt Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) with substantial philanthropic support, including from private foundations, also funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to certain local election administrators. Both the motives and arguably predictable effects of those donations were plausibly called into question.
During the 2019–20 election cycle, according to CRC’s Kristen Eastlick, employees of those foundations in the “FoundationMark 15” made a total of about $832,000 in contributions that were reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Of that, 96.9 percent supported Democrats, while just 1.7 percent supported Republicans. Specifically, they contributed $806,534 to Democratic candidates, related political action committees (PACs), or other entities during the cycle, according to FEC data, with only $14,121 going to GOP-related candidates or PACs. That might strike one as disproportionately one-sided, unreflective of the voting populace’s preferences as a whole.
On December 18, 2021, the influential Blue Tent’s David Callahan emailed liberal and progressive donors this advice:
As you think about last-minute charitable donations before December 31, here’s a tip: focus on helping Democrats win victories in next year’s high-stakes elections.
I know: Tax-deductible gifts to 501(c)(3)s supposedly can’t be used for electoral work. But that law is a joke. Any donor who does a little homework can find lots of ways to make “charitable” donations that help their political party.
Chronicle of Philanthropy columnist and Giving Review contributor Craig Kennedy wrote in a January 2024 column that “[i]n the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, billions of dollars were spent on voter-registration, mobilization, and education efforts conducted by nonprofit organizations. According to Candid, foundations alone gave more than $2 billion for a range of election-related activities from 2019 to 2022.
“Such patterns are already playing out in the run up to the 2024 election,” he continued:
For example, as part of a $130 million initiative, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta recently awarded 68 organizations grants of $50,000 to $500,000 for voter outreach and civic engagement work in Southern states. Other donors undoubtedly are giving even more. During the 2020 election, for instance, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative gave $400 million to local and state governments for election administration.
Some of this work is primarily focused on ensuring a healthy American democracy. However, a significant portion of funds is also likely supporting partisan political causes.
This latter kind of “philanthropy” properly prompted Congress to investigate the Ford Foundation’s funding practices in the late 1960s and subsequently to include explicit language to prevent the mixing of politics and tax-incentivized charity in the 1969 Tax Reform Act ( see No. 5 below). Despite the efforts of the mid-century Congress, such mixing is now rampant, growing, and bipartisan, although conservatism and liberalism do not draw equal proportions of policy- and advocacy-oriented charitable funding.
Full data from the 2022–2024 cycle needs to wait for nonprofit tax filings that are not all available yet, making historical comparison and trend-spotting difficult. It does seem likely that public charities engaged in more election-adjacent activity than they did in 2016.
It also seems worth noting that the many urgent online and in-person meetings of liberal and progressive Big Philanthropy and nonprofitdom in 2025 to express alarm about and make plans to counteract what’s considered the administration’s dangerous “authoritarian attack on civil society” might perhaps have been less necessary if there had been at least some meetings—say in 2019 and 2020—about the dangerous risks that politicization, if not partisanization, of so much of the sector poses to charity.
5. It’s always had a tenuous place in America’s social contract.
As Schambra told the Council on Foundations in 2013, “our social-contract roots forever privilege the individual, on the one hand, and the state, on the other, which is why institutions in between, like foundations, seem to have a somewhat tenuous legal and constitutional status.” In fact, philanthropy was the subject of much political debate over its proper role and relationship with government during and for some decades since the Gilded Age.
The Walsh Commission, created by Congress in 1912 to examine U.S. labor law, spent much of its time and energy examining income inequality in the country, scrutinizing figures like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Its chairman, progressive Kansas City labor lawyer and activist Frank P. Walsh, wrote in 1915 that “huge philanthropic trusts, known as foundations, appear to be a menace to the welfare of society.” In 1916, a Walsh Commission report recommended that multipurpose foundations with assets exceeding $1 million be chartered federally, with limitations on their size and duration.
Thirty-five years later, in 1952, Rep. Eugene E. Cox, a Georgia Democrat, introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives to investigate tax-exempt private philanthropy, including grantmaking foundations. In 1953—referring to the work of the Cox Committee as “unfinished business”—Tennessee Republican Rep. B. Carroll Reece introduced a resolution to essentially start over and conduct a new, more-thorough investigation. It passed, and the committee released its findings in 1954.
In 1955—when Democrats regained control of Congress—the House Select Committee on Small Business also investigated tax-exempt, charitable foundations. Chaired by crusading New Deal Democrat Rep. Wright Patman of Texas, it was and is known as the Patman Committee. “Down in Houston,” the populist Patman once said, “there are some neighborhoods so rich that every flea has his own dog. The Rockefellers are like that. Every one of them has his own foundation.” The Patman Committee issued a report in two lengthy installments in late 1962 and 1963. Warning of “possible exploitation of the people’s respect and admiration for charitable acts and gifts,” it aggressively recommended a moratorium on the granting of tax exemption for foundations.
The 1969 Tax Reform Act, which fundamentally still legally structures the nonprofit sector, followed continued congressional interest in and investigation of philanthropy, including by the House Ways and Means Committee. For example, the 1969 law—passed by an entirely Democratic Congress—makes it a “taxable expenditure” for any private foundation to pay or incur any amount “to influence the outcome of any specific public election, or to carry on, directly or indirectly, any voter registration drive”—though excepted from this definition, among other things, is “any amount paid or incurred by any organization … the activities of which are nonpartisan, are not confined to one specific election period, and are carried on in 5 or more States.”
When Republican President Nixon signed the law in December ’69, his formal signing statement said,
Tax-free foundations were brought under much closer Federal scrutiny although Congress wisely rejected provisions that would have hampered legitimate activities of the voluntary sector. At the same time, we must recognize that congressional consideration of this matter reflected a deep and wholly legitimate concern about the role of foundations in our national life.
According to the General Explanation of the Tax Reform Act of 1969, prepared by the staff of and published in 1970 by the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation,
In recent years, private foundations had become increasingly active in political and legislative activities. In several instances called to Congress’ attention, funds were spent in ways clearly designed to favor certain candidates. In some cases, this was done by financing registration campaigns in certain areas. In other cases contributions were made to organizations that then used the money to publicize the views, personalities, and activities of certain candidates.
This was just more than half a century before the 2020 election—in which VPC-registered voters (in “key states”) participated and which was administered in large part, in many (key?) places, with help from the philanthropically supported CTCL (see No. 4).
As Schambra also told the Council on Foundations more than a decade ago, “Whenever foundations in the past have forgotten their tenuous status in the American political order, the political sovereign was quick to remind them of it.”
6. Big Philanthropy doesn’t appreciate the renewed public scrutiny.
In 1955, former Ford Foundation director and Fund for the Republic president Robert Maynard Hutchins delivered a speech forcefully defending private foundations—their prerogatives, practices, and positions—to an audience that included Reece, who had recently finished leading his investigation of foundations. Perhaps naturally enough, Hutchins’ speech was highly defensive of philanthropy, but it included more than a little arrogance and disdain, if not contempt—certainly for Reece and his colleagues and staff personally, if not also for Congress institutionally.
“In the conduct of the hearings” before Reece and his colleagues, “Mr. Reece added some new wrinkles to the distortions that we have become accustomed to in congressional investigations,” Hutchins said. “The foundations were elaborately attacked by the staff and some witnesses of dubious standing. … The most entertaining of the new wrinkles was that the majority of the Committee took a philosophical position.” Reece and fellow committee member Jesse P. Wolcott, Hutchins added, “came bustling out in second-hand suits of anti-empiricism, supplied them by the sages of the staff …. The Congressmen could not be bothered with history,” and they “could not be bothered with consistency.”
Hutchins continued:
We may as well state it plainly: the Reece investigation in its inception and execution was a fraud. Nobody in his right mind could suppose that the great accumulation of wealth left by our richest men were being intentionally used by their trustees to overthrow the institutions of this country.
In 1969, Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy’s testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee was considered by many to similarly be “arrogant and condescending.” According to Karen Ferguson in Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism, the committee later produced the 1969 Tax Reform Act, described in No. 5 as “‘McGeorge Bundy’ amendments—as they were called after his defiant performance in front of the House Ways and Means Committee caused him to be blamed for pushing its members over the brink in their quest to shut down liberal foundations’ activism and put strict new controls on philanthropies’ political involvement.”
To some, the 1969 Act “seems an aberrant spasm of Congressional anger at foundations, generated by the unfortunate acts of a handful of individuals and organizations,” including the unapologetic Bundy and Ford. But “it was not a Congressional bolt from the blue,” observes Thomas A. Troyer in a 1999 paper. “The concerns of Congress at which the law struck had roots reaching back for more than two decades.”
In his last “President’s Review,” in the Ford Foundation’s 1978 annual report, Bundy himself looked back, too. “Public and Congressional opinions on the institutions of our society tend to go in cycles,” he writes. “Foundations, including this one, were attacked by the Reece and Cox Committees in the 1950s and lived in an era of good feelings through most of the 1960s. There is no guarantee that the relatively kindly environment of 1979 will last through the 1980s. But on the whole I am optimistic, in part because the troubles of 1969 were not all that bad.”
“Fast-forward” to 2023, when the Ways and Means Committee’s Republican members issued an open letter of inquiry seeking comment on whether charitable nonprofits are functioning as key players in political races, rather than serving charitable causes. The letter succeeded in “drawing the ire of charity experts and professionals across the ideological spectrum,” according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
And after that same Chronicle published earlier this year its list (see No. 1) of all those private and community foundations that had $500 million or more in assets—compiled to help track which ones might be subject to one of President Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders—the reaction from many sector leaders was furious, merely for publishing the list. In addition to several harshly disapproving letters to the editor, Nonprofit Quarterly editor Sara Hudson argued online that the naming of donors “handed a target list to a hostile government that has a public practice of threatening its opponents and squashing dissent.”
Quite curiously for an editor, referencing the Chronicle list, Hudson’s post declares—emphasis in original—“I will not link to this piece and I encourage you not to search for, click on, or share it. Doing so only amplifies its reach.” Publishing the list—compiled from tax filings made publicly available because of laws meant to bring the apparently now-quaint notion of transparency to the tax-advantaged philanthropic enterprise—constitutes unethical journalism, in her opinion. Embarrassingly, she called for its retraction.
As also noted (in No. 4), as of this writing, Big Philanthropy and nonprofitdom have held many urgent meetings of to express alarm about and make plans to counteract the dangerous “authoritarian attack on civil society.”
7. If you’re a taxpayer, you contribute to the pool of funds that incentivizes its growth and maintenance.
The taxation from which private foundations are exempt—the large pool of funds from which the incentive of exemption is drawn—is collected by and with the power of the state. For the most part, you and every other citizen are expected—required—to pay those taxes, albeit with all the limits, deductions, credits, and workarounds that have been placed on the system over many decades.
In fact, many consider the tax-preferred status of charitable entities as itself basically a workaround for the rich to avoid paying taxes on their generated or inherited wealth.
8. The conservative and progressive populist reaction against Big Philanthropy is not going to go away.
The populist backlash against Big Philanthropy—coming from both conservatives and progressives—does not seem to be a fleeting phenomenon. It is borne of deep concerns about power, representation, and the role of elites in society. These concerns are likely to persist and may even intensify.
While we’re discussing the previous Trump administration, the damage done to philanthropy and the nonprofit sector by the attention and scrutiny brought to bear on some of its activities by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in its early days are just the beginning of this persistence. To so many conservative populists now, there is no slack given to any group just calling itself a charity or registering as a charity, whether deserved or not. The invocation doesn’t yield the automatically sympathetic receptivity it used to get in the eyes of the democratic populace—or that the groups’ and their backers’ used to deserve, at least in their own eyes.
Again, as per the allusion above (No. 4), this could and should perhaps have all been avoided, or mitigated, but it sure seems a little late now. Much damage has been and is being done. Too many abuses and misuses of charitable status, including its politicization, have occurred. What many thought would be something of a predictable (see No. 5) response has occurred, too, and it is continuing and will continue. Long-term policy ramifications are inevitable.
The anti-elite critique of Big Philanthropy from populist progressives, unless they’re dissuaded from offering it because of the concomitant conservative one, should remain and intensify—mostly because elites and the managerial class they employ aren’t going away either. Nor is those unelected elites’ desire to use—when they easily can, which is often—their structural power, including through charitable status.
