A compilation of interesting and insightful thinking from the first five of nine recorded discussions since July about grantmaking and giving.
John Adams, transgenderism, and the general welfare
“I’ve been around for a while. I remember the ’80s, I remember the ’70s. What were they saying? They were saying, Think globally, act locally. What’s missing from that equation? The nation.”
Foundations were actively downgrading any appreciation for the nation, for America, “40 years ago, 50 years ago. The ’70s were 50 years ago. Who was saying this? Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon. What are they saying now? They’re saying the same thing.
“What’s Mellon doing? Now, that one has a monuments project. Five hundred million dollars. That’s a half a billion dollars. What are they trying to do? They’re trying to reimagine American monuments. Too many monuments to dead white males—Alexander Hamilton, to Jefferson, to Madison, to Lincoln, for that matter to Washington.
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“The New Right is not by itself enough. The legacy conservatives are not enough. It has to be sort of a coalition of this New Right and legacy.
“You have these foundations, Scaife and Bradley, and they’re sort of funding both people, both groups— which makes sense, I guess, from their point of view. So there’s an awareness that times have changed. That’s all I’m suggesting here: that we are aware of what’s changing.”
Should the conservative response to the progressive revolution perhaps also include reform of government policy regarding philanthropy and nonprofits? “Well, I think yes. It’s use of government … in the sense of the Founding Fathers.”
In Florida’s actions against Disney and the Trump administration’s actions against government funding—directly or through contracts with or grants nonprofits—of other diversity, equity, and inclusions (DEI) efforts, as well as critical race theory, “The government has acted, and I contend the Founding Fathers” would act similarly. “If this happened in Virginia or Massachusetts, can you see John Adams sitting on his hands and doing nothing as the East India Company spread transgenderism in the 18th Century?
“So, yes, there is a use of government for the common good. That’s right in the Constitution, the question of the general welfare. Foundations like Mellon that promote DEI, that promote [The 1619 Project], that promote transgenderism—is that part of the general welfare of the United States? We certainly can argue it’s not and perhaps they shouldn’t have, they should lose their tax-exempt status ….”
— John Fonte, from “A conversation with the Hudson Institute’s John Fonte (Part 1 of 2),” July 1, 2025, and “A conversation with the Hudson Institute’s John Fonte (Part 2 of 2),” July 2, 2025
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Defining donor intent with specificity for successors
“I think the biggest problem we face is donors failing to properly define their intent. You know, they do it in broad terms, in generalities and platitudes, but not with any specificity. So I think the challenge is not so much people not following the intent as it is failing to define the intent in the clearest and most-actionable terms, with intentionality, with specificity, so that the successors to the donor understand exactly what the donor wanted to accomplish. And using platitudes in generalities—like ‘I want to help the poor. I want to help the disadvantaged …’—is an absolute guarantee for mischief. …
“The lack of specific definition of what the donor’s trying to accomplish allows his, or her, or their successors to interpret it any way they want. … Absent the specificity of donor intent, there is no real donor intent and it’s just becomes a jump ball, just up for grabs.
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“The primary objective of The Schuck Initiatives is to move people from dependency to independence. It could be dependence on substance, or dependency on the government. I want people to become independent. That’s applicable in education, for school choice. It’s applicable in substance abuse. It’s the values that drive our goals for the future, not organizations or methodology or any of that kind of stuff. I’m a long way from being smart enough to be able to anticipate everything, but stating values and objectives is, again, we think survivable. It will survive most attacks.”
— Stephen M. Schuck, from “A conversation with The Schuck Initiatives’ Stephen M. Schuck (Part 1 of 2),” July 21, 2025, and “A conversation with The Schuck Initiatives’ Stephen M. Schuck (Part 2 of 2),” July 22, 2025
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How government funding compromises nonprofit independence
“[T]here’s no sort of broadly accepted threshold level at which a nonprofit starts to have issues with the strings attached to the government funding. For some, it might be 30% of their revenues. For others, maybe 50%. But there really is no hard number,
“What I would say is the greater the dependence, the higher the risks that come with receiving those funds. I would say that the ultimate measure of how much is too much is if that government funding was withdrawn tomorrow,” would the “nonprofit be able to survive? Would they be able to survive without following government priorities and government regulations? That’s the ultimate question.
“[G]overnments can attach a wide range of conditions to the funds that nonprofits receive. This could be reporting requirements and auditing rules to limit certain things that aren’t allowed legally. Sometimes, there are basic accountability measures, like preventing fraud or ensuring money is spent as promised. But other times, they cross a line into restricting speech, forcing programmatic changes, and imposing compliance costs on nonprofit organizations. The broader the conditions, the more government exerts control on the nonprofit’s sort of direction or its mission.
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“The U.S. is really unique in the entire world when it comes to private philanthropy. In terms of charitable giving, the U.S. gives … like seven to 10 times more as a share of GDP—that’s private donations—compared to many European nations, as well as neighboring nations like Canada, you know, countries of the Anglosphere.
“In Europe, we used to have a thriving charitable sector. … We don’t really have a charitable sector in in the U.K. or in Europe broadly speaking anymore because of the interventions and the growth of the state. And so I’m really concerned that the U.S. doesn’t go down that same path. That’s another reason why I’m really invested in this topic, preserving the Tocquevillian ideal.”
— Jack Salmon, from “A conversation with the Mercatus Center’s Jack Salmon (Part 1 of 2),” September 2, 2025, and “A conversation with the Mercatus Center’s Jack Salmon (Part 2 of 2),” September 3, 2025
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College sports and nonprofit status
“[D]onors and boosters to programs could create nonprofit entities to pool resources and they could pay college athletes in a way that the universities themselves could not. And many of these came on board as nonprofits in part because there was this tacit encouragement that as long as college athletes were involved in a kind of do-gooder [activity], that was passable. This was never explicitly said, but it was sort of at least tacitly said, or communicated. … They were just vehicles to pull money from boosters and supporters of programs to pay and induce college athletes to come and stay and play for their favorite programs.
After a 2023 Internal Revenue Service memorandum and (c)(3)-status denial last year, “the jig is largely up.
“The idea was one way that which these entities could gain charitable status, is that they would help facilitate college athletes to do endorsement work with other legitimate 501(c)(3)s and by doing that, they would sort of be riding on the charitable back of these other entities. But yeah, I mean, it was a joke.”
Why the policy deference to college-sports nonprofitdom? It’s “just really a product of history and the sacred status that college sports has.
“Members of Congress have had opportunities” to reform, “and some members of Congress have even raised concerns about, the general nonprofit patina over college sports. But we like college sports, they like college sports, their constituents like college sports. It’s never been something that’s really galvanized politicians in the past to really clamp down on and to call out the legitimacy of the charitable aspect of it.
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“In light of the new changes to the rules allowing schools to directly compensate athletes, which have just come on board a couple of months ago, the schools are now trying to come up with new architecture, new accounting architecture, financial architecture, to do one of two things.
“One, to give them the ultimate flexibility in how they pay athletes now and in the future. And two, ways of raising revenue that they might not have been able to do before, at least into the university itself. In some cases, that means building new 501(c)(3)s that they effectively have control over, but they’re legally distinct. In some cases, it’s converting existing (c)(3)s or replacing (c)(3)s with new for-profit entities. … That’s at the vanguard of the new kind of financial model of college sports.
“As I’m sure you’re aware, one of the big conversations of the last year is the potential introduction of private-equity money into universities. Obviously, if you’re a (c)(3), there’s limitations potentially on where you can raise money. So in some cases, while the (c)(3) still has a lot of value and they’re being created as we speak for athletics departments, they might become a relic as people are looking to raise private-equity capital, private debt money.
It “wouldn’t shock me” if “foreign sources of money are sought to be raised.”
— Daniel Libit, from “A conversation with Sportico’s Daniel Libit (Part 1 of 2),” September 15, 2025, and from “A conversation with Sportico’s Daniel Libit (Part 1 of 2),” September 16, 2025
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Institutional philanthropic structures and accelerationism
“For Carnegie, philanthropy reflects a life chapter that is distinct from the life chapter of wealth creation. There is kind of embedded in Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth a blueprint for the life of the then-industrialist tycoon that, in simplified form, runs something like this: you spend the first part of your life making a lot of money, doing something that may be valuable for society in some way. …
“That wealth-creation activity is temporally and conceptually distinct from what comes after, which is giving back. You make a lot of money, you become very wealthy, and then you have an obligation to do something different from making money, by giving back, a spending-down of your wealth.
“That is, on the one hand, an activity that fits into a different life chapter, and the other hand, it’s an activity that calls for different institutional structures. You make your wealth through one particular institutional form, the corporation. You give your wealth back to society through another institutional form, the foundation.
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While accelerationism “maybe just is an updated account for legitimizing wealth creation,” it’s “in a new technological scenario or situation, I mean, a lot of this writing is grounded in just the ideas around artificial general intelligence as a general-purpose technology [AGI] that has the potential to completely reshape society again. There’s a very rich and open debate about whether that interpretation of AGI is the correct one,” but accelerationism has “this almost-teleological view of technology, that … we are birthing a new technology, like a new consciousness in a way. And so the goal of facilitating the emergence of this kind of technology supersedes any other small-bore, human, democratic small-d, just like human goal that that we might want to attach to economic activity.
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“With the legacy foundations, maybe the trade-off is you as a wealthy individual, you will get a huge haircut on your tax bill if you give a billion dollars to a foundation, so that benefits you. But in return, you then are constrained by certain institutional guardrails that are just built into the sort of legal structure of the foundation.” There are “not a lot of guardrails, but there’s some of them,” including “you have to give to nonprofit organizations” and there are reporting requirements. There are also restrictions against certain kinds of political activity, of course.
“Then, put yourself in the in the position of an up-and-coming trillionaire today, who is sort of trying to think through different vehicles for channeling quote-unquote philanthropic wealth. Well, in a world where trillionaires are maybe not paying a lot of taxes anyway, maybe the tax-benefit factor just doesn’t weigh as heavily for them. And so they’re willing to gut that potential advantage in order to channel their philanthropic giving through an institutional structure that doesn’t have the kinds of guardrails that the foundation has—namely, an LLC, which itself is again like a private-sector entity and institution that embodies … this eliding of the distinction between making money and giving money.”
— Jeremy McKey, from “A conversation with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Jeremy McKey (Part 1 of 2),” September 23, 2025, and “A conversation with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Jeremy McKey (Part 2 of 2),” September 24, 2025
