David Callahan is (about 90%) right, and he will still be after next November 3.
Last month, in one of his weekly “Toplines” newsletters, Inside Philanthropy founder and editor-in-chief David Callahan wrote another intriguing and insightful piece on the ever-more-porous boundary between American philanthropy and politics. I hope I don’t alarm his progressive readership (or my far-more-modest conservative readership) when I say that I agree with about 90% of what he says.
“Long before Trump and other officials started calling out foundations and top philanthropists for their political activism,” Callahan begins, “I was making a similar point, albeit without the demagogic threats and hypocritical, one-sided framing.” At The Giving Review, we too have been calling out those institutions for blatant and excessive political activism.
(This is not the place to get into his charge of one-sided conservative demagoguery. But after U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley’s “Arctic Frost” revelations, that’s a difficult charge to take seriously. The Biden Administration’s Arctic Frost operation tops any recent use of government power to lean on nonprofits. It involved not only FBI investigations of eight Republican U.S. Senators and other prominent Republican politicians and individuals, but dozens of § 501(c)(3) groups as well, nominally in search of criminal activities related to the 2020 presidential election. Thus the 10% disagreement I have with Callahan.)
Callahan knows whereof he speaks when it comes to political applications of philanthropy, of course, because he’s been a leading practitioner of the art. He notes that “over the past three decades, wealthy people and institutional funders have gotten far more savvy at using philanthropy to sway politics,” as well as “more sophisticated at integrating their philanthropic giving with campaign donations, lobbying, media strategies and business operations.” Few have done more than he thus to make them savvier and more sophisticated.
But he’s apparently willing to give that up in the name of getting partisan politics out of philanthropy. “In fact, America’s tax-subsidized charitable sector has strayed far from its founding mission. The public does not support a system that offers so many different ways to convert wealth into political influence and get a nice deduction in return.” As he notes, “curtailing these distortions” will take Congressional action, since he “doesn’t expect philanthropists and foundations to exercise unilateral restraint, especially right now.” Indeed, he urges like-minded funders right now to “use every legal channel they can to fight.”
This is a somewhat muddled war cry, however. There is, to be sure, a massive appetite among progressive funders for this sort of fight. But it’s on behalf of causes that only complicate, rather than enhance, the ability of the left to appeal to actual voters.
The wrong battle, making matters worse
Callahan makes that clear in a response to a recent LinkedIn post by Carmen Rojas, president and chief executive officer of the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Marguerite Casey is one of the nation’s most-aggressive funders of progressive causes. In fact, earlier this year, it vowed to tap its endowment and “grant more than five times what we gave last year to ensure leaders and organizations are prepared” to “defend constitutional rights before they no longer exist,” as Rojas puts it in a May Inside Philanthropy article.
For Rojas, any call to moderate demands for social justice in the face of the Trump administration is submission to “a fiction called centrism,” she writes on LinkedIn earlier this month. “We can’t defend democracy by appeasing those who threaten it,” she insists. “Our power relies on our courage to name who we’re up against—billionaires, fascists, etc.—and to remain steadfast in our refusal to leave anyone else behind.”
In his own comment in response, Callahan is careful, first, to establish his own progressive credentials: “I’ve repeatedly called on philanthropy to lean into the fight against authoritarianism and spend whatever it takes to block the MAGA agenda.” So for him, “it’s been inspiring to see the Marguerite Casey Foundation set an example with its dramatically increased spending.”
But—and here Callahan courageously challenges one of philanthropic progressivism’s foremost spokespersons—he does not agree that
doubling down on existing progressive funding strategies is the self-evident answer here, and that anyone who doesn’t see that must be internalizing a repressive agenda or embracing a reactionary centrism. After all, philanthropy has invested unprecedented sums since 2016 in these strategies and has not achieved the impact that funders hoped for, to say the least.
Similarly, in his “Toplines” newsletter this past Saturday, Callahan more generally writes, “Given how things have turned out, anyone arguing for doubling down on the progressive funding strategies of the past decade needs to answer an obvious question: Why is that likely to work?” (Emphasis in original.) He then laments, “Over the past year, I haven’t seen anybody answer that question with any measure of depth and rigor—starting with how such strategies can succeed in drawing enough working-class Americans back into the left-of-center coalition to reliably win governing power.” He wonders why there hasn’t been, and urges, more debate about this.
So Callahan’s war cry is complicated: the leading progressive philanthropic funders may be willing to “use every legal channel they can to fight,” but, it turns out, they are fighting the wrong battle. The “unprecedented sums” the philanthropic left has pumped into politics over the past decade have only made matters worse. We considered this problem last April, after Callahan had made essentially the same argument—that Donald Trump’s return to power in 2024 resulted from the left’s ignoring the immediate and practical material concerns of voters. Instead, according to Callahan, the “best-funded left-of-center advocates” had “been more focused on concerns that include racial justice, gender equality, and climate change.” Small wonder, since “philanthropy is largely run by highly educated professionals with little connection to the working class or material hardship.”
Perhaps Callahan is interested in tightening the boundary between politics and philanthropy because he has seen—first-hand, and as one of the leading practitioners of politically savvy philanthropy—just how politically unsavvy philanthropy has become. Better to return politics to the politicians, who have a tangible stake in consulting voters, rather than leave it to the philanthropists, who are proud of the fact that they do not.
The coming claim of vindication, and the next reckoning
The problem for Callahan’s call for moderation is that donors are only going to be open to it until November 3, 2026. On that day, entirely predictably, Democrats will retake control of the U.S. House of Representatives and possibly the Senate. Rojas and her allies will claim that the triumphant return of (at least) a Democratic House majority completely vindicates their strategy of refusing to surrender an inch to the fascist billionaires who had been threatening democracy.
Callahan will properly point out that this proves no such thing. After all, history tells us that this sort of midterm swing against the incumbent political party is one of the few solid rules of American politics. If there is a particularly pronounced swing to the Democrats, surveys indicate that it will be because Trump, like Biden, failed to meet the practical material demands of the voters—not because they yearned to return to progressivism’s open borders and DEI programs.
But the time for progressive introspection about its political ineptitude will have passed. Foundations of the left will resume pumping billions into “racial justice, gender equality, and climate change.” Philanthropy’s unyielding commitment to the most-advanced progressive causes will have been what saved American democracy, Rojas will tell us. Philanthropic retreat from political engagement will be unthinkable.
Ironically, the conservative philanthropic establishment will have contributed substantially to the resuscitation of full-throated philanthropic progressivism. In its December 5, 2025, e-mail newsletter, the Philanthropy Roundtable proudly announced that it “had won its biggest fight yet,” by helping to remove any hike in the excise tax on foundation endowments from the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” So in its almost 40-year history, the biggest victory by the group founded to battle progressive philanthropy apparently came in protecting progressive philanthropy from the Trump administration and its Congressional allies.
Perhaps the new progressive Congressional majority will remember and reward this principled stand after November 3, 2026, by exercising scrupulous regard for “philanthropic freedom” as it drafts witness lists of the fascist billionaires who had come so close to destroying American democracy.
The only path to the reform sought by Callahan lies in some kind of alliance with the conservative populists who are willing to defy the Roundtable and use federal legislation to restore the boundary between politics and philanthropy. But that’s difficult to negotiate when philanthropy has persuaded itself that conservative populism is an existential threat, and when too many conservatives have indeed indulged in rhetoric giving philanthropy some cause for that fear.
And so it seems that reform will have to wait for another political cycle. A year from now, progressive foundations will have begun funding a reinvigorated agenda that will, if anything, be even more politically aggressive than before, driven by young, educated professionals ignorant of material hardship but steeped in the doctrines of the academic left. Nothing will have been done to address the underlying problem for foundations described by Callahan: the fact that “America’s tax-subsidized charitable sector has strayed far from its founding mission. The public does not support a system that offers so many different ways to convert wealth into political influence and get a nice deduction in return.” That simply means that the next political reckoning for American philanthropy will be even more perilous than the one it just narrowly survived.
