I’ve spent thirty years tracking money through corporate structures for family offices, hedge funds, and courtrooms. As a designated expert witness in fiduciary duty cases, I’ve testified about a simple principle: When someone holds money for a stated purpose, he doesn’t get to divert it to something else. Charities operate under a version of that promise. Donate to a “nonpartisan” 501(c)(3), and you’re told your dollars will save animals, cure cancer, feed the hungry, or plant trees, not bankroll a candidate.
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Last week, a new report reminded us how often that promise gets broken, and on a scale that would make any fiduciary blush.
On August 24, the Capital Research Center released The “Charities” Influencing Elections: 2024 and Beyond, a 64-page investigation tracing $638.7 million spent by 83 tax-exempt voter registration groups in 2024, a 30-percent jump from 2020 even as traditional PAC spending fell roughly 20 percent after inflation. That’s a migration of political money out of the regulated campaign-finance system and into a sector that runs on tax deductions and donor anonymity.
A year earlier, the House Oversight Committee’s DOGE Subcommittee held a hearing bluntly titled “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild,” where chair Marjorie Taylor Greene laid out a cycle: Administration officials steer grants to friendly nonprofits, whose leaders fund the campaigns of the same officials’ party. Witnesses pointed to a $372-million cash-and-voucher program that funneled prepaid debit cards to migrants at the border through similar charitable architecture. Democrat ranking member Melanie Stansbury called it a “wild journey of baseless conspiracy theories.” Some of it was theater. But theater needs a script, and CRC just handed Congress a footnoted one.
Start with the money trail. CRC traces the modern “vote machine” back to a 2015 plan pitched to Democrat operative John Podesta by a foundation tied to billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, laying out how 501(c)(3) charities could register voters in battleground states while the edited drafts still showed deleted language about “beating Republicans.” One of the largest players since has been the Everybody Votes Campaign, which raised more than $75 million in 2024 and sent $4.6 million to a canvassing firm, Field+Media Corps. Seven of that firm’s employees now face forgery and public-records charges from Pennsylvania’s attorney general over allegedly fraudulent registration forms. Another grantee, Stacey Abrams’s New Georgia Project, paid a $300,000 penalty for campaign finance violations before dissolving.
Then there’s Virginia. CRC documents more than $66 million behind an April 2026 redistricting ballot measure that could have flipped the state’s congressional delegation from a narrow 6-5 Democrat edge to a lopsided 10-1. Five 501(c)(4) organizations accounted for over 96 percent of the large contributions to the measure’s main backer, with money traced to networks tied to George Soros and the old Arabella Advisors umbrella, an operation that managed the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, and several other vehicles where the donor list is about as easy to find as parking at Fenway on Opening Day. Virginia voters approved the map. The state Supreme Court threw it out two weeks later over procedural violations, but the money had already made its point.
The same report catalogues the Voter Participation Center’s digital ads, which reportedly excluded audiences interested in NASCAR, Duck Dynasty, and golf while pitching itself as nonpartisan. It documents $118 million shaping the 2020 Census, tied to an undercount and overcount pattern CRC says cost Florida two congressional seats that went instead to Minnesota and Rhode Island, and it tracks the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which now claims states worth 222 of the 270 electoral votes needed to bypass the Electoral College. These scandals are all branches of one tree.
The foreign money angle isn’t hypothetical. In November 2025, Nebraska’s attorney general sued Wyss directly, along with the same New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund, alleging that the Swiss billionaire, who has never held U.S. citizenship, funneled more than $10 million through that network into Nebraska ballot campaigns on marijuana, paid leave, and abortion, violating the state’s ban on foreign contributions to ballot questions. Federal law already bars foreign nationals from funding candidates outright. The same layered nonprofit structure that hides domestic donors makes that ban far harder to police.
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Donor betrayal isn’t limited to election infrastructure. In April 2026, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on eleven counts of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money-laundering. This is the group best known for its “hate map.” Prosecutors allege that the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to individuals tied to the KKK and other extremist groups it was publicly denouncing. The SPLC denies wrongdoing, and the case is pending, but the allegation captures the dynamic this piece is about: trusting a mission statement instead of a ledger.
Here’s the legal line, and it’s not complicated. A 501(c)(3) cannot intervene in a candidate election and can lobby only in limited amounts. A 501(c)(4) can do more politics but has to be organized primarily for social welfare, not as a campaign vehicle in a tax wrapper. Cross that line, mix in undisclosed donors, foreign or domestic, and you’ve built something federal investigators would recognize instantly if it wore a hedge fund label instead of a nonprofit one.
Surely not every advocacy group is a front. A wildlife charity can lobby against a pipeline, a faith-based nonprofit can oppose an abortion law, and neither becomes a political operation just because its board has opinions. The test isn’t whether an organization takes positions; it’s whether its actual spending and coordination function as a campaign while its tax filings claim otherwise. That distinction protects legitimate advocacy, and conservatives should defend it as readily as we criticize its abuse. I coach kids, sit on several boards, and manage other people’s money for a living. I know the difference between an organization doing its job with conviction and one using that job as camouflage.
The tragedy is that this abuse taxes the credibility of a genuinely generous country. Americans donated an estimated $592.5 billion to charity in 2024, ranking sixth in the world’s giving index, with 61 percent reporting a donation. Most of that money does what donors think it does. But every dollar diverted into a partisan machine gives ammunition to those who want to regulate all giving into the ground.
Congress has the tools already; it just needs the will to use them. Require 501(c)(4)s above a reasonable spending threshold to disclose their funders, foreign and domestic alike. Direct the IRS to audit the affiliated-entity structures CRC flagged, and refer the fraud in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nebraska, and Alabama to prosecutors instead of press releases. Donors, take a page from due diligence in my business: read the Form 990 before you write the check, and treat a “charity’s” spending timeline tracking the election calendar as the red flag it is.
Trust, but verify. That standard built American finance into the deepest capital markets on Earth, and it can do the same for American philanthropy. Anything less turns the collection plate into a ballot box with a tax deduction attached, and neither the donor nor the democracy comes out ahead.
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Image via PickPik.