How Dark Money Moves: The Foundation Ecosystem That Funds American Activism

The money that divides you doesn't arrive with a return address.

It flows through foundations, re-grants through fiscal sponsors, passes into 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations, and emerges on your screen as a campaign ad, a protest movement, a viral outrage cycle — with no visible connection to the billionaire, foreign government, or anonymous donor who started the chain. This isn't a conspiracy. It's infrastructure. And it was built, deliberately, on both sides of the American political spectrum.

Understanding it requires understanding one financial instrument that most Americans have never heard of: the donor-advised fund.

The Mechanism

A donor-advised fund — a DAF — works like this: a wealthy individual or institution contributes money or assets to a sponsoring organization, takes an immediate tax deduction, and then directs grants from that account to downstream nonprofits over time. The sponsoring organization files a public 990 tax return that discloses who received grants. It does not disclose who funded the DAF.

That gap — between who gave and who received — is the engine of modern dark money.

The original source of funds can be a billionaire, a foreign national's domestic intermediary, a corporation, or another foundation. By the time money reaches its intended destination — a voter registration drive, an activist organization, a media outlet, a litigation fund — it has passed through enough institutional hops that tracing it back to its origin requires teams of investigative journalists, years of FOIA requests, and a significant amount of luck.

This is not accidental. It is the system working exactly as designed.

The Left Side of the Ledger

The Tides Foundation is the most prominent institution on the left side of this ecosystem — and one of the most misunderstood.

Founded in San Francisco in 1976 by philanthropist Drummond Pike, Tides was conceived explicitly as infrastructure for progressive political activism. Its core innovation was fiscal sponsorship: allowing donor money to flow to activist organizations that lacked their own nonprofit status, using Tides as the legal and financial intermediary. A donor contributes to Tides. Tides re-grants to a project. The project gets tax-exempt status and operational support. The donor's identity stays with Tides.

Over nearly five decades, this model scaled into something much larger.

In 2024, the six Tides nonprofit entities combined reported $785 million in total revenue and $784 million in net assets. The Tides Foundation alone made $442 million in grants — to more than 2,400 organizations. More than $47 million of those grants went to foreign recipients whose identities are not publicly disclosed.

Tides's political arm, Tides Advocacy, operates as a 501(c)(4) — a "social welfare" organization that, unlike a charity, is explicitly permitted to engage in partisan political activity. In 2024, Tides Advocacy reported $16.8 million in direct political campaign expenditures, more than triple the $5.3 million it spent in 2023. Its revenue surged from $65.8 million to $92.5 million in a single election year.

The money flowing into Tides comes from some of the largest names in left-aligned philanthropy. The Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, contributed $17.8 million to Tides between 2022 and 2023. The Ford Foundation is a regular donor. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund contributed nearly $1 million in 2023. Many of Tides's largest donors are themselves donor-advised funds — meaning the original source of funds is separated from the ultimate recipient by two or more institutional layers.

What does that money fund? In 2024, Tides Foundation grantees included environmental justice organizations, voter mobilization groups, immigration advocacy organizations, and a range of progressive policy and media projects. Tides Advocacy fiscally sponsors organizations including the Movement for Black Lives Action Fund, Dream Defenders, Flip the Vote, and Voices for Progress.

This is not a secret. Tides publishes annual reports. Its 990 filings are public. What is not public — and what current law does not require to be public — is who ultimately funded the money that arrived at each of those destinations.

The Right Side of the Ledger

The mirror infrastructure on the right is built around DonorsTrust, founded in 1999 and headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia.

Where Tides presents itself as broadly progressive infrastructure, DonorsTrust makes an explicit ideological promise to its donors: contributions will never be directed to politically liberal causes. It is, by design, a one-way valve. This has made it the preferred vehicle for conservative and libertarian donors who want to fund right-aligned organizations without their names appearing in public records — and without risking that their money might drift ideologically after they've contributed it.

Mother Jones called DonorsTrust the "dark money ATM of the right." Senator Sheldon Whitehouse called Tides the equivalent on the left. Both assessments are directionally correct.

In 2024, DonorsTrust reported $1.36 billion in net assets and distributed over $103 million to policy and influence organizations. Since 2020, it has distributed more than $612 million. Its funding network includes the Koch political network, the Bradley Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, and the Marble Freedom Trust controlled by conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo — whose Concord Fund has reshaped the federal judiciary over the past decade.

Where does the money go? In 2023 and 2024, DonorsTrust's largest recipients included the State Policy Network ($10.5 million) — a web of right-aligned think tanks operating in 49 states — the Federalist Society ($4.3 million), Consumers' Research ($6.5 million), and more than $44 million to right-wing litigation centers and legal advocacy groups. It also distributed $26.5 million to right-leaning media outlets in 2024 alone.

As with Tides, the public record shows who received the money. It does not show who provided it. Two separate donations of $427 million and $426 million each arrived at DonorsTrust in 2021 from a single unidentified source. Combined, those two contributions exceeded the entire annual political ad spending of the 2014 midterm election cycle — and the donor's identity remains legally protected.

The Third Layer Nobody Talks About

Here is the number that should recalibrate everything above: since 2020, the donor-advised funds operated by Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard have distributed $63 billion in grants — more than 100 times what DonorsTrust disbursed in the same period.

These are not ideological vehicles. They are the charitable arms of mainstream investment firms, and their political giving is buried inside an ocean of donations to hospitals, universities, and community foundations. That camouflage is precisely what makes them the most significant and least scrutinized channel in American political finance.

A 2024 DeSmog investigation found that Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard's DAFs distributed $171 million to organizations affiliated with Project 2025 — nearly three times the $66 million DonorsTrust contributed to the same groups in the same period. The donors behind those grants are unknown. The investment firms processing them are household names whose charitable operations attract virtually no political scrutiny.

The same dynamic operates on the left, where commercial DAFs fund progressive causes at scale with similar anonymity. The political money hiding inside mainstream financial infrastructure dwarfs the dedicated ideological vehicles on either side.

The Foreign Money Question

In 2024, more than $47 million in Tides Foundation grants went to undisclosed foreign recipients.

That single fact sits at the intersection of the most important unresolved question in American political finance: how much foreign money is currently flowing into U.S. domestic activism — through legal channels — and influencing American political discourse?

The Foreign Agents Registration Act, passed in 1938 to combat Nazi propaganda operations, requires individuals and organizations acting as agents of foreign principals to register with the Department of Justice and publicly disclose their activities. For most of its existence, FARA was rarely enforced. That changed in 2017 with the prosecution of Paul Manafort, and enforcement has intensified since.

But FARA has a structural gap: it was designed to regulate explicit foreign government agents, not the layered philanthropic infrastructure that now moves money across borders at institutional scale. A foreign foundation contributing to a U.S. donor-advised fund, which re-grants to a fiscal sponsor, which funds a domestic activist organization, does not obviously trigger FARA's registration requirements at any point in the chain — even though foreign money is ultimately funding domestic political activity.

Congress is actively debating this. The FRONT Act, introduced in the Senate in July 2025, would expand FARA to cover nonprofits receiving money from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, or other countries designated as "of concern" by the Secretary of State. Five states — Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Texas — have already enacted "baby FARA" laws in 2025. Similar legislation is pending in Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, and others.

The disclosure gap is real. Foreign nationals cannot legally contribute to U.S. federal elections. But a foreign national contributing to a U.S. donor-advised fund — which then supports domestic policy advocacy, media, and political organizing — operates in a legal gray zone that current law was not designed to address.

What Reform Would Actually Look Like

The problem is not that dark money exists. In a country with the First Amendment, anonymous political speech has constitutional protection. The problem is asymmetric visibility: some political money is publicly disclosed because it flows through channels that require disclosure, and some is not because it flows through channels that don't. Voters cannot evaluate the full picture because the full picture is legally obscured.

Meaningful reform would require three things.

First, expanded disclosure requirements for donor-advised funds engaged in political grantmaking — not eliminating DAF anonymity for genuine charitable giving, but creating a disclosure threshold when DAF grants flow to 501(c)(4) political organizations.

Second, a modernized FARA framework that accounts for multi-hop philanthropic chains — requiring registration and disclosure when foreign money can be traced, through any number of institutional hops, to domestic political activity. The FRONT Act is a start, but it addresses only a defined list of adversary nations and may not capture money originating from allied nations with their own influence interests.

Third, standardized 990 reporting requirements for fiscal sponsors like Tides that would require disclosure of the original funding source for grants to domestic political organizations, not merely the immediate grantee.

None of these reforms would eliminate dark money. They would make it visible. In a functioning democracy, visibility is the mechanism. Voters can evaluate disclosed money. They cannot evaluate money they cannot see.

The Actual Story

The political ads you see in October are not where the money starts. They are where it ends.

The money starts in donor-advised funds, foundation networks, and fiscal sponsorship chains that most Americans have never heard of and that current law was not designed to make transparent. It passes through institutions with legitimate charitable purposes, acquires the legal protection of those institutions, and emerges as political activity — voter mobilization, opposition research, media production, litigation, and eventually advertising — with its origins legally obscured.

This is not a left-wing story or a right-wing story. The infrastructure is bipartisan. The mechanism is identical. The scale is enormous on both sides.

What differs between the two sides is not the mechanism but the architecture. Right-aligned dark money tends to flow through explicitly ideological vehicles like DonorsTrust, where the political intent is transparent even if the donor identity is not. Left-aligned dark money tends to flow through multipurpose philanthropic infrastructure like Tides, where political activity is embedded within a broader charitable operation.

Both are legal. Both are opaque. And both are funded, in part, by money whose origin American voters are not permitted to know.

That is the system. Not a conspiracy — a structure. And structures can be changed.

Sources: Capital Research Center analysis of 2024 Tides Form 990 filings (consolidated across six entities), IRS Form 990 filings via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Center for Media and Democracy / EXPOSEDbyCMD (DonorsTrust analysis), DeSmog (commercial DAF investigation, October 2024), OpenSecrets, Brennan Center for Justice, Federal Register (FARA proposed rulemaking, January 2025), Inside Political Law (FRONT Act analysis, August 2025).