Since 2020, three major financial services companies — Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Vanguard — have helped affluent philanthropists funnel at least $171 million to the nonprofits behind Project 2025, whose central platform rejects the climate crisis, DeSmog has found.
The contributions, which include hundreds of donations to 68 Project 2025 groups, were distributed on behalf of outside philanthropists via the companies’ “donor-advised funds,” or DAFs. DAFs provide donors with complete anonymity, a legal loophole that makes it virtually impossible to follow the trail of money back to its source — which is why some donors use them for their most controversial giving.
“They’re being used for the kind of political giving that donors probably wouldn’t want disclosed,” said Helen Flannery, a research fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive research organization that supports DAF reform.
The $171 million figure underscores the significant, underappreciated role that well-known asset management firms now play in the larger dark money ecosystem. Though politically charged funding began shifting into DAFs more than a decade ago, right-wing donors historically relied on bespoke vehicles with an explicitly conservative focus. The biggest players attracted a lot of scrutiny. Journalists only need to review the annual grantmaking of a DAF such as DonorsTrust, which Mother Jones has called “the dark-money ATM of the right,” to map out vast amounts of shadowy funding.
DAFs provide donors with complete anonymity.
But the larger financial firms have generally been able to avoid the same kind of attention — in part because their controversial bequests are buried within a sea of mainstream charitable donations, including significant funding to progressive causes. For comparison, DonorsTrust, widely deemed the most influential conservative DAF, has distributed roughly $612 million since 2020. Together, the DAFs operated by Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard have doled out a whopping $63 billion in grants since financial year 2020 — more than 100 times what DonorsTrust disbursed.
In order to find their Project 2025-specific funding, DeSmog analyzed datasets with hundreds of thousands of entries. The sheer size of overall giving by Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard has helped to obscure their growing role as a financial conduit for causes on the political fringe. Still, the $171 million they donated to Project 2025 far surpassed the impact of DonorsTrust, which disbursed only $66 million to 53 Project 2025 groups in the same timeframe.
That number will grow proportionately, as DonorsTrust’s 2023 return is not yet available. But the broader dynamic is clear: the for-profit financial services companies are now the biggest sources of DAF dark money. Other DAFs run by for-profit asset management companies — including the Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund and others not analyzed in full for this story — sent additional funds to Project 2025 groups.
It’s not hard to see why donors might want to keep their Project 2025 donations secret. Just 4 percent of Americans support the initiative to radically reshape federal governance to the right, according to an NBC News poll. And some of the nonprofits involved hold policy stances that are extreme by any measure.
In our analysis, DeSmog found that Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard’s DAFs each sent untraceable money to Project 2025 groups that actively engage in climate science denial and obstruction, as well as several classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights watchdog.
These findings are especially striking because all three financial companies tout their strength in for-profit environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, which is marketed to conscientious investors as a way to align their capital gains with the greater good. The companies’ donor-advised giving undermines the very causes their ESG funds claim to support, DeSmog’s analysis shows.
DeSmog found that Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard’s DAFs each sent untraceable money to Project 2025 groups.
“We take a cause-neutral approach to grantmaking, giving our donors the right to recommend their donations to the qualified public charities of their choosing,” Elaine Kenig, chief communications officer of Vanguard Charitable, told DeSmog in a statement. That makes it sounds like the decision to invest in climate disinformation groups rests with the original donors, and not the DAFs themselves.
But Chuck Collins, director of the program on inequality and the common good at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that excuse rests on a “legal fiction.” DAF donors receive large tax benefits from giving up their ability to decide where the money goes. And by law, once a DAF like Vanguard becomes steward of a donor’s giving, it has the legal right to refuse to give to certain causes or organizations that are not in line with its values.
“It technically is no longer the donor’s money,” he said.
DeSmog also reached out to Fidelity and Schwab asking for comment on the findings in this story. Neither had responded by publication time.
A vast network of untraceable funding
DeSmog identified 111 groups that are heavily involved with Project 2025 — organizations that contributed to the initiative’s central “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint, serve on its advisory board, or both. DeSmog was able to track exactly how much money each organization received since 2020 by matching its unique, federally assigned employee identification number to donations made by the three DAFs: the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, the Schwab Charitable Fund and the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program.
Sixty-eight Project 2025 groups, or about 61 percent of the total, received donations via at least one of those three DAFs since 2020. Of the three, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund donated by far the most money to Project 2025 nonprofits — over $82 million to 68 groups since 2020. In that span, Schwab donated at least $54.1 million to 50 groups, while Vanguard donated at least $28.8 million to 50 groups.
Many of the Project 2025 groups that received funding are listed in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database, which tracks organizations that cast doubt on the need for climate action. Together, the three DAFs gave $11.7 million to Turning Point USA, which organizes for conservative causes on college campuses and is closely linked to the Trump campaign. Turning Point, which has acknowledged that some of its funding comes from the fossil fuel industry, has a history of platforming climate deniers. The DAFs also sent $10.2 million to the Heritage Foundation, a Project 2025 lead organizer with a long history of climate obstruction.
Sixty-eight Project 2025 groups received donations via at least one of those three DAFs since 2020.
Some of the Project 2025 groups Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard funded are among the most notorious purveyors of climate disinformation. DeSmog found the three DAFS gave more than $3.4 million to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which argues that “socialism, not climate change, is the real threat” and “nobody’s kids need to be scared about climate change.” Media Research Center, which platforms climate deniers such as Steve Milloy and publishes regular blog posts on climate change “alarmism” in the press, received $3 million from the three DAFs. And they funneled more than $1.3 million into the Heartland Institute, which publishes reports suggesting that “nature,” not human activity, are the primary source of climate change.
Conservative DAFs seem threatened by the amount of money the major financial services companies are throwing into the right-wing money machine. In a panel next month that includes the current vice president of DonorsTrust, a roundtable of conservative philanthropists appears poised to accuse the mainstream DAFs of not being conservative enough — and is encouraging donors to steer their money back to “reliable alternatives.”
“DAF accounts overseen by financial giants often deny grants to nonprofits because of their right-of-center pedigrees,” according to the event listing (which also refers to the mainstream funds as “donor-advised fiends”). But the data DeSmog reviewed shows that the mainstream funds are doing plenty of giving at the far end of the right wing. More than that: They’re outpacing the competition.
How donor-advised funds became a dark-money behemoth
Today, more than $50 billion annually flows through donor-advised funds — more than 10 percent of all charitable giving, according to Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a Notre Dame Law School professor who researches nonprofit advocacy.
But DAFs weren’t really designed to be a major player in the nonprofit sector. They first came into play without fanfare in the 1930s, as community foundations looked for ways to make it easier to give. By contributing to a donor-advised fund, philanthropists could claim an immediate deduction from a single large check — but decide where the money should go later. This approach helped ease the logistical burden of annual financial planning, while helping local foundations get money in the door.
“They’d go to a donor and say, ‘Look, contribute to us. It’ll go into what we’ll call your donor-advised fund. We control it, but you can recommend where you want it to go within the community once you decide what to do,” Mayer said. “‘But just to be clear, we control it. We can make grants out of it without your okay. We don’t have to follow your advice.’”
When donor-advised funds were formally codified into the U.S. tax code in 1969, they were still used almost exclusively in this way, according to Flannery, who directs the Institute for Policy Studies’ charity reform work. It wasn’t until the 1990s when the first big financial services company got interested: Fidelity Investments. Fidelity executives realized that they could get paid to manage nonprofit giving, unlocking a whole new market. Even better, clients could pay their money managers out of tax-deductible funds — a publicly subsidized win for both the funds and their clients.
As DAFs grew in popularity, other benefits for donors became clear.
“It started with Fidelity, but Schwab got into the act, and Vanguard, and then Goldman Sachs, everybody,” Flannery said. “It became a lucrative proposition for these commercial investment firms, and they started really marketing them aggressively.”
As DAFs grew in popularity, other benefits for donors became clear. The caps on deductibility are higher than they are for private foundations, allowing donors to get even bigger tax breaks. And the flow of money becomes completely untraceable. Once a DAF takes in a donation, it has complete control of those funds — which go into a big pool of charitable money. It becomes impossible to link any subsequent gifts to the priorities of any specific donor.
“There’s no way to really beat DAFs for making gifts completely anonymous,” Flannery said. “There’s no way for grantees or the public or even the IRS to know where the money behind them is coming from. They’re essentially completely impenetrable.”
In Vanguard’s statement to DeSmog, Kenig said that 96 percent of its donors voluntarily include identifying information with their donation. But disclosing that information isn’t mandatory, and it’s not available to the public.
That impenetrability has made them an increasingly popular vehicle for dirty political work and dark money. In a recent report, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Climate Accountability Research Center found that DAFs funneled almost $1 billion to climate disinformation groups between 2020 and 2022. That amounts to 73 percent more than private foundations gave to the same groups during the same period.
Shining a light on dark money
Legally, DAFs are not required to obey their donors’ wishes on where the money should go.
“They’re not obligated to do anything,” said Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School, who studies philanthropy. “They’re not even obligated to distribute it to other charities. They could take the money and just pay themselves salaries.”
That also means that Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard could decline to fund organizations that are out of line with professed company values, or that conflict directly with the goals of their much-touted ESG portfolios. They’ve refused to give to a specific organization at least once: In 2019, both Fidelity and Schwab halted donations to charities affiliated with the National Rifle Association. But that decision appears to have been due to an Internal Revenue Service investigation that threatened the NRA’s charitable status rather than any kind of ethical or ESG-related determination.
“Disclosure on an account-by-account basis would go a long way.”
“We are … scrupulous about our responsibility to ensure grants from Vanguard Charitable abide by IRS guidelines that require all charitable dollars be used to advance the public good,” Kenig said. “Only charitable organizations that are in good standing with the IRS that qualify as tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) and are classified as public charities under Section 509(a) of the Internal Revenue Code are eligible for consideration.”
But so far, the big DAFs have refused to filter out climate disinformation groups from the pool of organizations they’re willing to fund — perhaps part of a general reluctance to start setting limits with donors around controversial causes. As the Vanguard Charitable spokesperson told DeSmog, the emphasis is on “cause-neutral” giving.
“The reason is very simple: because they want people to give them more money,” Mayer said. “If I give you the money, and you don’t listen to my advice, then I’m not gonna give it to you. Next time, I’m gonna give it to the other guy.”
“The DAF sponsor could say, ‘It’s our money now and we’re not going to fund what you wanted to fund,’” Collins said. “Of course, they would be out of business if they did that.”
That’s why DAF critics tend to call for policy reforms that would make it harder to use the funds as the major, hidden-in-plain-sight, dark money vehicles they have become. In their report on the growing role of DAFs in climate disinformation funding, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Climate Accountability Research Center argued that DAF sponsors such as Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard should be required to disclose the names of individual donors that contribute $10,000 or more.
“Disclosure on an account-by-account basis would go a long way,” Collins said. “It would hold the donor accountable for what they’re funding. You could follow the money much more easily.”
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