Not long ago, an executive at a top foundation told me that their institution wouldn’t “touch politics with a ten-foot pole.” They said that at the very moment that DOGE was unlawfully dynamiting vital federal support for some of their core priorities and many of their grantees were experiencing extreme trauma.
Politics was touching this foundation in a big way, but it barely seemed to register that this multibillion-dollar institution could or should fight back with whatever legal means were available. Even strongly worded public statements are apparently out of bounds: Just a single mild press release out of more than 20 the foundation has issued in the past three months offers any words of protest.
Is this about fear of retaliation? Probably, in part. All funders are on edge, and for good reason. But after many years of watching this particular left-of-center foundation, I don’t think fear is the main explanation of its pacifism in the face of attack by ideological extremists. Instead, the grantmaker is emblematic of the cautious, technocratic ethos of American philanthropy that I described in my article, “How We Got Here: Six Reasons Liberal Philanthropy Is Losing the Battle for America’s Future.”
As I explained there, a mid-20th-century model that imagines foundations as neutral, evidence-based problem-solvers may have once made sense, when both political parties were equally committed to democratic norms and people still read newspapers. But that moment has passed. Foundations that don’t recognize the new reality are like farmers in the face of an invading army who can’t or won’t put down their plows and take up arms to defend themselves. To me, it seems obvious that you don’t focus on sowing the usual crops when somebody is coming to burn your fields — and your whole nation — to the ground, but that is exactly what many foundations are doing.
My sense is that 90% of liberal foundations are distributing 90% of their grant money in exactly the same way that they were a year ago. Everything has changed — except funding priorities. Grantmakers who’ve dramatically pivoted their spending to meet the moment, like Freedom Together and now Marguerite Casey (see below), remain outliers. Check out the grant announcements and databases of key funders if you don’t believe me. You’d never know from all the business-as-usual awards going out the door that these institutions face an existential threat to everything they care about, not to mention their own institutions.
In advocating that philanthropy needs to fight harder, including through legal electoral channels, I’m occasionally accused of wanting to “politicize philanthropy.” The other day, commenting on my recent work on LinkedIn, somebody wrote that this is “very sad to read.” She went on to reflect wistfully on a meeting she’d been at with nonprofit leaders with “service hearts” where nobody cared about political labels — just how to do good work to improve their communities.
Her comment resonated with me. It is sad how the philanthropic sector has been drawn ever deeper into political warfare over the past few decades. I have written frequently about how the “charitable” sector has become yet another conduit through which wealthy actors — whether individual donors or endowed foundations — amplify their political views through influence spending in ways unavailable to ordinary citizens. We’re in an ideological arms race, and the weapons in that race include billions of 501c3 dollars flowing into think tanks, legal groups, advocacy campaigns, and voting organizations. As I described in my book, “The Givers,” the mighty river of money flowing into politics should be understood as having three tributaries: campaign donations in elections, the bankrolling of lobbyists, and philanthropic influence spending.
It’s a deeply problematic system, and in my book, I laid out an agenda for reforming it.
Yet as with any arms race, one side can’t just walk away. I want the funders who support democracy to operate effectively in the world as it exists, rather than living in the past and engaging in unilateral disarmament, like the grantmaker I mentioned above. That means using all legal means to leverage their funding for maximum impact. I’ll be writing more soon on how funders can do that.
