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Americans for Public Trust, a government transparency advocacy group, is releasing a new database that tracks more than $5 billion in foreign spending, bankrolling politically active nonprofits in the U.S.
The tool, the first of its kind, aims to provide a searchable database that catalogs 523 groups and 12,090 records of foreign contributions to nonprofit organizations that, under current law, aren’t required to disclose the names of their donors, stemming from provisions passed under the Tax Reform Act of 1969. The database also reinforces the cautionary warnings from some lawmakers that those contributions are having an outsized influence on American discourse.
At a hearing on the matter earlier this year, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., blasted the privileges that nonprofits enjoy that he believes are being abused.
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“It is clear the status quo is unacceptable. Tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right. It exists to support legitimate charitable and educational work that strengthens our communities, not to serve as cover for foreign propaganda, election interference, or activities that undermine our national interest,” Smith said in a press release.
Fox News Digital is not aware of evidence that the Department of Justice is investigating or considering charges against groups in the database with any criminal behavior.
But Caitlin Sutherland, executive director for Americans for Public Trust, thinks maybe that should change — that the law itself should change.
“That’s exactly the problem. It should be illegal for foreign influence to permeate our political system and right now it’s not. Our database is designed to give them the information they need to address these loopholes and close them once and for all,” Sutherland said.
The tool allows users to search specific organizations and their contributions. It also provides a timeline of when the contributions were injected into the American scene — some as recent as the past election cycle, others stretching back to 2007.
When asked why some form of similar tool hasn’t existed until now, Sutherland said the idea of nonprofits has disguised the amount of money coming in.
“The term nonprofit, it conjures up an image of putting soup in a homeless person’s bowl, vaccinating orphans. The term nonprofit does not necessarily mean helping the needy. In the United States, nonprofits have really, really morphed into these huge entities. That are engaging in lobbying and public policy,” Sutherland said.
“The nonprofits of today are not what we have seen in decades past.”
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Sutherland also explained that because of a wide-ranging definition for what qualifies as a nonprofit, organizations have a wide latitude about what they want to do with that money.
“Foreign money can pay for get-out-the-vote drives. It can be spent on ballot harvesting. It can be spent on ballot issue campaigns, protests that are emerging across the country,” Sutherland said.
Smith, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, believes the database may soon shed light on the relationships between the groups.
“This database confirms what the Ways and Means Committee has been exposing for months: foreign money is flowing into America’s tax-exempt sector through shell funds and intermediaries designed to hide where it actually came from to influence American policymaking and our public discourse. The size and scope of the problem that Americans for Public Trust has identified is concerning, further underscoring the need to pass our legislation and close these loopholes once and for all,” Smith said.
Under current law, nonprofits aren’t required to disclose the source of their donations.
Supporters of the current policy framework argue that donors could receive harassment for their contributions if they were made public. That’s the position of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a state-level think tank that advocates for free markets, limited government and federalism.
“Donor disclosure and donor privacy are very important issues. Unfortunately, instead of a focus on government transparency and individual privacy, many advocates of donor disclosure are actually attempting to pass laws that would require the disclosure of personal information—like names and home addresses of Americans—in order to intimidate these donors from contributing to the causes they care about most,” the group states on its website.
“The First Amendment protects freedom of speech and association, yet many donor disclosure bills are designed to intimidate people from associating with organizations and ideas that the government may not like.”
Even so, Sutherland believes voters shouldn’t have to scrape through what reporting does exist to get a sense of where foreign dollars are going. She explained that getting that documentation is especially difficult because of varying legal standards for international contributions.
“That means that we are beholden to the laws of other countries that may not necessarily have to report money out here in the United States; a list of groups that are receiving money, whereas foreign charities don’t necessarily have to publish the same information,” Sutherland said.
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“There is no central European registry for foreign charities, so we’ve really put together a piecemeal collection of information relying on the foreign charities’ annual reports as well as their grant databases. We think that it should be simple,” she added.
Aubrie Spady and Cameron Cawthorne contributed to this report
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