The $5 Billion Back Door: How Foreign Interests Fund American Political Activism
Nearly $2 billion moved from foreign foundations into American nonprofits last year and almost none of it broke a single law. It's part of a much larger pattern: A new watchdog database has now tracked more than $5 billion in foreign money flowing into U.S. nonprofits altogether — across 523 organizations and roughly 12,000 records, covering all categories of foreign nonprofit spending. Under federal election rules, none of it is supposed to be possible.
A Loophole Hiding in Plain Sight
The New York Times has described how this money travels, calling it “a daisy chain of opaque organizations that mask the ultimate recipients.” More than 150 U.S. nonprofits took in that cash last year, then pushed it into climate campaigns, left-wing protest movements, and efforts to sink Republican candidates… Some of it even funded activists telling Americans to eat less meat and give up their cars.
How Does It Work?
Federal law bars foreign nationals from donating to candidates or campaigns. Nobody disputes that. But Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust (APT), told the House Ways and Means Committee this February that the law stops well short of where money actually flows. “Foreign money running through foundations and nonprofits to influence policy and advocacy is not prohibited,” Sutherland testified, explaining that this gap is exactly where dark money lives.
It was APT’s own reporting, released the same week as Sutherland’s testimony, that first mapped this overseas dark money operation in detail. The group’s research traced funding from a handful of foreign foundations through more than 150 American organizations, and that research is now the backbone of a federal case. Nineteen state attorneys general cited it directly in a letter urging the Department of Justice to investigate, arguing that many of these groups look like unregistered agents of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA.
The Billionaires Behind the Curtain
The billionaires funding all of this aren’t hiding either. Hansjörg Wyss, Christopher Hohn, Alan M. Parker, Jeremy Grantham, Suneil Setiya, and Greg Skinner have built an entire donor ecosystem around it. Indivisible, the group responsible for organizing “No Kings” protests since President Trump began his second term, took $6.5 million directly from Wyss, a Swiss billionaire who has also written checks to the ACLU, Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Sierra Club, FreeDC, and MomsRising. Several of those same groups turned around and sponsored protests that Wyss’s money helped organize.
And that’s just one protest movement. Community Change pulled in $1.6 million from the Oak Foundation, a Geneva-based philanthropy tied to Jeep fortune heir Alan Parker, and used it to fund anti-police organizing in Washington, D.C. Extinction Rebellion counts Hohn, a British hedge fund manager, as its “single biggest individual donor.” And Wyss alone also donated $280 million to Sixteen Thirty Fund, a U.S.-based fiscal sponsor that channels money to dozens of progressive advocacy projects, and has backed pro-Kamala Harris super PACs and spent $130 million across ballot fights in 26 states.
Influencing Climate Policy
Climate money dwarfs it all. Quadrature Climate Foundation, backed by the London hedge fund Quadrature Capital, has sent $530 million to American nonprofits, and the Oak Foundation has sent $750 million more––much of it aimed squarely at killing the Keystone XL pipeline project, enforcing the Paris Climate Accords, and promoting other radical climate policies. The KR Foundation, a Danish philanthropy focused on climate policy, spent $36 million to promote a version of American cities with no private cars. One Quadrature grantee, Windward Fund, a U.S. nonprofit that acts as a financial umbrella for environmental campaigns, spends its share nudging people away from meat and dairy and toward plant-based diets. The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, a London-based charity built on Hohn’s hedge fund fortune and reported to maintain ties to groups linked to the Chinese Communist Party, has put more than half a billion dollars into what state attorneys general describe as “a broader effort to push radical climate and DEI policy on U.S. soil.”
States Are Acting. Will Washington?
States have already taken the lead on cracking down on these practices. Iowa was the most recent state to ban foreign funding on ballot initiatives this June, becoming the twelfth state to do so, and momentum in statehouses shows no signs of slowing. But state action only goes so far. As Sutherland put it, the country still needs “more expansive guardrails… to protect our democracy.” And that means Congress and the Justice Department must use the tools sitting in front of them through FARA.
“We respectfully submit there is substantial evidence that many of the over 150 U.S.-based organizations that collectively have received nearly $2 billion from five foreign-registered charities are acting as unregistered agents of foreign principals by engaging in coordinated funding and advocacy efforts to influence U.S. energy policy and undermine American energy independence,” wrote the 19 state attorneys generals in their letter to Justice Department officials earlier this year.
This pattern of foreign influence has repeated itself for so long it has almost become mechanical. A foreign billionaire funds a foundation. The foundation funds a nonprofit. The nonprofit organizes a protest, bankrolls a lawsuit, or otherwise lends support to the radical Left, and by the time the money reaches an American sidewalk or courtroom, its origin is nearly untraceable.