DAF Funding of Hate Groups and Anti-Government Organizations

Helen Flannery and Brian Mittendorf posted a fascinating study concluding that donor advised funds are the largest "non-governmental" source of money for hate groups and anti-government organizations.  DAFs give to such organizations "at a rate 3.5 times that of other giving methods; in fact, we find that donor-advised funds account for more than one-quarter of all non-government giving received by these organizations."  So the rest of us subsidize hate.  And what's this about "non-government giving?" Is there government giving to hate groups?  Anyway, the study is about even more than that -- providing insight on DAF dark money generally.  Here is the abstract:

Donor-advised funds are a prominent and rapidly growing charitable giving vehicle. As intermediaries, they serve as a layer of separation between donors and grantees, a layer that provides a significant degree of donor anonymity. With this in mind, we examine whether donor-advised funds help facilitate giving to politically engaged charities — a type of giving that donors may particularly prefer not be publicized. We find that donor-advised fund sponsors distribute grants to politically engaged charities at a rate nearly 1.7 times that of other giving methods, with an even higher rate for national sponsors in particular. We further show that giving to politically engaged charities is greater when sponsoring organizations are more financially reliant on donor-advised funds, and when sponsors receive more funding from private foundations — this latter finding indicating that donor-advised funds are anonymizing political gifts from private foundations. In additional analyses, we find that donor-advised fund sponsors publicly promote anonymity at higher rates than do operating charities; however, sponsors that do more promotion do not give grants to politically engaged organizations at markedly different rates than less vocal sponsors. Finally, we find that donor-advised funds give grants to anti-government and hate groups — organizations at the extreme fringe of the political spectrum — at a rate 3.5 times that of other giving methods; in fact, we find that donor-advised funds account for more than one-quarter of all non-government giving received by these organizations. Collectively, our results suggest that donor-advised funds play a key role in the wider network of money in politics.

darryll k. jones