George Soros is the Hungarian-born billionaire international investor turned large-scale political donor and philanthropist for a wide array of liberal and Democratic causes.
His investment firm, Soros Fund Management, has given over $288 million to political campaigns since 1990 according to Open Secrets. In 2019, his Open Society Foundations (OSF) spent $48.8 million on lobbying alone, the second largest spender that year.
But it’s his nonprofit giving where the dollar amounts are much larger. An estimate from the think tank Capital Research Center put OSF total giving at $21 billion since 1990.
Soros is regularly accused of using his influence to help upset governments, like those in Eastern Europe, and profiting from the tumult through currency speculation and purchasing recently privatized national assets.
In the U.S. he spearheaded a campaign to elect 75 separate district attorneys dedicated to criminal justice reform and decriminalization. Rather than declining to prosecute low level crimes like marijuana possession, the Soros DAs were regularly dropping or losing felony cases including gun crimes and homicides. While the campaigns were largely successful, eventually the anti-prosecution approach experienced a backlash:
Boudin was recalled, Gardner and Rollins recently resigned in disgrace. Mosby lost her primary election and is being prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department. Foxx bowed out of running for re-election due to political pressure, and Gascon has barely survived two recall attempts.
The Non-Profit Network
While there are other billionaires that invest in politics and non-profits, the scale and breadth of Soros’ giving is on another level altogether. His major non-profit entities—The Foundation to Promote Open Society, Open Society Policy Center (previously the Open Society Action Fund), Open Society Institute, Alliance for Open Society International, and the Fund for Policy Reform—gave out almost $1.7 billion in grants in 2023 alone according to IRS filings.
That number is not completely representative as some of those grants are inter-organizational grants—grants to other Soros-related organizations. For example, in recent years, the Soros Economic Fund gave $289 million to the Foundation to Promote Open Society, who then gave the Alliance for Open Society International $12 million, but the Foundation to Promote Open Society also gave the Soros Economic Fund back $55 million.
According to data on the Open Society Foundations (OSF) website, total grants were $2.06 billion in 2022 and total giving by OSF since 1984 was $32 billion, although it doesn’t specify if all of that came from George Soros and his economic fund or other grantmakers to the OSF entities.
Yet while the grand total is large, the individual grants are not necessarily so. Since 2016, OSF has given to 6,613 separate groups or individuals with a median grant amount of $106,000—not exactly a bonanza for a nonprofit to survive on. While there are large donations to certain universities—particularly Bard College ($1.05B) and Central Eastern European University ($1.39B)—or political action committees and grantmakers—like the Tides Foundation, Arabella Advisers, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Rockefeller Philanthropy, and America Votes—90 percent of OSF contributions are below $500,000.
No Direct Soros-Government Overlap
In a recent interview, Elon Musk mentioned that Soros “hacked” the system by creating nonprofits who then reap large government grants to pay for the majority of their work as non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
But based on the IRS data, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Of the recipients of OSF grants, only 1.6 percent of their 2023 revenue was government grants.
There are some counterexamples to this, like a $2 million grant from USAID to the Alliance for Open Society in 2007 to support “[sic] economic growth, agriculture, trade, global health, democracy, conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance.” There are six Department of State grants to various smaller Open Society groups across the world, but the total amount was less than $1 million altogether.
Potentially the best example of the government-Soros overlap is a $24.7 million USAID grant in 2016 to the Tides Center for “civil society innovation.” The Tides Center isn’t specifically a Soros non-profit, but close to it—an ideologically similar large-scale, left-wing grantmaker that receives a lot of money from the OSF. OSF has given Tides almost $77 million since 2016.
In general, OSF tends to give to politically active groups that are less likely to be NGOs receiving government grants. That might include think tanks, journalists, political action committees, grantmakers, or individual researchers through fellowships and scholarships.
Common Trends: International Human Rights, LGBT, COVID, and Drug Legalization
While the data is not fully categorized, there are certainly noticeable trends based on common keywords. For example, $87 million in OSF grants went to grants related to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There was $20 million for LGBT funding. Exactly $10 million went to work on the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP). Over $93 million went to COVID projects.
Almost $33 million went to Ukraine. That might seem like a paltry sum considering that Soros has taken a keen eye to Ukraine and published policy documents prescribing what should happen to transform the nation, such as dissolving the state energy provider, Naftogaz, that he believes is the major source of all corruption in the country.
Strangely, few donations are shown going to Drug Policy Alliance, the nonprofit for which Soros is the director and cofounder. While $24 million was spent by OSF on drug-related nonprofits, drug and alcohol councils, and drug policy projects, only $770,000 was spent on Soros’ own group, although $12 million went to Drug Policy Action, the organization’s political advocacy arm.
Drug Policy Alliance is a controversial organization as it advocates for total decriminalization of drugs and supports harm reduction approaches—where groups provide drugs and paraphernalia to help avoid overdoses, like heroin-assisted treatment.
Alliance for Open Society International
While the main Soros funding groups appear to spread money across a wide spectrum of recipients, the Alliance for Open Society International (AOSI) takes a more targeted approach. Of its $4.9 million in giving, 12.5 percent went to nonprofits in and around Baltimore on a wide range of topics. According to its IRS filing, that includes:
Democracy Defense, Voting Rights, Election Integrity, Census, Redistricting, Economic Security, Workers Rights, Immigration, Civil Rights, Racial Justice, Gender Justice, LGBTQ Rights, Reproductive Freedom, Courts Accountability And Ethics Reform, Combatting Mis- And Disinformation, Technology And Civil Rights, Community Safety, Climate And Environmental Justice, Corporate Accountability, Government Accountability And Transparency, Judicial Nominations, Criminal Justice Reform, National Security And Civil Rights, Housing And Health Equity, Education, And Advancing A Non-Militarized, Diplomacy-First U.S. Foreign Policy
But while the group took a dedicated focus on Baltimore in 2023, its IRS filing noted that their office closed that year and they have since ended all programs in the city.
AOSI also spent $286,207 on the Journalism Development Network Inc. While that’s not a lot for OSF, it’s an interesting contribution as the Journalism Development Network is the umbrella organization for the OCCRP—an international publication focused on international corruption.
OCCRP has received growing attention in recent days following the changes to USAID. While OCCRP presents itself as an independent news organization, in its 2022 IRS filing it lists getting 78 percent of its $13.7 million in revenue from USAID grants.
Nonprofits Giving to Nonprofits Giving to Nonprofits
Similar to how OSF entities give to other OSF entities, the same is true of OSF grant recipients and nonprofits in general.
According to IRS data for 2023, a full 28 percent of Alliance for Open Society International’s grants, or $11 million, went to one recipient: The New Venture Fund. But The New Venture Fund is simply another left-leaning grantmaker. Of that nonprofit’s grants, $206 million or 62 percent of total giving went to Co-Impact Philanthropic Funds—yet another left-leaning grantmaker. Co-Impact also gave New Venture Fund $9.2 million that same year.
Of the 20 largest OSF grant recipients for which there is grant data in 2023—like Tides, New Venture Fund, International Crisis Group, Media development Investment, and Neo Philanthropy—$67.5 million was to the same grantmakers in that list of the top 20.
In general, tracing the full path of who sponsors which group and by how much is compromised by this blending of donations. Many also operate as donor-advised funds (DAFs), where a donor can contribute one year and specify a subsequent recipient of the money from the fund later on. DAFs also have the benefit of obscuring the source of nonprofit contributions
Grants Between 2023 OSF Grant Recipients
Thanks for this!