The Trump administration’s widening assault on civil society has found its first target in the world of philanthropy: the Open Society Foundations (OSF), established by George Soros and now chaired by his son Alex.¹ Trump has called George Soros a “bad guy” who “should be put in jail,” and he recently suggested that prosecutors charge him under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. In September Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—one of the president’s former personal lawyers, like a number of his appointees to the Justice Department and the courts—took up his recommendation and instructed more than six US attorneys’ offices to launch investigations of OSF on possible charges ranging from arson to support of terrorism, for which no evidence has been offered.

Soros began his philanthropic giving in 1979, nine years after founding his enormously successful hedge fund. His first grant was to the University of Cape Town in support of scholarships for Black students under apartheid. Five years later he established a foundation in Hungary, the country of his birth; it became best known for providing fax machines and copy equipment to emerging civil society groups. This was the first in a network of organizations, called the Open Society Foundations, that he launched in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the countries of the former Soviet empire. Their mission was to promote the development of open societies, characterized by democratic governance, the rule of law, free markets, and equal treatment for racial, ethnic, religious, and national minorities.

In subsequent years Soros added regional foundations in Southern Africa, West Africa, and East Africa and national foundations in South Africa, Guatemala, Haiti, Mongolia, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, each with separate though interconnected budgets and governing bodies. In 1986 he established a foundation in China. (It was shuttered in 1989, in the aftermath of the crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.) In 1996 Soros launched a wide-ranging funding program in the United States. He thought US drug policy was wrongheaded, and it became a focus of his philanthropy, alongside improvements in palliative care for the dying and the expansion of after-school programs in poor urban areas. By now, most of the autonomous foundations around the world have concluded their work, but a few, such as those in conflict zones like Ukraine and Moldova, continue. The sums disbursed today—$1.2 billion in 2024—make OSF one of the largest private grant givers in the world.

Soros was not a major donor in American politics until 2004, when he became the largest contributor to the unsuccessful effort to prevent George W. Bush’s reelection, because of his adamant opposition to Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. (His campaign contributions were entirely separate from his financial support for OSF, and electoral contributions are not tax-deductible like philanthropic contributions.) Since then Soros has been active in political giving, which has drawn the antagonism of many Republican Party supporters. Republican politicians often cite him in speeches and attack ads, sometimes invoking antisemitic tropes. (Soros is Jewish and survived the Holocaust in Hungary because his family members concealed their identities.)

Today Soros and OSF join a growing list of purported Trump critics and opponents—from universities to broadcast networks to media personalities to newspapers and law firms—that have been subjected to threats including the loss of government funds, licenses, and even access to federal buildings. After the announcement of the Justice Department investigations, OSF called the accusations “politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with.”

Modern philanthropy dates to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the oligarchs Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller established the first large foundations in the United States. They did so to much condemnation, particularly from progressives of the era who saw them as using charitable giving to launder reputations stained by labor abuses and monopolistic practices. Progressives also feared that foundations would exacerbate the already outsize influence of individuals whose wealth allowed them to meddle in public affairs without public accountability.

A number of foundations have done pioneering work to address public policy issues that have been neglected by governments. Remarkable AIDS research, for example, was underwritten by the Aaron Diamond Foundation, named for the New York real estate developer who with his wife, Irene, launched it to support an array of causes including education for minorities, the performing arts, gun control, and human rights. AIDS was medically recognized in 1981, in the early months of the Reagan administration, which regarded it as a disease primarily afflicting gay and bisexual men and seemed to have little interest in combating it. After Aaron’s death in 1984, Irene enlisted two prominent physicians, Lewis Thomas and Alfred Gellhorn, to serve on the foundation’s board. They selected a young Taiwan-born scientist, David Ho, to direct the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center starting in 1991. By 1996 Ho and his team were able to announce their development of the antiretroviral therapy that transformed AIDS from a death sentence to a treatable disease. This is an outstanding example of a private philanthropy that effectively addressed a major issue that the government had failed to address. The Aaron Diamond Foundation no longer exists, having spent down its assets.

An earlier example is the Garland Fund, which helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement. In 1922 a twenty-one-year-old Harvard dropout, Charles Garland, decided not to accept a bequest of about $800,000 from his father; he believed that he did not deserve the money and wanted to use it to help the needy. He was advised by Roger Baldwin, the founding director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who persuaded him that it should be used to address major social issues. As John Fabian Witt’s The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (2025) recounts, Garland set up a private foundation administered by Baldwin, NAACP executive secretary James Weldon Johnson, the socialist leader Norman Thomas, and other leading left-liberals of the period. The Garland Fund’s grantees included the magazine New Masses, the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee, the League for Industrial Democracy, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the American Birth Control League. A grant to the NAACP financed a book-length strategy report by the young lawyer Nathan Margold. Thurgood Marshall and his associates drew on the report in litigation that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Boardof Education, declaring school segregation unconstitutional. In the 1950s and 1960s a few small progressive foundations like the Field Foundation and the Taconic Fund were important backers of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Over the years many legacy foundations, as they have come to be called, have proved an indispensable element of civil society and social progress. Carnegie’s foundation supported the professionalization of medicine in the US through the 1910 Flexner Report, which recommended a variety of changes to the medical education system, and the Russell Sage Foundation did the same for the nascent profession of social work in the Progressive Era.

If at times such foundations seem to loom large, it is because in the United States, government support for health care, education, and the arts is far more limited than in nearly every other democratic nation. What are considered public obligations in countries like France, South Africa, and the UK are in the US heavily dependent on foundation support. (It should be said that the combined resources of all foundation endowments are dwarfed by the federal budget, so a foundation’s principal function where public policy is concerned is to serve as a catalyst.)

Virtually every social movement of the past seventy years took root well before almost any foundation considered funding it. In fact, while OSF and other foundations are being attacked by the right for their support of some grassroots groups involved in the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, foundations are on the whole risk averse, more comfortable supporting conferences and policy papers than organizing.

Yet in addition to the well-known “genius” grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the inventiveness of a good number of grant recipients has helped build leadership in emerging fields. In nearly thirty years of grants to Soros Justice Fellows, OSF helped build a generation of activists and scholars who have challenged mass incarceration and abusive police practices. Michelle Alexander wrote her influential book The New Jim Crow (2010) on her fellowship; Vanita Gupta used her fellowship to bring a case against a fraudulent, racially discriminatory drug sting operation in Texas and went on to become the third-ranking official in the Biden Justice Department, to cite just two of many examples.

While many prominent foundations might be characterized as left of center, conservative ones like the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and those established by the Koch brothers have had a major impact on public discourse and policy. The Bradley Foundation heavily promoted school voucher programs, and the Olin Foundation was the crucial early funder of the Federalist Society, which has reshaped the federal judiciary in a conservative mold. The Olin Foundation also helped build the Heritage Foundation, which is responsible for Project 2025. While overall smaller than foundations that are considered liberal, they have been quite strategic as well as effective. Over the years there has been an uneasy right–left alliance to resist attacks on foundations in the name of First Amendment values and pluralism. It is encouraging to see that a few conservative foundations, too, have criticized the Trump administration’s assaults on their progressive colleagues.

Foundations, many of which are powerful and wealthy, not to mention typically private and opaque, should hardly be immune from criticism. There are well-worn complaints from grant seekers of foundation timidity, bureaucracy, and unresponsiveness.² In recent years their principal critics have come from the left and questioned the private disbursement of money that would otherwise be taxed and available for public purposes. The most resonant criticism is that the overdependence of important civil society institutions on relatively few large sources of funding is sapping them of democratic energy and leaving them vulnerable to swings in foundation priorities and policies. It is likely no accident that some of the most robust and effective advocacy organizations in the US, like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, have diversified funding bases with millions of small-dollar donations.

The national reckoning over race and gender since 2020 has not spared philanthropy, with scholars such as Megan Ming Francis, Erica Kohl-Arenas, and Maribel Morey challenging the conventional wisdom even about “progressive” foundation accomplishments, like Carnegie’s support of Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark study of race, An American Dilemma (1962), and the Ford Foundation’s support of California farmworkers. (In a striking instance of foundation tolerance for critique and dissent, Morey wrote her book, White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s ‘An American Dilemma’ and the Making of a White World Order, on a Carnegie grant.)

Many foundations have turned to a new generation of leadership, after so many years in which American philanthropy was led by older white men. Darren Walker, who stepped down as Ford’s president last November, made inequality the central target of the foundation’s work and used his network of relationships in the art world and among the wealthy to draw many new donors in support of campaigns against mass incarceration, among other causes. The poet Elizabeth Alexander, who became the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2018, has championed a $500 million project to reimagine more inclusive public monuments. Binaifer Nowrojee, a Kenya-born human rights lawyer, became the president of OSF in 2024 and has already significantly increased its grant making in the Global South.

In order to make a greater impact in the nearer term, large foundations have been encouraged by their grantees and progressive philanthropy critics to increase their payout rate beyond the 5 percent minimum required by the tax code, and some have done so. An increasing number have also begun following the example of the duty-free shop billionaire Chuck Feeney and committed to spending down their assets rather than drawing their annual giving from the income earned by their endowments. There are also calls for the devolution or democratization of philanthropy, moving decision-making power closer to the communities most affected by the issues being addressed.

In recent years it seemed an exciting and energizing possibility that the legacy foundations of the past century might be eclipsed by newer donors from the tech world. The Gates Foundation, for example, has made a considerable impact on public health for more than twenty-five years. (It recently announced that it will shut down by 2045.) MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Jeff Bezos, in just a few years has spent $26 billion of her almost $40 billion fortune on large, unsolicited general grants to a wide range of civil society institutions. She does so with virtually no bureaucracy, earning the plaudits of nonprofit organizations and influencing the thinking of many newer philanthropy leaders like Alex Soros.

Other powerful figures in tech, like Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and Bezos—whose myriad corporate interests are heavily dependent on government approval in a time when the Trump administration has shown no hesitation in rewarding friends and punishing enemies—are already showing signs of retreating from their work on climate change, poverty, and human rights. In November Zuckerberg and Chan announced that they would shift their foundation’s focus to scientific research and artificial intelligence. Its restructured institution is called Biohub. And Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the recipient of the world’s first trillion-dollar pay package? The New York Times recently reported that his foundation has $14 billion in assets but for four years running has not met the minimum 5 percent payout required by law. He recently said that philanthropy is “very hard.”

Of course the charitable tax deduction that has encouraged American philanthropy results from the political decision to encourage wealthy donors to give away their money. (The vast majority of charitable givers are of more modest means and do not itemize their deductions, and therefore few of them benefit from the tax incentive.)

The Trump administration has not been shy about threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of foundations and nonprofits that criticize or oppose it. The Ford Foundation seems to be a particular obsession of Vice President J.D. Vance. As a Senate candidate, he called it a “cancer on American society,” telling Tucker Carlson, in a typically feverish outburst:

Why don’t we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who’ve had their lives destroyed by their radical open-borders agenda. Give it to the people whose lives have been destroyed by the heroin epidemic. Give it to the angel moms who have lost a kid thanks to the Ford Foundation’s ideas.

A tax measure designed to promote philanthropic freedom can also be a cudgel for control. Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative and the Legacy Museum in Alabama, recently offered an acknowledgment rarely heard in the nonprofit and philanthropy world when he told The New York Times, “I keep giving these talks, and I say, ‘They may try to take away our 501(c)(3) tax status, which would be devastating. But I would rather be a truth-teller and taxed, than to be silent and untaxed.’”

The Trump administration, in investigating George Soros’s foundations and threatening actions against others, is imitating the authoritarian regimes it appears to admire. In May 2015 Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing Russian prosecutors to label foreign nongovernmental organizations as “undesirable” on national security grounds, effectively banning them. That November the prosecutor general declared OSF an undesirable organization, accusing it of undermining Russia’s constitutional foundations and national security. (OSF had been operating in Russia since the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev was president, and had undertaken many major projects in the country focused on education, science, the prevention of disease, the spread of independent media, and Internet connectivity, beginning with libraries and universities.)

The MacArthur Foundation, which had been supporting local branches of the country’s principal human rights organizations, was also declared undesirable. This came three years after Russia adopted a “foreign agents” law, requiring organizations that received support from abroad to declare themselves as foreign agents (a term that in Russia implies they are acting as spies or saboteurs) and imposing restrictions and heavy administrative burdens on them. That law, which has been amended a number of times to make it stricter, has largely eliminated foreign support for civil society in Russia. Georgia and El Salvador have recently adopted similar laws, making it virtually impossible for foreign foundations to support projects in those countries.

Also in 2015, the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, launched a public attack on OSF’s work in the country. In a radio broadcast that October, Orbán—who once received a Soros-funded scholarship to attend Oxford University—claimed that Soros was one of those who “support everything that weakens the nation-state” and that he “maintains and finances the European human rights activism which encourages the refugees” to come to Europe. At the time large numbers of Syrian refugees were flooding into Europe, for which Orbán repeatedly blamed Soros. His campaign against Soros—which took on a blatantly antisemitic character—forced the cessation of OSF activities in Hungary. It also drove out the highly regarded Central European University, founded by Soros in 1991, which relocated to Vienna.

The Trump administration is attacking civil society institutions at a time when they are needed more than ever to counter the destruction of government programs like USAID and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. There is no way that foundations can assume full responsibility for social welfare, education, or arts programs that the government has sharply curtailed or abandoned. The total assets of US foundations in 2025 were $1.68 trillion; the federal deficit for 2025 was $1.78 trillion. Total giving by foundations in 2024 was $593 billion, a fraction of the $6.8 trillion federal budget. While some foundations will endeavor to respond to the human misery and cultural impoverishment wrought by the Trump administration, they cannot make up the shortfall.

What foundations can do is help to raise public awareness of cruelties and injustices in the hope of inspiring a demand for change. The creation of OSF’s Emma Lazarus Fund in 1996 provides a good road map for such an approach. That year the Republican Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, passed a budget that cut social safety net benefits for legal immigrants, which at the time amounted to a nearly $13 billion expenditure. President Bill Clinton reluctantly signed the bill. Soros, an immigrant who benefited from the UK’s National Health Service when he was injured as a young man, was outraged. The Emma Lazarus Fund supported many immigrant services like English language instruction and legal representation as well as nonpartisan advocacy efforts. These led, a few years later, to the restoration of most of the benefits.

American foundations have rarely sought the spotlight, preferring to promote the nonprofit organizations they support. But that may be changing, by necessity. In the heated atmosphere following the murder of Charlie Kirk in September, almost two hundred foundations joined a statement condemning political violence and reaffirming support for freedom of speech and philanthropic pluralism and independence.

Civil society organizations, many of them reeling from government funding cuts that gut health care and nutrition programs, from direct attacks on the populations they serve, such as immigrants and trans people, and from threats over their DEI practices, have also demonstrated a solidarity that has been sorely missing elsewhere. More than 3,700 of them, from the ACLU to the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, signed a similar statement organized by the Democracy Defenders Fund, founded by former US ambassador Norm Eisen.

After the announcement of the Justice Department’s investigation into OSF, a number of other philanthropic groups, including the MacArthur and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundations, spoke up immediately, though the tech foundations again remained disappointingly silent. Deepak Bhargava, the relatively new leader of the Freedom Together Foundation, condemned “the administration’s latest step to politicize and weaponize the federal government against groups that disagree with its policies.” Many foundations have so far risen to our moment of democratic stress with admirable firmness and a recognition that an attack on one is a danger to all of them. In the difficult months ahead, we must all hope that this strength and solidarity proves enduring. We cannot acquiesce.