Protestors on the campus of New College of Florida chase after Christopher Rufo in Sarasota, Fla., on May 15, 2023.
Photo: Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Rufo’s rise in conservative media and politics has coincided with increased donations to his nonprofit: In
2020, the Documentary Foundation’s total revenue was $155,353, according to tax filings. In 2021, the year after he broke into the mainstream, that number increased by more than a factor of 10 to
$1,991,274. Before that, the organization’s peak revenue was $425,121 in 2013, with a low of $36,735 in 2018, according to tax records.
Asked about the organization’s 2021 revenue, Rufo said, “Much of this was for a fiscal sponsorship, not fundraising by or for the Documentary Foundation. In addition, I was working for Discovery Institute for much of 2020, which accounts for the lower amount of fundraising relative to the following year, when I was actively working on Documentary Foundation initiatives.” He described that work as “a range of research, publication, production, and distribution work across 2020 and 2021, including the PBS documentary
America Lost and work on homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, and critical race theory.”
The funding has poured in from a variety of conservative foundations. The aforementioned Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit advocating for the anti-evolution concept of “intelligent design,” donated $225,000 in 2021. In 2020 and 2021, the Conru Foundation, backed by Adult FriendFinder founder Andrew Conru, donated a total of
$50,000, while other individual linked charities including the McCarthy Family Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation donated a combined sum of over $100,000.
The Documentary Foundation’s largest donors, however, are donor-advised funds. In 2021, the single largest donor identifiable in public IRS records was the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which contributed $496,995. In total, DAFs funneled at least $670,000 to Rufo’s nonprofit that year. The Documentary Foundation went on to donate almost that same exact amount — $690,000 — to the National Progress Alliance in 2021, the year it was founded, according to a tax
filing. That’s almost all of the organization’s total revenue of
$704,150 that year.
Asked about who advised on its half-million-dollar donation, Fidelity spokesperson Yakub Mohamed said that the fund does not comment on individual donors for privacy reasons.
The other DAFs that contributed to the Documentary Foundation are Schwab Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, the American Endowment Foundation, the Greater Houston Community Foundation, and the American Online Giving Foundation.
Schwab, one of the DAFs that received and distributed money to and from organizations tied to Leonard Leo, has
lobbied the IRS to maintain the practice of shielding investors from scrutiny. “Schwab Charitable is cause neutral and does not interfere with a donor’s recommendation to a charity that is deemed eligible by the IRS and state regulators,” Grace Connoly, a spokesperson for Schwab told The Intercept. “Grants recommended by donors do not reflect the values or beliefs of Schwab Charitable or its management. We encourage anyone with concerns about a charitable organization to contact the IRS.”
Spokespeople from Vanguard and the Greater Houston Community Foundation also cited cause neutrality in their responses to The Intercept. The other DAFs that donated to Rufo did not respond to requests for comment.
“All donations made through donor-advised funds are reported in detail to the IRS,” Rufo wrote to The Intercept. “The idea that they are ‘untraceable’ is simply not true.”
Under U.S. tax code, charities must collect donations from a diverse set of donors to maintain tax-exempt status, though DAFs are a way for a single donor to provide most of an organization’s funding without causing it to forfeit its charitable status, said Roger Colinvaux, a professor of tax law at Catholic University.
“Some people use DAFs as a dark-money facilitator, but there are other ways to anonymize, so it’s not like DAFs are the only way to make large anonymous donations,” Colinvaux said. “One thing that could be happening with Leonard Leo or Chris Rufo, if they receive money through a DAF, and the DAF gives money to a charity, then that can help the charity to qualify as a public charity instead of as a private foundation.”