The D.C. Power List: The Most Influential Philanthropists Shaping National Policy

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on May 9, 2023.

The currency that counts most in Washington, D.C., isn't money. It's power. And today, a growing array of philanthropists are tapping into deep reservoirs of both to influence national policy.

These donors come from across the ideological spectrum and have a range of agendas. Some are laser-focused on specific challenges, like climate change, while others work across multiple issues — including the most contested of the day: immigration, criminal justice, voting rights and more.

Tapping the skills of Beltway insiders and, in some cases, setting up offices in the city, top philanthropists have become ever more adept at working the levers of power. They’re putting their fortunes to work to affect legislation, influence regulatory and budget processes, shape the judiciary, and — for the most ambitious — shift the broad narratives that frame American life.

Philanthropists have a long history of chasing influence in Washington. Among the earliest mega-donors on the scene was Robert Brookings, who established the Institute for Government Research (later to be the Brookings Institution) in 1916 to become "the first private organization devoted to analyzing public policy issues at the national level." Many would follow his example, including a wave of conservative philanthropists later in the century intent on rolling back FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society by establishing organizations like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.

Now, as the vast fortunes of a second Gilded Age are channeled into philanthropy, Washington is more awash in nonprofit cash than ever before. A new class of billionaire mega-donors has transformed the funding landscape for D.C. nonprofits. Their money pours into a long list of think tanks, legal networks, advocacy organizations and grassroots (authentic or astroturf) outfits that work to pressure lawmakers. While some of these givers are well known, like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, others fly below the radar even as their foundations make multimillion-dollar gifts.

Who has wielded power most effectively in Washington? There’s certainly a case to be made for conservative donors whose patient investments since the 1970s have swayed the actions of government — and especially the federal judiciary — in fundamental ways. But progressive funders can claim their share of victories too, including helping enact the Affordable Care Act, elevating climate change to a top-tier national issue, and catalyzing a challenge to neoliberal economics that’s been largely embraced by the Biden administration.

One thing is clear: A growing range of philanthropists with ever-deeper pockets are giving to sway government policy. Understanding who these influence seekers are, what they want, and how they operate is more important than ever.

The following is an unscientific list of the living philanthropic donors who wield the most power in Washington today. My metrics for compiling it were necessarily fuzzy, given that it’s hard to measure the impact of policy-focused philanthropy, which often unfolds over many years or even decades. But what the donors on this list share in common is that they’re all investing large amounts of money in a focused way to shift public policy and sustaining this investment for years on end.

Because some donors operate anonymously, the list below is almost certainly incomplete. It only offers a picture of the giving that America’s leading donors choose to reveal publicly. Also, this list doesn’t mention the many endowed legacy foundations that fund many of the same Washington policy groups as top individual donors. I’ll look at them in a separate article.

Finally, a quick note about how I’ve numbered the list, which is arranged alphabetically. I count each source of wealth as a single philanthropist, even when writing about a couple or two business partners.

John and Laura Arnold

Tapping a hedge fund fortune and guided by the belief that philanthropy should address “systemic failures through evidence-based solutions,” this billionaire Houston couple are tackling a range of major issue areas such as criminal justice, healthcare and drug prices, and higher education. Their philanthropic vehicle, Arnold Ventures, has offices in Washington and has hired a number of Beltway insiders over the years. In 2015, it absorbed the Coalition for Evidence-based Policy, also based in D.C., as part of its successful push to catalyze federal policy changes along more pointedly evidence-based lines.

Arnold has been a major funder of a long list of think tanks and advocacy groups, including the Brookings Institution, Center for American Progress, Families USA and the Urban Institute. One area where it’s been especially active is battling Big Pharma — one of the most powerful lobbies in D.C. — to reduce drug prices. Beyond bankrolling extensive research in this area, Arnold has helped scale up the lobbying and advocacy organization Patients for Affordable Drugs Now. Arnold has also been deeply engaged in trying to move policy on student loan debt. The foundation’s focus has been on treating students and their families as consumers, arming them with enough information to make informed decisions about whether their investments in higher education will pay off. The Biden administration has been listening. It has proposed new rules that will end federal funding for any career program whose graduates will not earn enough to be able to repay their loans.

Jeff Bezos

The Amazon founder has been stepping up his presence in Washington for a while now, buying the Washington Post in 2013 and a mansion in Kalorama a few years later. His growing philanthropy is likely to boost his influence even further. In 2020, Bezos pledged to give $10 billion over 10 years to address climate change. To date, his Bezos Earth Fund has given $1.63 billion spread among more than 100 grants, including $100 million each to five major national environmental groups — nearly all of which have a strong presence in D.C. The Earth Fund itself is based in Washington, in offices on M Street, and is almost certainly the largest philanthropy in town. Its CEO, Andrew Steer, previously headed the World Resources Institute, a think tank based on Capitol Hill.

Among its other goals, the Earth Fund is trying to shape the national conversation on climate by promoting the concept of carbon credits that businesses can purchase. Credits — to grow more forests, for example — are supposed to offset the amount of carbon businesses emit. The philanthropy has given $11 million to the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, an independent body that advances the notion that with the right governance and “high integrity,” a market for carbon offsets can work. It’s also collaborating in this area with the Rockefeller Foundation, and more importantly, the U.S. State Department, whose representatives, including White House climate envoy John Kerry, issued a joint statement at COP27 in 2022 to make the case for a well-regulated carbon market.

Michael Bloomberg

The former New York City mayor and short-lived presidential candidate gave away $1.7 billion last year, backing work on a range of issues on Washington’s agenda. Among his biggest passions is to make gun control more politically achievable. Everytown for Gun Safety, the advocacy group he founded in 2014, now claims to be the largest gun control group in the U.S., with 10 million supporters. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which he has generously supported, is a leading center for research on gun violence. Grassroots advocacy from groups he funded helped prompt Congress to finally pass a law in 2022 that took small steps to address gun violence.

Bloomberg is also a major donor for climate change, education reform and global health. Like many top philanthropists, he amplifies his influence in Washington through political giving — including $100 million in the 2020 election cycle. And in the realm of philanthropy, that influence may continue to grow even after the 81-year-old passes away. He plans to essentially donate his company to his powerhouse giving vehicle Bloomberg Philanthropies when he dies.

Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates

melinda french gates. photo by Chatham House, London, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

While they are no longer married, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates remain co-chairs of the Gates Foundation, which has a major presence in Washington. Its government relations work is led by Rob Nabors, a former aide in the Obama administration who works out of the foundation’s D.C. office, not far from the White House. In 2019, the foundation created a new 501(c)(4) arm to give it more leeway in working Washington’s corridors of power. In a statement at the time, Nabors said that the Gateses would not use c4 funds to support political campaigns, as so many other billionaires do. “Bill and Melinda have a long history of engaging the executive branch, the legislative branch, in a bipartisan way, I don’t see that changing,” he said. “We are focused almost exclusively on legislative outcomes and the lobbying effort.”

A huge funder of global health and development, the Gates Foundation collaborates with USAID and other federal agencies in this area. During the Obama years, it was a major player on K-12 reform issues — including working closely with Education Secretary Arne Duncan to get states to embrace the Common Core standards, a push the foundation backed with $200 million in funding. By 2010, the standards were adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.

More recently, Bill Gates and the foundation’s CEO, Mark Suzman, lobbied the Biden administration to protect the intellectual property of vaccine makers, effectively delaying poorer countries’ access to COVID vaccines. Despite the protests of many progressives in Congress and public health advocacy groups, Gates’ position likely persuaded the Biden administration to wait many months before calling on drug makers to waive intellectual property rights.

Laurene Powell Jobs

The widow of Apple c0founder Steve Jobs has a sprawling agenda, including immigration, climate change and anti-violence. Because her philanthropic vehicle, Emerson Collective, is organized as an LLC, details are scarce on where its grant dollars go. But occasional reporting offers glimpses of an active progressive funder intent on influencing federal policy on issues she cares about. For example, Emerson has invested heavily in work on immigration to protect DACA recipients from deportation. And in 2021, we reported on Emerson’s support for a federal anti-violence collaborative created by the Biden administration.

One area where Powell Jobs’ giving is coming into better focus is climate change, where she’s now moving money in a more transparent way. In just the past year or two, her Waverley Street Foundation has emerged as a top climate funder, giving well over $100 million in grants. The foundation is led by Jared Blumenfeld, California’s former Secretary for Environmental Protection. Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson chairs its board. Other Washington insiders in Powell Jobs’ orbit include former Rep. Joseph Kennedy, a senior advisor to the Emerson Collective and former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Powell Jobs’ other means of influence in D.C. is political giving, including a reported $2 million in 2020. She’s also the majority owner of The Atlantic, among other media properties.

Charles Koch

Starting in the 1970s, Charles and his brother, the late David Koch, used wealth from Koch Industries, an oil and gas behemoth, to advance a libertarian agenda of limited government. A half-century later, Koch philanthropy is still going strong, anchored by the umbrella entity Stand Together, which describes itself as a “philanthropic community” of organizations, including the Charles Koch Foundation.

Koch money flows to such right-wing groups as the American Legislative Council, Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, Pacific Legal Foundation and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (which fights federal regulation). The Charles Koch Foundation also pumps tens of millions of dollars annually into university-based efforts to promote pro-market and anti-regulatory thinking. At the same time, the Koch network of political donors — which underwrites the powerful advocacy group Americans for Prosperity — is a major player in U.S. politics, spending nearly $70 million to help elect Republicans candidates in the 2022 election.

While Koch has said that he’s been a libertarian all his life and that his philanthropy is driven by principle, critics have long observed that both his nonprofit and political giving helps to advance the bottom line of Koch Industries. For example, Koch money has fueled climate denialism and worked to slow down efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. That said, Koch philanthropy today doesn’t strictly adhere to right-wing precepts. The Cato Institute, which Koch cofounded in the 1970s, has long been a critic of mass incarceration and excessive policing, as well as military interventionism. On both of these issues, Charles Koch has found common cause with progressive funders like George Soros. In 2019, the two billionaires jointly provided seed funding for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a D.C. think tank that’s become an influential skeptic of U.S. foreign policy. Meanwhile, Stand Together — which is headquartered in Arlington and made $100 million in grants in 2021 — has emerged as a major funder of antipoverty groups as part of its mission to advance economic empowerment.

Dustin Moskovitz. Photo by Web Summit, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna

Moskovitz was Facebook’s first chief of technology, and when he left the company in 2008, he was the world’s youngest billionaire. As major philanthropists, he and Tuna have been at the forefront of the effective altruism movement, initially focusing grants largely on global health. Over time, they’ve expanded the scope of their giving through Open Philanthropy, a philanthropic vehicle created in collaboration with the charity advisory group GiveWell. The couple’s priorities include a number of issues on the national agenda, including criminal justice reform — now funded through a spin-off entity, Just Impact — and pandemic preparedness.

Moskovitz is especially passionate about influencing policy on the latter issue, giving more than $20 million to a center for biosecurity at Johns Hopkins University and underwriting similar work at Georgetown. In 2021, he was part of a group of tech leaders who pushed the Biden administration and Congress to set aside tens of billions for biosecurity. The effort failed, but top Democrats have good reason to listen when Moskovitz talks: He and Tuna gave nearly $70 million in the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, with funds going to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, to voter engagement groups such as the League of Conservation Voters, and to Future Forward, a super PAC that used the money on pro-Biden TV ads.

Pierre and Pam Omidyar

While the eBay founder and his wife have been engaged in philanthropy for over two decades, they’ve notably stepped up their efforts to influence federal policy in recent years. The CEO of their main philanthropic vehicle, the Omidyar Network, works out of offices in D.C., which also houses an Omidyar-backed spinoff, the Democracy Fund. That group has made grants to a wide range of D.C.-based organizations in recent years and has been involved in battles over federal protections for voting rights, the 2020 census, and oversight in government.

Economic policy is another area where Omidyar funding is working to shape federal policy. Through its program on “reimagining capitalism,” the Omidyar Network has backed a number of Washington groups that are helping shape Biden’s tougher antimonopoly stance, as well as the administration’s push to strengthen workers’ rights. Omidyar has also backed groups looking to rein in Wall Street. Grantees include Americans for Financial Reform, Better Markets, Center for American Progress, Community Change, and the Economic Security Project. The Omidyar Network amplifies its influence by operating as an LLC, allowing it to move both c3 and c4 funding.

Barbara Picower

The widow of the financier Jeffery Picower, who was famously embroiled in the Bernie Madoff scandal, has become a powerhouse funder of progressive policy work in Washington and beyond through her JPB Foundation. This grantmaker, which moves over $300 million in grants a year, is something of a dream for Beltway groups in that it often makes seven-figure donations. Top recipients of its largesse include the Advancement Project, Center for American Progress, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Community Change and Faith in Action. JPB also supports a who’s who of other stalwart liberal groups with a big presence in D.C. policy battles, such as Planned Parenthood, NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Sierra Club.

Picower and JPB’s other leaders rarely speak publicly about the foundation’s strategy, but grants reveal its support for work on nearly every hot-button issue before Congress — including immigration, voting rights and climate change. JPB also invests heavily in movement-building, looking to build outside pressure on government policymakers as well as tilt electoral outcomes — with grants going to the Center for Popular Democracy, a top hub of progressive organizing, Sunrise Movement and the Movement Strategy Center. This spring, it was announced that Picower will step down next year from her reportedly active role as president of JPB and become president emerita. Succeeding her will be Deepak Bhargava, former longtime head of Community Change and a skilled progressive leader who knows his way around Washington.

Eric and Wendy Schmidt

The former CEO of Google, Schmidt and his wife Wendy founded the Schmidt Family Foundation in 2006, and then Schmidt Futures in 2017. While Wendy is the main driver of the couple’s extensive environmental giving, Eric’s work on scientific issues has made him a quiet power player in Washington. Schmidt helped Bill Clinton launch the first White House website, and campaigned for Obama and advised his team on tech issues in 2012. In 2018, he chaired a national commission on AI, nominated by the Republican chair of the Armed Services Committee. Last December, leaders of the Armed Services Committee also named Schmidt to an 11-member biotech advisory commission. In recent years, Schmidt has called for the Pentagon to move more quickly to adapt new technologies and warned that the U.S. is falling behind in its competition with China in areas like AI and quantum computing. For years, he served as board chair of New America, a prominent Washington think tank.

Schmidt has exerted significant influence in the Biden administration. He reportedly has used Schmidt Futures to influence a small but powerful executive branch agency, the Office of Science and Technology Policy. According to Politico, nearly 10% of the agency's staff has ties to Schmidt. Schmidt Futures helped pay the salaries of at least two senior OSTP officials and the foundation has also provided money for staffers to attend scientific conferences — funding that has raised conflict of interest questions at the agency. Schmidt has given millions to Democratic Party committees, candidates and related electoral groups over many years.

Barre Seid

This wealthy businessman was virtually unknown until last year, when news broke that he had transferred business assets worth $1.6 billion to a 501(c)(4) group controlled by the conservative strategist Leonard Leo. That massive donation came on the heels of years of anonymous giving to right-wing nonprofits at both the federal and state level, which totaled at least $775 million between 1996 and 2018, according to ProPublica.

Seid’s quiet but immense policy giving hammers home the fact that any list like this one is inherently incomplete. Particularly, but not exclusively, conservative mega-donors have often funded D.C. work through less-visible channels, supplementing a robust stream of smaller donations to right-leaning policy groups.

Meanwhile, details are sketchy on which Washington-based groups Seid has funded or how the new funds controlled by Leo are being used. But Seid is known to be keenly interested in moving the federal judiciary to the right and was reportedly the anonymous donor behind a $20 million gift to George Mason University to name its law school after the late Justice Antonio Scalia. Seid is also said to have been a major donor to the Heartland Institute — a group that, although based outside D.C. in a suburb of Chicago, has helped to influence federal climate policy by casting doubt on climate science.

George Soros

After years of giving abroad, Soros first emerged as a top U.S.-focused philanthropist in the late 1990s and has since become one of the biggest backers of progressive causes. In fact, it’s hard to think of an important liberal group that doesn’t get OSF’s U.S. funding, which totaled $400 million in 2021. OSF-backed groups engaged in Washington policy battles include the Center for American Progress, ACLU, National Immigrant Law Center, J Street, National LGBTQ Task Force, and many more. There’s also the Roosevelt Institute, whose work to challenge neoliberalism has helped shape the Biden administration’s embrace of progressive economic policies.

OSF’s strategy also includes applying grassroots pressure to national policymakers, via funding for groups like Community Change, the Green New Deal Network and United We Dream, as well as organizing in key battleground states to increase voter turnout in communities of color.

Tom Perriello, director of OSF’s U.S. programs, is a former U.S. representative and has been a frequent visitor to the Biden White House. Alexander Soros, George’s youngest son and chair of OSF’s global board, also is a regular presence in Biden land; records show that he’s visited the White House 17 times in the past two years. OSF’s former president, Patrick Gaspard, now serves as president of the Center for American Progress, which OSF has supported with millions in funding. In 2019, OSF funded the creation of a new D.C. policy group, Governing for Impact, with the goal of influencing federal regulatory policy across a range of issues. At the same time, the 92-year-old Soros has continued to rank among the left’s largest political donors. He spent $128 million to help elect Democrats in 2022 — in addition to a range of other donations to 501(c)(4) groups working to fight voter suppression and encourage turnout.

Diana Davis Spencer and family

The daughter of late philanthropists Shelby Cullom Davis and Kathryn Wasserman Davis, Diana Davis Spencer is executive chair of the $1.5-billion-plus Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, one of several huge philanthropies associated with the family. Her foundation is a major backer of the conservative Heritage Foundation, including through a recent $25 million gift to advance the conservative think tank’s policy priorities. And millions have flowed from the Spencer family to Heritage in the past, with a record of support going back to the 1970s.

The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation also supports plenty of other right-wing D.C. policy shops including the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution and the Manhattan Institute. The family’s longtime support for conservative policy groups is part of a history of patient philanthropic funding for right-wing policy priorities in D.C. going back decades, and reflected in the fact that the budgets of groups like Heritage still match or exceed those of their rivals on the left, despite new money coming in from many of the deeper-pocketed liberal donors on this list. Going forward, another family member to note is Abby Spencer Moffat, Spencer’s daughter and one of our powerful heirs to watch, who heads the foundation’s day-to-day work and has served as a Heritage Foundation trustee since 2009.

John Taylor

Taylor is president of the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, a foundation based in New York that now makes over $400 million in grants annually and has reportedly tapped a hedge fund fortune created in part by Taylor’s brother, Frederick. It has quietly become one of the largest backers of progressive groups in Washington. In 2020, for example, Wellspring gave $5 million each to the Center for American Progress and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, making it among the largest supporters of both of these flagship liberal think tanks. It also made seven-figure grants that year to Common Cause, the Center for Law and Social Policy, and Faith in Action.

What’s striking about Wellspring is not just the size of its grants, but the breadth of its agenda, which spans a range of issues including abortion rights, climate change, economic justice, global development and international security. Like other top progressive funders, Wellspring plays both an insider and outsider game, complementing its extensive funding of Beltway policy groups with big investments in grassroots organizing around the country. Wellspring is also notable for its super-low profile. Taylor serves as the foundation president, he never speaks to the media, nor does the program staff. Wellspring lets its grantees do the talking — and collectively, they speak with an ever-louder voice in D.C.’s corridors of power.

Hansjörg Wyss

The Swiss billionaire, who lives in Wyoming, is best known for his environmental philanthropy. But Wyss cares about other issues, too, including liberal policy priorities like expanding economic opportunity. His foundation, based in D.C.’s Dupont Circle area, has been a major backer of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the influential antipoverty think tank, and has given millions of dollars to the Center for American Progress, where he also sits on the board. Other liberal policy groups who’ve received Wyss grants include the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, the Center for Law and Social Policy, and the Center for Responsible Lending. The foundation has been led for years by Molly McUsic, a former top aide in the Interior Department during the Clinton administration.

Wyss engages in major political giving alongside his philanthropy, emerging as “an increasingly influential force among Democrats,” according to the New York Times. The Times also reported that Wyss had given tens of millions of dollars to progressive 501(c)(4) organizations through the Berger Action Fund, which it said shares office space with his foundation in Dupont Circle.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan

Priscilla chan. photo by TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you believe some conservative critics, no philanthropists have had a greater impact on federal policy in memory than Meta’s CEO and his wife — by giving more than $400 million in 2020 to boost voter turnout in urban areas and help elect Biden president. While that claim is dubious, what’s not debatable is that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has a growing footprint in Washington.

The advocacy group fwd.us, which is headquartered two blocks from the White House, is by far the biggest recipient of CZI funding. Initially focused on promoting pro-immigration policies, it now also advances criminal justice reform. Since 2018, CZI has made grants totaling $221 million to fwd.us, mostly in the form of c4 funding. The organization focuses on both federal and local policy, with nine offices outside D.C., so not all of this funding goes to exert influence in the Capitol. But fwd.us is definitely a player inside the Beltway, especially on immigration policy. Meanwhile, a range of other D.C.-based groups have pulled in CZI funding in recent years, including the Advancement Project, American Enterprise Institute, Bipartisan Policy Center and the Cato Institute. Money also goes to Washington groups working on K-12 education, reflecting how CZI has become one of the top funders in this space in recent years.

Conclusion

The federal government will spend more than $6 trillion this year, and its many agencies make decisions that affect nearly every part of American life. It’s not surprising that so much money goes to influence the decisions made in Washington. But while some types of such spending are well-understood, like the billions that flow to campaigns and lobbying, philanthropy’s role in shaping federal policy gets far less scrutiny. I’d guess that most voters wouldn’t be thrilled to learn how billionaires increasingly use tax-deductible “charitable” gifts to press their agendas in the corridors of power.

This is not how democracy is supposed to work, with a small cast of uber-wealthy individuals having an outsized voice in public debates. Nor does it feel consistent with the spirit of charitable tax law. While those rules bar using tax-deductible gifts to affect political outcomes, savvy donors know that they can buy just as much, if not more, impact in Washington with 501(c)(3) dollars as with other forms of spending. In any case, most of the donors I’ve discussed also wield clout through direct campaign donations.

The motives of these donors matter. There’s a big difference between those who give to push policies that make them richer and those who give to advance the public interest. I was struck by how many left-leaning figures made this list, although not all that surprised. I first wrote about the leftward shift of wealthy donors 13 years ago in my book, “Fortunes of Change,” and Inside Philanthropy has reported often on how Trumpism has catalyzed new progressive giving on a major scale. Liberal readers will no doubt be heartened by this development. In the end, though, all this influence spending still amplifies civic inequality. If you have tons of money, you have a much better chance of being heard in key public policy debates than if you don’t. That’s wrong.

This isn’t the place to tease through possible solutions to the increasing politicization of philanthropy. Check out the conclusion of my book, “The Givers,” if you want to go down that rabbit hole. In the meantime, we need to change how we think about money in politics. This swollen river doesn’t just have two tributaries, elections and lobbying; it also has a third: philanthropy. And that tributary keeps getting bigger and bigger.

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Correction: This article reflects updated information about Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.

Celia Wexler provided research and analysis for this article. You can read her other pieces for IP here.

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