The 2026 election is seven months away, and at this point, it’s clear that we could face a major political crisis when it arrives. Trump has made repeated threats to interfere with voting, issuing an endless stream of false claims about fraud and dispatching the FBI to raid an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, this January, in an effort to prove discredited charges around the 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s statements and actions are just the latest reminder of a reality that many philanthropy leaders are reluctant to state out loud: U.S. democracy is under attack by an authoritarian president and a Republican Party subservient to him.
It’s hard to say whether an election crisis will actually happen, or how it might play out, although I’m sure legal groups and others are gaming out scenarios.
The recent seizure of 650,000 ballots by a Republican sheriff in Riverside, CA, Chad Bianco, underscores the many wildcards at play across a decentralized election system. Imagine if an official like Bianco pulls a move like that in a congressional district that could help decide House control? And then Trump sends federal agents to back him up?
Don’t worry, I’m not going to go any further down the rabbit hole of what might go wrong this fall and ruin your Saturday morning. Plenty of better-informed people than I have written extensively on this, and you can read up on the nightmare scenarios elsewhere.
My concern here is what philanthropy is doing in the face of these threats. That question is not so easy to answer.
Inside Philanthropy is tracking a range of moves by funders to back election protection and civic participation this year. Two weeks ago, frequent IP contributor Sarah Henry spotlighted grantmakers that are supporting democracy work, including NEO Philanthropy and the Ford Foundation. And this week, IP’s Mike Scutari took a close look at the MacArthur Foundation’s recently announced commitment of $100 million to democracy groups. Among its grantees is the Campaign Legal Center, one of the most important organizations working to secure elections, which received $10 million.
IP is conducting other reporting to better understand what funders are doing as the election approaches, with a growing sense of urgency as we move deeper into the year. It’s essential that grants for election protection and civic participation go out early so organizers can get to work. That’s why a coalition of funders came together in 2024 and again this year to commit to early giving through the All By April campaign.
But it’s hard to say how much money is flowing for election work at this point. Beyond MacArthur, we haven’t seen many major public commitments, with dollar signs and grantees attached. For example, the Ford Foundation, likely to be the biggest player in the democracy space this year under Heather Gerken’s leadership, hasn’t publicized details of its push. Nor has the Open Society Foundations, another top democracy funder and one that has been threatened with prosecution by the Trump administration.
I hear some reports of strong momentum around funding for election-related efforts, which aren’t easy to confirm, especially since large amounts of money for such work are likely to move through non-transparent channels. That’s been the case in recent cycles and is likely to be even more so this time around.
In sum, it’s too early to say what philanthropy is doing to ensure fair and representative elections this year.
One thing I know for sure is that alarms are sounding among some voter engagement and organizing groups. Sarah Jaynes of the Rural Democracy Initiative told me that while funding is coming in at a level comparable to past cycles, it’s not enough. Most grassroots civic engagement groups are starting with diminished capacity, following steep declines in funding last year. “Considering the urgency of the threats to our democracy and communities, we really need to see a big surge in giving this spring for our groups on the ground to have the capacity to deliver what’s needed,” Jaynes said.
Billy Wimsatt, who leads Movement Voter Project, a leading civic funding intermediary, painted a bleaker picture, telling me, “Money is moving extremely slow — slower than I have ever seen in an even-numbered year. We’re only at 40% to our most minimal goal for Q1. He added: “A lot of strong and proven groups are doing layoffs right now instead of expanding to meet the moment… Where are the funders? It feels like they’re mostly out to lunch.”
Yikes. That’s not what we want to be hearing seven months out from a critical election, even as the Trump administration ramps up threats to interfere with voting across multiple states. But the good news is that there’s still time for more funders to step up.
What We’re Reading and Hearing
A call to action by family foundations. David Rockefeller Fund CEO Lourdes Rodríguez makes an impassioned case for family foundations to move quickly to fund the fight for democracy, in a blog post for the National Center for Family Philanthropy. “The superpower of family philanthropy is our nimbleness and capacity to move with purpose,” she writes. One way to be most effective, Rodríguez says, is for family foundations to understand democracy as a common thread between many different program areas.
Bezos Earth Fund and AI. Describing “harnessing AI to help save the planet” as part of its mission last fall, the Bezos Earth Fund announced $30 million in grants in October for its AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge — which went to green groups such as the Nature Conservancy and the Wildlife Conservation Society. (IP’s climate reporter, Michael Kavate, anticipated the AI shift after looking into the Earth Fund’s new leader, Tom Taylor, last summer.) This week, however, Elika Roohi at Alliance wrote: “Despite pledging to achieve net zero carbon by 2040, [Amazon’s] emissions rose six percent in 2024. The increase was driven by AI data centre expansion and transport.” In February, the Bezos-owned Washington Post laid off most of its climate reporters. All this adds to the list of questions we have about Bezos’s seriousness and potential impact as a climate funder.
The fundraisers and the “Epstein Class.” In the New York Times, Eli Saslow profiles David A. Ross, a former museum director who approached Jeffrey Epstein and others in his orbit as donors to cultivate — and is now facing the fallout of some regrettable email exchanges with Epstein. Saslow’s article sheds some light on what he describes as “a vast circle of billionaires, academics and fund-raisers like Ross who had never been accused of participating in Epstein’s crimes or visiting his island but had nonetheless helped sustain him by cashing his checks, hosting him at galas and laundering his reputation with their own.” Ross’s regrets may be disturbingly familiar to others in the fundraising universe: “I blew smoke at people to raise money,” he said. “Some donors were great, wonderful people who became friends — people who cared deeply about art. Some were horrible assholes with just unbelievably troglodyte points of view, and I was the karma wash.”
What’s needed to make nonprofit local news viable? Media Impact Funders has released a new report on the infrastructure nonprofit news needs to produce reliable civic information sustainably and at scale. The report encourages funders to think about supporting the nonprofit news ecosystem over the long term and as a whole, rather than giving sporadically or organization by organization.
Conservative billionaire philanthropy goes global. Donors from overseas have long looked to the U.S. for pointers on how to engage in effective philanthropy. Among those following parts of the American playbook is Pierre-Édouard Stérin, a far-right funder who has clearly learned a thing or two from the likes of Richard Scaife and the Bradley Foundation. According to a recent article in the Times, the billionaire Frenchman has steered money to “think tanks, political training programs, social media influencers and nonprofit groups to shape the country according to his beliefs — anti-immigrant, free-market, less Islamic and more Catholic.” Stérin’s giving is yet another reminder that those of us who are always calling for more billionaire giving might want to be careful what we wish for.
How foundation CEOs are managing. The Center for Effective Philanthropy put out a new short report on how foundation CEOs and boards are navigating risk, accountability, and change in this uncertain time.
What We’re Covering
Billionaire philanthropy is booming. Recent news reports and vibe shifts notwithstanding, billionaire giving isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s accelerating, as I explore in a new piece. We expect this trend to speed up further in the coming years, given that some 100 U.S. billionaires are 85 or older. One simple reason to expect more giving is that vast fortunes need to “go somewhere,” as John Arnold wrote recently, responding to a recent New York Times article on the Giving Pledge. There are many examples of billionaires who are stepping up their giving, 12 of whom we spotlight in a related piece by Katherine Don. The latest news on this front is the creation of a new multibillion-dollar foundation left behind by OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky, who died recently at 43, as Michael Kavate reports.
GiveWell’s transition from charity advisor to powerhouse grantmaker. IP contributor Lauren Evans writes about GiveWell’s evolution from a philanthropic research and recommendation hub into a major funding intermediary over the last several years. In fact, the $418 million in grants distributed by GiveWell to 69 organizations in 2025 puts it in the company of some of the most notable global development grantmakers. The organization is now working to find cost-effective solutions for funding gaps caused by the dismantling of USAID.
How funders can encourage clashing housing advocates to work together. YIMBY Action’s Laura Foote notes in a guest post that as someone who “started out advocating for luxury condos and ended up married to an affordable housing developer,” she is well-versed in the heated debates that dominate the housing policy space. But where others, such as policy analyst Ned Resnikoff, have focused on the divisions between housing justice advocates and YIMBYs, Foote argues that each camp meaningfully contributes to the greater whole. “It’s like the parable of the elephant,” she writes, “everyone feels one part and mistakes it for the whole. And when others don’t acknowledge or respect your part of the elephant, things get heated.” The answer, says Foote, is for funders to act as conveners rather than dividers.
The case for DAF reform. Donor-advised funds are putting the nonprofit sector’s most important intangible assets — moral authority and public trust — at grave risk, argues Bromme Hampton Cole in a guest post. He says that this begins with “the most elementary operational question,” which is, in essence, to ask why it is that 501c3 DAFs, which exist to deploy resources for the benefit of the public, account for more than $326 billion in assets with no payout requirement whatsoever. “It is a fundamental misalignment between the sector’s stated purpose and its structural reality,” he writes.
Lessons from a longtime peace funder. Milt Lauenstein of the Peace and Security Funders Group recently celebrated this 100th birthday and shared some lessons from a quarter-century as a peace funder in a guest post for IP.
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