VIDEO: Gilded Giving 2026: Philanthropy Under Oligarchy – Report Spotlight

Below is a lightly edited transcript of remarks at our third annual Wallace Symposium, called “Forging a Democracy That Works for All.” Watch and read more from the symposium here.

Bella DeVaan: Hi, everyone. It is so wonderful to be here with all of you today. My name is Bella DeVaan, and along with Chuck Collins I lead the Charity Reform Initiative here at the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Our Initiative operates at the place where two uniquely American phenomena meet — one, our culture of generosity, of charity, of voluntary association, and two, our extreme, breathtaking wealth inequality. 

We produce transparent and original research that makes the case for transforming our broken philanthropic system. We believe that philanthropic institutions are underrated and under-scrutinized sites of concentrated power — where trillions of tax-benefited dollars lay fallow, and where stingy, controlling billionaires can launder their reputations or do harm.

Since 2010, our team has published a biennial Gilded Giving report — a periodic wellness check on the nonprofit sector and its ultra-wealthy funders. Shocking probably none of you, we’ve consistently observed that as people get richer, their giving does not scale to their wealth.

Here’s a sneak preview of this year’s edition. We’re examining philanthropy under oligarchy, and have identified three major orientations towards giving shared by philanthropists under this second Trump Administration: Accumulation, capitulation, and, in rare but important and instructive cases, solidarity. 

First, let’s talk about accumulation. Political scientist Jeffrey Winters describes oligarchy as “rule by the wealthy few” who are united by their obsession with defending their wealth from seizure or redistribution.

Our research has consistently found that, overall, ultra-wealthy Americans’ philanthropy mirrors their tactics to accrue and defend their wealth. Under a presidential administration that has concentrated more wealth in the hands of even fewer people, philanthropic hoarding is out of control. 

An everyday giver is likely to donate directly to a working charity or nonprofit. That’s not what a typical ultra-wealthy giver does.

Instead, they’ll donate to their own private foundation or donor-advised fund, intermediaries that funnel money or assets to causes of their choice. While private foundations have a legally mandated five percent payout every year, donor-advised funds do not.

Our latest research shows that private foundations far too often treat that 5 percent rate as a ceiling, not a floor; of America’s 144 private foundations with endowments worth over 1 billion dollars, their median payout rate was 5.1 percent. Plus, payments to family members who manage the foundation and other dubious expenses can count towards this total. 

How about the original Giving Pledge signers who have promised to give away the majority of their wealth? We found that 80 percent of their gifts traveled to their own foundations, and collectively, as of last summer, still-living pledgers who signed on in 2010 had gotten nearly three times as wealthy. 

Even MacKenzie Scott, who accounted for one-third of all mega-gifts in America last year and has moved over $27 billion dollars to charities, has only been able to decrease her wealth by $7.4 billion dollars. 

At the same time, donor-advised fund sponsors now account for 11 of the top 20 charities in America, including every spot in the top five, and have grown by over 475 percent in the last sixteen years. 

These gifts are tax deductible and subsidized by the public by up to 73 cents per dollar in lost tax revenue. And those tax benefits are up front, while the money warehoused in foundations and DAFs can take decades, a lifetime, or even generations to reach groups on the ground..

That’s why we currently have a massive pool of assets piled up in charitable intermediaries like foundations and donor-advised funds. We project that these assets will surpass $2 trillion in value by the end of 2026, and by 2028 will take in the majority of all U.S. individual giving. 

Next — capitulation. The current administration is hell-bent on vanquishing their ideological enemies, and racking up appeasements from everyone else. They’re creating new terrorism definitions, holding bombastic Congressional hearings, extracting settlements from universities, chilling speech, and abusing unelected power in the executive branch. Many grantmakers have been trying their best to avoid the president’s wrath.

Take Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Since Trump’s re-election, the couple has dramatically pivoted their public philanthropy away from racial justice, election defense, and other “liberal-coded” priorities after conspiracists claimed Zuckerberg’s voting-infrastructure grants swung the 2020 election to President Biden.

It’s not just them: The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy found that nearly three quarters of prominent foundations whose websites they surveyed had remained silent about authoritarian threats — and dozens more had made edits to their copy to “comply in advance with arguably illegal executive orders that attempt to forbid “promotion” of DEI.”

Major commercial donor-advised fund sponsors, which manage hundreds of billions in philanthropic capital, paused grantmaking to the Southern Poverty Law Center civil rights group after a DOJ indictment. Meanwhile, DAFgiving360, Schwab’s donor-advised fund sponsor, continues to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into Leonard Leo’s right-wing network.

Some have chosen to actively curry favor through philanthropy: tech companies, crypto firms, and government contractors have donated hundreds of millions into the nonprofit affiliated with Trump’s ballroom project. 

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom. There are grantmakers who seek to meet the moment, relinquish control, and defy the status quo of oligarchic wealth defense disguised as generosity.

Organizations like the Wallace Global Fund, the Stupski, Park, and Marguerite Casey Foundations have committed to spending-down or spending-out. Dozens more have committed to the Level Up Pledge, increasing their grantmaking and committing to share proof of it with researchers. These actions have directly catalyzed hundreds of millions of dollars to move directly into movements and their infrastructure, supporting frontline advocates who are challenging this administration’s authoritarianism. 

The Wallace Global Fund has also aligned all of their endowments’ investments with their mission, boldly divesting from the extractive practices that they also fight through their grantmaking.

This kind of solidarity through giving is exemplary: it should be applauded and become the standard for universal baseline practices. 

We believe philanthropists should aggressively and immediately practice solidarity, and also rally for structural reform that mandates better conduct from everyone. 

Of course, we need to properly tax wealth. But even just turning the dials modestly on what’s required from our philanthropic system could unleash hundreds of billions of dollars for our common good.

Think about this: If even just the 121 billion-dollar-plus private foundations that paid out less than 10 percent had paid out at 10 percent in 2024, they would have given out  $23.4 billion more for charity. 

That $23.4 billion rivals the total amount of funding that goes towards social movement infrastructure each year. 

Or, think about how much good that dormant capital could do for our people another way. IPS’ National Priorities Project estimates that this $23.4 billion equals the cost of fully restoring the SNAP cuts made in H.R. 1 and providing a year of Medicaid coverage for over 560,000 people.

We hope our report inspires grantmakers to evaluate themselves frankly: Are they accumulating or capitulating, or are they giving in solidarity? If they need to change, they’ll be equipped with great examples and resources for better conduct. 

We also hope our work rallies everyday people to see how charity reform is ESSENTIAL to any agenda to fight fascism and topple oligarchy in America. 

Thank you! Please check out our report when it’s released in the beginning of August.