Executive Summary

  • A single conservative trustee, Leonard Leo, controls a $1.6 billion fund spending over $100 million per year to shape judicial appointments and litigation strategy, with no public disclosure of donor identities required, according to reporting by The Intercept and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's office.
  • In 2024, donor-advised fund DonorsTrust distributed $195.3 million to more than 300 right-leaning organizations — including $44.1 million to litigation centers and $21.3 million to America First Legal Foundation alone, according to watchdog group Exposed by CMD.
  • The left-wing mirror: the Arabella Advisors network — now rebranded as Sunflower Services — operated the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which spent $311 million on progressive causes in 2024, according to OpenSecrets. Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss contributed $245 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund since 2016, per Read Sludge.
  • Both networks exploit the same legal loophole: 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations and donor-advised funds may influence policy and litigation without disclosing who funds them. The IRS has not revoked a single such status for political spending violations since 2015.
  • The practical result: coordinated waves of amicus briefs, funded judicial selection pipelines, and litigation campaigns all trace back to the same anonymous sources — manufacturing the appearance of broad public support for positions backed by concentrated private wealth.

The Machine Nobody Voted For

When the Supreme Court issues a landmark ruling on religious liberty, free speech, or civil rights, the public sees nine justices and the litigants' names. What it does not see is the invisible architecture behind the case: which anonymous donors paid for the litigation strategy, which think tanks produced the supporting briefs, and which judicial selection committees vetted the judges hearing the appeal.

That architecture has become one of the most consequential — and least scrutinized — forces in American governance. And it operates entirely outside the public disclosure requirements that apply to political campaigns, lobbying, and most government activity.

The mechanism is not secret. It is simply unexamined. A network of 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations and donor-advised funds — legal structures that can accept unlimited, undisclosed contributions — has been built on both the left and the right into billion-dollar influence operations. They fund litigation, select judges, draft model legislation, and coordinate amicus briefs. Federal law requires them to disclose virtually none of it.

The result is a system in which the most powerful decisions affecting Americans' constitutional rights are shaped by donors whose identities are, by design, unknown.

The Right's Litigation Machine: $1.6 Billion and Growing

The most thoroughly documented example of anonymous money rewriting constitutional law is the network built around Leonard Leo, the former Federalist Society executive who served as judicial adviser to Presidents Trump and Bush.

Between 2014 and 2017, Leo and allies collected more than $250 million from undisclosed donors while advising on Trump's judicial appointments, according to Senate Judiciary Committee research cited by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). That effort has since expanded dramatically. In 2022, a single donor — Chicago businessman Barre Seid — transferred a manufacturing company to Leo's Marble Freedom Trust, generating an estimated $1.6 billion in a single transaction. Leo now spends more than $100 million per year from that fund, according to The Intercept's 2024 investigation.

The spending priorities are explicit: judicial appointments, law school funding, and the coordination of amicus brief campaigns to the Supreme Court. Leo's network has helped select, vet, and publicly support every Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice since John Roberts, including Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Groups Leo helped fund filed coordinated amicus briefs in many of the landmark cases these justices have decided.

The practical effect is that a single private trust, accountable to no voter and disclosing no donor, has had documented influence over the selection of lifetime-tenured federal judges and the legal arguments they receive on the most consequential constitutional questions of the era.

DonorsTrust: The Distribution Network

Below Leo's flagship fund sits DonorsTrust, the Alexandria, Virginia-based donor-advised fund that serves as the distribution infrastructure for conservative and libertarian causes. In 2024, DonorsTrust distributed $195.3 million in grants to more than 300 organizations, according to Exposed by CMD's analysis of IRS Form 990 filings. Its net assets at year-end stood at $1.36 billion.

The litigation allocation is striking: $44.1 million went to 35 right-wing litigation centers and legal advocacy groups in 2024 alone. The single largest beneficiary was America First Legal Foundation — the nonprofit founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller — which received $21.3 million from DonorsTrust in 2024. That figure represents a sixfold increase from the $3.2 million America First Legal received from DonorsTrust in 2023, per the same analysis.

America First Legal has used that funding to file more than 20 lawsuits in 2024 targeting DEI practices, voting rights procedures, and election monitoring operations, according to Democracy Docket's tracking. The organization does not disclose the identity of the donors whose money flows through DonorsTrust to fund those cases.

DonorsTrust also transmitted approximately $19 million to state-level think tanks and to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the organization that drafts model legislation distributed to state legislatures, according to Exposed by CMD. The State Policy Network — a coordination body for right-leaning state think tanks in 49 states — was among the leading recipients.

The Left's Parallel Infrastructure

Any honest accounting of anonymous policy money requires confronting the equivalent structure on the progressive side, which is substantially larger by recent revenue figures.

Arabella Advisors — a for-profit consulting firm that managed the left's primary dark money network — administered the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund until rebranding as Sunflower Services in November 2025. In 2024, the Sixteen Thirty Fund reported $282 million in revenue and spent approximately $311 million on progressive causes, according to Read Sludge's review of 990 filings. The New Venture Fund reported $662 million in revenue in the same period.

The network deployed approximately $1.5 billion in the 2024 election cycle, according to CampaignNow's analysis. Its largest expenditures were on state ballot measures — particularly abortion measures — where it outspent opponents by margins of 26-to-1 in Arizona and 93-to-1 in Montana, per the same analysis.

A single foreign-born donor, Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, has contributed $245 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund since 2016, according to Read Sludge. Federal law prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to U.S. political campaigns. It does not prohibit them from funding 501(c)(4) organizations that influence legislation, litigation strategy, and judicial nominations.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund's 2024 disclosures show $27.85 million to America Votes, the Democratic Party's primary voter turnout infrastructure. Its spending on litigation and legal advocacy — including to voting rights organizations whose cases have reached federal courts — is not broken out separately in public filings.

The result is structurally identical to the right-wing network: undisclosed donors, distributed through a management entity, funding litigation and policy campaigns at scale.

How the Amicus Brief Machine Works

One of the least visible but most consequential products of these networks is the coordinated amicus curiae brief — "friend of the court" submissions that are supposed to represent independent expert or organizational perspectives on Supreme Court cases.

Research has documented a systematic pattern: when major constitutional cases reach the Supreme Court, dozens of amicus briefs arrive from organizations that appear independent but share overlapping funders and, in many cases, coordinated drafting. Sen. Whitehouse's office has mapped multiple instances in which organizations funded by the Leo network filed amicus briefs in the same cases where Leo-vetted justices were ruling — without any disclosure of the funding relationship.

The pattern exists on both sides. Progressive litigation organizations coordinated by the Arabella network have similarly filed parallel amicus campaigns in voting rights, reproductive rights, and administrative law cases. The organizations appear in court filings as independent voices. Their shared funding infrastructure is invisible to the justices receiving their briefs.

This is not illegal. It is, however, a direct contradiction of the purpose of the amicus process — which is to provide courts with genuinely independent expert perspectives, not coordinated messaging from a single funding source.

Who Benefits?

Conservative litigation funders gain the ability to select friendly judges, fund the cases that reach those judges, and file the supporting briefs — all without public accountability for the coordination. The Leo network's documented return on investment includes multiple Supreme Court seats and a generation of lower-court appointments.

Progressive litigation funders gain equivalent capacity to fund voting rights cases, abortion litigation, and administrative law challenges, with no disclosure of the foreign and domestic donors whose money drives the campaigns.

Lobbyists and influence professionals who operate through disclosed channels — who must register, report, and comply with contribution limits — operate at a structural disadvantage against undisclosed 501(c)(4) networks that face none of those constraints.

Courts receive what appear to be independent perspectives but are often coordinated campaigns. The integrity of the amicus process depends on the assumption of independence that these networks systematically undermine.

The American public funds part of this system. Donor-advised funds and 501(c)(4) organizations receive federal tax subsidies — either through charitable deductions for donors or through tax-exempt status for the organizations themselves. Taxpayers subsidize operations they cannot see and whose donors they will never know.

The Enforcement Gap

Federal disclosure law has not kept pace with the evolution of these structures, and — critically — Congress has taken deliberate steps to ensure it doesn't.

Since 2015, a spending rider embedded in annual appropriations bills has barred the IRS from issuing new guidance clarifying how much political activity 501(c)(4) organizations may engage in before losing their tax-exempt status. The rider has been renewed every year since, with support from both parties — Republicans protecting conservative networks, Democrats protecting their own. The IRS has not revoked a single 501(c)(4)'s status for political activity violations in that period, even as organizations on both sides spend hundreds of millions of dollars on explicitly political campaigns.

The DISCLOSE Act, which would require 501(c)(4) organizations to disclose donors contributing more than $10,000, has been introduced in multiple Congresses. It has passed the House twice with Democratic majorities and failed in the Senate each time, blocked primarily by Republican filibusters. Democratic senators have simultaneously defended the Arabella network from scrutiny, citing donor privacy concerns.

The Government Accountability Office has recommended strengthened disclosure requirements for donor-advised funds. The recommendation has not been acted upon.

The Constitutional Question

The argument for protecting donor anonymity is not without merit. The Supreme Court's 1958 ruling in NAACP v. Alabama established that compelled donor disclosure can violate First Amendment associational rights — a ruling that emerged from state efforts to expose civil rights donors to harassment and retaliation. That precedent is real and important.

What has changed is scale. The anonymous donor privacy that protected civil rights organizers from state violence has been repurposed into an infrastructure for billion-dollar influence over judicial selection and constitutional litigation. The question is not whether anonymity has ever served legitimate constitutional purposes — it clearly has. The question is whether a mechanism designed to protect individual citizens from government retaliation should extend to billion-dollar trust funds selecting federal judges.

That is a question neither party has been willing to answer honestly, because both have built their influence infrastructure on the same foundation of non-disclosure.

What Accountability Would Look Like

Several disclosure frameworks have been proposed. The DISCLOSE Act model would require 501(c)(4)s to report donors above a threshold. A narrower approach would target judicial selection specifically: requiring organizations funding amicus briefs or judicial vetting operations to disclose their donors in court filings, consistent with existing party and lobbying disclosure rules.

The Government Accountability Institute, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Campaign Legal Center — organizations across the ideological spectrum — have proposed overlapping versions of these reforms. None has advanced through a Congress in which the majority party always has a reason to protect its own network.

The result is a constitutional law increasingly written by anonymous donors, adjudicated by judges those donors helped select, and argued by organizations those donors fund — all within a disclosure framework that was designed for a different era.

The money is flowing. The decisions are being made. The public, which funds the tax advantages enabling this system, remains uninformed about who is driving it.

Sources: Exposed by CMD, OpenSecrets, The Intercept, Read Sludge, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Senate floor research, Democracy Docket, CampaignNow, NOTUS, Washington Examiner.