When Congress debates whether to require a warrant before the government searches Americans' communications, the organizations providing the intellectual framework for that debate are largely funded by donors whose identities no member of the public can discover.

That is not an accident. It is infrastructure.

The mechanism is the donor-advised fund — the fastest-growing and least-scrutinized vehicle in American philanthropy. It is the same structure that has allowed billionaire donors on both the left and right to claim immediate tax deductions on contributions that may sit in investment accounts for years before reaching any working charity. And it is the same structure that routes tens of millions of dollars annually into the policy organizations whose analysts brief congressional staff, whose reports are cited in floor debates, and whose positions — laundered through the credibility of institutional research — shape the votes that determine how much warrantless access the federal government retains over Americans' private communications.

The Architecture of Anonymous Influence

A donor-advised fund operates on a simple premise: a donor contributes cash or securities to a sponsoring organization — typically the charitable arm of a financial services firm like Fidelity, Schwab, or Vanguard — and receives an immediate tax deduction. The money grows tax-free in an investment account. The donor "advises" the fund on where to distribute grants. There is no legal deadline for distribution, no requirement to disclose the original donor's identity, and no meaningful IRS enforcement.

The result is a $326.45 billion pool of assets held across 3.56 million accounts, nearly double the total from 2020, according to the 2025 Annual DAF Report published by the DAF Research Collaborative using IRS Form 990 data. The total grantmaking from donor-advised funds reached $64.89 billion in fiscal year 2024 — a 19 percent increase — according to the same report. But the identity of the individuals directing those grants is, in almost every case, entirely unknown.

This anonymity has direct consequences for the surveillance policy debate unfolding in Congress this week.

The Think Tank Funding Pipeline

DonorsTrust, the preferred donor-advised fund of the Koch political network, distributed $284.1 million in grants in 2024 — its second-largest year on record — according to its IRS Form 990 filing. Its disclosed grantees include organizations that have provided some of the most prominent intellectual infrastructure for opposing warrant requirements on surveillance programs.

The Heritage Foundation received approximately $735,000 from DonorsTrust in 2024, including $365,000 specifically earmarked for its "Going On Offense On Gender Ideology" project, with additional national security programming funded by separate grants, according to the same DonorsTrust Form 990. Heritage's analysts have consistently published against imposing warrant requirements that would "hamper" foreign intelligence collection, and Heritage's congressional relations staff regularly brief the offices of members considering FISA legislation.

America First Legal Foundation, led by former Trump advisor Stephen Miller, received nearly $21.3 million from DonorsTrust in 2024 — a more than sixfold increase from $3.2 million the prior year — according to the DonorsTrust 2024 IRS Form 990, as reported by NOTUS. America First Policy Institute received $4.4 million from the same source in the same year.

Eight unnamed individuals made seven- or eight-figure contributions to DonorsTrust totaling $162.4 million in 2024 alone, according to the fund's IRS disclosure. The public has no way of knowing who funded nearly 57 percent of DonorsTrust's total grant distribution that year, what policy outcomes they are seeking, or whether their financial interests are aligned with the surveillance architecture they are paying to preserve.

The Left's Parallel Infrastructure

The anonymous funding of surveillance policy advocacy is not a problem confined to the right.

Arabella Advisors, founded in 2005 by former Clinton administration official Eric Kessler, operates the largest known dark money network in American politics. Between its founding and 2021, the network raised $6.5 billion through its constellation of affiliated nonprofits, including the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund, according to Capital Research Center's analysis of IRS Form 990 filings. In the 2022 cycle alone, Arabella's nonprofits took in $3 billion — a figure that exceeds the combined fundraising of the Democratic and Republican National Committees in most cycles.

Arabella-connected organizations fund civil liberties and surveillance reform advocacy as well, but their donors are no more visible than those funding the organizations on the other side. Swiss-born Hansjörg Wyss — a foreign national legally prohibited from making direct contributions to U.S. federal political campaigns under the Federal Election Campaign Act — was identified by The New York Times as a significant funder of the Arabella network. There is no evidence that Wyss's contributions violated campaign finance law. There is also no requirement that the public be told about them.

The structure is identical on both sides: anonymous donors, tax-deductible contributions, grant distributions to policy organizations, policy organizations providing the analytical framework that shapes legislation. The specific legislative outcomes differ. The accountability gap does not.

Defense Contractors at the Table

Beyond the donor-advised fund infrastructure, think tanks receiving direct funding from defense contractors and the intelligence industry have been prominent voices in the surveillance reauthorization debate.

Top think tanks received over $7 million from Pentagon contractors in their most recently disclosed fiscal years, according to the Think Tank Funding Tracker, a database maintained by Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Organizations with substantial defense contractor funding — the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Atlantic Council, and others — have provided analysis supporting the intelligence community's position on Section 702 reauthorization. These organizations are not required to disclose which specific contracts or contractors fund which specific research programs. An analyst whose salary is funded by a defense contractor can testify before Congress as a "neutral expert" with no disclosure requirement.

The IRS Enforcement Gap

The Internal Revenue Service has acknowledged in published guidance that some organizations "appeared to have abused the basic concepts underlying donor-advised funds, established for the purpose of generating questionable charitable deductions, and providing impermissible economic benefits to donors and their families." Enforcement has not followed. The agency lacks both the statutory authority and the investigative resources to audit donor-advised fund sponsors at the scale necessary to identify abuse, according to IRS testimony before the Senate Finance Committee.

The Accelerating Charitable Efforts Act — the ACE Act — would have imposed mandatory distribution timelines on donor-advised funds and prohibited private foundations from meeting their own mandatory payout requirements by distributing to DAFs. The bill attracted bipartisan support. It was never brought to a floor vote. The financial services industry, which earns management fees on the $326 billion in DAF assets it holds, lobbied against mandatory payout requirements. That lobbying effort itself was funded in ways that do not require public disclosure.

What Accountability Requires

As Congress votes this week on whether to require a warrant before government agents search Americans' private communications, the organizations providing the analytical ammunition for that debate are funded through a system specifically designed to prevent the public from knowing who is paying for the arguments.

A tax deduction is a public subsidy. The $64.89 billion in annual DAF grantmaking represents money that the United States Treasury declined to collect in taxes because Congress decided to incentivize charitable giving. Americans have a legitimate interest in knowing whether that public subsidy is flowing to organizations genuinely engaged in charitable work — or to policy advocacy organizations whose anonymous donors have specific financial interests in the surveillance, defense, and intelligence industries whose legislative fate those organizations are actively shaping.

The warrant requirement debate is a question about constitutional rights. The question of who is paying the experts arguing both sides of that debate is a question about whether Congress is deliberating in the open or in the dark.

On both counts, Americans are entitled to an answer.

This investigation draws on publicly available IRS Form 990 filings, the 2025 Annual DAF Report, DonorsTrust's 2024 annual disclosures as reported by NOTUS, Capital Research Center's analysis of Arabella Advisors, and the Think Tank Funding Tracker maintained by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. VALOR Institute's full donor-flow analysis of the surveillance policy advocacy network is available at valor-institute.org.