Every well-funded state-level policy fight in America has a donor footprint. When three think tanks advising a state on an exclusion policy and a congressional caucus advancing the same exclusion policy at the federal level appear in one another's public giving records, the footprint ceases to be incidental. In the Texas voucher case arriving at a federal courtroom on Thursday, that overlap is visible in IRS Form 990 filings, campaign finance disclosures, and the publicly posted annual reports of the donor institutions themselves.

This article is a read of that overlap. It does not allege coordination in violation of any law. It does allege — using only public records available through the IRS's Tax-Exempt Organization Search, OpenSecrets, and ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer — that the institutions funding the state-side arguments and the institutions funding the federal-side arguments draw from substantially the same set of donors.

The Three Think Tanks

Three organizations have been publicly active on the state-level side of the Texas voucher exclusion debate, per press releases archived on their respective websites and coverage of state-level testimony in the Texas Tribune.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has produced policy briefs arguing that state national-security interests justify school-choice participation criteria that treat certain foreign-linked institutions differently. Per FDD's 2022 Form 990 available through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, the organization reported approximately $14.6 million in program expenses and identifies foundation grants as a substantial portion of its revenue. FDD does not publicly disclose individual donors.

The Middle East Forum's "Legal Project" has drafted model legislation used by state attorneys general in multiple jurisdictions, including Texas and Florida. Per MEF's IRS 990 data through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, the organization reported approximately $3.5 million in recent annual revenue. MEF has historically listed a small number of family foundations in its publicly available giving disclosures.

The Heritage Foundation's Center for Education Policy has published briefs arguing for broad state discretion in voucher-program design, including participation criteria. Per Heritage's FY2023 annual report, the organization reported revenue of approximately $110 million and lists several hundred foundation and individual donors across multiple giving tiers.

The Four Foundations That Appear Across All Three

Cross-referencing the publicly disclosed foundation giving that appears in grant databases, annual reports, and 990-PF filings, four family foundations appear as identified donors to all three of the organizations above. The giving records are drawn from the Foundation Directory Online and Candid's 990-PF archive, which indexes the reported grants-out of private foundations.

The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, per 990-PF filings searchable on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, has reported grants to FDD, MEF-adjacent Middle East advocacy institutions, and Heritage across multiple fiscal years. The foundation is a major funder of conservative legal and policy infrastructure.

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, per the foundation's public grants database, has reported substantial grants to Heritage and to education-policy intermediaries. Bradley's fiscal-year grants-out, per the foundation's published annual summaries, routinely exceed $40 million.

The Sarah Scaife Foundation, per 990-PF filings available through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, has reported grants to Heritage and FDD. Scaife is part of the broader Scaife family philanthropic network that funds a cross-section of conservative legal and policy institutions.

Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that describes itself in its public materials as a "principled conservative" giving vehicle, has distributed substantial funds to Heritage, FDD, and MEF according to Form 990 pass-through records searchable via ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer. DonorsTrust does not disclose the original donors whose gifts pass through its accounts.

The four foundations are not the only donors to the three think tanks. They are, however, the four that appear in the identifiable giving records of all three — which is to say, the donors whose giving pattern is visible on both sides of the state-level exclusion architecture.

The Federal Caucus

The Sharia-Free America Caucus, which has added members steadily across the 2025–26 congressional session and now operates a four-bill legislative slate, is the federal-level analogue of the state-level exclusion effort. Per FEC disclosures indexed by OpenSecrets, the caucus membership draws campaign contributions from a donor footprint that overlaps substantially with the foundations identified above.

The Bradley Foundation and its associated Bradley Impact Fund have, per 990 filings searchable via ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, reported giving to conservative PACs that contribute to the caucus membership. DonorsTrust has similarly reported giving to movement-conservative PACs. The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation's affiliated Spencer Political Action organization, where one exists, has reported independent expenditures.

The caucus's public legislation — including the "No Sharia Act" and the "Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act," both introduced in the current Congress and trackable through Congress.gov — operates on a design similar to the state-level exclusion statutes. Both the state and federal vehicles use language nominally directed at a single religious legal tradition but structured in ways that, per legal analyses published by the Brennan Center for Justice, would implicate religious arbitration broadly. The Bastion Daily coverage of the religious-arbitration architecture was published on April 15.

What the Overlap Means Legally

The overlap between state-level think-tank donors and federal-level caucus donors does not constitute a legal violation. Coordinated expenditure rules, per Federal Election Commission guidance, apply to specific forms of coordination between outside groups and candidate campaigns. The overlap described here is a shared donor network — not a coordinated expenditure.

What the overlap does do, legally, is inform the reading of the amicus briefs that will arrive in the Texas court this week. A brief filed by FDD in support of the state's exclusion criteria will present as an independent scholarly voice. The donor footprint behind the brief — the same four foundations funding the same policy architecture at the state and federal levels — is not required to be disclosed to the court under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure governing amicus filings at the district-court level.

The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules has considered and, in 2023, proposed expanded amicus-funder disclosure requirements. The proposal has not been adopted at the district-court level. It remains, per the committee's subsequent docket, an open question.

What the Overlap Means Politically

Politically, the overlap is the evidence that state-level and federal-level exclusion efforts are elements of a single architecture rather than a set of independent initiatives. The public records show that the institutions funding the state briefs and the institutions funding the federal legislation are drawn from the same small cluster of family foundations and donor-advised pass-throughs. OpenSecrets' Center for Responsive Politics has documented the pattern for more than a decade. The Yale Law Journal forum piece by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse on amicus influence made the structural argument for expanded disclosure in 2020. The Brennan Center's tracking of dark money in state-level policy advocacy has extended the same analysis to state legislative campaigns.

The court on Thursday will not be asked to consider any of this. The state's amicus briefs will be evaluated on their legal arguments, not on the donor footprint behind the institutions filing them. That is the rule. The question the public record raises is a separate one: whether courts and legislatures alike are well-served by a disclosure regime that makes the donor architecture of policy advocacy visible only to readers willing to do the document-pulling themselves.

Why It Matters

The Texas voucher case is one of several religious-liberty cases moving through federal courts this spring. The legal doctrine — Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza, Carson — is clear. The question in each of these cases is whether a state's administration of a generally available benefit has produced exclusion that is neutral in form but status-based in operation. Courts evaluating that question rely on the adversarial process to produce a complete record.

The adversarial process, per the public records cited above, is running through an institutional architecture whose state and federal layers share a substantial portion of their funding. That is not a violation of any rule. It is, however, a material fact about the information environment in which the April 24 hearing will take place — and about the information environment in which Congress will move its next tranche of federal exclusion legislation through the Sharia-Free America Caucus's legislative slate. Readers who want to see the donor footprint can. The court is not asked to.

VALOR Institute's investigation of the dark-money think-tank pipeline maps the same foundation network driving the state-level exclusion briefs and the federal caucus legislation.

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