Did the Heritage Foundation disclose Project 2025 donor names and timelines?

1. Big Money, Small Circle: Who reporting identifies as bankrolling Project 2025

Independent reporting found that a small group of wealthy families — identified as the Coors, Koch, Uihlein, Scaife, Seid, and Bradley families — and their networks have funneled substantial sums into Project 2025 advisory structures since 2020, with some estimates putting the total above $120 million and the Bradleys alone contributing over $52 million. These findings rely on investigative aggregation of grant records and affiliate disclosures rather than a single Heritage-produced ledger; the reporting frames the project’s funding as concentrated among a handful of long-standing conservative donors rather than broadly diversified grassroots funding and highlights repeated financial support to advisory groups tied to Project 2025 ^[1].

2. Donor-Advised Funds: The legal pathway that preserves anonymity

Reporting also documents that large contributions to Project 2025 came through donor-advised funds (DAFs) managed by Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard, which provided at least $10.2 million to the Heritage Foundation for Project 2025-related activity. DAFs legally allow donors to remain anonymous to the public, meaning that even when sponsoring institutions disclose grants, the underlying individual or family donors often remain undisclosed. Analysts argue this mechanism created practical barriers to reconstructing a full timeline of donations to Project 2025 from public records alone, and investigative pieces call for policy reforms to increase transparency ^[2].

3. Heritage’s public posture: Emphasizing advisory breadth while declining funding transparency

Heritage Foundation leadership publicly emphasized the size and diversity of Project 2025’s advisory board and defended the initiative’s scope, but the organization did not provide a public, itemized disclosure of Project 2025 donors or a grant-by-grant timeline when queried. Reporting notes that Heritage did not respond to repeated requests for comment about specific funding sources, and filings and press coverage instead relied on third-party documents and analyses to trace contributions. The absence of a formal, public donor timeline from Heritage leaves independent researchers dependent on patchwork disclosures and third-party grant data to piece together the funding story ^{[1] [3]}.

4. Multiple data points converge but leave gaps: How investigators reconstructed funding

Investigators used publicly available grant records, tax filings, affiliate disclosures, and reporting on DAF grants to assemble overlapping evidence of who supported Project 2025 and when those flows occurred. This reconstructed picture indicates significant support starting as early as 2020 and intensifying through 2024, linked to advisory networks and institutional grants rather than small-dollar public contributions. While these methods substantiate the claim of concentrated, sustained funding, they cannot fully substitute for a direct Heritage-produced donor timeline or a comprehensive donor names list that would definitively attribute every dollar ^{[1] [2]}.

5. Competing perspectives and incentives: Why disclosure matters and who resists it

Proponents of transparency argue that revealing donor identities and timelines matters because Project 2025 aims to influence public policy and government staffing at scale; critics of mandatory disclosure assert donor privacy and charitable giving norms should be preserved, especially when donations are routed through DAFs. Reporting highlights that Heritage and several donor networks declined comment when approached, and DAF sponsors’ current practices legally shield donor identities. This clash reflects broader policy debates over the balance between political transparency and donor privacy embedded in U.S. charitable law ^{[2] [4]}.

6. Bottom line: What established facts show and what remains unsettled

Established reporting demonstrates substantial, concentrated funding for Project 2025 from identifiable family networks and intermediary donor-advised funds, and Heritage has not produced a public, itemized disclosure listing all Project 2025 donors and a donation timeline. However, gaps remain: the full roster of individual donors and an exhaustive, date-stamped ledger of contributions to Project 2025 cannot be derived from public records alone because of DAF anonymity and nonresponse from key actors. The evidentiary record supports claims of significant private funding but falls short of providing a single, authoritative Heritage disclosure of donor names and timelines ^{[1] [2] [4]}.