What methodology do critics use to aggregate OSF grant totals and how do OSF records compare?
This fact-check may be outdated. Consider refreshing it to get the most current information.
Executive summary
Critics who claim to have tallied “OSF” grant totals are often speaking about the Open Society Foundations (the Soros network), but the available reporting supplied here does not document a single, sourced methodology that critics use to aggregate those totals [1] [2]. Public records show different headline totals over time — older NGO summaries cited “over $10 billion” in grants [2], while encyclopedic reporting lists cumulative expenditures exceeding $24.2 billion as of 2025 [1] — and a meaningful comparison between “critics’ aggregates” and official records cannot be completed from the provided sources alone.
1. Who’s who: a name collision that matters
The initial obstacle in this debate is terminological: “OSF” refers to two different, unrelated entities in the supplied reporting — the Open Society Foundations, a major philanthropic network founded by George Soros [1], and the Open Science Framework, a research platform maintained by the Center for Open Science [3] [4]; conflating them produces confusion about grants, databases, and transparency. The Open Science Framework (osf.io) is a platform for sharing and managing research outputs and is not a grantmaking foundation [3] [4], whereas the Open Society Foundations is the grantmaker whose cumulative spending figures are the subject of aggregation debates [1] [2].
2. What the records show about OSF spending — divergent public claims
Public-facing summaries and third‑party guides give different headline numbers: a 2013 NGO guide referenced that “OSF has spent over $10 billion in grants” across its activities [2], while a contemporary encyclopedic entry reports that Open Society Foundations had recorded expenditures in excess of $24.2 billion since 1993 as of 2025 [1]. Those two figures coexist in the record supplied and likely reflect different update dates, scopes, or accounting conventions, but the sources do not supply an itemized grant‑level ledger tied to the critic claims that would permit line‑by‑line reconciliation [2] [1].
3. How critics generally aggregate grant totals — implied approaches and limits
The supplied materials do not include direct documentation of a specific critics’ methodology for aggregating Open Society Foundations grants; however, best practices and donor monitoring literature describe common approaches that critics might adopt: collecting public tax filings and annual reports, extracting grant listings from foundation databases, mapping heterogeneous grants into standardized indicator buckets, and summing amounts while navigating differing fiscal years and in‑kind support (illustrative guidance on aggregation and indicator mapping is discussed in a donor MEL toolkit) [5]. That source explains why aggregating diverse grants requires standardization and sometimes secondary data to fill gaps, which suggests where discrepancies typically arise when outsiders attempt totals [5]. The reporting available does not confirm any one critic actually used that exact workflow.
4. Where mismatches come from — accounting, scope, and data completeness
Differences between asserted totals and foundation records commonly derive from scope decisions (whether to include affiliate entities, international offices, or program‑related investments), timing (commitment date versus payment date), and source completeness (partial scraping of databases versus audited financial statements); the donor aggregation literature supplied stresses the need to map diverse grantee indicators into “outcome baskets” to permit portfolio‑level summaries, underscoring the methodological choices that can change totals [5]. The provided sources do not give critics’ raw data or a reconciliation showing which grants they included or excluded, so it is impossible, from these materials alone, to definitively compare a critic’s aggregate to OSF’s internal accounting [5] [1].
5. What can be verified and what remains unproven
It can be verified from the supplied reporting that Open Society Foundations has multiple public summaries and that journalists and NGOs have reported different cumulative figures over time [2] [1]. It cannot be verified from these sources that a specific critic used a particular aggregation method, nor can a precise, line‑by‑line comparison be produced here because the underlying grant‑level datasets and critic methodologies are not included in the available material [5] [2] [1]. A rigorous reconciliation would require obtaining OSF’s itemized grants database or tax filings and the critic’s raw spreadsheet of included items and formulas.