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Fact check: How much money did the no kings 2 March cost?
Executive Summary
The publicly reported cost of the "No Kings 2" march is not definitively established in available reporting; city officials considered waiving a roughly $120,000 fee related to the event before removing the item from the agenda, and broader, much larger figures cited online (up to $45 million or $300 million) are either about different events or have been rated mostly false by fact‑checkers [1] [2] [3]. Key funding claims about billionaire or Open Society backing exist, but available documents show grants to allied organizations rather than clear, traceable expenditures for this specific march [4] [5] [3].
1. What proponents and critics are claiming that matters most to the public
Reports and political messaging have presented multiple, sometimes conflicting cost figures for the "No Kings 2" march: a municipal fee of about $120,000 that a city considered waiving, an estimated $45 million tag tied to earlier, separate protests, and sweeping accusations that billionaires spent hundreds of millions to finance the movement. Each claim carries distinct provenance and implications for accountability and public debate, and the factual record shows these are different types of assertions—municipal permitting costs, aggregated security/public-safety estimates from other protests, and broad fundraising claims without direct transaction-level evidence [1] [2] [3].
2. The most concrete municipal figure: the $120,000 fee and its limbo
Local reporting shows a city agenda item proposing waiving an approximately $120,000 fee related to the march, but the item was removed before the governing body met to decide, leaving no official waiver or final municipal cost recorded in that source. That procedural removal means no final, auditable municipal payment or waiver is documented there, and the item’s temporary appearance on an agenda cannot substitute for final expenditure records or post-event cost reporting [1]. The absence of a completed vote or payment record is central to why a firm dollar figure remains elusive.
3. The $45 million figure: a mismatched comparison that inflates context
An analysis cited an up-to‑$45 million estimate tied to initial No Kings protests that coincided with a major protest day in June; however, reporting explicitly frames that figure as not directly related to the "No Kings 2" march and instead reflects broader estimates around large-scale events and security responses in Washington, D.C. Using that number to quantify the cost of No Kings 2 conflates separate incidents, jurisdictions, and mixes public-safety aggregate costs with organizer budgets, producing a misleading sense of scale if applied directly to the single march in question [2].
4. Billionaire funding claims: grants exist, but linkage to the march is weak
Multiple outlets reported grants from organizations associated with George Soros’ Open Society network to groups affiliated with the protest ecosystem, including a $3 million grant to Indivisible. Those grants appear in public grant reporting but were not documented as being earmarked specifically for the "No Kings 2" march, and reported grants to allied organizations do not equal direct, line-item financing of a discrete event. The reporting supports the fact of philanthropic support to related groups, but does not establish a transactional trail funding the march itself [4] [5].
5. Fact‑checks and the debunking of headline claims: Snopes and corroborations
Independent fact‑checking found that broad claims that billionaires spent $300 million on the No Kings protests rate as mostly false: philanthropies have funded organizations that participated in or supported protest infrastructure, but there is no evidence of direct, event-specific payouts in the hundreds of millions. This distinction matters because aggregated philanthropic support to political groups is not the same as documented payments for a particular march, and fact-checkers flag the leap from organizational donations to explicit event financing as unwarranted [3].
6. What reporting omits and why that matters for accountability
Available pieces consistently do not disclose a definitive, audited cost for No Kings 2: municipal accounting records, host-organizer budgets, security invoices, or grants explicitly tied to the event are absent from the sources. That gap prevents conclusive public accounting. The reporting does, however, show municipal processes (agenda items) and philanthropic grant records that create plausible avenues for tracing costs—but journalists and officials have not yet connected those dots with admissible documentation [6] [7].
7. Bottom line: the best supported conclusion and outstanding questions
The most defensible conclusion is that the specific cost of No Kings 2 is undetermined in public reporting; the only concrete figure tied locally is the $120,000 permit/fee item that was considered and then removed from an agenda, while larger sums referenced in the public debate either relate to other events or have been debunked as overstated. To resolve the question definitively requires municipal expenditure records, organizer financial disclosures, or transactional grant language explicitly naming the march—none of which appear in the cited reporting [1] [2] [3] [4].