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How much did each corporate donor give to Project 2025 by year?
Executive summary
Project 2025’s public funding picture is fragmented and incomplete: existing disclosures in the provided materials do not allow a reliable, year-by-year tally of how much each corporate donor gave to Project 2025. Multiple analyses show large flows from wealthy individuals and donor-advised funds into Project 2025-aligned groups since 2020, but they stop short of a clean corporate-by-year ledger, leaving a gap between documented institutional influence and line-item corporate attribution [1] [2]. The immediate takeaway: no single source among the provided materials gives a comprehensive, annualized corporate-donor breakdown, and available reporting instead points to aggregated networks, intermediaries, and PAC-level records that obscure direct corporate contributions [3] [4] [5].
1. Why the records don’t add up: dark money, DAFs, and intermediary networks
The core reason analysts cannot produce a per-company, per-year ledger is that major contributions flowed through intermediary vehicles like donor-advised funds and private foundations, which mask the original corporate or individual source in public reporting. Investigations documented at least $171 million channeled via DAFs at Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard into 68 Project 2025 groups since 2020, with Fidelity alone accounting for over $82 million—figures recorded as grants from the DAFs rather than named corporate benefactors [2]. Other reporting traces six billionaire donor networks contributing more than $120 million to Project 2025 advisory groups, but these totals aggregate across organizations and years without providing a corporate-by-year breakdown, leaving a structural opacity in the data [1].
2. Conflicting snapshots: PAC filings versus investigative totals
OpenSecrets-style PAC filings and investigatory pieces provide contradictory scopes: PAC disclosure lists show relatively small itemized donations from individuals in the 2023–2024 cycle, with many contributions under $5,000 and few explicit corporate entries, while investigative reporting documents tens or hundreds of millions moving into affiliated entities over multiple years [3] [4]. This divergence reflects different reporting regimes—PACs must disclose donor identities above certain thresholds in specific cycles, whereas non-profits and DAFs report grants that can aggregate and hide original sources. The result is that one dataset can show detailed micro-level PAC donors (often individuals) while another shows macro-level influxes from wealthy networks and intermediaries [3] [2] [4].
3. Who the major players are—wealthy families and custodial fund platforms
Available analyses consistently identify a concentrated set of wealthy donors and fund platforms as principal financiers behind Project 2025-aligned activity. The Bradley, Seid, Scaife, Uihlein, Koch, and Coors networks are named as funneling tens of millions into advisory groups and aligned institutions since 2020, while donor-advised funds at Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard served as major conduits for another large tranche of funds [1] [2]. Reporting emphasizes that these players often give to intermediary institutions—heritage think tanks, issue groups, or PACs—rather than directly to a labelled “Project 2025” account, which complicates efforts to map corporate-origin donations by calendar year [1] [2].
4. Where the data is weakest—and what that means for a year-by-year accounting
Every source supplied flags the same limitation: absence of a centralized, transparent register linking corporate donors to annual amounts for Project 2025. Some datasets cover only the 2023–2024 election cycle PAC filings and list mostly individual donors; others aggregate multi-year totals from major donor families or DAFs but omit per-year corporate breakdowns [3] [4]. Consequently, any attempt to create a corporate-by-year table from these materials would either double-count intermediated grants or falsely attribute aggregate family or DAF totals to specific corporate entities—an analytical error the available reporting warns against [1] [2].
5. Conclusion: the evidence you have — and the missing documents you’d need
The materials provided show clear, significant funding into Project 2025-aligned groups via billionaire networks and donor-advised funds, and limited PAC-level corporate entries in single-cycle filings, but they do not deliver the granular, year-by-year corporate donor ledger you asked for [1] [2] [3]. To produce that precise breakdown, researchers need access to donor-advised fund grant detail tied to originating corporate accounts, comprehensive IRS Form 990 schedules from recipient nonprofits by year, corporate political spending disclosures over time, and cross-checked PAC filings—documents not present in these sources [2] [4] [3]. Until those records are assembled and reconciled, the most defensible conclusion is that large sums flowed into Project 2025 ecosystems, but attribution to specific corporations by year remains unresolved within the available evidence [1] [2].