Fact check: Which corporations contributed to Project 2025 and what were the donation years?

1. A clash of lists: Why one source says “over 100” while others list 228 recognizable companies

Public compilations differ in scope and labeling, producing contrasting tallies of corporate involvement. One source explicitly documents more than 100 organizations that “helped produce” the Conservative Promise and Project 2025, emphasizing contributions from groups and advisory-board members rather than raw corporate donors ^[1]. By contrast, two identical lists published earlier in 2025 present a roster of 228 companies that allegedly supported Donald Trump and Project 2025, naming household firms such as Amazon, Apple, and Google and providing details about donation patterns across candidates ^{[2] [3]}. The divergence suggests that one dataset focuses on organizational partners shaping the policy platform while the other aggregates corporate political donations linked to the campaign cycle, which yields substantially different counts and implications.

2. Think tanks and intermediaries: Where the money is concentrated and how it flows

Beyond corporate checkbooks, significant funding into the Project 2025 ecosystem travels through conservative think tanks and donor-advised vehicles, altering how influence is recorded and perceived. Reporting shows the Heritage Foundation provided substantial grants tied to Project 2025 work — including $1.67 million in grants in 2022 and nearly $965,000 directed to advisory-board organizations — and DonorsTrust acted as a major conduit, funneling over $16.5 million to advisory groups in 2022 ^[4]. Those figures indicate that assessing “corporate contributors” solely by direct corporate donations undercounts the role of foundations and donor-advised funds that aggregate and redistribute corporate, individual, and family philanthropy into policy projects.

3. Billionaire families and concentrated philanthropy: A different ledger of support

Investigative analysis identifies six family fortunes — including the Coors, Koch, Uihlein, Scaife, Seid, and Bradley families — that cumulatively directed more than $120 million to organizations linked to Project 2025’s advisory network since 2020, with family-level sums ranging widely and at times dominating the funding picture ^[5]. These gifts typically flow to nonprofit organizations and think tanks rather than appearing as corporate campaign contributions. This pattern highlights a structural reality: large donors and family foundations can exert outsized influence on policy roadmaps while their contributions may not appear on corporate donor lists, complicating attributions when questions ask “which corporations contributed” versus “which organizations funded the project.”

4. What financial filings and organizational reports reveal about scale and transparency

Assessments of the Heritage Foundation’s finances provide additional context: the organization reported raising roughly $100–$101 million in 2023, with substantial portions coming from gifts, grants, and contributions used for program services and Project 2025 work ^{[6] [7]}. Profiles and summaries of Heritage’s spending, lobbying, and outside activity underscore transparent line items for grants and program expenses but also show the reality that many donors route money through intermediaries, reducing the visibility of underlying corporate sources ^{[8] [6]}. That structural opacity explains why datasets diverge: some lists capture visible corporate donations tied to electoral campaigns, while others map institutional support and advisory relationships.

5. Reconciling the claims: What can be stated with confidence and what remains uncertain

It is verifiable that multiple published compilations identify corporate names associated with support for Project 2025 or related political activity — including lists naming 228 companies and another listing over 100 contributing organizations — and that major non-corporate funders and family foundations poured tens of millions into advisory groups connected to the project ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]}. What remains unsettled is a definitive, single ledger tying each corporate entity to a specific “donation year” for Project 2025: the available sources present donation totals, grant years, and aggregated flows at organizational or family levels, but they do not produce a harmonized, year-by-year corporate donor list that reconciles direct donations, pass-through grants, and advisory-board support ^{[4] [5] [6]}.

6. Bottom line for researchers and reporters: How to proceed to get a definitive answer

To produce a concrete, year-by-year list of corporate contributors to Project 2025, researchers must triangulate across datasets: direct corporate campaign filings, nonprofit IRS forms and grant disclosures from think tanks, donor-advised fund transfer records, and investigative compilations that map family foundations and intermediary flows ^{[2] [4] [5] [6]}. The existing materials establish that corporate names appear in public lists and that significant funding came through foundations and donor intermediaries, but they stop short of delivering a fully reconciled table of corporations with precise donation years without additional primary-document matching and disclosure.