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How have Turning Point USA's fundraising and administrative expense ratios trended over the past five years?
Executive summary
Turning Point USA’s reported fundraising has grown substantially over the past five years, with multiple outlets citing roughly $39–$55 million in earlier years and about $85 million in 2024, a rise described as more than double between 2020 and 2024 [1] [2]. Available sources provide firm figures for total revenue or fundraising at specific years but do not publish a clean, five‑year series of TPUSA’s administrative‑expense ratios (administrative or overhead percentages) across that same span; IRS returns and audited consolidated financial statements are referenced but full, comparable ratio calculations for each year are not extracted in the available reporting [3] [1].
1. Fundraising: a steep upward arc in headline totals
Reporting by The Guardian and Britannica places Turning Point USA’s receipts in sharply higher territory by 2024 — The Guardian reports TPUSA “raised $85m” in 2024 and contrasts that to $39m in 2020, while Britannica documents the 2020 fiscal year at $55m (different bases for the 2020 numbers appear in the sources) — together these accounts show substantial growth in the organization’s headline fundraising totals between 2020 and 2024 [1] [2].
2. Why the numbers vary between accounts — definitions and fiscal years matter
The apparent disagreement in 2020 figures (The Guardian cites $39m; Britannica cites $55m) reflects different framing (for example, which affiliate or fiscal-year slice is being referenced) and the complexity of TPUSA’s structure, which includes multiple nonprofit entities, PACs and for‑profits that may report separately; Britannica notes Turning Point and Turning Point Action had distinct receipts in 2020 [2] [4]. Readers should not treat single headline totals as a definitive, fully comparable time series without checking exact fiscal-year boundaries and which legal entity is being counted [2] [4].
3. Administrative and “overhead” ratios: available reporting is sparse
The set of documents and articles provided includes an audited consolidated financial statement (Turning Point USA, Inc. and Affiliates) and secondary reports that reference totals and expense categories, but none of the items in the search results explicitly supplies a consistent five‑year series of administrative‑expense ratios (administrative costs as a percent of revenue) ready for direct citation across 2020–2024. The audited consolidations are available to compute such ratios, but the current reporting excerpts do not present those year‑by‑year ratios explicitly [3] [5]. Therefore, a precise five‑year trend in administrative ratios is not available in the supplied sources.
4. What the audited and IRS filings can show — if you compute them
The consolidated financial statements (an audited PDF is in the results) contain line items for operating expenses, program service costs, and supporting‑service expenses; in principle, those statements permit calculation of administrative or fundraising ratios for each fiscal year if one extracts year‑by‑year totals [3]. Several secondary write‑ups (Paddock Post summaries and Form‑990‑based posts) indicate categories like compensation and travel/conventions as major expense buckets, which would be inputs for any ratio calculation, but the excerpts do not present the calculated ratios themselves [6] [7].
5. Context — scale, donor channels and reporting opacity
Reporting in Fortune, Forbes and Katie Couric’s piece included in the results stresses that TPUSA’s revenue growth has been accompanied by complex funding channels — donor‑advised funds, multiple affiliates and a growing endowment — which complicate simple overhead analysis because some funds may be routed through sister entities that do not publish unified public line‑items in the same place [4] [8] [9]. Forbes and Fortune note large cumulative fundraising totals and an endowment increase, signaling scale that can shift ratios [4] [8].
6. Competing perspectives and limitations of available reporting
Journalistic coverage emphasizes rapid fundraising growth after 2020 and especially by 2024; watchdog‑style analyses point to the difficulty of tracing money across related entities and donor‑advised funds [1] [9]. The limitation: the supplied sources do not include a ready five‑year administrative‑expense percentage series, and some figures for the same year differ because different outlets appear to use different tax returns, fiscal-year cutoffs or entity definitions [1] [2] [3]. I did not find an explicit, source‑published five‑year overhead trend in the material you provided — computing it would require extracting the relevant line items from the audited consolidated financial statements and/or the IRS Form 990s for each year [3] [5].
7. If you want the precise trend: where to look and how to compute it
To build an accurate five‑year trend, retrieve TPUSA’s audited consolidated financial statements and the IRS Form 990s for each fiscal year you care about (the consolidated audit is in the results and Form 990s are cited by secondary posts), then calculate administrative (supporting) expenses ÷ total revenues for each year; the consolidated audit will be the most authoritative place to get consistent, entity‑wide line items [3] [5] [10]. The sources here point to those primary documents but do not extract the full five‑year ratio series in the excerpts provided [3] [10].
If you’d like, I can: (a) extract and compute admin‑expense ratios for 2020–2024 from the consolidated audited statements and Form 990 documents you point me to; or (b) draft a short methodology you can use to compute those ratios from the primary filings (tell me which years/fiscal cutoffs you want).