Donor Advised Funds Quotes

“Third, DAFs (donor-advised funds) allow private foundations to avoid the public scrutiny that Congress wanted them to have. If a private foundation makes a direct donation to a hate group or other questionable charity, that information is available to the public through public disclosure of tax returns. But if the private foundation wants to avoid this disclosure, it can simply make a distribution to a DAF, then make the donation to the hate group from the DAF, and no one is the wiser.45 While DAFs do publish their distributions, they list them over thousands of pages, and the information is disconnected from any particular donor.

45. Charitable gifts to hate groups can have devastating effects both within and outside the United States. Proposed legislation in Uganda imposing the death penalty for homosexuals was supported by significant charitable donations from United States taxpayers, many of which came from donor-advised funds. — Lydia Namubiro, “Charity Loophole Lets US Donors Give Far-Right Groups $272m in Secret,” Open Democracy (July 5, 2023).”
― Ray D. Madoff, The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy