The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave nearly $70 million last year to a major liberal charity that acts as the “parent” organization of one of the largest pro-Democrat dark money groups, a recent update to the group’s online grant database reveals. It was the largest one-year commitment the foundation has made since 2014, and its second largest ever.
The donations were given to Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund (NVF), a major player in the political nonprofit sphere that is the payroll reporting agent for Sixteen Thirty Fund, a dark money group that funneled tens of millions to super PACs during that 2020 election cycle that backed Democratic candidates including President Joe Biden. The most recent tax returns available (2019) show that New Venture Fund, which raised $450 million from anonymous sources that year, transferred $33 million to Sixteen Thirty—the largest single donation given by the former and received by the latter.
Gates’ Commitments By The Numbers
There are an abundance of questions concerning who funds New Venture Fund, but Bill Gates’ foundation has had a prominent role over the past 13 years. According to the foundation’s online grant database, it committed $8.6 million to the group in 2008, and over the next five years additional annual commitments fluctuated between $3.5 million and $13.5 million—until 2014, when the Microsoft founder pledged a massive $95.5 million. As New Venture Fund’s annual revenue ballooned, so did the Gates Foundation’s donations. From 2015 to 2019, it made annual commitments of roughly $26 million, $25 million, $47 million, $59 million, and $48 million—making the nearly $70 million committed during 2020 the foundation’s largest single-year commitment in over half a decade.
Overall, Bill Gates’ private foundation has committed over $419 million dollars to Arabella’s dark money behemoth, which describes its missions as “[helping] to build a just, equitable, and sustainable future by getting the right types of philanthropic capital into the hands of people with the right ideas.” As for 2021, the Gates Foundation has committed roughly $4 million (per its online grant database). Over the 13 year relationship, Gates Foundation’s numerous grants to NVF have been described by the database as being intended for a myriad of projects both in the U.S. and abroad: Issues related to “gender equality”, “K-12 education”, and “agricultural development”, and “general public policy” seemingly being the basis for the largest allocations.
Regarding the Gates Foundation’s grant commitments, many of them span varying lengths of time—some spanning 2, 3, 6, even 9 years before the grant has been paid in full. Given this staggered method of cash distribution, grant amounts on the foundation’s tax returns vary widely in some cases from the amount committed. According to an analysis of Gates Foundation tax returns, the organization had a substantial role in the earlier days of NVF’s financing—accounting for nearly 24% of NVF’s yearly donations from 2009 through 2012. Overall, NVF has received over $250 million from Gates Foundation since 2009—making up just under 10% of its total funding during that timespan, and making Gates Foundation a cornerstone donor of one of the largest dark money networks in the country.
Founded in 2000 with a grant of Microsoft stock worth $20 billion, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has become an institution in the philanthropy world with roughly $50 billion in assets, raising and spending billions annually on hundreds of organizations. In 2006, Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett signed on as a trustee, and during his tenure (which ended with his resignation earlier this year), donated approximately $33 billion in Berkshire stock to the foundation. In his June resignation letter, Buffett stated that he had been an “inactive trustee,” though the nonprofit is still “100% in sync” with his philanthropic goals. Traditionally, the foundation has allocated its funding with a strong focus on global vaccine development and distribution, as well as other public health related subjects (the World Health Organization and the Clinton Health Access Initiative, for example, draws most of their funding from Gates’ foundation)—so it’s easy to overlook its substantial contributions to politically focused organizations like New Venture Fund.
The Arabella Umbrella
New Venture Fund has exploded from a $6 million venture in 2008 to the $450 million juggernaut it is today, and a large portion of its operations, as well as details about who funds it, are mostly shrouded in mystery. In 2019 alone, NVF spent roughly $242 million in grants to approximately 650 nonprofits and universities. Fourteen percent of that, or roughly $33 million (their largest donation to any organization), went to its political dark money vehicle, Sixteen Thirty Fund—which accounted for nearly a quarter of the $137 million the group brought in that year.
Sixteen Thirty Fund was a major player in the 2018 midterm elections, but played an even more significant role in the 2020 cycle, spending roughly $60 million funding the most prominent pro-Joe Biden super PACs, including seven-figure donations to Future Forward USA, League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, Take Back 2020, Priorities USA, Unite The Country, American Bridge, America’s Progressive Promise, Pacronym and other groups that spent hundreds of millions of dollars combined on anti-Trump and pro-Biden ads. The Republican-led anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project received $300,000 from Sixteen Thirty Fund in 2020.
Funding super PACs is just one facet of NVF and Sixteen Thirty’s influence machine on American politics. The nonprofits of Arabella’s network spend millions funding other political organizations and dark money groups, such as America Votes and Center for Popular Democracy—but they also spend millions of dollars annually on lobbying the U.S. government. In 2020, New Venture Fund spent $1.36 million lobbying, while Sixteen Thirty Fund spent $1.92 million, with spending ramping up significantly in the fourth quarter as Trump became a lame duck. Since Biden has taken office, and Democrats the Senate, both NVF and Sixteen Thirty both look poised to far surpass their lobbying totals from the previous year. In fact Sixteen Thirty Fund has already spent $1.93 million on lobbying Congress through only Q2 (already more than 2020), with NVF spending $970,000.
The groups tend to lobby on nearly identical issues—during the last year of Trump, Arabella’s organizations focused on attempting to influence numerous appropriations bills, the National Defense Authorization Act, “support[ing] war powers + AUMF,” as well as PATRIOT Act-related legislation, per lobbying documents. As the new administration has taken over, the groups have shifted their focus over to influencing Congress on tax code and filibuster reform, its handling of the For The People Act, as well as various other bills that deal with political and financial transparency.
Both groups have publicly pledged their support to For The People Act, despite the bill’s campaign finance reforms that could, in some circumstances, force groups like Sixteen Thirty Fund to disclose their donors should they continue funding super PACs. This stance is at odds with the Arabella Advisors’ nonprofit network’s history of raking in hundreds of millions of dollars anonymously and then spending a large portion of it on attempting to influence elections and legislators from behind layers of opacity.
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While Gates may in fact be one of New Venture Fund’s oldest and most prominent donors, he isn’t the largest (especially in recent years), nor is he the only famous billionaire whose funds are attached to the group. NVF’s largest recorded donations came in the form of a transfer from the country’s largest donor-advised fund, Fidelity Charitable, which sent $80 million to NVF from July 2019 to June 2020—making its total since 2018 upwards of $153 million. Donor-advised funds allow wealthy philanthropists to invest unlimited sums in an account, which is run by the fund sponsor, only to be disbursed to charities upon the eventual direction of the account holder. When the donation is made, it is credited to the fund, rather than the donor, creating an additional layer of anonymity. Behind Fidelity, Bill Gates’ foundation appears to be the second largest annual donor, but as mentioned, several other liberal power players write substantial checks to the group.
Democratic megadonor George Soros gave nearly $25 million combined to NVF and Sixteen Thirty through his Open Society network of nonprofits in 2019, and multimillion dollar contributions have been identified as coming from the tech-billionaire-funded Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which draws funding, in part, from Facebook cofounder and DNC megadonor Dustin Moskovitz, as well as from executives of Netflix, Oracle, Square, and eBay. Another collective of philanthropic billionaires, Blue Meridian, which includes Mackenzie Scott and Steve Ballmer among its members, also gave heavily to the group. For a comprehensive list of identifiable donors to NVF since June 2018, click here.
For Arabella Advisors, the for-profit company behind New Venture Fund and its affiliates, the nonprofit consulting business has been rather lucrative. Arabella made over $32 million in 2019 alone from the combined consulting and fees paid by its four main nonprofits—the previously mentioned New Venture and Sixteen Thirty Funds, as well as Hopewell and Windward Funds, with Hopewell Fund being a major entity in its own right.
Arabella was founded in 2005 by Eric Kessler, a former Clinton White House appointee who later served as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative—he was also national field director for League of Conservation Voters, and currently sits on the board of the National Democratic Institute, a regime change organization chaired by Madeleine Albright. Arabella describes itself as a team of “problem solvers” that has provided strategic philanthropy guidance to hundreds of clients that, per the firm’s website, represent over $100 billion collectively. It has been previously reported that Bill Gates is a long time client of Kessler’s.
Embracing The System?
Even though the Arabella network states its support for campaign finance reform, it also brandishes dark money in politics at very high levels. In a statement made to Politico late last year, Sixteen Thirty Fund executive director Amy Kurtz said, “We have lobbied in favor of reform to the current campaign finance system (through H.R. 1), but we remain equally committed to following the current laws to level the playing field for progressives in this election and in the future.” Kurtz would expand on this in an op-ed published to Medium, detailing her and her group’s support for H.R.1: “Our organization invested hundreds of millions (in 2020) to shore up election infrastructure, ensure access to the ballot, and educate communities around the country about what was at stake, our opponents fought aggressively to block our work, spending millions in an effort to suppress voting rights and re-elect Donald Trump.” She continues: “We support and will continue to advocate for a massive rewrite of the rules to protect voting rights, reduce the influence of special interest money in politics, and rebuild the trust of all Americans. We will also continue to level the playing field for progressives until that happens.”
Even though New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund expressed support, and even lobbied for, the For The People Act, the provisions contained therein may not force them to reveal their donors despite their funding of super PACs. The bill contains provisions protecting from disclosure amounts received in the ordinary course of business, funds subject to donor restrictions, and instances where there are threats of donor harassment or reprisal, all potential loopholes that some experts say could allow some dark money donors to stay hidden if the bill became law.
Political dark money—typically defined as money spent on elections that cannot be traced back to its source, usually by 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits and their affiliates—has become one of the most polarizing issues of the last decade, especially in the post-Citizens United landscape of American politics. Even though Democrats have consistently railed against such money in stump speeches, since 2018, they’ve benefited from it far more than their Republican counterparts. According to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets, more than $1 billion in anonymous cash was spent in the 2020 election cycle—with more than $514 million benefitting Democrats, more than double the roughly $204 million such groups spent in support of GOP candidates.
How much of the massive commitment New Venture Fund actually received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2020 will be known later in the fall, as the tax returns for NVF, Gates Foundation, and Sixteen Thirty Fund are released to the public.
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