Scott Walter’s Oral Testimony to House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight
Oral Testimony: HTML and video
Written Testimony: HTML or PDF (House website)
Full Subcommittee Hearing (YouTube)
Oral Testimony to the House Judiciary
Subcommittee on Oversight
Rep. Jefferson Van Drew, chairman
Hearing on “How Leftist Nonprofit Networks Exploit Federal Tax Dollars to Advance a Radical Agenda”
Scott Walter
President, Capital Research Center
July 15, 2025
Chairman Van Drew, Ranking Member Crockett, distinguished members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the honor of testifying. I’m president of the Capital Research Center, where we study money flows to special interest groups.
America’s nonprofit sector is one of her glories, the envy of the world. But though I admire many American nonprofits, including for instance, the Heritage Foundation, I don’t want federal tax dollars going to Heritage or to my own nonprofit, and neither they nor we ever have or will accept a penny of government money. If tax dollars ever go to a nonprofit, it should probably be performing biblical good works—healing the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and the like.
Tax dollars should never go to nonprofits best known for pushing controversial social issues or meddling in politics here and abroad, yet that is what so many federally funded nonprofits, especially those receiving USAID funding have done.
This improper funding harms both the charitable sector and our politics. It harms innocent American nonprofits abroad, by stigmatizing all American nonprofits working abroad. I have heard from leaders of those nonprofits who resent their genuine good works being ignored as they become, in local eyes, just one more American NGO fighting for George Soros’s hard-left agenda. Imagine you’re a nonprofit leader who struggles to raise private funds as she desperately fights human trafficking in a poor country. Meanwhile, a wealthy, Soros-funded network of NGOs in the same country, receiving the American government’s imprimatur through USAID funds, is loudly trying to decriminalize the very prostitution that’s the engine driving the human trafficking you’re trying to stop.[1]
This left-wing collusion of government and NGOs not only hurts your noble charitable work directly; it also makes the local citizens and government view you as the enemy.
The same improper funding hurts our politics as well. We hear a lot about so-called “dark money” in politics, but what is darker than the funding of alleged “charities” that work in foreign countries to elect politicians they like to, say, the European Parliament, or to enact government policies involving controversial issues like prostitution and abortion, or even to change entire regimes. Much evidence has been published on Soros’s network trying to do these things, as well as on the NGO networks of other American billionaires, including those with the same last name, Foundation.[2]
My written testimony documents massive amounts of tax dollars going to numerous improper grantees.[3] Examples include the 15 groups receiving federal funds who sued the current administration in just its first month. Four were Justice Department grantees; three, USAID grantees. Then there’s TransLatin@ Coalition, a radical group that advocates for, among other things, expanding abortion, abolishing ICE, and one day abolishing the police. It received funding from Justice as well as Labor and HHS. Fully half its 2023 revenues came from government, proving that so many NGOs—Non-Governmental Organizations—are really BGOs: Basically Governmental Organizations.
Another group should especially worry this Judiciary Committee, the Environmental Law Institute, which receives funds not only from the Justice Department but also from EPA, the National Science Foundation, and the Departments of Homeland Security, Agriculture, and State. It runs the notorious Climate Judiciary Project, which allegedly “educates” federal and state judges on climate issues, but whose speakers, as one critic notes,[4] come exclusively from the climate tort bar’s witnesses and amicus brief filers. Sen. Cruz describes it accurately as “ex parte indoctrination.”[5]
Many more grantees boosting the Left’s agenda occur in the immigration field. As one critic puts it,[6] billions of tax dollars have been used to construct a shadow immigration system that operates in direct defiance of U.S. federal immigration law, yet is financed partly by Congressional appropriations.
One Justice Department grantee in this area is Chinese for Affirmative Action, which denounced Secretary Rubio’s policy of revoking visas for persons tied to the Chinese Communist Party as “racist and dangerous.”[7]
Another Justice grantee and contractor is the Acacia Center for Justice, spun off from the Vera Institute, a hard-left, Soros-backed group famous for its soft-on-crime, soft-on-illegal-immigration advocacy. Acacia’s federal awards in the last administration topped $769 million. It was a lead contractor for a massive federal immigration contract, even though it insists “no immigrant should be detained,” electronic surveillance of illegal aliens “must be abolished,” and “the use of local law enforcement for immigration purposes . . . must be dismantled.”[8]
If this funding were put to a vote of the American public, little to none of it would survive the democratic process. This funding is democracy suppression.
Thank you.
Notes
[1] For a scholarly article that details the widespread and powerful efforts by Soros’s network to decriminalize prostitution, see Jody Raphael, “Decriminalization of Prostitution: The Soros Effect,” Dignity 3, No. 1 (2018), https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1087&context=dignity. Author Jody Raphael, a law professor at DePaul University, states that the Soros network’s “rationale for full decriminalization fails to consider violence and coercion in the sex trade industry, misreads research, and does not include research from venues where full decriminalization of prostitution has occurred. Thus OSF and its grantees have created a partial view on prostitution that they advocate to the public. Those concerned with trafficking for sexual exploitation, violence, coercion, and abuse in prostitution should be cognizant of these strategies used by decriminalization advocates funded by OSF and be prepared to point out the unsupported assumptions and meet OSF’s allegations with proven facts.”
[2] See, for example, Jon Rodeback, ed., Mapping Soros’s “Philanthropy” at Home and Abroad, November 2020, https://capitalresearch.org/article/mapping-soross-philanthropy-at-home-and-abroad/.
[3] Scott Walter, “How Left-Wing Nonprofits Exploit American Taxpayers to Fund Their Agendas,” written testimony House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, July 15, 2025, https://capitalresearch.org/article/how-left-wing-nonprofits-exploit-american-taxpayers-to-fund-their-agendas/.
[4] Climate Litigation Watch, “Climate Litigation Industry Update,” September 4, 2024, https://climatelitigationwatch.org/climate-litigation-industry-update/.
[5] Forbes Breaking News, “Ted Cruz Alleges Alliance Between ‘Leftist Billionaires, Radical Environmental Organizations, & The CCP,’” Dailymotion, video at 10:06,
[6] Mark Krikorian, statement before Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, June 4, 2025, https://www .dailymotion.com/video/x9m4jb4. [omit space after “www” to follow link]
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Krikorian-Written-Testimony.pdf.
[7] Chinese for Affirmative Action, “Fact Sheet for Chinese Student Visa Holders,” May 30, 2025, https://caasf.org/2025/05/fact-sheet-for-chinese-student-visa-holders/.
[8] Chuck Ross, “‘No Immigrant Should Be Detained,’ Says Left-Wing Nonprofit with $769 Million Federal Immigration Contract,” Washington Free Beacon, January 30, 2025, https://freebeacon.com/politics/no-immigrant-should-be-detained-says-left-wing-nonprofit-with-769-million-federal-immigration-contract/.
