The Trump admin is doing everything it can to *bankrupt* the Southern Poverty Law Center

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice announced it secured an indictment by a federal grand jury against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a firm that’s spent over 50 years researching, tracking, and fighting violent hate groups nationwide.

The SPLC is best known for bringing lawsuits that have bankrupted white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation, as well as publishing annual Hate and Extremism reports that track organizations like the Proud Boys.

The charges seem baseless, accusing the SPLC of “misleading their donors” by paying informants to infiltrate groups to collect intelligence, the same thing the FBI does commonly in their investigations. Legal experts say it’s based on a flimsy premise that abuses the power of the DOJ to go after who it sees as its “enemies”, which is the Trump admin’s entire playbook.

But what I wasn’t aware of (until today) was it this isn’t just an attempt to derail the SPLC’s important work temporarily, but it’s a direct attack that attempts to remove their funding sources entirely.

Let’s talk about donor advised funds (DAFs) for a minute

Several years ago when I left Salesforce, a friend who had experienced an IPO suggested that before I cash out my final shares of employee stock, I should siphon some of them into a DAF, or donor advised fund. I hadn’t heard of a DAF before but quickly learned they’re one way people donate to causes that also allows the money to grow over time (tax-free) so the money can almost perpetually be donated to causes (I’ll explain the mechanics in a bit). On top of that, you also get a tax break when you set one up that can offset taxes you’d pay on regular stock sales.

So here’s how a DAF works: you give away some shares of stock to a charitable account (mine is at Fidelity). And those shares are immediately sold to provide funds for the account. Whatever the stock sells at on that day is completely tax-free, so the new DAF gets 100% of the value of the sold stock.

Once the money is in a DAF, it’s out of your hands and something you can‘t touch for personal gain, as it can only be given away to approved non-profits by the holding company. While the money sits in the account, it can grow with the markets like any other investment.

For my own DAF, I gave a couple hundred shares of Salesforce into a new account back in 2021, when the shares sold for about $50k. In the years since, I’ve given away about $5k in donations on average each year to organizations like food banks, planned parenthood, and groups fighting for LGBTQA+ rights.

The funny thing is, since the ultra rich wrote the rules for these, it gives your money way more power than normal people donating to charities get.

I just looked at the transaction history of my own DAF, and I’ve given out $29k to nonprofits since I started my DAF. And my account balance currently has over $33k in it. So my initial donation has turned into at least $62k of spending power in just a few short years.

Fidelity says no

When the charges against the SPLC were announced this week, the group said they would fight them in court and I saw online calls for donations to support the SPLC. This was an easy choice for me, so I logged into my DAF account and did a search, found the SPLC, then started a grant request to send them $1k. Usually a day later you get a response saying the money went out to the organization like you asked.

A day later, I got the following email saying my request was denied, due to pending investigations. I’ll reach out to Fidelity for clarification, but I noticed that if I search for the SPLC now at Fidelity’s DAF grant finder, it is no longer listed as an organization you can direct money to.

Keep in mind the nonprofits you can fund aren’t all innocuous ones as The Heritage Foundation (authors of Project 2025) and Turning Point USA are still listed as possible recipients.

I guess I learned what “advised” means

I started a DAF because I’d read about how it really stretches out your philanthropy dollars. As your money grows over time, it lets you donate more to causes you support. But it’s not a fund I own completely or can ever take money out of personally, I can just advise the holders of where the funds should go.

It looks like the Trump administration is doing everything it can to dry up the SPLC’s funding and prevent them from continuing their work on tracking hate groups and publishing their findings.

As to why this administration would do such a thing is an exercise left up to the reader.