The donations are striking because American Compass is a partner organization in Project 2025, a controversial right-wing think tank that has been building the policy and personnel firmament for a second Trump administration. . .
American Compass expresses a desire to work across traditional ideological lines, but its own ideology appears more as a definition of what it isn’t. However, what the group is is still radically conservative—and its platform is built to serve a second Trump administration.
NOTE: American Compass founder Oren Cass—a former Bain executive and adviser to Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential bid—has staked out what he casts as a more labor-friendly economic conservatism.
While he has advocated for “genuine” bipartisanship, Cass is also aligned with the New Right. He rejects many of the absolutist tenets of laissez-faire capitalism that the GOP has held dear for so long, arguing that free-market fundamentals have failed the American worker. Last year, Cass drew a salary of $275,000 from his nonprofit—more than one out of every four dollars raised.
Conservative Group Accidentally Reveals Its Secret Donors...Some of Them Are Liberal Orgs
WHOOPS
American Compass included five key names on a 2022 tax statement that The Daily Beast obtained.
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Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
Project 2025 backers include xenophobic Trump advisers Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, as well as Christian nationalist and former Trump budget chief Russ Vought, one of the group’s top advisers.
- According to The Washington Post, Project 2025 has been crafting “specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents,” with Trump himself “naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute.”
- The group is also “drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations,” the Post reported.
- For instance, the address on its tax filing is inside the Conservative Partnership Institute, which employs Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and political attorney Cleta Mitchell, another architect of Trump’s potentially criminal plot to overturn the 2020 election. CPI is another key force behind Project 2025.
Founders Fund
That pro-Trump agenda is all the more jarring when contrasted against American Compass’ top supporters.
The Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network are heavyweight philanthropic organizations that have long been considered bastions of liberalism.
The Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network are heavyweight philanthropic organizations that have long been considered bastions of liberalism.
- The Omidyar Network—founded by former tech mogul Pierre Omidyar—has poured money into Democratic dark money groups and spends enormous resources promoting pluralism and fighting racism globally.
- (Omidyar founded eBay in 1995, and provided the original funding for the news site The Intercept.)
American Compass also disclosed support from another center-left group, the Action Now Initiative, which has contributed a total $250,000 since 2020, according to the tax return. ANI is run by John Arnold, a billionaire former Enron executive and Democrat whose nonprofit network has funded aerial police surveillance in Baltimore, among other controversial philanthropic investments.
The document also reveals
- $200,000 in support from the Walton Family Foundation—the charity group helmed by the heirs to Walmart founder Sam Walton—along with
- $100,000 from an obscure group called America Fund LLC.
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