Grantmaking transparency
The unnamed billions
$79.2bn in reported grants was filed naming no recipient in the public record. The money is disclosed. The list of who received it was filed as well. It does not reach the published copy, and whether it does comes down to which form the funder files. We have since opened $18.2bn of it.
What the filings say instead of a name
Foundations report grants line by line: recipient, address, purpose, amount. A funder making hundreds or thousands of grants a year may attach the list as a separate schedule and write a pointer on the return itself. Those pointers read SEE ATTACHED, SEE ATTACHED SCHEDULE, or SEE ATTACHED LIST OF DISTRIBUTIONS.
The attachment is filed with the return. The structured data the IRS publishes carries only the pointer, and no amount of better parsing reaches past it. The rendered copy of the return, published separately as a PDF, sometimes carries the attachment itself.
The form decides
Which of those happens tracks the form. Private foundations file Form 990-PF, and roughly half of their attachments reach the published copy. Public charities and donor-advised fund sponsors file Form 990, and theirs almost never do.
| Filer type | Form | Grantmakers | Dollars unnamed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private foundations | 990-PF | 3,961 | $24.0bn |
| Public charities and DAF sponsors | 990 | 255 | $14.6bn |
| Patient assistance programs | 990-PF | 8 | $25.9bn |
Size is not what separates them. One private foundation's published return carries a 309 page attachment in full, while other filers many times its size publish none. The difference is which attachments get carried into the copy that reaches the public.
Nothing here suggests a funder is withholding. Attaching a long grant schedule is what the form provides for, and a funder that does it has disclosed exactly what a funder that itemizes has disclosed.
One group is set apart for a different reason. Patient assistance programs run by pharmaceutical foundations account for $25.9bn of the total across 8 filers. Their attachments list individual patients rather than organizations, so that money is neither recoverable nor appropriate to recover.
Where it falls hardest
Donor-advised fund sponsors file Form 990. Of the $14.6bn behind pointers on that form, 79% sits with sponsors.
These are intermediaries: money arrives as a contribution to the sponsor and leaves as a grant to a working charity. The published record shows it arriving and shows a total leaving. It does not show where it went. A grant routed this way is already one step removed from the donor who prompted it, and the second step is missing as well.
The most recent years are the emptiest
Each bar is the money reported in that fiscal year with no recipient named. FY2017 to FY2023 is the span the public record has finished filling. FY2024 to FY2026 are still arriving and marked partial below, so a shorter bar at the right-hand end measures how much has been released so far. This is a lag rather than a permanent gap, and it fills in.
The states publish what the federal copy drops
A charity soliciting donations in a state registers with that state, and several states collect the complete federal return, attachments included, and publish it. California and New York both do. Filings that arrive from the IRS as a pointer arrive from those registries as the full schedule, sometimes running past a thousand pages, with the recipient's own taxpayer number printed beside each amount.
Coverage there follows solicitation rather than size. A private foundation that never fundraises has no reason to appear on any state register, while national sponsors, which do solicit, are registered widely.
What can be read back
Where an attachment does reach a published copy, the recipients can be read off it. The schedule prints its own column total, so a reconstructed list can be checked against the total the filer reported without relying on any outside source.
How to read these figures
Two checks sit behind these records. Reconciliation confirms that a document's amounts add up to the total its filer reported, which is what establishes the rows are complete and the amounts right.
These records are held apart from filer-supplied data and are not yet matched to recipient taxpayer numbers, so they answer who received money rather than fixing exact organizational identity. Individual grant recipients are counted and never named.
What this means for reading the record
- Sector totals are sound. Every dollar here is reported, and any question about how much was granted is answered correctly by the published record.
- Recipient-level analysis is not. A question of the form “who funds this cause” is answered from a record missing 19% of the money that has no name attached.
- The gap concentrates on intermediaries, so the part of the sector that is hardest to trace is also the part most affected by it.
How the underlying graph is built, and how much of it connects, is on the data quality page. The methods behind these figures are on the methodology page.
Figures cover FY2017 to FY2026 of electronically filed Forms 990, 990-EZ and 990-PF, computed 2026-08-27. Filings reach the public record 12 to 24 months after the year they describe. FY2017 to FY2023 has finished arriving. FY2024 to FY2026 are not complete, so the totals above are floors that rise with each monthly release. Publication behavior described here was observed at the same time and may change.