Before the 2024 election, a group of Democratic political operatives came together in Washington, D.C., to form a nonprofit to support groups aligned with the left. Bright Future Fund wound up spending $182 million, including a chunk of money to the largest super PAC that made ads supporting candidate Kamala Harris.
Like many other nonprofits, Bright Future Fund submitted its annual tax return for 2024 to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) last November. Just two days later, it quietly went out of business. Bright Future Fund seemed likely to be remembered as nothing more than a small cog in the vast dark money machine that tried to elect Harris and failed.
But Bright Future Fund is now attracting attention among some tax experts and conservatives because of where almost all its money came from during 2024.
The nonprofit received $37.5 million from Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, one of the country’s largest donor-advised funds. Donor-advised funds are tailored to people who wish to donate anonymously and receive tax breaks for their philanthropic giving. In its own tax return, Fidelity said that it gives money only to nonprofits “where the funds distributed will be used exclusively for charitable purposes.”
