California sends $18 million to Soros-backed lefty group

Susannah Luthi writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a questionable use of Californians’ tax dollars.

California has doled out nearly $18 million in taxpayer funding to the left-wing Tides Center since Gavin Newsom (D.) became governor in 2019, a Washington Free Beacon review of state spending records found. Thanks to the way the dark money behemoth operates, it’s a mystery whether the money goes to any of the far-left groups it supports.

That setup allows the state to obscure which group actually gets taxpayer dollars after it awards contracts or grants to the Tides Center. The Golden State’s spending database shows that 18 agencies, ranging from health departments to workplace regulators, sent payments to the George Soros-backed nonprofit. The database does not reveal which project gets the cash in the end. State officials also told the Free Beacon that the database is missing information from some departments, meaning total payments to the Tides Center could eclipse the nearly $18 million shown.

The Tides Center essentially acts like a middle man, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars every year to a network of seemingly independent charitable organizations—primarily progressive activist groups. But unlike traditional nonprofits, these groups are housed within the Tides Center as so-called fiscally sponsored projects, enabling them to operate as charities while sidestepping the IRS’s robust financial transparency requirements for tax-exempt groups.

This arrangement is “almost designed to be non-transparent,” Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher with the Capital Research Center, said. Left-wing billionaires favor structures like Tides’s “precisely because it allows them to shovel their money faster to left-leaning causes,” he added.

“It sounds like California’s government is so eager to give away money, they’re using Tides as a way to shovel money out the door to pop-up ‘nonprofits’ that don’t have to file independent form 990s disclosing who they pay, how much they pay them, or where they send money to,” Thayer said.