The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the tax-free status of several prominent left-wing nonprofits, including George Soros's Open Society Foundations, in what sources describe as the most aggressive use of the tax code against politically active charities in decades.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the IRS are drafting a blueprint that could force Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations to pay the full 21% federal corporate tax rate, according to three sources familiar with the Treasury Department's internal policy deliberations, as the New York Post reported. The effort stems from a 2025 executive order signed by President Trump targeting nonprofits operating with a "substantial illegal purpose", a standard broad enough to encompass organizations the administration says are tied to political violence, radical ideologies, or efforts to frustrate federal immigration enforcement.

The financial stakes are substantial. A Post analysis of the latest IRS filings found that if all three organizations lost their 501(c)(3) status and were taxed at the standard corporate rate, they would have owed roughly $165 million in federal income tax for 2024 alone. Open Society Foundations accounts for $163.6 million of that figure. The SPLC would owe about $354,000, and 17 CAIR chapters combined would owe approximately $860,000.

Those numbers represent just the starting point. Sources told the Post that the administration is considering penalties ranging from corrective fines to full revocation, and that back payments could compound the liability dramatically.

Bessent tapped a special operations veteran to lead the review

Bessent recently enlisted Tony Saffier, a former special operations veteran and AI executive, to spearhead an interagency task force reviewing nonprofit compliance. Bessent confirmed on the "Charlie Kirk Show" last October that work on compiling a list of targeted organizations had already begun. The task force's scope extends well beyond the three marquee names. The Post identified additional groups under scrutiny, including the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, the anti-Amazon Athena Coalition, left-leaning watchdog MediaJustice, and the Strategic Organizing Center alongside its affiliated union, the SEIU.

One insider described Treasury officials as "like a dog with a bone" and said many of the groups and their donors could be "on borrowed time." Another source acknowledged friction inside the bureaucracy.

That source told the Post:

"There's a lot of internal pressure to get it done, but some people are still moving too slowly at the IRS. That is expected to change very soon."

The Treasury Department declined multiple requests to comment.

Open Society Foundations funneled billions to activist groups, including one working to block deportations

Open Society Foundations, now chaired by George Soros's 40-year-old son Alexander, has distributed billions to NGOs across the political spectrum, but the administration's focus is on grantees that cross from advocacy into conduct the executive order defines as illegal. Among the beneficiaries the Post identified: Black Lives Matter, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and United We Dream Action, which the paper described as a group that actively works to frustrate the deportation of illegal immigrants.

The congressional angle reinforces the financial picture. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Subcommittee Chairman Chip Roy have demanded that Open Society Foundations and the Alliance for Global Justice turn over financial records and communications related to alleged support of Antifa, which Trump designated a domestic terrorist organization. The committee's letter cited a Capital Research Center report alleging that OSF has donated more than $80 million to extremist organizations since 2016, including $250,000 to the Alliance for Global Justice in 2020 and at least $2 million to the Sunrise Movement, which the report connects to Antifa.

An Open Society Foundations spokesperson pushed back on both the congressional probe and the Treasury effort, calling the accusations recycled from "a discredited report."

"Threatening any nonprofit's tax status for political reasons would be nothing more than an illegal attempt to target and stifle work that the administration disagrees with."

That framing, political targeting dressed up as tax enforcement, is the core argument progressive groups are making in court and in public. But the administration's position rests on specific conduct, not ideology. Whether the IRS can prove that distinction in individual cases will determine whether the effort holds up.

SPLC faces its own federal indictment while CAIR carries an unindicted co-conspirator label

The Southern Poverty Law Center, long a self-described anti-racism outfit, is fighting credibility problems that have nothing to do with the Treasury review. Federal prosecutors recently indicted the SPLC's former intelligence director. Prosecutors allege the organization secretly funneled donor funds to extremist informants, including an operative who allegedly helped organize the violent 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The SPLC did not respond to the Post's requests for comment.

The pattern of nonprofits and politically connected organizations misusing funds while shielded by tax-exempt status is not new. What is new is an administration willing to treat the tax code as an enforcement tool rather than a rubber stamp.

CAIR occupies a different lane entirely. The administration treats the organization strictly as a national security target, and the paper trail is older than most of the current debate. Federal prosecutors named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial, a designation CAIR adamantly denies, insisting it has no ties to illicit foreign funding or terror organizations. CAIR also did not respond to the Post's requests for comment.

The Soros-Treasury connection adds a biographical wrinkle that neither side can easily dismiss. Bessent served as chief investment officer at Soros Fund Management, where he helped execute what the Post described as a wildly lucrative wager against the British pound. When Bessent stepped down in 2015, George Soros staked his new firm with $2 billion. The man now drafting plans to strip the Soros nonprofit empire of its tax shield once built his career inside that empire.

Protect Democracy sued to block the crackdown, calling it a First Amendment violation

The legal counteroffensive is already underway. Protect Democracy, a left-leaning legal organization, filed suit against Treasury and the IRS earlier this year, accusing Bessent and the White House of bypassing strict federal tax laws to conduct what the group calls a partisan campaign that violates the First Amendment rights of progressive charities. The case, Protect Democracy Project v. Internal Revenue Service, is docketed on CourtListener, though its current status is unclear from available reporting.

The lawsuit raises a question that extends beyond progressive nonprofits. Samuel Handwerger, a tax policy professor and certified forensic accountant at the University of Maryland, told the Post that actual revocation may be less likely than the collateral damage the process itself inflicts.

"If I were assessing real-world exposure for these organizations, I would rank it: bank de-risking first, donor and grantmaker chill second, examination costs third, and actual revocation a distant fourth."

In other words, the mere announcement of a review can dry up bank relationships and scare off donors long before the IRS formally acts. For organizations that depend on large-dollar philanthropy, that chill may be the real enforcement mechanism, whether or not a single 501(c)(3) letter is ever revoked.

Handwerger also cautioned that the precedent cuts in every direction. The tools one administration builds, the next one inherits.

"Every administration inherits the precedents of the last one. Organizations across the political spectrum have an interest in the answer (to this question), and many of them have not yet noticed that."

That warning deserves weight. But it also deserves context. Conservative nonprofits spent the Obama years watching the IRS single out Tea Party groups for extraordinary scrutiny, delays, invasive questionnaires, and selective enforcement that a Treasury inspector general later confirmed was real. The precedent Handwerger worries about was set long before this administration arrived. The question now is whether the current effort targets genuine misconduct or merely settles old scores under a new label.

The answer depends on what the audits actually find. The executive order's "substantial illegal purpose" standard gives the IRS wide latitude, but latitude is not evidence. If Treasury can document that specific grantees used tax-exempt dollars to fund criminal conduct, organizing political violence, sponsoring illegal immigration networks, financing designated terrorist entities, the revocations will stand on solid ground. If the cases rest on guilt by association or ideological distaste, courts will say so.

$165 million in potential tax liability puts real pressure on Soros's network

For now, the financial math alone creates pressure. Open Society Foundations' $163.6 million estimated tax exposure dwarfs the combined liability of the SPLC and CAIR. An organization that large does not lose its tax-exempt status quietly. Donors recalculate. Banks reassess risk. Grantees scramble for alternative funding. The downstream effects ripple through an entire ecosystem of progressive advocacy, from immigration activism to racial-justice campaigns to anti-corporate organizing.

The broader question of how billionaire donors shape American politics through tax-advantaged vehicles is not a partisan concern, even if this particular crackdown targets the left. Taxpayers subsidize every dollar that flows through a 501(c)(3). When those dollars fund groups that obstruct federal law enforcement, finance extremist networks, or funnel money to operatives who organize violent rallies, the subsidy becomes complicity, and voters have a right to ask why the IRS looked the other way for so long.

The administration's list also signals a willingness to confront organizations that have long enjoyed a kind of institutional immunity. The SPLC, for decades, operated as the unofficial arbiter of what constitutes a "hate group" in America, a designation that carried real consequences for the organizations it targeted, from deplatforming to loss of corporate partnerships. Now the SPLC faces its own federal indictment while the government questions whether it deserves the tax break that funded its operations. The irony is structural, not personal.

Questions about financial transparency among politically powerful figures have dogged both parties. But the scale of the Soros network, and the breadth of the organizations now under review, makes this effort qualitatively different from past skirmishes over nonprofit compliance.

Whether the administration can execute the crackdown without overreach remains an open question. The IRS is not known for speed. Formal audits trigger internal administrative appeals. Federal tax court battles can drag on for years. And the Protect Democracy lawsuit adds another layer of judicial review before a single dollar changes hands.

But the political dynamics have already shifted. Progressive nonprofits that spent years operating as if their tax-exempt status were a constitutional right are now confronting the possibility that it was always a privilege, one that comes with obligations they may not have met. The tensions between progressive activism and community accountability are not confined to any single organization or city. They run through the entire infrastructure of left-wing philanthropy.

For years, the IRS treated politically connected nonprofits like untouchable institutions. If Bessent and the administration follow through, taxpayers may finally get an answer to a simple question: what exactly did all that tax-free money pay for?