Shining a Light on the Dark Side of NGO Funding
A New Organization is Monitoring NGO Transparency
On May 22, 2025, the Transparent Democracy Initiative was formed in Berlin to investigate and publish information on non-transparent funding of politically active NGOs. The member-based non-profit aims to investigate the non-transparent funding of NGOs and other activist groups. It will monitor and publish its findings on the dark or indirect financing of activist NGOs (APEs), be that from political parties, governments, the European Union and other transnational bodies (like UN agencies), philanthropists and foundations (including the dark funds and fiscal sponsors operating within these organizations).
The Transparency Democracy Initiative will be confronting a wide range of questions:
Why aren’t NGOs held to the same transparency scrutiny as industry?
Why are governments and political parties allowed to fund activist groups that engage in parallel campaigns?
How are philanthropists using their foundations to fund NGOs and media groups that serve their interests?
Why is all of this non-disclosed support for activist lobbying groups tax deductible?
There have been relentless activist campaigns over the past two decades to demand transparency from industries, trade associations and lobby groups but there has been little scrutiny on how NGOs are funded. As annual NGO budgets (for communications, policy campaigns and lobbying) have grown excessively in the last two decades (often into the hundreds of millions of dollars), it is time to stop the double standards and demand transparency for all stakeholders involved in political debates and policy/issue management (ie, lobbying).
Watching the Watchdogs
In some cases, the hypocrisy has been astonishing. NGOs that have been formed to demand transparency from industry groups, like Corporate Europe Observatory or the US Right to Know, have not respected these same transparency standards for themselves.
The Firebreak exposed how almost all of US Right to Know’s funding comes from foundations via dark donor-advised funds, meaning that anonymous interest groups provide foundations with funding earmarked for the NGO, but prefer not to have this funding made public.
Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) receives funding from the Global Greengrants Fund. The Firebreak editor, David Zaruk, commented on X how unethical it was that the CEO founder and head, Olivier Hoedeman, also sits on the fiscal sponsor’s board (a consultancy that takes funding from non-disclosed foundations to regrant to NGOs). Caught with their pants down, within a week, Hoedeman resigned from the Global Greengrants Fund board, but they still take non-transparent funding from this dark fiscal sponsor, among others.
So if the transparency watchdogs are not transparent, then it is time for another transparency initiative to prevent such dark funding from interfering with the democratic process.
Motivations for the Transparent Democracy Initiative
While NGOs have been getting into trouble for corrupt funding practices for as long as Gazprom has been meddling in Western politics, the volumes of non-disclosed contributions have recently gotten out of hand. The Transparent Democracy Initiative gathered momentum after an exposé into the German government funding of political activist groups and NGOs to attack the center-right political parties during the last national elections. The CDU-CSU party launched an inquiry, asking the German coalition of Greens and Socialists 551 questions on the non-transparent funding of a large number of left-wing political activist NGOs who tried to disrupt the center-right CDU’s election campaign. See the Firebreak’s analysis of the inquiry’s questions (which the past German government declined to address).
The Transparent Democracy Initiative press release (available in German and translated into English) also highlighted the European Court of Auditors report that “criticized the lack of oversight in the allocation of more than €7.4 billion, which flowed to more than 4,400 NGOs in the EU between 2021 and 2023”.
One further key area of monitoring and disclosure will be in how foundations are using intentionally dark funds to finance NGO campaigns or forming fiscal sponsors to run activist campaigns (acting as NGO front groups). The Firebreak has been central in exposing the techniques and the levels of funding that have been largely hidden from public view by non-transparent foundation tools. The managing editor and head of research for the Transparent Democracy Initiative, Ludger Weß, recently published an article (translated into English in The Firebreak) on the depth of non-transparent funds.
The Role of The Firebreak in the New Initiative
Before the Firebreak exposés into the foundation-NGO-media nexus, most stakeholders in policy debates had never heard how donor-advised foundation funding or fiscal sponsor consultants were operating under the radar, but they had seen how NGOs and foundations had somehow become much more professionalized and dominant in issue management in the last decade. In the absence of transparency, we are just now finding out how these activist groups, with hundreds of millions of undisclosed or redirected foundation funding from so-called philanthropists, have been able to control the narrative and media coverage on issues like climate change, chemicals and agricultural technologies.
When a discreet lobbying group like the European Climate Foundation, for example, has €275 million a year (mostly from US tech billionaire foundations) to splash around on climate lobbying and communications campaigns, controlling the public narrative and the media while spreading irrational fear is not very difficult. We are only now learning what this stealth group has been doing (like funding almost every NGO remotely tied to climate issues or running the entire Greta show).
The Firebreak will continue to pull back the curtain on dark foundation and NGO activist funding and fight for stricter rules demanding NGO transparency and ending certain types of predatory funding practices. We are pleased to have the Transparent Democracy Initiative by our side.
The Firebreak editor, David Zaruk, is one of the founding members signing the constitution of the Transparent Democracy Initiative in Berlin last month. We will continue to share our research with the Initiative and amplify their investigations within our network. While the activists in the political NGOs are relentless at framing the narrative and defending their interests, more voices and stronger organizations will hopefully put an end to their transparency hypocrisy.
