One of President Donald Trump’s top priorities in his second term has been rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government—and for good reason. With help from Elon Musk and DOGE, Americans have already gotten a sobering look at just how casually Washington was lighting taxpayer money on fire. As fraud scandals continue to surface in places like Minnesota, new details are also emerging about how recklessly the Biden administration treated the hard-earned dollars of working Americans in its final year in power.
Enter the Tides Center.
The Tides Center, a so-called “social justice” fiscal sponsor closely tied to the Tides Foundation, raked in a staggering $37,810,397 in taxpayer funds in 2024, according to tax records. That’s the largest amount of government funding the group has received in a decade, up dramatically from just $13 million in 2014. Most of that cash came through government grants—handed out, unsurprisingly, during the Biden years. And yes, the money went exactly where you’d expect.
In Joe Biden’s final year in office, the Tides Center funneled funds to groups pushing expanded abortion access, affirmative action, and assistance for illegal immigrants to get out of detention facilities. They also provided fiscal sponsorship to outfits like the “Anti-Police Terror Project” and promoted information on sex-change procedures. Apparently, that’s what “public service” looks like now.
A particularly eye-opening detail: $21.9 million of those taxpayer dollars went right back into the Tides ecosystem—to the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy, a 501(c)(4) “social welfare organization.” Tides Advocacy claims its mission is to provide financial, legal, and personnel services to nonprofits promoting “shared prosperity and social justice,” and boasts that it manages around 140 projects and activities. Translation: a massive left-wing funding pipeline with a taxpayer-funded on-ramp.
And the spending didn’t stop there.
In 2024, the Tides Center donated $25,000 to the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ)—an organization so controversial that Discover Card cut ties with it in 2021 after revelations about its connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist terrorist group. AFGJ also fiscally sponsored a pro-Iran activist who was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in October 2024 for fundraising tied to the PFLP. But apparently, that wasn’t a red flag when taxpayer dollars were involved.
The Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC) in Oregon received $48,500. Their specialty? Providing legal defense for Antifa and other left-wing protesters. Their current focus includes defending activists under federal investigation for allegedly doxxing immigration officials. Even Biden-era federal agencies weren’t shy about feeding the beast.
The Department of Labor awarded the Tides Center $3 million for the “expansion of registered apprenticeship programs,” with another $5.9 million reportedly in the pipeline—something the Trump administration may want to examine closely.
And then there’s the real kicker: between 2014 and 2022, the State Department and our old friends at USAID shoveled an eye-watering $27 million into the Tides Center. Exactly which left-wing causes benefited from that global generosity? Your guess is as good as anyone’s.
Thankfully, the free ride is over.
In August, President Trump signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to award grants only to programs that “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” That means no more taxpayer funding for race-preferential programs, transgender ideology, illegal immigration advocacy, or projects promoting openly anti-American values. The gravy train has officially derailed.
Americans are fed up—fed up with fraud in states like Minnesota, and fed up with seeing their tax dollars treated like Monopoly money by ideological bureaucrats in Washington. Groups like the Tides Center have grown rich off a system that ignored voters and rewarded radical activism.
Under President Trump, that era is ending. And not a moment too soon.
