Trump admin set to target Soros nonprofit, Southern Poverty Law, CAIR in major tax crackdown

 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the IRS could revoke the tax-free status of left-wing nonprofits such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, three sources familiar with the matter have told The Post.

It is part of a Trump-backed crackdown on “bogus” charities, and Treasury officials are drawing up a sweeping audit of outfits deemed to be using and abusing Uncle Sam’s tax code, the three people briefed on the Treasury Department’s internal policy deliberations said.

Bessent’s inner circle is drafting a blueprint that could ultimately strip non-compliant organizations of their 501(c)(3) status, according to two of the people familiar with the plans. The reviews could result in massive back payments and civil penalties, the same sources said.

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Billionaire philanthropist George Soros, founder of the Open Society Foundations, whose lefty network is now in the crosshairs of a Trump administration tax crackdown led by his former chief investment officer, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.AFP via Getty Images

The initiative leans in part on a 2025 executive order signed by President Donald Trump targeting nonprofits operating with a “substantial illegal purpose,” paving the way for the IRS to issue fines or even strip the tax-exempt status of charities allegedly tied to political violence, protests or radical ideologies.

Officials have also scrutinized a number of anti-corporate and labor-aligned advocacy groups that could end up on the blacklist, including the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, the anti-Amazon Athena Coalition, left-leaning watchdog MediaJustice, and the Strategic Organizing Center alongside its parent union, the SEIU, according to the three insiders briefed on the matter.

One of the sources warned that Treasury Department officials were “like a dog with a bone” and reckoned that many of the groups and their donors could be “on borrowed time.”

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

The aggressive crackdown is already facing fierce legal blowback. Left-leaning legal powerhouse Protect Democracy sued Treasury and the IRS earlier this year, accusing the administration of illegally weaponizing the tax code against its political opponents.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is leading the administration’s charge targeting progressive nonprofits and tax-exempt organizations.Jim LoScalzo – Pool via CNP/Shutterstock

The suit claims Bessent and the White House are bypassing strict federal tax laws to conduct a partisan witch hunt that violates the First Amendment rights of progressive charities.

While there is intense internal pressure from some administration officials to get “a good chunk of the crackdown” over the line before the midterms, others have argued for delaying formal enforcement until later in the term to avoid triggering massive, protracted legal battles, the three sources said.

There is a fear that adding high-profile domestic political targets like the SPLC and Soros’ network will trigger a wave of lawsuits, potentially stalling any momentum against foreign terror-linked groups like CAIR, these people told The Post.

The Treasury Department declined multiple requests to comment, but Bessent confirmed last October on the “Charlie Kirk Show” that work on compiling the hit list had begun.

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Uncle Sam’s tax collector is supervised by the Treasury Department, granting Bessent huge influence over how the IRS targets NGOs and charities accused of using and abusing the tax-exempt status.Getty Images

Formally stripping a group of its 501(c)(3) status is a notoriously sluggish process that can take years, involving protracted IRS audits, internal administrative appeals, and inevitable battles in federal tax court.

To help with the review of nonprofits, Bessent enlisted Tony Saffier, a former special operations veteran and AI executive recently tapped to spearhead the interagency task force.

Penalties under consideration range from corrective fines to the ultimate regulatory sanction: full revocation of tax-exempt status, which would force the nonprofits to pay the standard 21% federal corporate tax rate.

A Post analysis of the latest IRS filings for all three organizations shows they would have owed about $165 million in federal income tax for 2024 if taxed at that 21% rate.

Almost all of it comes from a single source: the Soros network accounts for $163.6 million of the total. The SPLC would owe roughly $354,000, and 17 CAIR chapters would owe about $860,000 between them. That combined total amounts to a mere rounding error for the US government’s coffers.

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Alex Soros, seen here at a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden last year, is now running the Open Society Foundations founded by his father.Charles Wenzelberg / New York Post

The targets face unique controversies that the administration is leveraging to justify the crackdown.

Now chaired by George Soros’ 40-year-old son, Alexander, the Open Society Foundations funnels billions to NGOs pushing diversity initiatives, bankrolling climate-change lawsuits, and supporting undocumented migrants.

A spokesperson for the Soros nonprofit told The Post: “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.”

Bessent is eyeing Soros’ charity despite famously spearheading global currency bets for the Hungarian-born billionaire—including a wildly lucrative wager against the British pound.

When Bessent stepped down as chief investment officer for Soros Fund Management in 2015, Soros staked his new firm with a cool $2 billion.

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The Open Society Foundations’ past financial backing of BLM and related activist groups has put the progressive network squarely in the crosshairs of a new Trump administration tax crackdown.Getty Images

OSF’s beneficiaries include Black Lives Matter, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and United We Dream Action, a group that actively works to frustrate the deportation of illegal migrants.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is reeling from the recent federal indictment of its former intelligence director. While OSF and SPLC are being scrutinized under the president’s domestic executive order, the administration is treating CAIR strictly as a national security target.

Prosecutors allege the self-described anti-racism outfit secretly funneled donor funds to extremist informants, including an operative who allegedly helped organize the violent 2017 Charlottesville rally.

Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has long faced scrutiny over alleged foreign entanglements.

Federal prosecutors named the group as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial. CAIR adamantly denies any ties to illicit foreign funding or terror organizations.

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The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is among several high-profile organizations targeted in a new proposal by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to review and potentially revoke their tax-exempt status.MediaNews Group via Getty Images

CAIR and the SPLC did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.

Samuel Handwerger, a tax policy professor at the University of Maryland, says the fear of losing an exemption misses the larger picture.

“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,” the certified forensic accountant said.

The tax expert warned that expanding executive power to target specific groups sets a dangerous precedent.

“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,” he told The Post.

https://nypost.com/2026/08/27/business/trump-admin-set-to-target-george-soros-nonprofit-in-tax-crackdown/

The Dollar's Not Dying

 by James Rickards

Last week’s financial media was full of apocalyptic headlines: “$40 trillion in national debt!” “U.S. debt in a doom loop!” “The end of the dollar is near!”

Gold and bitcoin soared in lockstep with the dollar doom and gloom. If you took the headlines at face value, one would assume the dollar was already toast and U.S. Treasuries were worth no more than digital confetti.

The truth is that the dollar’s position as the leading reserve currency is not in jeopardy. Of course, foreign exchange reserves are not simply piles of currency. They are largely held in liquid financial assets, including U.S. Treasury securities denominated in dollars.

Dollar-denominated assets will dominate global reserves for decades to come.

The reason is simple. There are few sovereign bond markets with the size, liquidity and depth of the U.S. Treasury market. Other large government bond markets, including Japan and major European markets, do not offer the same combination of scale and liquidity. King dollar will remain king.

This does not mean interest rates won’t rise or inflation won’t increase. Both are likely. But neither means the end of the dollar. It just means the Treasury pays more to borrow and you pay more at the gas pump and grocery store.

So, there are problems in the dollar bond markets, but debasement-trade hysteria is not a useful way to understand them.

BESSENT GOES AFTER THE BOND MARKET

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has just announced a plan to address higher interest rates in U.S. Treasury securities markets and, by extension, mortgage and credit card markets. It has both long-term and short-term components.

One short-term component involves U.S. support for Japan’s efforts to prop up the yen, including joint currency intervention and potential greater use of the Federal Reserve’s FIMA Repo Facility. That facility allows Japan to borrow dollars against its U.S. Treasury holdings rather than selling those securities outright.

In turn, that could take pressure off U.S. interest rates. Japan is the world’s largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, with about $1.12 trillion as of June.

Another short-term component is for the Treasury to purchase longer-dated Treasury securities, specifically those in the 10- to 30-year sectors. The Treasury recently announced that it will at least double the size of certain scheduled buyback operations from $2 billion to $4 billion, with the possibility of going higher.

Treasury has also relied heavily on short-term maturities such as one-month, three-month and six-month Treasury bills in its overall financing mix. These Treasury bills generally carry lower interest rates than longer-dated notes and bonds. Greater reliance on shorter maturities can lower U.S. interest expense, at least in the short run.

Treasury bills are also prized by dealers and hedge funds because they are highly liquid and are widely used as collateral in financial transactions. Supporting liquidity at the long end while maintaining a large supply of short-term Treasury securities makes sense. Why it is causing such hysteria in the media is a bit of a mystery.

BESSENT’S 3-3-3 GAMBIT

The longer-term component of the Bessent Plan is sometimes referred to as the Three Arrows.

The first arrow is to keep annual deficits at 3.0% or less of GDP. The second arrow is to achieve GDP growth of 3.0% or more. The third arrow is to increase U.S. energy production by the equivalent of 3 million barrels of oil per day.

That’s where the shorthand 3-3-3 comes from: a 3% deficit, 3% real GDP growth and 3 million additional barrels of oil equivalent per day.

Since oil output does not directly impact fiscal policy, we can leave that to one side in our analysis. The deficit and GDP growth targets, however, are critical.

The metric that really matters in terms of whether investors have confidence in U.S. Treasury securities is the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio. It’s silly to hyperventilate about $40 trillion as the U.S. national debt unless you put that number in the context of the GDP available to finance and roll over the debt.

Right now, gross U.S. federal debt is roughly 123% of GDP. That’s the result of approximately $40 trillion of debt divided by roughly $32.5 trillion of annualized nominal GDP. That ratio is near the highest levels in U.S. history.

High debt-to-GDP ratios can be a drag on growth and leave governments with less room to respond to crises. A ratio of 60% is much more comfortable. A ratio of 30% is more comfortable still. The previous postwar high was reached around the end of World War II.

The annual deficit will not go down to zero. That’s a fantasy. The level of U.S. national debt will also not go down anytime soon. That’s another fantasy.

But that doesn’t matter.

What does matter is whether the debt-to-GDP ratio goes down.

The way to do that is to grow the economy faster than the debt. If you can do that, the ratio goes down even if the debt goes up. That’s Bessent’s plan. That’s what he meant when he said the U.S. could “grow its way out” of the debt problem. In theory, he was right.

For example, let’s say annual deficits are $2 trillion so that a year from now the national debt will be $42 trillion. That’s a 5.0% increase in the national debt.

But if GDP grows from $32.5 trillion to $34.5 trillion, that’s a 6.2% increase. The debt-to-GDP ratio drops from roughly 123% to 121.7%. That’s still high, but it’s lower than the year before.

That’s all the so-called bond market vigilantes need to see. As long as the debt-to-GDP ratio is coming down, bond investors have reason to retain confidence in U.S. Treasuries and the U.S. dollar.

The U.S. has done this before. The gross federal debt-to-GDP ratio reached roughly 119% in 1946 and was down to about 31% by 1980. That process took more than three decades and occurred under both parties using a combination of fiscal and monetary policy, strong nominal growth and inflation.

During that period, the national debt increased substantially. But GDP increased by more than 1,000%. And that was the key. If GDP grows faster than debt, the ratio comes down and America’s fiscal position improves.

HERE’S THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

So, that’s the plan. But there’s a dirty little secret that Bessent has not emphasized.

When the government computes debt-to-GDP ratios, it’s using nominal numbers, not numbers adjusted for inflation.

In the example above, GDP grew by about 6.2% while the national debt grew by 5.0%. That lowers the ratio, but it does not reveal how much of the GDP growth was real and how much was inflation.

The 6.2% nominal growth could have been 4.2% real growth plus 2.0% inflation. That’s fairly healthy. But it could have been 2.2% real growth plus 4.0% inflation.

At 4.0% annual inflation, the purchasing power of the dollar is cut roughly in half in about 18 years and cut in half again over the next 18 years. That kind of inflation can destroy your net worth and income if you’re not prepared.

So, how much inflation is included in the Bessent Plan? Secretary Bessent didn’t say.

Investors should assume the worst.

The U.S. has had difficulty sustaining real growth of more than about 2.0% per year on average since the global financial crisis. If we need roughly 6.0% nominal growth to outrun the growth in debt and if we can only produce 2.0% real growth per year, then the difference has to come from inflation.

That could mean 4.0% inflation.

That’s not a policy preference. It’s just fifth-grade math.

In describing how the U.S. lowered its debt-to-GDP ratio dramatically between the end of World War II and 1980, I conveniently omitted the fact that consumer prices rose about 50% between 1977 and 1981.

That’s one way the U.S. government took care of the debt problem.

I lived through that period. It was a fun time if you owned gold or real estate, if you used leverage and if you had a job that gave you a raise every few months.

It was not a fun time if you depended on fixed-income streams like annuities, insurance policies, pension plans or Social Security.

Which side of that trade are you on?

https://dailyreckoning.com/rickards-the-dollars-not-dying/

"Most Jobs Will Disappear Forever": Gates Urges Taxes On AI, Robots To Protect Jobs For Humans

 by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times,

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates warned Wednesday that artificial intelligence (AI) will permanently eliminate many white- and blue-collar jobs and called for taxes on AI and robots along with protections reserving certain jobs for humans.

"Many jobs will disappear forever," Gates wrote in an essay published on his Gates Notes website. He said AI could become "the greatest equalizer ever invented" or "the worst source of injustice," and governments are not adequately preparing for the disruption.

Gates said comparisons between AI and earlier technological changes are misleading. The shift from agricultural to office work occurred over generations and created jobs requiring human thought. AI now can replace human cognition and can operate through devices and systems already in use.

AI will affect law, customer service, medicine, software, and manufacturing over roughly a decade, Gates predicted. Entry- and mid-level positions face the greatest immediate danger, while robots will eventually threaten construction, hospitality, and other physical jobs.

Gates proposed creating a category called "Human Reserved" for work that society decides should continue to be performed by people even when machines become capable of doing it.

Examples could include delivering a terminal medical diagnosis, education, and mental health care, although Gates acknowledged that governments would face difficult decisions about which jobs to protect.

Gates also proposed taxing AI tokens and robots. Employers pay payroll taxes when they hire workers but can often deduct robots as business expenses, creating an incentive to replace labor, he said. A tax could slow that process and provide revenue for retraining displaced workers and strengthening the social safety net.

Gates also said AI could make fraud, cyberattacks, bioterrorism, surveillance, and disinformation easier. He expressed particular concern about children forming relationships with AI companions and relying on the technology in ways that weaken critical-thinking skills.

Despite those dangers, Gates said AI could accelerate medical research, improve diagnoses, expand educational opportunities, and help address problems involving agriculture, energy, and climate change.

He called for new national and international institutions to manage AI's effects, saying cooperation between the United States and China will be necessary.

"This unprecedented technology demands an unprecedented global response," Gates wrote.

U.S. Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) supported the idea of taxing AI.

"Even tech billionaires like Bill Gates are saying we need an AI token tax to prevent mass unemployment," Casar posted on X on Wednesday. "I introduced the first and only bill in Congress to do it." The Cato Institute's Adam Michel pushed back in June on some of Gates's ideas, including taxing the robots that replace jobs done by humans.

"Empirical research consistently finds that investment in new technologies is complementary, primarily augmenting, not replacing, work," Michel wrote in an article.

"For workers to succeed in an AI economy, they will need more investment in newer and better tools, not less. Taxing the capital behind those tools would slow the very process that can raise wages and expand opportunity."

Pedro Domingos, a professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, compared Gates to Dario Amodei in a post on X on Wednesday.

Amodei, an AI entrepreneur and CEO of Anthropic in Silicon Valley, has been labeled a "doomsayer" on AI and unemployment by the media.

"Training AI to imitate humans is not the path to superintelligence," Domingos posted on X.

University of Washington professor emeritus Oren Etzioni said in a post he wrote for GeekWire that Gates correctly identified AI-driven job displacement but his solutions were "mostly wrong."

Etzioni supports a tax on AI but said a proposed tax on tokens would only increase the cost of American AI and send consumers to cheaper versions made by China.

Etzioni said AI isn't causing layoffs; it is causing jobs to never be posted. Etzioni's solution is to encourage AI literacy and move displaced workers into the caregiving industry.

https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/most-jobs-will-disappear-forever-bill-gates-calls-taxes-ai-and-robots-protect-jobs-humans

Trump trumps the judge, and it’s an instant classic

 Haha.  This is great.

Back in January, President Trump and his State Department instituted a freeze on visas from 75 countries likely to import public charges to our shores.  It took a while for it to work its way through the court system, then finally on August 21st, a Biden-appointed judge struck it down for the usual ridiculous reasons.

Okay, said Trump, five days later, I’ll see your 75 countries and raise you 120 more, and freeze visas globally.

Take that, he effectively said.  Take that, and I dare you to tell me a president lacks the authority to do it. G’head you pointy-headed progressive. The president has near plenary power to deny first time visa applicants entry onto our shores (emphasis added).

In an essence, the so-called ‘plenary power doctrine’ theoretically shields any legislative or executive actions related to immigration law from judicial review. Understanding the role of deference in immigration law requires explaining the concept of deference generally and briefly retelling the history of the doctrine. Since its origins in the nineteenth century, the plenary power doctrine has taken on different meanings: initially, it meant absolute federal power over borders, as well as the nonjusticiability of challenges to immigration law, under a string of cases, first established in Chae Chan Ping. Through the twentieth century, it evolved from strict nonjusticiability to a highly deferential standard of review. Specifically, the Supreme Court has ruled that it will uphold decisions excluding noncitizens from entry so long as the government advances a ‘facially legitimate and bona fide’ reason for the exclusion. While developments in constitutional law over the last century have eroded the plenary power doctrine’s scope, especially as to procedural due process claims and challenges to indefinite detention, courts have not extended these developments to first-time visa applicants with no existing ties to the United States.

A reminder, via Fox:

A public-charge determination can make an immigrant visa applicant inadmissible under federal immigration law if officials determine the person is likely to become dependent on certain forms of public assistance after arriving in the U.S.

 

That’s right.  Fox remembered, but everyone else, including this judge, appears to have forgotten a 1996 law which passed under the last even minimally rational Democrat President, Bill Clinton. And was, for all intents and purposes, upheld under Trump 1.0.

From a 2020 article in, of all places, The Cape Cod Times, entitled “‘Public charge’ law is nothing new; Clinton signed similar bill in 1996”:

This is existing law. The Immigration Service is required to deny those who may become a ‘public charge’ from permanent legal residency. 

The new [2020] regulation would broaden that definition to include anyone who receives more than an aggregate of 12 months in a 36- month period, and also expands what constitutes being a public charge to include things like housing assistance via a voucher or food assistance via food stamp programs.

 

There are other unenforced laws on the books. Federal agencies are also being instructed to begin enforcement of a 1996 law signed by President Clinton that requires the sponsors of green card holders to reimburse the federal government for welfare and other benefits received.

Trump is perfectly within his rights here, and when lawfare appeals this all the way to the Supreme Court, which will almost certainly happen, Supreme Court precedent should slap them back good and hard.

Well played, Mr. President. Well played.

M. Walter blogs at www.mwalterwriter.com where you can find The Lunatic Left Series, a daily snapshot of Democrat words and deeds so you can see what they’re up to without having to go hip-deep in their toxic brew. You’re welcome ;)

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/trump-trumps-the-judge-and-it-s-an-instant-classic/