Trump Admin Set to Target George Soros Nonprofit, Southern Poverty Law Center and CAIR in Major Tax Crackdown: Sources

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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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.”

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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.

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.

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.

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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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