Editorial

Articles, 2008–2026

19 pieces covering the policy, regulatory, and structural shifts that have reshaped American charitable giving over nineteen years.

2026 2026-03-04

The Universal Charitable Deduction Returns to the Agenda Eight years after the post-TCJA decline in donor households began, the policy proposal that would address it has its most serious congressional consideration in years.

Policy Giving Trends

2025 2025-10-14

AI in Fundraising and the Cybersecurity Bill That Came Due Generative AI passed from novelty into operating-system status across the sector. Cybersecurity incidents at three large nonprofits demonstrated how unprepared most organizations remained.

Technology Operations

2024 2024-04-08

Proposed DAF Regulations and the Quiet QCD Expansion Treasury proposed the first significant federal rules governing donor-advised funds since 2006. SECURE 2.0’s charitable provisions came online in parallel.

Donor-Advised Funds Regulation

2023 2023-11-30

Two Crises for Effective Altruism, and a Wider Sector Question The collapse of FTX and the OpenAI governance crisis were not, strictly, nonprofit stories. They became the year’s most discussed nonprofit story anyway.

Foundations Governance

2022 2022-08-19

The IRS Gets $80 Billion. Exempt Organizations Gets a Sliver. The Inflation Reduction Act’s historic IRS funding was sold as a generational rebuild of the agency. The implications for nonprofit oversight were narrower than the headline suggested.

2021 2021-09-22

Donor-Advised Funds Cross $230 Billion as ProPublica Publishes the IRS Leak The fastest-growing vehicle in American philanthropy met the most extensive leak of high-net-worth tax information in the agency’s history. The collision was not coincidental.

Donor-Advised Funds Transparency

2020 2020-12-31

The Pandemic Year: Emergency Giving and a Brief Universal Deduction The COVID-19 pandemic produced the largest single-year giving response in modern US history. The CARES Act briefly restored a federal incentive for non-itemizers.

Disaster Response Policy Giving Trends

2019 2019-12-30

The SECURE Act and the Reshaping of IRA Charitable Giving The first major retirement-savings legislation in over a decade adjusted the rules around qualified charitable distributions in ways that mattered for older donors and the institutions that serve them.

Policy Planned Giving

2018 2018-06-12

Giving USA Confirms the TCJA Effect: Individual Donors Pulled Back The first complete giving year under the new tax law produced the result the projections had warned about. The structural conversation about the donor base began in earnest.

Giving Trends Policy

2017 2017-12-22

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the Standard Deduction Cliff Doubling the standard deduction was framed as middle-class tax relief. For the charitable sector, it was a structural change in the donor base.

Policy Giving Trends

2016 2016-12-24

When a Private Foundation Becomes a Liability The Donald J. Trump Foundation’s closure announcement, and the New York attorney general’s ongoing investigation, illustrated the difference between a charitable vehicle and a personal checkbook.

Foundations Compliance

2015 2015-08-26

One Year After the Ice Bucket Challenge: What $115 Million Bought The 2014 viral campaign that filled the ALS Association’s bank account with a year’s worth of revenue raised harder questions about the next year — and the years after.

Fundraising Giving Trends

2014 2014-07-15

The Form 1023-EZ and the Lowest Bar in Sector History A streamlined application for 501(c)(3) status replaced thirty pages of documentation with a three-page checklist. Critics said the IRS had stopped trying.

2013 2013-05-30

The IRS Targeting Controversy and What It Did to Exempt Organizations An inspector general report on screening of 501(c)(4) applications consumed Washington for months. The lasting damage was to the IRS division that regulates the sector.

2012 2012-12-30

Two Disasters, Two Fundraising Models Hurricane Sandy and the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting drew vast outpourings of charitable response — and exposed how differently the sector handles different kinds of crisis.

Disaster Response Fundraising

2011 2011-06-09

275,000 Charities Lost Tax-Exempt Status in a Single Day The Pension Protection Act’s automatic-revocation provision finally hit. Many of the affected organizations did not know they had ceased to exist.

Regulation Form 990

2010 2010-11-22

Citizens United and the Reawakening of the 501(c)(4) A Supreme Court decision on corporate political spending sent traffic to a tax classification most Americans had never heard of.

Regulation Policy

2009 2009-08-04

The Form 990 Redesign and the Governance Disclosure Era Filings for tax year 2008 had to use a substantially expanded Form 990. The new schedule arrived without much fanfare and quietly changed what the public could see.

Form 990 Regulation Transparency

2008 2008-12-18

How the Financial Crisis Reshaped American Giving Total giving fell for the first time in over a decade as individual donors retrenched and foundation endowments collapsed.

Giving Trends Foundations