Treasury drafts a plan to review and potentially revoke the tax-exempt status of Open Society, the SPLC and CAIR
Treasury officials are drawing up a sweeping audit of organisations deemed to be using and abusing the tax code, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's inner circle is drafting a blueprint that could strip non-compliant organisations of their 501(c)(3) status, with George Soros' Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations among those whose tax-exempt status could be revoked. The audit and the named organisations are reported on the account of three people briefed on the department's internal policy deliberations; the blueprint on the account of two of them.
What happened
The New York Post reports, on the account of three sources familiar with the matter, that Bessent and the IRS could revoke the tax-free status of the three named organisations, and that penalties under consideration range from corrective fines to full revocation of tax-exempt status, which would force the nonprofits to pay the standard 21% federal corporate tax rate. The initiative leans in part on what the report describes as a 2025 executive order signed by Trump targeting nonprofits operating with a "substantial illegal purpose", which the report says paves the way for the IRS to issue fines or strip the tax-exempt status of charities allegedly tied to political violence, protests or radical ideologies. Open Society and the SPLC are being scrutinised under that domestic executive order, while the administration is treating CAIR strictly as a national security target. Bessent enlisted Tony Saffier, a former special operations veteran and AI executive, to spearhead the interagency task force. The Treasury Department declined multiple requests to comment; Bessent confirmed in October 2025 — "last October", in the 27 August 2026 report — on the "Charlie Kirk Show" that work on compiling the list had begun. The report also records that Protect Democracy sued Treasury and the IRS earlier in the year, accusing the administration of illegally weaponising the tax code against its political opponents. On 1 September 2026, Reps. Lloyd Doggett and Terri Sewell cited the report in renewing a 14 April 2026 oversight demand to IRS chief executive Frank Bisignano, whose own release records Bisignano telling the Ways and Means Committee on 4 March 2026 that he would "100%" not initiate audits, investigations or revocations of tax-exempt status based on political targeting.
Why it matters
Tax exemption is the financial precondition for most organised advocacy, and the authority to review it sits inside the executive branch rather than with a court. What this reporting describes is a review whose targets are named before any finding — the department's own account, on Bessent's October 2025 confirmation, is that the compiling work had already begun — and the named organisations are drawn from one side of politics. A review that can be opened against a named opponent imposes cost and uncertainty long before any status is revoked, and that cost lands whether or not the theory ever survives a challenge.