In 2012, Donor’s Trust, a tax exempt organization emphasizing a libertarian, free-market oriented political ideology, and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund each spent around three times as much as did the largest Political Action Committee. These organizations (organized under section 501 of the US Code) expend significant money to promote their political opinions (which run the gamut of the ideological spectrum from Citizens United to the Sierra Club). In this work, we present a novel set of data based on IRS documents filed by every tax-exempt organization in the United States since 2001. This presents computational difficulties, as there exist many millions of tax documents. We use machine coding techniques to extract semantic content from these documents. For this preliminary analysis, we then extract the network of inter-organizational grants of a selection of the largest exempt organizations.
We use this network structure to characterize the giving behavior for all
groups connected to these large organizations using correspondence analysis.