A week ago, Christopher Ryan wrote about a number of bills affecting tax-exempt organizations that the House Ways and Means Committee had advanced. One was the Foreign Funding Transparency Act.
If enacted, the FFTA would require specified organizations exempt under Section 501(c) to report, separately, on their Form 990 donations received from foreign nationals and donations from foreign nationals in countries of concern.
As part of this process, the Committee has requested donor information for a subset of tax-exempt organizations, including nonprofit tax-exempt newsroom, BreakThrough News. In February, in connection with the bill, the Committee sent an inquiry that BreakThrough News declined to answer, on both technical and First Amendment grounds.
In response, the Committee issued a subpoena.
BreakThrough News argues that the request is harassment, based on its political views. But the Committee gave them until Friday to respond.
As Christopher said, this bill (and the others that have advanced) demonstrate a Congress that is interested in tighter oversight of tax-exempt organizations, and perhaps one that is flexing its political muscles to discourage tax-exempt organizations from certain viewpoints. We’ll see where it goes from here.
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