The Amazing Journey of Stacey Abrams Through the Non-Profit World

There’s been a lot of stuff in the news the past five weeks about public money, the political-nonprofit industrial complex, and the resulting waste and abuse.

Sometimes it’s helpful to see these things through case studies, perhaps through the experiences of a given person.

A certain name has come up several times in the news over the past month regarding non-profits: Stacey Abrams, the celebrated author and twice-failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate. No word yet if she will team up with Beto O’Rourke to do a lecture tour on how to keep losing election campaigns and still remain popular.

My bad, it’s now twice-failed candidate, celebrated author, and successful businesswoman Stacey Abrams. Because she was the senior counsel for Power Forward Communities’ parent organization, Rewiring America.

Rewiring  America went from $100 in revenue to $2 billion in three months (take that, Elon):

DOGE discovered $2 billion in taxpayer funds set aside for a fledgling nonprofit linked to perennial Georgia Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

 

The Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration awarded Power Forward Communities the grant in April 2024 as part of the agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program. Power Forward Communities received the green energy grant despite the fact that it was founded months earlier in late 2023 and never managed anywhere near the grant’s dollar figure—it reported just $100 in total revenue during its first three months in operation, according to its latest tax filings.

Last month there was the headline, “Voting Rights Group Founded by Stacey Abrams Fined for Illegal Campaigning.”

Abrams created the New Georgia Project (NGP) in 2013 with the purpose of increasing voter registration and turnout. She served in its leadership until 2017 when she left to run for governor. The organization was then chaired by Raphael Warnock from 2017 and 2020, until he left to run for US senator. It was during the time Warnock was involved that the organization illegally campaigned for…. Stacey Abrams.

This isn’t to accuse Abrams of wrong-doing with either NGP or Power Forward Communities (PFC), but her involvement points to a common theme, which is that non-profit organizations form the backbone of the Left’s power.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled over the past five weeks about wasteful federal spending in the political-nonprofit-industrial complex. There are the strange USAID grants for things like a drag show in Ecuador and expanding atheism in Nepal. The various pass-throughs of funds from the feds through middlemen like the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors to end up in the pockets of the politically-connected. Then there are the monstrous overhead (indirect) costs charged to the federal government by various grantees, or the fact that after the various pass-throughs there is little money left for actual programming.

This all misses the point, which is that the stated purpose of the project is merely one of its benefits. These grants place funds and people in certain strategic locations that can be dual-purposed for other objectives. That $1.5 million to promote job opportunities for LGBTQ individuals in Serbia through USAID is a way of getting money to somebody in Serbia. The federal monies that get whittled away as they move through various pass-throughs fund a web of politically-affiliated, dual-purpose non-profits.

Let’s go back and look at the example of Abrams’s first NGO go-around, NGP.

NGP had a sibling, the New Georgia Project Action Fund (NGAP), that was formed in 2017 to engage in electioneering activities. NGP was fined the afore-mentioned $300,000 because it allowed its personnel and resources to engage in those NGAP activities. In fact, the two organizations shared the same address until 2019. Anybody who has worked in organizations on projects that have different funding lines but complementary leadership and workplace culture, let alone the same office space, understands the temptation to mix activities. That’s just “smart” leveraging and problem-solving, but illegal when it comes to politics and tax-exempt status.

The point is that there was an existing NGP structure, funded under different auspices, that could be dual-purposed to assist NGAP activities. The fact that the legit, public side of NGP that was involved in turning Georgia purple through registration drives was also involved in illegal electioneering was just a “coincidence.”

So an obvious question to ask is: When Warnock left NGP in 2020 to run for the US Senate, were any NGP resources used for his campaign, in the same way they were used for Abrams in 2018? To my knowledge Warnock hasn’t been asked. If the resources weren’t dual-purposed, what in the culture and office management of NGP changed? Was it merely the fact that NGAP got new office space?

As a postscript, in 2020 NGP’s annual revenues jumped from $1.9 million to $25 million. Keep that under your hat for a bit.

So let’s turn our attention back to Abrams, PFC, and Rewiring America.

This story came to light when newly installed EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin discovered $20 billion that the Biden Administration had parked at an outside financial institution in order to push the funds out the door. Zeldin’s office made the connection between the $20 billion and a December 2024 Project Veritas video capturing a Biden-era EPA appointee comparing the effort of getting appropriated money out-the-door as the equivalent of throwing “gold bars off the Titanic.”

PFC was in line to receive $2 billion of those gold bars.

Much was made of the fact that PFC’s previous revenues only amounted to $100. However, if you dig further you find that the money was not awarded to PFC in the last days of the Biden Administration as that Project Veritas video might lead you to believe. Rather, it was awarded in April 2024, just a few months after PFC was created.

If you dig a bit deeper and look at PFC’s parent organization, that Abrams was senior counsel for — Rewiring America, its 2023 tax return shows total revenues of $621,317 and that it only received its tax-exempt status in March 2024.

Why on earth would anyone think that giving PFC and Rewiring America $2 billion was a good idea? Even better is the example of the “Coalition for Green Capital” — which received $5 billion despite revenue of just $3.4 million in 2023.

I’m going to guess that given the very short period of time (a few months) between PFC’s creation and the EPA’s awarding of the money, that not only was PFC specifically created to receive the funds, but that in all likelihood its creation was EPA’s idea all along.

So the question is with the gushers of spending coming out of the Biden Administration, how many other custom-designed creations like PFC are there?

Take it another step. What would PFC have done with that $2 billion? How would it have disbursed it? In order to fulfill its mission of decarbonizing American homes, it would have to set up a network of various grantees and sub-grantees across the country — each funding organizational infrastructure and various personnel — thereby creating a national web of personnel and slush funds.

This newly created network would have operated with little oversight because PFC simply didn’t have the resources or experience to provide it. Go back to the point above NGP’s annual revenue in 2020 jumping from $1.9 million to $25 million. Want to bet that came from the gusher of guilt money that flowed after George Floyd? Remember what happened when an organization with ramshackle administration, BLM, received tens of millions of dollars?

Take it yet one more step, what would all of those grantees and sub-grantees, whether from PWC or the Coalition for Green Capital, have done with those billions of dollars and thousands of people in such a poorly supervised environment?

Personally, I cannot wait for Abrams’s biography.