Shady Soros-Funded Group Influenced Biden Reforms in Nearly Two Dozen Policy Areas, Memos Show

The Hungarian-born hedge fund boss got his start funding “civil society initiatives” aimed at toppling Communist governments in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, but has since spread his activities to over 60 countries around the world, including the United States. Several countries have now banned his organisations’ activities.

"Governing for Impact", a little-known but apparently highly influential DC-based nonprofit which has received millions of dollars from George Soros, has boasted of success in reversing nearly two dozen Trump-era regulatory policies through quiet, behind-the-scenes lobbying of the Biden administration, memos and a slide presentation first reported on by Fox News show.

The group’s website, invisible to search engines, is home to nearly three dozen “proposed action memoranda” which began to be formulated in November 2020, immediately after the tension-filled election which unseated Donald Trump and installed Joe Biden as president.

The legal strategy memos, most of them written by anonymous authors, focus on five areas: education, the environment, health care, housing, and labour – all areas in which Democrats have sought to reverse four years of Trump policies via executive orders and legislation.

Screengrab of the Governing for Impact website landing page. The website is not accessible by search engine.

© Photo : Screenshot

The memos point to cooperation between Governing for Impact and organisations including the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at Berkley Law School, the National Student League Defense Network, a non-profit created in 2017 and focusing on issues like quality of education and student debt, and the Economic Policy Institute, a DC-based policy think tank co-founded by Robert Reich, the former secretary of labour in the Clinton administration.

Governing for Impact presents itself as a counterweight to “corporate and other entrenched interests”, and a protector of “everyday, working Americans”.

“Governing for Impact seeks to fill this gap and build progressive power at the state and federal level. Through collaboration with partners, we help make progressive policy priorities a reality by focusing on the nitty gritty details of policy development and implementation. Many of the proposals on this site focus on how the new administration could unwind the previous administration’s harmful regulatory legacy, but GFI continues to take on new policy projects at all levels of government”, the "About" section of the site says.

A Harvard Law School internship from late 2020 filled in the details on Governing for Impact’s goals, saying it was created to help prepare the Biden administration for office through “more than 60 in-depth, shovel-ready regulatory recommendations”.

In an internal slide show uploaded to Prezi but now inaccessible, the group boasted that “more than 20” of its policy proposals had been implemented by the Biden administration during its first months in office. The slides pointed to multiple Biden officials who had been given what the organisation called a “listening tour”, including now-former regulation review head Sharon Block, as well as senior figures from the Departments of Justice, Labour, Energy, the Office of Domestic Climate Policy, and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Some 10 offices and agencies were said to have received memos aimed at shifting federal policy on a raft of issues.

Governing for Impact receives cash from the New Venture Fund, a DC nonprofit incubator tied to Soros’ Open Society Foundations, which gets its money from Arabella Advisors, a massive liberal dark money hub. The convoluted funding scheme reportedly allows GFI itself to avoid filing with the Internal Revenue Service.

OSF accounting data shows that GFI and its associated "action" platform – the Sixteen Thirty Fund – were given nearly $13 million in grants in 2019 and 2020.

The OSF has not shied away from its support for Governing for Impact, with the organisation’s executive director Tom Perriello saying it was “proud to support” its “efforts to protect American workers, consumers, patients, students and the environment through policy reform”. Perriello insisted that the OSF has been “transparent” about its “enthusiasm” for GFI’s “victories for American workers and families”.

Lawmakers and principled opponents of dark money in politics have expressed concerns over George Soros’ activities in the US political space. The hedge fund manager, best known in the business world for plundering the British pound in 1992, “declared war” on Trump following the real estate mogul and reality show host’s surprise victory in the 2016 presidential race, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into initiatives to undermine his presidency. Soros’ organisations have continued their operations under Biden.

Before becoming involved in US politics, Soros spent decades funding “civil society initiatives” in dozens of countries in the Third World and the post-Soviet space, seeking to transform countries into cookie cutter Western-style liberal democracies through extensive funding for political parties, media, education, and cultural initiatives. Some countries, including Russia and his native Hungary, have since deemed his activities a form of unwanted interference in their internal affairs. Russia banned the OSF’s operations in 2015. In 2018, Hungary kicked Soros-backed Central European University out of the country. In 2017, tens of thousands of people signed a petition on Change.org asking Trump to ban Soros and his Open Society Foundations from operating on US soil, accusing him, his family, and businesses of manipulating US politicians and spreading an “anti-America open borders globalist New World Order agenda”. The petition has since been taken down.