Treasury Secretary Bessent backs nonprofit disclosure bills to close tax loopholes

Tobi Opeyemi Amure Tue, July 28, 2026 at 9:06 AM PDT 6 min read

Generosity is one of the few money decisions most people make without running the math first. You write the check because something moved you, and the arithmetic shows up later—if it shows up at all.

The ritual is familiar enough to be invisible. A donation goes out in December. A receipt comes back in January. The number lands on a tax return in April and then disappears into a filing cabinet until the next holiday season.

Nobody checks the second half of the trip: where the money actually went after it left the account, who controlled it once it got there, and whether the group that cashed the check was the same group doing the work.

That is a lot of trust to extend to a form letter. Americans extended $617.20 billion in giving in 2025—the first year total giving cleared $600 billion, according to Giving USA.

Washington has decided to start checking. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threw his weight behind a package of nonprofit disclosure bills last week, and the timing lands on the charitable deduction at the exact moment millions more filers are about to claim one.

Treasury is rewriting Form 990 while the House moves four disclosure bills. — valiantsin suprunovich / Getty Images

Why the Charitable Deduction Works Differently for 2026 Filers

The tax code treats your giving differently this year than it did last year, and most people have not noticed yet.

Starting with the 2026 tax year, filers who take the standard deduction can write off up to $1,000 in cash donations—or $2,000 for joint filers—a break that did not exist on last year's return, according to Fidelity Charitable.

That is a big deal for the roughly 86% of filers the Tax Foundation expects to skip itemizing this year, as TheStreet has reported.

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The same law moved the goalposts in the other direction for people who do itemize. Charitable gifts are now deductible only to the extent they exceed 0.5% of adjusted gross income. So a couple earning $300,000 gets nothing on the first $1,500 they give, the firm confirmed.

Retirees have a workaround that sidesteps both limits, which TheStreet covered when Vanguard flagged the qualified charitable distribution as the 2026 move.

The Scale of Giving

When I pulled the Giving USA breakdown, one number stood out. Individuals accounted for $394.20 billion of last year's total—or 64 cents of every charitable dollar in the country.

That is not foundation money or corporate money. That is household money, given by people who will never see a Form 990 in their lives.

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Related: Peter Schiff sends blistering message to Secretary Bessent

The receiving end has grown to a size most donors would not guess. Rep. David Schweikert put the tax-exempt share of the U.S. economy at roughly 17% during a June hearing with Bessent, according to the congressman's office.

Put those two facts side by side, and the policy fight stops looking abstract. A sector that large, funded that heavily by ordinary households, has been reporting on itself through a form that has not kept pace with how money now moves through it.

The Core Issue: Fiscal Sponsorship

The issue centers on a tax-code blind spot known as fiscal sponsorship. Under current rules, an established charity can let an unregistered group operate under its tax exemption. Donors get a tax deduction, the parent charity takes a fee, and the group doing the work never has to file a Form 990 or reveal its name to the IRS. To regulators, it creates a massive black hole for accountability.