Anti-Trump groups like ‘Families Over Billionaires present themselves as grassroots campaigns for ordinary Americans. The truth is very different.
Days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a group of former Joe Biden and Kamala Harris staffers came together to launch an effort to arouse the public against the GOP’s looming push to cut taxes on the wealthy. Dubbed “Families Over Billionaires,” the project quickly assembled an eight-figure war chest.
“The campaign will elevate the voices of the majority of Americans who oppose more tax breaks for the rich,” the group says in its mission statement. Mia Ehrenberg, the spokeswoman for Families Over Billionaires—and an ex-Harris campaign aide—told The Free Press that the organization is teaming with “grassroots organizers” to get its message out.
In fact, like a surprising number of Trump 2.0 resistance pop-up groups, Families Over Billionaires owes its existence not to small-dollar donations from ordinary Americans or to grassroots organizers but to a single entity: the consulting firm Arabella Advisors, which oversees a massive “dark money” network bankrolled by the super-rich and aligned with the Democratic Party.
The network relies on support from billionaires like Bill Gates, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Democratic megadonor George Soros. In other words, it’s not Families Over Billionaires so much as it’s billionaires over other billionaires.
“The Resistance is almost pure astroturf, not grassroots,” said Scott Walter, the president of the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank that investigates left-leaning philanthropies. “It’s a plaything of megadonors uninterested in ordinary Americans’ money.”
Families Over Billionaires’ affiliation with the behemoth Arabella network is a window into how various Resistance 2.0 groups are portraying themselves as grassroots yet receiving either all or significant portions of their funding through billionaire-backed nonprofits. The money donated by the billionaires gets funneled to a group of nonprofits with names like Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, and the New Venture Fund. These nonprofits are overseen by Arabella Advisors, which receives management fees for handling legal, payroll, and HR matters.
The Arabella-managed entities house and incubate a raft of projects boosting left-leaning causes like Families Over Billionaires. They are unincorporated, with registered trade names but no legal standing. This arrangement allows them to avoid filing their own financial disclosures with the IRS. It also makes it difficult, and often nearly impossible, to trace how all grants into the Arabella network are doled out—prompting concerns about “dark money” from watchdog groups.
They do have staff, however. For instance, Families Over Billionaires is led by numerous former Biden and Harris officials: ex-Harris digital rapid response director Katherine Vibbert, ex-Biden White House aide Ben Schwartz, and ex-Biden White House official Michael Linden, its director.
Each year, the Arabella-managed nonprofits dole out hundreds of millions of dollars propping up environmentalism, climate activism, voter registration, diversity initiatives, and—in the case of the Sixteen Thirty Fund—the largest Democratic political action committees in the United States.
The documents examined by The Free Press show that in addition to Families Over Billionaires, the dark money funds have registered dozens of other trade names, including the likes of the Rural Victory Fund, Stop Deficit Squawks, Protect Our Care, and the Better Internet Initiative. In other words, what looks like a groundswell of grassroots organizations is, in reality, just a series of trade names for what are legally the same entities.
In 2023, Arabella Advisors was investigated by the Washington, D.C. attorney general after dueling complaints were filed against both Arabella and a conservative network shaped by Leonard Leo, the conservative activist who is co-chairman of the Federalist Society, an influential legal group. In April 2024, the investigation was closed.
“We follow all local, state, and federal law[s] in our work,” Ehrenberg, the Families Over Billionaires spokeswoman, told The Free Press.
On its website, Families Over Billionaires lists almost a dozen partners. They have names like Moms Rising, Americans for Tax Fairness, and Economic Security Project Action. One partner, Unrig Our Economy, says it is helping lead one million grassroots activists to hold “wealthy executives and the politicians who enable them accountable.” In fact, on its 2022 federal tax forms, the group disclosed revenue of $5 million—all of it from the Sixteen Thirty Fund.
Similarly, partner Americans for Tax Fairness is not a standalone group: It’s part of the Arabella-managed New Venture Fund, which boasts over $768 million in assets. The New Venture Fund, based in D.C., counts some of its largest donors since 2018 as the Bill Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Soros-funded Foundation to Promote Open Society, according to tax records.
“The groups that the New Venture Fund house essentially act less as meaningful organs of policy change than as providing cover for billionaires and the consultant class,” said a former New Venture Fund official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “They created an intentionally complex web of interrelated organizations that espouse anti-corporatist beliefs and call themselves grassroots—but really serve to consolidate power into the hands of a few influential individuals.”
The Families Over Billionaires project is also partnered with Fair Share America—which says it aims “to make wealthy individuals and the most profitable corporations pay what they owe so that all of us can thrive.” Fair Share America was incubated at the Rockefeller Foundation, which has more than $6.2 billion in assets, according to its 2023 financial disclosures.
Another partner group, Indivisible, is helping to orchestrate protests across the country against the Trump administration. In Montana, more than 250 people marched this month to raise concerns about the government’s policies with the help of Indivisible Bozeman. In Decatur, Georgia, protesters rallied at a Tesla dealership against DOGE leader Elon Musk, the world’s richest man—with local reports identifying an Indivisible chapter as the organizer. Purported grassroots activism in red districts at town hall meetings against Republican lawmakers was aided by the handiwork of Indivisible, The Washington Free Beacon reported, pointing out that Indivisible is heavily funded by Soros.
Families Over Billionaires declined to comment on its relationships with the Arabella-managed funds or on its plans to push back against the Trump tax cuts. Republicans in Congress are aiming to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which Families Over Billionaires argued in a memo will deliver “trillions in tax giveaways to billionaires and big corporations.”
