Philanthropic funding of science in the US is now on a par with federal research funding. That is according to an analysis of tax returns from non-profit organizations, which finds that philanthropic institutions now spend at least $30bn in total on science each year.
While there has been a lot of work exploring the patterns of government science funding, not much focus has been given to philanthropy even though it is known to contribute significant sums of money for research. Part of the issue has been a lack of data, but recent changes by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has made tax data from non-profit organizations available for research. As well as financial and organizational details, these tax forms also list grants that the organization has awarded.
Louis Shekhtman from Northeastern University in Boston and colleagues analysed more than 3.5 million tax forms filed by US non-profit organizations between 2010-2019. They identified almost 70,000 organizations that are involved in funding scientific research and higher education.
Their analysis shows that over the study period, these organizations gave more than 900,000 grants totalling $208bn. In 2018 and 2019 the total awarded was about $30bn per year, which is comparable to grant funding distributed by the National Institutes of Health and around three times that awarded by the National Science Foundation.
Doling it out
Philanthropic bodies that support science and higher education gave cash to other causes such as the arts, religion and education. Yet about 44% of funders gave more to science than any other area with 16% exclusively funding science. Those funders that focused primarily on science accounted for 93% of all scientific philanthropy.
Unlike government science funding, which relies on a few large organizations, the data shows that philanthropic funding involves a few large foundations and many small funders. The top 200 were responsible for 66% of the cash given to science but made up just 0.3% of grant-giving organizations. The smaller organizations still contributed significant amounts of money, with more than 7000 non-profits giving at least $1m over the study period.
[This is] the first step of at least tracking where the money is going
Louis Shekhtman
Philanthropic funders tend to give more grants and money locally. Approximately 35% of grants went to recipients in the donor’s state and 49% of funds remained in the same state. The researchers found that about half of funders awarded their largest grant to someone within the same state as them.
The study also discovered that once a grant was awarded, 69% of those relationships repeated a year later and 60% two years later. Funding then became more entrenched over time. Donations over two consecutive years had a more than 80% chance of continuing the next year and funding relationships of seven years had an almost 90% likelihood to continuing. Machine learning reveals links between climate misinformation and philanthropy
Given that the IRS data does not include money given by private individuals and only accounts for the 80% of non-profits that file their taxes electronically, the researchers say that their figures of the amount of money given to science via philanthropy is likely to be an underestimate.
“[This is] the first step of at least tracking where the money is going,” Shekhtman says. “The next step has to be what are the publication outputs, what new centres are being developed and what researchers are being hired as a result of this funding.”
Yet Shekhtman says that it will be difficult to determine what all of the money is spent on. Universities in the US bring in billions of dollars in donations and while some of that money has strings attached, a lot goes to general operating costs, infrastructure and buildings – things scientists don’t tend to think about or list in their funding acknowledgements. “Who donated the building you work in? Without them your research couldn’t get done,” Shekhtman adds.
