by Steven Richards
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith says a more than two-year congressional investigation into how nonprofits have abused their tax-exempt status – as a source of foreign influence, fraud or political action – is finally producing results as the Trump administration cracks down.
“We’ve been seeing progress over the two-plus years that we’ve been investigating nonprofits and the foreign interference of money and how they’ve been using nonprofits to help terrorist organizations,” Smith recently told the Just the News, No Noise TV show. “We have named names, and I’m glad to see that the Treasury Department has been responding to that as well.”
He also said: “It should alarm every single American that these tax-exempt entities have been able to be abused to allow foreign intervention.”
The Missouri Republican highlighted three distinct fronts in the committee’s investigation: terrorism-linked charities, the Neville Roy Singham network connected to Beijing and the nonprofits behind waves of anti-ICE unrest across the country.
A two-year paper trail
Smith’s committee launched its tax-exempt sector investigations in September 2024, sending letters to the Biden-era IRS requesting that seven organizations with alleged ties to foreign terrorist groups lose their tax-exempt status.
The list has grown since.
The committee, the House’s chief tax-writing body, referred the Alliance for Global Justice to the IRS over its financial support for Samidoun, an organization the Treasury Department has designated for its affiliation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – a designated terrorist organization.
The committee has also pressed the IRS over Islamic Relief USA’s financial relationship with its overseas affiliate, Islamic Relief Worldwide, which the committee says has ties to Hamas, the Sunni Islamist Palestinian nationalist political group that governs the Gaza Strip.
IRUSA has since sued its overseas counterpart to sever the relationship, citing the committee’s IRS referrals, the Ways and Means Committee said.
In January, Smith wrote to the IRS about the “Feeding Our Future” scandal, a Minnesota nonprofit fraud scheme in which the committee says hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars earmarked for pandemic-era food aid in the United States moved through a web of nonprofits and shell companies, with some funds potentially reaching the al-Shabaab terrorist network in Somalia.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent opened his own investigation into that possibility, but so far no charges related to that allegation have been brought.
Bessent has embraced the broader mission publicly.
In July remarks before a ministerial on political terrorism, the secretary said his department was expanding its work, at President Trump’s direction, to identify organizations that abuse nonprofit and charitable structures to move illicit money, framing it as an extension of financial counterterrorism tools long used by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and IRS Criminal Investigation.
“Shanghai Singham” and the data-center fight
Neville Roy Singham, to whom Smith is referring as “Shanghai Singham,” is a U.S. citizen and founder of the software consultancy ThoughtWorks who now lives in Shanghai and is married to CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans.
He is the primary sponsor of a network of organizations: The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. House and Senate investigators have documented extensive financial and leadership ties between the groups and Singham as well as Singham’s close relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Public 990 filings – IRS forms for tax-exempt groups – cited by the committee show The People’s Forum alone received over $20 million from Singham and Evans from 2017 to 2022.
Smith has specifically cited the People’s Forum for hosting courses pushing communist propaganda and supporting disruptive college campus occupations, arguing that tax-exempt status is a privilege that should be revoked when used to “sow chaos” and interfere in American politics.
Despite years of congressional pressure, a sprawling web of activist groups – including the People’s Forum, Code Pink, the ANSWER Coalition and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) – has retained its tax-exempt status while avoiding prosecution under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), Just the News previously reported.
The Justice Department has also opened its own inquiry. Fox News Digital reported in June that a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York, authorized by then-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, began issuing subpoenas for bank records tied to Singham’s network as part of a wire fraud, bank fraud and money-laundering investigation.
Smith’s newer allegation – that this same network is now “organizing disruptions on data centers” to help China “win the AI war” – reflects a claim he has been making publicly since at least June, when he told the news outlet NOTUS that Chinese money had flowed into nonprofits organizing protests against data centers because Beijing wants computational dominance. Since then, several outside reports have built out the theory.
Singham’s network has been tied to the anti-Israel protest movement that swept college campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack against that country by Hamas terrorists, the anti-ICE protests amid President Trump’s illegal immigration crackdown, and most recently to organizing and campaign efforts against data centers and Artificial Intelligence in the United States.
“We’ve been tracking the money,” Smith said, “and we’re going to continue to do so.”
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Steven Richards is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “Jason Lewis” by Jason Lewis.
