Democrats allege Freedom 250 solicited donors under America250 name

Report alleges Freedom 250 directed public funds to Trump allies

Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, told NPR that the report—titled “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People out of their 250th Birthday”—was months in the making. It is based on interviews with unnamed whistleblowers, sworn congressional testimony, internal Freedom 250 documents, and other written responses.

“We put it all together to really tell the story … of how Donald Trump hijacked what should have been a unifying national celebration and repurposed it for his own interests,” Huffman said in an interview. “This was a team of operatives using the Freedom 250 shell company, but it was also Donald Trump himself telling them what to do.”

The report describes Freedom 250, created via executive order in 2025 as an LLC under the National Park Foundation—the nonprofit arm of the National Park Service—as “a shadow organization capable of infiltrating the celebrations and injecting America’s 250th with Trump’s extreme, partisan agenda.” The foundation’s board now includes a number of Trump loyalists, including Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser on his 2024 campaign.

Freedom 250 is the entity behind some of the summer’s highest-profile anniversary events, including a UFC fight outside the White House in June, a state fair on the National Mall, a July Fourth fireworks show opening with a Trump rally, and the “Patriot Games” high school athletic competition scheduled for August. Several of those events, including the state fair and a prayer gathering on the Mall, have drawn criticism for what critics describe as a sanitized presentation of history and an overtly Christian bent.

“Once you siphon off the funds and supplant the real bipartisan commission with this new entity and you declare it the main platform for our nation’s celebration, and you award all these shady contracts to your friends, you can do anything you want,” Huffman said. “And what these folks chose to do was to push a very divisive, very extreme and explicitly sectarian religious agenda into all these materials in our name, using our taxpayer dollars.”

The report alleges that donors who intended to support the congressionally chartered, bipartisan America250 commission were instead given banking information for Freedom 250, a practice the report says could constitute wire fraud. It says Congress allocated $150 million in federal funds last year to the Interior Department for anniversary events, with Democrats saying there was an “understanding” that $100 million of that would go to America250. The report says America250 has only received $25 million, citing unnamed sources.

Freedom 250 spokesperson Danielle Alvarez denied those claims, saying in a statement that “every major sponsor received documentation identifying Freedom 250 as the recipient’s organization before funds were transferred, and donors were free to decline.” The entity also said that no federal funds were “specifically earmarked for one entity over the other,” calling allegations that funds were diverted “baseless.”

The White House referred a request for comment to Freedom 250, which told NPR it does not speak for the White House. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who serves as ex officio director of the National Park Foundation’s board, testified before Congress in May that he was “not aware of the final decision maker on Freedom 250,” but told CNN the organization is “run out of the White House.”

Alan Zibel, a researcher with the nonprofit Public Citizen, called the donor-confusion allegations “very troubling.” He said House Democrats, even without subpoena power, have laid the groundwork for further investigation. “They’ve given House Democrats, should they take the majority next year, months and months of investigative work to do,” he said. “And there are some pretty rich target opportunities.”

Toni Aguilar Rosenthal, a program director at the Revolving Door Project, co-authored a separate report on Freedom 250’s contracts. She said that of more than $120 million in public funds directed toward the anniversary, over $100 million has gone to projects and entities with ties to the Trump administration. Some of those contracts, she said, have gone to Event Strategies Inc., the firm that helped organize Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 rally near the U.S. Capitol.

“There is little visibility into the origins and destinations of donations in general,” Aguilar Rosenthal said. She said the funds could, in the worst case, be operating as “a slush fund” for the administration and its allies.

The report also raised questions about potential foreign influence, noting that Freedom 250 CEO Keith Krach, a former Trump administration official, appeared to solicit international participation at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, offering “toolkits for countries.” Alvarez said Freedom 250 does not accept foreign donations.

Huffman said his investigation will continue, especially if Democrats reclaim the House in the fall midterm elections, at which point he did not rule out subpoenas or criminal referrals.

“We may not be able to undo the damage they’ve done to us and the national celebration,” Huffman said. “But we can do something very patriotic by reminding everyone that our government belongs to all of us, not to Donald Trump.”