America250, the commission created by Congress to plan and execute nationwide celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, funneled millions to leftist groups during the Biden years, according to the tax filings for the group’s supporting nonprofit organization.
The group has been ten years in the making, with President Barack Obama signing the commission for the group in 2016 and President Donald Trump doing so again in 2020. But, from 2022 to 2023, the congressionally created commission and its supporting nonprofit shuttled enormous sums of money to at least two far-left communications consulting firms as the semiquincentennial narrative seemingly succumbed to a hostile takeover.
According to America250’s 990 financial disclosure filings from 2023, the most recent available on the nonprofit’s website, SKDKnickerbocker and Precision Strategies, firms that advance left-wing policy positions of some of America’s most unsavory special interest groups, received millions each.
Precision Strategies received more money from America250 than any other independent contractor that year, raking in $3,667,828, while SKDKnickerbocker received the second most at $2,664,095. Those dollar amounts are exponentially higher than the next three firms listed, which average about $300,000. Those sums also account for more than half of America250’s entire expenditures for 2023. SKDKnickerbocker also received 178,500 in 2022.
Around the time the two firms came into the fold, the mission statement of America250 on the 990s also changed. In 2019 the organization’s stated purpose was “to engage all Americans in what will be the largest and most inclusive celebration and commemoration in our nation’s history, this four-part visionary framework encourages and guides the creative programming that will shape America 250 and the future of the United States.” In 2023 America250 said that it sought to “deepen understanding of America’s complicated past” — the kind of phrasing that is typically a euphemism for for anti-America propaganda.
America250 for a time was a “congressionally controlled group paying large sums to consulting firms that also happen to do work for multiple members of Congress on the Democrat side” and appeared to be “a slush fund for very powerful Democrat consulting firms,” Parker Thayer, investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center, told The Federalist.
“It seems as if they went and found the two communication firms that are best at selling anti-American messages to run the American campaign,” he continued, adding it would be like hiring Democrat funding platform ActBlue to do the job. “They can’t be faulted for saying that they’re not good at doing consulting — they are — they have led some very successful left-wing campaigns over the years, but not anything that really screams ‘I love America.’”
It is now one month away from the semiquincentennial celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and some patriotic Americans are noticing that there has not been much pomp and circumstance around the 250th birthday of the nation. There is a lack of patriotic merchandise, left-wing propaganda from America250 itself pushing Franklin Roosevelt’s socialism as a founding principle, and seemingly a general sense of disillusion after “decades of anti-America indoctrination.” If one looks back to the bicentennial in 1976, it is clear that there is not the same Spirit of ’76 today.
On July 4, 2023, America250 “kick[ed] off a multi-year effort to engage the public in building the largest, most inclusive commemoration in American history,” according to its 2022 990, which was supposed to culminate in 2026 with the peak focused on July 4.
But given the muted state of celebrations thus far, it is hard not to wonder whether the initiative was tainted by left-wing leadership and the communication firm friends they hired — not anticipating a Trump win in 2024 — and therefore expecting to get away with “racial reckoning,” “LGBT pride,” and pro-abortion narratives.
For example, Rosie Rios, chair of America250 and Treasurer of the United States under Obama, in a since-deleted post from June 4, 2024, gave a snapshot of what America250 might have been like under a Kamala Harris presidency: “Happy #PrideMonth, America! As we acknowledge the vibrant history and significant contributions of the LGBTQIA+ community, I’m honored to highlight their resilience and our nation’s ongoing journey toward equality.” Rios went on to post about “trailblazers” most people do not associate with the American founding and likely have never heard of (except, perhaps, Harvey Milk, a pedophile).
But the decision to hire SKDKnickerbocker and Precision Strategies suggests this kind of messaging could have been widespread, and that with a Trump win, programming that may have been prepared was no longer viable.
Precision’s clients include Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, a group focused primarily on amnesty, open borders policies, and “criminal justice reform.” The firm boasts about its work in Oklahoma, where it led a soft-on-crime campaign “to make a complex report engaging and digestible to conservative policymakers, justice-minded reformers, and people affected by the criminal justice system.”
In other words, they are “fooling Republicans into voting for soft on crime bills,” Thayer said.
Another client of Precision’s is States Newsroom, which is a project of the left-wing dark money group Arabella Advisors and operates propaganda outlets that masquerade as local newsrooms.
Precision‘s clients have also included Planned Parenthood Votes, the Democratic National Committee, Kamala Harris for President, the William J. Brennan Jr., Center for Justice, Vote.org, Voto Latino Foundation, the Human Rights Campaign, March for Our Lives, SEIU, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Earth Justice. Online records appear to indicate that Precision’s only Republican client in recent years was Steve Daines for Montana.
SKDKnickerbocker was instrumental in President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and it gave “misinformation briefings” to officials in California, which were then fed to the leadership of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google in order to censor conservative speech online. The firm’s leadership includes former Obama White House Communications Director and Biden Senior Advisor Anita Dunn, former DNC spokesman Doug Thornell, and Hilary Rosen, founder of Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund.
During the Obama administration, SKDK orchestrated public relations efforts against the Defense of Marriage Act, which aimed to protect the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman. It also handled public relations for Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign. It has also done work for numerous Democrat campaigns and PACs, the DNC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).
Responding to a request for comment from The Federalist, an America250 spokesman said that Precision and SKDK are no longer working with the commission, though the timing of the break and the circumstances around the removal are unclear.
Stating that America250 uses a “Professional Services Team composed of multiple organizations and vendors that specialize in public initiatives to allow us to reach 350 million Americans,” the spokesman said that “we have since worked with additional communications consulting firms such as Narrative Strategies, PLUS Communications, and others.”
Narrative Strategies was founded by former Republican staffers and a journalist, and its leadership team includes former Democrat staffers.
PLUS Communications, on the other hand, has done work for FWD.us pursuing “criminal justice reform” in Louisiana and “mobilized a broad bipartisan coalition of support” that included the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). PLUS also worked on another FWD.us project seeking a “permanent solution to protect DREAMers,” that is, illegal aliens who were brought to the U.S. as young people. They credit their work for bringing multiple amnesty bills to Congress and appear to take credit for changing Trump’s tune on amnesty as well.
PLUS has also done work for two groups pushing Ukraine aid.
“Ultimately, we always seek to be responsible stewards of our funding and over the past several years, America250 has implemented significant cost-saving measures that have resulted in substantial savings for the organization,” the spokesman concluded. “As America250 continues its work, it remains focused on delivering a world-class commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary while operating as efficiently and fiscally responsibly as possible.”
America250 may no longer pay these left wing groups to run communications for the festivities that are supposed to take place in 2026, but there is no telling how much damage was done to the celebration by putting them in charge in the years leading up to it.
