Austin’s NGO machine isn’t breaking any rules. That’s the problem.
Since October 2023, the City of Austin has paid $1.58 million to a progressive nonprofit with deep ties to Democratic socialism: the Workers Defense Project (WDP). Curiously, three councilmembers who oversee that spending—Vanessa Fuentes, José Velásquez, and Mike Siegel—won their seats with support from a political committee run by WDP’s own affiliate. Curiouser still, the organization’s lobbyists have worked city hall continuously since 2017.
It is, from all appearances, a taxpayer-funded merry-go-round benefiting a well-connected few at everyone else’s expense: taxpayers’ pockets to city coffers, city coffers to the nonprofit, the nonprofit’s PAC to the aspiring politician, the politician to the dais—where the next check gets signed and the ride starts anew.
George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall boss, called this kind of arrangement “honest graft.” If a man could hand out good things in private life, he reasoned, why shouldn’t he do the same in public life? Austin’s political machine simply has better paperwork. Call it lawful graft. Its hall sits on Manor Road.
A shabby but bustling building, it houses a labyrinth of related entities: the Workers Defense Project, a 501(c)(3) charity; the Workers Defense Action Fund, its 501(c)(4) lobbying arm; and two state level General Purpose Action Committees (GPACs)—Workers Defense in Action and the Workers Defense Action Fund PAC—registered with the Texas Ethics Commission and filing campaign reports with the city.
Federal records add more: two super PACs registered on consecutive days in October 2018, both since administratively terminated, plus two independent-expenditure filers. Together they spent over $68,000 on federal races backing Mike Siegel, Candace Valenzuela, Greg Casar, and Joe Biden. The Workers Defense Project, meanwhile, has collected $1,079,851 in federal grants.
Same address. Same people.
The people are fungible. Emily Timm ran both nonprofits at once; in 2021 the two entities split her pay—$28,287 from the charity, $80,325 from the affiliate. She also appears on the state PAC’s payroll. José Garza was co-executive director of both organizations in 2019 and 2020, drawing a $97,311 salary from the charity, before moving straight to the Travis County District Attorney’s office with in-kind support from the affiliated PAC. It should be noted that Workers Defense has received several thousand dollars from Travis County mostly in the form of consulting services. Greg Casar rose from Workers Defense organizer to the council dais to Congress—all without so much as a water break. And José “Chito” Vela Austin’s new mayor pro tempore served as Worker Defense Project Board President prior to his election to city hall.
Consider the machine’s own words. Their joint annual report describes a “Movement Politics” program that as Workers Defense Action Fund’s website puts it, exists to “elect people’s candidates to key offices in our priority counties”—Travis, Tarrant, Dallas, and Harris—and to build “co-governance relationships with those we elect to office.” Round and round it goes.
And co-governance comes cheap. In 2016, per city clerk reports, the Workers Defense in Action PAC spent roughly $33,000 backing its endorsed council slate: Delia Garza, Greg Casar, Leslie Pool, Alison Alter, and Jimmy Flannigan. In 2018 it endorsed a slate including Mayor Steve Adler and councilmembers Pio Renteria, Ann Kitchen, and Kathie Tovo, reporting $23,666 in direct expenditures for Adler, Lewis Conway Jr., and Renteria. In 2020, the two GPACs reported $20,209 more while naming Alter, Flannigan, David Chincanchan, and Pooja Sethi as supported candidates.
State filings suggest their two GPACs, Workers Defense in Action and Workers Defense Action Fund Pac, have spent over 1.2 million dollars supporting state and local officials including councilman Velasquez, Siegel and Fuentes, all three who now sit on council.
All told, city records show WDP has received $5,001,229 from the City of Austin—more than five million dollars to the charitable arm of a network whose political arm helps elect the councilmembers who vote on that spending, egged on by lobbyists working those same offices.
There is much to dislike here, but the core objection is the lack of separation: the charity should do charity, the PAC and C(4) should do politics, and never the twain should meet. The machine’s own tax filings say otherwise. On IRS Form 990 Schedule R, the charity discloses cash grants to its 501(c)(4) affiliate—$674,065 in 2018, $296,723 in 2019, and $250,000 or more in each of 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. That’s roughly $1.1 million from the charitable arm to the advocacy arm in four of the most recent years on file.
But does the political operation actually connect to the grants? Is it a duck, or merely the mirage of one? Consider Project Connect, the city’s multibillion-dollar transit plan. As the Austin Chronicle reported during the 2020 campaign, the Workers Defense Action Fund had “thrown their support behind Project Connect” working to pass prop A, the enabling ballot proposition. Two years later, the city awarded the Workers Defense Project $2 million from Project Connect’s anti-displacement funds. When the same network campaigns for a program, helps elect the officials who administer it, and then collects a seven-figure grant from it, “coincidence” demands more faith than the facts will bear.
None of this is necessarily illegal. That is precisely the problem. Federal law drew this line long ago: government contractors may not make contributions or expenditures to candidates, parties, or committees—on the simple theory that money received from the public shouldn’t come back around as help getting elected. Austin built itself a loophole instead. The city’s anti-lobbying ordinance exempts social service contracting, meaning nonprofits like WDP are immune from similar restrictions, even though the city’s own audit team flagged the exemption in 2019 and is flagging it again now.
And the Workers Defense Project is one cog in a much larger system. Nearly $2 billion in Austin tax dollars has gone to nonprofits since 2019 alone—and the true total is unknowable, because, as the city auditor conceded in 2025, “the data we relied on for the analyses in this report appears to be incomplete.” Several of these organizations are deeply involved in lobbying, elections, and Democratic Socialist advocacy. The Center for Public Policy Priorities—now Every Texan—has lobbied the council, taken city money, and received a sizable contribution from the Workers Defense Project. Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas and Planned Parenthood of Austin have received city funds and a dollar-a-year lease on city property while its affiliated PACs and 501(c)4s remains active in Texas politics.
Nor is this pattern of government subsidized waste and graft confined to city hall. TPPF research on school-bond elections found that a $2,000 contribution from a consulting firm to a bond PAC can precede more than $2 million in compensation to that firm once the bond passes. Or the Education Foundation like Barbers Hill which received over $90 million in taxpayer dollars but interestingly only spent $2.4 million helping teachers and students. Those who stand to profit from a public decision help finance the campaign to secure it—while taxpayers are left holding the bill.
The fix isn’t complicated. State and local policymakers must make clear that public money is for public purposes, not political programs. The First Amendment guarantees the right to political speech; it does not guarantee the speaker a city contract. No political subdivision should award grants or contracts to a nonprofit that operates a political action committee—or reports one as a Schedule R related organization—or that lobbies the very government cutting the check. And when cities do spend taxpayer dollars on vendors and social services, third-party efficiency audits should follow the money to confirm it bought what was promised. Want the grant? Wind down the PAC.
Plunkitt saw his opportunities, and he took ’em. Austin’s 21st-century machine has been taking them ever since. It deserves a new home: the history books, right next to the page on Tammany Hall