The Rockefeller Foundation is a philanthropic grantmaking organization based in New York City. It was founded in 1913 as the primary philanthropic vehicle for the charity of Standard Oil billionaire John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1839-1937). With an endowment estimated to be worth $6 billion as of 2025, the Rockefeller Foundation is routinely ranked as one of the largest private foundations in the United States. ^{1 9}

In 1891, Rockefeller hired Frederick T. Gates to be his assistant in handling philanthropic and business concerns. Gates wrote in his memoirs that he considered his first task to shield his employer from people who wanted a share of his fortune. “Neither in the privacy of his home or at his table, not anywhere else, was Mr. Rockefeller secure from insistent appeal,” Gates wrote. “Mr. Rockefeller was constantly hunted, stalked, and hounded almost like a wild animal.” ¹⁰

Gates encouraged Rockefeller to practice “retail” philanthropy and donate to nonprofits rather than “wholesale” philanthropy to individuals. In 1905, Rockefeller gave $100,000 to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to promote Congregationalism overseas. Rockefeller’s lawyer, sister-in-law, and Gates were Congregationalists. ^{11 13} Rockefeller agreed, and planning for the Rockefeller Foundation began in 1909.  Four years later, the Rockefeller Foundation began operations. ¹⁵

Allies of longtime Rockefeller aide Frederick Gates wanted the foundation to deal with less-partisan medical and scientific issues. Gates called Greene’s proposal “scatteration,” as it would give many small grants instead of a few large ones. ¹⁵

Transfer of Authority

John D. Rockefeller began transferring his fortune to his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., beginning in 1916. Although the younger Rockefeller was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation for most of his life, he decided not to exercise any more power than any other trustee. ¹⁶

In 1919, John D. Rockefeller wrote to his attorney, Starr Murphy, stating that “I could wish that the education which some professors furnish was more conducive to the most sane and practical and possible views of life rather than drifting, as it does, in cases, to socialism and some forms of Bolshevism. It seems to me that some influences ought to be brought to bear upon the universities and colleges with reference to the textbooks which, from my standpoint at least, are calculated to lead astray and do more harm than good.” ¹⁷

Murphy responded that “the placing of limitations…upon academic freedom must be left to the trustees and faculties of the institutions” and that “it would be extremely unwise to place limitations” on what professors could teach. ¹⁸

Rockefeller backed off, and, although he lived for 18 years after this exchange, made no further attempt to assert his intentions. ¹⁸

Medical Research Efforts

The Rockefeller Foundation’s early successes were in medical research. In 1910, before the foundation’s creation, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. committed $1 million in an effort to eradicate hookworm, a parasite disease that ravaged the southern United States. The public health effort, which was taken over by the Rockefeller Foundation when it was created in 1913, was largely finished by 1915. Although hookworm remained a continuing problem in the South until the worms were finally eradicated around 1985, the Rockefeller-backed hookworm prevention effort alerted officials in states affected by the disease to the extent of the problem and showed strategies that were effective in killing the disease-bearing worms. ²⁰

Flexner approved grants for medical schools on one condition: doctors who taught in these schools could not have outside practices, but could only make their living from medical school salaries. Flexner refused to accept any compromises. When the Harvard Medical School in 1913 proposed allowing medical school professors to have private practices as long as doctors’ offices were on-campus, Flexner rejected the request and blocked Rockefeller Foundation medical funding to Harvard. ²⁰

Flexner continued his intransigent policy until 1928, when a reorganization of the Rockefeller philanthropies eliminated his position and ended the “full time in medicine” program. Nearly all the medical schools receiving Rockefeller Foundation aid ended their restrictions against doctors having private practices after Flexner’s departure. ²⁰

The Green Revolution

In 1943 the Rockefeller Foundation, after being urged by then-Vice President Henry Wallace, began programs in Mexico designed to increase the productivity of Mexican agriculture. “The philosophy of the Rockefeller Foundation,” said Norman Borlaug, a leader of the effort who would later win a Nobel Peace Prize for his work to increase agricultural productivity, “was to ‘help Mexico help itself’ in solving its food production problems, and in the process work itself out of a job.” ²⁹

John D. Rockefeller, III personally pushed Rusk to champion birth control at the federal level as a means of achieving goals outlined by the population control movement. Soon after, in a speech addressed to the nation, President Lyndon Johnson became the first U.S. President to characterize population growth as a problem. By 1965, the Office of Population was created under the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID). By 1972, its annual budget had increased from an initial $10 million to $123 million. ²⁹

By 1992, the population control movement had reached worldwide attention, with hundreds of national policies and dozens of international groups working to slow population growth. ³⁰ Warren Weaver, the delegate to the Williamsburg Conference from the Rockefeller Foundation, said that “I will be blunt…We are talking about population from the viewpoint of Western Protestant philosophy,” highlighting the anti-Catholicism of some attendees. ³¹

According to Philanthropy Roundtable, the first three John D. Rockefellers (Sr., Jr., and III) were major supporters of the eugenics movement. Rockefeller, Jr. studied population control theory at Brown University; he went on to join the American Eugenics Society and become a trustee of the Bureau of Social Hygiene. Rockefeller Jr. would share his ideas on sterilization with Charles Davenport, director of the Eugenics Record Office of Cold Spring Harbor. ³³

As an early example, according to the Rockefeller Foundation’s 1915 Annual Report, the Foundation gave $4,050 to the “Eugenic Record Office, of Cold Spring Harbor” to provide “field workers in Eugenics in State institutions,” and $900 to the Westchester County Poor Special Agent “to cover expenses for nine months.” Along with the Carnegie Institution for Science, Rockefeller was the main funding source for the Eugenics Record Office until 1939. ³⁹

In May 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation announced it was providing $9,000 over a three-year period to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics to research twins and “effects on later generations of substances toxic for germ plasm.” The scientific investigation of the make-up of twins was a coveted area of hereditary research for the American eugenics movement due to a twin pair’s usefulness as a “control group.” The president of the Institute for Anthropology, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, was a celebrated figure among American eugenicists. Verschuer later left the Institute to establish a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt to study twins, receiving praise from American eugenics journals and newspapers. In the journal Der Erbarzt, Verschuer wrote that the Second World War would lead to the “total solution to the Jewish problem.” Infamous Nazi SS officer Josef Mengele, who would go on to experiment on Jewish at the Auschwitz concentration camp, worked as an assistant to Verschuer while the latter was receiving Rockefeller grants. ^{43 52} Part of this initiative includes the Foundation attempting to achieve a Net-Zero standard for all its global operations. Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, commented on the new initiative by stating:

“The strategy is designed around a simple idea: humanity does not have to choose between addressing climate change and advancing human opportunity, we simply have to work in new ways and at a bigger scale and with new people and in new places to make sure everyone cannot just survive the climate crisis but thrive.” ⁵²

Voter Registration Project

The Voter Registration Project (VRP), also known as Everybody Votes, is a voter mobilization group that hosts voter registration drives targeted at demographic groups it has identified as Democratic voting blocs. Its founding goal, according to a confidential summary memo from 2015, was to “re-shape the electorate” by registering 6.3 million “African Americans, Latinos, unmarried women, and young people.” It was run by individuals with long-standing connections to left-of-center nonprofits, including the AFL-CIO labor union federation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and the State Voices network of left-of-center state-level advocacy groups. ^{55 56 58 59}

Clinton Foundation Controversies

In 2015 Politico reported on a controversy concerning Huma Abedin, who in April 2012 was an advisor to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Later that year, she would leave her full-time position in the State Department to become a part-time advisor to Hillary Clinton and a part-time consultant to Teneo, a consulting company whose president, Doug Band, was, Politico reported, “a close confidant of Bill Clinton.” http://www.capitalresearch.org/article/deimagining-america-because-our-college-campuses-aren’t-far-enough-to-the-left/