AJC Budget: $126M, $53K Lobbying, No CharityWatch Grade

The American Jewish Committee took in $126,680,875 in fiscal 2024 and spent $102,290,971. It ended the year holding $334.9 million in assets and a $24.4 million surplus — roughly four times the surplus of either of the two preceding years.

It reported $53,000 in federal lobbying.

Both numbers are accurate. Understanding how they sit together is most of what there is to know about how AJC operates.

Two surge years, not one

The easy version of this story is that AJC's revenue jumped 44% in a single year. That version is misleading and worth correcting before it spreads.

Fiscal 2022 revenue included an $11.3 million realized securities gain that collapsed to $461,981 the following year. That one-off suppressed the apparent growth in FY2023 and inflated it in FY2024. Strip it out and the real pattern is simpler and steeper:

FY2023 contributions: $83.0 million, up 54.4% from $53.8 million
FY2024: up roughly another $38 million

Two consecutive post-October 7 contribution surges. Expenses rose far more slowly — 23.7% in FY2024 — which is where the surplus came from.

What AJC spent it on, by its largest FY2024 program lines: Government and International Affairs $29.4 million. The 25-office regional network $19.2 million. Communications $10.9 million.

What drove the contribution growth — a handful of very large gifts, a bequest, a campaign, or broad-based giving — cannot be determined from public filings. The relevant disclosures sit in AJC's audited financial statements, which its content delivery network blocks to automated access.

$53,000 against a $102 million expense base

AJC's reported federal lobbying, from Lobbying Disclosure Act filings:

2022 — $41,000
2023 — $50,000
2024 — $53,000
2025 — $40,000
2026, first half — $56,000

That is 0.05% of AJC's expense base. AJC registers itself, retains no outside firm in any year, and fields a single registered lobbyist across every quarter from 2022 to 2026 — Julie Fishman Rayman. Filings are signed by Chief Legal Officer Marc D. Stern. The issue codes never change: Immigration, Foreign Relations, Civil Rights.

Now the comparison, all from primary LDA filings:

ADL — $1,450,000 in 2024, $1,650,000 in 2025. ADL also retained Ballard Partners from the fourth quarter of 2024 through 2025 at $40,000 a quarter, a visible move toward Republican-side representation immediately after the election.
AIPAC — $3.3 million in 2024.
Hillel International — zero. No federal lobbying registration at all, verified across three separate client-name queries for every year.

AJC carries the largest budget of the group and reports roughly one twenty-sixth of ADL's lobbying spend.

There are two honest readings and this piece carries both. Either AJC does its influence work through channels that never trigger LDA registration — diplomacy, convening, 17 international posts, 41 partner communities — which is entirely consistent with how the organization is staffed. Or the reported figure understates the activity. Note that IRS Schedule C uses a broader definition of lobbying than the LDA does, so $56,000 is a floor rather than a ceiling. AJC's Schedule C could not be retrieved for any year.

CharityWatch would not issue AJC a grade

This is the strongest item in the file, and it did not come from us.

CharityWatch withheld its letter grade for AJC's fiscal 2024. It had rated the organization B+ for FY2021. The open questions, in CharityWatch's own accounting:

$24.2 million in "Other Professional Fees" booked to program
$6.95 million paid to Talbot Digital LLC for media communications
$7.85 million in conferences and meetings
Whether fundraising costs were classified as program expenses

CharityWatch also records AJC as not meeting its transparency benchmarks. AJC had not responded as of April 13, 2026.

For context across the series: ADL holds a B+ from CharityWatch for the same period. Hillel International is unrated. Each has a transparency flag of its own — ADL declined to participate in BBB Wise Giving Alliance evaluation, Hillel does not post its Form 990 on its own site and scored 45% on Charity Navigator's website-disclosure measure. Neither has a withheld grade.

On this one dimension, AJC is the outlier of the three.

Nobody knows what the CEO is paid

Two sources give two figures for Ted Deutch's FY2024 compensation: $735,841 and $973,333. Same fiscal year. The gap is most likely base pay against base-plus-deferred-and-related-organization compensation, but it could not be reconciled against the filing itself.

For scale: ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt drew $1,435,295 in FY2025. Hillel's Adam Lehman drew $731,633.

73% of the traceable money arrives anonymously

Roughly $17.5 million of the ~$24 million in identifiable 2024 institutional grants to AJC — about 73% — came through donor-advised fund sponsors:

Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund — $7,056,871
Vanguard Charitable — $4,466,576
Schwab's DAFgiving360 — $3,750,720
Jewish Communal Fund — $2,243,979

The Chicago Community Trust routed a further $10,053,250 in 2023, earmarked for Project Interchange and general operating support.

Donor-advised fund grants are legally attributed to the sponsor, not the advisor. The human beings behind the largest single bloc of AJC's traceable institutional funding are not disclosed in any public record, and no further filing research will surface them.

This is not an AJC anomaly. It is the sector:

AJC — roughly 73%
ADL — roughly 56%, excluding internal ADL Foundation transfers
Hillel International — 33% to 58%, depending on whether Combined Jewish Philanthropies is classified as an intermediary or a direct funder

Fidelity Charitable appears among the top funders of all three. These percentages describe the institutional grant channel, not total revenue, and the three are not computed on identical denominators — the classification of federations and community foundations swings Hillel's figure by 25 points.

The structural point survives every one of those caveats. The largest identifiable bloc of institutional money flowing into major American Jewish organizations arrives through vehicles designed to sever the gift from the giver.

The named foundations are not what a donor-chain theory would predict

Three private foundations gave AJC seven figures and their grant schedules are public. What else they fund is worth reporting accurately.

Shapiro-Silverberg Foundation — $4.6 million to AJC in FY2025, the largest single named commitment found. Its other grants: Target ALS $5 million, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy $3.2 million, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston $3 million, UJA-Federation of New York $4.6 million, Rockefeller University. Concentrated, mainstream, and with no electoral or 501(c)(4) giving anywhere in the schedule.

The Wexner Family Charitable Fund — $2.6 million. Its portfolio is dominated by charter-school expansion (KIPP, roughly $57 million), Columbus civic and medical institutions, Ohio State, and mainstream Jewish federated philanthropy — plus $2 million to the Environmental Defense Fund. AJC is one to two percent of it.

Karsh Family Foundation — $2.5 million, earmarked "Facts for Peace." Elsewhere: the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia $5.3 million, Cedars-Sinai $5 million, KIPP $5 million, Teach For America, Howard University, UNCF.

These are legacy institutional philanthropies with ideologically mixed portfolios, not movement funds. A donor-chain argument built on these schedules would not survive contact with the schedules.

What the money built

AJC's two largest post-October 7 investments are both Jewish-content operations led at vice-president level: the Center for a New Middle East, consolidating MENA advocacy across Washington, Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi under Anne Dreazen, formerly principal director for Middle East policy at the Pentagon; and the Center for Education Advocacy, covering campus and K-12 antisemitism under Laura Shaw Frank.

Over the same period AJC's public policy index narrowed to five topics — antisemitism, Israel, BDS, hate crimes, Iran. Its climate engagement stopped after a single COP28 appearance in December 2023. Its immigration policy page remains online but is orphaned from the policy index and frozen in pre-October 7 content, still referencing refugee admission targets for fiscal 2022.

Whatever else the record shows, the money went where the organization said it would.

Methodology

Financial figures for FY2019 through FY2023 come from ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer structured extract of IRS e-file data. FY2024 figures come from ProPublica's filing index, corroborated to the dollar by two independent aggregators. Lobbying figures come directly from the federal Lobbying Disclosure Act API for AJC, ADL and Hillel International. Foundation grants come from grantor Form 990-PF filings. Watchdog findings come from CharityWatch, Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance. All retrieved August 14, 2026.

No primary Form 990 document was opened: AJC's content delivery network returns HTTP 403 to automated requests for PDFs on its own domain while serving HTML normally. Figures dependent on aggregators rather than filings are identified as such. The FY2024 revenue, expense and asset figures are corroborated across three independent sources.

AJC did not respond to a detailed list of questions submitted more than seven days before publication.

Also in this series: Who Runs AJC? · What Does AJC Actually Believe?

Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W, a PR, creative and AI visibility company. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of For Immediate Release.