Senator JD Vance is supposed to be closing down a tiny, dormant charity he founded in 2017.
So far, he has not.
Last month, Donald J. Trump’s campaign told The Associated Press that Mr. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, was preparing to close Our Ohio Renewal Foundation and give its remaining money to causes “benefiting Appalachia.”
This week, Ohio officials said no one has yet filed the paperwork to close Mr. Vance’s foundation, which as of March had just $11,000 in the bank. Mr. Vance is not required to shut down the group, either by nonprofit or campaign law.
Neither the Trump campaign nor the nonprofit’s own accountant responded to questions from The New York Times about the nonprofit’s fate.
That leaves the Our Ohio Renewal Foundation as a kind of charitable time capsule, a frozen remnant of a different time in Mr. Vance’s life.
Mr. Vance founded that group in 2017, when he was known as the author of a best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and still an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump. After his book’s success, Mr. Vance left his job as a venture capitalist in California and moved back to Ohio. But he rejected rumors that he intended to run for office.
Instead, Mr. Vance said, he had come back to start two nonprofits.
These would battle the issues that had plagued his own family: opioid addiction, joblessness, broken families. In paperwork filed with the I.R.S.’s nonprofit division, the nonprofits said they planned to raise more than $3 million combined, and that they would “make it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.”
“I never wanted to be a public intellectual or a talking head,” Mr. Vance told the Washington Post in 2017. “I actually care about solving some of these things.”
Neither of his groups made a significant impact on Ohio.
The larger of the two, a politically active nonprofit called Our Ohio Renewal, was to lobby for changes in state policy. It raised $220,000: Mr. Vance said he gave $80,000 of that total, personally. But the group was not much of a lobbying force: It produced two op-eds and a pair of tweets. Tax filings show it spent much of its money paying its staff.
The group also paid $45,000 for a survey of “social, cultural and general welfare needs of Ohio citizens.” Several former staffers said they had never seen the results of that survey, despite it consuming 20 percent of the group’s annual budget.
Former staffers at that nonprofit told The New York Times in 2022 that they came to believe the true goal was to launch Mr. Vance’s own political career. The nonprofit paid a man who also served as one of Mr. Vance’s political consultants, and it also paid an assistant who arranged Mr. Vance’s speeches to GOP groups around the state, according to the group’s former staff.
That nonprofit shut down in March 2021. Mr. Vance announced he was thinking of running for Senate in May.
The nonprofit that still survives, Our Ohio Renewal Foundation, was organized as a traditional charity. It raised only about $64,350, according to Ohio nonprofit records, and spent the bulk of that money on a single project. The foundation paid for a psychiatrist to spend a year in an Ohio town hit hard by opioids.
After that, nothing.
Ohio records show that the foundation has not spent a dollar on charitable activity since 2019.
In Mr. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign, Democrats turned his nonprofits into an attack ad: “JD Vance was in a position to really help people, but he only helped himself.”
In the past, Mr. Vance has blamed the groups’ ineffectiveness on unfortunate circumstances. He said that he entrusted their management to a law-school friend, who then was diagnosed with cancer.
“I’m not going to pretend that that didn’t dampen our plans a little bit and that didn’t distract us for a little while. It did. But I also think that even with that distraction, we did some good work and never said we were doing anything that we weren’t,” he said in 2021.
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