The Pattern
Family Research Council has operated as a fixture of Christian-right advocacy in Washington for more than four decades. According to its most recent federal tax filing, the organization brought in $26.2 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 2025, up from $24.5 million the year before. Tony Perkins has led it since 2003, longer than any of his three predecessors. In 2026, FRC’s sixteen-year dispute with the Southern Poverty Law Center over its “hate group” designation has collided with something unrelated: SPLC itself is now under federal indictment for wire fraud, false statements, and a money-laundering conspiracy tied to a confidential-informant program it ran for years. The two things are not the same fight. Treating the indictment as if it settles the older argument is itself a distortion of the record.
This is a dossier on one organization’s documented funding, leadership, current advocacy, and long public dispute with SPLC. It is not a claim about Christianity, evangelicalism, or the millions of Christians who share FRC’s theological positions without ever donating to or working for the organization. The subject here is Family Research Council: its money, its structure, its campaigns, and the record on both sides of its fight with SPLC.
Four decades, two arms
James Dobson, who also founded Focus on the Family, helped start Family Research Council in 1983 with a group of eight Christian leaders. Gerald P. Regier became its first president. The organization briefly lost its independence: from 1988 to 1992 it operated as a division of Focus on the Family before separating again. Since then, three men have led it: Gary Bauer from 1988 to 2000, Kenneth Connor from 2000 to 2003, and Tony Perkins from 2003 to today. Perkins has now run FRC for 23 years, longer than Regier, Bauer, and Connor combined.
FRC operates through two connected entities. Family Research Council Inc. is the 501(c)(3) that does research, publishing, and public commentary; donations to it are tax-deductible. FRC Action, a 501(c)(4) formed in the early 1990s, handles lobbying and runs FRC Action PAC, which cannot accept deductible money. This is a funded architecture: one mission split across a charitable arm and a political arm, so the same overall operation can accept tax-deductible donations for its research and commentary while running direct political advocacy through a separate account.
The two arms are not close to the same size. FRC Inc.’s most recent Form 990 (the annual financial disclosure nonprofits must file with the IRS), for the fiscal year ending June 2025, reports $26.2 million in revenue, $25.6 million in expenses, $23.8 million in total assets, and $14.9 million in net assets, with the large majority of revenue coming from contributions. FRC Action’s filing for the same period reports just $1.4 million in revenue against $2 million in expenses, a deficit that has pushed the smaller entity’s net assets negative. Charity Navigator gives FRC Inc. a four-star rating with an accountability score near 90 percent. Perkins’s current team includes Executive Vice President William “Jerry” Boykin, a retired Army lieutenant general; Vice President for Policy and Government Affairs Travis Weber; Vice President for Strategic Initiatives Brent Keilen; and Vice President of Communications JP Duffy.
The current campaigns
FRC’s 2025 and 2026 advocacy runs across Congress, the courts, and federal agencies at once. It opposed the bipartisan DIGNITY Act (H.R. 4393), joining Heritage Action and the Center for Immigration Studies in calling the bill’s legal-status provisions amnesty, even as its sponsors marketed the bill as enforcement paired with reform. It backed an IRS consent decree, pursued with an eye on being in place before the 2026 midterms, that would have let two Texas churches and the National Religious Broadcasters treat pulpit endorsements of candidates as protected speech, exempt from the Johnson Amendment’s 70-year-old ban on campaigning by tax-exempt religious groups. This is strategic timing: pursuing a legal mechanism timed to an election calendar rather than litigating the underlying constitutional question on its own schedule. A federal judge dismissed the case on March 31, 2026, for lack of jurisdiction. Perkins called the ruling a missed chance, on the nation’s 250th anniversary, “to correct a wrong that strikes at the very heart of American freedom.” FRC says it plans to appeal, though its parallel effort to mobilize thousands of pastors toward endorsements before the midterms is now on hold. In the summer of 2025, FRC also filed public comments opposing petitions that asked the FDA to loosen mifepristone’s safety-monitoring requirements, arguing the agency should reconsider the drug’s approval altogether rather than relax it.
FRC’s clearest 2026 win came from the Supreme Court rather than from Congress or an agency. On June 30, 2026, the Court ruled 6-3 in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. that state bans on transgender athletes in women’s and girls’ school sports violate neither Title IX nor the Fourteenth Amendment. FRC was not counsel in the case, but the outcome matches years of its advocacy, and the organization has said it intends to push the ruling’s reasoning into areas the decision itself left untouched.
None of this runs through FRC Inc. and FRC Action alone. FRC organizes Watchmen on the Wall, a network it describes as tens of thousands of pastors nationwide, and it runs the annual Pray Vote Stand Summit, successor to the Values Voter Summit, which has drawn sitting and former national officials to the same stage. A policy shop with a comparatively small paid staff reaches Congress, federal agencies, and the pulpit at the same time by convening pastors, elected officials, and allied advocacy groups under its own banner.
The hate-group dispute
SPLC has listed FRC on its “hate map” as an anti-LGBT hate group since 2010. SPLC’s stated rationale, published in its own extremist file on the organization, centers on FRC’s history of citing discredited research connecting gay men to child sexual abuse, its promotion of what SPLC calls “recruitment” claims about LGBT people, and its reliance on research by psychologist Paul Cameron, whose conclusions mainstream professional associations have rejected for decades.
FRC disputes the designation. Perkins has separately called the label a “deliberately timed smear campaign.” In an issue brief on its own site titled “Answering the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Attacks Upon Family Research Council,” FRC says it does not advocate criminalizing homosexuality and has not since 2003, and has apologized specifically for past use of “import and export” language about homosexuality that it now describes as a poor choice of words. FRC also denies lobbying in favor of Uganda’s death-penalty anti-homosexuality bill, saying it only responded to requests from U.S. congressional offices for help wording a resolution condemning the bill.
Both sides point to the same 2012 event and read it differently. A gunman, Floyd Corkins, entered FRC’s Washington headquarters that year and wounded a security guard before being subdued. He later told investigators he had found FRC through SPLC’s hate map. Neither side disputes that this happened. FRC treats it as proof the label itself incites violence against the organizations it names. On December 16, 2025, Perkins carried that argument to Capitol Hill, testifying before a House Judiciary subcommittee at a hearing titled “Partisan and Profitable: The SPLC’s Influence on Federal Civil Rights Policy.” He argued SPLC “routinely lumps peaceful Christian ministries together with actual violent extremists,” cited Dr. Ben Carson’s past inclusion on an SPLC list for affirming traditional marriage, and told the committee SPLC should “drop the gun,” meaning retire the hate map entirely. This piece does not adjudicate the designation itself. SPLC has published its stated reasons. FRC has published a direct, itemized rebuttal. Both are linked above, and neither characterization is treated here as settled.
A separate, unresolved case
Four months after Perkins’s testimony, SPLC ran into a legal problem that has nothing to do with whether FRC belongs on a hate-group list. On April 21, 2026, a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama indicted SPLC, an indictment being a formal accusation, not a finding of guilt, on 11 counts: six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering (in plain terms: secretly moving illegally obtained money through legitimate-looking transactions to hide where it came from). Prosecutors allege that, starting by at least 2014, SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million to paid informants embedded in groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance, routed through accounts tied to fictitious entities, while telling donors it was working to dismantle those same groups. SPLC was arraigned on the original charges and pleaded not guilty on May 7, 2026. Jury selection is scheduled to begin October 5, 2026, before Judge Emily Marks. SPLC’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, has called the charges “provably wrong” and accused the Justice Department of leaking details to reporters before the indictment was filed.
The case has already been amended twice since that original filing. A first superseding indictment in June 2026 revised the alleged total to more than $4 million without adding new charges or defendants; SPLC was arraigned again and pleaded not guilty a second time on July 7, 2026. A second superseding indictment, unsealed August 12, then added a second defendant: Heidi Beirich, who directed SPLC’s Intelligence Project before leaving the organization in December 2019. Prosecutors now allege the scheme ran from 2007 to 2023, and that Beirich personally shared a home and bank accounts with an informant with whom prosecutors say she had a romantic relationship, with roughly $140,000 flowing to her over six years. Her attorney says she is innocent and calls the case “politically motivated.” Lowell has separately said the administration’s attacks on Beirich are “as legally and factually flawed as their previous attacks.”
This is a live, unresolved prosecution. No one has been convicted of anything, and SPLC disputes the fraud characterization entirely, saying the payments funded legitimate confidential sources who helped the FBI and saved lives. The indictment concerns SPLC’s informant-payment program, its bank filings, and how it described that program to donors. It does not concern, and no court has ruled on, whether FRC’s inclusion on SPLC’s hate list is accurate. Perkins has called the indictment “a welcome development” and argued that if wrongdoing is proven, SPLC should pay restitution out of an endowment he describes as exceeding $750 million. That is Perkins’s characterization of a case still headed to trial, not a resolution of it, and it does not retroactively settle the separate, older argument over FRC’s own designation.
Verdict: Documented operation. Family Research Council is a $26-million-a-year operation split across a charitable research arm and a political lobbying arm, led by the same team across Congress, federal courts, and federal agencies at once, and amplified through a pastor network and an annual summit that extend its reach well past its own payroll. Its sixteen-year fight with SPLC over the “hate group” label remains genuinely contested, with both organizations’ own statements on the record above. SPLC’s federal indictment is real, current, and serious, and it is also a separate matter, about a confidential-informant program, that no court has decided and that does not resolve the older designation dispute either way.
Family Research Council was not contacted for comment on this piece.