The Leftist Billionaire Behind the Group Angling for Influence at Trump’s VA
Veterans Education Success trades on its image as a nonpartisan defender of the GI Bill. But the Washington nonprofit is quietly working to rebuild its access to the very administration its own president spent years attacking. In March 2026, VES signed onto a letter demanding that VA Secretary Doug Collins reinstate the monthly GI Bill “stakeholder” meetings that had long given the group a standing seat at the table, and it has kept pressing its agenda in written testimony to the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees throughout the current administration.
Follow the money and the picture comes into focus. It leads to Houston, and to Arnold Ventures.
Who Is John Arnold?
John Arnold made his fortune as an Enron natural gas trader before founding the hedge fund Centaurus. He and his wife Laura converted that fortune into Arnold Ventures, one of the most aggressive policy-shaping philanthropies in the country. Arnold Ventures does not simply write checks to charities. It builds advocacy infrastructure: grantees, research shops, and litigation-ready nonprofits designed to move left wing policy at the state and federal level.
The portfolio tells you where the ideology sits. Arnold Ventures seeded the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research with a $20 million gift and has framed firearms policy as a public health problem demanding new research and new rules. Its criminal justice program has poured money into the bail reform and decarceration movement — including, by the Washington Examiner’s accounting, $17.2 million to four organizations that backed calls to defund the police (a movement Arnold Ventures says it opposes). And the Arnolds’ foundation has drawn criticism for its contributions to Planned Parenthood and its affiliates.
None of this is a secret. Arnold Ventures publishes much of it proudly. What is less advertised is how this funding flows into organizations that then approach Republican administrations claiming neutral, technocratic credibility.
VES: A Grantee, Not a Grassroots Group
Veterans Education Success is a core Arnold Ventures higher education grantee. Arnold Ventures profiled VES president Carrie Wofford on its own website in April 2020 — a profile VES proudly reposted — and the multi-agency study of Post-9/11 GI Bill outcomes conducted by the American Institutes for Research with the Census Bureau and the VA was supported by Arnold Ventures, the Gates Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation, with VES itself helping to conceptualize the project.
Wofford is not a veteran. By her own biography, her resume runs through the Clinton White House, an in-house think tank she ran for the Democratic Caucus under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Senate Democratic committee staff. And her hostility to President Trump is a matter of public record on her own X account: a September 2016 post accusing the Trump team of empowering “evil-doers & nutjobs” by refusing to disavow “KKK & neo-Nazis”; a September 2017 post asking whether Trump’s “ignoring Puerto Rico is another dog whistle to appeal to white supremacists”; and a February 2019 post claiming Trump “thinks Neo Nazis are ‘very good people’” — a year and a half after Trump had said on camera that neo-Nazis and white nationalists “should be condemned totally.” An archived August 2016 post urging veterans to oppose Trump during the campaign rounds out the record.
This is not the record of a neutral watchdog. It is the record of an advocacy shop with a political customer base and a billionaire patron.
There is also a paper trail at the VA itself. A March 2022 VA Office of Inspector General reportfound that Charmain Bogue, then executive director of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s Education Service, violated federal ethics rules by participating in matters involving VES while her husband worked as a paid VES consultant. VES paid him $5,000 a month from November 2018 through November 2020, then a $35,000 lump sum as the contract wound down — exceeding the group’s own budgeted amount by $30,000. The OIG wrote that its investigation “was hampered by a lack of cooperation from VES”: the group’s president declined the OIG’s requests for interviews, and Bogue resigned from the VA in January 2022 rather than complete hers.
Why It Matters Now
The Trump VA controls policy that VES and Arnold Ventures have spent years trying to shape: GI Bill program approval, school accountability rules, and oversight of the education benefits pipeline. Arnold Ventures has an entire “Higher Education and Career Pathways” program devoted to moving federal regulation in its preferred direction, complete with formal comments to the Department of Education and statements praising Biden-era accountability rules.
When a funder with that agenda places a grantee inside the tent at a Republican VA, the grantee does not stop working for the funder. The influence simply arrives wearing a veterans-services lanyard.
Whatever one makes of the group’s stated mission, the structural point stands on its own. Veterans Education Success is not funded by veterans. It is funded, in significant part, by a progressive billionaire’s policy operation with positions on guns, crime, and abortion that much of the veteran community it claims to represent would reject.
The Bottom Line
Administrations are entitled to choose their advisers, and they are entitled to know who is paying those advisers. Before the Trump VA extends access or credibility to Veterans Education Success, it should ask the question any oversight-minded official would ask: whose agenda walks through the door with them?
The answer, on the public record, is Arnold Ventures.