George Soros’ Foundation Slashing 40 Percent of Staff

Billionaire investor George Soros delivers a speech on the sideline of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, eastern Switzerland on Jan. 24, 2019. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

George Soros’ foundation, which is now controlled by the billionaire activist’s son, plans to cut 40 percent of its workforce, according to reports and a statement from the Open Society Foundations (OSF)

The board of directors of OSF, which George Soros founded in 1979 and personally led until about a month ago, has approved “significant changes” to the organization’s operating model that require “difficult decisions” and will make the foundation “nimbler,” The Epoch Times has learned.

“The changes are intended to maximize Open Society’s impact in helping to counter the forces currently threatening open and free societies,” said a joint statement released Friday by George Soros’ son and OSF chair, Alexander Soros, and the organization’s president, Mark Malloch-Brown.

While OSF did not immediately respond to a request from The Epoch Times for more details, a spokesperson confirmed to CNN that the “difficult decisions” are job cuts amounting to at least 40 percent of the organization’s global workforce.

OSF employs around 800 people worldwide, with around 320 of those on the chopping block.

George Soros Cedes Control

Barely a month ago, George Soros told The Wall Street Journal that he had ceded control of his $25 billion empire to his 37-year-old son, Alex Soros, who suggested that he would be even more politically engaged than his father.

The Democrat megadonor told the outlet that he initially didn’t want to cede control of the foundation to any member of his family “as a matter of principle.”

However, he said that he and his son “think alike” and that he’s taking over at the helm of the foundation because “he’s earned it.”

Alex Soros told the outlet that he’s “more political” than his father and that he’s worried about the prospect that former President Donald Trump might win the 2024 race for the White House.

“As much as I would love to get money out of politics, as long as the other side is doing it, we will have to do it, too,” he told the Journal, suggesting that the deep pockets of the Soros organization will be deployed to support presidential campaigns opposing Trump.

Philanthropist Alex Soros, son of George Soros, attends an event in New York on June 4, 2013. Ben Gabbe/Getty Images

Alex Soros was quietly elected to the OSF board as its chairman in December 2022. He now directs political activity as president of Soros’s political action committee.

“We are going to double down on defending voting rights and personal freedom at home and supporting the cause of democracy abroad,” a spokesperson for Alex Soros told the Financial Times regarding his priorities for political action.

‘Soros DAs’

George Soros, a Hungarian-born investor worth billions, is a controversial figure in the United States after groups tied to him poured money into left-wing district attorney candidates’ campaigns across the country.

Trump has vowed to target what he and other Republicans have described as “Soros DAs” after being indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who reportedly took campaign cash from Soros during the 2021 election.

Responding to an allegation that he backed Bragg, Soros said in March that he’s never met him and didn’t contribute any money to his election bid.

“I think some on the right would rather focus on far-fetched conspiracy theories than on the serious charges against the former president,” he told Semafor.

However, Soros has made clear his backing for certain prosecutors. In an earlier op-ed, he explained why he has donated to “reform-minded prosecutors” and has “no intention of stopping.”

“The funds I provide enable sensible reform-minded candidates to receive a hearing from the public,” he wrote.

“In recent years, reform-minded prosecutors and other law-enforcement officials around the country have been coalescing around an agenda that promises to be more effective and just.”

George Soros, Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Foundations arrives for a meeting in Brussels on April 27, 2017.
Olivier Hoslet/AFP/Getty Images

Soros noted that this includes less-punitive criminal justice policies.

“This agenda includes prioritizing the resources of the criminal-justice system to protect people against violent crime. It urges that we treat drug addiction as a disease, not a crime. And it seeks to end the criminalization of poverty and mental illness,” he wrote.

“This is why I have supported the election (and more recently the re-election) of prosecutors who support reform. I have done it transparently, and I have no intention of stopping.”

Alex Soros’s remarks to the Journal and the Financial Times suggest that the OSF and affiliated groups will continue to press ahead with the agenda charted by George Soros.

OSF President Mark Malloch-Brown recently argued for the adoption of a “new economic order” that would focus on “justice and stability.”

Malloch-Brown said in a speech that if there’s “one watchword for this new framework of global governance, it must be ‘inclusivity,’” and along with it, “a multilateralism that has the roots and staying power for the new world that we are going into.”

He said a challenge of this new world would be whether collective rights supersede individual rights and whether “the interest of the state to build that green transition, provide inclusive growth means that it’s at the expense of human rights.”

“It’s not at all clear where that battle lands, as it’s not at all clear where the battle for democracy lands,” Malloch-Brown said.

Some critics of the work of OSF have argued that its political agenda leans too far to the left.