The money: what Children's Health Defense's own tax returns show

A federal racketeering suit against the American Academy of Pediatrics presents two physicians as men destroyed for dissenting. The organisation standing behind them files an annual return with the Internal Revenue Service, and those returns are public. Over three years it spent $10.09 million on legal fees — and books most of that as its charitable programme rather than as overhead.

A QuackeryWatch record · Posted 21 October 2026 · build 21-10-F · Companion to the RICO suit record and the RFK Jr. running file

Where to check every number on this page

Children's Health Defense is a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 26-0388604, registered at 852 Franklin Avenue, Suite 511, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. Its tax exemption was issued in October 2007.

Returns for every year from 2015 to 2024 are free to read. ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer republishes the filings and links the original PDF for each year; the IRS's own Tax Exempt Organization Search holds the same documents. Both are listed under Sources at the foot of this page. Any reader who thinks a figure here is wrong can check it against the filing in a few minutes, and is invited to.

Ten years of revenue

“Net income” below is revenue less expenses as reported; “net assets” is the figure at the close of each year.

In 2016 the organisation took in $165,937 and finished the year with $149,477 to its name. Six years later it took in $23.5 million and held nearly $20 million. Measured against 2016 that is a rise of a hundred and forty fold — but 2016 flatters the comparison, being the weakest year on the record and the only one before 2023 in which the organisation spent more than it took in. Measured from 2017 the increase is thirty-twofold, which is the fairer figure and remarkable enough. Either way the steepest part of the climb — 2020 to 2022 — coincides exactly with the pandemic.

Why the spending rose

Expenses jumped $4,743,664 between 2022 and 2023, then fell back $3,295,380 in 2024 while still sitting $1,448,284 above where they started. The returns say exactly what drove it. The six groupings below are our own consolidation of the individual lines of Part IX, and each year's groupings add back to that year's reported total to the dollar.

Payroll was 88 per cent of the 2023 increase. Salaries other than officers nearly doubled in a single year, from $3,193,920 to $6,241,363. Add benefits, payroll taxes and officer compensation and total people costs rose $4,175,476 — against a total increase of $4,743,664.

Note the one large offset. Contracted “other fees for services” fell $1,542,245 in the same year that salaries rose by three million. That pairing is what it looks like when an organisation stops buying work from outside and puts those people on staff instead. 2023 is also the year it launched Reform Pharma, described further down in its own words.

Then 2024 came down — but payroll did not. Total people cost was $9,754,834 in 2023 and $9,662,853 in 2024: essentially flat. What fell was legal fees, by $1,725,560; conferences, by $668,406; video and photography, by $584,657; grants, back to nothing; and publications and office costs.

That is the whole answer, and the donuts carry it: people costs were 38.6 per cent of all spending in 2022, 50.8 per cent in 2023 and 60.7 per cent in 2024.

Where the money actually went

Part IX of the return divides every dollar of expenditure three ways: programme services, management and general, and fundraising. The shift across three years is substantial.

The reported programme share fell from 93.1 per cent to 70.8 per cent in two years, while management and general quadrupled in dollar terms and fundraising rose from $140,633 to $1,244,739. A 93 per cent programme ratio is unusually high for an organisation of this size, and the later figures are closer to what a charity of this budget would ordinarily report. How an organisation allocates expenditure between these three columns is a matter of its own judgement, and the next section is where that judgement does the most work.

The legal bill

Form 990 requires legal fees to be stated separately, at Part IX line 11b. For an organisation whose public identity is substantially built on litigation, this is the single most informative number in the return.

Ten million and eighty-six thousand dollars on legal fees in three years, a fifth of everything the organisation spent. And of that, $9.43 million — 93.5 per cent of it — is reported as programme service expense rather than as management or overhead.

That is an accounting choice, and it is a defensible one: if litigation is the charitable mission, then its cost is a programme cost. But it is worth seeing plainly, because it means that when a reader is told that seventy or ninety per cent of this charity's money goes to its programmes, a very large part of what is being counted is lawyers.

Who the lawyers are

Part VII, Section B of the return lists the five highest-paid independent contractors receiving more than $100,000. In all three years, four or five of the five are law firms.

These are the top five in each year only. The returns state that the number of contractors paid more than $100,000 was 12 in 2022, 14 in 2023 and 10 in 2024.

Who was paid what

Form 990 requires a charity to name its officers, directors, key employees and highest-compensated employees and state what each was paid. The 2024 return names twenty-five people, of whom twenty-one were paid more than $100,000. Total reportable compensation to those listed was $2,406,635, plus $58,543 in other compensation.

A further nine people are listed as directors or board chairpersons at $0: Kay Sullivan (board chairperson thru 9/1/24), Michelle Walrath (board chairperson), Tony Lyons, Michael Baum, Deirdre Imus, Leigh Merinoff, David Silver, Karen Hopper and Mark Gorton. The board is unpaid, which is the ordinary and proper arrangement.

The chairman's pay, year by year

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. What Children's Health Defense paid him while he chaired it is a matter of public record in its own filings:

His compensation rose from $184,375 to $510,515 between 2018 and 2022 — it nearly tripled across the same four years in which the organisation's revenue rose twentyfold. It then fell to $326,056 in 2023 and to nothing in 2024.

The general counsel's second invoice

The 2024 return is flagged for reported conflict of interest transactions. Schedule L is where a charity must disclose business dealings with people connected to it, and in 2024 it contains exactly one entry.

This was disclosed, which is the system working. Schedule L exists precisely so that related-party transactions are visible, and CHD reported it as required. Parts I, II and III of the schedule — excess benefit transactions, loans to or from interested persons, and grants benefiting interested persons — are all blank. The organisation's own Schedule O states that conflicts are disclosed at quarterly board meetings, reviewed by the board and where appropriate by outside counsel, and approved only if fair and in accordance with legal standards, and that every director annually signs an acknowledgement of the conflict of interest policy.

The publishing arm and the film arm

Schedule R discloses that Children's Health Defense owns two trading subsidiaries, both registered at its own Franklin Lakes address and both legally domiciled in Georgia:

Publishing income nearly doubled between 2023 and 2024 while film income fell by a quarter. The main return's royalty line tracks the publishing arm closely: royalties of $424,510 in 2024 against publishing income of $425,510. Royalties were $971,336 in 2022, $246,714 in 2023 and $424,510 in 2024.

Alongside these, the 2024 return pays Tommey Burrowes Productions LLP $512,682 for film and media production, and the 2023 return records $584,657 in video and photo expenses and $234,084 in publications. This is an organisation that makes and sells media at scale, and the returns record it as such.

What the organisation gave away

Across the three years read for this page, Children's Health Defense made grants in one year only. The 2022 and 2024 returns report no grants to organisations or to individuals at all — those lines are blank.

In 2023 it reported $241,599 to domestic organisations, $36,000 to domestic individuals, and $315,000 to foreign recipients. Schedule I itemises the domestic organisations:

Seven recipients totalling $226,000 of the $241,599 reported; grants below $5,000 need not be itemised. Global Health Project and The Kirsch Foundation are listed at the same street address.

The $36,000 to individuals is recorded by category rather than by name, as the form permits: $24,000 for “educational website support” to one recipient, and $12,000 for “educational podcast support” to one recipient. Neither individual is identified in the return.

For scale: in the single year in which this organisation made grants at all, it gave away $592,599 in total, and spent $4,362,739 on lawyers.

Where the foreign money went

Schedule F records what a charity does outside the United States. It is reported by region, and the form does not require foreign recipients to be named — in both 2022 and 2023 the recipient column is left entirely blank. The region column is therefore the only reliable test of where the money went, and it is a complete one: every dollar sent abroad has to be attributed to a region.

The 2023 payments are the $315,000 shown on the face of the return as grants to foreign organisations. The 2024 figures are not grants — that return reports no grants of any kind — but expenditure on the organisation's own operations abroad, totalling $205,866 across four offices. Note that by 2024 the European programme is described by the organisation itself as including a litigation program.

A programme called Reform Pharma

The 2023 return's Schedule O describes a new programme begun that year, in the organisation's own words:

The same schedule breaks out the $1,236,270 of “other fees for services” in that year as $980,330 to educational activities contractors and $255,940 for HR services.

What is still not in this page

Three things, each of them a limit on what the public filings contain rather than a gap in the reading:

• Donors are not public. Schedule B, which lists substantial contributors, is withheld from public inspection by law. The 2024 return records $14,119,684 in contributions, of which $4,620,398 was non-cash — nearly a third. Who gave it, and what the non-cash gifts consisted of, is not in the public document.
• Contractors below the top five. Each year's return names only the five highest-paid, while stating that 12, 14 and 10 contractors respectively exceeded $100,000 in 2022, 2023 and 2024. The unnamed remainder is everything paid less than $235,518 in 2022, $293,933 in 2023 and $300,416 in 2024.
• The 2025 return. Due 16 November 2026 with extension, and likely public some months after filing. It will cover the year Kennedy became Health Secretary and the year in which Shaw v. AAP was prepared, and it will show whether the revenue decline ran to a third year.