In 2020, campaigning for the Senate seat he now holds, Tommy Tuberville made a promise that was easy to remember and easy to check. He would not keep his Senate salary. Every dollar of it — “every dime,” he said — would go to Alabama’s veterans.
He repeated it through the primary and into the general. The vehicle would be his own charity, The Tommy Tuberville Foundation, formed in 2014 and rooted, he has always said, in his father.
His father earned that mention. Charles R. Tuberville Jr. of Camden, Arkansas, registered for the draft on his eighteenth birthday in July 1943 and was in the Army by November. He served in Company A of the 746th Tank Battalion, one of the independent tank battalions that came ashore in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and he fought with it across France, into the Rhineland, through the Ardennes and on into Germany. He was wounded in Europe in 1945 and came home with a Purple Heart. His headstone in Camden records it plainly: Wounded 1945 Europe. Nothing below is his doing.
One clarification, offered in his favor. The senator has said for years that his father earned “five Bronze Stars.” The Bronze Star Medal is an individual decoration, and no record shows he received one — but the 746th earned credit for exactly five campaigns, and a soldier who served through all five wore five bronze service stars on his campaign ribbon. Two different things that share a name. The likeliest explanation is a family story that lost a word over fifty years, and five campaign stars is no small record. It is a man who was there for the whole war.
The pledge, and the veterans it was made to
Six years in, Tuberville has drawn roughly a million dollars in Senate salary. There is no public record that any of it reached Alabama’s veterans through his foundation — and the foundation’s own tax filings show nothing moving on that scale.
The foundation files a Form 990-EZ, the short return for small charities. Reported revenue: about $93,000 in 2015, its first full year; $64,000 in 2016; $32,000 in 2018; $74,000 in 2021; $162,000 in 2023, its best year. Then in 2024 revenue fell to $23,950 — down eighty-five percent. Over roughly a decade the foundation has taken in something near half a million dollars, raised, its treasurer says, through an annual golf tournament, donated speaking fees and old investment income. Not a Senate salary.
What the reporting found
None of this is new ground. In October 2020 — in the middle of the campaign where the promise was made — both the Associated Press and The New York Times reported that the foundation had spent one third or less of its money on charitable activity, with tens of thousands of dollars going to stage the golf tournaments that raised it. Doug Jones, then the incumbent, put the share actually reaching veterans at about 18 percent and said so publicly. Alabama elected Tuberville anyway, three weeks later.
The reporting that pried this open came from Lagniappe in Mobile, where Scott Johnson found that some $90,000 in recent grants went to recipients the foundation did not disclose, and that the state had no record of the foundation registering to solicit charitable contributions in Alabama, a requirement under state law. AL.com followed.
The grants that have been identified went to organizations doing work that matters in this state — the VFW of Alabama, Three Hots and a Cot in Birmingham, Still Serving Veterans in Huntsville, and $15,000 to Dovetail Landing, which disbanded in 2025. Good groups, all of them chronically short of money. Which is the point. A million dollars, delivered as promised, would have been transformational for outfits that operate on grocery-money budgets and turn veterans away for lack of a bed.
The senator’s answer
Asked directly this summer whether he had kept his word, Tuberville did not say either way. “Yes, I said that in 2020,” he told AL.com. “My dad was a veteran who served in World War II… That’s why I have a foundation that supports veterans.”
His own treasurer, Chester McKinney, was blunter. “Coach has to live with that himself,” he said. “I know what he said and I know what he promised — me and the people heard that. I’m not trying to cover for him.”
Tuberville is on the ballot again in November, running for governor. The promise he made in 2020 was to veterans in this state, Lee County’s among them — a specific promise, with a number attached. Asking what became of it is not a slight against the man in the Sherman tank. It is the least the people he promised are owed.
In November he faces Doug Jones, the former U.S. senator he unseated in 2020 — the same campaign in which the “every dime” promise was made.
The campaign’s response
Asked Saturday night whether the senator had donated his Senate salary to Alabama veterans as promised, and if so where the money went, campaign communications director Mallory Jaspers responded Sunday morning with a statement from Tuberville:
“Yes, I said that in 2020. My dad was a veteran who served in World War II and died while on active duty at age 53. That’s why I have a foundation that supports veterans.
“To no one’s surprise, Joe Biden’s IRS audited my foundation in 2021 but found ZERO infractions. I’ll continue raising money for veterans long after my tenure in the senate is over.”
The statement is identical, word for word, to the one the campaign provided to AL.com on June 30 in response to the same question. In six weeks, and across at least two news organizations, the answer has not changed and the question has not been answered.
It is worth separating what the statement says from what it does not.
It does not say the salary was donated. It does not say how much was given, to whom, or when. It does not address the promise of monthly checks. The senator’s tenure is the thing at issue, and the closing line — that he will keep raising money for veterans after that tenure ends — points forward rather than back.
The audit reference answers a question no one asked. An IRS examination that finds no infractions establishes that the foundation’s filings complied with tax law; it does not establish that roughly $174,000 a year in Senate pay passed through the foundation, and the foundation’s own returns show total revenue well short of that in the years reported. The examination also covers 2021 — the first year of a term that still has months left to run. Nothing in it speaks to the four years since.
As for his father: Charles Roe Tuberville Jr. was drafted at 18, landed with the 746th Tank Battalion, and came home with a Purple Heart. He died in 1978 at 53. He is the reason the promise carried the weight it did in 2020, and no part of this story asks anyone to think less of him. The question is only whether the promise made in his name was kept.
This newspaper’s request remains open. If the campaign provides records of the senator’s giving during his Senate term, we will publish them.
Illustration: AI-generated (ChatGPT). It is not a photograph, and does not depict Senator Tuberville, any real person, or an actual event.
