Am I wrong to assume that Tor is effectively a US government project at this point? It may allow people to bypass local internet controls (in some cases including government-imposed internet controls), but I would assume it is not truly anonymous.
"At this point"? It was always a US military/intelligence project, it just happened to be useful for their purposes to launder their traffic by making it available to civilians. It's never exactly been a secret, and the project has seen a fair amount of scrutiny for this fact.
An interesting test would be for no one at all to make a donation..