Powerful Right-Wing Groups Are on a Stealth Mission to Make America Look Like Texas

Conservative think tanks are on the march, working to tear down organized labor and promote extreme right-wing policies in state capitols from Alaska to Florida.

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A look at the donors to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the SPN affiliate in Austin, provides a rare window illustrating how these think tanks operate today. The evidence shows that the Big Tobacco–era strategy has been embraced by other large corporations.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose leaders recently stirred up controversy for surreptitiously lobbying on behalf of the government of Malaysia, received the bulk of its money from more than seventy-five business interests, including firms like ConocoPhillips, Boeing, TXU Energy, ExxonMobil, AEP Texas and Devon Energy. The largest company on the donor list, Koch Industries, gave $159,834 through its Austin lobbyist, J. William Oswald, in addition to a $69,788 donation from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, a Koch family foundation run in part by Richard Fink, another executive with Koch’s lobbying operation. As The Texas Observer noted, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has focused much of its advocacy on issues pertaining to its corporate benefactors, including energy deregulation and opposition to Environmental Protection Agency rules to curb mercury, smog and carbon pollution.

The Texas donor list also reveals that Sharp has played a larger role in directly financing the expansion of her affiliates than was previously known. Public disclosures indicate that SPN distributed only $19,500 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2010. That modest amount, which is similar in size to grants given to other state think tanks, suggests that many of the groups do not rely on a central source of cash. But the leaked document shows Sharp as the contact for a donation of $300,000 from the “State Think Tank Fund,” as well as $195,000 from the “Government Transparency Fund” and $49,306 from SPN itself—a discrepancy of $524,806 compared with the disclosed grant. Neither the State Think Tank Fund nor the Government Transparency Fund appears on Guidestar.com or the Foundation Center, repositories for nonprofit and foundation disclosures.

Like many SPN affiliates, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has seen its budget steadily rise. In 2011, the group brought in $5.5 million in contributions, $2.4 million more than it raised in 2008. How the other state think tanks in SPN’s orbit are funded largely remains a mystery, since they, like many overtly political nonprofits, do not disclose their donors. A recent investigation by the Center for Public Integrity shows that Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that caters to wealthy individuals, has provided much of the funding for the recent expansion in state think tanks backed by the Franklin Center and SPN.

Under Sharp’s leadership, State Policy Network has grown, opening new think tanks (now numbering fifty-nine) and forging close relations with ALEC, which brings together conservative state lawmakers and corporate lobbyists to draft “model legislation.” In 2009, ALEC gave Sharp an award to thank her for “getting SPN members more involved” with the organization. “This special acknowledgement belongs to those who have put in dedicated time and energy through ALEC,” said Sharp, who accepted the award onstage with lobbyists from Verizon and Altria.

While progressive donors have also sought to fund targeted think tank and state media outlets in certain states—namely Colorado and, reportedly, Texas—there is no comparison in terms of size and scope, or in the underhanded tactics embraced by their ideological opponents.

Brian Rothenberg, head of ProgressOhio, notes that while family foundations exist on the right and the left, corporate money has flowed almost exclusively to conservative think tanks. “Especially after Citizens United,” he says, “the right is inherently better funded than the left.” In 2011, during the effort to repeal Governor John Kasich’s collective bargaining law, unions still provided less than 20 percent of ProgressOhio’s budget.