Revealed: Conservative think tank SPN coordinating right-wing assault on education, healthcare and the environment in 34 states
By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
Friday, December 6, 2013 2:57 EST
Conservative
groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public
sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare,
income tax, workers’ compensation and the environment, documents
obtained by the Guardian reveal.
The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe
themselves as “free-market thinktanks”, includes proposals from six
different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce
the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school
voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and
a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions
that cause climate change.
The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained
by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy
Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative
strategy at state level.
The
documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a
blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the
Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is
publishing SPN’s summary of all the proposals to give readers and news
outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that
could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public
to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with
the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.
Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal
scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities. Last week
the Obama administration announced
a new clampdown on those groups that violate tax rules by engaging in direct political campaigning.
Most of the “thinktanks” involved in the proposals gathered by the
State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are
exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are
not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict
restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform.
Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents propose
the launch of “media campaigns” aimed at changing state laws and
policies, or refer to “advancing model legislation” and “candidate
briefings”, in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.
The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements
behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has
members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn
from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch
brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the
multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.
SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July.
Ranging in size from requests of $25,000 to $65,000, the plans were
submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Trust, a private foundation
that in 2011 donated almost $15m to largely rightwing causes.
The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late
Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire – now part of Pfizer –
which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays
of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity,
the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland
Institute and the State Policy Network itself.
SPN’s
link to Searle, the Guardian documents show, was Stephen Moore, an
editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle
on its grant-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals
in two halves – a “top 20″ and “bottom 20″. It is not known how many of
the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been
successful.
Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle
Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said
the grant decisions were made by Searle’s sons and grandsons based upon
the late businessman’s “commitment to the advancement of free enterprise
and individual rights”.
The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents
go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:
• “reforms” to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in
Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;
• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;
• an education voucher system to promote private and home schooling in Florida;
• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;
• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.
SPN’s president, Tracie Sharp, told the Guardian that “as a
pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace
freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone
issues of a free people and a free society.”
In its grant bid, the Maine Heritage Policy Center asked for $35,000
to support a “research and demonstration project” that would “release
residents from extreme government dependency”. It would turn the state’s
poorest area into what the Portland Press Herald describes in its
report from Washington County as “a gigantic tax-free zone”.
Dubbed “FreeME”, the initiative would eliminate state income tax and
sale taxes from residents and businesses until the economic conditions
in the county rise to the statewide average. The hole in the county’s
income from lost tax revenues – estimated at $35m a year by the think
tank – would be filled through budget cuts.
Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas
Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely
by rightwing foundations and corporations including the energy tycoons
the Koch brothers, tobacco company Altria and the telecoms giant
Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the
document and points out that in its request for $40,000 from Searle,
TPPF claims credit for blocking Medicaid expansion in the state.
“[S]topping Medicaid expansion is just the first step,” the proposal
says, adding that the “missing piece to complete our message is an
economic forecast” showing how block-granting Medicaid would “bring
significant savings” to the state. That information would then be used
to garner attention from the media.
The Observer describes TPPF as “one of the most influential
state-level thinktanks in the nation”. One of its former executives was
Ted Cruz, now US senator for Texas, who today is the keynote speaker at
the national conference in Washington of SPN’s sister organisation, the
American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec).
Several hundred miles to the north east in Massachusetts, the Beacon
Hill Institute requested $38,825 from Searle to weaken or roll back a
five-year effort by states in the region to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. The institute said it would carry out research into the
economic impact of the cap-and-trade system operating in nine states
known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
BHI appeared to have already arrived at its conclusions in advance,
admitting from the outset that the aim of the research was to arm
opponents of cap-and-trade with data for their arguments, and to weaken
or destroy the initiative. “Success will take the form of media
recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative activity
that will pare back or repeal RGGI,” the funding proposal says.
The Beacon Hill Institute, technically an affiliate rather than a
full member of the SPN, operates out of the economics department of
Suffolk University in Boston. David Tuerck, its executive director,
denied the group had engaged in lobbying. “There is never any lobbying,”
he told the Guardian. “Maybe I need to look up the definition again,
but lobbying consists of buttonholing legislators and other policymakers
to get a particular result on a particular issue, and we never do
that.”
But Suffolk University, which hosts the Beacon Hill Institute as a
research arm of its economics department, sharply criticised the
research proposal to the Searle Foundation. In a statement to the
Guardian, the university said the grant bid had not been submitted to
the university, as required, and that the university would never have
approved the proposal. “The stated research goals, as written, were
inconsistent with Suffolk University’s mission.”
Watchdogs that monitor the work of SPN and other conservative
networks in the US said that the centralised coordination of state-level
campaigns showed a significant attempt to build local activism into a
nationwide movement. Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for
Media and Democracy, which
issued a recent report on SPN,
said that the local identity of the network’s members belied a larger
purpose. “They appear to be advocating purely local interests but what
they are promoting is part of a larger national template to radically
remake our government in a way that undermines public institutions and
the rights of workers,” she said.
The SPN said that its co-ordinating role was justified because local
and state issues were increasingly impinging on national politics.
“There’s no mystery here,” Sharp said. “The whole idea of a state policy
network is that individual thinktanks can be in communication, share
best practices and analysis, and combine their efforts when they see a
benefit from doing so.”
Some of the grant bids to Searle focus specifically on prominent
local politicians the thinktanks hope to influence. The grant bid that
emanated from New Jersey, from the
Common Sense Institute
(CISNJ), another tax-exempt “research and education organization”,
floats the idea of a campaign to support the efforts of the Republican
governor Chris Christie in ending the ability of public employees to
claim untaken sick days and vacation leave in their retirement packages.
“Governor Chris Christie has been waging a war to eliminate this
practice; and CSINJ would like to provide ammunition,” the proposal
says. The thinktank plans to produce a “research study” which it would
call “Busting the Boat Checks” – an allusion to the phrase Christie uses
to denote the watercraft retirees are claimed to buy on the back of
sick and holiday leave payments.
The institute conceives a “media campaign” with its aim being the “full elimination of unused sick and vacation leave payouts”.
“We believe our study can be used to sway public sentiment further and be used as a brandisher for reform in Trenton,” it says.
CSINJ’s president, Jerry Cantrell, denied that the grant bid involved
any element of lobbying, insisting instead that his group was providing
a service that in the past might have been done by the decimated local
media.
“CSINJ is an education organization focused on providing the public
with facts and the truth. We don’t represent any interest besides the
folks who are burdened by this practice – the taxpayers,” he said.
He said the proposal was focused on the “abusive practice of
accumulating sick or vacation day payments over an entire career and
using them as retirement bonus. We’ve seen too many instances of high
level individuals working out the door with $500,000-$750,000 claiming
to have never missed a day in 30 years of employment.”
The proposal from the Illinois Policy Institute for a campaign to
deal with Chicago’s government worker pensions crisis by switching to
401(k)-style retirement plans similarly focuses on a politician – in
this case Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The proposal says that “Mayor Emanuel has
privately expressed the need for 401(k)-style changes to truly achieve
reform.”
The institute plans to “leverage the leadership potential of Mayor
Emanuel … as the spark for wider pension changes in Illinois.” It adds
that “friendly legislators would be welcome to draft legislation
modelled on our policy work and work in tandem with Mayor Emanuel to
move it forward in the legislative process.”
John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Guardian
that Emanuel had been “an outspoken proponent of pension reform that
includes moving to a 401(k)-style, defined contribution system.” He saw
no problem with the lobbying that the think tank undertakes.
“We are not allowed to do any campaigning or electioneering, and we
don’t. We are allowed to spend a significant percentage of our
expenditures on lobbying and we are very proactive in lobbying for
liberty-based policy, including the urgently needed pension reform. We
report our activities accordingly.”
© Guardian News and Media 2013
The
notoriously secretive ALEC has been thrust into the sunlight in the two
years since the Center for Media and Democracy launched
ALECexposed.org, analyzed over 800 of ALEC's previously-secret model
bills, and documented the corporations and legislators pushing ALEC's
legislative agenda. It now appears that ALEC has been scorched by the
sunshine.