Shortly after Bill Clinton’s election, Republican operative Bill Kristol raised $1.3 million from conservative foundations and New York donors to fund a nonprofit activist organization to resist nationalized health care. Read more…
Three large foundations—Rockefeller, MacArthur, and the Pew Charitable Trusts—pledged a combined $20 million in 1991 to found a new organization devoted to political-campaign-style efforts to change U.S. energy policy: reducing Read more…
Charitable donations aimed at influencing policy can occasionally lead to disaster, particularly if they are entangled with taxpayer money. That’s the lesson of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so-called government-sponsored Read more…
In 1991, former Reagan administration lawyer Chip Mellor approached philanthropist Charles Koch with an idea for a “national law firm on liberty” that he would co-found with litigator Clint Bolick. Read more…
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation began a long-term public crusade against tobacco use in 1991. Moving far beyond traditional medical efforts and using all the levers of public-policy advocacy, the Read more…
The biographer of billionaire investor and donor Warren Buffett describes him as having “a Malthusian dread” of population growth among the poor. In 1964 he set up an Omaha foundation Read more…
In the 1970s, the conventional wisdom in international aid organizations was that the biggest hurdles to the economic development of poor nations were external factors like the legacy of colonialism Read more…
During the 1980s, scholars such as Thomas Sowell developed intellectual arguments against the racial preferences advocated by the civil-rights establishment. By the end of the decade, conservative foundations were ready Read more…
When Michigan auto-parts executive Edgar Prince visited Christian radio personality James Dobson in Colorado in 1988, he learned that Dobson was trying to raise $1 million to jumpstart the Family Read more…
In 1988, the Pew Charitable Trusts, whose resources derive from Sun Oil, offered a $120,000 gift to the University of California at Santa Barbara to study “the impact of climate Read more…
One of the first major initiatives of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation was to bring school choice to its home city of Milwaukee. In so doing, it both revolutionized Read more…
In 1987, the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation awarded a group called Alternatives to Militarism the first known grant to challenge military regulations on homosexual behavior. The topic worked its way Read more…
The Charles Koch Institute was founded in 2011 by the billionaire industrialist to run educational programs that give students and professionals a deeper understanding of markets and politics. Its main Read more…
Hedge funder Thomas Steyer made lots of money developing new coal mines in Asia. More recently, he decided fossil fuels are evil, and developed a taste for policy fights on Read more…
Drilling horizontally into shale and then cracking it by pumping in water under high pressure—a process known as “fracking”—has had stunning effects on U.S. oil and gas production, turning the Read more…
Retired investor Roger Hertog has made it a centerpiece of his philanthropy to create first-rate intellectual seminars that can inspire an interest in politics among top students who are likely Read more…
In the summer of 2008, the three largest unions of government employees and a collection of left-wing organizations including ACORN, MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, Alliance for a Just Read more…
While working for the governor of North Carolina in the 1980s, Art Pope became frustrated by a lack of organizations able to supply well-developed ideas for conservative political reform. After Read more…
Back in 1987 the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation provided a $2.8 million startup grant to launch the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a think tank focused on the economic Read more…
In 2004, Colorado was a solidly Republican state: the governor, both U.S. Senators, and five of seven House members belonged to the GOP, and President George W. Bush won the Read more…