InfluenceWatch Friday

InfluenceWatch, a project of Capital Research Center, is a comprehensive and ever-evolving compilation of our research into the numerous advocacy groups, foundations, and donors working to influence the public policy process. The website offers transparency into these influencers’ funding, motives, and connections while providing insight often neglected by other watchdog groups.

The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interested parties research to use in reporting on significant topics that are often overlooked by the American public.

CRC is pleased to present some of the most significant additions to InfluenceWatch in the past week:

• Justice Unites Us PAC is a self-described “data-driven” super PAC. Formed in 2022, it supported Carrick Flynn’s campaign that year in the Democratic primary for Oregon’s sixth congressional district while using what Politico characterized as a “quirk” in federal campaign finance filing requirements to temporarily conceal its donors. According to a filing from May 2022, the group’s sole donor at the time was Protect Our Care, which is a project of the Arabella Advisors-managed nonprofit Sixteen Thirty Fund.
• NetGain Partnership is a collective of left-of-center philanthropies and foundations focused on digital and technology issues. Some of its members include the Democracy Fund, the Ford Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
• Powered by Michigan is a project of the left-of-center environmental activist group Michigan League of Conservation Voters (Michigan LCV), the state affiliate of the national League of Conservation Voters (LCV). In September 2023, Powered by Michigan released online advertisements asking state residents to “demand more home-grown” weather-dependent energy. It wants 60% of the state’s energy to come from such sources and to eliminate conventional energy usage in the state by 2035.
• Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is a left-of-center organization that provides legal aid to whistleblowers speaking on environmental issues within state and federal agencies. The group has been criticized for focusing on publicity instead of cases it can win and for wasting taxpayer money on lawsuits about issues that could have been handled internally. Several left-of-center nonprofit donors include the Firedoll Foundation, the Seattle Foundation, the Denver Foundation, and the Wallace Global Fund.
• The Conference Board is a New York-based think tank with over 2,000 member companies, which advocates on U.S business policies. The Conference Board has supported environmental, social, and governance activism (ESG Activism); diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); and concepts of critical race theory-influenced racial justice. The Board also advocates for reaching “net zero” carbon emissions in the U.S by 2050.