Washington, D.C. — The Trump administration just put a Capital Research Center Senior VP directly in charge of the machinery it’s using to punish nonprofits it doesn’t like.
NOTUS reports that the Interior Department last month appointed Kristen Eastlick, who previously helped lead Capital Research Center, as the agency’s head of grants. Eastlick built her career pushing the argument that nonprofits and civil society groups are scary boogeymen. Now she’s running an office, previously occupied by qualified experts, that decides how to distribute federal dollars. This comes as the Interior Department’s political review process keeps more than 1,400 grants worth more than $360 million stuck in a backlog.
CRC has spent years supplying the “research” Republicans use to punish organizations they disagree with. Now one of its own is inside the agency doing it directly.
Congressional Integrity Project Spokesperson Jeremy Funk released the following statement:
“Capital Research Center should drop the facade of being an independent research shop. They just got caught supplying the staff who run the White House’s partisan grant review process. Kristen Eastlick spent her career arguing nonprofits and civil society groups don’t deserve federal funding, and now she holds the pen deciding which ones get it. Hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for parks and communities are sitting frozen because the Trump administration handed the keys to someone from a partisan attack shop.”
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