Last week, the Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch Friday was an all-green sweep. Every single profile was a conservation or climate organization. Organizations that protect land, track emissions, and fund grassroots environmental work were treated as threats to be catalogued.
The “evidence” of danger ranges from thin to farcical. Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit that creates urban parks and protects open space, was flagged because employees donated to Democrats. WattTime, a clean energy emissions-tracking nonprofit whose partners include Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, was labeled a “climate activist group.” Global Greengrants Fund, which distributes small grants to community environmental organizations around the world, was labeled suspect because it was co-founded by a former Greenpeace regional director thirty-three years ago.
Far from being the well-sourced “research” that Capital Research Center claims to produce, this was a target list meant to serve an ultimate goal of decimating civil society organizations and nonprofits that they disagree with. And the Capital Research Center has a useful vehicle for accomplishing this: Donald Trump’s White House.
Here’s how it works: Capital Research Center president Scott Walter personally briefs senior White House officials on nonprofits and their vulnerabilities, coordinating with the common goal of identifying “targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem.” Then, the administration cancels and freezes billions in grants.
That’s the Capital Research Center playbook: Profile an organization. Walk a file to the White House. Watch the funding disappear.
Capital Research Center would have you believe it’s simply tracking where money goes. But notice who never seems to get any real scrutiny? The fossil fuel industry trade groups that helped draft the administration’s energy policy, the dark money networks financing the push to open public lands to drilling, or the ideologically driven funders who write Capital Research Center’s own checks. They get what they’ve paid for.
Walter has testified before Congress multiple times since Trump’s inauguration and has made himself a reliable conduit between the conservative “research” apparatus and an administration more than happy to act on what he delivers. For the second year in a row, Trump is trying to gut hundreds of millions in funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. The administration has also proposed defunding the Land and Water Conservation Fund allocations that support land conservation across the country.
This is how it works. Capital Research Center generates the intellectual facade, including profiles, funding maps, and bogus insinuations. Suddenly, a nonprofit that tracks power grid emissions is an “activist group” and a land trust network is a “suspicious actor.” Then, the administration supplies the wrecking ball.
None of this is research. It’s opposition targeting with fancy letterhead. And the conservation organizations in last week’s InfluenceWatch Friday now have reason to wonder whether a federal crackdown is coming.
###