Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation — the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025 — provided Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray with model legislation, detailed feedback, and line-by-line edits for a bill that limits foreign spending on campaigns for state ballot measures.
Documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) show how, over three months, Heritage Action’s Wyoming State Director Kristen Christensen helped Gray to advance the organization’s model legislation on foreign spending.
Freshman Representative Nina Webber (R–24), a member of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus who assumed office in January, introduced the bill, which was signed into law by the governor barely two months later. The text of Webber’s initial bill and amendments (HB 337) reflects Christensen’s edits word for word.
Wyoming is the first state with a legislative chamber controlled by members of the State Freedom Caucus Network, a web of extremist state legislators founded in 2021 by the Conservative Partnership Institute. Like other state Freedom Caucuses, Wyoming’s group opposes gender-affirming care, Medicaid expansion, most taxation, and allowing public schools to teach about the history of racism in the U.S. Gray was one of its founding members.
Watchdog groups warn that direct influence by out-of-state groups over the legislative process poses a threat to democracy in Wyoming.
“The people of Wyoming deserve transparency from their elected officials and the state agencies they oversee,” Marissa Carpio, a policy director at the Wyoming-based Equality State Policy Center, told CMD. “Any outside influence over Secretary of State Gray raises serious questions about who really set the… agenda this legislative session.”
Backlash Against Progressive Ballot Measures
The Wyoming bill prohibits the “foreign funding of ballot measures.” Nearly identical, Heritage-backed legislation also passed this year in Kansas (HB 2106) and Kentucky (HB 45), and last year in Ohio (HB 1). Similar legislation is pending in Alabama (HB 363), Arizona (SCR 1027), Arkansas (HB 1837), Missouri (SB 152), and Montana (HB 818). Other right-wing organizations, including the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the Honest Elections Project (HEP), and Americans for Public Trust (APT) have also advocated for this type of legislation.
The push comes in the wake of numerous successful ballot measures in red states backed by the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a dark money group that has championed progressive causes such as protecting abortion and voting rights, raising the minimum wage, and providing paid medical and family leave. The New York Times has described the fund as “a clearinghouse of undisclosed cash for the left.”
According to the right-leaning APT, the Sixteen Thirty Fund has spent $130 million since 2014 on ballot measures in 26 states, most of which were passed by voters. Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss has donated $245 million — or roughly 20% of the group’s total revenues — to the fund since 2016.
AFPI, a right-wing organization founded by former Trump officials, refers to Wyss as “an avowed leftist with a track record of endorsing progressive causes.”
Right-wing groups have latched on to funding from Wyss as a way to neutralize the Sixteen Thirty Fund. In addition to prohibiting foreigners from direct spending on ballot measures, the new Wyoming law bars any group that has received more than $100,000 from a foreign national in the preceding four years from spending on ballot measures. The parallel Ohio law sets that limit at $10,000 at any time.
“Heritage Action, alongside other groups such as the Honest Elections Project and Americans for Public Trust, has been at the forefront of this battle” to restrict foreign spending on ballot initiatives, wrote Catherine Gunsalus, Heritage Action’s director of state advocacy, in an op-ed.
“Citizen-led ballot measures are intended to give the people a direct check on their government,” wrote HEP’s Jason Snead and APT’s Caitlin Sutherland. “But liberal groups like the Sixteen Thirty Fund have coopted the process, using initiatives to bypass elected lawmakers and enact extreme policies without bipartisan debate.”
After lauding Wyoming as “the first state to enact a foreign funding ban this year,” Gunsalus wrote that Heritage Action has been working “to advance similar legislation in Kentucky, Indiana, and Kansas.”
Despite being pushed by right-wing think tanks, bills limiting foreign spending on elections often garner broad bipartisan support. The Wyoming bill passed in the legislature with a near unanimous vote. And a number of blue states already have such legislation on the books, including California, Colorado, Maryland, Nevada, and Washington. Maine voters overwhelmingly decided to prohibit foreign spending on elections in 2023, though that measure is currently being challenged in court.
Where the bills backed by Heritage and others differ is in prohibiting ballot measure spending not just by foreign nationals themselves but by domestic nonprofit groups that receive a relatively small amount of funding from foreign nationals. The legislation in Arkansas sets that bar at $10,000 in aggregate over a four-year period.
Heritage’s Backdoor Access to Gray
The methods Heritage Action uses in Wyoming to move its policy agenda through the state legislature and onto the governor’s desk raise legitimate questions regarding democratic safeguards and transparency.
Last December, Christensen sent Heritage Action’s desired legislation to Gray directly. “Here is the Ban Foreign Funding for Ballot Measures model we discussed,” she wrote in an email, linking to a model policy developed by HEP, the Leonard Leo-funded voter suppression group.
HEP is led by Snead, a former senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation who has maintained regular contact with Gray, according to communications obtained by CMD.
A week later, Christensen also shared model policies on “ballot harvesting” and banning DEI in educational institutions.
Heritage Action’s work clearly paid off. At the beginning of the year, Gray included the ban on foreign funding in his “election integrity agenda” for the legislative session. On February 3, Webber introduced it as HB 337 in the House. One month later, the governor signed it into law.
Theories about how the legislation managed to pass so quickly are speculative. Critics say that bills favored by Gray are finding quick passage through the state legislature primarily due to his close relationships with members of the State Freedom Caucus Network.
The day the bill was introduced, Christensen wrote an email to Gray with “some recommendations to improve [it],” including 10 bulleted items and a model bill from HEP, which, she wrote, “has useful language to address these concerns.”
The following week, Christensen wrote back with a few more “tweaks,” all of which were incorporated word for word into the modified version of the bill that Webber introduced the following day.
Days after introducing that legislation, the representative wrote in an op-ed that she, along with other State Freedom Caucus Network members, were “bucking the status quo” by “listening to voters” instead of the “‘expert class.’”
Webber made no mention of Heritage Action or its partner Heritage Foundation, which together spend more than $100 million per year to influence public policy. “We turn ideas into bills and bills into law,” the group’s website boasts. The Heritage Foundation lists 68 “experts” on its website who it touts as “effectively marketing” the group’s positions to “the American people and policymakers.”
“We know that there [are] direct ties from the Freedom Caucus to D.C. operatives,” said Wyoming State Representative Karlee Provenza (D–45) in an interview. “Wyoming is run by people out of state. The bills that they bring… do not match the values of the people of Wyoming.”
Webber did not respond to a request for comment regarding the bill provided by Heritage Action.
Although moves to limit foreign spending on ballot measures typically garners bipartisan support, right-wing organizations often back a wide range of proposals designed to keep voter initiatives off the ballot altogether, especially as more groups have taken to using these measures in recent years to pass popular reforms that red-state legislatures won’t even consider and protect rights that those legislatures want to take away.
In doing so, lawmakers and other elected officials “are making a concerted effort to reduce citizens’ power to enact policy through ballot initiatives,” warns a brief from the Brenner Center for Justice.
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