How Wisconsin Money Funded Trump’s Policies

The Bradley Foundation moved to the Hammes Headquarters building in 2019.

The incredible speed with which President Donald Trump moved to radically reshape the United States has been traced to Project 2025, the policy road map created by the Heritage Foundation. More than 100 nonprofits signed on as advisers to Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” document. Who funded this huge effort?

Much of the money came from Wisconsin, according to several publications that track philanthropy and foundation giving. By far the most important of the six biggest funders of the effort was the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, which gave $52.9 million to 29 different Project 2025 advisers since 2020, according to an analysis by DeSmog, the research group that calls itself “the world’s No. 1 source for accurate, fact-based information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns.”

The foundation’s money came from the sale of the Allen-Bradley company in 1985 and has grown ever bigger since then. Much of the $52.9 million in funding was awarded through the foundation’s growing subsidiary, the Bradley Impact Fund.

Ranking fourth highest in giving to Project 2025 were Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who have given $13 million to Project 2025 groups since 2020. The Uihleins are billionaires who are also near the top in funding right-wing Republican candidates, and whose money has come from their Wisconsin-based company, Uline.

The other four donors were industrialist Barre Seid, who gave $22.4 million to Project 2025 groups; the Scaife family foundations ($21.5 million); oil refinery industrialist Charles G. Koch ($9.6 million); and the Coors family, whose wealth came from the beer company ($2.7 million).

All told, about 65% of the big money funding Project 2025 came from Wisconsin. And that might be an underestimate. An analysis of the grants by an independent publication called United Methodist Insight, which provides “news and views for concerned United Methodists and decision-makers,” found that the Bradley Foundation and its Impact Fund together “donated $61.4 million to 17 of the nonprofits behind Project 2025 (including $27.1 million to Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation and just under $2 million to Young America’s Foundation).” The difference between the two estimates appears to depend on which groups are counted as contributors to Project 2025.

The dominance of Bradley in funding Project 2025 is, in some ways, not surprising. Since 1986, the Bradley Foundation has been called the biggest funder of conservative policymaking in America and has been a regular, generous funder of the Heritage Foundation over the past 40 years. Meanwhile, it has grown much larger, with total assets in 2024 of nearly $1.2 billion, including the smaller pot of nearly $200 million in the Bradley Impact Fund, according to its most recent tax forms.

On the other hand, the Bradley Foundation was once a less secretive organization with connections to neoconservative thinkers that sponsored workshops seeking consensus between conservatives and moderate liberals on issues like welfare. But over the past decade or so the foundation has gotten more and more closely aligned with Trump-style MAGA Republicans.

“The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and Bradley Impact Fund have emerged as major forces in Maga circles,” noted Michael Beckel, the research director for Issue One, a bipartisan political reform group, in a story by The Guardian.

“The radicalization of the foundation could be seen in the addition of board members like James Arthur Pope (in 2014) and Cleta Mitchell (2012),” an Urban Milwaukee story observed.

“Pope is a rabid right-winger who used his family foundation money to almost single-handedly turn North Carolina into a red state and to help bankroll a gerrymandering scheme the U.S. Supreme Court overturned as unconstitutional for targeting and reducing the impact of Black voters with ‘almost surgical precision,’” the story noted.

As for Mitchell, she is a longtime Washington, D.C., lawyer who worked with President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election and participated in the infamous phone call to the Georgia secretary of state where Trump pushed the official to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win in that state. The controversy forced her resignation from the Foley & Lardner firm, yet the Bradley Foundation was happy to keep her on the board.

Mitchell has become one of the foremost election deniers in the nation, “recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections,” as the New York Times reported.

Her fervor was matched by the Bradley Foundation, which over a 10-year period spent some $18 million to support groups tied to voter suppression legislation and to stoke false fears that the 2020 election was stolen, as a New Yorker story reported. That funding included $200,000 going to Mitchell’s Conservative Partnership Institute, the main vehicle for her election conspiracy work.

Another key Bradley board member is Robert P. George, who also served on the board of the Heritage Foundation from 2019 until November 2025, when he resigned after Heritage President Kevin Roberts refused to retract his defense of Tucker Carlson, who had interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes. By then, the impact of Heritage’s 2025 plan was becoming brutally clear in the actions taken by Trump, but George has never offered any criticism of it.

Another connection to the Heritage Foundation is Gabe Conger, head of the Bradley Impact Fund, who served for nearly seven years with Heritage, including as an adviser to the president for donor relations. He joined Bradley in April 2018. Under Conger, the Impact Fund worked “to ramp up donations to Project 2025 groups,” as the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism observed.

The Bradley Foundation, which for decades used to court the media, no longer lists any staff member who handles communications or media relations, and calls to the foundation for comment were not returned. But it seems clear the foundation is very happy about the Trump administration’s policies, to judge by an essay this year by Conger.

“Like ideas, elections have consequences,” he wrote. “Looking at a list of the best-positioned reform, accountability, transparency, and policy experts contributing to the new administration’s fast start is like looking at the Bradley Impact Fund’s grant recipient list. Especially now, our community of purpose is living up to its name as an Impact Fund.”

In short, the radical regime of Donald Trump was brought to you by the Bradley Foundation.