Meet the Florida think tank behind Kansas bills to restrict elections and welfare benefits
As the Kansas Senate prepared to pass a bill limiting the Governor and Secretary of State’s powers over election laws last week, Sen. Ethan Corson, a Fairway Democrat, asked a seemingly simple question.
“Who is Opportunity Solutions Project?”
Instead of answering, Sen. Rob Olson bristled.
“I don’t see what that has to do with the bill,” said Olson, the Olathe Republican carrying the measure.
The question had to do with the bill’s author.
If state legislatures are considered laboratories of democracy, then its scientists are trading formulas. Legislation often crosses state lines, through model bills written by advocacy groups, or as part of a national political strategy, such as a Parents Bill of Rights. Sometimes lawmakers will appropriate language that has attracted attention elsewhere, like the Missouri state representative who offered legislation similar to the Texas anti-abortion law, or the Georgia Senator who proposed a “Don’t Say Gay” bill after it passed in Florida.
Opportunity Solutions Project is one of the conservative think tanks working to shape laws at the state and federal level. In the wake of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen, the organization has become a leading advocate for state bills to place restrictions on election administration. It is also pushing back against federal election reform.
The Florida non-profit has been a low-profile force in the Kansas state house, working to advance bills that would make election laws more restrictive and government assistance harder for poor people to receive.
Their proposals are moving through the Kansas Senate. One bill to end the three-day grace period for mail-in ballots — requiring that they arrive by 7 p.m. on Election Day — has reached the Senate floor. A proposal to bar state officials from unilaterally entering into consent decrees — legal settlements to resolve disputes — involving election laws has passed the Senate. The organization’s sweeping bill restricting access to welfare programs dominated a full day in the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee.
The committee chair, Sen. Richard Hilderbrand, who has also championed some of their election proposals, seemed confused when asked who the organization was and why he trusted them.
“I just talked with whoever their representatives are here at the Capitol,” Hilderbrand said. “I don’t even know that organization.”
They are Dugan Consulting, a lobbying firm run by former Gov. Sam Brownback’s campaign manager, Mark Dugan.
Who is Opportunity Solutions Project?
In 1996, 21-year-old Tarren Bragdon became the youngest person ever elected to the Maine legislature, defeating a three-term incumbent. He served for two terms before leaving to shape policy behind the scenes. He landed at the Maine Heritage Policy Center, a conservative think tank, where he initially focused on health policy before rising to become CEO and one of the most influential non-elected officials in the state, according to the Portland Press-Herald.
In 2011 he left Maine for Florida to start his own venture: The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA). Opportunity Solutions Project is its lobbying arm.
The group immediately began work in Kansas, focusing on the same issues Bragdon pursued in Maine — a conservative approach to healthcare and welfare reform. After Kansas passed welfare reform in 2013 under Brownback, the foundation tried to bring the legislation to other states.
In a 2017 testimony before Congress, where he was invited to speak about healthcare reform, Bragdon said his organization contributed legislation to 41 states and that its bills passed in 29 over three years.
Nick Stehle, spokesman for the Foundation for Government Accountability, said the group is currently active in 32 states. The policies it has advanced, he said, have gotten 9.5 million people off government assistance in the past four years.
The foundation was not involved in election issues prior to 2021, when Trump promoted baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential contest. Since then, it has published reports and polls on the issue.
Asked if the group believed the 2020 election was stolen, Stehle said it was focused on addressing voters’ concerns, employing a line similar to one used by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell when discussing Trump’s claims.
“We look forward, not backwards, when it comes to the 2020 election,” Stehle said. “We recognize that people have questions, and consider faith in our institutions to be critical. That’s why FGA wants to restore trust in our democracy by making sure it is easy to vote and hard to cheat, as well as by providing transparency to voters so that they know how much their vote matters.”
Still, several reports focus on the 2020 election, specifically the use of what they call “Zuckerbucks” — grant money from The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a non-profit funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The funds were intended to help local and state officials deal with the additional expense of running elections in the middle of a pandemic.
The papers, including one that focuses on Missouri, imply that Zuckerberg’s money tilted elections toward Democrats (the fact checking organization Poltifact reported that election officials said the money did not create outside influence). That allegation has also been made by former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, who was recently subpoenaed by the House of Representatives committee looking into Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
In Kansas, 25 counties applied for grants from The Center for Tech and Civic Life in 2020, receiving a total of $2.3 million, according to the Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit.
While the audit found no obligations associated with accepting the grant money, the Kansas legislature passed a law last year barring election officials from accepting outside funding. Opportunity Solutions Project was listed as the sole proponent of the policy.
While the FGA and Opportunity Solutions project have been public about purported policy goals, their revenue stream is more complicated. A “dark money” group, registered as a tax-exempt political non-profit under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, Opportunity Solutions Project, doesn’t have to disclose donors. The organization reported $2.6 million in donations in 2019, their most recent publicly available report.
The FGA is registered as a charitable non-profit under 501(c)(4) and also doesn’t have to disclose donors. It raised $10 million in 2019, according to their most recent report.
Stehle declined to say who donates to the groups.
“We protect the identity of our donors as a courtesy to them,” Stehle said. “While we’re proud of our donors and our donors are proud of us and many of them are happy to share their role, protecting donor privacy is a fundamental tenet of free speech and expression.”
While they do not reveal funding, FGA is associated with a number of high-profile conservative organizations, including the American Legislative Exchange Council and the States Policy Network, both of which have been influential in promoting Republican policy goals at the state level.
Bragdon also lives in Ave Maria, a planned community near Naples, Florida, founded in part through money from philanthropist and Dominos Pizza founder Tom Monaghan. He was a prominent backer of Sam Brownback when he ran for governor in 2008.
What do they want?
Opportunity Solutions Project has been the main proponent for several election-related bills in Kansas, including some Republican Secretary of State Scott Schwab has opposed.
These include a bill to ban the use of ballot drop boxes, a measure to prohibit the Governor or Secretary of State from entering consent decrees that alter election law without the Legislature’s consent, and bills eliminating the three-day grace period for return of advance ballots.
The organization was also behind a bill expanding work requirements for food stamp recipients.
In testimony to the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee, Opportunity Solutions Project fellow Stewart Woodson described their goal as simply to “reduce barriers to work and promote free and fair elections.”
“Ballots that don’t arrive until 3 days after the election can seriously undermine voter confidence,” Woodson explained. “Whether or not there is fraud … is irrelevant.”
Hundreds of bills are brought to the Legislature each session. Many are never granted hearings, even when they have broad support. Versions of Opportunity Solutions Project’s bills cleared those barriers. The measures limiting drop boxes and the three-day grace period were combined and passed out of the Senate Federal and State affairs committee. The measure limiting consent decrees passed the full senate.
Last year, the organization backed provisions in a law that limited the number of advance ballots an individual can return on behalf of other voters and banned election offices accepting outside dollars. The law is being challenged in Shawnee County District Court.
While organizations pushing model legislation is not uncommon in Kansas, Corson, the Fairway Democrat, said he’s grown particularly concerned about the Opportunity Solutions Project.
“It seems like they have a little bit of a more specific mission, it seems like they’re very focused on making false claims of voter fraud and then telling a state like Kansas how we should be administering our social service programs,” Corson said.
“I don’t know why a Florida-based organization has an interest in how the state of Kansas is administering social service organizations.”
In promoting the bill banning the governor and secretary of state from entering election consent decrees without the Legislature’s approval, Woodson cited consent decrees in Pennsylvania in 2020. But he focused on a pre-litigation agreement and Kelly struck with Loud Light Civil Action last year to require that voter registration forms be sent to social service recipients.
The Kelly administration, however, has entered similar pre-litigation agreements on Kansas’ foster care and mental health systems.
When asked why the focus was on election consent decrees rather than the practice as a whole, Hilderbrand and Olson couldn’t answer.
“It’s not my bill,” Olson said.
This story was originally published March 21, 2022 at 5:00 AM.