Right Web

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FreedomWorks is a conservative advocacy organization that has been a key backer of the Tea Party movement. The current incarnation of FreedomWorks was created in 2004 as part of a merger between Citizens for a Sound Economy, a rightist pro-free market organization, and Empower America, which was founded in 1993 by William Bennett, Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan and a rightist pundit on issues from defense policy to family values. As of late 2010, FreedomWorks was led by board chairman Dick Armey, the former right-wing Republican from Texas who along with Newt Gingrich helped draft the 1994 “Contract with America,” and president Matt Kibbe, a long-standing Republican Party operative.[1]

A purported champion of small government conservatism, FreedomWorks claims to drive “policy change by training and mobilizing grassroots Americans to engage their fellow citizens and encourage their political representatives to act in defense of individual freedom and economic opportunity.”[2]

Despite its grassroots claims, observers have argued that FreedomWorks is an establishment organization that has endeavored to co-opt grassroots movements. Shortly after the Tea Party began to emerge as a force in national politics, FreedomWorks was one of several establishment groups that stepped in to claim the leadership of the movement.

Wrote Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, “Suddenly, tens of thousands of Republicans who had been conspicuously silent during George Bush's gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires showed up at Tea Party rallies across the nation, declaring themselves fed up with wasteful government spending. From the outset, the events were organized and financed by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was quietly working to co-opt the new movement and deploy it to the GOP's advantage. Taking the lead was former House majority leader Dick Armey, who as chair of a group called FreedomWorks helped coordinate Tea Party rallies across the country.”[3]

FreedomWorks financial backers have included several conservative foundations—including the Bradley, Scaife, Castle Rock, Earhart, and Olin foundations[4] —as well as the Koch brothers (David and Charles), who along with Rupert Murdoch have provided much of the financial backing for anti-Obama administration activism.[5]

Commenting on the Koch brothers, the New York Times’ Frank Rich wrote, “There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the ‘death panel’ warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. … Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.”[6]

After FreedomWorks was created in the run up to the 2004 presidential election, Bill Berkowitz wrote in MediaTransparency: "Stealing a page from MoveOn.org 's successful organizing playbook, the leaders of FreedomWorks … hope to conduct massive get out the vote and political education campaigns in the swing states on behalf of President George W. Bush. The two groups decided to merge because there was 'an overlap in issues between the two organizations,' Shawn Small, the director of policy at Empower America, told me in a telephone interview. It was an opportunity to bring together Empower America, which Small characterized as a 'grasstops' organization driven by such inside the beltway 'superstars' as William Bennett, Vin Weber, and Jean Kirkpatrick, and CSE's 'grassroots' following.”[7]

Despite the claims of overlap, FreedomWorks has largely abandoned the get-tough foreign policy advocacy that characterized much of Empower America's work, especially in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Among Empower's more notable efforts during the early years of the "war on terror" was the creation of the Bill Bennett-led Americans for Victory over Terrorism (AVOT), an advocacy outfit closely aligned with pro-war neoconservative groups that helped push public opinion to support the invasion of Iraq. AVOT eventually merged with the conservative Claremont Institute.

On foreign policy, FreedomWorks has little to say aside from advocating free trade agreements and pushing through immigration reform, including border security. As of late 2010, FreedomWorks’ “Key Issues” web page failed to mention any foreign policy concerns. On “border security,” the group wrote on its website, "Large-scale illegal border crossings—the vast majority for economic reasons—are compromising the security of America's borders. … By providing American employers and temporary guest workers a legal way to operate, we can eliminate the source of much of the current lawlessness at the border. Reducing the overall flow of illegal traffic at the border will allow law enforcement to focus on stopping criminal gangs and capturing terrorists."[8]

Describing FreedomWorks pre-Tea Party work, Rolling Stones’ Taibbi writes, “Prior to the Tea Party phenomenon, FreedomWorks was basically just an AstroTurfing-lobbying outfit whose earlier work included taking money from Verizon to oppose telecommunications regulation. Now the organization's sights were set much higher: In the wake of a monstrous economic crash caused by grotesque abuses in unregulated areas of the financial-services industry, FreedomWorks—which took money from companies like mortgage lender MetLife—had the opportunity to persuade millions of ordinary Americans to take up arms against, among other things, Wall Street reform.”[9]

A 2007 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists listed FreedomWorks as an organization that received much money from “Big Oil” and also promoted an agenda that did not recognize global warming: "CSE received $275,250 from ExxonMobil in 2001, an increase from $30,000 the year before. CSE merged with Empower America and became FreedomWorks in 2004. FreedomWorks maintains that the science of climate change is 'far from settled' and cites scientists such as Sallie Baliunas" (Baliunas is an astrophysicist who has criticized theories of global warming).[10]

FreedomWorks earned hundreds of thousands of dollars through a plan, designed by Citizens for a Sound Economy in 2000, in which people buying tax-free medical savings accounts sold by Medical Savings Insurance Co. were asked to become members of the advocacy group. The plan, which was the subject of a class-action lawsuit begun in 2005, was challenged on the basis that insurance holders were not made clearly aware that they were becoming members of the CSE when signing on. According to the lawsuit's motion for class-action status, "The certificates of insurance issued to class members, despite the clear language contained herein, did not disclose the identity of the Group Policyholder [CSE, and later FreedomWorks] of the group policy, despite the fact that each putative insured must 'join' and pay money to such group as a condition of obtaining insurance.”[11]

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.