Who’s Behind Project 2025?

Kingmaker Leonard Leo and his Christian Right dark money world

LEONARD LEO, A RIGHT-WING CATHOLIC lawyer, judicial activist, and Co-Chairman of the conservative legal think tank, the Federalist Society for Law and Policy, has emerged as a key architect and funder of Project 2025, backed by billions of dollars of slush fund dark money. He works closely with Heritage Foundation colleagues, including Kevin D. Roberts, lead author of Project 2025, the conservative party’s Mandate for Leadership electoral blueprint. While Heritage is the public face of Project 2025, Leo is the shadow money king who has united the Christian nationalist movement behind its radical agenda.

In 2022, Leo received a huge infusion of fresh money from a Chicago industrialist Barre Seid into the Marble Freedom Trust; Seid then put Leo in charge of the nonprofit 501(C)(4) trust (see details below). Seid is a longtime right-wing billionaire who has funded climate denialism, business deregulation, and fought Medicaid expansion, among his conservative priorities. (1)(2) Leo quickly moved to expand his vision of reshaping America and our legal system to reflect arch-conservative values, policies, and law. Tax records show funds from the Seid gift were transferred into Leo-controlled nonprofits, the donor-advised Donors Trust and the 85 Fund, then disbursed to a tight circle of mainly Catholic activists and right-wing groups. A majority are key Project 2025 members.

Our investigation of tax records, watchdog and media reports, shows that at least 60 of over 80 groups listed as advisors to Project 2025 are tied to Leo and his money – most being direct recipients of funding, some indirect. In 2022, a striking 28 of 54 Project 2025 Advisory Board members received funds from Leo-linked Donors Trust, described as a “dark money ATM” for the conservative movement. (3) (see THE LIST). A fiscal investigation by the watchdog group Accountable US found that Project 2025 groups received over $16.5 million in the period after Seid multiplied Leo’s coffers.

It’s all part of the plan: to stoke divisionism,

fear, and ‘us against them’ thinking

But that may prove an undercount. More conservative groups have jumped on the Project 2025 train, nearly 100 as of mid-February. (4) More Leo-linked and funded groups emerge when one looks at allies. There, the connections of dark money also reveal several longtime billionaire donors to right-wing causes, including Charles Koch, including the Scaife, Searle, Bradley, Uihlein, DeVos, and Mercer family foundations.

Then there is newcomer Teneo Network, set up last year by Leo to lure Silicon Valley donors, especially younger conservatives and libertarians; tech mogul Peter Thiel was an early member. It’s been mobilized to fund anti-“wokeism.” (See THE LIST.) Finally, there are anonymous donations passed through the Schwab Charitable Trust and Fidelity Charitable Trust to Leo-linked entities. The maze of dark money is rather astonishing, and it shows just how and where Leo is giving resources to a small, but growing, network behind Project 2025.

The Heritage Foundation has also benefited from Leo’s largesse – and shared the wealth, too. Tax records show it received three infusions of money from the Donors Trust in 2022, including over $400,000 for general operating funds and $50,000 for an oversight project. Heritage gave out big grants to many Project 2025 groups that year, some for almost $1 million. A recent New Republic investigation found that Heritage funding of groups behind Project 2025 made up 58 percent of its 2022 gift giving.

Leo has clearly funded groups run by his closest friends and allies, including Catholic activists and high-level GOP officials, some former Trump officials. He also serves on their boards. Several authors of Project 2025 chapters lead or play senior roles in Leo-funded nonprofits. Meanwhile, Leo himself has been paid handsomely in consultancy fees from the same nonprofits that he’s funded, a neat hat trick move criticized by watchdog groups who’ve exposed the circular flow of Leo’s dark money. Is it legal? They think not. (See THE LIST.)

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) is among US leaders who have held Congressional hearings about Leo’s dark money influence on America’s politics and legal system, including the Supreme  Court, warning of its corrosive impact on our democracy. (5)(6)

What money will buy

Since 2022, that money has helped fund conservative battles and issues that are central to Project 2025’s agenda: deregulation, lower taxes, curbing federal government authority, increasing states’ rights, voter redistricting, and the front-burner “wokeism” cultural war issues. Topping the list is fighting abortion, erasing LGBTQ, gender, and racial equality protections, and reversing climate change policies, to list conservative movement priorities.

The other big Leo agenda is spiritual. Project 2025 reflects a Christian Right war plan and calls for realigning US policies and rules to reflect a Christian nationalist agenda. Here, many Leo funded groups are leading the charge to roll back transgender rights and abortion, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) across America. Leo-linked money was also key to funding pro-life groups who helped overturn Roe. Come January 2025, if they win the election, the GOP plans a federal abortion ban – a long sought dream, one Leo is working hard to secure. (7) (See THE LIST.)

Over half of Project 2025 Advisory Board’s 54 member groups received funds from Leo-linked Donors Trust in 2022.

The Christianity piece is also critical

Religion and faith institutions link many of the groups, people, and dark money backing Project 2025. Many are run by staunch Catholic activists. Among them, Leo and a handful of allies are members of, or affiliated with, Opus Dei, a lay Catholic organization (see Who is Leonard Leo?). They include at least two Project 2025’s authors and ex-Trump officials who are confirmed Opus Dei members, and other members running Leo- and Project 2025-linked nonprofits. Leo is also personally credited with placing six Supreme Court justices on the highest bench, several alleged in the media to be Opus Dei supporters, if not members. (See Who Is Leo Leonard?) (8) 

All of this reveals the essential role that close spiritual and social ties appear to play in the tight knit Leonard Leo orbit. Not all beneficiaries are Catholic or Christian, either. The Donors Trust, for example, lists several Jewish groups that got funded in 2022, including arch-conservative groups. (9) Meanwhile, Barre Seid, who made so much happen with his big donation to Leo, is Jewish. There, the ties that bind are a shared arch-conservative ideological agenda.

Leo was introduced to Seid by Eugene Mayer, director of the Federalist Society; Seid was a longtime contributor to the Society. Shortly after Seid transferred shares of his electricity company, Tripp Light, into Marble Freedom Trust, he removed himself as trustee and hand wrote in Leo’s name to replace him. That’s how Seid managed to legally avoid paying a stiff tax penalty, and how the nonprofit did, too. The move was dubbed “attack philanthropy” by ProPublica and The Lever, who exposed Leo’s role, along with The New York Times. Seid’s is the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in US history. (10)(11) 

Putting dark money to work 

In the GOP, Leo is considered a master fundraiser, having raised over $600 million between 2014 and 2020 from major donors including the Koch family, (12) Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, and hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. (13) During that period, Leo’s own worth skyrocketed: he earned $435,000 annually as a Federalist Society employee. (14) Last year, the Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service that accused Leo of misusing $73 million. It called for an investigation of seven Leo-affiliated nonprofits, including big payments they made to Leo himself for consultancy services — a shadowy revolving door of funding that, the campaign stated, “demonstrates the extent to which his money-raising benefited his own bottom line.” (15) It called for revoking the IRS nonprofit status of the Leo-funded nonprofits, arguing they served as a dark money laundromat to wash money. (16)

These organizations are among the big money groups now bankrolling Project 2025’s network, notably the Rule of Law Trust, Concord Fund (formerly the Judicial Crisis Network), the 85 Fund (formerly the Judicial Education Project), the Federalist Society, the Marble Freedom Trust, and the Freedom and Opportunity Fund; the Wellspring Committee, also singled out, is now closed. (See THE LIST.) 

The heads of several Leo-funded Project 2025 groups are also members of the secretive conservative Council for National Policy (CNP); Leo sits on its Board of Governors. (17) CNP members include the presidents of Americans United for Life, Family Research Council,  Students for Life, the Family Research Council, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life Action, and Public  Interest Legal Firm – and that’s a partial list.

In 2023, Leo’s circle began expanding with the Teneo Network. It aims to be an umbrella of loosely affiliated nonprofit and for-profit entities, and seeks to “crush liberal dominance” in American society. In 2022, Teneo got over $3 million from the Donors Trust. (See THE LIST.)

The fight has gone overseas, too. Media reports show Leo’s dark money is being used to oppose LGBTQ rights in Africa and elsewhere, and to block funding for US government funded HIV programs, notably the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). (18) “PEPFAR  should not be a major slush fund for the Biden administration’s radical social policies on abortion, sexual orientation, and gender ideology overseas,” argued a Family Research Council Talking Points position paper in May 2023. FRC called for adding strong anti-choice protections to the PEPFAR reauthorization bill “to ensure that taxpayer funding for PEPFAR does not include abortion or promotion of radical sexual ideologies.” That’s also Project 2025’s position. Tax records show the FRC got $11,100 from the Donors Trust in 2022. (19)

Leo is single-handedly credited for putting six conservative justices on the Supreme Court.

Similar inflammatory language infuses Project 2025 discussions of “wokeism.” That’s strategic, too. It’s all part of the plan: to stoke divisionism, fear, and “us against them” thinking, while appealing to conservative voters. This strategy borrows a textbook page from an authoritarian playbook – labeling and criminalizing specific groups of people as dangerous to the larger social order, an enemy “Other,” while seeding doubts about the credibility of government institutions, universities, and the media. Project 2025 is full of such polarizing rhetoric and animus. (See our Readers Guide: Unpacking Project 2025’s Propaganda.)

Funding the legal battles

A big piece of Project 2025’s agenda relies on judicial activism. Above all, Leo is a seasoned legal strategist and, as Co-Chair of the Federalist Society, retains close social and financial ties to SCOTUS justices and conservative legal groups. Many are connected by a shared faith as evangelical Catholics or Christian nationalists. (See Who Is Leonard Leo?). 

Leo is single-handedly credited for putting six of the current conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Several are close friends, including Clarence Thomas, a godfather to one of Leo’s children. Leo considered the late Antonin Scalia “like an uncle,” and socializes with Samuel Alito and his wife Martha-Ann, to the point where the justices view Leo as a “den mother,” according to George Conway, a GOP conservative attorney and now-vocal Trump critic who used to hang out with the justices. Conway has since broken with Leo and Co. and is outspoken about his opposition to Project 2025’s agenda. (20) 

Leo’s been equally focused on the lower courts, packing the federal appeals court with conservative judges recruited from the Federalist Society – Leo’s legal tribe. (21) A number of Leo linked legal firms and lawyers are leading the fight to keep the GOP’s favored candidate on the ballot – Donald Trump – while advancing arch-conservative legal arguments in Supreme Court cases. This legal strategy is aimed at paving legal ground for future GOP battles discussed in Project 2025. (See “Who’s Zooming Who?”)

Targeting Church vs. State 

There is also a religious legal project that underlies Project 2025. The blueprint not only calls for realigning US domestic and foreign policy to reflect a “pro-family values” agenda, but to promote specific legal doctrines that reflect a traditionalist reading of the US Constitution. Project 2025 seeks to replace secular public education with conservative Christian education, and erase the Constitutional separation of church and state. But some Project 2025 authors would go further, putting church above state: they view divine law – God’s words, or the literal words printed in the Bible – as the supreme authority in earthly matters. In a word, Project 2025 is also a blueprint for a future American theocracy – or, as some view it, a fusion of wealth and Christian nationalist ideology, a pluto-theocracy.

We have summarized our early findings about Leo’s links to 60 Project 2025 advisor groups, with capsule summaries about each organization, their key leadership, Leo linked funding, agendas, and how they may overlap or are tied to Project 2025. Our list is far from definitive, but already provides an alarming and illuminating picture of the collusion of far right groups, dark money, and power uniting to implement the GOP’s radical plan to dismantle our democracy. As we dig further, we’ll update this information. Stay tuned.

– Anne-christine d’Adesky

Journalist and Founder, Stop The Coup 2025