About

“We’re part of the right-wing movement,” Michael Grebe, president and CEO of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2011. With over $500 million in assets as of 2010 and annual giving in the tens of millions, the influential Bradley Foundation directs much of its substantial funds toward organizations, publications, and projects that constitute, in Grebe’s words, “the conservative intellectual infrastructure in this country.” It has provided the financial support for public policy initiatives that include welfare reform in the 1990s, school voucher programs that would privatize public education, and, more recently, the crackdown on public-sector unions’ collective bargaining rights in the foundation’s home state of Wisconsin.

To further its mission of “strengthening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles, and values that sustain and nurture it,” the Bradley Foundation has doled out money to virtually every major player in the conservative intellectual cavalry, including millions of dollars to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute. In 2010 alone, the Bradley Foundation gave away over $42 million, and from 2001-2009 decade it handed out almost as much as all seven Koch and Scaife foundations combined. It contributes to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that drafts conservative and pro-business state-level legislation including voter ID laws and the controversial “Stand Your Ground” laws. In 2010, it gave $150,000 to Grover Norquist’s influential anti-tax group, Americans for Tax Reform. Vocal anti-gay hate group the Family Research Council received $60,000. The global warming-deniers at the Heartland Institute got money to support “public education”; in Heartland’s case, that means a strategic and coordinated effort to undermine the credibility of climate science.

The Bradley Foundation calls itself the “philanthropic legacy” of the Bradley brothers, who were entrepreneurs and union-busters with an interest in limited government and free-market economics. Lynde Bradley moved to set up the foundation in 1941, but died before its establishment, which was finalized by his relatives. Although the foundation initially supported a variety of charitable and political causes, it didn’t attain its current size until two decades after Harry Bradley’s 1965 death, when the brothers’ company, Allen-Bradley, was bought by Rockwell International and the foundation’s assets multiplied twenty times over.

At that point, with the election of Reagan transition team member Michael Joyce as its president, the Bradley Foundation upped its political involvement, increasing the proportion of its grants related to public policy from just 2.5 percent in 1980 to over 60 percent by 1990. With Joyce at the helm, the Bradley Foundation parceled out millions of dollars that helped build the modern conservative infrastructure and funded the development of conservative public policy initiatives. Joyce was “a central figure in Wisconsin's welfare reform movement,” for example, and under his guidance, the Bradley Foundation championed an expansion of Milwaukee’s school voucher program.

In 2001, Joyce stepped down and Michael Grebe took over as President and CEO, deepening the foundation’s ties to the Republican Party. Grebe’s resume includes an 18-year stint as the Republican National Committeeman for Wisconsin, time as a general counsel to the Republican National Committee, and a spot as a delegate to five Republican National Conventions. In 2010, Grebe served as chairman for Republican Scott Walker’s Wisconsin gubernatorial campaign and later headed Walker’s transition team.

Under Grebe’s leadership, the Bradley Foundation has sought to expand the reach of its ideas, handing out $250,000 Bradley Prizes to figures such as Jeb Bush, the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone, and the Washington Post’s George Will. It has also begun funding a new handful of media organizations sympathetic to Republicans during the Wisconsin recall elections. This dovetails with Grebe’s personal political activities; after working unsuccessfully to prevent Gov. Scott Walker from having to face a recall election, he chaired Walker’s recall election campaign.