About

The William E. Simon Foundation is a New York-based foundation with assets of over $100 million at the end of 2010. That year, it dispersed more than $9.3 million in grants. The foundation’s mission, according to its website, is to support “programs that are intended to strengthen the free enterprise system and the spiritual values on which it rests: individual liberty, initiative, thrift, self-discipline and faith in God.” Toward that end, the organization funds a wide range of socially and politically conservative groups that play an active role in the political arena. 

The foundation’s benefactors include: the Philanthropy Roundtable, which advocates against philanthropic transparency (has received more than $1.5 million since 2006); the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an advocacy group “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy” (over $1 million since 2002); the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a think tank focusing on free-market economics (over $1 million which since 2000); the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (over $750,000 since 2008); and The Heritage Foundation, (over $800,000 since 2000). The foundation also gives generously to colleges and universities, including Pepperdine University, Princeton University, the University of Vermont, and the University of Rochester (which has named its businesses school after the foundation’s founder). 

The foundation’s namesake, William E. Simon, served as Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and was a pioneer in the leveraged-buyout industry. In 1982, Wesray, a company Simon cofounded, purchased a greeting cards company for $80 million with only $1 million put up by him and his partners; the deal was financed almost entirely by borrowing against assets of the company being bought. According to a 1983 article in New York magazine, Simon’s initial investment of $330,000 turned into $66 million when the company went public. Simon also served as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee during the 80s and, according to the foundation’s website, served as a “trustee of several think tanks, including The Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution.” Simon was the first president of the now-defunct John M. Olin Foundation, a large grant-making foundation that funded many of the same right-wing groups. 

In one of his books, A Time For Truth, Simon explained his basic philanthropic philosophy: “Funds generated by business must rush by the multimillions to the aid of liberty […] to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers, and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty.” Businesses, he wrote, must “cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economy, government, politics, and history are hostile to capitalism.” 

President Gerald Ford wrote the forward to Simon’s autobiography, released posthumously in 2003 by right-wing Regnery Publishing. “By the time he passed away in June 2000,” according to a recent tribute published by the Philanthropy Roundtable, “his net worth was estimated around $500 million.” 

The William E. Simon Foundation is now led by James Pierson, a senior fellow at The Manhattan Institute, and a board member at the Hoover Institution, the Center for Individual Rights, the Foundation for Cultural Review, as well as DonorsTrust, another grant-making outfit. For many years, Pierson was also executive director of the aforementioned John M. Olin Foundation, which officially shut down in 2005 but continued to disperse grants though 2010.