Money, Friends, and Goals

Greve and McDonald make no secret of the sources that fund their $1.3 million operating budget which supports a nine-person staff that includes four full-time lawyers and pays the rent on the organization's swanky offices in downtown Washington. A list of contributors released by CIR includes some of the country's largest conservative or libertarian foundations. During CIR's fiscal 1997, nearly half of the center's budget came from five large foundations: the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Bradley Foundation and the Randolph Foundation. Olin, the center's largest single donor, contributed $200,000.

Matthew Freeman, senior vice president of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, says these five foundations have been in the forefront of funding a Variety of conservative causes in recent years.

"These foundations are interested in shaping public policy in a number of areas," he says. "They have an agenda and they promote it."

The Olin Foundation funds a variety of conservative college publications and also supports the National Association of Scholars, an organization of conservative professors. Both the Olin and Bradley foundations have been contributors to the American Enterprise Institute. which has supported conservative scholars such as Dinesh D'Souza. And the Carthage Foundation has been a regular contributor to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which has lobbied for restrictions on legal immigration to the United States.

While foundation funding has been critical to CIR, perhaps even more important has been the willingness of high-priced lawyers at some of the nation's most elite law firms to provide free legal assistance. For example, in Hopwood, the center recruited high-flying lawyer Theodore B. Olson of the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to handle the appeal.

Olson had been a top official in the Reagan Justice Department and represented Reagan during the IranContra investigations. He also successfully convinced the U.S. Supreme Court that a lower federal court judge acted appropriately in deviating from federal sentencing guidelines in order to impose a reduced jail term on Stacey Koon, one of the Los Angeles police officers convicted in the 1991 beating of motorist Rodney King.