Charles Koch's network launches $20m campaign backing Trump tax breaks

The Guardian

27-01-2025

Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the flagship political arm of the rightwing network formed by the fossil fuels billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David, is launching a multimillion-dollar campaign backing Donald Trump's plans to extend tax cuts and roll back federal regulations.
A private fundraising letter from AFP to its secretive list of donors, seen by the Guardian, outlines the organization's strategy for the first six months of the new Trump administration.
The eight-page document, made public here for the first time, promises a 'herculean undertaking' in which AFP says it will press for renewed and deepened tax cuts and an 'unwinding [of] as many of the growth and innovation killing regulations as possible'.
The group, which has played a significant role in shifting the Republican party to the right in recent years, has announced a $20m campaign to extend the tax cuts introduced by Trump during his first presidency that are due to expire at the end of this year. The donor appeal calls for even bolder tax cuts for corporations that would directly benefit Koch Industries, the energy and chemicals giant from which most of AFP's funding derives.
AFP's donor pitch, presented as a 2025 'prospectus', outlines a vast 'lobbying and grassroots effort' – replete with digital adverts, phone calls, social media posts, podcasts and on-the-ground door-knocking – to boost core Trump ambitions. As such, it speaks to the oligarchy of 'extreme wealth, power and influence' coalescing around Trump, which Joe Biden warned about in his final address from the Oval Office.
Trump's inauguration on Monday gave tech billionaires including Elon Musk, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos front-row seats. Charles Koch, one of the world's richest people, is now joining the list of oligarchs seeking to enhance Trump's second presidency in mutually-beneficial ways.
It is estimated that the Kochs, who own the US's second-largest privately held company, have benefited by more than $1bn a year from Trump's tax cuts. That bonanza would continue were the reduced corporate and income tax rates effected by Trump continued.
Koch Industries, which includes major oil refining and distribution interests, also stands to profit from any curtailment of federal environmental regulations combatting the climate crisis. As one of his first acts back in office, Trump moved for the second time to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement.
'Koch Inc is primarily a fossil fuel company, so they are going to do very well under Trump,' said Arn Pearson, executive director of the progressive non-profit watchdog Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). CMD obtained the donors' letter and shared it with the Guardian.
AFP was founded in 2004 by the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch (David died in 2019). It remains a key political advocacy group within the Koch network, with $130m of its $168m budget in 2023 coming from the Kochs through their main funding channel, Stand Together.
Relations between Trump and Charles Koch have at times appeared to be strained. In 2018, Trump wrote on social media: 'I don't need their money or bad ideas,' referring to the 'globalist Koch Brothers' whom he derided as 'a total joke in real Republican circles'.
Last year Americans for Prosperity Action, the Koch network's Super Pac, supported Nikki Haley in the Republican primary race over Trump. But AFP went on to aid Trump's bid for a return to the White House by running an intensive digital advertising campaign in swing states relentlessly and falsely attacking 'Bidenomics' as the sole cause of inflation in the US.
AFP's prospectus suggests that whatever remaining animus that may exist between the two men has now been smoothed over.
'Trump and Koch are working hand in glove transactionally to move the parts of the Trump agenda that the Koch network agrees with – and that's a lot of it,' said Nancy MacLean, professor of history and public policy at Duke university. MacLean is author of Democracy in Chains that chronicles how the Kochs exerted their grip on US politics.
The affinity of the two rightwing behemoths is amply on display in Trump's cabinet nominations. Pete Hegseth, the newly-confirmed defense secretary, is former chief executive of Concerned Veterans for America, a non-profit group working for the rights of military veterans that now forms part of AFP.
Chris Wright, a fracking company boss who has been nominated as Trump's energy secretary, has openly expressed support for the Kochs. In 2023, he donated $100,000 to AFP Action, research by the Energy and Policy Institute found.
Extending the tax cuts is one of the key policy aims of the second Trump administration, at an estimated cost of $5tn. Such a massive expense would require deep cuts to public services, including potentially slashing MediCaid.
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Trump got his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act through Congress with the help of a $20m ad campaign by AFP. Before he died, David Koch boasted: 'AFP worked very closely with the White House to win passage of the tax reform plan President Trump outlined.'
The AFP donors' letter depicts the tax cuts as a 'huge win for the American people', including 'low- and middle-income Americans making less than $50,000'. In fact, the cuts have disproportionately benefited wealthy Americans and corporations like Koch Industries.
The prospectus says that AFP will mount a huge lobbying effort with a goal of 1,500 meetings on Capitol Hill to 'turn up the heat' on Congress members who do not support extending the tax cuts and rewarding those who do. 'We will work to counter the class-warfare argument that tax cuts are for the 'rich'.'
An analysis by the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that making the tax cuts permanent would have an even more inequitable impact than the original 2017 cuts. The top 1% of income earners would benefit most, while the poorest fifth of Americans would get just 1% of the total provisions.
The donors' appeal singles out Latino voters as an especial target of AFP's campaigning. The Libre Initiative, an outpost of AFP that spreads anti-tax and anti-government ideology within Latino communities, will launch a 'national grassroots program to rally Latino Americans to support the extension of the tax cuts', the document says.
MacLean said the notion that the Koch network was working on behalf of middle- and low-income and Latino families was a 'bald-faced lie. This is corporate interests from the dirtiest industrial sector – fossil fuels – whose unbelievable wealth can hire an army of so-called grassroots supporters to mislead us all with an agenda for irreversible change that will harm most Americans.'
The Koch network has also played a central role in the unfolding attack on federal regulations in areas such as environmental and energy controls. A Koch-affiliated group, Cause of Action, was behind Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, the case that last year led the US supreme court to puncture a gaping hole in the regulatory powers of federal agencies.
One of the lead lawyers pressing the Loper Bright case before the supreme court was AFP's former head of policy.
AFP's appeal to donors said that it will now use the Loper Bright decision to 'unwind the harmful growth of regulation and the unconstitutional overreach of the administrative state'.
It also pledges to use the Koch network's extensive lobbying resources on Capitol Hill to make permanent any cuts to regulation and federal spending achieved by Elon Musk's fledgling 'department of government efficiency', Doge.