cnp dark-money conservative christian-right networking secretive strategy
related: Heritage Foundation Federalist Society Leonard Leo Americans for Tax Reform - Grover Norquist
Who They Are
The Council for National Policy (CNP). A secretive conservative networking organization founded in 1981 that brings together approximately 400 of the most powerful conservative donors, political operatives, and religious leaders three times per year. CNP’s membership list has been leaked periodically and includes: the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, Leonard Leo, the Mercer family, NRA leadership, Heritage Foundation presidents, and dozens of conservative mega-donors.
CNP does not lobby or make political contributions directly. Its power is coordinating: the meetings bring together the conservative movement’s donors, strategists, and media figures in the same room, enabling the planning and synchronization of campaigns, judicial nominations, policy agendas, and messaging that would be difficult to coordinate otherwise. CNP is the conservative movement’s board of directors — a body that sets strategic priorities for an ecosystem that includes think tanks, PACs, media organizations, and grassroots advocacy groups.
What They Want
Conservative judicial appointments (the Federalist Society pipeline feeds directly into CNP strategy discussions), tax reduction, deregulation, religious liberty protections (often code for anti-LGBTQ policy), immigration restriction, and defense of traditional social values. CNP’s agenda reflects the coalition that formed under Reagan: economic libertarians (Koch), Christian conservatives (Dobson, Falwell), and national security hawks — unified by opposition to government regulation and cultural progressivism.
What They’ve Gotten
Judicial Strategy Coordination: CNP meetings have served as planning sessions for conservative judicial campaigns. Leonard Leo’s presentation of judicial candidates to CNP audiences — including the Federalist Society’s pipeline of potential Supreme Court nominees — enabled the donor community to coordinate resources behind specific nominees. The result: three Supreme Court justices (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett) selected from a pipeline developed in coordination with CNP-connected networks.
Movement Synchronization: CNP’s three-times-yearly meetings function as the conservative movement’s strategic planning sessions: donors learn which organizations need funding, operatives learn which campaigns to prioritize, and media figures learn which messages to amplify. This coordination mechanism — absent from the progressive movement at comparable scale — gives the conservative movement a structural advantage in long-term strategic planning.
Money
CNP represents the conservative donor class’s governance structure: a private body where 400 of the wealthiest and most powerful conservatives coordinate the allocation of billions in political spending across think tanks, PACs, media organizations, and judicial campaigns. CNP does not spend money — it coordinates the spending of others, making it the most efficient influence organization in American politics. The meetings synchronize the efforts of organizations that collectively spend $2+ billion per cycle, ensuring that conservative resources are deployed strategically rather than redundantly. CNP is the answer to the question: who decides what the conservative movement does?
Sources
- IRS: CNP 990 filings (Tier 1)
- Ballotpedia: Council for National Policy (Tier 3)
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