Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council assembled this unprecedented, jointly produced report to help shine the public spotlight on a corrosive, secretive and highly influential power in state capitals around the nation — the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). As documented in the pages that follow, while ALEC purports to be a “good-government” group operating in the public interest, its sole mission is to advance special-interest legislation across the nation on behalf of its corporate sponsors and funders. The organization’s behind-the-scenes advocacy has been surprisingly effective – leading, according to ALEC material, to the enactment of more than 450 state laws during the 1999 and 2000 state legislative sessions.

ALEC would have the public believe that it’s an association of elected members of the 50 state legislatures with varying political and public policy philosophies. However, ALEC is nothing less than a tax-exempt facade for the country’s largest corporations and kindred entities. Companies likes Enron, Amoco, Chevron, Shell, Texaco, Coors Brewing, Koch Industries, Nationwide Insurance, Pfizer, National Energy Group, Philip Morris, and R. J. Reynolds pay for essentially all of ALEC’s expenses. The payments might be membership dues, fees to sit on nine industry-specific committees that approve “model” bills, expenditures for lavish parties and entertainment, or “scholarships” to pay for targeted legislators to attend ALEC’s junket-like meetings.

ALEC’s role is especially insidious because state law-making bodies are even Foreword more vulnerable to secretive and well-financed corporate advocacy than the U.S. Congress. Many states have little or no public reporting requirements that would require disclosure of junkets and gifts awarded to legislators by ALEC, and little or no lobbying disclosure laws requiring public release of information about ALEC’s funding support and methods of operation. State legislatures are often made up primarily of underpaid, under-appreciated, part-time lawmakers with few if any personal staff to help research, evaluate and enact complex laws, and are notoriously parsimonious in providing for their own analytical needs. Meanwhile, the public advocacy groups most likely to oppose corporate excesses are too thinly funded to compete effectively in most states. For all of these reasons, ALEC’s approach of brazenly promoting a corporate agenda as the product of a supposedly objective, nonprofit organization is especially effective in state legislatures, and especially attractive to the corporations that set its advocacy agenda.

Environment is an especially popular target for ALEC, which is currently promoting more than two dozen industry bills related to energy and environmental protection. According to one staff member, the goal is “...to break the stranglehold of the command-and-control policies promoted by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and the extremist environmental lobby.” But this is only one aspect of ALEC’s reach. While our organizations are of course especially concerned about ALEC’s destructive environmental initiatives, the organization’s “model” bills cover the full range of subjects on which business has a state legislative interest, including health care, land use, tobacco restrictions, mandated employee benefits, utility regulation, agriculture, tax policy, education and much more.

American capitalism has helped give this country the highest standard of living in history, and its potential to continue to do the same is remarkable if the rules within which government requires that it compete, grow and evolve are properly drawn to protect our environment and quality of life against corporate excesses. These protections are essential in part because it is the nature of the corporate ethic to continually fight to obtain the most lenient regulatory environment possible in order to maximize profits and stock price. The resulting pressures can create an attitude that whatever is possible within the law is justified, as is re-shaping the law to make it increasingly more permissive.

Due to the magnitude and visibility of the Enron collapse, the public can hope for some remedial action at the federal level. But that is not sufficient. Polluters, developers, and their big business allies will use their extensive resources to finance a corporate takeover of state government if we continue to turn a blind eye to the deceptive and insidious work of the American Legislative Exchange Council. It is time to hold this group, and its members, accountable for the greater public interest.