INST POLITICAL ECONOMY usu

SEE randy SIMMONS NOT DANL BUT HIS FR

PUNKED NEWSWEEK

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[### Strata Policy

Energy and Policy Institute

https://energyandpolicy.org › Front Groups](https://energyandpolicy.org/category/front-groups/strata-policy/)

Simmons was the “Charles G. Koch Professor of political economy” at Utah State from 2008 through 2013 and was the President and Director of Research for Strata.Read more

AI Overview

Dr. Randy T. Simmons is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Political Economy at Utah State University (USU) and the founding director of the Institute of Political Economy. He is also the president and co-founder of Strata Policy, an off-campus, Koch-funded libertarian think tank.

Center for Biological Diversity +2

Key Connections and Activities

The Koch Network: Simmons has received significant funding from the Charles Koch Foundation for his institute at USU and Strata Policy.

Public Lands Advocacy: Strata Policy was hired by the Utah Legislature to promote the transfer of federal lands to state control. Simmons and his researchers have actively advocated for reducing federal oversight and shrinking national monuments.

Center for Biological Diversity +3

Energy Policy Research: Simmons has utilized Strata Policy and his university role to publish research heavily critical of clean energy mandates and renewable energy incentives.

University Influence: The close ties between Simmons, Strata, and Koch funding generated notable controversy among Utah State University students and faculty. Critics have argued that the Koch-funded entities function more as advocacy or lobbying arms rather than unbiased, peer-reviewed academic institutions.

The Utah Statesman +2

The Far-Right Campaign to Destroy Our National Monuments

Dec 20, 2017 — Strata's co-founder and president, Randy Simmons, is a professor at. Utah State University (USU), where he served as the Charles G...

Center for Biological Diversity

Firm hired by Legislature for Utah lands fight has ties to Koch ...

Jun 29, 2015 — A Logan-based think tank hired by the Utah Legislature to promote the state's legal efforts to wrest control of 32 million acres o...

The Salt Lake Tribune

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nation mag

The Far-Right Campaign to Destroy Our National Monuments

The attack on Bears Ears was just the first successful salvo of a robust offensive backed by dark money and powerful allies in Washington.

Jimmy Tobias

Bears Ears dark money

A billboard outside Blanding, Utah, stating opposition to the Bears Ears Monument designation. ODD SPARSE RW AND BLUE HASHTAG FLAG

(Reuters / Andrew Cullen)

On December 4, Donald Trump swaggered onto a stage in Utah’s sprawling granite capitol building and declared before an adoring crowd of local politicians and conservative activists that he would radically shrink two national monuments in the state’s wild and arid southeastern region.

“I don’t think it is controversial, actually,” he told his audience, without irony. “I think it is so sensible.”

The audience laughed and clapped and cheered. Then the president sat down and signed an order that dismembered both the 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument and the 1.8 million-acre Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument. Designated for protection by President Obama and President Clinton respectively, the two monuments were meant to preserve red-rock landscapes rich in intricate topography, ancient artifacts, and Native American sacred sites. They were meant to protect forever federal land owned by all Americans. But with a stroke of his pen Trump eradicated those protections, shrinking the monuments by a collective 2 million acres and raising the prospect that the terrain they occupied may someday be open to uranium mining, coal extraction, or oil and gas drilling.

As the ink on his presidential order dried, Trump mingled onstage with prominent county commissioners, Utah’s congressional delegation, and the governor. The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” blared over loud speakers in the background.

The Salt Lake Tribune, in a blistering editorial later that week, called the gleeful event “downright sickening.” It was, according to the Tribune, a “disgraceful display of hubris” that showed Utah “at its very worst.”

But the conservative operatives and politicians onstage were apparently too pleased to care about optics—and not without reason. Trump’s attack on the two national monuments, after all, wasn’t just a lucky break, a gift that fell from the sky. Rather, it was the result of a savvy, multiyear campaign by a network of far-right organizations with powerful friends in Washington and financial backing from dark-money funds tied to the billionaire Koch brothers and their political kin.

Led by organizations like Utah’s Sutherland Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, and an array of allies, this network has labored assiduously over the last few years to undermine the legitimacy of federal lands across the American West. It has done this, in part, by working to erode public support for key conservation laws and institutions, including the Antiquities Act of 1906. And it has had great success.

Trump’s trip to Utah, his decision to destroy the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante monuments, is a consequence of that deeper, long-game campaign to chip away at America’s conservation system.

The Antiquities Act is one of this country’s oldest conservation statutes. It empowers the executive branch to unilaterally protect “objects of historic or scientific interest” on public land by declaring them national monuments. Theodore Roosevelt signed it into law in 1906, and since then every president save Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush have used it to designate national monuments on federal lands across the country. The act was instrumental in establishing the progressive conservation paradigm that later gave birth to public-interest laws like the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. And in this era of intractable partisan polarization, the act has been one of the few reliable tools presidents can use to preserve portions of this nation’s vast public estate.

This is precisely what President Obama did when he established the Bears Ears National Monument on December 28, 2016, after months of deliberation and a campaign by a coalition of Native American nations. The monument preserved public access and prohibited most commercial activity on more than 1.3 million acres of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land in southeastern Utah.

“The protection of the Bears Ears cultural landscape is powerful medicine for healing—of the land, of plants and animals, and for all people,” wrote a coalition of tribal governments, including the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and Zuni Nations, at the time of the designation. “The Bears Ears National Monument will also ensure continued access to tribal ceremonies, firewood and herb collection, hunting, grazing and outdoor recreation.”

But even as the tribes were celebrating their historic achievement, conservative groups in Utah and Washington were gearing up to roll back the designation, tapping into a long tradition of trying to rip monument protections from the public domain. From the beginning, the Antiquities Act—and the monuments it protects—has had powerful enemies: When Teddy Roosevelt used the law in 1908 to protect more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon, mining, cattle, and other commercial interests were enraged; the prospector turned US Senator Ralph Cameron fought the federal government for control over portions of the canyon for years, ultimately losing the battle when the Supreme Court ruled against him in 1920.

Trump's decision to destroy the Bears Ears and Grand Escalante monuments is a consequence of a deep, long-game campaign to chip away at America's conservation system.

In the century since, the struggle between commercial interests and conservationists has never really ceased. Our country’s 640 million acres of federal land are a titanic repository of natural wealth and scenic splendor—a grand, albeit imperfect, social-democratic experiment. Laws like the Antiquities Act constrain the ability of powerful interests to do as they please on these lands. By banning or limiting activities like mining, drilling, and grazing in order to promote conservation values, they enshrine the notion that the public interest takes precedence over private and even local concerns.

As a result, both the public lands and the conservation laws that protect them are constantly under attack. From the Sagebrush Rebellion in the 1970s and ’80s to the militant occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge early last year to the many local lawmakers and activists today who seek to transfer federal lands to state and local control, the dedicated foes of the federal domain have always been with us. The attack on the Antiquities Act is just the latest iteration of this anti–public land legacy. This iteration, though, has had astonishing success—and powerful supporters.

The state of Utah, with its world-renowned canyons, is the ground zero of the anti–public land movement today. Since at least 2012, right-wing politicians and activists there have been leaders of the so-called land-transfer movement, an effort across the West to force the federal government to relinquish ownership over the public lands to state and local governments. And the state has also been the site of vigorous and ongoing anti-monument activity. So it’s not altogether surprising that it was in Utah that a well-connected far-right think tank called the Sutherland Institute largely led the charge against both the Bears Ears National Monument and the Antiquities Act itself.

From its headquarters in Salt Lake City, Sutherland launched a flagship website called rescindbearsears.org, filling it with a constant squall of anti-monument content. It produced an array of video clips that cultivated and amplified the voices of local residents opposed to the monument, including the local county commission and members of the Aneth Chapter of the Navajo Nation. It maintained a constant social-media presence, organized a petition drive, and sent staffers to Capitol Hill to rally against the proposed monument. Its operatives flooded news outlets with op-eds, publishing regularly in The Hill, The Salt Lake Tribune, and Deseret News, among other places.

“What would you think if you found out that one individual could take away your home, ruin your livelihood and destroy your culture—all in the name of securing his legacy and furthering his political agenda?” wrote Matthew Anderson, director of the Sutherland Institute’s Coalition for Self-Government in the West, of the Antiquities Act in a November 2016 Daily Caller op-ed. “Such a proposition seems impossible in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But an antiquated law makes this a reality for countless Americans every day.”

The Institute also worked in the Utah State Legislature. According to e-mails obtained by the Western Values Project, Sutherland’s Matthew Anderson actually wrote the draft language of a controversial resolution the Utah Legislature passed in February 2017 that called on President Trump to rescind the Bears Ears National Monument designation.

The Sutherland Institute’s campaign was a multifaceted and far-reaching attempt to shape the public narrative about Bears Ears, and the group had the influence to pull it off. The Institute’s president, Boyd Matheson is the former chief of staff to Utah’s junior US senator, Mike Lee, and an oft-mentioned prospect for high office himself. (In October, he met with Steve Bannon and Citizens United President David Bossie to discuss a potential challenge to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, but ultimately decided to pass on the chance.)

According to tax filings, the Institute has also received at least $1.3 million between 2010 and 2015 from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark-money funds that have taken millions of dollars from the billionaire fossil-fuel tycoons Charles and David Koch and their network of corporate magnates and conservative donors. Mother Jones has described the two entities as the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement”—multimillion-dollar donor-advised funds that strive to conceal the identity of their benefactors.

The Sutherland Institute is also a member of the State Policy Network, or SPN, an association of state-based think tanks and advocacy groups that the Center for Media and Democracy describes as “the tip of the spear” of a “nationally funded policy agenda in the states that undergirds extremists in the Republican Party.” SPN and its member groups have together received large cash contributions over the years from corporate interests and conservative billionaires, including the Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, the Bradley Foundation, and the Scaife Foundations.

Sutherland did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but, in a written statement last May, a spokesperson told me that the group “has not received any out-of-state funds for research or communications related to the Bears Ears issue.” According to tax filings, however, many of the donations the group typically receives from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund are earmarked for “general operations.”

By spring, it was clear that Sutherland’s message, and that of its allies, had been well received in Washington, DC. Their efforts were shepherded along by Utah’s congressional delegation, including Senator Orrin Hatch, who once described Obama’s Bears Ears designation as a “massive land grab,” and Representative Mike Lee, who has taken a pro-environment stance on just 9 percent of his congressional votes, according to the League of Conservation Voters. Representative Rob Bishop, the powerful chair of the House Natural Resources Committee and a longtime opponent of environmental laws and regulations, also played a crucial role in stoking animosity toward the Antiquities Act and Bears Ears in particular.

On April 26, Trump held a press conference at the Interior Department headquarters in Washington, DC, where he announced that his administration planned to “review” and possibly resize or rescind dozens of national monuments across the West, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. During the conference, Trump singled out Utah’s senior senator, Orrin Hatch, for praise.

“Believe me, he’s tough,” said Trump of Hatch, who is perhaps Utah’s most powerful political figure, a man that has taken more than $870,000 in career campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industries. “He would call me and call me and say, ‘You got to do this.’” And Trump did it.

Upon news of the White House’s national-monument review, staffers at the Sutherland Institute rejoiced. From a chic office building, the Institute’s Matthew Anderson celebrated the announcement in a video broadcast over the group’s website and social-media accounts.

“As the dust settles from President Trump’s executive order calling for review of national monuments, Western rural communities wake up to a brighter and more hopeful future,” he said. In May, when Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke traveled to the Bears Ears National Monument as part of his review, photos of the event showed Anderson by his side.

As the Sutherland Institute continued its anti-monument campaign over the summer and fall of 2017, it had a notable assortment of allies at the local, regional, and national level.

In Utah, a group called Strata Policy stands out. A research institution that takes a “liberty-minded” approach to the issues of “the environment, energy, and public lands,” the group has published a number of anti-monument op-eds and submitted a lengthy public comment to the Interior Department opposing Bears Ears. In November, it unveiled a slick, professionally produced 14-minute documentary that features local opponents of the monument and frames the Bears Ears designation as a tyrannical imposition.

As with Sutherland, Strata has close ties to what is often described as the Koch network. The group has received more than $500,000 in recent years from Donors Trust. It also received a $310,000 grant from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2015 for general operating support, and a $1.1 million grant in 2014. Strata’s co-founder and president, Randy Simmons, is a professor at Utah State University (USU), where he served as the Charles G. Koch Professor of Political Economy from 2008 to 2012, according to LinkedIn. Simmons also runs USU’s Koch-funded Institute of Political Economy. (After a number of requests for comment, Strata informed The Nation that its president was away on holiday.)

The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), in Bozeman, Montana, which describes itself as “the home of free market environmentalism,” has also been a stalwart voice against the Antiquities Act. Its many fellows have churned out a regular stream of anti-monument op-eds this year. In late September, a PERC adjunct fellow and Pacific Legal Foundation lawyer named Jonathan Wood published an opinion piece in The Washington Post arguing that Trump has a legal right to shrink Bears Ears and other monuments like it. And in May the House Committee on Natural Resources, which is chaired by the powerful Utah Republican Representative Rob Bishop, posted on its website an op-ed published in Montana newspapers in which PERC staffer Shawn Regan calls for the “modernization” (i.e., dismantling) of the Antiquities Act.

PERC, meanwhile, received more than $130,000 from Donors Trust between 2010 and 2015 alone. It also gets support from the Charles Koch Foundation, which gave it a $150,000 grant for general operating support in 2015. PERC’s executive director, Reed Watson, worked as an associate at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation between 2008 and 2009. One of the members of its board of directors, Kimberly Dennis, is also chairman of the board of Donors Trust and vice chairman of the board of Donors Capital Fund. And PERC counts among its many fellows Randy Simmons, the director of Strata Policy in Utah.

This close-knit network of anti-monument activists, however, is not confined to the western side of the 100th meridian. Powerful people with close Koch ties have also been agitating passionately against the Antiquities Act in Washington, DC.

The Nation

This Is How the Trump Administration Gives Big Oil the Keys to Public Lands

Adam Federman

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a network of state elected officials and private sector operatives that receives consistent funding from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, has long had its gun sight set on the Antiquities Act. In 2000, the group approved a model bill that legislators could use to denounce potential national monuments within their state’s borders. ALEC reapproved that bill in 2013. The model bill has a similar objective, if different language, as a resolution passed by the Utah legislature in 2016 that urged President Obama not to designate the Bears Ears National Monument and called on Congress to prevent future presidents from independently designating national monuments in the state. Meanwhile, the floor sponsor of the legislature’s February 2017 anti–Bear’s Ears resolution—the one that the Sutherland Institute helped draft—was a state senator named Wayne Niederhauser. Niederhauser is the second vice chair on ALEC’s board of directors. ALEC, meanwhile, received $500,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation in the years 2014 and 2015 alone.

The Heritage Foundation—that 100-pound gorilla of far-right policy-making—is also out to destroy the Antiquities Act. With its bank accounts flush with funding from a wide variety of corporate entities and wealthy individuals, it has enormous sway in Washington, DC. At least three of its former employees currently work at the highest levels of the Interior Department. According to her LinkedIn page, Elinor Renner, a special assistant to the Interior secretary, worked in a variety of roles at the Heritage Foundation from December 2012 until July 2017, when she took a job in the federal government. Lori Mashburn, who began serving as Interior’s White House liaison in May, has worked on and off for Heritage since 2011.

The foundation’s influence is indisputable. And it has used that influence to rail against Bears Ears as well as other national monuments. In 2015, for instance, it published a report called “The Antiquated Act,” in which it called on Congress to repeal the executive branch’s ability to independently designate national monuments. And in October of this year, it partnered with the Sutherland Institute to hold a summit in Washington called “National Monuments and The Communities They Impact.” The event featured speeches by Representative Rob Bishop of Utah, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Hannah Downey of PERC, and the Sutherland Institute’s Boyd Matheson and Matthew Anderson, who also formerly worked in Congressman Bishop’s office. The gathering’s central message was simple: Obama and others have abused the Antiquities Act’s intent and so it must be abolished in its current form.

When The Nation reached out to Heritage to inquire about its involvement in the campaign to shrink Bears Ears, as well as its connection to groups like the Sutherland Institute and ALEC, a Heritage spokesperson responded with a statement saying that the organization’s “experts have long-argued that antiquities designations strip economic opportunities away from local communities, with often little-to-no input from them. For far too long these designations have exceeded their statutory limitations and President Trump is right to shrink this abuse of power.”

Other Koch-backed groups that have militated against national monuments in recent months include Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Many of these organizations, from the Sutherland Institute and ALEC to Heritage and Cato, are also major proponents of transferring federal land to state and local government, thereby depriving millions of Americans of their stake in the public domain.

In June, almost every single one of the groups named above came together to send a letter to President Trump. They called on the White House to “reduce or rescind egregious national monuments where local support exists to do so.” The letter’s signatories included the Sutherland Institute, Strata Policy, ALEC, Heritage Action for America, Americans for Prosperity, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, numerous members of the State Policy Network, and the American Energy Alliance.

On August 24, 2017, after many months of lobbying and agitation, these groups finally got their way: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke completed his national monument review and recommended that the president shrink or otherwise alter a slew of national monuments across the country. Just three months later, during that gloating rally in December, Trump made his first move on those recommendations, shrinking Bears Ears by 85 percent and shrinking Grand Escalante by nearly 50 percent. It was the largest cutback of land conservation protections in American history. And the president will likely modify or shrink a half dozen other sites in the months ahead, including the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southern Oregon.

This is how the Kochs’ anti-renewable agenda becomes White House policy

Koch-tied officials “got their wish” with Trump’s attacks on climate action, environment.

Simmons has produced Institute of Political Economy projects as part of his normal research load, Vitale said. The Institute for Political Economy has never promoted Strata Policy, although Strata Policy might have used Institute for Policy research for its own reasons, he explained. “Other organizations — any organization — can access IPE research and use it as they see fit,” he said.

Utah State University, a public university, climbed into second place on the list of Koch-funded universities earlier this year when the schoolaccepted a $25 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation. Prior to the latest donation, the university’s Institute of Political Economy was already receiving large sums from the Kochs.

The university will receive the Koch money over the next 10 years in increments of $2.5 million a year. George Mason University, a public university in Virginia, is the largest recipient of Koch funding,earning it the nickname “Koch U.”

The Huntsman Foundation, founded by conservative industrialist Jon M. Huntsman Sr., alsodonated $25 million to the university to launch theCenter for Growth and Opportunity and expand the Huntsman Scholar Program. The new center will be located at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, named after the industrialist. The Koch and Huntsman money will allow the school to hire several additional professors.

“The Kochs have extended influence to institutions of higher education, setting up grants at universities to hire professors that teach the Kochs’ anti-tax, anti-regulation business and political philosophies to mold young minds to fall in step with the Kochs’ industrial wishes going forward through the 21st century,” Salt Lake Tribune columnist Paul Rollywrote in 2016.

While Charles Koch gives a substantial amount to Utah State University, foundations and organizations associated with both brothers are also funding Strata Policy to advance many of the same anti-renewable energy, pro-fossil fuel aims. A ThinkProgress review of Strata Policy’s funders (according to data provided by Conservative Transparency, Guidestar, and CitizenAudit revealed that since 2011, its donations included at least:}:

$2,260,500 from the Charles Koch Foundation, the primary private foundation through which Charles Koch funds higher education programs.
$183,000 from the Searle Freedom Trust, which consists of wealth inherited from G.D. Searle & Company, a company that created the artificial sweetener aspartame marketed as NutraSweet. The foundation also has funded Americans for Prosperity, the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heartland Institute, and many other right-wing groups.
$165,559 from the Apgar Foundation, a foundation created by the widow of John “Jack” N. Apgar Jr., founder of Somerset Tire Service, an automotive service and tire company based in New Jersey. The foundation was created topromote the teaching of “Western Civilization” on college campuses.
$93,000 from theInstitute for Energy Research, a right-wing energy think tank funded by groups linked to the Koch brothers.
$51,600 from the Charles Koch Institute, Charles Koch’s anti-government “educational” arm created from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation in September 2011.

Strata Policy describes itself as the “premier research hub on environmental, energy, and public land issues.” The Institute of Political Economy focuses on similar energy and environmental issues. Both entities have advocated against renewable portfolio standards in states, published anti-renewable energy reports, and sent Utah State University professors to testify in states against renewable energy.

In a 2015report opposing a renewable portfolio standard in Kansas, Strata Policy and the Institute of Political Economy concluded that the standard “will increase fiscal and economic costs significantly between now and 2020” that will include a $171-million “burden” on Kansas electricity ratepayers and a loss of 795 jobs. “When major errors in the study’s methods are corrected, the study’s results actually confirm that state Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards (RPS) like those in Kansas create hundreds of jobs and save consumers tens of millions of dollars,” Michael Goggin, senior director of research at the American Wind Energy Association, wrote in ablog post.

The Institute of Political Economy issued a report in 2016 on a renewable portfolio standard report for Pennsylvania — authored by four out of the five researchers who prepared the co-branded Kansas report — that reached similar conclusions. The report found that Pennsylvania’s renewable portfolio standard has contributed to an increase of 10 percent in the unemployment rate.

Synapse Energy Research, in a study released in late 2016, countered that Pennsylvania’s renewable portfolio standard has not harmed the state’s economy. In fact, the study explains that meeting Pennsylvania’s electric power needs entirely with renewables by 2050 is both achievable — and economic. Instead of greater unemployment, Pennsylvania could see a net increase of nearly 500,000 job‐years from 2015 to 2050 under a scenario in which the state moved to 100-percent renewables during this period, the consulting firm found. (One job for one year equals one “job year” and if that job continues for another 12 months, it’s two “job years.”)

In 2015, Ryan Yonk, an assistant professor at Utah State University and executive director of research at Strata Policy, testified before Ohio and Kansas lawmakers, where renewable energy standards were in jeopardy, to lay out his group’s research in opposition to the state renewable energy policies. Utah State University allows faculty to conduct outside consulting work; faculty members are not permitted to “exploit the institution’s name or their relationship to the institution for personal reasons unrelated to their legitimate academic or professional activities” and must avoid “creating the impression that they are representing the institution in public appearances or statements,” according to the university’s faculty code.

Most recently, Strata Policy partnered with the Institute of Political Economy to refocus on North Carolina as lawmakers were once again debating the state’s renewable energy policy. Updated in 2017, the partner organizations’report found that the renewable portfolio standard in North Carolina has faced opposition since its creation, including from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch-funded group that drafts model legislation for states. “North Carolina is still where the action is,” Gibson said.

The Koch-funded groups, though, failed in their attempt to undermine North Carolina’s renewable energy policy. A new lawcreated a competitive bidding process that will bring more than 2.6 gigawatts of new solar into service over a three-and-a-half-year period. The Solar Energy Industries Association lauded the bill as one that “will significantly enhance the solar market in North Carolina.”

Strata Policy “waged these state-level attacks” because “they want to drive regulation to the state, where it’s more controllable and because that’s where their dollar really goes the farthest ” Gibson said.

Recently, Strata Policy has begun to expand its portfolio beyond attacks on renewable energy to embrace a Republican-led effort to allow greater use of public lands by extraction companies. Two years ago, the think tank won a public relations contract from the state of Utah to promote its efforts to force the federal government to transfer control of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands to the state. The Utah Legislatureapproved $2 million in funding in 2015 for Strata Policy and other groups to promote the benefits of turning over federal land to the state.

Utah Republicans believe that allowing the state to control the lands will create more economic value by clearing the way for more oil wells, coal mines, and tree harvests. Public lands supporters fear states would sell off the lands that belong to all Americans, allowing industry to destroy the environment.

Simmons’ Strata Policy “landed the public relations contract for the Utah Legislature’s efforts to wrest control of 31 million acres of public land from the federal government,” Rolly wrote in his op-ed.

Strata Policy has put out several studies on public lands issues. In a 2016 op-ed, Yonkargued that economic activity in Utah and other Western states is “limited by the decisions of federal land bureaucrats.”

In May, Simmonsauthored a report that recommended the Department of the Interior reduce the size of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah “to more appropriately encompass sites of legitimate historical and scientific interest.” Native American groups pushed for the monument designation for years to protect their artifacts. The position embraced by Simmons is the same as Republican lawmakers in Utah; once Trump won the presidency, the lawmakers immediately began lobbying the new administration to make reducing the size of the Bears Ears monument a priority.

Tribes gear up for major legal battle with Trump over Bears Ears National Monument

Native leaders baffled by Zinke’s claim that they are “very happy” with a potentially reduced monument.

Strata Policy joined other conservative groups, many of them also funded by the Kochs, to thank President Donald Trump for signing anexecutive order calling for a sweeping review of national monument designations. In the Juneletter to Trump, Strata Policy and the other groups said the support the criteria in the executive “to reduce and rescind egregious national monuments where local support exists to do so.”

The American Lands Council, a group formed to gain control of federal lands across the West, has also received funding from Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by the Kochs. TheIdaho Freedom Foundation, which also signed the letter to Trump, has received funding from Koch-affiliated groups and is a partner organization in the Charles Koch Institute’s Liberty@Work program.

Along with significant funding from the Charles Koch Foundation, Strata Policy has received donations from the Institute for Energy Research, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that is also funded in part by the Kochs and their affiliated organizations. Simmons’ son, Daniel Simmons, previously worked at the Koch-funded Institute for Energy Research as vice president for policy.

Daniel Simmons now serves in Trump’s Department of Energy as acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Prior to joining DOE, the younger Simmonsalso held a top position at the Koch-funded American Energy Alliance, which advocated for the office he now oversees at DOE to be eliminated.

Josh Israel contributed to this piece.

#CLIMATE, #KOCH BROTHERS, #RENEWABLE ENERGY, #SOLAR POWER

===

Newsweek: We didn't vet wind power op-ed

By HADAS GOLD

04/22/2015

Newsweek didn’t vet the author of an op-ed piece critical of wind energy who turned out to have ties to oil groups, the magazine’s managing editor told the On Media blog on Wednesday.

The piece by Randy Simmons, published on April 11, questions the true cost of wind power to American taxpayers. And though the original article mentioned that Simmons, in his role as a professor of political economy at Utah State University, receives funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and Strata, a 501 c3 non-profit organization, it failed to mention his connection to the Kochs and Exxon-Mobil.

According to Newsweek managing editor Kira Bindrim, a note was appended to the piece after Media Matters flagged Simmons’ connections. The editor’s note now reads:

“The author of this piece, Randy Simmons, is the Charles G. Koch professor of political economy at Utah State University. He's also a senior fellow at the Koch- and ExxonMobil-funded Property and Environment Research Center. These ties to the oil industry weren't originally disclosed in this piece."

(Simmons told The Washington Post's Erik Wemple he is no longer the Charles G. Koch professor of political economy, though he currently currently supervises a program known at Utah State University as the “Koch Scholars” program.

According to Bindrim, the oped came to Newsweek by way of a syndication relationship with several opinion sites, including the site that originally hosted Simmons’ piece The Conversation.

“Admittedly, we did not do an outside vetting of Simmons, and we are not in the habit of fully fact-checking opinion pieces picked up like this from outside sites. These are aspects of our workflow that we're looking at now,” Bindrim said.

The piece also had several factual errors, which the wind lobby group American Wind Energy Association and others flagged in various online posts. Newsweek then corrected the errors and published a counter-oped, titled “The True Benefits of Wind Power” by Jim Marston, the founding director of the Texas office of Environmental Defense Fund.

*Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico.

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[### Suspicious relationship between the Koch brothers and ...

ThinkProgress

https://archive.thinkprogress.org › kochs-fund-energy-t...](https://archive.thinkprogress.org/kochs-fund-energy-think-tanks-in-utah-482ab143e66d/)

Aug 17, 2017 — Simmons and the other professors who staff the Koch-funded Institute of Political Economy also hold positions at Strata Policy. Simmons, who ...Read more

[### Newsweek: We didn't vet wind power op-ed

Politico

https://www.politico.com › blogs › media › 2015/04](https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/04/newsweek-we-didnt-vet-wind-power-op-ed-205940)

Apr 22, 2015 — “The author of this piece, Randy Simmons, is the Charles G. Koch professor of political economy at Utah State University. He's also a senior ...Read more

Missing: Institute ‎| Show results with: Institute

[### The Far-Right Campaign to Destroy Our National Monuments

Center for Biological Diversity

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org › news › tru...](https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/media-archive/a2018/trump_monuments_nation_12.20.17.pdf)

PDF

Dec 20, 2017 — Strata's co-founder and president, Randy Simmons, is a professor at. Utah State University (USU), where he served as the Charles G. Koch ...Read more

[### USU students protest $25 million donation from Charles ...

The Utah Statesman

https://usustatesman.com › sold-usu-students-protest-25...](https://usustatesman.com/sold-usu-students-protest-25-million-donation-charles-koch-foundation/)

Jun 10, 2017 — Critics accused Simmons, researcher Ryan Yonk and his colleagues at Logan-based Strata Policy, a Koch-funded libertarian think tank, of using ...Read more

[### How Charles Koch Is Buying Credibility With Academic ...

DeSmog

https://www.desmog.com › 2020/09/12 › charles-koch-a...](https://www.desmog.com/2020/09/12/charles-koch-academic-george-mason-utah-state-university/)

Sep 12, 2020 — ... Institute for Political Economy (IPE), and also the president of Strata. Simmons publicly denies Koch involvement in the affairs of Utah ...Read more

[### Utah State's Ryan Yonk: Same Soup as Randy Simmons ... Checks and Balances Project

https://checksandbalancesproject.org › utah-states-ryan-y...](https://checksandbalancesproject.org/utah-states-ryan-yonk-same-soup-different-bowl/)

Jul 16, 2015 — As I mentioned earlier, Randy Simmons, the Charles G. Koch professor of political economy at USU, was recently involved in a scandal that ...Read more

[### Charles Koch gave $25m to our university. Has it become a ...

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › charles-koch-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/02/charles-koch-gave-25m-to-our-university-has-it-become-a-rightwing-mouthpiece)

May 2, 2019 — Critics say the Koch Scholars program is one example of how Charles Koch has sought to transform the Utah State business school into a libertarian mouthpiece.Read more

Missing: Institute ‎Economy

[### Rolly: Firm hired by Legislature for Utah lands fight has ties ...

The Salt Lake Tribune

https://archive.sltrib.com › article](https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=2669342&itype=CMSID)

Jun 29, 2015 — A Logan-based think tank hired by the Utah Legislature to promote the state's legal efforts to wrest control of 32 million acres of public land ...Read more

Missing: Institute ‎| Show results with: Institute

[### Koch Foundation to fund new research institution at USU

The Utah Statesman

https://usustatesman.com › koch-foundation-fund-new-...](https://usustatesman.com/koch-foundation-fund-new-research-institution-usu/)

Jun 4, 2017 — Similar accusations have been levied at Logan's own Strata, a Koch-funded public policy research center which relies on research conducted ...Read more

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