Ron Arnold: Congress should stop funding Big Green lawsuits against the government

America's taxpayers need to know about a thorny federal program lurking in the Obama budget: the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. It began decades ago as a millionaire's hobby horse and grew into a Frankenstein monster that today feeds millions of taxpayer dollars to green groups that sue the federal government -- and thus sue the taxpayer.

I began researching NFWF in a 1995 report on Big Green's federally funded trial lawyers, "Feeding at the Trough" (www.undueinfluence.com/feeding-at-the-trough.pdf).

NFWF's origins are bizarre: Congress created it as a nonprofit corporation in 1984, specifying that it "is not an agency or establishment of the United States Government." President Reagan denounced that double talk when he reluctantly signed the bill, writing, "Entities which are neither clearly governmental nor clearly private should not be created."

The intent for NFWF was to develop private sector support for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a government agency. This perverse purpose allows a well-connected private elite - originally including timber heiress Nancy Weyerhaeuser, oil billionaire Caroline Getty, and now hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones - to carve out government funds, solicit limitless private funds, and funnel the cash to whom they please, including $25,000 to Nancy Weyerhaeuser's son Rick for an anti-logging project he ran in Montana - and $23,500 to a Planned Parenthood-type group in Rajasthan, India, for population control near Ranthambhore National Park.

As it grew, NFWF created one horror story after another. It gave $89,748 to the Grand Canyon Trust, which filed suit and shut down the coal-fired Mojave Power Plant in Laughlin, Nev., and cost 200 Navajo miners their high-paying jobs at the Black Mesa coal mine that supplied the plant.

NFWF gave nearly $442,000 to the National Wildlife Federation and in return got a lawsuit to divert water from generating electricity in Pacific Northwest power dams - and spill it for migrating salmon. The suit now threatens to remove four vital hydroelectric dams on the Snake River. Another NFWF recipient, American Rivers ($296,700), is also a party to the suit, which is still in court.

The list goes on and on, lawsuits against fisheries, agriculture, energy, construction, manufacturing, the whole economy. NFWF claims that grantee lawsuits do not use federal money. After examining the Internal Revenue Service Form 990 reports of major litigious NFWF recipients, I found no separate segregated accounts for lawsuits - you can't tell federal money from private - making NFWF's claims appear disingenuous at best...

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/02/ron-arnold-congress-should-stop-funding-big-green-lawsuits-against-govern#ixzz1F9hzaAS4