# Foundation for Government Accountability The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) is a conservative policy organization founded in 2011 by Tarren Bragdon and based in Naples, Florida. It operates as the **right's premier anti-welfare-state shop** — the organization most responsible for drafting and lobbying the model legislation that imposes work requirements on Medicaid, SNAP, and public housing recipients at the state level. If [[ALEC]] is the right's state-legislative factory for corporate deregulation, FGA is the equivalent for **shrinking the safety net**. FGA is a member of the [[State Policy Network]] and operates with the same "Ikea model" of pre-fabricated policy: it writes the bills, provides the research (often criticized for cherry-picking data), trains the state legislators, and lobbies for passage — all funded by [[Dark Money]] flowing through [[DonorsTrust]], the [[Sarah Scaife Foundation]], and [[Leonard Leo]]'s network. ## Founding and Leadership Tarren Bragdon founded FGA in 2011 with $60,000 in seed money from the [[State Policy Network]]. Bragdon is a former Maine state legislator and past CEO of the Maine Heritage Policy Center (itself an SPN affiliate). He built FGA into a national organization with a $30M+ annual budget by the early 2020s. ## Policy Focus Areas ### Welfare and Work Requirements FGA's flagship agenda. The organization pushes legislation requiring "able-bodied adults" aged 18–60 to work or attend training programs for 20+ hours per week to receive SNAP, Medicaid, or public housing benefits. FGA-drafted legislation or FGA-lobbied provisions have been enacted or considered in dozens of states. In 2023, FGA successfully lobbied for federal work-requirement expansions during the debt ceiling negotiations. ### SNAP Restrictions In January 2025, FGA released a memo advising states to "stop taxpayer-funded junk food" — restricting what SNAP recipients can purchase. By April 2025, at least 14 states had considered such legislation, and Idaho and Utah had passed it. Critics note that FGA's research on outcomes for people who lose benefits selectively reports data only on those who found jobs, ignoring those who simply lost food access. ### Medicaid FGA has been a leading opponent of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, lobbying state legislatures to reject expansion and imposing work requirements on existing Medicaid enrollees. The organization argues that Medicaid traps recipients in dependency; critics counter that its proposals simply remove health coverage from vulnerable populations. ### Election Policy FGA has expanded into election-administration advocacy — supporting voter-ID requirements, citizenship verification for voter registration, and restrictions on mail-in voting. This work connects to the broader infrastructure around [[Cleta Mitchell]]'s [[Election Integrity Network]] and the [[SAVE Act]]. ### Child Labor FGA has also pushed to roll back child-labor protections, advocating for expanded work hours and job categories for teenagers — framed as "workforce freedom" but criticized as a return to pre-[[New Deal]] labor practices. ### Guaranteed Income Bans Since 2023 FGA and its 501(c)(4) lobbying arm, the **Opportunity Solutions Project**, have run a model-legislation campaign to prohibit cities and counties from operating guaranteed-income pilot programs. Five states have enacted bans — Arkansas first in 2023, followed by South Dakota, Idaho, Iowa, and Kansas — with bills pending in Illinois, North Carolina, and Wisconsin in the 2026 sessions. FGA's framing casts the pilots as "socialist experiments" that "trap Americans into dependency." This is the fullest expression of the FGA method: a nationally-funded organization removing policy discretion from local governments, in a domain where the evidence base was still being generated. Full treatment at [[Guaranteed Income Preemption]]. ## Funding FGA's donor base is a map of the [[Dark Money Ecosystem]]: - **Ed [[Uihlein Family Foundation]]**: $17.85M (2014–2021), the single largest identified donor - **[[DonorsTrust]]**: $15.99M (2014–2023), the right's anonymizing donor-advised fund - **Vanguard Charitable Endowment**: $10.6M (2015–2022) - **[[Sarah Scaife Foundation]]**: $4.8M (2016–2023) - **Searle Freedom Trust**: $3.95M (2013–2023) - **[[Leonard Leo]]'s 85 Fund**: $5.3M through 2023 ## Connection to the KB Ecosystem - **[[State Policy Network]]**: FGA is an SPN affiliate — part of the national constellation of state-level conservative policy shops. - **[[ALEC]]**: Overlapping model-legislation strategy, though FGA specializes in welfare/health policy rather than ALEC's broader corporate-deregulation portfolio. - **[[DonorsTrust]]**: FGA's second-largest funding source — the anonymizing conduit that makes it impossible to trace individual donors. - **[[Leonard Leo]]**: Leo's network has invested $5.3M+ in FGA, connecting the welfare-cutting agenda to the broader [[Marble Freedom Trust]] infrastructure. - **[[Dark Money Ecosystem]]**: FGA is a case study in how anonymous philanthropy translates into state-level policy that directly affects millions of Americans' access to food and healthcare. ## See Also - [[Guaranteed Income Preemption]] - [[Universal Basic Income]] - [[State Policy Network]] - [[ALEC]] - [[DonorsTrust]] - [[Heritage Foundation]] - [[Koch Network]] - [[Leonard Leo]] - [[Sarah Scaife Foundation]] - [[Dark Money Ecosystem]] - [[SAVE Act]] - [[Kris Kobach]] - [[Cleta Mitchell]]