It is almost certainly true that most, if not all, CEOs get paid entirely too much. No one’s doing ten, twenty, or a hundred times more work leading a company than the workers they oversee, so their pay shouldn’t be orders of magnitude bigger, either. Now, some might disagree, and claim that the economic market should be free to decide how much people’s work is worth. One would expect that conservative lobby groups would be the first to defend high CEO salaries, and indeed, the Heritage Foundation has done just that.
Which is what makes it so surprising to see a hit piece by “reporter” Kevin Mooney at the Koch/Mercer/tobacco/polluters-funded Heritage Foundation’s fake news website, the Daily Signal, attacking a high CEO salary. Apparently the “big salaries” at the Congressionally-created National Fish and Wildlife Foundation “raise eyebrows.”
Whose eyebrows? Well there’s Alex Echols, who worked at NFWF from 1995 to 2000 and told Mooney that “I don’t know if there is anything untoward with NFWF, but the fact that the salaries are as high as they are does raise some questions.” Now, those questions might have answers, like the ones that Heritage Foundation experts have laid out before in defense of other CEOs.
But most of the raised eyebrows Mooney “reports” are coming from his fellow conservative front group employees, like Heritage’s Katie Tubb, and Heritage’s former in-house climate science denier Nick Loris, who’s now “vice president of public policy” for the “Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions.” (Yet another fake coalition to make it look like Republicans aren’t gleefully lighting the planet on fire with fossil fuel campaign contributions.)
That said, the salary is pretty high. NFWF CEO Jeff Trandahl got paid $1.29 million in 2018, more than the $200,000 to $600,000 range of other green groups that Mooney mentions, from the Sierra Club to National Audubon Society.
But one group Mooney doesn’t mention is the Heritage Foundation. Because had he done so, it would have made it obvious that this is much less about careful oversight of philanthropic funds, and more about bad faith hit pieces on environmental organizations.
While Mooney, Tubb and Loris were quick to throw stones at Randahl’s $1.29 million salary, the Heritage Foundation paid its President James DeMint just shy of $1.4 million dollars in 2017.
When Heritage replaced him in 2018 with Kay Cole James (a Black woman) they dropped that compensation to just $504,136. Don’t worry about her though, because in 2019 her pay rose to $868,411, so she’s clearly on an upward trajectory
She’ll likely keep earning more, but she’d have to more than triple her salary (and double Trandahls) before she catches up to Heritage’s longtime President Edwin Feulner, who got $3.5 million in compensation when he left in 2013, “a figure” the Hill’s Alexander Bolton wrote in 2014, “that could raise eyebrows among the think tank’s critics.”
It’s hard to imagine how someone overseeing an organization that shapes the facts to fit its politics could possibly earn such incredible amounts of money, but Bolton offers a clue. In DeMint’s first year as president in 2013, Heritage’s budget grew by 31%, thanks to “a $25.9 million contribution from an unnamed donor.” (Probably unrelated that Rebecca Mercer, a billionaire hedge fund heiress who funded Trump, Parler, Breitbart and a racist, urine-obsessed climate denier, just so happened to become a Heritage Trustee in 2014.)
But if Heritage is fine with paying its own CEO a million for bringing in millions in funding, why would it have a problem with a CEO bringing in, as Mooney notes, billions of dollars in grants, being paid similarly?
Unless, of course, it’s not actually about the money at all, and just the latest in a long line of Kevin Mooney’s lazy anti-environmental screeds.