Foreign-Funded Green Groups Lead Charge Against Trump Interior Nominee Doug Burgum

Influential climate groups bankrolled by Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss have emerged as some of the loudest voices opposing President-elect Donald Trump's nomination of Gov. Doug Burgum (R., N.D.) to lead the Department of the Interior.

"The threat speaks for itself," Climate Power said immediately after Burgum's nomination was announced last month, characterizing the North Dakota governor as a "climate skeptic."

The League of Conservation Voters accused Burgum of working to enrich oil executives, while the Wilderness Society vowed to "defend against any attempts" to increase fossil fuel development on public lands.

All three of those groups are cogs in Wyss's well-funded network of nonprofits, which the billionaire, despite being a foreign national, has leveraged to push far-left climate policies across the United States. The groups advocate for fossil fuel shutdowns, green energy development, and the lock-up of government-managed land.

The groups' visceral reaction to Burgum's nomination suggests that Wyss's network is gearing up to fight Trump's energy agenda at every turn. The League of Conservation Voters and the Wilderness Society spearheaded a number of lawsuits during the first Trump administration and appear poised to do the same during Trump's second term.

The Department of the Interior will likely play a critical role in implementing Trump's energy and "drill, baby, drill" agenda. The agency manages hundreds of millions of acres of federal lands and waters and is authorized to lease oil-rich or mineral-rich public property to private developers. Trump has vowed to open up lands and waters for drilling following the Biden administration's opposite approach, blocking drilling across vast swaths of lands and waters.

For more than two decades, Wyss has been highly involved financially in various left-wing environmental and social causes—he founded the Wyss Foundation in the late 1990s as his main tax-exempt funding arm, with pass-through group Berger Action Fund coming years later in 2007. The Swiss billionaire has pushed hundreds of millions of dollars to those two nonprofits, which in turn have spread those funds to a vast array of groups, such as those opposing Burgum's nomination.

"Any organization connected to or funded by Hansjörg Wyss should be treated with disdain and distrust in Washington, D.C.," Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center, told the Free Beacon.

"Wyss has refused to obtain American citizenship while sticking his nose, and checkbook, into American political affairs for years," Thayer added. "He has gotten away with openly breaking campaign finance laws, while propping up the biggest 'dark money' network in the world and treating American politics like some game that he has the right to play."

Wyss's longtime deputy, Molly McUsic—who serves as president of both the Wyss Foundation and the Berger Action Fund—served as vice chair of the Wilderness Society's board and is now a director on the League of Conservation Voters's board. Wyss himself is an at-large member of the Wilderness Society's board of directors.

The Wyss Foundation wired $2.1 million to the Wilderness Society and $400,000 to the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, according to its tax filings covering the 2023 calendar year and first obtained by the Washington Examiner.

And the Berger Action Fund, according to its tax filings covering April 2022 through March 2023, contributed $5 million to the League of Conservation Voters and $150,000 to the Wilderness Society Action Fund. Between April 2018 and March 2023, the Berger Action Fund sent a total of more than $17.5 million to the League of Conservation Voters.

Those contributions, though, are only the tip of the iceberg for Wyss's environmental spending. Over the last five years, the Berger Action Fund has given a staggering $184.4 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a fund that is part of the billion-dollar liberal dark money network managed by Washington, D.C., firm Arabella Advisors. The Sixteen Thirty Fund has, in turn, given millions of dollars to groups such as the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council.

Those groups both lambasted Trump's selection of Burgum for interior secretary. "We will hold the incoming administration to account," the Natural Resources Defense Council said.

"The Sierra Club and its millions of members and supporters across the country will do everything in our power to stop Donald Trump and Doug Burgum's fossil fuel agenda," the Sierra Club said.

Through the Berger Action Fund, Wyss over the last five years has donated an additional $91 million to the California-based group Fund for a Better Future, putting him among the group's top benefactors in that time span. Fund for a Better Future, which gives to a variety of liberal social and environmental causes, housed and was the fiscal sponsor of Climate Power until Climate Power broke off into its own independent nonprofit in mid-2023.

Fund for a Better Future gave $21.3 million to Climate Power shortly before the group became independent. The payment came around the same time that Berger Action Fund wired $19.8 million to Fund for a Better Future, a donation that represented nearly 50 percent of the fund's total revenue for the year.

"The Wyss Foundation and Berger Action Fund are proud to fund numerous conservation organizations and their efforts to protect access to public land, preserve wildlife, and conserve 30 percent of the planet in a natural state by the year 2030," a spokeswoman for the two groups told the Free Beacon in a statement, adding that the groups' grantees "operate independently."

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