A secretive “dark money” organization funded by a network conservative backers has seen its team take key jobs across the Trump administration — and helped score a series of victories in rolling back landmark environmental and climate change policies.
That group, the Center for Environmental Accountability, has little presence outside of its website and its physical address at a P.O. Box in a strip mall outside Houston. But its influence reaches across federal agencies and into the office of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff.
It’s difficult to gauge how influential CEA’s work was in driving the regulatory changes ultimately enacted under President Donald Trump. But the group’s alumni have fanned out into positions of power within the administration, and many are now responsible for implementing the policies that its largely undisclosed backers paid them to advocate for as part of a broader network of conservative organizations financed by fossil fuel interests.
CEA’s sources of funding are largely shielded in anonymity. Federal tax filings showed CEA took in $2.4 million over its first two years in operation, money it used to hire former Trump environmental lawyers to fight pollution and climate rules imposed by the Obama and Biden administrations that were long opposed by fossil fuel interests. The organization is still active and filing comments on environmental regulatory actions.
