Bradley Foundation Transformation - Coordinated Conservative Infrastructure Funding

In 1985, the Bradley Foundation underwent a dramatic transformation when Rockwell International Corporation acquired the Allen-Bradley Company, expanding the foundation’s assets from $14 million to over $290 million - a more than 20-fold increase. This windfall enabled systematic, coordinated funding of conservative infrastructure on an unprecedented scale.

Michael S. Joyce, hired away from the Olin Foundation, became Bradley Foundation president in 1985 and would serve until 2001. Dubbed the “godfather of conservative philanthropy” by neoconservative writer Irving Kristol, Joyce was described as “an accomplished neoconservative thinker in his own right.”

Under Joyce’s leadership, the Bradley Foundation began systematic funding of the entire conservative institutional network including Heritage Foundation, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), Federalist Society, American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute, Hudson Institute, Hoover Institution, and dozens of other organizations implementing the Powell Memo vision.

In 1987, the Bradley Foundation gave the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), a State Policy Network member, a $2.8 million startup grant. The foundation’s funding strategy coordinated support across think tanks, legal organizations, state-level policy groups, and media operations, creating an integrated infrastructure for conservative policy development and implementation.

The foundation’s approach demonstrated sophisticated understanding of how to build parallel governing infrastructure outside democratic accountability. By 2013, Bradley was funding a vast network of neoconservative organizations including American Foreign Policy Council, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and many others.

The 1985 Bradley transformation represented a quantum leap in coordinated conservative funding, enabling the movement to operate at scale across federal, state, and local levels simultaneously. The foundation’s strategy showed how concentrated wealth could systematically build alternative policy infrastructure, judicial pipelines, and legislative templates that would capture government institutions while maintaining appearance of independent scholarly research and grassroots activism.