A conservative advocacy group once known for raising the national profile of the tea party movement is closing down operations in a surprise move announced on Wednesday.
FreedomWorks President Adam Brandon confirmed the organization’s closure to the Washington Examiner on Wednesday, pointing to a shift in the “modern Republican Party” as a reason for its shuttering. The closure comes as former President Donald Trump has remade the GOP in his favor as he seeks to reclaim the Oval Office in November.
Brandon would not directly name Trump during an interview with the Washington Examiner, instead blaming the “rise of national conservatism.”
“Our limited government, classical liberal values, libertarian values — we’re just kind of forced out into this no man’s land between the Democrats and the Republicans right now,” Brandon said.
Brandon explained that FreedomWorks lost about half of its donorship last year when the organization tried to pivot its image a year ago from being a “Republican auxiliary unit” to a centrist-identified group targeting independent voters.
“So you kind of just had the situation where it just wasn’t tenable,” Brandon said. “When you look at our donor and our activist base and what our values were, we have a slight misalignment there.”
The FreedomWorks Board of Directors voted on Tuesday to dissolve the group. Brandon described the decision to close FreedomWorks as “abrupt,” saying that when discussing the organization’s contracts and lease liabilities, the board concluded that closing was the best option.
“We explored everything and just kind of came to the conclusion: ‘Sorry, this isn’t going to work,’ and so it’s just better to jump on it fast now and move,” Brandon said.
The split in ideological stances that Trump and his MAGA-style brand of politics brought to the GOP after the 2016 election led to a “huge gap” between the “Never Trump” and libertarian wings of the group against the MAGA Republicans.
The ideological differences ultimately negatively affected fundraising for the group.
“When you’re trying to appeal to independent swing voters … it doesn’t do well in the mail. And in just a lot of other — I think we’ve always tried to be caught between conservative and libertarian, and when that starts to break down, you lose conservative donors,” Brandon said.
Paul Beckner, a member of the board, cited concerns among donors about what FreedomWorks is doing for Trump.
“We’re not for or against Trump. We’re for Trump if he’s doing what we agree with, and we’re against him if he’s not. And so I think we’ve seen an erosion of conservative donors,” Beckner told Politico, which reported the news of FreedomWorks shutting down.
Brandon pointed out two key issues that he felt clashed with the organization’s principles.
“The shift in the modern Republican Party doesn’t exactly necessarily line up with classical liberal principles we’ve been trying to advocate,” Brandon said, pointing to tariffs and the increase in the United States’s national debt as examples.
Trump has regularly touted his use of tariffs against other countries during his presidency, even floating the idea of introducing more should he be elected for a second term.
“I don’t think tariffs are a great idea. You know, we tend to be free traders,” Brandon said. “When you look at our debt, it’s very obvious that and — that’s the main thing I looked at — we’re going from $35 [trillion] to $50 trillion in debt.”
Trump contributed about $8 trillion to the nation’s debt while in office, while President Joe Biden has added about $7 trillion.
“Both parties are piling up debt, both parties,” Brandon said. “And the problem is that that bill is going to come due soon. And neither party is going to be just talking about entitlement reform.”
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Brandon would not get into next steps for FreedomWorks, making it clear that the organization was “wrapping it up.” He did, however, affirm to the Washington Examiner that the organization would wrap everything up “legally” with its employees, saying he was already working to find them new positions and has spoken with “a lot of different people.”
The group originated through the billionaire Koch family political system under the name Citizens for Sound Economy. In 2004, Citizens for Sound Economy split into two groups: Americans For Prosperity and FreedomWorks.