Koch and Covid-19.

• Author: Graves, Lisa
• Position: On Wisonsin

What is the real role that groups funded by the Koch fortune are playing in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic?

Charles Koch, the billionaire chief executive officer of Koch Industries, has been making personal donations to help individual families through his newly rebranded Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, which now operates under the name Stand Together. The group has been used to give money to some local efforts in exchange for branding opportunities that put a rosy gloss on Koch's broader record of undermining the power of government.

In an op-ed in USA Today, Koch called for a "distinctly American approach" of private charity and business action, as opposed to government funding to help struggling Americans. Yet the $5 million he has given to a COVID-19 relief fund amounts to just 0.000125 of his net worth of roughly $40 billion, about the equivalent of a $5 donation for someone who makes $40,000 a year.

At the height of the "reopen" protests, Koch's team emphasized it was not actively promoting the protests at state capitals against orders issued by health departments to prevent the spread of this deadly disease. But the next week, Koch's political operation, Americans for Prosperity, went to court in Wisconsin to strike down the power of state health officials to issue such emergency orders to respond to a deadly infectious disease.

Americans for Prosperity has also pressured legislators to oppose funding for states and cities whose budgets have been crushed by the pandemic, as sales tax revenues have...