President Donald Trump’s political movement, Make America Great Again (MAGA), heavily relies on Christian nationalists who ignore the Founding Fathers’ secularism to argue the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian country. Yet according to a groundbreaking new report, Christian nationalists are engaging in self-dealing on a massive scale — and through connections with American government entities.
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“Ballrooms, slush funds, jumbo jets. Worship services in the Pentagon, electioneering in churches, the Ten Commandments in schools,” reported Zeteo’s Lauren Windsor on Wednesday based on over a year’s worth of reporting. “Conflicts of interest and Christian nationalism have been hallmarks of Donald Trump’s second presidency. The epic flood of corruption swamping Washington isn’t just overwhelming American politics – it’s also obscuring the grift occurring in red states across the country, as officials work to put public investment funds under the control of their friends at Christian finance firms.”
Windsor added, “A major conduit for that corruption is the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a small but powerful nonprofit that convenes Republican state treasurers and auditors, right-wing activists, and Christian finance executives to strategize over how to defeat liberals and weaponize state treasuries against allegedly woke corporations, while steering state treasury money to their ideological allies. Much of their “War on Woke” consists of boosting the fossil fuel industry and crushing efforts to mitigate climate change, under the notion that corporate safeguards are bad business.”
Although Windsor’s report briefly mentioned the state of affairs in Kentucky, she focused on Alaska, including a character named Derek Kreifels.
“Derek Kreifels was the CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation for more than a decade,” Windsor wrote. “He resigned from this role in the fall of 2024, but he remains an SFOF board member, and his wife serves as one of its top executives. Now, Kreifels is lobbying SFOF treasurers to put public retirees’ savings and other funds they oversee into faith-aligned financial products and services offered by his firm, Prospr Aligned, and its affiliates in the Christian finance industry.”
Windsor added, “Kreifels’s firm has already won business from the Kentucky auditor’s office, which is led by a member of the State Financial Officers Foundation’s leadership team, as I can report for the first time. Another state Kreifels has targeted heavily is Alaska, where he has friends in former Revenue Commissioner and ex-SFOF Vice Chair Adam Crum and Alaska Permanent Fund Chair Jason Brune.”
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She also said that in an interview with her in Anchorage last year, “Brune defended Crum and his collaboration with Kreifels as efforts to promote resource extraction in the Arctic – arguing that he and Crum, as members of the governor’s cabinet, ‘are pimping for the state.'”
Describing one event, Windsor reported that “in the weeks leading up to the event, SFOF honored Crum, naming him its vice chair for 2025, and Kreifels announced he was resigning as CEO to embark on a private business venture he would soon reveal.
She added, “‘I have been called to a new mission,’ Kreifels declared. The Anchorage summit presented great synergies for Kreifels. He could, using nonprofit money, convene right-wing finance officials and industry executives who lobby them – while lobbying those officials himself on the services offered by his new business venture and celebrating his tenure at SFOF with friends and family in an exotic locale. According to emails from Kreifels that I obtained, SFOF covered travel costs for public officials and their staff.”
The State Financial Officers Foundation has also helped support Kreifels’s private business ventures. According to state travel disclosures, SFOF paid for at least one treasurer’s travel to the New York Stock Exchange launch party for Prospr’s Alaska investment fund, reports Windsor, adding that SFOF also arranged for a special speaker: longtime ally Paul Atkins, who as chairman of the Trump Securities and Exchange Commission regulates the Prospr fund.”
IRS rules prohibit self-dealing and private benefit from nonprofit money, Windsor said.
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