Government Accountability & Oversight
FOIA-litigation shop funded by coal billionaire Joe Craft.
§ 1 · Background & fossil-fuel ties
Government Accountability & Oversight describes itself in vague terms, stating that it will fight for “transparency” in the public realm. It makes statements like this:
“Institutions suffer from capture – including, increasingly, the public’s academic institutions, enlisted by donors and ideologues as weapons in legal, political and policy battles, almost universally on one side of the ideological divide.”
But GAO is precisely a front group for donors and ideologues of the coal industry. It has no employees, only three board members with ties to fossil fuel companies. And half of the nonprofit’s financing comes from one billionaire’s coal industry foundation that doesn’t believe in climate change.
The group, formed as a nonprofit in 2018, is led by Chris Horner, an attorney who denies climate change is real and has worked for the coal industry. GAO’s three-member board of directors also has fossil fuel and climate denialism ties.
Matthew Hardin represented another similar libertarian front group, Energy Policy Advocates, when it sued the state of Minnesota related to climate change litigation records.
Greg Garrison, in 2018, said that climate change, “has been a hoax, a snare and a delusion always.” He also referred to former Vice President Mike Pence as a “longtime friend.”
Joe Thomas is a correspondent for The Daily Signal, a self-described “leading conservative news website.”
Meanwhile, it appears that half of GAO’s funding comes from the Joe Craft Foundation, according to IRS filings. Joe Craft is the billionaire president of Alliance Resource Partners LP, the 2nd-largest coal producer in the eastern US. This decade, GAO has received $1.5 million dollars from the Craft Foundation, according to IRS filings.
And when Craft’s wife, Kelly Craft, was a U.S. Ambassador, Joe Craft attended meetings his wife held with Suncor execs. that raised congressional concern. Suncor is now a party to a case before the U.S. Supreme Court—Suncor v. Boulder—that seeks to protect fossil fuel companies from paying for the damage wrought by climate change. The group has chimed in as a “friend of the court” in the landmark case, arguing the city of Boulder’s climate liability claims should not proceed in state court.
GAO funder The Craft Foundation also lists investments with the following fossil fuel companies: Alliance Resource Partners LP, Energy Transfer LP, Enterprise Products LP, Plains All American Pipeline LP, Western Gas Partners LP, HYPERLINK "https://law.justia.com/cases/hawaii/supreme-court/2023/scap-22-0000429.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com"Sunoco LP, and USA Compression LP. Sunoco is a defendant in another similar climate liability fight, Honolulu v. Sunoco.
Murray Energy, the now-bankrupt coal mining company, also dispersed $300,000 to GAO, according to bankruptcy filings. The company was owned by climate crisis denier and Trump donor Robert Murray.
§ 2 · Record of fronting
According to IRS disclosures, GAO spends almost all of its money on litigation. But looking at the cases it does weigh in on, its positions are in defense of the fossil fuel industry. For example, the GAO filed an amicus brief in 2026 supporting EPA’s rescission of a power-plant air toxics rule, arguing the prior rule was a pretext to force coal/power generation shifts. In Suncor, GAO is aligned with energy companies in opposition to the entities seeking damages from companies for the destruction wrought by climate change.
The group also has a documented history of trying to roll back the EPA. In 2025, GAO submitted comments supporting reconsideration of EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, arguing U.S. emissions reductions have minimal or undetectable climate effect.
§ 3 · The cover story, debunked
“U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably minimal, if any, direct impact on the global climate and any effects—which again are not expected to be detectable—will emerge if at all only with long delays.”
This was GAO’s response to the Clean Air Act’s Endangerment Finding, and whether greenhouse-gas pollution may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health. It is not about whether one rule singlehandedly cools the planet. EPA’s 2009 finding determined that six greenhouse gases threaten current and future generations, and that motor vehicles contribute to that pollution. The National Climate Assessment says human-caused climate change is already “far-reaching and worsening” across every U.S. region, and that rapid emissions reductions can limit future warming and many risks.
GAO told the Supreme Court that it’s an “independent” entity with no “direct interest” in the outcome of the climate liability case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Suncor v. Boulder.
GAO can’t argue that it is “distinct and independent” from the fossil fuel industry.
GAO says there is “great reason” not to accept climate-model assumptions because “by design they bake in anthropogenic warming,” or human-caused warming.
Climate models help test whether warming can be explained without human emissions, and the answer is no.