Editor’s note:
The story below is from investigative reporter and documentarian Lauren Windsor. It’s the culmination of over a year’s worth of reporting, and breaks open a world of staggering corruption on the right you’ve likely never heard of. Please give it your time, and support our ability to do more original, in-depth reporting at Zeteo by becoming a paid subscriber or making a donation.
Ballrooms, slush funds, jumbo jets. Worship services in the Pentagon, electioneering in churches, the Ten Commandments in schools. 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.
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.
That theory is convenient for conservatives’ fossil fuel funders – as well as for SFOF’s longtime top executive, who’s moving to cash in.
Derek Kreifels was the CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation for more than a decade. 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.
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.
In an interview with me in Anchorage last fall, 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.”
Over the last year, I attended public board meetings in Alaska; staked out an SFOF conference in DC; and obtained records, photos, audio, and video documenting Crum’s efforts to direct public resources to his friend’s nonprofit and for-profit ventures during his tenure as revenue commissioner. Crum’s efforts are on the verge of paying off for Kreifels: A major state agency will soon decide whether to put money into Prospr’s Alaskan-themed investment fund.
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. Seven other state financial officials were in attendance. 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.