type: timeline_event By 2014, the Council for National Policy's membership included the DeVos and Mercer families, representing some of America's wealthiest conservative donors and demonstrating CNP's function as a coordination hub linking billionaire money with conservative institutional infrastructure.
Richard DeVos, Amway co-founder and billionaire, served as one of CNP's presidents. His daughter-in-law Betsy DeVos would later serve as Trump's Secretary of Education. Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, mother of Blackwater founder Erik Prince and Betsy DeVos, was a CNP member, with the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation serving as a donor to the organization.
The Mercer Family Foundation had been among CNP's major donors since 1994, representing two decades of funding the conservative coordination network. The Mercer family's CNP membership meant their funding decisions could be coordinated with Heritage Foundation strategy, ALEC legislation priorities, and Federalist Society judicial selections discussed at CNP's secretive meetings.
This integration of billionaire donors into CNP's coordination network explained how conservative funding moved in lockstep across multiple organizations. At CNP's three-times-yearly meetings, DeVos and Mercer family representatives could coordinate funding priorities with the leaders of Heritage Foundation, ALEC, Federalist Society, religious right organizations, and grassroots mobilization groups.
The 2014 leaked membership directory (released by SPLC in 2016) documented this billionaire integration, showing how CNP served as the coordination point between massive wealth (DeVos, Mercer, Koch families), think tank infrastructure (Heritage Foundation), legal networks (Federalist Society), state-level legislation (ALEC), religious right organizations (Family Research Council), and grassroots mobilization (Tea Party Patriots).
CNP's ability to bring billionaire donors, institutional leaders, and grassroots organizers into the same secretive meetings explained the conservative movement's coordinated effectiveness. Funding priorities, policy development, legal strategy, legislation, and grassroots mobilization could all be synchronized through CNP's network.
The DeVos family's CNP membership was particularly significant given their control over massive education-related funding. Betsy DeVos's later appointment as Education Secretary represented CNP network members moving into government positions where they could implement policies coordinated through the CNP infrastructure.
This period demonstrated CNP's evolution into a full-spectrum coordination network: billionaire money (DeVos, Mercer), institutional infrastructure (Heritage, ALEC), legal strategy (Federalist Society), grassroots mobilization (Tea Party), religious right coordination (Family Research Council), and eventually government power (Trump administration) - all coordinated through CNP's secretive meetings.