Editor’s Note: The story below is from investigative reporter and documentarian Lauren Windsor. It’s the culmination of 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 reporting like this at the Alaska Current by making a recurring or one-time 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. At least 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.
“Just as bad as his using public office for personal enrichment of himself and his family, Trump is setting the example for others to follow. Derek Kreifels and Adam Crum of the State Financial Officers Foundation are obvious cases in point,” Craig Holman, an ethics lobbyist at the watchdog group Public Citizen, tells me. “They are using SFOF not only to embed their own ideology in state governments – they are directing state actions into self-serving business opportunities.”
Much of this material is reported for the first time here, exclusively in Zeteo and The Alaska Current.
Kreifels, Crum, and the State Financial Officers Foundation did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
‘I’m Trying to Inject Right-wing Politics Into Investments’
In coordination with Republican state legislators and attorneys general, SFOF’s right-wing treasurers and auditors work to punish corporations that embrace environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies, focused on items such as carbon reduction, gay rights, or board diversity. The officials claim that companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder profits above all else (they don’t), and that ESG considerations constitute political interference with that mandate (they aren’t).
Publicly, Kreifels has promoted the idea of “political neutrality” in investments, wielding this as a political cudgel against supposedly woke banks and corporations. But the Prospr chief has been more explicit about his own politics behind closed doors.
According to exclusive audio from an October 2025 Christian finance conference hosted by Innovest Portfolio Solutions at Catholic University, Kreifels advised the audience of institutional investors to turn the tables on “activist investors on the progressive left” by denying contracts to any consultant that supports ESG or diversity initiatives “to any degree.”
“They shouldn’t be considered,” Kreifels said, echoing similar remarks he made at a conservative conference earlier in the year.
In an apparent reference to reporting from an Alaskan journalist, Kreifels added: “I love this – I just got hit in the media because I’m trying to inject right-wing politics into investments. I call it neutrality.”
But Kreifels isn’t simply looking to inject neutrality, or even right-wing politics, into state investments or treasuries – he’s also trying to collect state money for his own business.
With Crum’s help in Alaska, Kreifels pitched Prospr’s services to government funds. As the revenue commissioner, and board trustee, Crum held sway at the $91 billion Alaska Permanent Fund, a sovereign wealth fund that invests oil company taxes to distribute a dividend check to every Alaskan; the $49 billion Alaska Retirement Management Board, which oversees the state’s pension funds; and the $1.7 billion Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA), a state investment bank.
Prospr’s services, marketed to red-state investment pools, include: proxy voting audits, bespoke ETF creation, and money management.
Proxies give shareholders a voice in the management of a corporation through votes on resolutions, which can cover issues from board governance to environmental sustainability goals. By auditing the proxy votes of a state’s investment fund, Prospr Aligned promises to identify votes in support of ESG and diversity initiatives by the fund’s portfolio managers. The goal is for red-state treasurers to “align” the proxy votes of their investments with conservative, Christian values. That means firing purportedly “woke” investment consultants and portfolio managers, which happened last year in Oklahoma when the SFOF-affiliated treasurer fired the incumbent consultant to hire Innovest, a firm run by devout Catholics. According to a proposal that Prospr submitted to the Alaska Permanent Fund, proxy voting audits start at $50,000.
An ETF, or exchange-traded fund, is a basket of securities – stocks, bonds, or commodities – that trades like an individual stock. ETF managers earn a percentage of assets under management. Money managers earn that plus a percentage of profits, and can generate millions of dollars in fees from large public investment pools.
Prospr’s Alaska ETF was created in 2025 in partnership with Crum and Christian investment firm Vident Asset Management. The ETF tracks the Alaska Last Frontier Index, which was designed, with data from the Alaska Revenue Department, to promote local businesses, with an emphasis on energy and resource extraction holdings. (Kreifels has told people in Alaska that Crum and Governor Mike Dunleavy wanted an investment tool that was Alaska-centric, and that he engaged with the revenue commissioner’s staff “on a regular basis.”)
Vident’s indices utilize the firm’s investment philosophy of “Principled Reasoning,” which is based on biblical wisdom. The philosophy was developed more than a decade ago by Vident CEO Vince Birley and Prospr’s head of corporate engagement, Jerry Bowyer, who has said that the world economy is cursed because of the fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden, and that principled reasoning will “reverse to some degree the curse,” which “will be here until the Second Coming and Resurrection.”
In the ‘90s, Bowyer crusaded for a “Christocracy” as the head of an organization that advocated for a constitutional amendment codifying America as a Christian nation. Today, he rejects the “Christian Nationalist” label, preferring “the lordship of Christ over every sphere of life, including politics.”
From the Last Frontier to the Finance Capital
The Alaska Revenue Department shared government data with Kreifels to help him identify investment-worthy businesses for Prospr’s very first fund, the Alaskan-themed ETF.
Crum’s deputies at the Revenue Department escorted Kreifels across the state, from the famous Iditarod Dog Sled Race to meetings with powerful officials in the North Slope, to a visit with Crum in the mountains above Wasilla. Kreifels made another trip to Anchorage with Vident executives in June 2025 to hold informational meetings about the ETF in conjunction with Prospr’s sponsorship of the governor’s energy conference.
Kreifels did not report any of these travel expenses nor the sponsorship in his lobbying disclosures to the state.
The revenue commissioner and Kreifels debuted the Alaska ETF last summer, promoting a two-day launch party with a closing bell ceremony at the New York Stock Exchange. Crum was listed on an event invite as a featured speaker, despite an out-of-state travel moratorium for government employees.
Not listed on the invite was an SFOF-hosted lunch featuring Securities and Exchange Commissioner Paul Atkins. According to ethics disclosures, SFOF paid for Oklahoma’s treasurer to travel to the bell ringing ceremony. That means the group spent nonprofit money to have a public official attend an event for a for-profit business venture led by its former CEO and current board member. (Several more state financial officers attended the event; their states do not require such disclosures.)
Additionally, ‘Smart Women, Smart Money Magazine’ – an SFOF online publication run by Kreifels’s wife Melanie – posted articles promoting the launch and Prospr’s business partners.
After public scrutiny, Crum pulled out of the ETF launch events, but another one of his colleagues, AIDEA Chief Investment Officer Geoff Johns, could be seen on the dais behind Kreifels with Alaskan lobbyists and business owners ringing the closing bell. Crum’s deputy, Llewellyn “Q” Smyth, appears to have attended as well.
Governor Dunleavy announced his revenue commissioner’s impending resignation weeks later; Crum launched an unsuccessful bid to succeed Dunleavy, who is term-limited, that August.
‘My Presentation Is Purely Informational Today’
This July, AIDEA convened a “special” board meeting to hear presentations from Prospr and Vident for investment in the Alaska ETF.
Institutional investors often wait for a 12-month track record before putting money into a new financial instrument. The Alaska ETF, which trades under the symbol AKAF, reached that threshold last month – one day before that meeting, where Kreifels spoke in public session.
AIDEA is often skewered for its opacity. Calling the state investment bank a money-losing “executive slush fund,” one former Alaska legislator recently called for its dissolution. So the officials’ defensive tone in the meeting was unsurprising.
Several participants stressed the “informational” nature of the presentation regarding the Alaska ETF.
Addressing public concerns, AIDEA Executive Director Randy Ruaro asserted that he had never met with anyone involved with Prospr’s Alaska ETF, adding, “I have not heard of or believe there is a pending request for investment in AKAF.”
Trustee Albert Fogle pressed Kreifels on this: “Just to confirm, you’ve never spoken with anyone from AIDEA other than to organize this meeting regarding AKAF fund or anyone on the board?”
Kreifels replied that he had not, only for Trustee Julie Sande to remind him that they had met before to discuss “economic development opportunities” and “introduce the fund.” He confirmed they had met in February. Kreifels also failed to mention his launch party collaboration with AIDEA CIO Johns, who was apparently in the room with him during the presentation. (Sande had joined remotely.)
Fogle continued, “Is there a specific ask today that you’re here for, or is this purely information?”
“My presentation is purely informational today,” Kreifels said, although he later noted that Vident would have an ask for the board.
Speaking with more candor than his peers, Trustee Al Haynes urged Prospr to “come back with a proposal to the board by the next board meeting.” Chair Bill Kendig replied, “I don’t think we can make that decision right this second, but we’ll definitely put that in the funnel.”
Prospr’s Alaska ETF currently has a little over $3 million in assets under management. To break even, ETFs typically need $25-30 million.
The AIDEA board meets on Wednesday. Any deliberations concerning investment in the Alaska ETF will take place in executive session.
‘The Worst Idea I’ve Heard All Week’
Kreifels is also lobbying the legislature to commission a statewide proxy voting audit, according to multiple Alaskan politicos, including state Senators Elvi Gray-Jackson and Jesse Kiehl, two Democrats who separately met with Prospr executives in February.
Gray-Jackson, who helms the powerful Senate legislative budget and audit committee, told me: “They were looking for work. They seemed desperate.”
According to Kiehl, during Prospr’s pitch on proxy voting audits, Kreifels argued that fiduciaries needed to know if money managers were voting for trans rights or climate activism. Ironically, the group was sitting beneath an award the senator received from a local LGBT rights organization that he proudly displays in his office.
Kiehl said Kreifels argued that legislative leaders should determine the consequences for managers’ wayward proxy votes. Kiehl replied that having legislators involved “would inject politics into it, rather than fiduciary interest,” adding, “That’s the worst idea I’ve heard all week.”
“My remarks seemed to shock them,” Kiehl told me. “I kind of want the investing to be amoral. We’ve seen a number of bills directing the Permanent Fund what to invest in. By and large we have resisted making the Permanent Fund a social fund.”
In his pitch, Kreifels named as a client the State of Kentucky, where Prospr has been hired to audit the state’s retirement funds.
Prospr’s Kentucky contract, which has not previously been reported, was signed with the auditor’s office, which is led by a longtime Kreifels ally, Allison Ball. Ball has served as a national chair and vice chair of SFOF, attended the 2024 SFOF conference in Anchorage, and is currently a member of the nonprofit’s leadership team.
According to the Kentucky Auditor’s office, Prospr was the only vendor to bid on the project. State records show that the firm won a contract worth $285,000, to “assist with [a] special examination of ESG-related investment.”
Asked why Prospr was the only vendor considered, a spokesperson for Ball said: “We are unsure why no additional vendors submitted bids – that would require asking unknown potential bidders why they didn’t submit a bid.”
Government Resources Tapped for Nonprofit Lobbying Junket
Throughout 2024, Commissioner Crum and Derek Kreifels were key allies, as the two men prepared to co-host SFOF’s Investing in American Energy Summit in Anchorage in September.
Crum spoke with Kreifels on a panel he moderated at the governor’s marquee energy conference that May that included the executive director of the Alaska Permanent Fund.
Among the sponsorships lined up for the SFOF summit: A vendor under consideration for a multi-million-dollar Revenue Department contract paid for a glacier cruise, and at the request of Crum’s staff, the Alaska Railroad, a state agency, covered a dinner rail excursion.
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.
“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.
One panel saw Crum and Alaska Permanent Fund Board Chair Jason Brune speak alongside Jerry Bowyer, an Episcopal deacon and SFOF adviser who jumpstarted the right-wing proxy voting movement in 2018 and now runs proxy services for Prospr.
Prospr and its Alaskan ETF would later sponsor the governor’s energy conference in 2025 and 2026, with an offsite fiduciary training for public pension trustees this year. Brune, Bowyer, and Vident CEO Birley spoke at the training. Kreifels did not report any related expenses in his lobbying disclosures to the state.
‘Back to Neutral Faster’ With Proxy Voting Audits
In an email, obtained through a public records request, Kreifels wrote that he discussed Prospr’s services with Crum and Brune in September 2024, around the time of the SFOF conference, although neither Kreifels nor Birley would be registered to lobby in the state until January 2025.
Speaking about the State Financial Officers Foundation conference, Brune told me, “I do not recall hearing a presentation or discussion about Prospr’s services at that event, much less discussing with Derek how Prospr might participate in an APFC [Alaska Permanent Fund] procurement.”
In late 2024, after hearing Prospr’s pitch, Crum and Brune pushed executives at the Alaska Permanent Fund to commission a proxy voting audit. At a Dec. 10 board meeting, they deterred the staff from signing a contract with their preferred vendor, Institutional Shareholder Services – a proxy adviser now under fire from SFOF, the Alaska attorney general, and the Trump administration over ESG considerations.
The revenue commissioner said his interest in a proxy voting audit was piqued after conversations with other treasurers about best practices at an unnamed conference. Expressing an urgent need to protect state economic interests from politicization, Crum claimed an intensive audit would get their investing “back to neutral faster,” and pressed for proposals from additional vendors. He said he also pushed for audits at the Alaska Retirement Management Board and other state funds.
Brune, for his part, told me in email, “My concerns about how companies and investment managers use their voting power long predate my service on the APFC board, much less any interaction with Prospr.”
Kreifels announced the founding of Prospr Aligned days after that December 2024 meeting, formally launched the firm in January 2025, and inquired with Permanent Fund officials about setting up an introductory call to discuss proxy audits the following month.
Just two firms vied for the Permanent Fund’s proxy audit business that spring: Prospr and Strive Asset Management, a long-time ally of SFOF in the anti-ESG investing space. Strive ultimately won the contract with a much lower bid.
But the proxy voting audit discussion was just a foot-in-the-door with the Alaska Permanent Fund. At Crum’s request, its chief investment officer, Marcus Frampton, met with Kreifels and an affiliate money manager for lunch in Juneau in March 2025. In an email to the Permanent Fund’s legal counsel, Frampton assessed that Prospr’s “aspiration is to manage money for us.”
Referrals from the Permanent Fund board to investment staff are supposed to be logged in a tracker that was instituted in the wake of a 2024 corruption scandal involving a former trustee who allegedly recommended several firms with ties to her own family businesses. There was no tracker entry for any Prospr meetings – despite assurances from Frampton and Executive Director Deven Mitchell during their Oct. 2, 2025 board meeting that the tracker was accurate.
When I questioned the executives about it, Mitchell conceded that if true, it was “a failure on our part.” Grasping for a rationale, Frampton said they only met once: “It might have actually not been an investment referral. Just like, this person’s in Juneau, have a meeting.”
‘Undue Influence to a Private Entity’
Numerous officials in the Dunleavy administration have obscured their involvement with Kreifels and Prospr Aligned, and much of the available information offers conflicting accounts.
Although Prospr announced the Alaska ETF as a joint venture with Crum, there appears to have been no official announcement from the state. When I questioned him outside of an SFOF conference last October, Crum said that the ETF was not a state venture, nor were any state resources invested in it. (Kreifels has told people in Alaska that the ETF was designed to meet the specific interests of Crum and the governor.)
When I asked about his absence from the Alaska ETF launch at the NYSE, Crum explained: “It ended up being the Department of Law says they didn’t want me to actually give an undue influence to a private entity.” But Crum then claimed that “because Derek had left” SFOF, the department did not think there was a conflict of interest in the joint project. In fact, Kreifels was and is still on the SFOF board.
Although the legal department prohibited Crum’s travel, other government employees were on hand for the ETF launch: AIDEA CIO Geoff Johns, who stood on the stock exchange dais behind Kreifels, and Crum deputy Smyth. At a December 2025 AIDEA board meeting, Executive Director Randy Ruaro told me unequivocally that AIDEA had no involvement with the Alaska ETF. Later that day, AIDEA CFO Jean Kornmuller offered that Johns “may have been in the vicinity and participated, but he’s not involved.”
Under direct questioning from me at their October 2025 board meeting, Permanent Fund executives acknowledged failing to document the Prospr referral from Crum.
I also asked them if they would commit to not investing in Prospr’s ETF. Permanent Fund Board Chair Brune intervened: “No. You can’t… Our job is to maximize risk-adjusted returns.” I told Brune I was aware of his relationship with Kreifels, and asked if he intended to recuse himself from any votes involving Prospr. He replied that “there would be no recusal necessary” because the board of trustees don’t make the investment decisions, only staff do.
That answer neatly avoided the issue of the board pushing contracts, like the one for a proxy audit.
In May of this year, Brune finally conceded to me that Prospr was the other vendor for the bid, adding: “I have no idea how Derek got into the mix.” On Wednesday, Brune reiterated to me: “As I have previously told you, I had no idea how Derek or Prospr became involved in the process.”
Lauren Windsor
Lauren Windsor is the executive producer of The Undercurrent, an independent investigative news webshow, sponsored by American Family Voices, a progressive nonprofit she leads. Her reporting to expose Jan. 6 deniers formed the basis for "Gonzo for Democracy,” a documentary she wrote, directed, and produced. Specializing in communications strategy, Lauren is a partner in Democracy Partners and Mike Lux Media. She has appeared on ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and Newsnation. Her work has additionally been featured on CBS, NBC, The New York Times, Politico, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, among others.
