On Tuesday, the Ford Foundation announced the selection of its new president. Heather Gerken, currently the dean of the Yale Law School, will take over in November.
The Ford board claims to have conducted an “extensive national and international search” to replace outgoing president Darren Walker, who announced last year that he planned to step down.
Their search wasn’t thorough enough, as I never heard from them about an interview. Just kidding. Sort of.
I research Big Philanthropy and have repeatedly analyzed the Ford Foundation’s specific grant behavior. I’m also a lifetime Michigan resident, the state where the eponymous auto pioneer created the Ford fortune. I can make a very strong case that I have a better appreciation for how ole Henry wanted his loot given away than the people who have been doing it for more than half a century.
On paper, this all makes me a stronger candidate than the future Ford president, her predecessor, and most of those that came before him.
But the Ford philanthropoids have long since abandoned Michigan for a fancy New York City headquarters. And their annual gusher of grants always includes hundreds of millions for strident left-wing advocacy.
Losing Their Way
Resigning in 1976 from the foundation named after his grandfather, Henry Ford II—then chairman of Ford Motor Company—sent a sternly worded criticism regarding this lefty lurch.
“I’m not playing the role of the hardheaded tycoon who thinks all philanthropoids are socialists and all university professors are Communists,” he wrote. “I’m just suggesting to the trustees and the staff that the system that makes the foundation possible very probably is worth preserving.”
That was good advice. I would have followed if they’d have given me the top job. But this is why nobody like me (nor Henry II, for that matter) will ever get that call. Today, it is impossible to parody the severity of Ford’s lefty funding.
The Center for Economic Democracy hoovered up $300,000 of Henry’s money in February 2024. The first words that currently greet a visitor to the group’s website are: “We’re building a post-capitalist world.”
Since October 2022, Ford’s grant officers have approved more than $800,000 for the Action Lab. A training center for left-wing activists, the Action Lab hosted a September 2024 event titled “Dismantling Racial Capitalism.”
There’s much more where that came from, including more than a million bucks for a magazine that literally draws its name from the Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle flag.
The greatest current threat to capitalism, to say nothing of industrial civilization itself, is the left-wing war on energy abundance. The Ford Foundation has been a generous belligerent, having shipped tens of millions in grants over the past two decades to groups so stridently anti-energy that they even oppose emissions-free nuclear power.
Examples include the Natural Resources Defense Council (more than $9.5 million from Ford since 2011), Oil Change International ($3.4 million since 2019), the Environmental Defense Fund (more than $1.5 million since 2008), Friends of the Earth (nearly $4 million since 2010) and 350.org (at least $750,000 since 2021.)
One Better Option
Henry’s money could have been spent in countless smarter ways. Here’s just one that would have gotten the carbon-obsessed Ford staff much closer to their objective without flying those commie flags.
The first two of three reactors built at the Palo Verde nuclear power station cost $6.2 billion each in 2025 dollars. Palo Verde now claims to be producing enough carbon-free power “for more than 4 million homes and businesses.”
The Ford Foundation annually spends an average of $860 million. If spent on direct subsidies for reactors such as those at Palo Verde, then that’s enough to defray 13 percent of the cost of beginning another three-reactor Palo Verda every three years.
That’s a real incentive. The average profit margin of American electric utilities is 10 percent, and nuclear power reactors have a capacity factor of more than 92 percent—the most reliable electricity generators we have.
If the Ford philanthropoids had begun using their annual grants to subsidize nuclear in 2001, then we could now have eight additional Palo Verde plants completed or in production. We would be on the way to removing 36 million additional American homes and businesses from carbon-emitting electricity.
Dial this strategy back to just 1976 when Henry Ford II told them to promote capitalism, and the Ford Foundation would today be responsible for getting half of America’s homes off fossil fuels and onto nuclear power.
But it gets better. The entire lefty-philanthropoid world is much larger than just Ford and funds the American anti-nuclear movement to the tune of $2.5 billion per year. Imagine what THAT pile of loot could do for nuclear power abundance.
More than a century ago, uber-capitalist Henry Ford brought us the assembly line, the mass production of automobiles, a doubling of the wage of his workers, and the birth of America’s modern middle class. The humanitarian progress wrought by just this one of America’s many legendary entrepreneurs is hard to exaggerate.
But sadly, those spending his fortune have found it far too easy to ignore.
