Policy wins of GOP candidate for Kansas governor trace to national conservative network

TOPEKA — Upon launching his campaign for governor, Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson touted his work cutting state taxes, improving election security and getting “woke ideology off our college campuses.”

But his policy wins aren’t fully his own, a Kansas Reflector investigation found. The foundation of his achievements was built with the help of a conservative nonprofit funded by a network of donors interested in fueling a right-wing agenda across the country.

Each of those wins can be traced back to model legislation authored by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which found a champion in Masterson, who serves on the group’s board of directors and acted as its legislative chair in 2024.

Masterson, a Republican from Andover, has spent thousands in campaign funds attending ALEC conferences and meetings and paying ALEC membership dues, according to his public financial disclosures. In his nearly two decades of public service, Masterson has remained under the guidance of ALEC, a conservative policy group that aligns legislators with corporate interests and offers state lawmakers templates for bills on topics ranging from free speech to cellphone use in schools to relaxed regulatory frameworks.

ALEC, which boasts 2,000 members and describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit advocacy group, has had ties to Kansas lawmakers for the better part of the century, including former Gov. Sam Brownback, whose tax experiment was the brainchild of Arthur Laffer — an ALEC advisory board member.

Masterson, in a podcast interview with Kansas Reflector, said ALEC was “very informative” and “impactful” for his career as a public servant. He said he has never been told by anybody, including the Koch brothers, “to vote a certain way or anything.”

But his involvement with the group over the past 20 years has molded him into ALEC’s ideal candidate, one who ascends the ranks of state government, bringing their priorities with him.

ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson said in a July 2025 newsletter, shortly after Masterson announced his gubernatorial candidacy, that Masterson “is a clear example of how ALEC equips leaders with the ideas, support, and experience necessary to serve at the highest levels.”

Masterson has spent $21,000 in campaign funds on ALEC-related expenses and travel since 2007, according to public disclosure records. He served as the group’s treasurer in 2022, its vice chair in 2023 and national chair in 2024, and he now serves as board member and Kansas state co-chair.

The $2 billion in tax cuts Masterson heralded when announcing his campaign emerged from 2024 legislation that bears substantial similarities to 2020 ALEC model legislation. The language of a Kansas law that examines the citizenship of voter registrants and was enacted in April over the governor’s veto mimics ALEC model legislation. And a bill that cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion content in college curricula began as an ALEC model bill titled the Freedom from Indoctrination Act.

Kansas Reflector found nearly 20 high-profile bills from the past two years that began as ALEC model legislation. Some copied ALEC’s language verbatim, while tailoring bill titles or summaries to Kansas. None of the bills Kansas Reflector reviewed contained a disclosure that they originated with ALEC. 

ALEC provided model legislation that stifled local authority to bring “public nuisance” lawsuits in Kansas against oil and gas companies, for instance. It gave a template for solidifying state relations with Taiwan and offered language for a college campus speech law that also honored Charlie Kirk, the right-wing figure who was killed on an Utah college campus in 2025. It provided the legislation that gave tax breaks to religious organizations who share healthcare costs with little oversight. It also provided model language for legislation that restricted cellphones in K-12 schools and bans “foreign nationals” from donating to ballot initiatives.

And year after year, it has provided a launchpad for Masterson, House Speaker and state ALEC co-chair Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, and other Republican leaders to block Medicaid expansion in Kansas.

Craig Holman, a governmental ethics expert and lobbyist for Public Citizen, said he considers ALEC’s role in introducing model legislation in states “highly unethical, but it is not illegal.” Public Citizen is a progressive nonprofit consumer advocacy group with a focus on greater government transparency.

Legislators almost always need assistance drafting reasonable legislation, Holman said, but what makes the use of ALEC’s model bills unethical is that lawmakers often don’t disclose that a piece of legislation was written by someone else. That is more often than not the case in Kansas.

ALEC’s corporate members promote legislation or public policy that will directly benefit them, Holman said, and lawmakers don’t disclose ALEC’s involvement in the lawmaking process.

“In the end, we rely on legislators and public officials being honest and actually telling us what’s going on, and those that don’t, they have their own reasons to want to hide the strings that are controlling them,” Holman said.

The Virginia-based group’s second-largest funder from 2019 to 2023 was Charles Koch through his affiliated trusts and foundations, which gave $2.3 million during that time, according to the nonprofit watchdog Center for Media and Democracy. The Wichita-based Koch family also is tied to Masterson’s former position at Wichita State University, where the Kansas City Star reported Masterson received a six-figure salary as the director of GoCreate. It is branded as a Koch collaborative where students and community members can use tools and technology. Some of the employees there didn’t know who Masterson was, the Star reported.

Lee Schalk, ALEC’s senior vice president of policy, said in a statement that ALEC will continue its “nonpartisan efforts to share legislator-led policy solutions in states like Kansas.”

“The Sunflower State has shown that legislation grounded in ALEC ideas — like prohibiting foreign funding in ballot measures and limiting the use of cell phones in schools — frequently earns overwhelming support in both legislative chambers,” Schalk said, although that’s not always true.

He pointed out the Kansas Senate voted unanimously to prohibit foreign funding of ballot measures, and that Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly signed into law and “publicly celebrated” legislation limiting cellphone use in K-12 classrooms.

Garrett Henson, a spokesperson for Masterson’s campaign, said Masterson only answers to Kansas voters, and “he’ll support any good idea that benefits Kansas.”

“Ty’s peers chose him to lead this national nonpartisan organization because he earned their respect,” Henson said.

Henson accused Masterson’s Democratic opponent, fellow Sen. Cindy Holscher of Overland Park, of flip-flopping on issues like data center tax breaks, calling her “way too extreme.”

“Nobody would trust Cindy to lead, because her positions change with the wind,” he said.

Holscher said in a statement that Masterson “spent years climbing the ranks of an insider group where corporate lobbyists sit side-by-side with pay-to-play politicians to write the laws they want passed.”

She likened the playbook to Brownback’s and linked the corporate donors behind ALEC to Masterson’s “no-show job” at Wichita State. Masterson has disputed the description of his position as a “no-show job,” saying he conducted work remotely when he wasn’t at the office, the Star reported.

Holscher said Kansas families pay the price for Masterson’s links to special interests. She said in an interview on the Kansas Reflector podcast that Masterson was “absolutely doing their bidding” in the Legislature.

Holscher said shorter legislative sessions imposed by GOP leaders in the past two years have made the presence of model bills more prominent as legislative staffers have less time to craft original legislation.

“It’s been easy to see that there are certain bills that have been given priority,” Holscher said, “and it’s the agenda of these far-right organizations like ALEC that are pushed through.”