Between 2020 and 2024, the United Nations Foundation quietly wired $1.7 million to North Carolina state agencies. The money paid salaries, benefits, and travel for the governor's top climate policy staff — the same people who spent those years pushing offshore wind mandates, electric vehicle requirements, and a plan to rip natural gas out of state buildings. North Carolina taxpayers had no idea who was signing the checks.
They weren't signing them. The UN Foundation was.
Tax filings and grant applications show former Governor Roy Cooper's office submitted multiple funding requests to the UNF starting in 2020. In 2020 alone, Cooper's office received $292,677 earmarked for "environment." By 2021, the pipeline had expanded to four separate state agencies pulling nearly $900,000 in a single year: $315,980 to the North Carolina Department of Transportation, $264,765 back to the governor's office, $144,949 to the Department of Commerce, and another $173,312 to an initially unidentified recipient later traced to Cooper's office. All earmarked for "environment" or "UN Strengthening."
UN Strengthening. On a grant to a state governor's office. In America.
The United Nations Foundation is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit founded by Ted Turner, sitting on a $210 million endowment dedicated to supporting UN social and environmental activities. The grants flow through something called the U.S. Climate Alliance — a coalition of Democratic governors founded in June 2017, right after President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords. The Alliance's stated purpose, according to spokesman Evan Westrup, is to "bolster state-level staff capacity to help Alliance members advance climate" goals.
Translation: when the federal government won't play along, fund state employees to do it anyway.
Cooper joined the Alliance in 2017. The North Carolina legislature never voted to join. Never approved the policy agenda. Never authorized a dime of outside money to fund state employees pushing that agenda. The grants just showed up, and the climate staff just appeared.
Chris Horner, an attorney representing Government Accountability & Oversight and Power the Future who has tracked these arrangements across multiple states, told the Free Beacon that "on their face, these arrangements raise legal and ethical concerns." North Carolina received more UNF money than any other state in the program. That's not an accident. Cooper's office was the most aggressive applicant.
The advisers funded by these grants weren't outside consultants offering suggestions. They were official state employees — drawing salaries bankrolled by an outside organization — who oversaw Cooper's signature policies: prioritizing offshore wind projects, "decarbonizing" the electric grid, implementing electric car mandates, and reducing the state's dependence on natural gas. Every one of those policies has a cost that lands on North Carolina ratepayers and taxpayers. The people who benefited from those policies were the people who wrote the checks.
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson's office called it what it was: the United Nations Foundation "funneling $1.19 million into North Carolina" to influence state policy.
The 24-governor coalition calls itself "bipartisan." Cooper used it to install a shadow policy shop inside his own government, staffed by employees whose loyalty ran to the organization that paid them, implementing an agenda the legislature never approved, funded by a foundation whose name includes "United Nations."
North Carolina spent $1.7 million worth of someone else's priorities. The grant applications are public. The tax filings are public. The silence from Cooper's office is the loudest part.
