Colorado has a love affair with nonprofits. They’re part of our politics and news organizations, they’re doing work for the government, and, thanks to a bipartisan 2025 bill, they’re now embedded in our legislature.
Starting this legislative session, in addition to the usual members of the Legislative Council Staff (LCS) making fiscal notes, demographic notes, etc., there will be four more analysts, called Legislative Fellows, writing reports, consulting with legislators, and providing what they term “expert” testimony at committee hearings.
What makes this unique, outside of the fact that these Fellows work specifically in areas such as public health, energy and climate, natural resources, AI and technology, is that they’re paid for by the nonprofit Institute for Science and Policy, an offshoot of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
If you’re anything like me, an outside organization funding analysts to advise our legislators opens the door wide to some questions.
Just follow ‘the science’
There is, of course, the obvious concern about the funding behind all this. Anyone who has lived on this earth longer than 5 minutes knows that money, even without visible strings attached, means a relationship. And relationships matter. The Institute is good enough to list their supporters, as well as stating that they make decisions “… independently and not on the basis of donor support.” But just saying the words doesn’t mean much without knowing who will enforce it and how, both notably absent from their site.
There’s also the tacit assumption here that somehow “the science,” and those hired to explain it, are free from prejudice or bias, but a reading of the Institute’s “about” page makes their political/ideological leanings painfully obvious. References to “equity,” “identity,” and “power” are as clear a progressive signal as if they wore campaign pins on their shirts.
Not to put intentions on anyone, and it’s worth noting that both the LCS and the Institute participated in the hiring process for the Fellows, but even without The Institute seeking to import their values into what should be nonpartisan counsel, you can still have trouble. Ask yourself what kind of individual would seek employment in the legislative space, and would do so through an organization with left-of-center values like the Institute’s.
One of the best bulwarks against this tendency would be to try and get analysts with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and ideologies. We can’t avoid bias, but we can seek to average it out. To see whether and how well this was done, I tried to gain some insight from both LCS and the Institute about the hiring process. For example, I tried to see what efforts they made to get ideologically diverse candidates with a variety of job backgrounds, but what I got back were generalities such as asking candidates if they could be impartial.
This is a good start and, again, I’m not trying to impute motive to anyone, but we live in a world of finite knowledge and understanding. Consider, for example, the wide gulf between how an engineer views the practical side of design while an academic chemist would operate from a more theoretical standpoint informed by current research. These are worlds apart, and both are equally true and important.
Biases and perspectives
Consider too how the Fellows’ work product will be reviewed. From my emails with LCS, I was told that their work will be reviewed in the same manner that, say, fiscal notes are reviewed when generated by LCS staff. A good start, but we are all relatively hopeless outside our areas of education and experience. The Fellows might be supervised by someone who is intelligent, but with little knowledge in their field. Outside of obvious mistakes and errors of style, there is little this type of supervision can do to ensure complete, balanced, and neutral advice. You can help by watching and weighing in on their work, but it must be remembered that any time one of these Fellows confers alone with a legislator you aren’t guaranteed the opportunity to see what was shared.
Whatever their job experience and education, everyone has their biases and perspectives. It’s a given, and you cannot, despite the best of intentions, change this. Attempts to sidestep questions about the individuals, their beliefs and previous work, do little to allay what are legitimate concerns about this program. It would be better in my view to acknowledge what the Institute seems to acknowledge on their website (if not in their answers to questions), and be more open about the Fellows and their perspective.
Otherwise we only get what we see from the outside. A program to set up a small group of individuals, paid for by an obviously left of center nonprofit who will provide to lawmakers, in the words of the Institute’s Executive Director Kristan Uhlenbrock, “…evidence and data-driven nonpartisan analysis.”
I’ll end with the reminder that the program is new, and the fact that the limited amount of work that I have seen from the Fellows has thus far been pretty pedestrian. What I hope for, what I will watch for and urge you to follow suit, is to see whether things stay that way, at least to the extent we can see the results of their work.
Cory Gaines teaches college physics and is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. He also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack.
