The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the most powerful corporate front group you’ve never heard of. The group, sponsored by some of America’s largest corporations, writes legislation that tends to benefit its donors and ships these template bills to state legislatures for compliant lawmakers to pass. ALEC has pushed for legislation doing everything from attacking workers’ collective bargaining rights, to making it harder for low-income Americans to vote, to the Stand Your Ground law that could prevent justice in the Trayvon Martin case.

One of the reasons ALEC is able to do this is because it’s extremely secretive. ALEC does not openly brand the legislation it passes off to legislators, and its staff is mostly hidden from the public eye. Until now. We dug into ALEC’s personnel to make a short profile of just some of the key Washington, D.C.-based ALEC staffers who help write the laws that pollute our communities, deny Americans access to health care, suppress our right to vote, and generally harm Americans. Their corporate-written bills may be secretly passed on to legislators, but these staffers can’t hide behind ALEC’s veil and avoid taking responsibility for the laws they produce and advance.

Ron Scheberle, ALEC’s Executive Director: Scheberle has been associated with ALEC for over 25 years, serving as a private sector member. He worked as a lobbyist for Verizon for 30 years, helping the telecom giant push its agenda nationwide. He started his own lobbying firm in 2003, and also is a senior consultant to another firm that represented Erik Prince’s notorious Blackwater at one point. Upset about ALEC’s corporate-written legislation? E-mail him at [email protected]

Todd Wynn, ALEC’s Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force Director: Todd, who uses the photo to the left as his Twitter picture, came to oversee much of ALEC’s work to deny climate change and empower dirty fossil fuel energies after 3 years at the Cascade Policy Institute. On his LinkedIn page, he brags that he conducts “public policy research for state legislators across the country.” One of Wynn’s claims to activism fame is when he boasted that “global warming could be a net benefit for the planet in fact.” His twitter handle is @toddwynn.

Amy Kjose, ALEC Civil Justice Task Force Director: