Oligarchs and the Trump Admin: Tim Dunn

Net Worth: $1.8 billion (Forbes, 4/14/26)

Who is Tim Dunn?

• Tim Dunn is the billionaire founder and CEO of Crownquest, his family’s Texas-based oil business. In 2023, Dunn sold Crownquest to Occidental Petroleum at a $12 billion valuation, with Dunn collecting $2.2 billion from the transaction.
  
• Dunn is an ultraconservative, and has spent more than $30 million in Texas to push state politics to the right.
  
• Dunn is on the board of Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a right-wing think tank affiliated with the State Policy Network. It has historically been funded by big oil companies and right-wing billionaires like Dunn and the Bradleys. 
  
  • The State Policy Network is a group of far-right influence peddlers working at the state and local level to advance extreme right-wing policy proposals like defunding education, gutting environmental regulation, and tax cuts for the wealthiest.
    
  • TPPF is incredibly close with Texas’ controversial Attorney General, Ken Paxton, who routinely speaks at their events. Paxton is now running for U.S. Senate.
    
• Defend Texas Liberty, a PAC under the Dunn umbrella (Dunn supplies roughly 90% of its funding), came under fire after its former president spent time with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
  
  • Some of the PAC’s recipients included Texas AG Ken Paxton and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.
    
• Crowned one of his top five donors, Dunn contributed more than $5 million to Trump’s re-election in 2024.
  
  • In the lead up to the 2022 midterms, Dunn coordinated with fellow billionaire Richard Uihlein to promote conservative candidates through Metric Media’s network of local news sites. The Columbia Journalism Review found that by October 2022, the network had received at least $1.6 million to boost information about Dunn and Uihlein’s desired candidates. 

How has Tim Dunn helped push Trump’s right-wing agenda?

• Through his positions at various right-wing think tanks, Dunn has strong connections to important players in the Trump administration.
  
  • Dunn is on the board of the America First Policy Institute, Linda McMahon and Brook Rollins’ MAGA think tank that has sourced at least 16 alumni for various positions in the Trump administration.
    
  • Dunn helped found and fund the America First Policy Institute. Brooke Rollins, the current Secretary of Agriculture, served as its president and CEO until March 2025.
    
    • Rollins also served as president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation before leaving to join the first Trump administration in 2018.
      
  • Dunn has also donated to the Center for Renewing America and America First Legal, far-right think tanks founded by high ranking Trump administration officials Russell Vought and Stephen Miller, respectively. Both organizations are part of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a network of think tanks, legal groups, and training centers advancing a hard-right, Christian nationalist agenda.
    
• At a 2023 event hosted by the America First Policy Institute, Dunn told an audience “It would be ideal if we could get rid of this ‘CO₂ as a pollutant’ business. I hope we have a [executive order], every E.O. we can, to curb all this silliness about CO₂ emissions.” 
  
  • In 2025, Trump disbanded the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, created to calculate the economic costs of emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Oligarchs in Trump World tracker.