Mystery Donor Funds $10 Million Campaign Against Hochul Home Care Plan

Governor Kathy Hochul is facing fierce opposition to her overhaul of a popular but pricey home care program that allows people with chronic medical issues to choose their own caregivers and pay them through Medicaid.

The Alliance to Protect Home Care, a social welfare nonprofit, has blitzed the airwaves with TV ads alleging that Hochul’s plan, which charges a single company with running the multibillion-dollar program, puts “lives at risk.” The group spent $10.6 million last year on a public relations campaign criticizing the move — the second-highest-spending lobbying campaign in Albany that year.

But it’s unclear who exactly is bankrolling Alliance’s spending. That’s because its donations are being routed through another nonprofit that was created on the same day as the Alliance.​​ Only the name of the nonprofit — not the individual donors — appears in the Alliance’s lobbying disclosure reports.

According to those reports, the Alliance received almost $14.2 million in donations between June and December. More than $10 million, or 75 percent, came from the separate nonprofit.

The tactic could run afoul of state lobbying rules, which are meant to curb the use of pass-through entities that obscure lobbying funders.

The Hochul administration argues that the $9 billion Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program has been riven with waste and fraud. Under the program, the state has used over 600 separate “fiscal intermediary” companies to serve as middlemen administrators, performing tasks for caregivers like wage and benefits processing.

Last spring, Hochul pushed language through the state budget that would replace those intermediaries with a single statewide one. Hochul said the shift would save taxpayers $500 million annually, and in September, after a hurried bidding process, her administration awarded the contract to Public Partnerships, LLC.

The hundreds of companies cast aside have fought back, filing multiple lawsuits seeking to stop Hochul’s plan, including one alleging that the bidding was rigged. And there has been an extensive campaign to sway public opinion.

The Alliance to Protect Home Care was incorporated on May 30. That same day, a charitable organization called “United CDPAP” was incorporated in Delaware. A week later, it was incorporated in New York, with David Lobl, a political consultant and former aide to Governor Andrew Cuomo, listed as its registered agent.

Since then, United CDPAP has donated to the Alliance 32 times for a total of nearly $10.6 million, according to lobbying reports.

But who’s donating to United CDPAP — and therefore indirectly funding the Alliance — remains a mystery.

“The Alliance to Protect Home Care and its donors are focused on stopping PPL’s train wreck of a transition before it hurts the 280,000 elderly and disabled New Yorkers who depend on this home care program,” said Bryan O’Malley, the executive director of the Alliance and another group that has long represented home care intermediary companies.

He said United CDPAP was a nonprofit social welfare organization that “supports this mission,” but he did not offer more details or address why the millions were routed to the Alliance through another nonprofit.

Soon after Cuomo became governor in 2011, he signed a law meant to shed light on who was funding state lobbying efforts.

Under current state law, any organization that spends more than $15,000 in a year lobbying the New York government must disclose every donor who provided more than $2,500.

Donors have sought to sidestep the law, and regulators have tried to respond.

In 2013 and 2014, more than $1 million in donations flowed to a lobbying group that opposed the construction of a marine waste transfer station on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The station was intended to ease the trash removal burden on poor, marginalized communities in New York City.

While neighborhood residents provided the public face of the opposition, donations to the cause were funneled through a newly founded law firm, whose name appeared as the donor in filings — rather than the name of the original, unknown donor.

After a state ethics investigation, the real estate giant Glenwood Management admitted in a 2017 settlement that it was the source of the $1 million. Glenwood owned luxury residential developments on the Upper East Side and its apparent concern was that the transfer stations could make the developments less desirable to rent by bringing rodents and waste-hauling traffic.

The state lobbying regulator at the time, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, responded by adopting regulations banning groups from using an intermediary or any other entity that “obscures” the name of the person or entity “actually making” a lobbying contribution. The rules have continued under the current oversight body, the Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government.

A spokesperson from the state lobbying oversight commission declined to comment on the Alliance’s activities.