Maine Policy Institute

Maine Policy Institute
Basic facts
Location:	Maine
Type:	501(c)(3)
Top official:	Matthew Gagnon, Chief Executive Officer
Founder(s):	Dick Jackson, Ronald Trowbridge, and William Becker III
Year founded:	2002
Website:	Official website

The Maine Policy Institute (MPI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Maine. The group describes itself as "a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to expand individual liberty and economic freedom in Maine."

Background

W.R. "Dick" Jackson, Dr. Ronald Trowbridge, and William Becker III founded the Maine Policy Institute as the Maine Heritage Policy Center in 2002. The organization adopted its current name in 2020. Jackson was a retired businessman who had earlier been president of PDM, a steel fabrication company in Pittsburgh. Trowbridge was a professor who earlier served as chief of staff to Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger and as vice president of Hillsdale College. Becker was a business executive who served as finance director for the gubernatorial campaigns of Peter Cianchette (R) in 2002 and Matt Jacobson (R) in 2010, and as campaign manager for Mary Mayhew's (R) gubernatorial campaign in 2018.

As of September 2025, the organization had the following mission statement:

“

Maine Policy is the strongest voice in Augusta for taxpayers and believes in an open, transparent, and accountable state government. We work to ensure hardworking Mainers keep the fruits of their labor and defend their rights and liberties from government overreach.

”

Leadership

As of September 2025, the following individuals held leadership positions at the Maine Policy Institute:

• Matthew Gagnon, chief executive officer
• Heather Noyes, director of operations
• Mike Quatrano, director of civic engagement
• Jacob Posik, director of legislative affairs

As of September 2025, the following individuals sat on the Maine Policy Institute's board of directors:

• Scott Wellman, chairman
• William Boeschenstein, Jr.
• Timothy J. Bryant, Esq.
• Susan Dench
• Scott Forrey
• Jeffrey Kane
• Jason Oney
• Christopher A. Pierce
• Debra Plowman
• Laurence Rubinstein, D.D.
• Fred Masciangelo

Work and activities

The Maine Policy Institute conducts research on policy and lobbies at the state level for policies it says will advance its mission. It also produces legislative scorecards ranking state legislators. The Maine Policy Institute publishes The Maine Wire, "a digital media outlet that provides investigative journalism, daily news coverage, and opinion commentary topics important to the people of Maine." The organization also runs the Maine Education Initiative, a project with the goal of "ensuring transparency and accountability in Maine public schools to restore public trust and academic excellence."

Legislative and policy work

As of September 2025, the Maine Policy Institute's official timeline listed the following policy accomplishments:

• 2002: Mr. W. R. “Dick” Jackson, Jr., Dr. Ronald Trowbridge, and Mr. William Becker III founded The Maine Heritage Policy Center in December 2002 to start a movement to inform, educate, and activate citizens concerned about the direction of our state by providing thoughtful, research-driven and credible information to lawmakers, the press, and Maine voters.
• 2006: Maine Policy drafted the model legislation behind a ballot initiative to enact a Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), a policy designed to limit the annual growth of government and require voter approval of spending increases above the limits of population growth plus inflation. While the initiative was narrowly defeated, TABOR elevated Maine Policy’s notoriety among Maine citizens, helped our work and mission permeate throughout the state, and led to future state-level policy reforms.
• 2007: In response to Maine Policy's TABOR initiative, lawmakers agreed to inject greater accountability into government spending at the local level by approving, as part of budget negotiations, a law that requires Mainers to approve their local school budgets before they take effect. This reform added an additional layer of protection for property taxpayers and injected real fiscal accountability in municipal spending, as school budgets are the largest driver of spending–and spending growth–at the local level.
• 2009: Maine Policy won the Sunshine Award from the Maine Legislature for the creation of MaineOpenGov.org, a website that featured comprehensive information about all public employee payrolls, pension benefits and vendor contracts. The website allowed anyone to track every penny spent by the state, providing unprecedented transparency to all levels of state government spending. The success of MaineOpenGov inspired numerous think tanks around the country to use our platform to publish spending data in their respective states.
• 2011: Maine Policy created TheMaineWire.com to provide Maine people with fact-based news, opinion, and information that is ignored by Maine’s traditional press outlets. The website includes original, investigative reporting and has grown to become one of the most effective, far-reaching news organizations in the state.
• 2011: In 2011, Maine Policy helped pass legislation making Maine the 41st state to allow for public charter schools. This legislation provided additional school choice options for Maine families and allowed educational entrepreneurs to adopt innovative learning methods to better meet the needs of Maine students and families.
• 2011: Maine Policy worked with the administration of former Gov. Paul LePage to reform Maine’s tax code, which included reducing the state’s top marginal income tax rate from 8.5% to 7.95%, saving taxpayers $150 million. These reforms allowed Mainers to keep more of their hard-earned money, and also represent one of the largest tax cuts in Maine’s history. Maine Policy also worked with former State Treasurer, Bruce Poliquin, to reduce Maine’s enormous public pension debt from $4.1 billion to $2.4 billion. This 41% reduction in Maine’s unfunded pension liability brought the system closer to sustainability and saved Maine taxpayers millions of dollars. Maine Policy also crafted a law known as PL 90, which resulted in substantial premium savings for insured Mainers and injected new, competitive forces into Maine’s health insurance markets. These free-market reforms reversed years of ballooning healthcare costs for Maine citizens and served as a model for states across the nation.
• 2012: Through our work with MaineOpenGov and The Maine Wire, Maine Policy uncovered and published questionable spending and rampant fraud within the Maine Housing Authority and Maine Turnpike Authority, resulting in the resignation of the housing authority’s director and the imprisonment of the director of the turnpike authority.
• 2013: Under Gov. Paul LePage, Maine Policy recommended cuts to underperforming programs to help stabilize the budget, including the Dirigo Health program, saving Maine taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The program did not save money, resulted in massive cost overruns, and it failed to provide adequate health coverage to uninsured Mainers.
• 2015: Maine Policy worked with Gov. Paul LePage's administration to build on the successful 2011 tax reform efforts to further reduce Mainers' income tax liability, this time reducing the state's top marginal rate from 7.95% to 7.15%. In total, the reduction in Maine's top marginal income tax rate from 8.5% to 7.15% during the LePage years represents the largest tax cuts in Maine history.
• 2017: Maine Policy worked with doctors and health insurance experts across the state to enact two pioneering healthcare laws to improve the physical and financial health of Maine citizens. These policies allow Mainers to procure primary care services from a doctor at a cost much cheaper than health insurance, as well as shop around for healthcare services, splitting the savings between themselves and their insurer.
• 2018: In 2018, Maine Policy created Maine Civic Action, a sister 501c4 organization. Realizing the need for like-minded lawmakers in Augusta who can advance our shared values of individual liberty, economic freedom and limited government, Maine Policy created MCA to identify, recruit, train, and elect these individuals.
• 2019: Maine Policy worked with lawmakers on bipartisan legislation signed into law by Gov. Janet Mills on May 23, 2019 that requires the Legislature to hold public hearings on ballot initiatives before these issues could be sent to voters. The law helped stop a common practice whereby the Legislature refused to hold hearings on ballot questions, reducing public awareness and feedback, before they appeared on Mainers' election ballots. The law enables all Mainers–regardless of their position on a potential ballot question–to testify before the Legislature, improving public discourse and awareness about the consequential issues Mainers would eventually decide on Election Day.
• 2020: In March of 2020, The Maine Heritage Policy Center rebranded itself as Maine Policy Institute. The name change reflects our commitment to independent, nonpartisan research and analysis, as well as the primary focus of our organization: to develop, analyze, research and advocate for policies that grow individual liberty and economic freedom in Maine.
• 2022: Maine Policy partnered with EdChoice in submitting an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the Carsons, a Maine family that sued the state over a law called the "sectarian exclusion," which prohibited families from using the state's school choice program to send their children to a religious school. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Carsons. The Court found that Maine's sectarian exclusion law violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, writing that it operated "to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools [from Maine's school choice program] on the basis of their religious exercise." The ruling was a major victory for religious freedom and school choice across the nation.
• 2023: Maine Policy worked with a bipartisan group of lawmakers and Gov. Janet Mills to enact historic budget reforms that stabilized the state’s transportation budget, plugging a persistent funding shortfall without tax increases and preventing the need for future bonding. These reforms save taxpayers millions of dollars in future debt payments.
• 2024: Maine Policy opposed and rallied countless Mainers from all corners of the state to contact the Bureau of Environmental Protection in opposition to California-style electric vehicle mandates that would have undermined consumer choice in automobile markets and significantly hurt the state's economy. The BEP ultimately voted 4-2 in opposition to the EV rules.
• 2025: In 2025, Maine Policy launched the Maine Education Initiative (MEI), a new effort to engage local school boards to improve student outcomes and the overall quality of K-12 education delivered to Maine students. MEI works to restore public trust and academic excellence in Maine public schools by empowering parental involvement in K-12 education and encouraging school boards to adopt our model policies to increase transparency, fiscal responsibility, and accountability at the local level. Learn more about MEI's work at www.FixMaineSchools.com.

Notable endorsements

See also: Ballotpedia: Our approach to covering endorsements

This section displays endorsements this organization made in elections within Ballotpedia's coverage scope. Know of one we missed? Click here to let us know.

Affiliations

The Maine Policy Institute has an affiliated 501(c)(4), Maine Civic Action. As of September 2025, the organization was the only Maine affiliate of the State Policy Network.

Finances

Ballotpedia was unable to locate detailed information on the Maine Policy Institute's finances. As of September 2025, the Maine Policy Institute qualified to file a form 990-N with the IRS. Only organizations with annual gross receipts of $50,000 or less are eligible to file a form 990-N.

See also

• What is an influencer?
• 501(c)(3)
• State Policy Network

External links

• Maine Policy Institute official website
• Maine Policy Institute on Facebook
• Maine Policy Institute on X
• Maine Policy Center on LinkedIn
• Maine Policy Center on Instagram
• Maine Policy Center on YouTube