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“Think tanks should be required, by law, to publicly disclose their funders,” said Ben Freeman. “There were widely varying levels of transparency about funding sources at America’s top think tanks, ranging from full disclosure of all funders and exact amounts donated, to think tanks that disclose absolutely no information about funders.”

The Top 5 U.S. Government Donors to U.S. Think Tanks

“Think tank experts testify before Congress and, in some cases, literally write laws. The very least they can do is be fully transparent about who is funding them,” said Ben Freeman in an interview with The American Conservative. “Taxpayers have a right to know if that expert they hear advocating for more Pentagon spending is being paid by the Pentagon. If the funding isn’t influencing their work, then they should have no problem disclosing their funders.”

Disclosure matters because journalists rely on think tanks to provide supposedly non-biased experts to weigh in on complicated policy matters. These think tank experts are frequently hosted on TV panels on CNN or Fox News, or are seen penning op-eds in  newspapers or heard on the airwaves of National Public Radio (NPR.)

Think tank experts also frequently appear and give testimony in Congressional hearings, a setting where transparency is of primary importance.

Think tanks contribute to the Washington ecosystem in a variety of ways: while their writers and influence-peddlers appear as experts on news shows and pen op-eds, they also conduct in-depth research on policy, help draft legislation, and write talking points, memos and Congressional scorecards. Think tanks provide a home for legislative experts when their party or views are out of favor, allowing them to cool their heels and collect a paycheck until an administration of another color regains power. Think tanks are also homes for former and future government officials: they employ former senators, representatives, executive branch officials, and their staff. The Brookings Institution is headed by retired four-star General John Allen and they employ two former Chairs of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, among over 300 experts.

Think tanks play an outsize role in shaping U.S. public policy, and have done so since at least the 1980s, when the Heritage Foundation sent president-elect Ronald Reagan over 1,000 pages of policy recommendations. By the end of his presidency, the think tank boasted that Reagan had adopted or attempted to adopt fully two-thirds of Heritage’s recommendations.

After serving as Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton, John Podesta founded possibly the most prominent liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., the Center for American Progress (CAP.) CAP works closely with Democratic members of Congress and presidential candidates, and previously with the Obama administration, and plays many of the same roles as the Heritage Foundation does for the right. Podesta even served as Chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Opaque think tank funding damages the neutrality of U.S. news reporting and the expert analysis lawmakers lean on for policy and legislative advice. Think tank experts are often held up as paragons of non-biased, expert analysis. Imagine how your perspective as a reader would change if you knew that the writer or panelist advocating for increased military security aid to Turkey was receiving their salary from a think tank that receives several million dollars from multiple defense contractors that sell weapons to Turkey.

As I pointed out in my previous article for TAC, think-tanker Brenda Shaffer now writes on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict for the think tank Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, without disclosing that she had been an adviser to Azerbaijan’s state-run oil company. Shaffer is FDD’s senior advisor for energy, so the public should know who’s paying her bills.

While think tanks protest that their work is independent of the funding they receive, that view is “naive, to say the least,” writes Freeman. “Most funding comes with explicit strings attached, like writing research reports or hosting public events about specific topics. While the public may or may not agree with funders’ objectives, these funders nevertheless place explicit or implicit constraints on what a think tank can and cannot do.”

One way this works is that an organization that promotes beliefs at odds with a prominent funder will quickly lose that donor’s funding.

“Funders directing what think tanks do is an obvious form of influence, but funders can also wield considerable power by paying for what think tanks don’t do,” writes Freeman. “In fact, one of the most valuable commodities funders buy is a think tank’s silence.”

There’s an easy fix Congress could implement that would end this problem, exposing think tanks and their experts’ conflicts of interest. The government should require that think tanks publicly disclose their funding, say the study’s authors. It’s not a difficult fix to implement, since many think tanks already disclose some of their funding, and all report donor data to the IRS.

“If think tanks are truly maintaining their intellectual independence from funding sources as many told us they were, they’ll be able to prove it when there is full transparency of their funding sources,” writes Freeman.

“When people talk about ‘the Blob’ it’s important to remember that it’s a self-sustaining ecosystem–the Pentagon and contractors dole out millions of dollars to think tanks every year, and those think tanks in turn make the case for more Pentagon funding. Rinse and repeat year after year after year,” said Freeman to TAC.

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Barbara Boland is TAC’s foreign policy and national security reporter. Previously, she worked as an editor for the Washington Examiner and for CNS News. She is the author of Patton Uncovered, a book about General George Patton in World War II, and her work has appeared on Fox News, The Hill,  UK Spectator, and elsewhere. Boland is a graduate from Immaculata University in Pennsylvania.  Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC.

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