The GOP-led war on think tanks is officially about foreign money, but it could also open the door to exposing secret backers of conservative research outfits.
Not only does their measure require the quick disclosure of all funding from foreign sources, including private citizens, it also orders think tanks to share the contracts so that the public would know, as in the case of Brookings’ Doha center, whether management had agreed to submit a budget and program agenda to a government ministry. And it says any briefings for Congress or the executive branch funded by the foreign donation be labeled as such.
“I call it an enormous dark-money operation,” Freeman says. “Let’s be honest here, these think tanks are going to play a vital role in advising policymakers and members of government about what would be good policies, presumably, in the national interest. The lack of mandatory disclosure, the fact it’s all voluntary, the fact that there’s no enforcement, even of the accuracy of these voluntary disclosures, it all kinds of builds towards what is potentially an enormous national security problem.
Like a lot of observers, the pair are skeptical about whether the measures can actually become law in a quickly-expiring Congress. But it’s likely that they presage future rough times for research outfits facing scrutiny from genuine reformers as well as ideological foes who just want to discredit the policy industry. That aspect of the national mood concerns even some folks who favor more transparency.
A quintessentially Washington industry whose research shapes public policy, whose jobs incubate future administrations, and whose role in Congressional testimony and media influences American public opinion, leaders of the institutions have often cast their world as a universe of dispassionate scholarship.
“People in the think tank world are worried,” says Ken Weinstein, the former head of the conservative-oriented Hudson Foundation. “They want to keep the focus on the scholars. They don’t want to talk about the funders. The motives of the funders are not always the motives of the think tanks.”
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