The Politicization of the Think Tanks
In my Forbes column today I look at the increasing politicization of Washington think tanks. BB
We hear the term "think tank" quite often, but it's doubtful that very many people know what it means. They may not need to because the term is increasingly devoid of meaning. At least in Washington, think tanks are becoming so political that they are more like lobbyists than academic institutions.
The original think tank was probably the Brookings Institution, established as a degree-granting graduate school in the 1920s. Eventually it evolved into the quintessential think tank, a sort of university without students; all research, no teaching.
Brookings has always had a moderately liberal perspective, and after World War II some businessmen decided that there was need for a conservative counterpart to it and established the American Enterprise Institute.
Brookings has always had an extremely high quality of researchers; any university could staff an excellent economics or political science department with them. AEI tried to match the quality of Brookings' staff, but it was a lot harder; in the 1950s and 1960s there just weren't as many top-level academics of a conservative persuasion.
This began to change in the 1970s as stagflation made many conservative economic ideas, such as monetarism, more academically respectable. There was also increasing demand for conservative ideas among policymakers. But they were frustrated by the slow, plodding style of AEI and Brookings, which tended to publish their research in books that often took years to complete.
One of those frustrated policymakers was Ed Feulner, a Republican staffer in the House of Representatives. After a particularly grueling fight over some issue that Republicans lost, Feulner's frustration boiled over when he got a really excellent book from some think tank filled with incredibly good material that would have been extremely useful in the just-ended legislative fight. But because it didn't come out until the fight was over it was completely useless; a waste of paper and ink.
Feulner resolved to fill the gap between the think tanks of that era and the fast-changing needs of Congress. The idea was to have an institution that wouldn't take years to study an issue to death and not deliver its research until it was too late, but that would produce its research on a much faster schedule, in time to influence congressional debate.
From Feulner's vision the Heritage Foundation was established in 1973. Rather than fill its staff with aging Ph.D.s, he hired people with master's degrees who had perhaps studied with the small number of conservatives in academia. Their job wasn't to do original research, but to take the research that had already been done by conservative academics, summarize it and apply it to the specific legislative issues Congress was considering. Instead of writing books of several hundred pages, Heritage studies were typically 10 pages or less.
The basement of the Heritage Foundation, where I worked in the 1980s, had the biggest Xerox machine I have ever seen. I once asked why Heritage used such a costly printing system and was told that although offset printing would have been much cheaper, it was too slow. If 1,000 copies of a document were needed then 1,000 of page one would have to be printed, then 1,000 of page two and so on before having one complete copy. A Xerox machine produced complete documents right from the first copy.
Often, Heritage staffers would grab handfuls of studies as they came out of the machine and literally run to the House or Senate to start distributing them. I know there were occasions when I wrote a quick one-pager on some hot topic and it was in congressional offices the same day. In the Internet era we take such speed for granted, but in the 1970s and 1980s Heritage was operating at light speed, while AEI and Brookings were still using horses and buggies, so to speak.
In the 1990s other think tanks began to catch up, and now all of them produce research far more quickly and with more focus on hot political issues. The increasing impact of think tanks brought in new money as corporations realized that think tank studies were highly effective ways of influencing legislation. They had a certain cachet that had more impact than the same document would have if produced by a lobbying or public relations shop.
Unfortunately, the additional money brought increased donor pressure to produce bottom line results--getting bills passed or defeated--and had a corrupting effect on the think tanks. New ones came into existence that were little more lobbying operations with tax-exempt status. The April issue of Harper's magazine has a feature on one such organization, the Lexington Institute, which appears to basically be a front for defense contractors. Not surprisingly, the executives of such organizations are paid more like lobbyists than academics. According to the information posted at www.guidestar.org, the top two officials at Lexington were paid $360,000 each in 2008.
As bottom line pressure increased at think tanks, many found themselves becoming ever more closely aligned with politicians and political parties. I recall one conversation I had with a very rich contributor to a think tank where I was working. He told me that the money he contributed to the organization came from the same pot of money he budgeted for political contributions.
This statement came as a revelation to me. Because think tanks, generally speaking, are 501(c)(3) organizations for which contributions are tax-exempt, I had always assumed that the principal competitors for donor dollars were other tax-exempt organizations such as universities, hospitals and museums. But if a think tank's real competitors are the National Republican Congressional Committee, the organization that raises money for all Republican House candidates, and like organizations, then it is operating in a completely different universe than I thought.
It's one thing to promise a donor some research that would be produced and distributed much faster than could be done by a university professor, the traditional producers of serious policy research--but it was quite another to promise the sort of immediate impact on legislation that a congressman or senator could offer. The result was even more pressure on think tanks to work with congressional offices and coordinate their activities. Now every Washington think tank has congressional liaisons on their staff.
At the same time, congressmen and senators were under pressure to dispense with costly policy analysts and replace them with PR people and Webmasters to manage their growing Internet and e-mail operations, which have allowed them to communicate with voters and constituents much more easily and directly. Congressional offices found that think tanks were more than willing to fill the gap and produce research to order.
As the think tanks became more political and donations from extreme partisans became a bigger source of revenue there was increased pressure on their staff to conform to the party line. Usually this took the form of self-censorship, as a former Heritage staffer recently told me. He understood that the organization was closely aligned with the Republican Party so he just avoided ever saying anything publicly critical of Republicans. No one needed to tell him to do so; it was part of the corporate culture that was simply understood.
But lately the partisan pressure seems to have ratcheted up. David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, appears to have been fired by AEI for being publicly critical of Republican strategy on health care. Frum believes that rather than oppose the Obama administration's plans with scorched-earth tactics, Republicans should have worked with Democrats to incorporate their ideas into the legislation. Inconveniently, he also noted that Obama's plan has much more in common with those previously endorsed by conservative groups like Heritage than the sort of single-payer plans traditionally supported by liberals.
The blurring of the lines between policy research and political advocacy at Washington think tanks took another step shortly after the Frum affair became public when Heritage announced the establishment of an explicitly political arm called Heritage Action for America. As Heritage President Ed Feulner explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on April 12, the new organization will be free from the legal limits on partisan political activity imposed on nonprofits and able to spend as much money as it would like to support or defeat legislation through lobbying, advertising and other methods that go well beyond the think tank's usual stock-in-trade.
With the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision having loosened the restraints on corporate political activity, it's likely that we will see other think tanks adopt the Heritage model as they did in the 1970s. The problem is that the pressure on researchers to conform to partisan political objectives is going to become even more intense, and if they are going to be expected to function as de facto lobbyists they are going to expect to be paid like lobbyists, which will ratchet up pressure to raise money from those with a purely bottom-line perspective. I fear that honesty and truth will get more and more lost in the process.
Addendum
There's a long comment on this column in the Columbia Journalism Review here.
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Incorrect
"Now every Washington think tank has congressional liaisons on their staff."
This is incorrect. AEI does not have a congressional liaison.
AEI
Its latest annual report says that the organization's outreach to Capitol Hill is a very important part of its operations. Presumably, someone arranged those events.
Naturally...
You ignore the left's contribution to this issue. The Center for American Progress was the policy opposition research division of the Obama campaign, through their c(4). I would defy anoyone to show me a critical document or ad on policy matters issued by that campaign that did NOT cite CAP. Prior to their creation, no serious think tank had a c(4) arm. Instead, for instance, the Bush campaign relied on the solid, but less reactive work of Heritage and AEI when the campaign's interests aligned with those of the respective think tanks. CAP's creation, and their c(4) arm, changed the game. They were EXTREMELY effective, and rendered AEI and Heritage effectively irrelevant in the 2008 election. So, one election later, the guys in the right are following suit.
The left
I certainly didn't mean to imply that the developments I discussed were exclusive to the right. However, in light of the vast sums being raised by groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it appears to me that at this time the right is doing far more to harness the potential of 501(c)(4) operations. One of the interesting things about the Obama presidency is that the left's lobbying and publicity operations have been pretty minuscule. Where were they during the health care debate, for example?
Did you read Ezra Klien's blogs in the Post?
You are not seriously arguing the left was not actively lobbying the health care bill are you? SEIU was threatening fire and brimstone against the Blue Dogs and several left wing groups were running ads as well. I recieved almost daily emails from AARP. Kos and Huffington were both holding moderate Democrats feet to the fire. I have given up all hope that your writing will ever again reflect objectivity and your previously valuable contributions to public policy development will be missed but, please, at least try to maintain a grip on reality.
Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
the left
Think tanks on the left spent decades developing ideas for health care reform, and many years working on the specific proposals that went into the recent legislation. They were not blind to the politics, but were mainly concerned to work out what would work best given the political constraints. The Heritage proposal, on the other hand--the one the White House touted as a progenitor for the recent act--was thrown up as a conservative alternative to Hillarycare. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt it was ever anything else.) In the case of HCR, at least, your focus on right-leaning think tanks in talking about politicization seems to me well justified.
The Road Not Taken
Hi Bruce,
"Feulner resolved to fill the gap between the think tanks of that era and the fast-changing needs of Congress."
Yes, of course, let's "fill the gap" by dumbing down the research process. I am by no means implying that Feulner or anyone at Heritage or at any other think tank is dumb. (Full Disclosure: I'm a RAND graduate.) I am saying that changing the research process instead of changing the legislative process is dumb.
Let's not expect Congress to adapt to the need for careful deliberation. After all, it's not a deliberative body, is it?
You can call me naive, but it's hardly a liberal notion to expect the 535 screaming monkeys to be a little more thoughtful. OK, maybe the problem is us (300 million screaming monkeys -- gimme my banana!), but if we don't see that haste is part of the problem ... we're bound to get less thoughtful policy ideas from left, right or center.
Maybe it was inevitable that we'd close the gap by changing the pressures on think tanks. It's still dumb.
Best regards,
Jim
The Real Problem...
is that Newt Gingrich destroyed the committee system in Congress in 1995. All power was centralized in the Speaker's office and the House Rules Committee, which is completely controlled by the Speaker. Ironically, HCR probably couldn't have been enacted without the legislative process changes Republicans enacted.