This is a Good Thing

There is a lot of hand wringing going on over theinvestigation and subsequent resignation of John Allen as president of the Brookings Institute, a Washington, DC think tank.

The short version, was that Brookings got lots of money from the government of Qatar, and that during an FBI investigation of whether or not Allen was an unregistered foreign lobbyist:

Last week a bipartisan bill was introduced in the House of Representatives to curb foreign influence in the US political process. This bill comes on the heels of Ret. Gen. John Allen’s resignation from his post as president of the Brookings Institution—the most prominent left-leaning think tank in the US—after being accused by the FBI of secretly lobbying on behalf of Qatar and obstructing the government’s investigation into his alleged lobbying and influence activities on behalf of the Qataris. This bombshell news and congressional action should send shockwaves through the national security community.

Think tanks are supposed to be the intellectual backbone of D.C. Their rigorous research guides policy discussions, and their staff shape media narratives, lobby Congress and the executive branch, and even help to write our nation’s laws. We know—we’ve worked at multiple think tanks for more than a decade and have done all of these things.

Clearly Mandy Rice-Davies* applies here.  The authors, Eli Clifton and Benjamin Freeman, having made their careers in the think tank industry, see their role as essential.

The truth is that these institutions are both corrupt and corrupting, defining what is and what is not acceptable discourse while taking money from numerous sources.  (See Neera Tanden's tenure at the Center for American Progress, where she took money from hedge funds, and served the interests of the UAE and the House of Saud after getting large donations.)

………

This risk is particularly high given that think tanks are awash in foreign money. In fact, foreign governments donate tens of millions of dollars to the United States’ most prominent think tanks every year, and there are myriad examples of how this money influences what these institutions do (or don’t) say. In some cases, think tanks have exploited loopholes in US lobbying laws, like the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Yet few in Congress or law enforcement have seemed to care—until now.

The accusations leveled against Allen represent the first publicly known Department of Justice investigation of a think tank staffer or leader for FARA violations since FARA enforcement began ramping up after Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

The Allen allegations do not implicate anyone else at Brookings or the institution itself, but do raise the flag that Qatari funding has flooded Brookings’ coffers for years. While funding records are incomplete as Brookings, like all think tanks, is not required to disclose any of its funders, publicly available information indicates that the think tank has received more than 30 million from Qatar in just the past 15 years, with the Embassy of Qatar regularly appearing in Brookings’ contributors list in the “2 million and above” category. Brookings certainly isn’t alone in accepting foreign government funding. In fact, with few exceptions—like the Council on Foreign Relations, Human Rights Watch, and the Quincy Institute, where we work—most US think tanks accept foreign government funding, with some accepting millions annually. Many of these think tanks have also been accused of bending to the desires of their foreign funders. Foreign funding has, allegedly, paid for a research report for the Center for a New American Security that recommended policies beneficial to the foreign funder. In other circumstances, it has financed conferences denigrating a foreign funders’ geopolitical rival. Think tanks have been notably silent about the misdeeds of their foreign funders. At Brookings, for example, one former employee alleged that he was not permitted to write negatively about Qatar.

(emphasis mine)

The entire think tank ecology is corrupt.

I'm not sure if it can be fixed, I would advocate burning them all to the ground, but a good first step would be to make their funders public.

*Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? Seriously, know your history.