Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His latest book is The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas.

In 2015, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president and CEO of the New America Foundation co-authored an ambitious manifesto about the future of the D.C. think tank that emphasized the need for civic action. “The Progressive Era model of think tanks as extensions of technocratic governance is no longer sufficient to make meaningful, large-scale progress in resolving public problems,” Slaughter argued. Instead, she suggested, “pre-partisan” efforts at civic enterprise were necessary for ideas to get traction “in the hyper-partisan, pay-for-play environment of Washington policy development.” She acknowledged that her undertaking was “an ambitious project—nothing short of rethinking the relationship between the people who make public policy and the people for whom they make it,” but New America was poised for the challenge.

Two years later, New America is embroiled in a pay-for-play controversy of its own making. The New York Times reported that Slaughter had parted ways with Barry Lynn, an influential critic of the growing clout of U.S. tech companies. He ran Open Markets, an initiative “to promote greater awareness of the political and economic dangers of monopolization,” and had been scathing in his assessments of Google, a firm that had donated more than $21 million to New America’s coffers. Slaughter has disputed some of the facts in the story and issued a statement asserting that Lynn’s “refusal to adhere to New America’s standards of openness and institutional collegiality” led to the rupture. Slaughter didn’t deny, however, that she had implored Lynn in emails, “We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points,” nor that she had warned Lynn to “just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.”


It would be easy to look at this mess, and the recent troubles of similar institutions, and conclude that think tanks are doomed in an age of growing corporate power and declining faith in elites. Historically, think tanks are supposed to act as the bridge-builders between the academy and government. That’s proving to be more challenging than ever nowadays, and not only due to newspaper exposés suggesting conflicts of interest or corporate pay-for-play scandals. The Trump administration’s general disdain for nonprofit expertise has compounded their predicament. Trump officials have spurned academic and think-tank scholars, turning instead to consultants and for-profit firms for policy advice. Even the traditional think tanks on the right find themselves imperiled. The Heritage Foundation has had the greatest success in reaching out to the Trump administration—yet that is one of the reasons that Jim DeMint was forced out as president by a board that thought he’d gone too far. Smaller think tanks, like Foreign Policy Initiative, have shuttered their doors.

As I argued in The Ideas Industry, think tanks are uniquely vulnerable to changes in the marketplace of ideas. Organizations like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs are explicitly for-profit; they are free of hypocrisy charges and can fund their own in-house think tanks as exercises in “thought leadership.” Universities are not untroubled, but they can rely on multiple streams of income to fund their activities, and have a robust tradition of scholarly independence. Think tanks are caught in the middle. They are not-for-profit, but they cannot rely on either tuition dollars or endowment income to sustain them during the lean years. As government funding shrinks and traditional foundations become obsessed with “impact,” many think tanks find themselves constantly needing to justify their purpose in an age when the White House isn’t interested in what they have to say.

Organizations like New America Foundation are particularly vulnerable. New America was founded with the explicit aim of trying to transcend the left-right political divide and seek out heterodox and nonpartisan solutions. In the two decades since its founding, however, political polarization made this task far more difficult. It has been the partisan think tanks like Heritage or the Center for American Progress that have thrived in this environment. Unsurprisingly, New America shifted toward a more progressive direction in recent years.

In this kind of political climate, think tanks that attempt to stay nonpartisan have to seek out a diversified set of funding sources—which will inevitably include large corporations, leading to inevitable ethical dilemmas. As George Washington University professor Henry Farrell observed, “[New America] is faced with what looks on the surface to be a direct clash between the values that it and its supporters publicly profess and the priorities that key donors would like it to have.” If a policy shop like New America cannot rely on companies like Google for funding, it will inevitably need to seek out alternative financing from more partisan plutocrats, such as Tom Steyer or Charles Koch, or from small, partisan donors: Witness how Open Markets prepped for its break with New America by setting up a donations page. Small donors tend to be strident advocates for a cause. In contrast, large corporations have a vested interest to maintain friendly ties with the executive branch. That tension will make life difficult for progressive think tanks and painfully awkward for center-left policy shops.

Think tanks face significant challenges in coping with the modern Ideas Industry, but it would be premature to sound their epitaph. In 2010, intelligence analyst Michael Tanji declared that “virtual think tanks” could eventually supplant their brick-and-mortar forefathers. He founded the online-only Center for Threat Awareness, convinced that “think tank 2.0” would prove to be leaner and meaner than organizations with high payrolls, physical plant and overhead. Tanji made this prediction in August 2010; his Center for Threat Awareness lasted only a year. Similarly, a more recent Silicon Valley effort called #WinTheFuture has crashed and burned.

Think tanks reacted to previous shocks with entrepreneurial adaptability, and have responded to their current predicament in a similar fashion. They are already practicing greater transparency in revealing their sources of revenue. Some organizations, like the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution are also consciously diversifying funding sources to minimize their dependency on any singular source of funds. I have been a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings for the past few years and have noticed that with each year Brookings has taken more stringent measures to ward off conflicts of interest before they happen.

Paradoxically, the very ineptness of the Trump administration might help make technocratic think tanks great again. The more Congress resists Trump administration proposals, the more it will rely on think tanks like New America to act as reservoirs of expertise to rebut bad policy proposals. Newspapers and civic organizations discovered that Trump’s victory helped to spark interest in their activities; the same phenomenon has the potential to invigorate think tanks that oppose the administration. The New America Foundation is now clearly on the progressive side of the political spectrum during a time when the right wing has at best an ambivalent relationship with policy expertise. This is particularly true for the Trump administration. Its failures in foreign policy, trade policy and health care highlight that there isn’t a first-rate policy intellectual anywhere to be found in Trump’s White House.

We need think tanks, and I’m not just saying that because I work for one. Think tanks have a unique ability to take abstract ideas and cutting-edge research from academia, repackage them for the real world and make practical suggestions informed by government experience. They’ve played a vital role in making public policy over the years—in the Reagan revolution, the expansion of NATO and the Affordable Care Act—and I’m sure they will again.

In fact, cleaning up after Trump is going to require smart, workable proposals from all across the ideological spectrum. America Firsters might control many levers of political power, but all the public opinion polling suggests they have little sway over the marketplace of ideas. This was not a great week for New America, and it hasn’t been a banner year for think tanks in general, but someday soon the country’s political leaders will need our help. And we beleaguered wonks will have our talking points and our white papers locked and loaded.

