The New York Times has published over the weekend an excellent study of how foreign governments are buying influence at Washington’s think tanks. According to the story, foreign governments are not only getting prominent think tanks to embrace their views of what is in America’s interest, but to lobby for these views with politicians and high officials.

I’ve seen the New York Times story greeted with a shrug and a “so what,” but it is a big deal, maybe even a bigger deal than the New York Times suggests. Washington think tanks, which were originally intended as a source of impartial, objective, and disinterested information, have become arms of foreign as well as domestic influence peddlers.

Some history is in order for those who think it has always been that way. The first policy groups, which originated early in the last century and only later became called “think tanks,” included the Brookings Institution (which was formed out of three other policy groups), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Twentieth Century Fund (now the Century Foundation). They were products of the Progressive Era idea of using social science to produce policy research that, in the words of Robert Brookings, would be “free from any political or pecuniary interest.”

Andrew Carnegie gave his think tank an endowment of $10 million in order to free it from having to raise money. Brookings, who had retired from business to devote himself to philanthropy, generously funded his. The scholars at these groups had definite ideas, but the groups resisted attempts by outside group to shape their conclusions. In 1933, Brookings’ president Harold Moulton, who was a conservative economist, rejected railway company complaints’ about a Brookings study recommending nationalization. “We are concerned only in finding out what will promote the general welfare,” he declared.

As I argued in The Paradox of American Democracy, these kind of groups can perform an important function in a democracy where the greater public, which does not have the time or the background to study arcane trade or environmental questions, or to probe Saudi or Russian intentions, often have to rely on experts to frame the choices they have to make. And that goes for many politicians as well. But sometime after World War II, this chain of expertise from the think tanks down to the politicians and the general public began to corrode. And what the New York Times story shows is that it has continued to do so.