The New America Foundation is reeling from controversy after its decision late last month to “part ways”—in the words of the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter—with anti-monopoly crusader Barry Lynn and his Open Markets project. It’s a complicated story with diverging accounts, but The New York Times summed it up neatly: “Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant.”

In a nutshell, according to the Times and correspondence released by New America: Google and Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, are major donors to New America, and Schmidt served as New America’s chairman. Lynn and his project have been critical of the tech giants, and in June published an endorsement of the European Union’s antitrust judgment against Google. Company representatives expressed their displeasure to Slaughter, and she accused Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.” Slaughter asked Lynn and Open Markets to leave.

Lynn says he was ousted because Slaughter succumbed to pressure from Google. While no evidence has surfaced that Google representatives demanded his ouster, there seems little doubt that the conflict between him and Slaughter stemmed from his “imperiling” a major donor. Slaughter says she fired Lynn because of a lack of “collegiality.” Lynn had failed to give Slaughter adequate notice of a conference last year that was going to single out Google for criticism, and had not allowed her to review his statement on the EU’s antitrust judgment. From Slaughter’s standpoint, Lynn was not simply an independent scholar, but the head of a program and had a duty to warn her and other program directors if his group was doing something that might alienate a major donor.

I can’t claim definitive knowledge of what happened. But as someone who spent a few years at a Washington think tank, and has written extensively about these institutions, I can say that the controversy at New America bears out the credibility problem facing think tanks. Instead of bolstering public trust in expertise, as the think tanks were initially supposed to do, they are increasingly feeding the growing distrust.

In fact, one can connect the events at New America to the transformation of American think tanks over the past century. The term “think tank” didn’t appear until the Kennedy administration, which relied heavily on Rand Corporation research, but these policy groups and research institutes date from 1916, when philanthropist Robert Brookings established the Institute for Government Research, which later became known as the Brookings Institution. Robert Brookings was one of a group of very wealthy businessmen who had become convinced that through the application of social science, government policies could be devised that would stem the rising conflict between the classes and parties and also achieve world peace. They were Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson progressives in the broadest sense of the term.