Quincy Institute Webinar to Explore Think-Tank Funding

On Tuesday, February 18, at noon Eastern time, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft will host an hour-long webinar, “Think Tank Funding in America.” The discussion will feature Estefanía Terán Valdez, director of On Think Tanks; Benoît Pelopidas, who holds the chair of excellence in security studies at CERI (Sciences Po) and co-authored a recent study on think-tank funding and conflicts of interest in nuclear-weapons analysis; and The Giving Review co-editor Michael E. Hartmann, who is also a senior fellow of the Capital Research Center.

The panel, registration for which is available here, will be moderated by Quincy Institute research fellow Nick Cleveland-Stout. Last month, Quincy published a report co-authored by its Democratizing Foreign Policy director Ben Freeman and Cleveland-Stout, Big Ideas and Big Money: Think Tank Funding in America. The report was released as the institute unveiled a new online repository of data, the Think Tank Funding Tracker.

The report and repository track funding during the past five years of 50 top American think tanks with interests in foreign policy and national security from: 1.) foreign governments and foreign-government-controlled entities; 2.) the U.S. government; and, 3.) U.S. Department of Defense contractors. The data are based on information that is self-reported in various forms by the think tanks themselves.

Foreign governments and foreign-government-owned or -controlled entities gave more than $110 million to the 50 think tanks during the studied period, Freeman and Cleveland-Stout found. The most-generous donor countries were the United Arab Emirates (which contributed $16.7 million), the United Kingdom ($15.5 million), and Qatar ($9.1 million). The largest recipients of money from foreign governments or foreign-controlled entities were the Atlantic Council ($20.8 million), the Brookings Institution ($17.1 million), and the German Marshall Fund ($16.1 million).

The U.S. government gave at least $1.49 billion to the think tanks during the period—$1.4 billion of which went to one of them, the Rand Corporation. The top 100 Pentagon contractors gave more than $34.7 million.

Big Ideas and Big Money also creates a transparency scale for the 50 think tanks, based on five binary questions. According to the scale, nine of the think tanks are fully transparent about their funding, 23 are partially transparent, and 18 are entirely opaque.

The report recommends that: a.) the media report on think tanks’ and their scholars’ funding sources, including when citing or quoting them; b.) Congress require more disclosure of think tanks’ funding sources overall and when their scholars testify before congressional committees in particular, c.) the Department of Justice clarify what think tanks can do on behalf of their foreign donors; and, d.) think tanks themselves end “pay-to-play” research and voluntarily disclose funding sources.

This article first appeared in the Giving Review on February 5, 2025.