| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| During his time at Bainbridge, he even had the opportunity to coach his son, Kirby. | ||
| Mr. Smart is survived by his wife, Sharon, and his three children, Carl, Kirby, and Kendall. | ||
| He will always be remembered as an incredible father, husband, coach, and friend. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The gentleman from Georgia yields. | |
| Pursuant to clause 12A of Rule 1, the chair declares the house in recess subject to the call of the chair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the house is gaveled out. | |
| Today, members are working on several pieces of legislation, including a measure to provide tax relief for residents of Taiwan who also pay U.S. taxes. | ||
| Lawmakers are also considering a measure to increase transparency for the incomes of certain employees of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation's largest public power provider. | ||
| And later this week, we expect a bill to come to the floor that would deport undocumented immigrants convicted of certain sex offenses and other violent crimes. | ||
| You can watch live coverage of the House when members return right here on C-SPAN. | ||
| A conversation now on think tank funding with Ben Freeman. | ||
| He's a director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. | ||
| And Ben Freeman, we should probably start this conversation by explaining what the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft is. | ||
| Are you a think tank? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are indeed. | |
| And first of all, thank you so much for having me. | ||
| And the Quincy Institute is a, it is a think tank. | ||
| It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, we sometimes call ourselves an action tank because we're not just there thinking, we're trying to get stuff done. | ||
| And really our purpose is to reduce the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| And critical to our discussion today, we try to call out some of the special interests that are driving U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| How is the Quincy Institute funded? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are funded in a lot of different ways. | |
| We have a lot of small donors. | ||
| We have big donors. | ||
| We have foundations. | ||
| Critically for our purposes, we are not funded by foreign governments. | ||
| We are not funded by the U.S. government. | ||
| And we are not funded by defense contractors. | ||
| And so this really frees us up, we think, to offer kind of a clear, unbiased view of the U.S. foreign policy process. | ||
| Is that unusual? | ||
| Are most think tanks taking money from one of those three places you just mentioned? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| We are, in many cases, we are on an island at the Quincy Institute. | ||
| We're surrounded by other think tanks in D.C. who do take money from foreign governments, the U.S. government, and defense contractors. | ||
| Many think tanks take considerable amount of funding from all three of those entities. | ||
| What is the think tank funding tracker? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much for asking that. | |
| To me, it's a labor of love. | ||
| It's something we've been working on for almost a year now, and it's a publicly available website where anybody, any of our viewers here, our friends in the media and friends in Congress can go to find out how the top think tanks in the U.S. are being funded. | ||
| It provides painstaking details about that funding, what year funding was received, which specific, if it's a foreign government, which foreign government that is, what branch of that foreign government that money came from, and whenever possible, the exact dollar amount of that funding. | ||
| What should viewers know about the Atlantic Council? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Many, many things. | |
| But I think what they can find in the think tank funding tracker about the Atlanta Council is that they're heavily funded by foreign governments. | ||
| We actually found that the Atlanta Council receive more money from foreign governments than any other think tank in the U.S., more than $20 million from foreign governments in the past five years. | ||
| They're also one of the top recipients of Pentagon contractor funding, too. | ||
| They get a lot of money from the very top defense contractors. | ||
| And sort of what we see with the Atlanta Council is this huge money, huge amount of money coming in from some of these foreign governments and some of these defense contractors. | ||
| And what we tried to do a little bit was to trace that back to work the Atlanta Council was doing. | ||
| And what we found was in some cases, it appeared that the Atlanta Council was making recommendations that would benefit some of those funders. | ||
| Who are the foreign governments that give the most money to American think tanks? | ||
|
unidentified
|
By and large, it's America's allies. | |
| It's our Democratic friends. | ||
| It's our friends in NATO. | ||
| It's places like the United Kingdom, Canada are some of the top donors. | ||
| If you look at the top 10 most generous donors, it's mostly filled with democratic regimes that are allies of the U.S. | ||
| However, the very top foreign government donor to think tanks was the United Arab Emirates. | ||
| They gave more than any U.S. allies. | ||
| And the UAE is an authoritarian regime. | ||
| It's been complicit in war crimes in Yemen and in Sudan, too. | ||
| They're helping to fund the RSF there, which was recently declared a genocide. | ||
| So in many cases, the UAE is a very destabilizing regime. | ||
| And yet we see them donating millions and millions of dollars every single year to the top foreign policy think tanks in the U.S. | ||
| We also see in that list too, other authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And the third highest foreign government donor to think tanks was actually the government of Qatar, which is another authoritarian regime in the Middle East. | ||
| It's got its own human rights issues to deal with, its own destabilizing behavior. | ||
| You know, both Qatar and the UAE have been caught red-handed, illegally meddling in the U.S. political process too. | ||
| And yet Qatar, just like the UAE, is giving millions of dollars every year to think tanks in the U.S. | ||
| So we think it's important for folks to know about this and to have a clear, clear-eyed vision of all the cards on the table when they're looking at analysis coming from think tanks that receive funding from these authoritarian regimes. | ||
| The numbers from your report, and this is available at quincyinst.org, this report that we're talking about, the United Arab Emirates over the course of a four-year period, nearly $17 million given to U.S. think tanks. | ||
| The United Kingdom, $15.5 million. | ||
| Qatar, $9 million. | ||
| Canada, $8.6 million. | ||
| Germany, $8.5 million. | ||
| How were you able to track this money? | ||
| How easy was it to come up with these numbers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was anything but easy. | |
| It was painfully hard, in fact. | ||
| Here's the thing about think tank funding is that think tanks aren't actually required to disclose their funding. | ||
| And we actually kind of, we looked at the top 50 think tanks and we found that more than a third, 18 of them, they disclose absolutely nothing about their funding. | ||
| We call these dark money think tanks. | ||
| And, you know, we see that as very problematic. | ||
| But amongst the think tanks who do disclose this information, in most cases, we get sort of a partial transparency that they might release the names of their funders, but no dollar amounts, or they might release some dollar amounts, but you get these wide ranges. | ||
| You don't really know exactly how much funding is coming in. | ||
| But to get that information, we had to scour their websites, annual reports, financial documents, you named it, anything that they've released that was publicly available where we could track down this information. | ||
| We did at thinktankfundingtracker.org. | ||
| You can even see some of our sources there for every one of these donations. | ||
| You can see the source where we got this information. | ||
| But it was really, really hard to do. | ||
| And as I mentioned, this whole process took almost a year to put together. | ||
| And so one of our big goals with this is we'd like your viewers to be able to not take a year to unearth some of these conflicts of interest and be able to very quickly just go to our website. | ||
| And, you know, if they have a suspicion about somebody might have a conflict of interest, might have some baggage, they can really quickly go to our website and look that up in a hurry. | ||
| So they don't have to be a nerd like me and pour through all these annual reports. | ||
| A few minutes ago, we mentioned the Atlantic Council. | ||
| The Atlantic Council has a donor acceptance policy. | ||
| This is how it reads. | ||
| Acceptance of any contribution is at the discretion of the Atlanta Council. | ||
| Accordingly, each is subject to a condition, which is reflected in a written acceptance letter for any contribution of $250 and above that stipulates that the Atlantic Council is accepting such contribution on the condition that the Atlanta Council retains intellectual independence and control over any content funded in whole or in part by the contribution consistent with the Council's intellectual independence policy. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's noble of them to put out a disclosure like that. | |
| Those intellectual independence policies are not unique to the Atlantic Council. | ||
| We see this at most of the top think tanks. | ||
| However, we also know a lot of these think tanks, they'll put out those policies, and yet they'll allow donors to preview research before it's published, to make comments on that research, and in some cases, provide line edits for that research. | ||
| And we also know that some of these top think tanks, they are doing what we call pay-for-play research, where a donor pays a specified amount of money to get a specific report done or a bank created. | ||
| So in other words, they're literally paying for the products that some of these think tanks are doing. | ||
| The Atlanta Council, for example, through leaked emails, we learned that the UAE ambassador had advance access to some of the Atlanta Council's reports before they were published and had the opportunity to provide his comments to the scholars in advance of the publication of those reports. | ||
| Our concern is that when donors are given that kind of opportunity, it really allows them to play censor. | ||
| And if they come back to those scholars and they have unfavorable recommendations for the report, we worry that some of this research might be bent to the whims of some of these foreign funders. | ||
| It's 9.30 on the East Coast. | ||
| Ben Freeman is our guest with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. | ||
| He's the director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy Initiative there. | ||
| Phone lines for you to call in. | ||
| It's split bipolitical party as usual. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| He's with us till the end of our program, 10 a.m. Eastern this morning. | ||
| Mr. Freeman, as folks are calling in, the top 10 think tanks that receive funding from the U.S. government include the RAND Corporation at over $1.4 billion, the Wilson Center to the tune of $52 million, the Stimson Center, Atlantic Council, Aspen Institute, Center for a New American Security, the German Marshall Fund, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, and the Inter-American Dialogue. | ||
| Why is the United States government giving money to think tanks? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a very good question. | |
| In some cases, this money is going to think tanks because the federal government needs answers to some very hard questions. | ||
| And the top recipient of that funding, as you mentioned, was the RAND Corporation. | ||
| And RAND is what's known as a federally funded research center. | ||
| And that's really a fancy way of saying these are kind of the government's nerds who help the government to answer some of these tough questions that they might have. | ||
| Most of the research that's being funded by the federal government going to RAND, it never sees the light of day. | ||
| These are private reports, usually going to the Department of Defense and the different service branches there. | ||
| And they're hoping that these RAND scholars can help the Department of Defense answer some of these really prickly questions. | ||
| And it's all done behind the scenes. | ||
| I don't particularly see any sort of conflicts of interest or problem with that private front. | ||
| I think we do get into some interesting questions when we think about the federal government using taxpayer dollars to fund very public-facing think tanks. | ||
| In some cases, as we identify in the report, those think tanks are kind of promoting an agenda that would benefit the agencies that are funding them. | ||
| And we really see this, especially with the Department of Defense, you know, funding kind of these hawkish think tanks, then who unsurprisingly recommend higher budgets for the Department of Defense. | ||
| And you can sort of see this cycle continuing on at this night. | ||
| What are some examples of that that you would cite? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, more money going to the Department of Defense and then that the Department of Defense in turn providing more money to those think tanks. | |
| Yeah, which think tanks are you referring to there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, I think the Wilson Center is a good example. | |
| But we really see this at just about any think tank the Department of Defense is funding. | ||
| You, you know, in some cases, they have service members who go on staff at these think tanks. | ||
| You know, they publish research there that would appear to benefit those services. | ||
| You know, we really see it across the board, you know, from top organizations like Brookings, you know, Wilson Center, and really any of those think tanks that they're funding. | ||
| I think that there's good legitimate questions about whether U.S. taxpayer dollars should be going to think tanks that are also effectively lobbying the federal government on foreign policy issues. | ||
| And the Department of Defense, by and large, the agency that gives the most to think tanks, followed by the Department of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and then so on down the line. | ||
| All this information available at quincyinst.org. | ||
| If you want to scroll through it yourself or call in with your questions about it, now's the time to do so. | ||
| This is Alex up first in Minnesota, Independent. | ||
| You're on with Ben Freeman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, thanks for taking my call, and thanks for putting this together. | |
| It sounds very interesting. | ||
| I'm excited to take a look. | ||
| I have two things I was hoping you could comment on. | ||
| One is I think you've done a good job of talking about the reports that think tanks are asked to put out, but what about actually taking action on behalf of the donors? | ||
| So an example would be, I think, the German Marshall Fund was on C-SPAN a while ago, and they were talking about their work flagging what they were considering misinformation. | ||
| And I asked them, I called and asked if they were funded by the U.S. government, and they said yes. | ||
| And I said, don't you see a conflict in the fact that you're being funded by the U.S. government, then you're in turn flagging things for censorship. | ||
| And the person kind of demurred. | ||
| So I was hoping you could expound on examples like that where they're kind of being used as a cutout to achieve maybe things that a government wouldn't be allowed to do legally. | ||
| That's the first thing. | ||
| And the second thing is, what about companies or other think tanks that are used as cutouts by foreign governments to avoid the impression of foreign government funding? | ||
| So CEFC, which was paying millions to the Bidens, they were a company, but they're really a cutout for the Chinese government, and they were spreading their money around to the Bidens and to like Columbia University, other things. | ||
| Should there be a law to make it so that you can't take money from cutouts in that way? | ||
| And thank you for taking my questions. | ||
| Mr. Freeman. | ||
| Those are absolutely excellent questions, and I'll try to answer them in order. | ||
| When it comes to U.S. government money going to think tanks, this in some ways is a bit of a loophole because federal agencies are not allowed to use their funding to hire lobbyists to lobby on their behalf. | ||
| They can't go out like a lot of other folks can and hire a K-Street lobbying firm. | ||
| But when you really look at the work that think tanks doing, I think you're absolutely right. | ||
| It's not just about the reports and kind of the research end of it. | ||
| That's really just the beginning of what think tanks do. | ||
| Think tanks are testifying before Congress. | ||
| In some cases, they're outright helping to write legislation. | ||
| And so if we believe that funding is influencing what think tanks do, and we also know that think tanks are helping the right legislation, then you can really see a clear path here for the U.S. government giving money to think tanks that are then, again, going on to directly influence legislation on their behalf. | ||
| So I think there should be some serious questions asked about that U.S. government funding. | ||
| To your second question, this is a really, really good point. | ||
| And I think a pivotal issue to bring up that we're seeing more and more foreign governments turning to think tanks. | ||
| And by the way, we found over $110 million going to think tanks. | ||
| That amount of money has gone up. | ||
| We looked at the last five years. | ||
| That money has gone up almost every single year that we looked at. | ||
| So foreign governments are turning to think tanks more and more for influence in the U.S. | ||
| And a big reason that they're doing that is, as I mentioned, think tanks don't have to disclose their funding. | ||
| Under current law, they don't have to disclose a nickel that they get from a foreign government. | ||
| Whereas if that foreign government hires a lobbying firm, a PR firm, they're going to have to register under what's known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act. | ||
| And once they do that, there's a lot of filing requirements. | ||
| Everybody, they have to report how much money they're giving. | ||
| They have to report the contract. | ||
| The firm they hire has to report everything they're doing on behalf of that foreign government. | ||
| But if you fund a think tank, you don't have to report any of that stuff. | ||
| And yet, in many cases, we see think tanks doing work that really resembles very closely some of this lobbying and public relations work, just without the disclosure. | ||
| And that's really the impetus of what we were trying to do is to shine a bright light on this rather dark and not transparent field of think tank funding. | ||
| Renee in Marietta, Georgia, sends this question via our tech service. | ||
| How are the heritage and AEI funded? | ||
| Renee's saying they seem to be the most powerful think tanks these days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a wonderful question. | |
| I'll tackle AEI first because that's a really quick one. | ||
| We have absolutely no idea how AEI is being funded because they are one of those dark money think tanks that I mentioned. | ||
| They do not publicly disclose their donors. | ||
| I've emailed them on multiple occasions asking them for their donor information. | ||
| And they rather politely explained that they do not make that information publicly available and they have no intention to do in the future, so far as I can tell. | ||
| But we do know about AEI. | ||
| They have sort of let slip at public events that they do accept funding from defense contractors. | ||
| And on one occasion, a public event, they mentioned this. | ||
| I mean, the chairman of their board, he owns a company that owns pieces of defense contractors too. | ||
| So we know there is some defense contractor money in there, but that's about all I can tell you because AEI is one of those dark money think tanks that doesn't disclose its funding. | ||
| The Heritage Foundation, they do disclose some of their funding. | ||
| And Heritage, very recently, over the years, I had kind of beat up on Heritage a little bit about taking a lot of money from defense contractors. | ||
| But just last year, they publicly announced that they were going to sever their ties with those defense contractor funders. | ||
| They're no longer taking that money. | ||
| I also know that the Heritage Foundation doesn't take any money from foreign governments either. | ||
| And so, at least on two of our buckets, the Heritage Foundation is not taking money there. | ||
| They're a little bit murky. | ||
| They're kind of in the middle in terms of transparency on the rest of their funding. | ||
| A lot of their funding comes from a huge small donor base that donates to them too. | ||
| So, you know, we would hope they would be a little more transparent in their funding, but they're certainly much more transparent than AEI is. | ||
| The top Pentagon contractor donors to think tanks. | ||
| Here's the top five: Northrop Grumman at the tune of about $5.6 million, $5.7 million over the course of four years from 2019 to 2023. | ||
| Lockheed Martin, $2.6 million. | ||
| Mitsubishi, $2.1 million. | ||
| RTX, about $1.8 million. | ||
| And Airbus at about $1.6 million, $1.7 million. | ||
| What should we know about Pentagon contractors donors? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a lot to know about him. | |
| Great question. | ||
| I think when it comes to that list you mentioned there, it's well worth noting that when you talk about companies like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, RTX, formerly known as Raytheon, these are some of the very top defense contractors. | ||
| These are what's known as the primes. | ||
| These are companies that are getting tens of billions of dollars every year in Pentagon contracts and in taxpayer money that they're getting every year. | ||
| And yet what we see with this think tank funding is that they're turning around and taking at least a little piece of that and giving that money back to think tanks, who, in many cases, as I mentioned before, are making recommendations that would be a financial benefit to them. | ||
| And, you know, this includes things like recommending specific arm sales to Ukraine that are made by their funders, recommending other arm sales, you know, to places like Israel for the war in Gaza. | ||
| You know, we see this over and over again that these think tanks that are funded by these Pentagon contractors, they're making recommendations that would be a financial windfall to these contractors. | ||
| So again, you're seeing this sort of, I would say virtuous, but I'm not sure it's quite virtuous, but you're seeing the cycle of taxpayer money going to these entities and those entities then donating to think tanks who recommend more taxpayer money going to these entities. | ||
| To New York, this is Cheryl Waiting, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| So you came on the show and you listed all of these Arab think tanks as a top think tanks, but I would think APAC, pro-Israel think tanks would be near the top. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I find that hard to believe. | ||
| And John, you had on think tanks talking about the Israel-Palestinian, I won't even call it a war, a conflict. | ||
| You never have any think tanks that have the Palestinian point of view. | ||
| For the past six months, it's all been pro-Israel think tanks, and you let them go on for like half an hour. | ||
| You take one or two calls. | ||
| So still what you're saying is it true? | ||
| Because I've hosted segments where we have people from a variety of viewpoints on that specific topic. | ||
| If you missed it, It's available at C-SPAN.org. | ||
| I would encourage you to search through those. | ||
| But let me let Ben Freeman jump in on Israel and think tanks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
APAC is certainly a word that we hear all the time. | |
| When it comes to whenever we're talking about foreign influence in Washington, I think AIPAC is one of the first things on folks' heads. | ||
| But for us, AIPAC is a really tricky case because AIPAC is not actually a foreign entity. | ||
| It's the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. | ||
| This is a domestic organization. | ||
| It's funded by domestic sources. | ||
| And so by our definition, we were looking exclusively at foreign government funding, what we could say for sure, money that was coming from a foreign government. | ||
| APAC just doesn't meet that threshold. | ||
| Until we hear some sort of smoking gun, that APAC is getting funding from the Israeli government. | ||
| I'm not aware of that. | ||
| But if that does come up and that changes, then we will go back and update the database and include that APAC funding, which actually brings me to a point. | ||
| We're going to update this database every year. | ||
| And so as some of these funding dynamics change, and to your question, if we do learn concretely that APAC is funded by the Israeli government, then we would certainly add it in then. | ||
| Madeline, is in Texas independent? | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is Madeline. | |
| I have a question. | ||
| Go ahead, ma'am. | ||
| Yes, I want to know. | ||
| It has to do with, are you on the air now? | ||
| Yes, ma'am, you are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I wanted to ask y'all, why are they taking money out of the social security of old and the disabled? | |
| They're taking $400 out of my check every month, and I can barely make it, honey. | ||
| I can't even afford to go down to get a car. | ||
| I got to ride a bus once a month to get groceries. | ||
| Not to go to town. | ||
| Madeline, certainly an important topic and one we will certainly come back to. | ||
| But I've got Ben Freeman focusing on think tanks right now and want to focus on his report because it's an interesting new report. | ||
| Ben Freeman, think tanks that focus on domestic policy versus foreign policy. | ||
| Do some of these countries that give money to think tanks, do they give them to think tanks that focus on U.S. domestic policy or is it strictly on the foreign policy side? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, we really don't see that as much. | |
| And, you know, part of this is that these foreign governments are hoping to get something in return for their donations. | ||
| They're just as much investments as they are donations. | ||
| So we do see far less money from foreign governments going to think tanks who don't focus on foreign policy type issues. | ||
| That's not to say some of these foreign governments are quite generous with their donations. | ||
| We've seen, I mentioned the UAE and Qatar, they've been quite generous donating to U.S. nonprofits following natural disasters here. | ||
| I live in the great state of Florida and I know the UAE specifically has donated following hurricanes here. | ||
| So they do make charitable contributions to domestic issues. | ||
| But when it comes to think tank funding, they are very much focused on U.S. foreign policy-centric think tanks. | ||
| Who are the most transparent think tanks? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I really, I can't say this enough, but when we finished this report, I kind of fell in love with the Stimson Center's transparency. | |
| This is the, To us, it was only one of two organizations that got our full five of five star rating when it came to transparency. | ||
| And the Simpson Center really does it all. | ||
| They put out their annual reports every year. | ||
| They list all of their donors in those annual reports. | ||
| And they don't just list them. | ||
| They list the exact dollar amount that each of those donors is giving. | ||
| And it's a level of transparency that we just don't see at other think tanks. | ||
| They're not hiding behind anonymous donors or any of these other sort of shell games that think tanks can play. | ||
| So we really recommend that when think tanks are considering how do they improve their level of transparency, take a hard look at the Simpson Center. | ||
| And we should all try to be emulating that model. | ||
| What does the Stimpson Center do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Simpson Center does a little bit of everything. | |
| They have a very large focus on U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| And I think like Quincy in some ways, they're an action tank. | ||
| They're looking to testify before Congress. | ||
| They're making recommendations for policy proposals in the foreign policy space. | ||
| They're really doing a lot of things that a lot of other think tanks are, but again, they're doing it in a transparent fashion. | ||
| Paulette in Florida, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You are next. | ||
| You're on with Ben Freeman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I wanted to, you know, well, I wanted to say something else for when he was talking about the domestic side and that the funding is not relative to the domestic side. | ||
| I think that's a lie because the countries that fund all of it go into play. | ||
| You know, when you keep the people poor, the richer stay richer. | ||
| So is it not domestic? | ||
| And I wanted to make a short little, well, they said it's a joke, but it's not a joke and it's not dirty or anything like that. | ||
| But just to show what all that funding is really about. | ||
| You have a billionaire, you have a working class person, and you have an immigrant. | ||
| They give 100 cookies to all three. | ||
| The billionaire take 99 and then tell the working class that the immigrant wants your cookie. | ||
| So it's all about money and keeping people dumb. | ||
| But people are rising up and they're learning and they're constantly trying to figure things out. | ||
| So please just be honest. | ||
| Did you hear that lady crying about Social Security check? | ||
| You think that's not all into play? | ||
| Come on now. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Ben Freeman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Paulette, I very much hear you. | |
| We are, I assure you, we are coming through the data. | ||
| We are looking to see where that foreign government money is coming from, where it's going. | ||
| And if we find it going to some of these domestic interests, we'll certainly do our darnest to tell folks about it. | ||
| I will say in a very basic level, there's only the pie that is the U.S. government's budget in any one year. | ||
| It is to some extent, it's a finite pie. | ||
| We only have so much of the pie, and we got to figure out how to chop it up every year. | ||
| And so when you see some of these forces like foreign governments that are clamoring for U.S. military bases on their soil or arms sales, all these sorts of things, they're clamoring for taxpayer dollars to go to them. | ||
| And Pentagon contractors too are clamoring for more money to go to them. | ||
| At some point, that money has got to come from somewhere. | ||
| And taxpayers are paying for all of this. | ||
| And so they might be squeezing some of these domestic interests to give more money to some of these moneyed interests that are donating a lot of money to think tanks. | ||
| Suki on X wants to come back to why you did this research project in the first place, saying, is this guy trying to make everything seem nefarious? | ||
| Why? | ||
| So no one believes anything anymore? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that is a wonderful question. | |
| And I would dare say quite the opposite. | ||
| I've worked at think tanks, a variety of think tanks for 15 years now. | ||
| And actually, where this started was about two years ago, a public opinion poll came out that said think tank experts were wildly distrusted. | ||
| In fact, they were less trusted than just about anybody you could think of. | ||
| Doctors, engineers, even lawyers. | ||
| Lawyers were more trusted than think tankers. | ||
| There's more lawyer jokes than there are lawyers. | ||
| But even lawyers were trusted more than think tank experts. | ||
| And so we sort of said that's a problem. | ||
| We think tanks, think tanks have a really important role to play in the policy process. | ||
| We want them to be trusted again. | ||
| And so we started taking a hard look at their funding and we realized maybe the public does have some cause for concern because a lot of think tanks, they're not transparent about their funding. | ||
| They do have these glaring conflicts of interest in some cases. | ||
| And they're kind of hiding this from the American public. | ||
| So what we're hoping for actually is that we get more of this information out there. | ||
| We encourage think tanks to be more transparent. | ||
| We hope at the end of the day, this will actually lead to an increase of confidence in think tanks, less of a conflict of interest and more trust that these think tanks are really working for the greater good in the U.S. policy process. | ||
| The German Marshall Fund, according to your report over four years, received some $16 million from foreign governments, another $3.2 million from the U.S. government, and nearly a million dollars from Pentagon contractors. | ||
| What should we know about the German Marshall Fund? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I think the German Marshall Fund is unique in some cases. | |
| You know, as the name would imply, this is an internationally focused think tank. | ||
| I don't think it would surprise anybody to learn that the German Marshall Fund gets money from foreign governments in Europe and from the U.S. government as well. | ||
| And I think because of that sort of their gamut, the role that they played, I think there's a lot of kind of truth in advertising when it comes to the German Marshall Fund. | ||
| And so I think, you know, I personally was a little less concerned with the amount of money going to the German Marshall Fund. | ||
| And if I remember correctly, I don't remember the specific details of it, but I believe it was overwhelmingly from our European allies. | ||
| And I'm sure some folks may have their own concerns about that. | ||
| But to me, as an independent researcher, I wasn't too worried about the German Marshall Fund's funding. | ||
| Some $4 million from the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, some $3.1 million from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sweden, $2 million from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norway, $2 million from the United States Agency for International Development, and so on down the line. | ||
| You can see it on your screen there. | ||
| Just a few minutes left with Ben Freeman this morning. | ||
| If you want to get your calls in, the numbers will put on the screen for you. | ||
| I did want to ask Ben Freeman, included in this report is recommendations for think tanks, for Congress, for the media. | ||
| What would you like to see done here to change this process that we've talked about? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I think since we're talking on TV, I think one of the things we're hoping for is that media outlets will use this as a resource. | |
| So when they have a guest on from one of these think tanks, they can quickly look up the funding of that think tank and then let their viewers know. | ||
| If they're talking about an issue, mention the United Arab Emirates, if they're talking about the United Arab Emirates and they work in an organization that receives funding from the United Arab Emirates, we're really hoping our friends in the media will let their viewers or their readers know about that potential conflict of interest. | ||
| We're hoping a similar thing too on Capitol Hill. | ||
| You know, as I mentioned, think tankers are working directly with Congress, directly with the executive branch. | ||
| And we're hearing from congressional staff that a lot of what we had in this report, this tracker, came as a surprise to them. | ||
| You know, they had no idea about some of these financial ties that some of these think tanks that they've been talking to had. | ||
| So we're hoping to make it easier for them to access that information too. | ||
| And then we're hoping what we really want to do is encourage Congress to set down some concrete rules about disclosing think tank funding. | ||
| Right now, as I mentioned, it's really the wild, wild west. | ||
| You know, think tanks aren't required to disclose any of this, and more than a third of think tanks disclose nothing about their funders. | ||
| We're hoping that Congress will help to change that and require think tanks to disclose this funding. | ||
| We've seen some promising signs of that. | ||
| There's the Think Tank Transparency Act has been introduced in the Senate. | ||
| The Fighting Foreign Influence Act has important improvements about increasing, requiring think tanks to disclose their foreign government funding. | ||
| We're hoping in this next session of Congress that one of these good bills will pass and then think tanks will at least be required to disclose any funding they get from foreign governments. | ||
| A question from Jay Sanders on X. What's your opinion of 501 C3 think tanks that have 501 C4 action arms? | ||
|
unidentified
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A great, great question. | |
| And Jason, we're seeing this more and more and more in the think tank landscape. | ||
| There's this sort of, you know, antiquated notion, I'll call it, that a think tank is just this nonprofit. | ||
| It's kind of the ivory tower for DC. | ||
| It's just independent. | ||
| You know, all they're doing is their research. | ||
| That idea has gone out the window because of these C4s, where they have this explicitly political arm to many think tanks now. | ||
| And we're seeing this across the think tank spectrum, you know, from conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, you know, they have Heritage Action. | ||
| The Center for American Progress on the other side, you know, on the left, they have a C4 too. | ||
| And so, you know, Republican or a Democrat, it doesn't matter. | ||
| We're seeing think tanks arming up in this political space explicitly. | ||
| My concern here is that it's really hard to disentangle this funding. | ||
| You know, you see these think tanks that have both a 501c3 and a 501c4. | ||
| The staff are in the same office. | ||
| You know, they're sitting arm in arm. | ||
| They're sitting right next to each other. | ||
| So I think it's really hard to disentangle when you're making a charitable contribution to the C3 side, or can that money sort of fungibly find its way over to the political advocacy side? | ||
|
unidentified
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I think there's important questions to ask there. | |
| But I think, you know, on a very basic level for viewers, you know, when you're looking at the work coming out of think tanks that have both a C3 and a C4, on some level, you got to recognize that even the C C3 side, that could be politically weaponized and it could ultimately be used to influence elections. | ||
| So at the very least, you got to take that research with a grain of salt and know that on some level, it might be political. | ||
| Two websites for our viewers. | ||
| It's quincyinst.org for the Quincy Institute and think TankfundingTracker.org. |