If you’ve ever wondered why the pundit discourse in DC seems so out of touch with the rest of the country, blame the so-called think tanks.
Washington, DC, is the think tank capital of the world, with over a billion dollars spent every year by donors to shape DC’s political discourse and policies. These think tanks range from left-of-center to the hard right. Well-funded lefty think tanks are non-existent since there’s no billionaire class to back them.
Under the guise of nonpartisan, “expert” advice, think tanks publish reports, policy papers, brief members of Congress, and appear as pundits on cable news advocating a host of polices from banking deregulation to foreign intervention. The latter is quite divergent from American public opinion. DC’s think tanks are nearly uniformly more hawkish than the average American, consistently advocating for US wars and intervention in foreign conflicts. Many of these think tanks, it will come as no surprise, are funded by defense contractors.
In the past few years:
The top 100 defense companies have contributed more than $34.7 million to the top 50 think tanks. The top donors include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Mitsubishi, which provided $5.6 million, $2.6 million, and $2.1 million, respectively, to the tracked think tanks between 2019 and 2023.
Foreign governments also like to get in on the action, funnelling money to DC think tanks who then launder the agenda of authoritarian regimes:
In the past five years, foreign governments and foreign government-owned entities donated more than $110 million to the top 50 think tanks in the United States. The most generous donor countries were the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Qatar, which contributed $16.7 million, $15.5 million, and $9.1 million to U.S. think tanks, respectively.
Pro-Israel think tanks are also a DC staple, existing to push hardline policies on Israel, aggressively seeking to shape DC’s political and policymaking class in favor of Israel. These think tanks go beyond Israel and the Palestinians, but push hawkish policies on other matters related to the Jewish State, such as Iran.
The most prominent of these is the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is an AIPAC offshoot. WINEP started as an in-house shop within the Israel lobby group before being spun off as an ostensibly independent “think tank.” It exists to push Israel’s agenda while pretending it is merely a scholarly organization. There is great propaganda value in presenting partisan advocacy as non-partisan “expert” advice. It’s the think tank game.
WINEP has an annual budget of nearly $20 million and an endowment of about $100 million. Then there’s the uber-hawkish, neo-con Foundation For The Defense of Democracies, which right now is giddily advocating for war with Iran and publishes articles threatening US allies like Jordan for daring to meekly voice opposition to certain Israeli policies. FDD, like WINEP, employs several Israelis who advocate under the imprimatur of an American think tank, even though they are nationals of a foreign country. FDD’s budget is over $30 million. And FDD actually started as an openly pro-Israel advocacy organization called “Emet”— Hebrew, ironically, for “Truth” — and subsequently changed its name, perhaps to sound more palatable to a mainstream American audience.
Lastly, there’s the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (formerly the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), with a budget of nearly $8 million. These are all single-issue, pro-Israel think tanks, but pro-Israel advocacy also exists in other prominent DC shops. Consider the world’s biggest think tank, The Brookings Institution, which has a Center for Middle East Policy. Until recently, it was named after the Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban (“I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”), after he donated $13 million to the institution.
Well-endowed conservative think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, are also very pro-Israel, with the latter even running Project Esther:
Project Esther is a policy initiative released by the Heritage Foundation in October 2024. It claims to be a “National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism,” but in practice, it redefines antisemitism in ways that blur the line between legitimate protest and hate speech, while simultaneously ignoring and obscuring right-wing antisemitism.
