"An Outsourced Staff" --Cicero Institute and Homelessness Policy

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.

Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle at NYT:

A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.

It was their third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails. “We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that,” a Republican state senator, Ron Alting, said last year, urging a more caring approach.

But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump’s, had made its initial efforts. Mr. Trump had issued an executive order on homelessness that so fully reflected Cicero’s agenda it was hard to tell 
where the group stopped and White House policy began. The sponsor of the Indiana law was fresh from a Cicero conference, Cicero lobbyists worked the bill, and three Cicero analysts testified that the threat of arrests would push homeless people into treatment for mental illness or addiction.

The ban passed just before the legislature adjourned.

...

With few rival groups working on homelessness, the institute had its lane. After Texas passed a statewide camping ban in 2021, Cicero made it into a model bill to take to other states.

Cicero was too small to matter in Washington, but about two dozen states had Republican control of the legislature and governorship. For harried legislators frustrated by encampments, Cicero’s bill offered a stance. And with no housing or services included, it required no spending.

“In most states, state legislators don’t even have policy staff,” explained Jared Meyer, an early Cicero recruit, on Mr. Lonsdale’s podcast. “The best thing you can do is be an outsourced staff.”

The Decline of Heritage

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.

 Jessica Riedl at X:

So for anyone interested, I was a Heritage fellow from 2001-2011 and saw the seeds of the mess starting in 2008. 

It's been long enough...I feel comfy telling the story:

In 2008, with the economy and markets collapsing, my colleagues in the econ dept felt necessary to endorse TARP. They were free marketers, but also Ph.D economists and accomplished lawyers trying to avert the threat of a potential depression. Anyway, TARP passed, markets recovered, and nearly all of the money was repaid. Agree or disagree with TARP, the scholar’s research at the time were wholly defensible and well-accepted by economists. (FWIW, I was not involved in the TARP debate).

Yet, after Obama took office, and many people linked up TARP with the Obama stimulus, a grassroots backlash developed claiming that Heritage had endorsed “Obamanomics and socialism” - and this spread to the board.

The key is that - ultimately - instead of defending their scholars, the fear of angering the small dollar donors, Fox News, and the Board won out. Within a few years, much of the economic team - including nearly anyone with a Ph.D. - was gone. They were often replaced with younger scholars who lacked the academic credentials but could be counted on to produce predictably partisan analysis without all the complicated nuance you get from more accomplished Ph.Ds and JDs.

This is also the time that Heritage Action was created, much of the Foundation leadership was replaced, and even Ed Feulner left by 2013. Nuance was out, brass-knuckles partisan politics were in.

I left during this time in 2011, following an incident when a reporter called me to fact check Rep. Michelle Bachmann's claim that we could balance the budget with a few waste tweaks (I endorsed the tweaks while gently noting they would not balance the budget).  

When the newspaper fact check column included my information, I learned that under the new rules, “friends of Heritage” were not to be publicly disagreed with, no matter how incorrect they may be.

As punishment, I was banned from talking to the media – or even answering my own office phone (a gallingly infantilizing punishment for a scholar with 300 publications and thousands of successful media appearances). Essentially, I was being told to put partisanship above truth and intellectual integrity. The Heritage I knew was gone, and as soon as I found the right job with Sen. Portman, so was I.

I hadn't told this story because I didn't want to spill beans on a former employer. But 1) its been 15 years, and 2) my ex-employee status didn't stop their leaders from trolling and mocking me when I came out last year.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Right Rot

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.

Kim Holmes at The Dispatch:

Which leads me to my first and most important definition of what a think tank should be. Above all, it should be about ideas. As soon as the purpose becomes advocacy alone, or some other purpose related to gaining money or power, the “think” part is lost. The organization becomes a mere propaganda machine. There is nothing inherently wrong with policy advocacy for its own sake. But an organization that does only that should not be described as a think tank. Nor should its word on policy be trusted. Any policy research organization worth its salt will respect the rules of evidence and argumentation and avoid sensationalist rhetoric and ad hominem attacks. And it should certainly avoid besmirching the think tank’s reputation by flirting with toxic and vile media personalities.

The ideas themselves must have integrity. There is no such thing as pure political science when it comes to policy analysis. All public policies are grounded in one way or another in principles of governance over which much disagreement will occur. But there is a difference between analyzing a policy problem from a particular point of view and simply tailoring your analysis to partisan talking points. The former requires evidence and reasoning, while the latter appeals solely to emotion and prejudice for the purpose of gaining influence and power.

For many years, the Heritage approach was to apply the principles of economic freedom, limited constitutional government, and strong national defense to the task of formulating policies. Today that is no longer the case. The doctrines driving Heritage’s output, as determined by the foundation’s president and the board of trustees, are a combination of Pat Buchanan-esque populism, nationalism, Trumpism, and various strains of what is called postliberalism. There are still some Reaganite conservatives left on the staff, and they write papers and make public appearances. But they are no longer the dominant voice, and their numbers are dropping ever lower amid a recent wave of resignations.

At Reason, Stephanie Slade writes of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute:

Former ISI President Christopher Long and former ISI Chairman Thomas Lynch resigned as trustees after the other board members voted against removing Burtka at a meeting on November 7. The pair explained their decision in an open letter posted to X, in which they object to "ISI's celebration of the odious and un-American ideas espoused by" figures such as Carlson and Curtis Yarvin and warn about the rise of "white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, and bigotry" on the right.

Carlson was the headliner at ISI's 70th anniversary gala in 2023. ISI also placed one of its three media fellows with Tucker Carlson Tonight this year—that is to say, after his Russia trip and Cooper interview—at a cost of $75,000, according to a document prepared for the board of trustees ahead of the November 7 meeting and reviewed by Reason.

Meanwhile, Yarvin, a blogger and leading "neoreactionary" thinker, was featured in the inaugural episode of ISI's Project Cosmos, a YouTube series hosted by Burtka that launched in August. Like Fuentes (who has claimed, among other things, that "a lot of women want to be raped"), Yarvin has a history of making highly controversial statements, including that he is "not exactly allergic" to white nationalism, that Americans need to "get over their dictatorphobia," and that an ideal society would find a way to accomplish "the removal of undesirable elements" while avoiding the "moral stigma" associated with genocide.

Yarvin, Fuentes, and Carlson are also among those who question or reject the notion that anyone who accepts this country's founding creed should be welcome here. Instead, they suggest—sometimes explicitly, sometimes subtly—that a certain ethno-religious or cultural background is a requirement to be truly an American, such that newcomers have less of a claim to belonging than do "legacy" or "heritage" Americans who can trace their bloodlines to the land for many generations.

Such thinking was until recently considered idea non grata on the mainstream right, and to see it making inroads into respected intellectual institutions has been a cause for alarm among many more traditional conservatives. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute's annual gala on Monday night, the historian of the American Revolution Gordon S. Wood pointedly warned against a view of American nationhood as rooted in blood, soil, religion, or race. Though he didn't mention Carlson by name, the impetus for his remarks wasn't hard to guess.

Conservative Split

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.

Christopher Long at X:

An Open Letter to the Conservative Movement The battle for the heart and soul of the American Conservative Movement is being fought on many fronts, with the latest trench warfare occurring in the boardrooms of its long-standing and most influential foundations and think tanks. The recent controversy @Heritage points to how Conservatism’s venerable institutions have been infiltrated and quietly taken over by a tight-knit, fringe group of post-liberal thinkers who believe America has been “off the rails” since the Founding.

In their minds, the Declaration and Constitution must take a backseat to usher in a new, post-democratic, post-capitalist economic system that advocates isolationism, an immigration ban, and a domestic policy that blurs distinctions between church and state. While often described as MAGA or populist, this group is more tightly aligned to the philosophy of media crank @TuckerCarlson than President Trump’s agenda.

As longtime board members and leaders of @ISI, the oldest conservative campus organization in America, founded in 1953 by William F. Buckley Jr., we have fought to preserve ISI’s longstanding mission from falling victim to a post-liberal hijacking. That battle was lost at a board meeting held last Friday, at the conclusion of which we tendered our resignations.

We hope our experience will serve as a wake-up call that the integrity and longstanding values of conservative institutions are being systematically and intentionally undermined by post-liberals who promote a “no enemies to the right” mindset.

We urged our fellow trustees to terminate ISI’s current President, @johnnyburtka, who formerly served as executive director of the post-liberal journal @amconmag, and return ISI to its core academic work of “Educating for Liberty” by helping American college students to learn and appreciate the perennial ideas and timeless values that have made America great.

ISI has largely abandoned its on-campus philosophical programming, which equipped future leaders to better uphold American ideals. Instead, it focuses on ideological and political podcasts that introduce audiences to alt-right online personalities, such as Tucker Carlson and others who seek to undermine the liberal ideas of the American Founding.

This fundamental shift in ISI’s focus was done behind the board’s back. It’s new signal program, the podcast Project Cosmos, was dropped on X (formerly Twitter) on August 19, featuring postliberal icon @PatrickDeneen and neo-reactionary @curtis_yarvin. Despite two board meetings taking place between the podcast’s release and the start of the costly production in February, the board was never informed of the existence of Project Cosmos.

Three Heritage Foundation directors, @LarryArnn of @Hillsdale, Michael Gleba of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and Heritage’s current president, @KevinRobertsTX, are trustees of ISI and attended the Friday meeting. None objected to or questioned the judgment of platforming Yarvin in Project Cosmos’s inaugural episode. This, after being confronted with a long list of damning quotes from Yarvin.

Yarvin is a self-described neo-reactionary, unapologetic monarchist, and a leader of the Dark Enlightenment movement who advocates for “rebooting” and replacing liberal democracy. He writes, “If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” He has also said, “Although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.”

Rather than peeling away disaffected young males who flock to the noxious ideas of Fuentes and Yarvin, ISI’s Project Cosmos fawns over their anti-liberal philosophies. They appear to be successful in appealing to the Yarvin-Fuentes-Carlson echo chamber, as Project Cosmos reported that the video garnered six million views on X, with a skewing of more than 90% male.

What is unclear is how many women and other traditional ISI students, professors, alumni, and donors are turned off by ISI’s celebration of the odious and un-American ideas espoused by Yarvin, Fuentes, and Carlson. Traditionally, ISI’s mission was to teach American ideals to curious students on college campuses. The mission of helping students search for truth is now replaced by the post-liberals’ lust for political power in Washington.

The Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College are not the only pillars of the modern Conservative Movement to subsidize @TCNetwork. Carlson was the headliner at ISI’s gala two years ago, and this year, one of its three $75,000 annual fellowships went to the Tucker Carlson Network. Before Burtka’s arrival, fellows were found at genuine journalism outlets, including  @WSJ, @USATODAY, @NRO, and @dallasnews.

What happened at Heritage and ISI in recent weeks underscores how a cadre of post-liberals has worked together, behind the scenes, to wrest control of conservative institutions from actual conservatives. They have quietly filled boardrooms with post-liberals, integralists, and other fellow travelers who disdain traditional conservatism’s central tenets of free markets, limited government, individual liberty, and personal responsibility. These usurpers of conservatism, as Yarvin puts it, find America’s core principles to be “historically leftist” and prevent the right from defeating the left both philosophically and at the ballot box.

The leaders of the postliberal project continue to be close friends with Carlson, Yarvin, and their ilk, to be open to discussion with the likes of Fuentes and other racists and antisemites, and to praise autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orban—and Carlson even lauds the “social values” of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro. They echo Yarvin’s call to overcome the fear of dictatorship and relinquish respect for representative government and the checks and balances the Founders established.

Traditional conservatives who believe in America’s Founding principles and look back at the Reagan Revolution as a step in the right direction need to wake up and understand the battle currently underway.

Heritage’s Founder and longtime ISI Chairman Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., presciently warned in the final article he penned in @NationalAffairs before his death this past July: “An existential identity crisis now grips the American right. A political movement once united by commitment to limited government, moral order, and a robust defense of American ideals now appears fractured, its purpose clouded by populist grievances and ideological drift.”

Supporters of ISI, Heritage, and other mainstream Conservative institutions must be on notice that the programs and purposes they are funding may no longer be what they think they are. Today is the time for choosing. We hope all conservatives will choose to fight on the side of William F. Buckley, Jr. and give no corner to those preaching white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, and bigotry. Onward!

Christopher Long, former President, Intercollegiate Studies Institute Thomas Lynch, former Chairman, Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Foreign Funding of Think Tanks

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments and businesses try to influence American politics and policy.

From the Quincy Institute: Foreign funding of think tanks

Foreign governments and foreign government-owned entities donated over $110 million in the past five years to the think tanks analyzed in this report. These contributions came from 54 different countries. Many think tanks have implemented policies against accepting foreign government funding, including several dark money think tanks, such as AEI and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Despite this, at least 65 percent (21 of 32) of the think tanks that publish a donor list have accepted foreign government funding since 2019, more than the number of think tanks that accepted Pentagon contractor and U.S. government funding. A majority of the top donor countries are U.S.–allied democracies, with a few notable exceptions, such as the United Arab Emirates, UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Since there is no legal requirement to disclose these contributions, think tanks may, in some cases, anonymize contributions from non-democratic countries for fear of sullying their reputations. Thus, these figures should be seen as a floor, not a ceiling, of foreign government funding at top think tanks in the United States. From 2021 to 2024, 89 percent of witnesses affiliated with think tanks that testified before HFAC are from organizations that take contributions from foreign governments.23

Liberty University and a "Think Tank"

Maggie Severns reports on Liberty Univesity's overt partisanship and its establishment of the Falkirk Center, a "think tank" that has not produced academic studies but instead puts out podcasts, social media and live events. Falkirk also does online advertising. 

The think tank — called the Falkirk Center, a portmanteau of Falwell’s name and that of GOP activist Charlie Kirk, who co-founded it — purchased campaign-season ads on Facebook, at least $50,000's worth of which were designated by the network as political ads, that promoted ... Republican candidates by name.

Liberty’s actions, detailed for the first time by POLITICO, suggest the university is pushing the boundaries of its status as a nonprofit organization under Section 501c(3) of the federal tax code, which forbids spending money on political campaigns. Liberty’s actions also go well beyond the traditional role of a university as a politically neutral institution of higher learning.

“The apparatus of the university has turned more and more towards political ends and concerns,” said Marybeth Baggett, a Liberty graduate who taught at the school from 2003 until this past spring. “Obviously the school is conservative, yes. But I don’t feel like it was ever so agenda-driven as it was in the last four of five years.”

Falwell resigned from his post in August, in the wake of a series of reports about his and his wife’s personal lives and use of university funds on businesses associated with friends and family members. Now, Liberty’s board of trustees appears torn over his use of Liberty resources for political activities.

...

"The Falkirk Center, to me, represents everything that was wrong with Liberty when Jerry [Falwell] was there,” said Karen Swallow Prior, a professor at Liberty for 21 years who left at the end of last school year. “It's brazenly partisan."

State Politics and Policy

Grossmann, p. 9: "Republicans, as the more nationalized of the two major American parties, had developed mature institutions – such as think tanks, state legislator associations, and grassroots networks -- to promote conservative goals."

Hertel-Fernandez & Skocpol

Across much of America, conservatives can mount powerful state legislative campaigns through three well-funded networks that operate as complements to one another. Think tanks affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN) spew out studies and prepare op-eds and legislative testimony. Paid state directors and staffers installed by Americans for Prosperity (AFP)sponsor bus tours, convene rallies and public forums, run radio and television ads, send mailers, and spur activists to contact legislators. And inside the legislatures themselves, many representatives and senators, especially Republicans, are members of ALEC, which invites them to serve alongside business lobbyists and right-wing advocacy groups on national task forces that prepare “model” bills that the legislators can advance at the state and local level, with assistance from ALEC staffers.

AND THE IRON LAW OF EMULATION CONTINUES...

Tom Steyer and The State Innovation Exchange 

The Troika:

• State Policy Network
• Americans for Prosperity
• ALEC 

The Policy:

• Model Legislation
• Liberals, not so much.

State polarization (update from p. 46 of Grossmann)

The obstacles:

• Path dependence, or as Robert Frost wrote, "way leads on to way."
• Retrenchment is harder than enactment.
• Feds encourage growth of state government.
• Courts may hinder activism.
• MARC:  Americans are ideologically conservative and operationally liberal.  See earlier post on coronavirus

The Anti-Greta

Desmond Butler and  Juliet Eilperin report at The Washington Post:

For climate skeptics, it’s hard to compete with the youthful appeal of global phenomenon Greta Thunberg. But one U.S. think tank hopes it’s found an answer: the anti-Greta.

Naomi Seibt is a 19-year-old German who, like Greta, is blond, eloquent and European. But Naomi denounces “climate alarmism,” calls climate consciousness “a despicably anti-human ideology,” and has even deployed Greta’s now famous “How dare you?” line to take on the mainstream German media.

“She’s a fantastic voice for free markets and for climate realism,” said James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, an influential libertarian think tank in suburban Chicago...

In December, Heartland headlined Naomi at its forum at the UN climate conference in Madrid, where Taylor described her as “the star” of the show. Last month, Heartland hired Naomi as the young face of its campaign to question the scientific consensus that human activity is causing dangerous global warming.

“Naomi Seibt vs. Greta Thunberg: whom should we trust?” asked Heartland in a digital video. Later this week, Naomi is set to make her American debut at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, a high-profile annual gathering just outside Washington of right-leaning activists.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Heartland’s tactics amount to an acknowledgment that Greta has touched a nerve, especially among teens and young adults. Since launching her protest two years ago outside the Swedish parliament at age 15, Greta has sparked youth protests across the globe and in 2019 was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” the youngest to ever win the honor.

"Covert Food Lobby Group"

In our textbook, we look at the many ways in which interest groups seek to influence public policy. Their philanthropy is often a form of lobbying:  donations can buy allies and curry the favor of elected officials who support the recipient.  They can also buy research.

At NYT, Andrew Jacobs reports on the International Life Sciences Institute, "an American nonprofit with an innocuous sounding name that has been quietly infiltrating government health and nutrition bodies around the world."

Created four decades ago by a top Coca-Cola executive, the institute now has branches in 17 countries. It is almost entirely funded by Goliaths of the agribusiness, food and pharmaceutical industries.

The organization, which championed tobacco interests during the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and the United States, has more recently expanded its activities in Asia and Latin America, regions that provide a growing share of food company profits. It has been especially active in China, India and Brazil, the world’s first, second and sixth most populous nations.

In China, the institute shares both staff and office space with the agency responsible for combating the country’s epidemic of obesity-related illness. In Brazil, ILSI representatives occupy seats on a number of food and nutrition panels that were previously reserved for university researchers.

...
 “What could possibly go wrong?” Amit Srivastava, the coordinator of the advocacy group India Resource Center, asked sarcastically. “To have a covert food lobby group deciding public health policy is wrong and a blatant conflict of interest.”

...
 After decades largely operating under the radar, ILSI is coming under increasing scrutiny by health advocates in the United States and abroad who say it is little more than a front group advancing the interests of the 400 corporate members that provide its $17 million budget, among them Coca-Cola, DuPont, PepsiCo, General Mills and Danone.

...
In the 40 years since its creation, ILSI has methodically cultivated allies in academia and government through the conferences it sponsors around the world, and by recruiting influential scientists to committees that work on issues like food safety, agrochemicals or the promotion of probiotic supplements.

Although conference topics seldom touch on politically contentious matters, critics say they serve a larger purpose: cultivating scientists and officials who might normally avoid an event directly sponsored by McDonald’s or Kellogg’s.

“It also helps that they are always held at five-star hotels, and that they serve you lunch,” said Dr. Shweta Khandelwal, a nutritionist with the nonprofit Public Health Foundation of India. “We certainly don’t have the money to pay for people’s lunch.”

Party-Aligned Think Tanks and Congress

E.J. Fagan at LegBranch.org:

As they have grown, these party-aligned think tanks have become more influential in Congressional debates. One way that I measure the changing influence of think tanks over time is to observe how frequently they testify in hearings. The figure below charts the number of witnesses from the six think tanks per hearing against the staff witnesses from the CBO, CRS, and OTA. The two trends are mirror images of each other. When Congress cut the budgets of its analytical organizations in the mid-90s, there was a subsequent explosion in think tank witnesses. While this explosion subsided after the 104th Congress, a new equilibrium was established for much of the late-90s and early 2000s. Finally, the series accelerates again in the mid-2000s, as the analytical organization budgets suffered further cuts.

The Working Class, Religion, and Community Service

David Brooks at NYT:

Washington think tanks are undergoing a fundamental evolution. A lot of them, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, were built to advise parties that no longer exist. They were built for a style of public debate — based on social science evidence and congressional hearings that are more than just show trials — that no longer exists. Many people at these places have discovered that they have more in common with one another than they do with the extremists on their own sides.

So suddenly there is a flurry of working together across ideological lines. Next week, for example, the group Opportunity America, with Brookings and A.E.I., will release a bipartisan agenda called “Work, Skills, Community: Restoring Opportunity for the Working Class.”

Written by a wide array of scholars, the report starts with the truth that the working class has been mostly ignored by the rest of society. Government has welfare programs to serve the poor and they have programs like 529 savings accounts to subsidize the rich. But there’s very little for families making, say, $50,000 a year.

From the report:

The role of faith in working-class families is well-documented. As Robert Jones, the CEO of the polling firm PPRI, has explained it, “Churches have served, for most of the nation’s life, as pipelines to all kinds of civic engagement—and not just because they hand out voter-registration cards or have them in the lobby. We actually see a link between all kinds of civic activity and church activity.”Yet, participation in this once-central institution has declined greatly, with weekly church attendance falling from 40 percent in the 1970s to 28 percent in the 2000s among those with a high school degree or some college (figure 19).

Mirroring this decline in churchgoing, the working class is also participating less actively in other civic institutions (figure 20). According to a PPRI survey, white working-class Americans, which they define as people without a college degree who are paid by the hour or the job, have lower rates of participation in sports teams, book clubs and neighborhood associations than their more-educated peers (30 percent to 49 percent).52 Our definition of working class includes people from all races without bachelor’s degrees, and among them too, rates of civic engagement—participation in service, school or community associations, or recreational or religious organizations—are all distressingly low and more like rates for low-income than high-income adults. According to data from the Civic Engagement Supplement to the Current Population Survey, no more than 15 percent of working-class men and women participate annually in any of these activities.

PAC Workaround

Kate Ackley at Roll Call:

Lobbyists for business interests say they’re implementing workarounds to get to know the 32 incoming freshman Democratic House members who have sworn off corporate political action committee dollars.

Those newbies, in town this week for member orientation, comprise the majority of what will be a total of 45 representatives and senators in the 116th Congress who have pledged to reject donations from business PACs.

Instead of PAC dollars, corporate interests plan to rely on individual personal donations from their executives, lobbyists and other consultants, instead of the collective contributions from corporate PACs. In addition, lobbyists will be sure to attend meet-and-greets happening over the coming days and weeks with the new members.

Some lobbyists said they also would rely on policy partnerships with think tanks, grassroots activist organizations and charities — as well as shopping op-eds focused on specific lawmakers — for entree to the newly-elected members of Congress.

...

CR Wooters, a lobbyist at Mehlman Castagnetti Rosen & Thomas and a former Democratic congressional aide, says corporate clients and the incoming lawmakers will have much to discuss on policy issues, including proposals on paid leave or increasing the federal minimum wage — and PACs aren’t a necessary conduit to those talks.

“Those could be very productive conversations,” Wooters said, as lobbyists educate new members about issues they may never have encountered before. “Businesses can also spend a lot of time educating new members on trade and tariffs, or maybe you have no idea what cybersecurity is. Now you’re having to deal with giant issues like health care and education.”

“The old way of saying, ‘We’ll write them a check’ just feels lazy and dated to me,” Wooters said.

Saudi Influence, Continued

At The Washington Post,  Tom Hamburger , Beth Reinhard and Justin Wm. Moyer report:

In the past two years, the Saudis have intensified their efforts to cement the U.S. relationship. The kingdom’s spending on U.S. lobbying and consulting, which had dropped from $14.3 million in 2015 to $7.7 million in 2016, surged to $27.3 million last year, according to public records. More than 200 people have registered as agents on behalf of Saudi interests since 2016, according to lobbying documents posted by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Among those on the payroll have been some of Washington’s top public relations and lobbying shops: the McKeon Group, helmed by Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, the former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee; BGR Group, a firm founded by prominent Republicans Ed Rogers and Haley Barbour; the Glover Park Group, which was launched by Democratic political strategists including Joe Lockhart and Carter Eskew; and the now-defunct Podesta Group, the former firm of Democratic superlobbyist Tony Podesta.

Rogers and Eskew are both contributing opinion writers for The Washington Post. Last week, both of their firms announced they were dropping their representation of Saudi Arabia. The Post had told them they could not continue to write for The Post and lobby for Saudi Arabia, according to spokeswoman Kristine Coratti Kelly.

Separately, Saudi money — and funds from its close ally, the United Arab Emirates — have also flowed into think tanks throughout Washington, including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Brookings Institution and the Middle East Institute. All three said last week that they are ending or reconsidering Saudi grants.

“One of the foreign policy truisms force-fed in Washington is that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have a special, unbreakable relationship,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat and leading critic of the war in Yemen. “At least everybody who is smart and knows about foreign policy who walks into your office tells you that. But as it turns out, a lot of those people are getting gulf money.”

One of the biggest beneficiaries of Saudi money has been the Middle East Institute, which touts itself as “an unbiased source of information and analysis on this critical region.” The organization is chaired by Richard A. Clarke, who held senior national security positions during the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Between 2016 and 2017, the think tank received between $1.25 million and $4 million in funding from Saudi interests, according to its public disclosures.

Heritage and Trump

When Reagan came to office, the Heritage  Foundation influenced policy with a thick, detailed handbook of proposals.  When Trump came in, the think tank provided not only proposals but names.

Jonathan Mahler at NYT Magazine:

The Trump team may not have been prepared to staff the government, but the Heritage Foundation was. In the summer of 2014, a year before Trump even declared his candidacy, the right-wing think tank had started assembling a 3,000-name searchable database of trusted movement conservatives from around the country who were eager to serve in a post-Obama government. The initiative was called the Project to Restore America, a dog-whistle appeal to the so-called silent majority that foreshadowed Trump’s own campaign slogan.

...
Today it is clear that for all the chaos and churn of the current administration, Heritage has achieved a huge strategic victory. Those who worked on the project estimate that hundreds of the people the think tank put forward landed jobs, in just about every government agency. Heritage’s recommendations included some of the most prominent members of Trump’s cabinet: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos (whose in-laws endowed Heritage’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society), Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions and many more. Dozens of Heritage employees and alumni also joined the Trump administration — at last count 66 of them, according to Heritage, with two more still awaiting Senate confirmation. It is a kind of critical mass that Heritage had been working toward for nearly a half-century.

Here's how the Trump policy shop worked in the 2016 campaign:
Staffers would watch Trump's speeches on TV, then Google policy-type stuff that seemed to match what he was saying, then write white papers.
Or they'd just browse the Heritage site. https://t.co/GtwdfRZIGP

— Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) June 22, 2018

Thush and Erica L. Green describe Heritage's role in Trump's agenda:

Benjamin Hobbs, a former employee of Heritage and the Charles Koch Foundation, who received a top policy job at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was a driving force behind a proposal to raise rents on some of the poorest residents of subsidized housing by as much as 44 percent, according to two administration officials.
In a recent meeting, Mr. Hobbs raised eyebrows by claiming the increases were intended, in part, to persuade unmarried couples to move in with each other to pool rent payments, according to two people in attendance.

Mr. Carson, his boss, broadly supports the idea of reducing dependence, aides said, but was lukewarm on the idea. The backlash to the proposal was so severe that Mr. Carson, speaking this month in Detroit, wavered when asked whether he planned to back legislation needed to achieve the hikes.

Rick Dearborn, another former employee at Heritage, who served as deputy chief of staff for Mr. Trump during his first year in office, steered a total of about 70 Heritage-linked experts into policy roles in the White House and various cabinet departments.
At the same time, Mr. Bannon, who was Mr. Trump’s most influential aide at the dawn of the presidency, enlisted one of Heritage’s founders, Edwin J. Feulner Jr., to help create a list of action items on scaling back social welfare programs days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Heritage had just received a multimillion-dollar commitment from Mr. Bannon’s former benefactor, Rebekah Mercer, according to two people familiar with the gift. Much of the cash was informally earmarked, they said, to help Mr. Trump expand his near nascent policy operation, according to two people familiar with the details of the donation.

By early 2017, Heritage produced a government reorganization plan that served as the initial template for Thursday’s announcement. They also drafted a list of 334 policy recommendations, about half of them aimed at domestic programs for poor people or Obama-era regulations protecting low-income consumers.

“Once the transition started, we seized on the opportunity to help out and define the policy agenda of the next administration,” said Paul Winfree, a social policy expert at Heritage, who once worked for the Domestic Policy Council coordinating administration policy of social welfare programs and entitlements.

“Even when many thought Trump had no chance, Heritage researchers and alumni were working hard over on implementation plans,” said Mr. Winfree. “We went to work while much attention was paid to the palace intrigue or on personalities. Having one big personality isn’t enough to change a government. Having many good people, who know and trust each other, in the right places is the key.”

The Changing Face of Think Tanks

At American Affairs, Ignacio Delcavoli finds that think tanks are paying their executive much more than in the past.

There also appears to be no significant correlation between the change in an organization’s impact over time and growth in executive compensation, much less the dramatic increases in impact that would be required to justify the high compensation growth shown above. On the other hand, there does appear to be some evidence of a change in focus at most major think tanks. Almost across the board, h-index scores (a more academic measure) have noticeably declined, while op-eds (typically written to advance a more immediate political concern) have noticeably increased. Various explanations can be offered, but one interpretation is that think tanks, initially conceived of as “universities without students,” are now mostly functioning as advocacy organizations.
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Think tanks are widely known to be breeding grounds for congressional staffers and presidential appointees (despite Trump’s relative unpopularity at think tanks, the current administration is no exception), and they have numerous points of contact with politicians. Thus a more significant measure of impact might be the number of think-tank fellows appointed to executive or legislative roles or the number of nonpublic meetings held with politicians and their staffs. In other words, think tanks today may mainly function as lobbying firms, and many donors may evaluate their impact primarily on that basis.

This was essentially the conclusion of a 2014 paper by Ken Silverstein entitled “Pay to Play Think Tanks: Institutional Corruption and the Industry of Ideas.”8 Silverstein details the many ways in which think-tank agendas (across the ideological spectrum) are increasingly driven by donors, including large corporations and foreign governments. In exchange for larger contributions, many think tanks allow donors to set or veto research topics, sponsor public events under the aegis of a nonprofit organization, enjoy private access to influential politicians or foreign leaders, and so on. Silverstein reports that scholars at the Center for American Progress were told to speak to the development office before publishing on topics that might adversely affect donor interests. Silverstein also describes situations in which think tanks worked to burnish the image of foreign governments and corporations after receiving large donations from them.

Facebook Lobbying

Peter Overby at NPR:

You hire a lot of lobbyists who are well-connected," said Lee Drutman, who studies lobbying at the think tank New America. He laid out how the companies work Washington.

Facebook opened its D.C. office when it was five years old — and already worth billions. It routinely hires lots of top-tier, veteran lobbyists, as does Google.

The current lobbying environment is ideal. Many lawmakers still don't fully grasp the technology. Congress long ago defunded its in-house technology office, which could have taught them.

Facebook reported its 2017 lobbying cost at nearly $12 million. Google spent even more: $18 million.

Drutman said it's important to "spread a lot of money around."

Some of the money goes to think tanks, where experts can shape policy debates on Capitol Hill. For one example, New America, where Drutman works, has had grants from both Google and Facebook.

Then there's campaign money. As Drutman put it, "People get that warm glow of 'This company's a good friend to my campaign.'"

Facebook's PAC and employees made political contributions totaling $4.5 million in the 2016 cycle, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. For Google's parent company, Alphabet, the total was nearly $8 million.

"Then you go in and you make your case," Drutman said. "Google and Facebook have become so central in our economy, it's not surprising that they have become tremendous players here."

Note the part where the Senator asks the corporate CEO to have the CEO's lobbyists (not the Senator's staff) write the regulations. That's how corporate power works in Washington these days. Only usually, it's not this blatant. pic.twitter.com/Evycgaoqt8

— Lee Drutman (@leedrutman) April 14,  

Measuring the Impact of a Think Tank

Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, explains at The Harvard Business Review that it is difficult to measure the impact of a think tank.

Instead of direct impact measures, we realized, think tanks need to develop proxy impact measures, by searching for where their supply curve intersects with competitive demand in the marketplace of ideas. We had to identify and track the products that leaders consume at some cost to themselves and in a direct trade-off with alternatives. In isolation, each of these metrics is a single point of limited utility. But considered together, they paint a pointillistic picture that helps us assess the impact of our work.

Here are just two examples from the suite of proxy metrics we’ve come to use:

The most prestigious national newspapers each receive about 1,000 unsolicited op-ed submissions every week. The “market” for real estate on those papers’ opinion pages is unbelievably competitive, and editorial staffers ruthlessly reject everything except what they believe readers most need and want. That selectivity can reveal competitive demand for our product. Thus, although total op-eds written per year is just an output metric, the number of op-eds our scholars publish in a defined set of the most competitive outlets constitutes a viable proxy measure for impact. Though far from a catchall figure, this metric has one particularly useful aspect: The data is by definition public and thus allows comparison with peers and competitors. Every year to date, AEI has maintained a lead.

We do the same thing with congressional testimony. Most policy experts want to testify on the Hill, but they can’t just call up the Senate switchboard and get on the docket. The Senate calls you. So although nobody believes that public testimonies are the only way think tanks shape the debate, they do offer one useful angle for measuring impact. And again, it is helpful that everyone’s data is a matter of public record. When we initially analyzed these numbers, during the 110th Congress (2007–2009), AEI was in fourth place among think tanks in terms of congressional testimony. By the 111th Congress we were number one, and we’ve maintained that position ever since.

Google Muscles Think Tanks

Previous posts have described how interest groups try to buy influence with think tanks.

At The New York Times, Jonathan Taplin writes that the New America Foundation just fired scholar Barry Lynn.

What horrible, dangerous act had Mr. Lynn committed? He wrote a piece for New America’s website in support of the $2.7 billion fine the European Union levied against Google for antitrust violations in June. That post fit perfectly with the work of the Open Markets initiative he lead, which has been one of the strongest voices in Washington calling for more antitrust scrutiny of our economy. It’s the platform Mr. Lynn, Matt Stoller and Lina Khan have used to call for regulatory scrutiny of the tech monopolies like Google, Amazon and Facebook as these companies increasingly come to dominate our economy. But Google’s financial power at New America was apparently such that it could close the group down. Though Ms. Slaughter denies the connection between Google’s funding and her decision, the implication seems clear. A firm whose motto was “Don’t Be Evil” has no interest in being called a monopoly by a think tank it funds.

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The Wall Street Journal’s report found that since 2009, Google had directly funded 100 papers written by academics and 100 papers that came through think tanks funded by Google. These papers make their way to the congressional committees and regulatory agencies that are charged with overseeing Google’s business, like the Federal Trade Commission.

Gutting CBO

Casey Burgat and C. Jarrett Dieterle write at National Review Online:

Rather than allow the agency to continue to conduct the independent analyses it has performed since it opened its doors in 1974, [Rep. Mark] Meadows wants to turn the CBO into an “aggregator” of cost-and-benefit scores performed by private think tanks. In other words, Meadows wants the CBO to serve as a middleman and collect scores from nongovernmental organizations, many of which have an admitted ideological leaning, to create a “composite score” on which lawmakers would rely.

Shifting to an aggregator model would fundamentally alter the CBO’s charter and foundational purpose. The agency was created to generate estimates of legislative costs that are independent of the executive branch’s budget shop, the Office of Management and Budget. The CBO was created by Congress, for Congress, so members would no longer be forced to blindly trust the budget numbers provided by the president’s administration.

If legislative cost estimates were outsourced to think tanks, Congress would give up a rare and vital source of internal, independent information. Furthermore, it’s far from clear that think tanks would even have the manpower or the desire to generate scores for the hundreds of pieces of legislation that are reported each year. In fact, the CBO itself has the resources to analyze only about one-tenth of the bills introduced each year.

Foreign Influence

Molly Ball writes at The Atlantic:

In Washington, it can be impossible to discern what is on the level and what is not, what is paranoia and what is justified. Did a bunch of conservative bloggers suddenly develop opinions about the Malaysian regime in 2011 out of sincere conviction, or because they were being paid off? (It turned out to be the latter.) Why did several prominent think tanks suddenly hold discussions and publish reports in favor of Norwegian oil drilling? (They were getting millions of dollars from the Norwegian government, according to a New York Times investigation.)

Foreign propaganda, which is legal lobbying as long as it’s disclosed, pokes into everyday life in odd ways. A few years ago, numerous D.C. buses and Metro stations were suddenly festooned with an awareness campaign for a decades-past war crime in Azerbaijan, the Khojaly Massacre. Regular D.C. commuters were left to wonder what the posters were about—in this case, the geopolitical rivalry between Azerbaijan, an oil-rich dictatorship, and its politically powerful neighbor, Armenia. According to a public-relations staffer whose firm turned down the work, the campaign actually had a primary target audience of one: the wife of a top official in Azerbaijan’s government, who frequently came to D.C. for shopping trips.
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Certain countries’ ambassadors are D.C.-famous for their socializing—these days the master is Yousef Al Otaiba of the United Arab Emirates, whose country’s oil wealth bankrolls star-studded galas, donations to charities and think tanks, and constant schmoozing at the highest levels. In 2013, Otaiba threw a 50th birthday party for the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough; this January, he hosted an Alfalfa Dinner after-party at Cafe Milano whose attendees included Rex Tillerson, Jeff Bezos, presidential adviser Gary Cohn, and multiple members of the Cabinet and Congress. Those who have taken his private-jet junkets to the Formula One Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi include a former Air Force chief of staff.

“They’re all being wined and dined, it’s incredibly glamorous, and he has put himself in a position of getting extraordinary access to all kinds of information,” a prominent D.C. socializer and sometime Otaiba guest told me, on the condition his name not be used. “The influence is palpable, but people don’t want to see it, because they enjoy the largesse.” Otaiba’s web of connections is obviously aimed at improving his country’s stature and relations with the U.S.; it is also alleged to have influenced American policy in the Mideast. If you are a D.C. climber, you can hardly do better than to be on his invitation list.