A Conversation with the Quincy Institute’s Nick Cleveland-Stout (Part 1 of 2)

Nick Cleveland-Stout is a research fellow in the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, D.C. As a 2023 Fulbright Scholar at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, he examined the influence of American think tanks in Brazil. He is also a former Marcellus Policy Fellow at the John Quincy Adams Society.

Earlier this month, the Quincy Institute published a report co-authored by Cleveland-Stout and Democratizing Foreign Policy director Ben Freeman, Big Ideas and Big Money: Think Tank Funding in America. The report was released as the Quincy Institute unveiled a new online repository of data, the Think Tank Funding Tracker.

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

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

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

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

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

Cleveland-Stout was kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation earlier this month. The less than 14-and-a-half-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. During the first part, we talk about the report and the repository, the methodology on which they rely, and the transparency scale created for them.

“We’re talking about think tanks that have massive annual budgets and so, of course, they’re taking money from all sorts of different donors,” according to Cleveland-Stout—who, in response to a question, says that Quincy itself does not accept donations from foreign governments, the U.S. government, or Pentagon contractors. Some of Quincy’s strongest support, which it discloses, is from philanthropic entities of George Soros and Charles Koch.

Cleveland-Stout is also keen to quickly note that all numbers “in the database, they’re all conservative estimates. It’s really just the tip of the iceberg—in part because of the funding ranges” that the think tanks use and in part because of the different, and sometimes-low, degrees of transparency.

We want to encourage think tanks to be far more forthcoming in their funding sources, but we want to also just report as accurately as we can on what we did find. … We went through all of the financial disclosures of these think tanks and just, transaction by transaction, built out this website.

The primary purpose of the project, Cleveland-Stout tells me, “is for disclosure of conflicts of interest to be present. That’s really the biggest thing, right? … We made this project largely with journalists in mind. We want good-faith journalists to use this database in order to disclose to their readers whether there are certain conflicts of interest present.” He adds, “I think the best thing to do is to let the readers make that decision for themselves. If a think tank as an institution is receiving funding from one of these sources and then they’re asked about” a specific subject area in which the funder may have an aim or interest, “you know, you might want to take that with a grain of salt.”

With the transparency scale, he says, “we wanted something as part of this project that would really focus on those think tanks that are less transparent”—relying on “what sometimes gets called ‘dark money,’ think tanks that don’t disclose anything about their funding.” In creating the scale, “we wanted to try and be as objective about the gradations of transparency as possible.”

In the conversation’s second part, Cleveland-Stout discusses the upward trend in foreign funding of American think tanks, the applicability of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and lobbying-disclosure law to U.S. think tanks, and some of the report’s recommendations for policy reform and a “culture shift.”

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This article first appeared in the Giving Review on January 27, 2025.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-conversation-with-the-quincy-institutes-nick-cleveland-stout-part-1-of-2/