A Conversation with the Quincy Institute’s Nick Cleveland-Stout (Part 2 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. In the first part of our discussion, which is here, we talk about the report and the repository, the methodology on which they rely, and the transparency scale created for them.

The less than just less than 16-minute video below is the second part, during which we talk about the upward trend in foreign funding of American think tanks, the applicability of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and lobbying-disclosure law to U.S. think tanks, and some of the report’s recommendations for policy and a “culture shift.”

Cleveland-Stout wanted to be careful “to draw broad trends since we only went back five years in the data,” he says, “but I’ll tell you, we saw an increase of over 30% in foreign-government funding of think tanks just in those five years.”

Regulatorily right now, “Think tanks are a little bit of the Wild West,” Cleveland-Stout tells me. “If a think tank is engaging in political activities on behalf of a foreign government pretty explicitly, it could fall into” the category of entities to which FARA applies, “but there’s kind of been a reticence to use FARA for think tankers, I think in part because it would just be a huge shift, right?

“It’s an area that I think I will certainly be keeping my eye on, whether” the Justice Department’s “FARA unit decides to come down harder on the think tanks,” he says. “Folks in the think-tank world just want more understanding from the FARA unit on” the statute’s applicability to them and how far exemptions from it can be stretched—so that would be one specific helpful reform, among others.

More largely, “what we’re asking for is not regulation in the strictest sense,” but transparency, according to Cleveland-Stout. “It’s getting think tanks to simply disclose their donors.” He acknowledges the objections, listing some of them, but says “the status quo is not good enough.”

“I hope that people take a look at” the online Think Tank Funding Tracker, he concludes. “I’m curious what kind of conclusions people come to, because … looking at the data, I have my own biases and this is what I look at and I think is interesting. So I want to hear from folks.”

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This article first appeared in the Giving Review on January 28, 2025.

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