The Do-Not-Think Tank

So when Lynn issued a press release on June 27, 2017, congratulating the European commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager, for fining Google $2.7 billion, it could hardly have come as a surprise to anyone at New America. “Google’s market power is one of the most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today,” Lynn wrote, and he called on U.S. regulators “to build upon this important precedent, both in respect to Google and to other dominant platform monopolists including Amazon.”

Yet it was a surprise to New America’s most-prominent donor, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Google and Schmidt have given more than $21 million to New America in recent years, and Schmidt chaired the think tank’s board for eight years. So displeased was he by Lynn’s praise for the EU decision that, according to one of the current co-chairs of the board, Jonathan Soros, he asked to be removed as chairman emeritus. Days later, Lynn and his team of 10 full-time employees were out.

When a New York Times story about the ouster appeared online on August 30, Anne-Marie Slaughter immediately tweeted, “This story is false.” This was followed by another tweet a few hours later saying, “Let me be clearer in an era of fake news; facts are largely right but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong.” She would later delete her first tweet.

Coming on the heels of the August firing of engineer James Damore for challenging what he described as an ideologically liberal “echo chamber” at the company, this episode has seen Google do the hardest thing possible in Washington—it’s brought left and right together to question the company’s power and generated a wave of anti-monopoly fervor.

The controversy also revives perennial questions about how think tanks operate: How do institutions that take tens of millions of dollars from corporations and wealthy individuals maintain their integrity? Can policymakers and the public trust the research that emerges? And in an age that demands transparency, in which missteps and scandals are instantly magnified thanks to social media, how can research institutions pursue both relevance and rectitude?

For two years, I received financial support—$50,000 a year—from New America to study and write about technology. After my fellowship ended in 2014, I was invited to continue my relationship with the foundation as an unpaid Future Tense fellow, part of a team that sponsored debates, panels, and book events on technology-related subjects in conjunction with Arizona State University and Slate. Everyone I know at New America is hardworking and intellectually curious.

Steve Coll was president when I joined the foundation, and I recall him emphasizing that as a fellow, I would face no interference with my work. I never did. The intellectual freedom and the generous money offered by New America make such fellowships deeply coveted. Giving people (mainly journalists but also independent scholars) who usually have pressing deadlines the time and space to work on more slowly developing projects is of immense value.

I used to joke that I was a token at the think tank not because of my conservative political views (though the overwhelming majority of folks on staff at New America lean left) but because of my skepticism about the blue-skies promises made by technology companies. At Future Tense events, in my writings, and during internal New America meetings, I never once felt pressure to moderate my views; indeed, on many occasions I was encouraged to make my criticism as public as possible to balance out the rampant techno-enthusiasm of my colleagues. Other former fellows, such as Evgeny Morozov and Franklin Foer, also pursued projects during their time at New America that directly challenged the pretensions of Big Tech (a fact that Slaughter would repeatedly cite when responding to the backlash over Lynn’s firing).

After news of the Open Markets team’s ouster at New America broke on August 30, I spoke to current and former fellows about what had happened. Most were shocked about how the immediate situation had been handled and despondent over what the fallout would mean for both the reputation of the institution and their own work. The next morning, I resigned my position as a Future Tense fellow.

On September 2, a group of 25 current and former fellows sent a letter to New America’s board outlining our concerns about the ouster of the Open Markets program and asking questions about Google’s role at the foundation. Our point was that freedom from donor influence was indispensable to fellows’ individual credibility as well as that of the institution.

Slaughter quickly moved from aggressive tweeting to damage control. She posted a defensive explanation of the firing of Lynn on the website Medium, maligning him as a colleague while claiming to be brave enough to speak the “truth” even though it was “messy and hard.” She went so far as to claim that Lynn’s new organization—Open Markets had quickly re-formed as an independent nonprofit called Citizens Against Monopoly—was “the opening salvo of one group of Democrats versus another group of Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 election, at a time when I personally think the country faces far greater challenges of racism, violence, a broken political system, and geographic and partisan divisions so great that we are losing any common sense of what we stand and strive for as a country.” Faced with ethical scrutiny of her leadership, Slaughter tried to distract people by pointing to racism and violence in American society.

There were a few positive comments made about Slaughter’s Medium article, including one from New America board member James Fallows, who said it “recognizes big issues” and “details of this case less pat than they may seem.” But the overwhelming reaction was negative. It was summed up best by a commentator on the site, “Democracy Expert,” who posted as succinct reaction the Latin tag Res ipsa loquitur. “The thing speaks for itself.”

Leading a think tank is a challenging task that marries the petty fiefdoms and grievances of academia with a constant pressure to raise money. Today’s think tank president or CEO isn’t merely a manager; he or she is expected to be a media-savvy public intellectual (or “thought leader” if you prefer Silicon Valley lingo), making regular appearances on television and in op-ed pages while cultivating a large following on social media. The pay for the job is handsome; Slaughter earns more than half a million dollars a year at New America.

Eric Schmidt recruited Slaughter in 2013 when he was chairman of New America’s board of directors. The board wanted a higher profile for the organization, and the former dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, who had served as director of policy planning under Hillary Clinton at the State Department, seemed the perfect hire.

Slaughter dropped “Foundation” from New America’s name and exchanged the group’s dowdy offices for sleeker digs, complete with a large conference room called the Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab. New America’s annual meetings started adopting the slick optics of a TEDx conference, with speakers such as Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and Jeff Flake featured alongside business leaders like Kevin Martin, a vice president at Facebook, and David Wiley, the chief academic officer of Lumen Learning. Rhetoric about how New America was tackling the problems of the “Digital Age” cropped up more and more frequently. “New America is committed to renewing America in the Digital Age, though a combination of big ideas, technology and policy,” Slaughter said in 2016, in a typical press release.

Every Washington think tank rebrands itself every few decades—and nearly every one has its share of internal Machiavellian intrigue and scandal related to funding. In 2014, the Washington Post asked “Who funds the new Brookings?” and outlined how the city’s oldest think tank, the Brookings Institution, had pursued an aggressive money-raising strategy that included soliciting donations from corporations and foreign governments, including more than $20 million from Qatar. The New York Times also uncovered increased foreign money flowing into think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Atlantic Council.

Ken Silverstein wrote a lengthy exposé in the Nation in 2013 outlining the many corporate and foreign donors to the progressive Center for American Progress (founded in 2003 by John Podesta, a White House chief of staff during the Clinton administration) and asked, for example, why CAP had not disclosed the money it received from alternative-energy companies when one of its fellows was praising those companies in congressional testimony. Silverstein argued that think tanks “effectively serve as unregistered lobbyists.”

The question he was really asking, however, is the one that bedevils every leader of a think tank: How do you measure influence?

The think tank appeared in Washington in the early 20th century thanks to the largesse of a few individuals—Andrew Carnegie set up the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for example, and Robert Brookings launched the Brookings Institution. These were avowedly nonpartisan and scholarly in their focus, with a mission to educate the public and the political class about a range of policy issues. Over the century, the number of think tanks grew exponentially and includes specialized groups such as the RAND Corporation and the Council on Foreign Relations as well as more political ones like the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation and the libertarian Cato Institute. And although often on opposing sides of policy debates, they operated along similar lines: churning out policy papers and serving as comfortable way stations for White House officials when their party was out of power. (These were the days before former presidents left office with lavishly funded personal foundations where they migrated with their staffs to continue to “lend our wisdom,” as the home page of the Obama Foundation boasts.)

Think tanks used to have straightforward measurements of their clout: They would point to legislation that relied on their research, books published by their scholars, and commentary by their staffers in newspapers or on television. Most also employed a few key figures who didn’t generate a lot of earned media, generally men and women with long tours of duty in government or the academy whose experience at the highest levels guaranteed they were people of substance.

Today it is harder to be heard above the relentless hum of information, and there is more competition for attention and resources. As a result, think tanks have started to function more like brands than quasi-academic institutions. But the corporatization of think tanks, like the corporatization of higher education, has consequences for what those institutions produce and for how they treat the people who work for them. In higher education, corporatization has created bloated, expensive college administrations that cater to the whims of their “customers” (what students are called these days). In the think tank world, references to a scholar’s influence on the world of ideas have given way to metrics and jargon and management-speak about “deliverables” and “returns on investment” and “synergy.”

Development departments within think tanks have also gained in influence; at many places, including New America, administrators sit in on discussions of scholars’ work, the better to coordinate fundraising efforts. Silverstein reported that CAP fellows told him they “were very clearly instructed to check with the think tank’s development team before writing anything that might upset contributors.” These tensions exist in think tanks regardless of where they rest on the political spectrum; the leadership meltdown at the Heritage Foundation this spring, which led to the ouster of its president, exposed serious disagreements about how politically engaged the think tank should be and how its political efforts should be funded.

So why is New America receiving sudden scrutiny for what think tanks have been doing for years? Some of the outrage can be explained by the fact that even people unfamiliar with the think tank world interact with Google on a daily basis, unlike with, say, Qatar. Stories about Google’s influence are international news. But it’s also that tech companies like Google have become formidable powers in Washington in a short span of time—pouring money into both progressive and conservative think tanks while also spending heavily on more traditional lobbying efforts focused on Capitol Hill.

During the Obama administration, Google representatives were at the White House constantly; more than once a week, on average, from the time the president took office until October 2015, according to the Intercept, and approximately 250 people went from working for Obama to working for Google (or vice-versa). The company’s lobbying efforts show no signs of abating with the Trump administration, either. As the Washington Post reported in July, Google “spent the most it ever has in a single quarter trying to influence elected officials in Washington,” according to lobbying disclosure forms. Companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Uber have followed suit.

This, combined with Silicon Valley’s oft-stated contempt for the slow and messy business of public-policy-making, should have people concerned—even those of us who defend a free market in which businesses are allowed to pursue and defend their self-interests.

Yet the gravest danger is not the heavy hand of Big Brother but self-censorship. You don’t have to agree with a single word that Barry Lynn and his colleagues said or wrote about monopolies to understand that what happened to them at New America will have a chilling effect on the work of others—and not just in think tanks.

Google, Facebook, and the other large technology companies fund a great deal of academic research. As NPR technology reporter Aarti Shahani reported the day after the New America story broke, “Yesterday, I called people whom I know get money from Google. I spoke with this one professor who was like, ‘You know, there’s an area of research I’ve thought about doing to look at the Communications Decency Act, which basically protects Google and other Internet companies from being liable for fake news and slander.’ The professor’s not touching it because [he] gets money from Google.” The Google Transparency Project, a nonprofit organization, found more than 300 research papers published between 2005 and 2017 “on public policy matters of interest to Google that were in some way funded by the company,” for which Google spent many millions. “Academics did not disclose the Google funding in nearly two-thirds of cases,” the group reported.

On September 6, New America hosted a lengthy all-staff meeting to discuss the previous week’s events—the meeting was declared off-the-record, which speaks volumes itself. A few minutes before it began, Jonathan Soros emailed a letter to staffers that signaled the board’s intent to stand behind Slaughter and doubled-down on her claim that it was “a pattern of behavior by Barry that merited his termination” and not Google’s role at the institution.

The letter was oddly conspiratorial in tone. Soros claimed the press coverage of New America was “the result of a targeted communications campaign” and that “the Open Markets team successfully seeded a sympathetic article in the New York Times.” New America, he wrote, was simply “collateral damage” of the Open Markets team’s broader challenge to Google. Although there were nods to the need for New America to explore “ways to codify standards” and plenty of praise for “transparency,” there is little evidence that, going forward, it will be anything but business as usual. And, as reported by Wired, in the all-staff meeting, Slaughter adopted Washington’s favorite way to make PR problems go away: promising to “form a committee to review and establish standards for interaction between donors and New America leadership.” At the meeting, one of the few voices to praise Slaughter’s handling of the crisis, according to Wired, was Alan Davidson, the man who launched Google’s first lobbying office in Washington in 2005 and went on to serve in Obama’s Commerce Department. Davidson, now a Public Interest Technology Fellow at New America, praised Slaughter and echoed her criticism of Lynn.

There was certainly no recognition that what drove the response to the events at New America is the same thing that has brought Google increasing skepticism from both left and right: the company’s unparalleled power. Google’s influence has grown not just in the corner of the ideas industry that includes Washington think tanks, but broadly throughout our culture. Its power and money might lead to censorship (and self-censorship) without its ever needing to issue a directive to a think tank president.

In an ideal world, think tanks offer a place both for policy-minded scholarship and for refugees from politics, academia, and the media who might otherwise have no institutional support. At their best, they generate ideas that can improve policymaking and inform the public. But pay-for-play is a deepening ethical challenge for these institutions.

In 2015, Washington Monthly featured a lengthy article on “rethinking the think tank.” In it, a pair of writers lamented the political polarization of think tanks in a hyperpartisan era and argued that “a plethora of specialized research institutions funded by trade associations, corporations, and partisan donors on both right and left have led many to question the objectivity of the policy positions adopted.”

The solution proposed was a wonky restatement of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra, “Move fast and break things.” Think tanks should embrace a “minimum viable policy product” in their work, the authors argued. “That’s a meaningful bit of jargon that adapts the hugely successful Silicon Valley concept of bringing products to market just as quickly as they can be made into semi-usable form. Spending years debating a policy problem without concrete proposals for change can alienate people. We have to be quicker to offer proposed solutions.” This approach, they noted, had the added benefit of being “far less susceptible to the appearance (or reality) of quid pro quo funding.”

One of the writers was Ben Scott, a senior adviser at New America. The other was Anne-Marie Slaughter.

What they seem not to have realized is that “minimum viable products” rely on early adopters to test their effectiveness and offer feedback about improvements. It’s a relationship built on trust. Just like the one between think tanks and the public. If the past week’s reaction to Google’s role at New America is any guide, the trust is broken.

Christine Rosen is a senior editor of the New Atlantis and a columnist for Commentary magazine.