Why everyone hates think tanks

So what do you do? That conversation starter, annoyingly ubiquitous in the Washington Beltway, is a conversation killer at family dinners back home. The problem is that we are professional policy experts and, worse than that, experts who work in think tanks. This means that we wear fancy suits and speak to the national media on complex, serious topics like European security and nuclear weapons. Like other experts, we have rows of academic credentials on our walls and networks of high-level contacts in Washington and beyond.

But no one at our family dinners really believes any of this gives us special insight. Our relatives have their own ideas about what is happening in the world and what the United States ought to do about it. They don’t see why the letters after our names or our think tank perches should qualify us to make better policy choices. Other highly educated professionals don’t have this problem. Third cousins don’t usually look an M.D. in the eye and say, “Interesting point, but I have my own views on how to perform heart surgery.”

In short, our families love us, but they hate our jobs. The worst part is that we see their point. After all, if think tank experts have such great insight into policy, why are the outcomes so terrible so much of the time? Even if it has escaped notice in Washington, most everyone around the family dinner table knows intuitively that the think tank industrial complex is failing to deliver for the country. A recent poll by the U.K.-based firm Cast From Clay concluded that only 20 percent of Americans trust think tanks, and our families, we can attest, are not among them.

If we have lost even our close relatives, it is time we confront the truth that think tanks have a serious, and perhaps also a deserved, reputation problem.

Why is this the case? People don’t dislike public sector workers. They appreciate first responders—fire, emergency medical services, and, if sometimes grudgingly, police. They have great respect for the uniformed military. The vast faceless bureaucracy of the federal civilian workforce may cause frustration, but when it shuts down, people miss it. Americans appreciate the folks who send the Social Security checks, who keep the national parks running, and who keep razor blades out of milk cartons. Even when people complain about the Postal Service or the IRS, you don’t hear them saying they’d rather deliver their own letters or go around to their neighbors with a tin cup. In other words, most parts of the government perform functions that ordinary people understand are needed, even if they don’t love them.

Compared with those noble professions, an elite, government-adjacent think tank gig that makes for self-important Beltway cocktail conversations gets little more than an indulgent shrug in the rest of the United States. As one colleague put it, think tankers only get respect from frequent flyer programs and each other. (And thanks to COVID-19, the airlines don’t respect us much now either.) Outside of that limited milieu, policy experts are seen as part of a big, wasteful Washington establishment that might even be doing more harm than good. For many Americans, the only apparent purpose of think tanks is to provide the cudgels that politicians use to whack each other in endless, wasteful partisan battles.

In the last century, think tanks were conceived as a mechanism to bring scientific principles and rigor to the making of policy. Like universities, they would over time accumulate knowledge and serve as centers of expertise and incubators of potentially revolutionary ideas. In their diversity, they would challenge each other and create a competitive, even adversarial, but still fact-based deliberative process for developing policy ideas, through which truth—or at least best practice—would eventually emerge. And they would act like intellectual venture capitalists, investing in people who might eventually emerge to take on important government positions.

All of these functions continue to varying degrees. But as our families seem to sense, none really describes the dominant reality of think tanks today. In point of fact, the think tank business model has evolved in troubling directions. As the industry has expanded, as society around it has become more polarized, and as the competition for funding has grown ever fiercer, some think tanks have become advocacy groups, or even lobbyists, by another name. Political parties want loyal propagandists, not niggling, equivocating academic hangers-on. And potential donors want veteran sharpshooters to fire their policy bullets into exactly the right target at precisely the right moment.

As a series of New York Times investigations in 2014-2017 revealed, the think tank business model has drifted disturbingly toward selling access and influence. For some, the point is no longer to generate new ideas or inform a deliberative process but rather to sell ideas that promote the interests of funders. It’s a straightforward transaction and hardly a new one. The Washington lobbying business has exploded over the past three decades, as the private sector, wealthy individuals, and even foreign governments turn to Washington’s revolving-door power brokers to help them purchase influence on issues that matter to them. Funders are essential for think tanks’ survival and success, but they could just as easily take their money elsewhere, so think tanks are under real pressure to give them what they want. Some funders have even cut out the middleman, so to speak, and created their own purpose-built think tanks.

If the funding chase is the why of the problem, Washington’s deeply tribal partisan political culture, and the echo chamber around it, is the how. In the jungle of proliferating new media, social media, and outright disinformation, think tankers battle one another to control the message. A lonely voice in the wilderness will be drowned out, so policy experts band together in teams, like political parties. Some groups, like the Heritage Foundation on the right and the Center for American Progress on the left, have even explicitly created lobbying arms to carry out the advocacy work their public charity arms would be barred from doing. This legal fiction makes for an inherently porous boundary between what purports to be nonpartisan research in the public interest and lobbying advocacy that is, for legal purposes, no different from K Street.

There are in fact countless honorable and praiseworthy exceptions to these dismaying trends and much fine work being done in policy shops in Washington and beyond. But when some institutions engage in influence peddling and advocacy all the time, and nearly all institutions do it some of the time, it makes it impossible for the ordinary citizen to separate out honest from dishonest think tanks. As a consequence, the policy community becomes one big swamp in which the influence-peddlers’ schmutz dirties even the most erudite and independent policy intellectual. And that’s why think tanks have an image problem. Because Washington has a lobbying and a partisanship problem. We have to do better.

Matthew Rojansky is the director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute. Jeremy Shapiro is research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations.