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Citation: The Nation April 26 1999, v.268, 15, 21(1)
Author: Callahan, David
Title: $1 Billion for Conservative Ideas.(growth of power,
influence and funding of conservative think-tank
organizations) by David Callahan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1999 The Nation Company Inc.
Last year the Heritage Foundation celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary.
For a progressive think tank, a birthday such as this might have been the
occasion for a fancy banquet and perhaps a modest fundraising drive. For
Heritage, it was an excuse to mount a massive "Leadership for America
Campaign" designed to raise $85 million. This effort yielded more than $40
million in 1998, and Heritage expects easily to bring in the full amount
before the end of 1999.
Heritage's success at filling its coffers is dramatic testament to the
growing financial resources available to conservative think tanks in the
nineties. These institutions have long been familiar players on the political
scene. But in recent years, following the Republican takeover of Congress, the
scope of their operations has grown dramatically. This decade has proven to be
a boom time like no other.
A recent report that I wrote for the National Committee for Responsive
Philanthropy estimates that spending by the top twenty conservative think
tanks will likely top $1 billion in the nineties. In 1996 alone, these
organizations spent $158 million to develop and disseminate policy ideas-an
amount comparable to what the GOP raised in soft-money political donations
that year. The $158 million represents a significant increase from 1992, with
many organizations more than doubling their budgets over that period. Partial
data from 1997 and 1998 suggest that the budgets of conservative think tanks
are continuing to grow rapidly.
Much of this money comes from corporations and wealthy businessmen, with
conservative think tanks increasingly acting as magnets for special-interest
money. More than ever, private-sector leaders see the dividends that come from
tax-deductible donations to nonprofit policy groups. These groups put a
highbrow spin on the self-interested arguments of corporate America. In
effect, gifts to right-wing think tanks have become another form of political
campaign donation by those anxious to roll back government regulations, cut
corporate taxes and loosen labor laws. Notable examples of this trend in the
nineties include the several million dollars that Wall Street firms have given
to the Cato Institute and other supporters of Social Security privatization;
large donations from telecommunications companies to Citizens for a Sound
Economy and like-minded antiregulatory groups that worked hard for passage of
the 1996 Telecommunications Act; and the millions that Koch Industries, an
energy conglomerate, has given to think tanks working to water down federal
environmental laws. This swelling river of private money has allowed the
network of conservative think tanks to grow and has enhanced the
sophistication of their operations. A number of developments in recent years
stand out:
The nineties have seen more than half a dozen new conservative think tanks
rise to positions of visibility. These newcomers include such aggressively
ideological outfits as the National Center for Policy Analysis, the Reason
Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Many of these new
organizations have doubled or even quadrupled their budgets since 1990. For
example, the far-right NCPA's budget grew from $1.7 million in 1992 to $4.3
million in 1997, making it a major player in the think-tank world. CEI grew
from $500,000 in 1990 to $2.5 million in 1996. On issues such as deregulation,
Social Security privatization and school vouchers, the smaller think tanks
have played an important role in echoing arguments made by the larger
institutions and adding a wider array of conservative voices to the national
debate.
Conservative policy groups have become ever more sophisticated at waging
high-intensity battles over extended periods of time, better coordinating
their activities with lobbyists in the private sector, political operatives in
Washington, DC, and the states, and activists at the grassroots. Major policy
battles in the nineties over telecommunications and healthcare have taught
these institutions important lessons and helped them to refine their advocacy
operations. Many operate as extraparty organizations, adopting the tactics of
the permanent political campaign by incorporating a fundraising arm, a
lobbying arm, a policy analysis and development arm, a public relations arm
and a grassroots mobilization or constituency development arm. All these
tactics have recently been on display in efforts by conservative policy groups
to torpedo the Kyoto Protocol on global warming signed in 1997. Bankrolled by
heavy industry, these efforts have focused on depicting global warming as
"theory, not reality" and exaggerating the economic consequences of curbing
carbon dioxide emissions.
Conservative think tanks have poured increasing funds into influencing
legislation in Congress. Despite legal restrictions on lobbying, conservative
policy institutes have dramatically expanded their visibility on Capitol Hill
and have come to work ever more closely with Republican leaders in Congress.
The Heritage Foundation in particular has solidified its role as the de facto
research arm of the GOP. Through major investments in data-management
technology, including the purchase of a Viper 1000 supercomputer, Heritage has
become an increasingly important resource for Congressional conservatives, who
rely on the organization to provide detailed economic analyses of various
legislative proposals. Meanwhile, Heritage's government relations team keeps
in constant contact with key legislators and staff members in Congress,
organizes briefings for Congressional officials and often hand-delivers
Heritage publications to GOP leaders. Cato, Citizens for a Sound Economy and
the Family Research Council have imitated Heritage's success in walking the
fine line between illegal lobbying and nonpartisan policy analysis.
Reducing government intervention in the private sector has always been a
central goal of conservative think tanks, and during the nineties deregulation
has become even more of a focus. As their budgets have grown, conservative
think tanks have been able to branch into new areas of deregulatory activity.
In addition to escalating longstanding attacks on environmental and
worker-safety regulations, they have recently concentrated fire on federal
laws safeguarding the nation's food and drug supply. For example, in the
mid-nineties, the Progress and Freedom Foundation launched a major project
aimed at weakening the FDA. Financing this work was at least $400,000 in
contributions from drug, biotechnology and medical-device companies.
Following their historic victory in eliminating the federal welfare
entitlement, conservative think tanks have begun a vigorous attack on the
other main components of the New Deal/Great Society legacy: Medicare and
Social Security. Aided by major new infusions of money from the financial
services industry, Cato and other conservative think tanks have invested
millions of dollars in a sophisticated campaign to privatize Social Security.
Among the more influential results of this effort has been the plan put
forward last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that
advocated partial privatization of Social Security along with deep benefit
reductions. Meanwhile, other groups like the National Center for Policy
Analysis have put enormous resources into developing the Medical Savings
Account concept and other ideas for privatizing Medicare. Overall, these
efforts reflect stepped-up conservative efforts to do away with universal
entitlement programs that have created common cause between the poor and the
middle class.
The past few years have seen major new efforts by conservative think tanks
to publicize ideas on the Internet. Their Web sites are some of the most
extensive and heavily used sites in the entire public policy arena. The
National Center for Public Policy Research, an organization with an otherwise
low profile, runs an extensive Web site that links together different
conservative organizations and bodies of policy analysis. Cato has built a
state-of-the-art Web site advocating Social Security privatization. Heritage's
Web site receives 100,000 hits a day and is an electronic octopus that now has
more than half a dozen separate sites dealing with various policy issues, a
vast archive of publications, a large job bank and links to scores of other
organizations. Heritage also collaborates with National Review to fund and
manage Town Hall, a venture that U.S. News & World Report called the "premiere
website on the right," and one that was logging 145,000 hits a day in 1997.
Conservative think tanks have also begun new campaigns to influence politics
at the state level. Throughout the nineties, conservatives have strengthened a
network of more than fifty state-level conservative think tanks; these
institutions are now better funded and more sophisticated than ever before.
The most visible include the Heartland Institute in Chicago, the Commonwealth
Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives in Pennsylvania, the North Carolina
Center for Public Policy Research and the Independence Institute in Colorado.
Many of these organizations explicitly pattern their operations after
Heritage, producing brief and easily digested materials and focusing heavily
on marketing. All of them have moved aggressively to take advantage of the
"devolution revolution" in the late nineties by pressing conservative ideas
for downsizing government at the state level.
Ultimately, it is impossible to measure the exact role that conservative
think tanks have played in bringing about the recent rightward shift in
American politics. But to those who play or observe the Washington game, on
both left and right, their influence is inescapable-and, most agree, it is
rising. Most impressive is the way in which conservative policy entrepreneurs
have been so skilled and invested so heavily in marketing their grand story of
American politics to the media. If national politics can be seen largely as a
contest of broad frameworks, there is little question that conservatives have
won this game in recent years.
Today, conservative think tanks are well positioned to consolidate and
extend their major policy gains. In terms of resources, there is every
indication that the vast funding stream that currently supports the
conservative policy infrastructure will continue to grow in the early
twenty-first century. Meanwhile, there is still no left-of-center parallel to
the critical mass of conservative think tanks operating in the United States
today. While progressive philanthropists and liberal foundations have greater
financial resources overall than their counterparts on the right, they have
proven reluctant to invest heavily in the war of ideas. Instead, the lion's
share of these resources are funneled into single-issue advocacy groups and
direct-service organizations [see Michael H. Shuman, "Why Do Progressive
Foundations Give Too Little to Too Many?" January 12/19, 1998]. New
progressive think tanks find it difficult to raise money, and even established
ones are invariably underfunded.
It is now beyond dispute that left-of-center funders have made a calamitous
strategic blunder by underfunding public intellectuals and policy thinkers.
This mistake is profoundly ironic. Who would have ever thought, thirty or
forty years ago, that the right would come to believe more deeply in the power
of ideas than the left? n
David Callahan, a fellow at the Century Foundation, is the author of
Unwinnable Wars: American Power and Ethnic Conflict (Hill and Wang). A copy of
$1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s can be ordered
from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (202-387-9177;
www.ncrp.org) in Washington, DC.
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