Think Tanks and Influence Networks: The Quiet Machinery of Elite Power

The Million Dollar Question: A defense contractor wants Washington to treat its position on a weapons program as sound policy rather than corporate self-interest. For a fraction of what it spends on lobbyists, what does it fund instead?
A) A Super Bowl ad campaign
B) A report from a respected think tank
C) A direct check to a sitting senator
D) A new in-house research department

Read on for the answer.

Think tanks are among the least understood institutions in public life. They look like universities — scholars, footnotes, book-lined offices, sober white papers — and they carry the authority that look confers. But most of them are not universities. They are advocacy organizations that produce research, funded by donors who care a great deal about the conclusions. This piece is about how that machinery actually works: who pays for it, what the money buys, why a policy idea is often cheaper to manufacture than to lobby for, and how a wave of billion-dollar single-donor networks has quietly rewired the whole system in the past decade.

What it is

A think tank is an organization that produces policy research and analysis, usually as a nonprofit, usually in Washington or a state capital. The polite definition ends there. The useful definition is that a think tank sits on a spectrum between two poles. At one end is genuine, contract-driven research — the RAND Corporation, which grew out of Cold War defense work and still earns most of its money doing analysis for the federal government, functions closer to a research firm than an advocacy shop. At the other end are movement institutions like the Heritage Foundation, founded explicitly to advance a political program and to supply a friendly administration with ready-made policy and staff.

Most think tanks live somewhere in between, and the interesting ones move along that spectrum depending on who is funding what. The label “think tank” is doing a lot of quiet work: it borrows the credibility of scholarship and applies it to output that is often closer to sophisticated persuasion. A report that would read as special pleading if a company published it under its own name reads as analysis when it comes from an institution with a marble lobby and a masthead of PhDs.

That is the core of why think tanks matter to the wealthy and the powerful. They convert money into something money cannot usually buy directly: the appearance of disinterested expertise. A senator can dismiss a lobbyist. It is much harder to dismiss a 60-page study, complete with charts, from an organization whose name sounds like a library.

Who uses it

The people and institutions that fund think tanks fall into three broad tiers, and it helps to keep them separate rather than lumping everyone into “the rich.”

At the first tier are corporations and trade groups, which fund research relevant to their industries — energy companies funding energy-policy work, tech firms funding antitrust and privacy scholarship, defense contractors funding national-security analysis. Their giving is often in the hundreds of thousands to low millions per institution, spread across several, and it buys a seat at the table on the issues that touch their bottom line.

At the second tier are foundations and individual donors in the $10 million to $100 million range — the people wealthy enough to underwrite a program, endow a chair, or seed a whole new institution. The Center for American Progress was launched in 2003 with roughly a $10 million budget as a deliberate counterweight to Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute; it now runs on over $50 million a year with a staff of more than 300. That is the scale at which a donor is no longer buying a report — they are building the machinery itself.

At the third tier are the single mega-donors and coordinated donor networks, operating at $100 million and, increasingly, $1 billion and up. This is the tier that has changed most, and it is where the story of modern influence really lives. Rather than fund existing institutions, these donors build parallel networks — of think tanks, advocacy groups, legal shops, and media outlets — and coordinate them. That coordination is the “influence network” half of the title, and it is worth understanding in detail.

Why they use it

The obvious answer — “to push their preferred policies” — is true but incomplete. The wealthy fund think tanks for four more specific reasons, and only one of them is about any single policy.

The first is credibility laundering. A position that serves a donor’s interest is far more persuasive when it arrives wearing the robes of independent research. This is not a cynical caricature; it is documented behavior. A 2016 New York Times investigation found that major think tanks sometimes discussed the likely conclusions of reports with donors before the research was finished, shared drafts with those donors, and even conferred “nonresident scholar” status on people who were, functionally, corporate lobbyists. The value of the think tank is precisely that its output does not look like it came from the donor.

The second is agenda-setting. Think tanks decide which questions are worth asking. By funding sustained work on a topic, a donor can move an idea from the fringe to the mainstream over a period of years — long before any specific bill is drafted. The third is the personnel pipeline: think tanks are where out-of-power movements park their experts, and where in-power administrations shop for staff and ready-made policy. Heritage’s Project 2025 is the most visible recent example of a think tank producing not just ideas but a personnel database and a governing blueprint.

The fourth reason is simple economics: influence through research is cheap relative to the alternatives. This is the heart of the opening question, and it is worth sitting with.

How it works

Start with the funding model, because everything follows from it. Most think tanks do not have large enough endowments to fund their work from investment income, so they raise money continuously — and, crucially, they often require individual scholars to raise the money for their own projects. That structure, the Times investigation noted, creates an obvious incentive: a researcher whose salary depends on attracting funding is unlikely to spend years producing work that offends the people writing the checks. No one has to be corrupt for the output to bend toward the money. The incentives do the bending on their own.

Then there is the revolving door. Think-tank scholars move into government appointments; former officials land at think tanks between administrations. This traffic is what gives the institutions their real-world weight — their people have run agencies, and will again — but it also blurs the line between independent analysis and the positioning of a government-in-waiting. A study from an institution stacked with a party’s former and future officials is a policy document dressed as scholarship.

The most consequential mechanism, though, is the coordinated donor network. On the right, the network built by Charles Koch operates through an umbrella called Stand Together and a flagship advocacy arm, Americans for Prosperity; its super PAC alone spent more than $157 million on the 2024 federal elections, more than triple its 2020 level. On the left, the Democracy Alliance, founded in 2005 by donors including George Soros, functions as a matchmaking club: members who commit to giving at least $200,000 a year are steered toward an approved portfolio of progressive organizations. Since its launch the Alliance has directed something on the order of $2 billion to liberal groups and helped incubate mainstays including the Center for American Progress and Media Matters. Neither network is a single think tank. Each is an ecosystem, designed so that research, advocacy, litigation, and messaging reinforce one another.

What it costs

The institutions themselves run on budgets that would surprise most people who picture think tanks as small rooms full of academics. RAND is the giant: in fiscal 2024 its revenues and other support came to about $514 million, of which roughly $328 million came from the U.S. federal government — a reminder that the single largest funder of American think-tank research is the government itself. By one accounting, Washington has directed at least $1.49 billion to American think tanks since 2019, the vast majority of it to RAND.

The advocacy-leaning institutions are smaller but still substantial. The Brookings Institution — routinely ranked the most influential think tank in the country — reported around $99 million in revenue in its 2024 financial statements. The Heritage Foundation operated on roughly $89 million in 2024, down from about $101 million the prior year. The Urban Institute, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and a few dozen others fill in the tiers below.

Some of that money comes from abroad, which is its own quiet story. By the same accounting, the Atlantic Council, Brookings, and the German Marshall Fund have taken in the most from foreign governments since 2019 — $20.8 million, $17.1 million, and $16.1 million respectively. A foreign ministry that would struggle to buy influence in Washington directly can instead fund research at a trusted American institution, and the resulting analysis carries a credibility no embassy press release ever could. The laundering mechanism works the same way whether the donor is a corporation, a billionaire, or a government.

For a donor, the relevant cost is not the institution’s whole budget but the price of buying influence at the margin, and that is where the arithmetic gets striking. Underwriting a specific research program might run a corporation a few hundred thousand dollars a year — a rounding error next to a serious lobbying and advertising campaign, and far more durable, because a respected study keeps circulating for years while an ad campaign ends the moment the money stops. At the top tier, the numbers become almost unrecognizable as charity. When manufacturing magnate Barre Seid wanted to fund the conservative movement, he gave $1.6 billion to a single trust run by legal activist Leonard Leo — the largest known donation ever made to a political advocacy operation, structured in a way that also let Seid avoid as much as $400 million in taxes. One check, larger than the annual budgets of Brookings and Heritage combined.

Hidden costs and tradeoffs

The main cost to the donors is reputational, and it is real. The whole value of a think tank depends on it looking independent, which means the influence has to stay quiet. When it surfaces — when a report’s funding is traced, or a “scholar” turns out to be a lobbyist — the credibility that made the investment worthwhile evaporates, and the donor is left looking like they bought exactly the conclusion they wanted. Disclosure is the constant battleground for precisely this reason. Many think tanks resist naming their donors, and the fights over transparency are fights over whether the machinery stays hidden.

There is also a subtler cost, one the institutions themselves bear. The shift toward a small number of very large donors makes think tanks dependent on, and therefore captured by, a handful of funders. An organization that once answered to hundreds of contributors, none decisive, now answers to one or two whose withdrawal would be catastrophic. That concentrates the pressure and narrows the range of acceptable conclusions. The scholar with a genuinely independent finding that cuts against the mega-donor’s worldview is in a far weaker position than a colleague was a generation ago.

For the wider public, the tradeoff is a slow erosion of a shared fact base. When “research” and “advocacy” become hard to tell apart, the currency of expertise is debased for everyone — including the honest analysts, whose work is now met with the same reflexive suspicion as the manufactured kind. The pollution spreads well beyond the guilty parties.

What people get wrong

The biggest misconception is taking the words “independent” and “nonpartisan” at face value. Many think tanks describe themselves this way, and some genuinely earn it. But the label is not a guarantee of anything; it is a claim, and often a marketing one. The useful habit is not to ask whether an institution calls itself independent but to ask who funds it, whether that funding is disclosed, and whether the conclusions happen to align with the funders’ interests. A think tank can produce excellent, honest work and still have a house view shaped by its donor base. Both things are usually true at once.

The second thing people miss is how much the game has changed. The old picture — a stable institution funded by many donors, producing broadly credible analysis — still describes some organizations. But the center of gravity has moved to the single-donor networks, where one fortune can stand up an entire parallel ecosystem overnight. The Marble Freedom Trust’s $1.6 billion did not go to a university-style endowment; it went to build and coordinate influence infrastructure at a scale that dwarfs the traditional institutions. Understanding modern policy influence means understanding that shift from many donors, one institution to one donor, many institutions.

Which brings us back to the opening question. The reason a defense contractor — or an energy company, or a tech giant — funds a think tank report rather than another lobbyist is that the report is cheaper, more credible, and longer-lasting than anything a lobbyist can produce. A lobbyist argues the company’s interest openly, and everyone discounts it accordingly. A think tank study makes the same argument in the language of independent policy analysis, and it circulates for years, cited by journalists and staffers who may never learn who paid for it. That is not a loophole in the system. For those who can afford it, it is the system.

Bottom line

The answer to the Million Dollar Question is B: the contractor funds a report from a respected think tank. It is the most cost-effective influence money can buy — a way to convert a self-interested position into something that reads as neutral expertise, at a fraction of what open lobbying costs and with a far longer shelf life.

That is the quiet machinery this piece set out to describe. Think tanks matter not because they are corrupt — most of the people inside them are sincere, and a great deal of the work is real — but because they occupy the trusted space between scholarship and advocacy, and that space is enormously valuable to anyone with an agenda and the means to fund it. The recent history is a story of that value being discovered at ever-larger scale: from corporations underwriting studies, to dono