Handbook·Money in politics

How do think tanks and universities launder influence?

Explainer·Verified 2026-07-10

The answer

Prestige laundering is when a funder with a direct financial or political stake pays for research, a fellowship, or a policy paper produced under the neutral-sounding banner of a university center, think tank, or NGO, lending the funder's preferred conclusion institutional credibility it would not carry coming from the funder directly. Most people assume a think tank's name signals independence. This happens across the political spectrum and is legal in almost all cases. The core problem is disclosure. Outside funding for research is normal and often useful. What's missing is telling readers who paid for it.

How it actually works

A 2014 New York Times investigation found more than a dozen major Washington think tanks, including Brookings, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Atlantic Council, had accepted tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments. Qatar pledged $14.8 million over four years to Brookings, and one Brookings Doha Center fellow said he was told in his job interview not to publish anything critical of the Qatari government. Few of the think tanks involved had registered as foreign agents.¹

A decade later, systematic tracking shows the pattern persists broadly. A 2025 Quincy Institute study scoring the 50 largest U.S. think tanks by budget found only 18 percent fully disclose their funders, 46 percent partially disclose, and 36 percent disclose nothing at all, functioning as dark-money think tanks. Foreign governments gave the top 50 think tanks more than $110 million over five years, led by the UAE, UK, and Qatar.²

This is not one-sided. Brookings, generally seen as center-left, publishes a donor list and says it will not grant government donors anonymity, yet has still received roughly $17.1 million from foreign governments since 2019.³ On the right, internal emails showed at least 15 meetings between Heritage Foundation officials and defense contractor Lockheed Martin around the time Heritage publicly defended continued funding for Lockheed's F-22 fighter program.⁴ The American Enterprise Institute's own tax filing once listed Taiwan's de facto embassy as its fourth-largest contributor, raising questions about whether the relationship required foreign-agent registration.⁵

Universities face a parallel version with corporate rather than government money. Exxon helped launch MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change in 1991, and a leaked 2018 BP internal strategy document proposed spending roughly $1.1 million funding white papers at Princeton and Imperial College favorable to framing natural gas as a climate-friendly bridge fuel.⁶ In medicine, a 2018 investigation found Memorial Sloan Kettering's chief medical officer failed to disclose millions of dollars in pharmaceutical industry ties across dozens of published papers, including ones he personally edited.⁷

Who holds the power

Funders, whether foreign governments, corporations, or wealthy individuals, choose which institutions to fund and can shape research agendas simply by deciding what gets funded and what doesn't, without ever dictating a specific conclusion.

Where you come in

Think tank tax filings (IRS Form 990s) are public, and some institutions now publish voluntary donor lists. The Quincy Institute's public Think Tank Funding Tracker lets anyone search foreign and Pentagon-linked funding for major think tanks by name before citing their research as neutral.

Glossary: dark money

Sources