The 2020 hopeful has tapped deep into her former world of academia, going well beyond Beltway think tanks.
Behind Elizabeth Warren’s trust-busting, Wall Street-bashing, tax-the-wealthy platform is a brain trust that extends well beyond the Beltway thinkers who often rubber stamp campaign proposals.
Instead, the former Harvard professor and her tight team of policy advisers have waded deeper into the world of academia than is usual in presidential campaigns, according to interviews with more than a dozen people her campaign has consulted and a review of the scholarship underlying her plans.
Leafing through Warren's plans posted on Medium, voters will find links to obscure academic literature from places like the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics, the Upjohn Institute, the Journal of Applied Business and Economics, and the American Journal of Sociology.
Sen. Warren has not been hesitant to spar with Washington's think tank establishment, including ones from the liberal side of the aisle. For example, she has been at war with the Brookings Institution for years, and in 2015 she sent a letter to the president of the think tank regarding its numerous financial conflicts of interest.
She has also criticized New America for the firing of one of its employees. The think tank Third Way has bashed Warren over the years but has now started to embrace here.
She has said that think tanks play a "critical role" in shaping policy, but their "credibility is jeopardized when decisions are based on funder preferences."
Before running for the Senate, Warren had considered launching what she called a Center for Middle Class Policy at the liberal think tank Roosevelt Institute, a policy shop that has been giving her lots of love recently.
