Think Tank Quickies (#513)
- Career civil servants and foreign service officers who staffed the State Department's Policy Planning Staff office, which has historically served as the secretary of State's in-house think tank, were all let go and reassigned into limbo without clarity on their next jobs.
- Despite Trump's past disavowals, many of the individuals involved in drafting Project 2025, such as Russell Vought and Brendan Carr, have been tapped to serve in prominent positions in his Administration.
- Several Cabinet-level officials, including the secretaries of education, agriculture, veterans affairs, and housing, have worked for AFPI. Trump's attorney general, Pam Bondi, reported earning $520,000 from AFPI in 2024. John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel, Trump's directors of the CIA and FBI, served as members of the group's American Security Team. All told so far, AFPI doled out nearly $2.6 million to incoming Trump Administration officials in recent years.
- Former acting Labor Secretary Julie Su is joining The Century Foundation as a senior fellow.
- Left-leaning economic policy think tank Groundwork Collaborative has added a pair of former Biden Administration staffers as progressives gear up to try and extract policy wins in this year's tax fight.
- Former Biden economist Jed Kolko has joined JPMorgan's think tank.
- National Institute for Deterrence Studies (NIDS), a "think tank" based in Fairborn, Ohio.
- Atlantic Council Global Foresight 2025 survey of hundreds of experts reveals that most believe the world will be worse off in 2035 than it is today.
- The Treasury Department has frozen funding disbursements to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
- A fairly new group known as the Ben Franklin Fellowship is helping pick who to place where at the US State Department.
