New "Mini Cato Institute" Launches

Washington, DC welcomes its newest think tank to the mix, the Defense Priorities Foundation, whose main goal is to promote foreign policy that includes a greater reluctance to assert military force.  It other words, it is basically the Cato Institute of defense, a libertarian shop that dislikes costly wars.

Here is more from Politico:

Sen. Rand Paul's vision of a less militaristic foreign policy got little traction in the GOP primaries, but some of his key backers are joining forces with associates of billionaire Charles Koch in a fresh effort to steer Washington away from interventions in overseas wars.

They’re launching a think tank, the Defense Priorities Foundation, that seeks to elevate national security policies that are decidedly out of the mainstream of Republican — and even some Democratic — foreign policy thinking, featuring a significantly greater reluctance to assert military force or even impose sanctions on nations such as North Korea. The related Defense Priorities Initiative, meanwhile, is designed as the organization's advocacy arm, which will seek to lobby Congress.

Among the architects of the nonprofit are William Ruger, a Navy Reserve officer who is the vice president for research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute. The institute is backed by the billionaire businessman and donor, who along with his brother David has poured millions into conservative political causes that champion lower taxes and lighter regulations.

The think tank is also the brainchild of several acolytes of Paul, the Kentucky Republican who rose to prominence criticizing American military operations in the Middle East and the expanding use of armed drones in particular.

The group's communications director, Eleanor May, was the national press secretary for Paul's presidential campaign. Paul's office declined a request to comment for this story.
The think tank has also enlisted some of D.C.'s leading libertarian foreign policy thinkers and several conservative pundits, as well as a retired Army officer and Afghanistan veteran, Daniel Davis, who was perhaps the most famous military whistleblower of the past generation.

A spokesperson for the Charles Koch Institute told POLITICO that the institute and the Charles Koch Foundation are not providing financial support to the new think tank...

The article goes on to note that Christopher Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at Cato, is a senior adviser at the new think tank.  Doug Bandow, a former special assistant to Ronald Reagan, and a Cato Senior Fellow, is also a "recruit" to the new think tank, according to Politico.  And Charles (Chuck) Peña, former Director of Defense Policy Studies at Cato, is a Foreign Policy Fellow and Scholar at the new think tank.  [It also notes notes that Koch has been a major backer of Cato.]

Edward King, who most recently served as Chief Operating Officer for Concerned American Voters, a pro-Rand Paul Super PAC, is listed as the President and Founder of the new think tank.

Unlike Cato, however, Defense Priorities Foundation will have a lobbying arm called the Defense Priorities Initiative.  That will allow it to officially lobby the US Congress and others, much like the Heritage Foundation, which has a sister lobbying arm called Heritage Action.

Cato Think Tanker Opening Up a Restaurant

In the revolving door of think tank land, most think tankers end up leaving their think tank to enter a new Administration, or to go into the corporate world, or academia.

But one scholar from the libertarian think tank Cato Institute has taken a different route: He is opening up a restaurant.  That scholar is Justin Logan, the former Director of Foreign Policy Studies at Cato, who is in the process of opening up a Latin American wine and spirits bar called Ruta del Vino in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, DC.

Mr. Logan is opening up the restaurant with his wife Jessica, who worked as an accountant at Cato.

Although opening a restaurant is not the typical route for a think tanker, Mr. Logan will have knowledge and access to Cato's broad writings on the food/restaurant industry, including the think tank's latest work on the "futile effort" of menu mandates and obesity.

Best Description of Political Leanings in a Think Tank Paper

Think tankers often describe their politics leanings as conservative, or liberal, or moderate.  Those are way too safe and boring.

In a Cato Unbound essay, Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, describes his politics leanings in a much more precise way:

When people ask me about my politics these days, I sometimes describe myself as “a very small-‘l’ libertarian.” I am—like many libertarians, in my admittedly skewed Silicon Valley experience—just another pot-decriminalizing, prostitution-supporting, computer-programming, science-fiction-reading, Bayesian-statistics-promoting, mainstream-economics-respecting, sex-positive, money-positive, polyamorous atheistic transhumanist government-distrusting minarchist.

Cato Unbound is the monthly only magazine and discussion forum of the libertarian think tank Cato Institute.  Each month is presents a big-picture topic by an important thinker.  Its current editor is Jason Kuznicki.

New Book Outlines Neocon Think Tanks That "Drive Policy & War"

Salon has just released some excerpts from a new book by Molly Sinclair McCartney and the late James McCartney entitled "America's War Machine: Vested Interests, Endless Conflicts" which says that well-funded think tanks push corporate agendas through media "experts."  Here are Think Tank Watch's favorite quotes:

• More than twenty AEI people wound up with top jobs in the George W. Bush administration. Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and backer of the Iraq War, is now a visiting scholar at the AEI, which has an annual budget of about $20 million. It has about fifty so-called scholars and about 150 on the payroll. Its objective is to influence public policy. Christopher DeMuth, president of the AEI from 1986 through 2008, who worked in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, put it this way: “We try to get in the newspaper op-ed pages and hawk our books and magazines much more aggressively than a university would feel comfortable with.”

• If you watch the op-ed pages in the newspapers carefully, you will find the AEI and other think tanks well represented, week after week, month after month. You will also see them on television presenting their point of view. When network-television talk shows and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) want “experts” on foreign policy, they often turn to the AEI or other prominent think tanks. But they don’t always tell the public who is paying the salaries of the “experts.” You can bet it is corporate America.

• A prominent opponent of the war was the libertarian Cato Institute, which is conservative on domestic issues but traditionally opposed to foreign intervention. In California’s Orange County Register, Cato vice president Ted Galen Carpenter wrote—just days before the war began—that the pro-war camp’s justifications for invading Iraq were faulty: “The United States is supposed to be a constitutional republic. As such, the job of the U.S. military is to defend the vital security interests of the American people. U.S. troops are not armed crusaders with a mission to right all wrongs and liberate oppressed populations. American dollars are too scarce and American lives too precious for such feckless ventures.”

• Two of Washington’s most successful think-tank hawks are Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, the husband-and-wife team who spent a year in Afghanistan working as unpaid volunteers for the U.S. general in charge of the war. Frederick Kagan is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, which has a history of supporting American military intervention around the world.

• Think-tank hawks have always sought to impact defense policy. The Kagans found a way to go beyond traditional influence peddling and gain the ear of the military man in charge of a real war. The Kagans were not paid by the U.S. government for their work, but their proximity to Petraeus provided valuable benefits. The Post article reported that the arrangement with Petraeus “provided an incentive for defense contractors to contribute to Kim Kagan’s think tank,” the Institute for the Study of War, which advocates an aggressive U.S. foreign policy. At an August 2011 dinner, Kim Kagan thanked two contractors, DynCorp International and CACI International, for funding her institute and making it possible for her to spend a year in Afghanistan with Petraeus.

The new book can be found here.  Molly McCartney was actually housed within the Wilson Center for part of the time that she was working on the book.

Sen. Warren Questions Independence of Brookings Institution

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) does not seem to be too happy with the Brookings Institution this week.  Here is more from the Washington Post:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren today takes her ongoing crusade against the outsized influence of the financial services industry to one of Washington's most respected think tanks.  The Massachusetts Democrat is questioning the independence of the Brookings Institution and one of its longtime scholars over a study that criticizes a proposed regulation aimed at reining in conflicts of interest among retirement advisors.

Post reporter Tom Hamburger obtained letters that Warren sent this week to Brookings and the Labor Department.  The Massachusetts Democrat blasts a report by non-resident scholar, Robert Litan, which predicted high costs for a measure backed strongly by progressives, consumer groups and President Obama.

Citing the $85,000 combined fee that Litan and a co-author received from the leading investment firm, Warren calls their report "highly compensated and editorially compromised work on behalf of an industry player seeking a specific conclusion."

Litan, who held senior positions in Bill Clinton's administration, confirmed that the outline for his study was reviewed by its sole sponsor, The Capital Group, which offered some comments.  The investment firm has more than $1.4 trillion under management in its American Funds and other products.  The company, like others handling retirement investment assets, has made opposition to Labor's rule one of its top priorities.

The scholar forcefully rejects Warren's criticism, arguing that he disclosed the funding arrangement repeatedly, including in July testimony before a congressional committee on which Warren sits.  He stressed that the funding did not influence hid study or its conclusions.

But Litan acknowledges one mistake: His testimony overlooked a relatively new Brookings rule prohibiting non-resident scholars - who are generally not paid by the institution - from associating their congressional testimony with the think tank.

Sen. Warren is now demanding more information from Brookings, including information about the think tank's rules for scholarship and congressional testimony.

This news comes as Brookings has faced increased questions about donor impact on its research.

Here is additional reporting on the Brookings-Warren sparring from the Boston Globe.  It notes that a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Litan's research on the Brookings website has a disclaimer about the funding by Capital Group.

It Sen. Warren getting revenge on Brookings for slamming her student loan proposal in 2013?

Think Tank Watch should note that this is not the first time that Sen. Warren has lashed out at think tanks.  Back in 2013, she sent a letter to the US's six largest banks asking them to disclose their donations to think tanks, saying that not doing so threatens the credibility and research of those policy groups.

We should also note that Sen. Warren seems to be taking a liking to none another than the libertarian think tank Cato Institute these days.  She has been quoting Cato and went to the think tank this month to participate in a panel discussion.  Is she angling for a post-Senate job in think tank land?

Stay tuned for more on the Warren-Brookings fight...

Trump Consulting With Think Tanks

Donald Trump seems to be his own man, but that does not mean that he does not lean on think tanks for help.  Here is more from Robert Costa of the Washington Post:

[Donald] Trump came out with an immigration paper today. He expects in early September, in the next few weeks, to come out with one on taxes. He's talking to different people at think tanks. He doesn't want to lose the edge he has.

Juleanna Glover, a corporate consultant and Republican policy and communications adviser who has co-hosted fundraisers for Jeb Bush, says that right-leaning think tanks would not pledge to support Trump if he became the Republican Party nominee for president.

So, which think tank does Donald Trump like and which think tank likes Donald Trump?

Heritage Foundation has done a "10 Facts About Donald Trump" piece and has written other fact-based pieces on Trump, but writers for Heritage have also criticized Trump.  And as Think Tank Watch noted before, Trump is one of the only Republicans presidential candidates who does not follow Heritage President Jim DeMint on Twitter.

Scholars at American Enterprise Institute (AEI) are worried that Trump could disrupt the 2016 elections.  They have also bashed Trump for his "disparaging comments" about women.

That said, Trump just came out saying that he is has been seeking advice from John Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations and a Senior Fellow at AEI.

The libertarian Cato Institute has just come out bashing Trump's new position paper on immigration policy.

We have found evidence of state-level think tankers who support Trump.  One example is Ed McMullen, co-chair of Trump's South Carolina campaign, and president of the conservative think tank South Carolina Policy Council.

On the Democratic-leaning side of think tank land, here is a Brookings Institution assessment of Donald Trump, here is a Brookings piece on how to beat Trump in the debates, and here is a Brookings piece on why you should stop laughing at Trump.

By the way, remember when Dana Milbank of the Washington Post compared Jim DeMint running the Heritage Foundation to the equivalent of Donald Trump running AEI?

Think Tank Watch should note that none of the top 10 members of Trump's inner circle appear to have any deep ties to think tanks.

Rand Paul's Tax Plan Comes From Heritage Foundation

Who has helped Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a presidential candidate and "one-man think tank," create his tax plan?  It appears that much of the plan has come from think tank land.  Here is what Sen. Paul writes in the Wall Street Journal:

My tax plan would blow up the tax code and start over. In consultation with some of the top tax experts in the country, including the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, former presidential candidate Steve Forbes and Reagan economist Arthur Laffer, I devised a 21st-century tax code that would establish a 14.5% flat-rate tax applied equally to all personal income, including wages, salaries, dividends, capital gains, rents and interest. All deductions except for a mortgage and charities would be eliminated. The first $50,000 of income for a family of four would not be taxed. For low-income working families, the plan would retain the earned-income tax credit.

It has been reported that Stephen Moore, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Heritage, is in Sen. Paul's "outer circle," along with David Boaz of the Cato Institute.  (Boaz has defended Paul on numerous ocassions.)  Those scholars happen to be from the two think tanks that Sen. Paul was accused on plagiarizing from.

Think Tank Watch is wondering if Sen. Paul's chainsawing of the tax code was also a think tank idea...

And of course, other think tanks are in deep disagreement with Sen. Paul's tax plan.

Cato Working Behind Scenes to Close GOP's Campaign-Science Gap

Here are some excerpts from a new piece by Sasha Issenberg at Bloomberg Politics:

This spring, the Cato Institute identified 600 Americans who read more than 20 books per year and made arrangements to send them each one more. The libertarian think tank split these readers into three groups. One group received a free copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, one got longtime Cato executive David Boaz’s The Libertarian Mind, and one a book that Cato scholars considered a useful placebo to free-market doctrine: the Bible. After three months, six months, and 12 months, members of all three groups would be surveyed to see if the unsolicited books they had received could explain differential response rates to one question: Do you consider yourself a libertarian?

The Cato researcher behind the project explained to other members of a below-the-radar Republican group known as the Center for Strategic Initiatives, or CSI, that the 600 books were just part of a pilot test. If the design appeared to work properly, the experiment would be replicated on a larger scale: 12,000 books this time. “Political books have never been tested,” says David Kirby, now a vice president and senior fellow at Cato. “Think tanks think that books persuade people. Do they?”

Very few other members of the CSI circle had ever used books as tools for changing minds. A range of political consultants and vendors, they tended to trade in more ephemeral modes of communication: television ads and robocalls, direct mail, digital ads, and door knocks. But they were there for the same reason that Kirby had been willing to entertain the perfidy of using Cato resources to question whether reading Ayn Rand actually led people to libertarianism—a willingness to take everything they thought they knew about what works in politics and hold it up to empirical investigation.

These "field experiments" are still taking place at Cato, and here is what the article says about the schedule:

The CSI circle has yet to fall into a reliable schedule, and its gatherings—which now take place roughly every six weeks or so at Cato’s Washington headquarters—already mark a very different mode of collaboration. There is not a politician in sight, or many brand-name operatives; few attendees appear to be over the age of 40. This sphere of political operatives and party hacks angling to remake Republican campaigns includes strategists and tacticians for many of the party’s top presidential candidates, along with staffers from the Republican National Committee and consultants attached to various elements of the Koch political network.

...About 50 people responded to [CSI founder Blaise] Hazelwood’s invitation to gather at Cato in early June and, arrayed before her that Thursday afternoon, at long tables in lecture-hall formation, the schisms of the Republican Party in the early days of the presidential campaign were unmistakable.

...Kirby became an enthusiastic booster of Hazelwood’s project. After he went to work at the Cato Institute in early 2014, he offered one of the think tank’s large conference rooms to host the right’s version of the “geek lunch.” The first CSI meeting, in late 2013, drew more than 100 people from across conservative politics.

The full article can be read here.

In 2015 Cato was ranked as the 8th best think tank in the United States and the 16th best think tank in the world by the annual University of Pennsylvania think tank rankings.

Cato Institute's Aggressive Advertising

The libertarian Cato Institute is shaking up the game on think tank advertising with splashy new advertising in New York's Times Square.  Here is what Cato says about the new campaign:

Idividual liberty and limited government now light up Times Square.  All summer long, Cato’s commitment to stopping the government from overspending, overregulation, policing the world, and invading our privacy will be shining down to passersby from a jumbo screen.

Cato is known to do lots of advertising, particularly in various Capitol Hill publications.  For example, on June 10, it took out a full-page ad in publications such as Roll Call, The Hill, and Politico promoting a Cato Institute Book Forum event entitled "Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis."

In related news, Cato also has a new CatoAudio App that provides instant access to the views of its think tank scholars.

Think Tank Watch has also learned that Cato has joined together with Land's End to create a new online store where merchandise can be customized with the think tank's logo.

In 2015 Cato was ranked as the 8th best think tank in the United States and the 16th best think tank in the world by the annual University of Pennsylvania think tank rankings.  It was also ranked as the 4th best think tank in the world in terms of best use of social media, and 2nd best think tank in the world in terms of best use of the Internet.  It was ranked 12th best in the world in terms of best use of media.

Update: We should note that Cato is not the only think tank to advertise in the newspaper.  For example, in the September 9, 2015 edition of The Hill, RAND Corporation ran an ad for the RAND Review (RR), its flagship magazine.