Think Tankers Divide Themselves on China and Trump

Here is more from Reuters:

Scores of Asia specialists, including former U.S. diplomats and military officers, want President Donald Trump to rethink policies that “treat China as an enemy,” warning the approach could hurt U.S. interests and the global economy, according to a draft open letter reviewed by Reuters on Saturday.

The letter recently appeared in the Washington Post.  Signatories from the think tank world include:

• James Acton, co-director, Nuclear Policy Program and Jessica T. Mathews Chair, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Andrew Bacevich, co-founder, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
• Jeffrey A. Bader, former senior director for East Asia on National Security Council 2009-2011 and fellow, Brookings Institution
• C. Fred Bergsten, senior fellow and director emeritus, Peterson Institute for International Economics
• Richard Bush, Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies, Brookings Institution
• Toby Dalton, co-director, Nuclear Policy Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Robert Daly, director, Kissinger Institute on China and the U.S., Wilson Center
• David Dollar, senior fellow, Brookings Institution
• Robert Einhorn, senior fellow, Brookings Institution; former assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, 1999-2001
• David F. Gordon, senior advisor, International Institute of Strategic Studies; former director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, 2007-2009
• Philip H. Gordon, Mary and David Boies Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations
• Lee Hamilton, former congressman; former president and director of the Wilson Center
• Yukon Huang, senior fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Marvin Kalb, nonresident senior fellow, Brookings Institution
• Charles Kupchan, professor of International Affairs, Georgetown University; senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations
• Nicholas Lardy, Anthony M. Solomon Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics
• Chung Min Lee, senior fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Cheng Li, director and senior fellow, John L. Thornton China Center, The Brookings Institution
• Jessica Mathews, distinguished fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Alice Lyman Miller, research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
• Moises Naim, distinguished fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Douglas Paal, distinguished fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Jonathan D. Pollack, nonresident senior fellow, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution
• Richard Sokolsky, nonresident senior fellow, Russia and Eurasia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Graham Webster, coordinating editor, Stanford-New America DigiChina Project

In response, an open letter was written by China scholars who support President Trump's China policy.  Here is more from Free Beacon:

An open letter to President Trump urged the president to stay the course on dealing with the Chinese government, which the letter states is in opposition to the values and strategic interests of the United States.

The letter was written by retired Navy Captain James E. Fanell, a former director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The letter is a response to an open letter published by the Washington Post on July 3 titled "China is not an enemy."

Fanell's letter has 130 signatories, including veterans and former U.S. military officials, scholars and professors, think tank members, and other China watchers.

Think tankers who have signed that letter include Ian Easton and Mark Stokes of Project 2049 Institute, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and John Tkacik of the International Assessment and Strategy Center.

US Think Tank Facilitated Russian Spy Meeting with Gov't Officials?

Here is more from Reuters:

Maria Butina, accused in the United States of spying for Russia, had wider high-level contacts in Washington than previously known, taking part in 2015 meetings between a visiting Russian official and two senior U.S. officials.

The meetings, disclosed by several people familiar with the sessions and a report prepared by a Washington think tank that arranged them, involved Stanley Fischer, then Federal Reserve vice chairman, and Nathan Sheets, then Treasury undersecretary for international affairs.

Butina traveled to the United States in April 2015 with Alexander Torshin, then the Russian Central Bank deputy governor, and they took part in separate meetings with Fischer and Sheets to discuss U.S.-Russian economic relations during Democratic former President Barack Obama’s administration. 

The meetings with Fischer and Sheets were arranged by the Center for the National Interest, a Washington foreign policy think tank that is supportive of efforts to improve U.S.-Russia relations. Paul Saunders, its executive director, in December 2016 urged then President-elect Donald Trump to ease tensions with Russia. In articles in its magazine, The National Interest, members of the think tank have also warned of the costs to the United States of confronting Russia or getting involved in Eurasian conflicts.

The meetings were documented in a Center for the National Interest report seen by Reuters that outlined its Russia-related activities from 2013 to 2015. The report described the meetings as helping bring together “leading figures from the financial institutions of the United States and Russia.”

Saunders, the think tank’s executive director, said Torshin spoke at an April 2015 event about the Russian banking system and Butina attended as Torshin’s interpreter. Saunders said people at the organization cannot recall details of Torshin’s presentation. 

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch piece about the Center for the National Interest (CNI) hosting Donald Trump.

Here is a ProPublica piece entitled "Why Russian Spies Really Like American Universities."

Update from Politico on July 26: Spotted at the Center for the National Interest’s annual Distinguished Service Award Dinner honoring Secretary of Defense James Mattis last night at the Four Seasons Hotel: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), Ret. Gen. Charles Boyd, Dimitri Simes, Paul Saunders, Dov Zakheim, Drew Gruff, Grover Norquist, Samah Norquist David Norquist, Suhail Khan, Jacob Heilbrunn and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

Center for American Progress Action Fund's (CAPAF) ThinkProgress first reported on Butina nearly two years ago.

How Heritage Stocked Trump's Government

Here are our favorite excerpts from a New York Times Magazine piece by Jonathan Mahler about how the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation has staffed the Trump Administration:


On staffing the Trump Administration:

The Trump team may not have been prepared to staff the government, but the Heritage Foundation was. In the summer of 2014, a year before Trump even declared his candidacy, the right-wing think tank had started assembling a 3,000-name searchable database of trusted movement conservatives from around the country who were eager to serve in a post-Obama government. The initiative was called the Project to Restore America, a dog-whistle appeal to the so-called silent majority that foreshadowed Trump’s own campaign slogan.

On Trump and Heritage being an unlikely match:

In some ways, Trump and Heritage were an unlikely match. Trump had no personal connection to the think tank and had fared poorly on a “Presidential Platform Review” from its sister lobbying shop, Heritage Action for America, which essentially concluded that he wasn’t even a conservative.

On helping each other:

And yet Heritage and Trump were uniquely positioned to help each other. Much like Trump’s, Heritage’s constituency is equal parts donor class and populist base. Its $80 million annual budget depends on six-figure donations from rich Republicans like Rebekah Mercer, whose family foundation has reportedly given Heritage $500,000 a year since 2013. But it also relies on a network of 500,000 small donors, Heritage “members” whom it bombards with millions of pieces of direct mail every year. The Heritage Foundation is a marketing company, a branding agency — it sells its own Heritage neckties, embroidered with miniature versions of its Liberty Bell logo — and a policy shop rolled into one. But above all, Heritage is a networking group.

On victory for Heritage:

Today it is clear that for all the chaos and churn of the current administration, Heritage has achieved a huge strategic victory. Those who worked on the project estimate that hundreds of the people the think tank put forward landed jobs, in just about every government agency. Heritage’s recommendations included some of the most prominent members of Trump’s cabinet: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos (whose in-laws endowed Heritage’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society), Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions and many more. Dozens of Heritage employees and alumni also joined the Trump administration — at last count 66 of them, according to Heritage, with two more still awaiting Senate confirmation. It is a kind of critical mass that Heritage had been working toward for nearly a half-century.

On the five ideologies of Heritage:

[Heritage co-founded Ed] Feulner packaged his fledgling think tank’s ideology into five basic principles: free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional values and a strong national defense. 

Heritage avoids never-Trump:

In March 2016, the Republican establishment stepped up its effort to stop Trump. More than 100 Republican national-security experts signed an open letter publicly committing to fight his election, calling him a “racketeer” and denouncing his dishonesty and “admiration for foreign dictators.” A number of the signatories were fellows of conservative think tanks; none were affiliated with Heritage at the time. Heritage treated Trump as it would any other candidate, giving his campaign staff more than a dozen briefings and sending them off with decks of cards bearing Heritage policy proposals and market-tested “power phrases.”

On what Heritage staffers ate during election night:

On election night, Heritage turned its first floor over to a viewing party with an open bar, chicken wings and red, white and blue cupcakes.

On Heritage staffing the Trump Administration:

Heritage helped place countless others, from staff assistants to cabinet secretaries. In some cases, DeMint intervened directly, calling Pence to argue for Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman whose political career DeMint helped start years earlier in South Carolina. Mulvaney is now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and as this article went to press, he was serving out the remaining time in a stint as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...

On current Heritage-Trump relations:

The president and his favorite think tank continue to draw closer. Administration officials speak regularly at Heritage and give frequent interviews to The Daily Signal. In April, Pruitt and Attorney General Jeff Sessions were both scheduled to speak at a Heritage donor conference in Palm Beach, Fla. (Sessions, under fire from the president because of the Russia investigation, dropped out.)

On the Trump-Heritage revolving door:

Churn is a central feature of this administration, even for its unofficial staffing agency. Paul Winfree, a Heritage economist who helped draft Trump’s first budget, is back at the think tank. So are Stephen Moore, who worked on the Trump tax cuts; David Kreutzer, who played a key role in dissolving a White House working group that was studying the monetary costs associated with climate-warming carbon dioxide; and Hans von Spakovsky, who helped run the now-defunct voter-fraud commission...

Here is a recent Think Tank Watch piece about big changes that have taken place recently at the Heritage Foundation.

Brookings: Trump Likely Obstructed Justice by Firing FBI Director

Several powerful think tanks continue to work at a furious pace to end the presidency of Donald Trump.  Here is more from The Hill:

President Trump "likely obstructed justice" and could possibly face impeachment for firing FBI Director James Comey if special counsel Robert Mueller reaches the same conclusion, a new analysis from The Brookings Institution found.

In a report released Tuesday, the left-leaning think tank said that Trump had authority to fire the FBI chief, but not if his motives for doing so centered around hindering the ongoing Russia probe.

The 108-page Brookings report, entitled "Presidential Obstruction of Justice: The Case of Donald J. Trump," was written by Barry Berke, Noah Bookbinder, and Norman Eisen.

Berke is co-chair of the litigation department at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, and a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

Bookbinder is Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and formerly worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee and US Department of Justice.

Eisen is a Senior Fellow at Brookings and was the chief White House ethics lawyer in the Obama Administration.  He is also chair and co-founder of CREW.

The report concludes that if special counsel Robert Mueller comes to the same conclusion as Brookings, Trump could be impeached.

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post says that the Brookings report "amounts to an amicus brief" for use by special counsel Mueller and his team., and "should scare the daylights" out of Trump supporters.

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch post which notes that James Comey is a longtime friend of Brookings scholar Benjamin Wittes.

During the summer, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released its own lengthy report making the case for collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Heritage Foundation Buying Trump Voter Data

Here is more from The Daily Beast:

Three weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, a data company owned by one of his wealthiest supporters began cashing in.

The company, Cambridge Analytica, inked a deal with the nation’s leading conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, for the purpose of hitting up Trump voters for donations.

The marrying of the two institutions was made easier by a shared principle. Cambridge Analytica is run by Rebekah Mercer, who with her father provided major cash infusions for Trump and groups supporting him during the 2016 campaign. Mercer is also a board member of the Heritage Foundation, the nation’s flagship conservative think tank.

The article notes that Heritage has used Cambridge Analytica in the past, including from late 2015 to June 2016 when the firm provided "statistical models to identify new donors" and developed digital ads for the think tank.

Even though Heritage already has a large donor base (having collected nearly $80 million from donors in 2016), Cambridge Analytica thinks it can provide the think tank with another 600,000 new potential donors.

Earlier in the year, Heritage had a huge shakeup which led some to speculate that the think tank could lose a big chunk of its donor support.

AEI Scholar Becomes Head of White House CEA

It is now official.  Kevin Hassett, a long-time scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has been confirmed as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).

Shortly after President Donald Trump announced his intent to nominate Hassett to head the CEA, Michael Strain, Director of Economic Policy Studies and Resident Scholar at AEI, said that Hassett would be a great choice as chief economist to the president.  Strain has also praised the confirmation.

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch post about Hassett.  Here is more about Hassett from CNN.

A handful of AEI scholars served on Trump's transition team and have gone into the Trump Administration, but the Heritage Foundation still dominates in terms of connections to the White House.

Former Heritage Scholar a "Fixer" in Trump's Washington

Politico recently highlighted the work of Lisa Curtis, the former Senior Research Fellow in Asian Studies at the Heritage Foundation's Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, who is now in the Trump Administration.  Here is a clip:

It may not be President Donald Trump's list of problems to solve but the relationship with Pakistan has an unfortunate habit of flaring up, and doing so at the most inopportune times.

Tasked with making headway in the thorny and knotty relationship with Islamabad is Lisa Curtis, a longtime expert on Pakistan and counterterrorism who was recruited earlier this year to the White House's National Security Council to be its senior director for South Asia.

Curtis is one of dozens of scholars at the Heritage Foundation who either advised the Trump Administration during the presidential campaign or who has actually gone into the administration.

In related news, the Heritage Foundation continues to look for a new president after Sen. Ben Sasse reportedly turned down the job.

Feds Turning to Heritage Report to See if Job Will Survive Cuts

Just as Greeks used to go to the Oracle of Delphi to have their questions answered, federal employees are turning to a modern-day Pythia in a think tank report to have their most pressing question answered: "Will I have a job tomorrow?"

Due to promised cuts in the federal government by the Trump Administration, many people who work in the executive branch are nervously wondering whether or not they will have a job when they wake up.  To divine insights, they are reading a wonky report from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with close ties to the Trump Administration, that may provide some answers.

Here is more from The Washington Post:

Some people are tweaking their résumés or thinking about retirement. But most are waiting to see whether the news from the White House really is as bad as they fear and if so, whether Congress will come to the rescue. For now, they are reading the tea leaves on cable television. And they are poring over the recommendations of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which the administration is leaning on for guidance.

Heritage’s list contains several agencies targeted not just for downsizing but elimination, including one that provides financial assistance to rural businesses, the International Trade Administration, and the Legal Services Corporation.

To the president and his supporters who see a bloated bureaucracy with lots of duplication and rules that choke jobs, the budget cuts are a necessary first step to make government run more efficiently.

The above-mentioned Heritage report that everyone is poring over, "Blueprint for Reform: A Comprehensive Policy Agenda for a New Administration in 2017," can be found here.

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch piece on that report, which may be 2017's most influential think tank document, along with this one, also from Heritage.

President Trump Negotiating Deal to Join Brookings After Presidency

Think Tank Watch has learned that President Donald Trump is in negotiations with top officials at the liberal Brookings Institution to pave the way for an eventual position at the think tank.

A senior Brookings official, who requested anonymity due to fear of upsetting Mr. Trump, tells Think Tank Watch that Trump would like to establish the first billion-dollar chair at a think tank.  His desire, according to the official, is to establish a new entity within Brookings called the "Center for the Art of Trump Negotiating Tactics."

Mr. Trump apparently is also trying to get Brookings to change its name to "Trump Institution," saying that Brookings has lost a lot of its prestige and goodwill after a series of scandals the past few years (see here).

The eventual goal, according to a top White House official, is for Trump to buy the adjacent American Enterprise Institute (AEI) building and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) building and turn in into one large think tank-themed hotel.

A Brookings spokesman would not comment on the specifics of negotiations, but said that he would welcome Mr. Trump joining Brookings as it "would seriously bolster its image" which has "been in steady decline in recent years."

Think Tank Chief Turns Down No. 2 Job at DoD

Michele Flournoy, the Co-Founder and CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), has reportedly turned down the No. 2 job at the Department of Defense.

Here is some more from Business Insider:

Michèle Flournoy met with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in December about coming on board as his deputy, but she ultimately turned down the job. 

A roundtable discussion in Politico Magazine published on Monday finally reveals why: Her own conscience would have made it difficult.

"When [Mattis] called me to ask me to consider ways to help, I had to give it due consideration," Flournoy told Politico's Susan Glasser. "But I also knew that he needed a deputy who wouldn't be struggling every other day about whether they could be part of some of the policies that were likely to take shape."

Flournoy, a cofounder of the Center for a New American Security, has served in a variety of top roles within the Pentagon in the past, and was considered a top pick for Secretary of Defense if Hillary Clinton had won. She most recently served during the Obama administration as undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, a highly-influential job that Mattis is still trying to get filled.

While there may be some policy differences and too many uncertainties about the Trump Administration, one thing is clear - she would have taken a significant pay cut if she switched jobs.  In 2014 she made $282,208 at the think tank, but the DEPSECDEF job only pays about $185,000.

Trump Ain't No Think Tanker

The New York Times reminds us that President Donald Trump is not exactly a think tank lover:

He [Donald Trump] will linger on the opulence of the newly hung golden drapes, once used by Franklin D. Roosevelt - for a man who sometimes has trouble concentrating on policy memos, Mr. Trump was delighted to page through a book that offered him 17 window covering options.

Here is a recent Think Tank Watch piece on how Trump supporters may be killing off traditional think tanks.  And don't forget to check out the Heritage Foundation's recent event on the "death" of think tanks.

To be sure, think tanks will be around for awhile.  After all, the White House is starting its own internal think tank.  And the think tank revolving door is alive and well.

Brookings Scholar Suing Trump

Brookings Institution scholar Norman Eisen is among a group of people suing President Donald Trump over foreign payments to Mr. Trump's firms.  Here is more from the New York Times:

A team of prominent constitutional scholars, Supreme Court litigators and former White House ethics lawyers intends to file a lawsuit Monday morning alleging that President Trump is violating the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other business operations to accept payments from foreign governments.

The lawsuit is among a barrage of legal actions against the Trump administration that have been initiated or are being planned by major liberal advocacy organizations. Such suits are among the few outlets they have to challenge the administration now that Republicans are in control of the government.

The legal team filing the lawsuit includes Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard constitutional scholar; Norman L. Eisen, an Obama administration ethics lawyer; and Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine. Among the others are Richard W. Painter, an ethics counsel in the administration of George W. Bush; Mr. Gupta, a Supreme Court litigator who has three cases pending before the court; and Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor and former congressional candidate who has been studying and writing about the Emoluments Clause for nearly a decade.

Forbes notes that Eisen attempted to justify the suit in a December white paper for the Brookings Institution, where is is a Fellow in Governance Studies.

He previously served as US Ambassador to the Czech Republic in the Obama Administration, and before that was Special Counsel to the President and Special Assistant to the President.

In 2001 Eisen co-founded Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), a government watchdog group.

Brookings is expected to be one of the biggest attack dogs when it comes to fighting Mr. Trump, and has recently been touted as a sanctuary think tank for liberals.

Pair of Think Tank Heads Could Become Ambassadors

Here is what The Hill is reporting about Jon Huntsman, the Chairman of the think tank Atlantic Council, and Michele Flournoy, the Co-Founder and CEO of Center for a New American Security (CNAS):

Incoming White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is backing candidates for ambassadorships that are opposed by other advisers to President-elect Donald Trump and who fall outside the far-right view for which he is known, according to a report Wednesday in The New York Times.

Bannon has spoken favorably of Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah who served as ambassador to China under President Obama, according to the Times. Huntsman has reportedly been suggested for ambassador to Japan.

Bannon has also backed Michele Flournoy, who was the third-highest-ranking Pentagon official under Obama, for ambassador to NATO, the newspaper reported.

Flournoy, who was widely believed to be Hillary Clinton’s choice for Defense secretary had she won, has already denied any interest in taking a role in the Trump administration.

Amid speculation that Flournoy was in the running for Trump’s deputy Defense secretary, her think tank, Center for a New American Security (CNAS), put out a statement saying she was staying put.

As we reported earlier this week, several top think tankers are still in the running for high-level posts in the incoming Trump Administration.

Think Tank Watch will continue to provide updates of all the think tankers who go into the Trump Administration as well as all the outgoing Obama officials who are beginning their post-government lives in think tank land.

Will Heritage Foundation Bring All Republicans Together?

Politico reports that the Heritage Foundation continues to bring powerful Republicans together, confirming the fact that the conservative think tank will play an outsized role in US politics in the years ahead.  Here is more:

...the House Freedom Caucus and the Republican Study Committee -- two conservative caucuses in the House -- are holding a joint retreat in New York in February. There will be A LOT of opinions at this one, as the two groups represent well more than half of all House Republicans. The weekend is organized by the Heritage Foundation.

The Freedom Caucus has quite an affinity for the Heritage Foundation, which reportedly plagiarized from the think tank a list of rules the incoming Trump Administration should immediately repeal or revise.

The Heritage Foundation has already been a big influencing on the Trump transition team and Trump's political and economic thinking.

However, Heritage and similar influential think tanks are not omnipotent.  After all, as Associated Press has noted, "Trump's roster of agency heads and advisers conspicuously lacks and academics."

Trump Dumping Think Tanks

Even though a massive amount of think tankers from the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks are on the Trump transition team, it doesn't mean that Donald Trump is actually listening to any of them.

Here is more from Politico:

While Donald Trump dines on frog legs with Mitt Romney and meets with a parade of lawmakers and governors in his gold-plated Midtown skyscraper, most of his transition staff are hunkered down in Washington, D.C., writing detailed governing plans for his first 100 days.

But so far, Trump and his inner circle have largely ignored those plans as they focus on top appointments and lean on the advice of politicians, CEOs and donors, rather than on their transition staff, say sources close to the transition.

The president-elect, meanwhile, has been more likely to set policy on Twitter than through consultation with his D.C. advisers.

The New York-D.C. transition divide reflects Trump’s tendency to focus on personnel and, especially, personality, over policy. Experts say that bent, combined with his improvisational style and the divisions between the teams will complicate his transition to the White House, making it less likely he’ll have a cohesive roadmap for governing on Day One. 

...former transition officials say Trump’s operation is unusual in the way it’s leaving so much of the policy and second-tier personnel appointments to D.C. transition team members, many of whom are volunteers with little power and no connection to Trump’s key advisers.

Trump has few real ties to Washington’s network of Republican policy wonks and is much more likely to take advice from son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, Trump’s incoming chief strategist, than from veterans of Republican presidencies.

The article goes on to list Mr. Trump's "inner core," which consists of Jared Kusher, Steve Bannon, Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, and Kellyanne Conway.  Think Tank Watch should note that of those five, only Mike Pence has any real connection to the think tank world.

To be sure, hundreds of think tankers will go into the Trump Administration over the next few months and years, and they will certainly influence policy, but by how much has yet to be determined.

Lobbyist Purge Allows Think Tanks to Dominate Trump Transition

The recent purge of registered lobbyist from Donald Trump's presidential transition team has created more work (and more influence) for think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation.  Here is more from Daily Mail:

The Trump transition team has lost nearly half its staff and volunteers in a matter of days since instituting a ban on registered lobbyists at the end of last week, the Daily Mail has learned.

...The sources estimated that the number of staffers and volunteers working on the transition plummeted from around 250 late last week to less than 125 on Tuesday.  The sudden purge of lobbyists has allowed conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) to take a stronger role in the transition.

Here is a recent Think Tank Watch piece on how the Heritage Foundation is vetting resumes for the Trump team.  Here is a piece on the fact that many think tankers are worried about the new Trump era.  And here is a piece about the new think tank landscape in Washington, DC.

Trump's Think Tank Whisperer on Taxes and Trade

Mr. Stephen Moore, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation who is also an adviser to Donald Trump, is trying to make the Republican nominee, well, more Republican.

Moore, who formerly wrote on economics and public policy for The Wall Street Journal, has already been working on Mr. Trump's tax plan, and is currently updating that plan for a release in the near future.  Slate reported in May that Trump had asked Moore ("a notorious right-wing hack") and another adviser to rewrite his tax plan.  The pair have signaled that the tax plan will be released sometime after the Republican National Convention (RNC).

Moore, along with Trump adviser Larry Kudlow, the former host of CNBC's The Kudlow Report, has also been trying to push Mr. Trump to be more pro-trade.

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch post of Stephen Moore, who rejoined the Heritage Foundation in 2014.  Moore also used to work for the libertarian Cato Institute.