Welcome to the Think Tank Funding Tracker, which provides a publicly available repository of foreign government, U.S. government, and Pentagon contractor funding of the U.S.’s top 50 foreign policy think tanks going back to 2019.
By law, think tanks are not required to disclose any of their funding and there are marked differences in how much donor information think tanks make publicly available. To provide users with a sense of think tanks’ varying levels of disclosure, the Think Tank Funding Tracker [TTFT] provides funding transparency ratings for all of the top foreign policy think tanks in the U.S.
The Think Tank Funding Tracker will continue to be updated annually with new data.
Methodology
To create this database, we collected self-reported information from think tank annual reports and donor roll disclosures on three categories: foreign government funding, U.S. government funding, and defense contractor funding. The Think Tank Funding Tracker provides the exact donation figure if it is disclosed, but otherwise includes a range for each transaction. For all total dollar amounts, the tracker sums the lower end of any range provided to provide the most conservative estimates of think tank funding. To keep the focus strictly on disclosures, we only include information from the think tank’s own websites or information that think tank’s provided directly to the Think Tank Funding Tracker. We do not include funding revealed through investigative reporting, leaked emails, or any other revelations outside of the think tank itself.
How did you collect this data?
There are well-over a thousand think tanks in the U.S., and it was well beyond our resources to analyze the funding of them all. We narrowed our list to focus on the top 50 most influential think tanks in the U.S., as rated by Academic Influence. With a team of academics and data scientists, Academic Influence compiles their list of the top 50 think tanks in the world by aggregating scholarly and academic citations, tracking the attention they receive, and weighing their merits against other information sources. Their list includes U.S. and foreign think tanks, so to keep our focus on the U.S., we substituted non-U.S. think tanks with the following influential foreign policy focused think tanks that are U.S.-based: Center for American Progress, Human Rights Watch, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Asia Society Policy Institute, United States Institute of Peace, Belfer Center for Science and International Relations, Inter-American Dialogue, Stimson Center, Pacific Council on International Policy, Middle East Institute, Center for Transatlantic Relations, Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, Institute for Science and International Security, Independent Institute, Global Security Institute, and the International Peace Institute.
Foreign government funding
Foreign government funding is taken to include any subdivision of a foreign government, such as a Defense Ministry or Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It also includes businesses that are owned or under the control of a foreign government, such as state-owned oil companies.
U.S. government funding
U.S. government funding includes all federal government funding, and, when possible, delineates the specific office and department that federal funds originate from. To keep the focus on the federal government, the database does not include contributions from state and city governments and municipalities, which only make up a handful of small donations.
Pentagon contractors
As there are over 10,000 Pentagon contractors, we limited the scope of the database to the top 100 largest defense companies by revenue, based on a list compiled annually by Defense News1. We broadened this list to add nine more Pentagon contractors, which reportedly have classified Pentagon contracts, intelligence community contracts, or make significant contributions to think tanks: McKinsey, IBM, Palantir, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, General Atomics, Merck, Accenture, and MBDA.
Donor Transparency Scores
Transparency is a scale rather than a dichotomy, and could potentially incorporate an immense variety of factors. To simplify this process and provide an objective scale of donor transparency we utilized a simple five question test to determine each think tank’s transparency score. Each of the five questions informs the degree of transparency of a think tank and provides the public with a general sense of how transparent a think tank is about their funding. These ratings are based on five binary questions, with a “yes” answer to each question assigning one star:
- Does the think tank update its donor roll annually?
- Does the think tank provide a publicly available list of donors on its website or annual report?
- Is this publicly available donor list free of anonymous donors who have given $10,000 or more to the think tank?
- Does the think tank list the exact dollar amount of donations? (If yes, it is awarded two stars and question five is not asked; if not, no stars are given, and question five is asked)
- Does the think tank list donors in four or more funding ranges?