Countries fund US think-tanks to gain influence in Washington

WASHINGTON — More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid world of think-tanks — which lawmakers, government officials and the news media have long relied on to provide independent policy analysis and scholarship — into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington and setting off troubling questions about intellectual freedom.

The arrangements involve Washington’s most influential think-tanks, including the Brookings Institution, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies as well as the Atlantic Council. Each is a major recipient of overseas funds, producing policy papers, hosting forums and organising private briefings for senior US government officials that typically align with the foreign governments’ agendas.

In interviews, top executives at the think-tanks strongly defended the arrangements, saying the money never compromised the integrity of their organisations’ research. Where their scholars’ views overlapped with those of donors, they said, was coincidence.

“Most of the governments that come to us, they understand we are not lobbyists,” said Mr Frederick Kempe, chief executive of the Atlantic Council, a fast-growing research centre that has accepted donations from at least 25 countries since 2008.

“We are a different entity and they work with us for totally different purposes,” Mr Kempe added.

Foreign officials, however, describe these relationships as pivotal to winning influence on the cluttered Washington stage, where hundreds of nations jockey for attention from the US government.

“Japan is not necessarily the most interesting subject around the world,” said Mr Masato Otaka, a spokesman for the Japanese Embassy, when asked why Japan donates heavily to American research groups.

“We’ve been experiencing some slower growth in the economy. I think our presence is less felt than before.”

In their contracts and internal documents, foreign governments are often explicit about what they expect from the research groups they finance. Norway, a major funder of forest protection efforts around the world, has often been lauded by environmentalists for the country’s lobbying of forest protection, although some critics attack the programmes as self-interested: Slowing deforestation could buy more time for Norway’s oil companies to continue selling fossil fuels on the global market as Norway and other countries push for new carbon reduction policies.

Documents obtained under that country’s unusually broad open records laws revealed that American research groups, after receiving money from Norway, have advocated in Washington for promoting its plans to expand oil drilling in the Arctic and pushed its climate change agenda.

Norway’s agreement with the Centre for Global Development, for example, imposed very specific demands. In return for Norway’s money, it was not simply asked to publish reports on combating climate change, but also to persuade Washington officials to double US spending on global forest protection efforts to US$500 million (S$626 million) a year.

The Brookings Institution, which also accepted grants from Norway, has sought to help the country gain access to US officials, documents showed.

Several legal experts who reviewed the documents, however, said the tightening relationships between US think-tanks and their overseas sponsors could violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the 1938 federal law that sought to combat a Nazi propaganda campaign in the US.

The law requires groups that are paid by foreign governments with the intention of influencing public policy to register as “foreign agents” with the Justice Department.

Mr William Antholis, the managing director at Brookings, said that if his scholars help Norway pursue its foreign policy agenda in Washington, it is only because their rigorous, independent research led them to this position. “The scholars are their own agents,” he said.

At least one of the research groups conceded that it may, in fact, be violating the federal law.

“Yikes,” said Mr Todd Moss, chief operating officer at the Centre for Global Development, after being shown dozens of pages of e-mails between his organisation and the government of Norway, which detail how his group would lobby the White House and Congress on behalf of the Norway government. “We will absolutely seek counsel on this.”

THE New York Times