The economy may be slowing down, but Washington's ideas industry is booming.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institution that was effectively broke seven years ago, just bought a US$33 million vacant lot downtown as the site for a new home. The Council on Foreign Relations is expanding its Washington office to a US$60 million building on F Street. The US Institute of Peace is erecting a US$180 million headquarters of steel and white translucent glass on a corner of the National Mall.
Not least, the rapidly growing Brookings Institution -- its operating budget is up nearly 50 percent in the past two years alone -- just paid US$18.5 million for a satellite building across the street from its headquarters on Massachusetts Avenue, in a stretch near Dupont Circle known as Think Tank Row.
The result of this boom has been ever more Washington conferences, policy papers and, for better or worse, outside influence on government. Most immediately, the research institutions, which operate as Washington's government-in-waiting, are supplying the presidential campaigns with policy staff.
Democratic Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is drawing expertise from Brookings, the Council on Foreign Relations and from a start-up, the Center for a New American Security. Democratic Senator Barack Obama has advisers from Brookings as well as from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Republican Senator John McCain has tapped into both the American Enterprise Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who came under fire late last month for a number of foreign policy gaffes, has cited John Bolton, a former UN ambassador in the Bush administration who is now at the American Enterprise Institute, as one of the advisers to his presidential campaign. But Bolton, who said that he would be happy to speak with Huckabee, has so far simply exchanged e-mail with him.
"The only advice I have provided is `call my secretary,"' Bolton said in a brief telephone interview.
The research institutions say the boom is fueled by three major factors: big money from Wall Street, a post-Sept. 11 sense that foreign policy matters and anger at the administration of US President George W. Bush.
"While President Bush was bad for the world, he was good for our business," said John Podesta, chief executive of the Center for American Progress, a liberal research institution financed by, among others, the investor George Soros and his Open Society Institute.
Podesta's annual operating budget is now US$23 million after barely four years in business.
But Podesta's group is hardly the only one flush with cash. Operating budgets are up at all of Washington's top two dozen research organizations -- liberal, conservative or bipartisan -- and philanthropy is feeding them. As the very richest Americans have given away record amounts of money, the organizations have become prestigious and relatively well-priced recipients of largess.
"To a Wall Streeter, intellectuals are pretty cheap," said Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World.
"There are wedding rings that cost more than I do," he said.
A US$20 million increase in the Brookings operating budget in the past two years, bringing it to US$60.7 million last year, came largely from donations from a few individuals. Among them were John Thornton, board chairman of Brookings and a former president of Goldman Sachs, who in 2006 gave the money for the new John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings.
At the same time, some of the country's largest foundations are pouring money into research organizations. In the past five years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has assets of US$37.6 billion, has committed more than US$24 million to the Center for Global Development, a research institution across the street from Brookings on Think Tank Row. The Gates Foundation has also given millions of dollars to Brookings, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations.
The 10-year-old Gates Foundation initially financed groups that fought AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in the countries most affected by those diseases. However, it gradually came to realize that it could have a larger impact by influencing policy from the ground up at the research institutions.
"That's when it made sense to us to look at some of these organizations," said Joe Cerrell, the foundation's director of global health advocacy.
The foundation has since committed more than US$2 million to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, largely known as a military research organization, for a bipartisan HIV-AIDS study group given the task of developing ideas for how to spend the billions the Bush administration has committed to fighting the disease.
Research institution presidents, who spend enormous amounts of time raising money, naturally embrace their big contributors, but they say problems arise when a donor expects a certain result from a study the donor is financing. Research groups say that no matter how tempting the millions, they quickly show such people the door.
"I've had conversations with funders and they say: `We'd kind of like you to do this work, and we'd kind of like you to say this,"' said John Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I guarantee you a seat at the table, but I do not guarantee a result."
But experts who study these organizations say big money is increasingly narrowing the focus of research institutions and undermining their quality.
"The agenda is really being distorted by interlopers -- they're the donors," said James McGann, a professor of political science at Villanova University, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and the author of four books on research groups.
"Most people don't want to talk about it because they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them," McGann said.
A larger question is how much impact the organizations really have on government policy, and how much of what they produce is Washington hot air. The record is mixed.
The American Enterprise Institute is widely credited with playing a critical role in developing the concept of the surge, the recent increase in troop strength in Iraq. The authors of the institute's report on the surge -- Frederick Kagan, a military historian and an institute scholar, and Jack Keane, a retired general -- briefed Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on the plan shortly before the administration announced it as policy early last year.
The US Institute of Peace, in collaboration with three other organizations -- the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Center for the Study of the Presidency and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University -- organized meetings and provided staff members and office space for the Iraq Study Group.
The co-chairmen of the group were Baker, a former secretary of state and Lee Hamilton, the director of another research organization, the Woodrow Wilson International Center.
The White House has since embraced some recommendations made by the group in a 2006 report that called for a pullback of all US combat brigades in Iraq, diplomatic engagement with Syria and Iran, and a jump-start to Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.
In 2002, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace produced a report calling for "coercive" Iraqi weapons inspections, backed up by force and intended to avoid war. The group's thinking made it into a UN resolution to disarm the Iraqis, but it died with the US-led invasion.
"Institutions like this don't possess power," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
"You're one of many voices in the political marketplace. It's up to those in the marketplace who possess power -- congressmen, people in the executive branch -- to run with one of your ideas," Haass said.
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