Washington's Think Tanks Achieve Historic Unity On The One Issue That Has Always United Them: Needing More Money To Think

WASHINGTON D.C. — Political scientists have spent decades searching for a policy position capable of uniting America's deeply fractured intellectual class. On Wednesday morning, in a beige conference room at the Capital Hilton, they found one.

Representatives from twelve of Washington's most prominent — and most ideologically incompatible — think tanks gathered for what organizers billed as "a historic convening of minds." By 10:47 a.m., those minds had reached a unanimous conclusion: more research funding is urgently required to determine whether more research funding is urgently required.

The joint statement, signed by all twelve institutions, was described by its authors as "a turning point for evidence-based discourse in America." It ran to six pages, cited forty-three footnotes, and recommended, in its closing paragraph, the formation of a new coordinating body to oversee future joint research into funding adequacy — provisionally budgeted at $4.7 million for an initial eighteen-month scoping phase.

"This is what it looks like when serious people take ideas seriously," said Dr. Howard Pell, President of the Meridian Institute for Policy Futures, standing at a podium beside a banner that read: TOGETHER WE THINK BETTER. He had been feuding publicly with the man to his immediate left — Dr. Cassandra Vought of the Liberty & Sovereignty Research Collaborative — for the better part of a decade. They did not make eye contact.

The Twelve Institutions: A Brief Survey

The coalition assembled Wednesday morning represented a cross-section of Washington's policy ecosystem so broad as to suggest, at least momentarily, that the American experiment might yet produce something resembling consensus. A brief survey of the signatories:

The Meridian Institute for Policy Futures (center-left) — Best known for its 2022 report, Toward a More Equitable Framework for Thinking About Frameworks, which concluded that "the evidence base remains insufficient to support definitive conclusions at this time."

The Liberty & Sovereignty Research Collaborative (hard right) — Authors of the 2021 white paper Freedom's Metrics: Why We Cannot Yet Measure Freedom, which called for a three-year, $6 million study into whether freedom is, in fact, measurable.

The Urban Flourishing Project (progressive) — Produced a widely cited 2023 report on urban housing policy that determined "further qualitative and quantitative analysis is needed before actionable recommendations can responsibly be made."

The Heartland Prosperity Alliance (conservative) — Released a landmark 2020 study on rural economic development whose executive summary recommended "a sustained research commitment of no less than five years before policy prescriptions are advanced."

The remaining eight institutions, spanning positions from libertarian to democratic socialist, have between them published 847 reports since 2018. Independent analysis of those reports, conducted by a graduate student at American University who has since left academia, found that 71% concluded with a variant of "more research is needed," 18% concluded with a variant of "the data are mixed," and the remaining 11% did not have a conclusion section.

The Press Conference: A Reconstruction

The event began eleven minutes late due to a dispute over podium order that was, according to two people present, "ideological in nature" but "resolved through alphabetical compromise."

Opening remarks were delivered by Dr. Pell, who described the gathering as "proof that in America, even the most divided communities can find common ground when the stakes are high enough." He did not specify what the stakes were. When asked afterward, his communications director said the question was "a bit reductive."

Dr. Vought, speaking second, struck a more cautious note. "We want to be clear," she said, "that our agreement on the question of funding adequacy does not represent agreement on any underlying policy question. We still believe the Meridian Institute is wrong about almost everything. We simply believe they are wrong in ways that require more funding to fully document."

Dr. Pell nodded at this. It was the most collegial moment of the morning.

The remaining ten speakers each made remarks averaging four minutes and thirty seconds in length, all of which, in various registers and with varying degrees of rhetorical sophistication, communicated the same basic message: the current funding environment made it impossible to know things, and knowing things required money, and they would like some.

SIDEBAR: What Did All That Research Actually Cost?

Not affiliated with Brookings. Named for a partner's college roommate.

The Broader Context

Washington's think tank sector has grown substantially over the past two decades, a period during which, by most measures, the quality of public policy has not grown commensurately. There are currently more than 1,800 think tanks operating in the United States, a figure that places America first globally in think tank density, a distinction that the think tanks themselves have studied extensively without reaching firm conclusions about its significance.

"The think tank model is predicated on the idea that better information leads to better decisions," said Professor Lyle Okonkwo of Johns Hopkins, who studies the policy research industry and has, to his evident discomfort, become something of a go-to voice on its dysfunction. "What we've ended up with is an ecosystem that's very good at producing information and very well insulated from any obligation to affect decisions. It's intellectually quite sophisticated. As a governance model, it's a disaster."

He paused. "Please don't tell any of them I said that. Three of them fund my department."

The Aftermath

The joint statement was released to the press at 12:15 p.m. By 1:30 p.m., four of the twelve signatory institutions had issued clarifying statements noting that their signature should not be interpreted as endorsement of any specific funding mechanism, amount, or oversight structure. By 3:00 p.m., two had issued clarifying statements about their clarifying statements.

At 4:45 p.m., a spokesperson for the Liberty & Sovereignty Research Collaborative confirmed that the organization had begun preliminary discussions about producing a report examining whether the joint statement had been a good idea.

Expected completion: eighteen months. Budget: to be determined, pending a scoping study.

Editor's note: During the writing of this article, three new think tanks were registered with the IRS. One of them, the Center for Research Into Research Capacity, has already published a preliminary brief calling for increased investment in research capacity. It did not cite a budget. It did not need to.