Republicans would be rightly irate if a Democratic president threatened to sue a conservative think tank and punish its corporate donors over research the White House didn’t like, but President Donald Trump’s attack this week on the Center for American Progress and its funders has been met with shrugs and silence.
Think tanks are as American as baseball, jazz and apple pie. They perform an unsung role in holding governments accountable at all levels. They incubate ideas and employ people, especially from whichever party is out of power, who will staff future White Houses.
Such organizations and their supporters should not fear legal harassment when elected officials dislike their work. Freedom of speech and association are foundational pillars of the First Amendment.
What set Trump off was a CAP report that found National Guard deployments in D.C. have not contributed to the decline of violent crime. The president said on social media that he’s drawing up a lawsuit against the liberal think tank and suggested that he might include some of its contributors. Trump named Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile and NBC Universal.
CAP is led by Neera Tanden, one of the Democratic Party’s most influential power players and a veteran of the past three Democratic administrations. But a less partisan think tank, the Niskanen Center, published its own report in May that also found no effect on violent crime in D.C. attributable to the National Guard deployment. (It did find a reduction in property crime, which CAP did not analyze.)
If a more Trump-friendly think tank — of which there are many — wants to publish research showing the deployment has reduced violent crime, it’s free to do so. The America First Policy Institute published a fact sheet last year touting a positive economic impact from the Guard’s presence. The Center for Renewing America, in an article defending the legality of Trump’s actions last year, noted a decline in violent crime. Neither of these attempted to demonstrate a causal link between the deployment and the reduction.
Observers can compare the quality and depth of the research and come to their own conclusions. That’s the beauty of America’s large and diverse community of think tanks.
According to the University of Pennsylvania’s last count, in 2020, the United States had 2,203 think tanks, nearly 800 more than any other country — about 4 percent of the world’s people but about 20 percent of its think tanks. More than 90 percent were headquartered outside D.C. Massachusetts was the leader with 168 think tanks. That’s more than Italy or Japan.
America has so many because it’s a fabulously rich country where there’s enough money to fund copious research that — let’s be honest — hardly anyone reads. A bunch of it is junk, much of it is slanted, and some is so narrowly focused that it couldn’t possibly have a wide audience.
But without this ecosystem, governments would face less scrutiny of whether their policies actually work. Based on John Marshall’s maxim that the power to tax is the power to destroy, think tanks are tax-exempt, in part to protect them from politicians who don’t like what they produce. That allows them to flourish.
The most immediate effect of Trump’s threat is to make Chandler Hall, the CAP report’s author, a folk hero among D.C.’s left-leaning policy analysts. But if the threatened lawsuit actually materializes, Trump will lose.
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