Weapons makers, foreign states lavish $32 million on US think tanks

In 2024, top think tanks received over $25 million from foreign governments and $7 million from Pentagon contractors, according to the most recently available donor rolls. This figure is a conservative estimate, as about 40% of think tanks do not disclose any donors at all.

These findings come from our newly updated Think Tank Funding Tracker, which now includes the top 75 foreign policy think tanks in the U.S. and tracks all of the foreign government, U.S. government, and Pentagon contractor money flowing to them.

The top Pentagon contractor donor was Northrop Grumman, which gave over $1.1 million to think tanks in 2024.

These same think tanks routinely promote ambitious new weaponry which benefit their donors. For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) touts the Trump administration’s “Golden Dome” idea to create a missile defense shield, a daunting challenge that many experts say is unlikely to prevent a nuclear attack. In October, CSIS published a brief asserting that “the Golden Dome and strong missile defenses will provide the United States a valuable security edge, a new tool for strategic deterrence, and a path to preserve peace.” In a virtual conversation posted on the think tank’s YouTube channel about the Golden Dome last month, CSIS Senior Fellow Tom Karako said that the Golden Dome is “absolutely overdue.”

Sure enough, CSIS is funded by the very same Pentagon contractors likely to benefit from Golden Dome contracts. The Missile Defense Agency has announced thousands of companies that are eligible to work on Golden Dome missile defense contracts, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics, General Dynamics, and RTX, each of which donated at least $250,000 to CSIS this year.

Think tanks rarely face scrutiny for these funding relationships, because they are rarely disclosed by mainstream media outlets. On one rare occasion, journalist Hind Hassan pressed Mark Massa, a Deputy Director at the Atlantic Council about these conflicts of interest. In an Al Jazeera docuseries about the business of war, Hassan posed the question bluntly to the think tank staffer: “How can you unravel from the interests of weapons companies when there’s money coming in from them?”

Massa, whose think tank accepts more Pentagon contractor funding and foreign government funding than any other, paused for ten full seconds before responding; “I think you’re right that it's something that a lot of people have commented on, the relationship…the relationship between, you know, the interests, we see this, we see this, you know, we see this often.”

Massa may have struggled to answer because the question points to how think tanks in America actually operate. Donors have intent; if the Atlantic Council writes too critically of RTX, Northrop Grumman, or Lockheed Martin, each of which gave more than $100,000 a piece in 2024, the think tank runs the risk of losing them as donors.

Instead of keeping a healthy distance, many think tanks take an approach more akin to a bear hug. The Atlantic Council openly advertises the benefits of being a corporate donor; according to their website, their partnerships “go beyond traditional sponsorships and are highly collaborative efforts that offer companies the most effective way to work with the Council to develop practical solutions to shared challenges.”

Many of the top donor countries are U.S. treaty allies, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan. A number of authoritarian Middle Eastern countries which rely on US weapons systems also donate heavily to think tanks, including the UAE, which gave over $3 million in 2024. UAE neighbors Qatar and Saudi Arabia were also top donors in 2024, giving over $1.2 million and $620,000 respectively.

The top foreign government donor since 2019 is the United Arab Emirates, which has splashed a whopping $20 million across D.C.’s think tanks over that time period. These donations have, in the past, come with strings attached. In 2016, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) received $250,000 to produce a report on drone exports. When the think tank put together a proposal, then-CEO Michèle Flournoy sent an email to Emirati Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, according to reporting from the Intercept. “Please let us know whether this is what you had in mind,” wrote Flournoy. When the report was finalized, Otaiba wrote back praising the study: “I think it will help push the debate in the right direction.” CNAS then released a public report suggesting that US reluctance to transfer drones turns countries to China, citing the UAE as one such example.

And this is just the funding that we are able to track. 30 of the top 75 think tanks in the US do not disclose anything at all about their funding sources, even as they produce influential research, appear frequently on the media circuit, and advise policymakers. Earlier this month, for example, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee five times in the span of just one week, despite not publicly revealing anything at all about its donors.

This epidemic of “dark money” at think tanks is worse in the US than any other region in the world. According to an annual survey from On Think Tanks, only 35% of North American think tanks disclose funding sources, compared to 67% in Asia and 58% in Africa. This has contributed to the American public reporting remarkably low levels of trust in think tanks.

Transparency about funding should be a minimum requirement for credibility. Many other top DC think tanks — including the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the America First Policy Institute — reveal nothing about their donors. How many of these think tanks accept millions from the weapons industry or foreign governments while pushing for U.S. foreign policy decisions that benefit those same donors?

Fortunately, at least some D.C. think tanks are commendably transparent. Kendra White, Senior Director of Institutional Advancement at the Center for Global Development, explained to RS that they publish their donors “as part of a strong institutional commitment to impartiality, transparency, and accountability.” A representative from New America, another transparent think tank, told RS that “Our research or educational activities are not directed or influenced in any way by financial supporters.”

Enrique Mendizabal, director of On Think Tanks, suggested in a recent blog post that think tanks ought to ask themselves tough questions about whether they maintain intellectual autonomy. Mendizabal says that think tanks should be able to look the public in the eye and say: “Here is who pays us. Here is what we do with it. Here are the lines we will not cross. And here is how you can hold us to account when we fail.”

If think tanks don’t voluntarily heed this advice and effectively remain “dark money” organizations, Congress should step in and mandate think tank transparency by passing legislation like the Think Tank Transparency Act, which would require all think tanks to disclose all of their foreign government donors. Doing so would take a critical step forward in restoring the public’s plummeting trust in think tanks and policy experts