Brookings Institution

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Brookings Institution opened its doors not in a gleaming Washington office but as a modest research outfit called the Institute for Government Research, founded on the 13th of March 1916. Its founding mission was audacious for its time: to become the first private organization in America devoted to analyzing public policy at the national level. A century later, Brookings holds the title of the most cited think tank in the world. But what does it actually do, and who controls it? Those questions have followed Brookings through every decade of its existence, shaping how it is perceived by politicians, journalists, and foreign governments alike.

• 2. From Three Branches to One

  ›

  Robert S. Brookings, a St. Louis philanthropist born in 1850, did not start with a single institution. He built three separate organizations: the Institute for Government Research, the Institute of Economics funded by the Carnegie Corporation, and a graduate school affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis. On the 8th of December 1927, these three bodies were merged into the Brookings Institution as it exists today.

  Harold G. Moulton became the first president of the consolidated institution and held that role for a quarter century. During the Great Depression, he and other Brookings scholars took part in a large study commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to understand the economic collapse. Moulton then turned around and led opposition to Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration, arguing it was slowing recovery rather than helping it. That pattern of studied independence from any one administration would define Brookings in the decades ahead.

  When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Brookings researchers redirected their work toward mobilization studies for the government. By 1948, the institution was asked to design the administrative framework for the European Recovery Program. The plan Brookings produced helped ensure that the Marshall Plan was run on what observers called a businesslike basis.

• 3. The Nixon Plot and After

  ›

  Kermit Gordon took over as Brookings president in 1967 and launched a recurring budget study in 1969 titled "Setting National Priorities," which examined federal spending choices in a systematic way. After Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, the relationship between the White House and Brookings became openly hostile.

  Nixon aide Charles Colson proposed firebombing the institution. G. Gordon Liddy and the White House Plumbers drew up a concrete plan to burn the headquarters and steal classified files stored there. The plot collapsed not because anyone had second thoughts but because the Nixon administration refused to pay for a fire engine to serve as the getaway vehicle.

  Despite that hostility from the executive branch, the 1970s saw Brookings receive more federal research contracts than it could handle. Gilbert Y. Steiner, director of the governmental studies program, was appointed the institution's fourth president in 1976 after Gordon died. His tenure as program director had already drawn in scholars working across topics from administrative reform to urban policy, producing work that later generations would regard as lasting contributions to political science.

• 4. Measuring the Middle

  ›

  A 2005 UCLA study examined congressional records from 1993 to 2002 and placed Brookings at a score of 53 on a scale of 1 to 100, where 100 represents the most liberal position. Conservative politicians cited Brookings almost as often as liberal ones did. The same study found Brookings to be the most frequently cited think tank by U.S. media and politicians across the board.

  That statistical centrism has not stopped outlets across the spectrum from applying their own labels. Time magazine called Brookings the nation's pre-eminent liberal think tank in 1977. The New York Times has described it as liberal, liberal-centrist, and centrist at different moments. The Washington Post has used centrist, liberal, and center-left. The progressive media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has variously called it centrist, conservative, and center-right. Newsweek settled on centrist, while Politico preferred center-left.

  Former Atlantic writer Matthew Yglesias and journalist Glenn Greenwald at Salon both argued that Brookings foreign policy scholars were overly supportive of Bush administration policies abroad. Brookings scholars, by contrast, have served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Among the named examples are Mark McClellan, Ron Haskins, and Martin Indyk. The board of trustees includes Kenneth Duberstein, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan, alongside figures from business including Philip H. Knight, the chairman emeritus of Nike.

• 5. Foreign Funding Under Scrutiny

  ›

  A 2014 New York Times investigation identified Brookings as one of more than a dozen Washington think tanks that had accepted payments from foreign governments while encouraging U.S. officials to support those governments' preferred policies. Documents the Times published showed that Norway made grants to Brookings that came with specific policy requests and arrangements to give Norway access to U.S. government officials. In June 2014, Norway agreed to make an additional four million dollar donation. Legal specialists who examined the documents told the Times that the language of some transactions appeared to require Brookings to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

  Qatar was named by the Times as the single biggest foreign donor to Brookings, with contributions of roughly 14.8 million dollars over a four-year period. A former visiting fellow at a Brookings affiliate in Qatar stated that he had been told during his job interview that he could not take positions critical of the Qatari government in his papers. Brookings officials denied any link between funder views and scholar output, pointing to published reports that criticized Qatar's education reforms and its support of militants in Syria.

  In 2018, The Washington Post reported that Brookings had accepted funding from the Chinese technology company Huawei between 2012 and 2018. A subsequent analysis covering the years 2014 to 2018 found that Brookings received the third-highest amount of foreign funding among the top 50 think tanks rated by the University of Pennsylvania, totaling more than 27 million dollars from outside the United States. John R. Allen, who had become the eighth president in October 2017, resigned on the 12th of June 2022 amid an FBI investigation into lobbying on behalf of Qatar.

• 6. Global Reach and Publishing

  ›

  Under Strobe Talbott, who became president in 2002, Brookings expanded its international footprint substantially. The Saban Center for Middle East Policy launched in May 2002 with a special address by King Abdullah II of Jordan. The Brookings-Tsinghua Center opened in Beijing in 2006 as a partnership with Tsinghua University's School of Public Policy and Management. The Brookings Doha Center was announced in October 2007 and directed by fellow Hady Amr in Qatar. By 2011, Talbott had added a Brookings India Office in New Delhi.

  Haim Saban, the American-Israeli film and television producer, donated 13 million dollars to establish the Middle East policy center that originally bore his name. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in a 2006 article that Saban Center publications never questioned U.S. support for Israel. Martin Indyk, a Saban Center fellow, disputed their framing sharply. He described their concept of a coordinated pro-Israel lobby as a cabal, arguing the claim was factually wrong.

  By 2020 and 2021, Brookings announced it was separating from its centers in Doha and New Delhi, and converting its Beijing partnership into an informal arrangement with Tsinghua University. The Brookings Institution Press, which publishes both internal research and outside authors, continued producing journals including the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. As of 2025, the institution's endowment as reported at the close of June 2019 stood at 377.2 million dollars, and the University of Pennsylvania's Global Go To Think Tank Index had named Brookings the top think tank in the world every year of the index's existence, with the exception of 2016.