New Research: Think Tank Funding Tracker Provides Insight into Cheerleading of Iran War
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Jessica Rosenblum, [email protected]
WASHINGTON – Top think tanks received over $25 million from foreign governments and $7 million from Pentagon contractors in 2024, according to the newly updated Think Tank Funding Tracker released today. Both figures, drawn from the most recently available donor rolls, are conservative estimates, as about 40% of think tanks do not disclose any donors at all. This finding might explain why so many of these institutions backed a war of choice launched by the United States on 28 February to forcibly overthrow the government of Iran.
The updated Think Tank Funding Tracker now includes the top 75 foreign policy think tanks in the United States and tracks all of the foreign government, US government, and Pentagon contractor money flowing to them. The tracker, which Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman and Nick Cleveland-Stout developed and launched in 2025, is the first-of-its-kind, publicly available repository of US think tank funding.
“Transparency about research funding should be a minimum requirement for credibility,” said Cleveland-Stout, a research associate on QI’s Democratizing Foreign Policy team.
The Atlantic Council, Center for New American Security, and the Aspen Institute received the most Pentagon contractor funding in 2024, among those that disclose their donors – $2.53 million, $1.42 million, and $625,000 respectively.
The Atlantic Council has long been a strident supporter of the US going to war against Iran. Leading up to the attack, it hired Michael Rozenblat, identified in his Atlantic Council biography as a “visiting research fellow from the Israeli security establishment” to write about Iran, including an article titled “Six reasons why Trump should choose the military option in Iran.” According to data provided, Northrop Grumman gave the most of any defense contractor to these think tanks, $1.1 million, followed by MITRE Corporation ($710,000), Saab ($510,000), and Lockheed Martin ($492,000).
Cleveland-Stout says that it’s especially troubling when think tanks push for war with Iran while hiding their funding sources. “Many top DC think tanks — including the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — reveal nothing about their donors while taking to the airwaves to promote war with Iran. How many of these think tanks accept millions from the weapons industry or foreign governments while pushing for US foreign policy decisions that benefit those same donors?” he said.
Top foreign government donors in 2024 were Canada ($4.4 million), followed by the United Arab Emirates ($3.1 million), Japan ($3.1 million), and Great Britain ($2.8 million).
“There is a ‘dark money’ epidemic amongst think tanks in the United States,” said Freeman, the director of QI’s Democratizing Foreign Policy program. “This tracker sheds light on the intimate dynamic between think tanks and Pentagon contractors, a relationship rarely discussed by legacy media. Think tanks are less likely to criticize a contractor if such criticism were to jeopardize that very contractor’s funding. The conflict of interest is abundantly clear,” said Freeman.