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Brookings Institution
Orientation: usually described as centrist or centre-left; Brookings calls itself nonpartisan. Funding: a large endowment plus foundations, corporations, wealthy individuals and some foreign governments, the last of which has drawn press scrutiny.
Founded in 1916, it is the institution later think tanks measured themselves against; the Heritage Foundation was set up partly as a conservative counterweight to it. Known for the Hamilton Project, an economic policy programme launched in 2006 with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin among its founders, and for the Tax Policy Center it runs with the Urban Institute. A good mainstream baseline on economics, governance and foreign policy.
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The Heritage Foundation
Orientation: conservative; its president since 2021, Kevin Roberts, has described its role as institutionalising Trumpism. Funding: individual donors and foundations; Heritage says it takes no government money of any kind and does no contract research.
Its signature product is the transition blueprint. Mandate for Leadership, published in 1981 for the incoming Reagan administration, ran to more than 2,000 recommendations, and its descendant Project 2025, published in 2023, set out a plan for a second Trump term with a personnel database and draft executive orders alongside it. Since late 2025 it has lost a stream of staff after Roberts defended Tucker Carlson, so check who wrote a paper as well as the logo on it.
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American Enterprise Institute
Orientation: centre-right, favouring free enterprise and limited government, and more establishment in tone than Heritage. Funding: foundations, corporations and individuals.
AEI's best-known intervention is Choosing Victory, the January 2007 plan by Frederick Kagan and retired General Jack Keane that argued for a troop surge in Baghdad while the Bush administration weighed its Iraq options; it is widely credited as a framework for the surge that followed. Its range is broader than that neoconservative reputation suggests, taking in housing, poverty and social mobility research and a Survey Center on American Life, so a reader meets AEI work well beyond foreign policy.
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Cato Institute
Orientation: libertarian, which means it fits neither party neatly: it argues for lower taxes and lighter regulation alongside open immigration, ending the war on drugs and a restrained foreign policy. Funding: private contributions only, with no government money; in its 2024 to 2025 financial year individuals supplied about 78 per cent of operating revenue.
Founded in 1977 with Charles Koch as a co-founder, Cato is the place to read the consistent small-government case on any issue. It co-publishes the annual Human Freedom Index with Canada's Fraser Institute, ranking countries on personal as well as economic liberty, and its immigration work regularly puts it at odds with many conservatives.
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Center for American Progress
Orientation: progressive, created in 2003 by John Podesta as a Democratic answer to Heritage and AEI. Funding: individual donors, foundations, labour unions and corporations; critics have faulted it for not disclosing all its donors.
CAP sits closer to Democratic administrations than most think tanks: Neera Tanden returned as its president in 2025 after serving as Joe Biden's domestic policy adviser. Its Medicare Extra plan offered a choice between public and private coverage rather than single payer, and it published some of the most detailed critiques of Project 2025. A sister organisation, the CAP Action Fund, can lobby more freely, so note which of the two put out a piece.
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RAND Corporation
Orientation: independent and nonpartisan, with a technocratic, evidence-first style rather than an ideological one. Funding: mostly the US federal government; in 2024 about $328 million of its $514 million in revenue came from federal sources, the rest from foundations, companies, universities and other governments.
RAND began in 1945 as Project RAND, an Air Force research effort run through Douglas Aircraft, and became an independent nonprofit in 1948. Paul Baran's packet switching work there fed into the networks behind the internet, and its Health Insurance Experiment, run from 1974 to 1982, remains a landmark study of how what patients pay changes the care they use. Because so much is commissioned, check who asked the question.
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Council on Foreign Relations
Orientation: describes itself as independent and nonpartisan, and its membership spans both parties' foreign policy professionals. Funding: individual and corporate memberships, foundations and a sizeable endowment.
Founded in 1921, the Council publishes Foreign Affairs, the journal that in 1947 carried George Kennan's anonymous essay The Sources of Soviet Conduct, which set out the containment strategy that framed American Cold War policy. With more than 5,000 members, its task force reports and explainers are a reliable guide to mainstream Washington thinking on a crisis, which is useful precisely because readers can then see where the populist right and the anti-war left depart from it.
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Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Orientation: nonpartisan and internationalist; it takes no institutional policy positions and has no political lobbying arm. Funding: an endowment that began with Andrew Carnegie's $10 million gift in 1910, plus foundation grants, individual donors and some government grants, with donors listed by gift size in its annual reports.
Founded in 1910, Carnegie stands out for its global footprint, with centres in Beirut, Brussels, Singapore, New Delhi and Berlin; its Moscow centre closed in 2022. For 30 years it published Foreign Policy magazine before selling it in 2008. Former Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines became president in 2026. Read it for regional expertise from analysts based in the regions they cover.
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Atlantic Council
Orientation: Atlanticist, committed to close ties between North America and Europe and broadly pro-NATO; it calls itself nonpartisan and independent of the US government and NATO. Funding: foundations, corporations, individuals and governments; a 2025 Quincy Institute study found it received almost $21 million from foreign governments between 2019 and 2023, the most of any US think tank studied.
Founded in 1961, the Atlantic Council became one of the loudest voices on the war in Ukraine, consistently arguing for arming Kyiv and against compromise with Moscow, and was the think tank most cited on the war by the three leading US newspapers. Its Digital Forensic Research Lab, set up in 2016, investigates online disinformation campaigns.
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Economic Policy Institute
Orientation: left of centre and openly pro-union, founded in 1986 by economists including Robert Reich and Lester Thurow. Funding: foundations and labour unions; eight unions pledged support at its founding, and unions supplied about 29 per cent of its funding between 2005 and 2009.
EPI is best known for its productivity-pay chart, which tracks how far a typical worker's pay has fallen behind productivity since 1979; its latest version puts typical hourly pay growth at about 0.6 per cent a year against 1.4 per cent for productivity. Expect firm positions on the minimum wage, collective bargaining and trade, with the underlying data tables published alongside the charts so you can test them.
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Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Orientation: conservative, with a focus on cities, policing, education and welfare. Funding: private donations, much of it from people in finance; Betsy DeVos succeeded the investor Paul Singer as board chair in 2025.
The Manhattan Institute has a record of ideas that left the seminar room. It paid Charles Murray to write Losing Ground, his 1984 critique of federal welfare policy, and its championing of broken windows policing helped shape Rudy Giuliani's approach as mayor of New York. Its quarterly City Journal is the easiest way in. Senior fellow Christopher Rufo, appointed to the New College of Florida board by Ron DeSantis in 2023, has taken it into the fight over American universities.
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Hoover Institution
Orientation: widely described as conservative, favouring free enterprise and limited government, though its directors dispute that it is partisan. Funding: roughly half private gifts, mostly from individuals, and half from an endowment, with conservative foundations among its named supporters.
Hoover is a think tank inside a university: formally part of Stanford, but with its own board and income. Founded by Herbert Hoover in 1919 around his First World War papers, it still holds major archives, and its fellows have included Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell and Henry Kissinger. Condoleezza Rice has directed it since 2020. Its output is academic-grade conservative economics and security work rather than quick-turnaround campaigning.
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Urban Institute
Orientation: calls itself nonpartisan and is often described that way, though some outlets label it liberal or left-leaning. Funding: foundations, federal contracts and private donors; in 2024 foundations supplied 39 per cent of operating revenue and the federal government 32 per cent.
Set up in 1968 under Lyndon Johnson to study urban problems and evaluate Great Society programmes, Urban is a data shop first. Its Tax Policy Center, run jointly with Brookings, publishes analyses of how a tax plan's gains and losses fall across income groups, the kind of table that settles arguments about who a bill really helps. Useful for numbers; read the framing around them with its leanings in mind.
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Peterson Institute for International Economics
Orientation: centrist and broadly pro-trade; it takes no institutional party line, and its economists generally favour open markets. Funding: foundations, corporations and individuals, plus publication income and a capital fund.
The institute gave the world a phrase. In 1989 its economist John Williamson coined the Washington Consensus in a background paper for a conference on Latin American reform, summing up the policies the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury were urging on debtor countries; he later said he regretted the label. Founded in 1981 by Fred Bergsten and renamed after its founding chairman Peter Peterson in 2006, it is the first stop for serious analysis of tariffs and trade wars.
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Center for Strategic and International Studies
Orientation: bipartisan by its own description and usually labelled centrist. Funding: corporations, foundations, governments and individuals; defence contractors and several foreign governments, including Japan, Taiwan and the UAE, are among its significant funders, which matters when it writes about arms or alliances.
Founded in 1962 and once part of Georgetown University, CSIS is a heavyweight on defence and Asia. Its January 2023 report The First Battle of the Next War played out a Chinese invasion of Taiwan 24 times and found that the invasion usually failed, but at enormous cost to the United States and Taiwan as well as China. Retired General Joseph Dunford took over as chief executive in May 2026.
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Claremont Institute
Orientation: conservative, founded in 1979 by students of the political philosopher Harry Jaffa; critics describe it as having drifted towards the fringe. Funding: private donors, with revenue of about $13 million in 2025.
Small next to Heritage, Claremont matters for supplying much of the philosophical case for Trump-era conservatism. Its Claremont Review of Books published Michael Anton's pseudonymous 2016 essay The Flight 93 Election, which likened conservatives who let Trump lose to passengers who refuse to storm a hijacked cockpit, and senior fellow John Eastman advised Trump on attempts to overturn the 2020 result. Read it to understand the ideas behind the movement rather than for policy costings.
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America First Policy Institute
Orientation: conservative and explicitly pro-Trump, promoting an America First agenda. Funding: donors it is not required to name, as a 501(c)(3) charity; Trump has hosted fundraisers for it, and revenue reached about $51 million in 2024.
Founded in 2021 by Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow, AFPI was described by Politico as a White House in waiting, and it proved one. Rollins became Agriculture Secretary and founding chair Linda McMahon Education Secretary in the second Trump administration, and by May 2025 AFPI said 73 of its alumni had been hired by the administration. Its America First Agenda, covering tariffs, energy, the border and the civil service, is a useful map of the thinking behind many of the administration's domestic moves.
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Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Orientation: progressive, focused on poverty and inequality, though it describes itself as a nonpartisan research institute. Funding: foundations such as Ford, MacArthur and Annie E. Casey, plus individual donors; it has taken small government grants.
Robert Greenstein, a Carter administration appointee, founded the Center in 1981 as an alternative voice to the Reagan administration's social policy, and federal and state budget analysis is still its core. When Congress moves on food aid, tax credits or Medicaid, its explainers set out who stands to lose income or coverage. It also launched the International Budget Partnership, which publishes the Open Budget Index on how transparent national budgets are worldwide.
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Roosevelt Institute
Orientation: liberal and progressive, carrying the name and New Deal legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Funding: foundation grants, led in recent years by the Hewlett Foundation; revenue was about $23 million in 2024.
Formed in 1987 from the merger of the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Foundation, it is best known on the economic left. Its 2015 report by chief economist Joseph Stiglitz challenged some 35 years of American economic policy and set out 37 recommendations, from more progressive taxes to expanded public programmes; Time called it a roadmap for what many progressives wanted to see over the following four years. Pair it with EPI for the progressive economic case.
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Bipartisan Policy Center
Orientation: centrist by design, set up in 2007 by four former Senate majority leaders, Republicans Howard Baker and Bob Dole and Democrats Tom Daschle and George Mitchell, to combine ideas from both parties. Funding: corporations, industry associations and philanthropies; a 2013 report from a Harvard ethics centre argued its work advanced its funders' interests, so check sponsors on energy and technology papers.
Its 2010 Debt Reduction Task Force report, Restoring America's Future, was a bid to shape the Obama-era fight over the national debt, and more recently it has briefed Congress on artificial intelligence and data-centre power demand. Its papers show where a bipartisan deal could land, rather than what either party actually wants.
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Mercatus Center
Orientation: libertarian and free-market, with a particular focus on regulation. Funding: private, with the Koch family a major supporter since the mid-1980s; it takes no money from George Mason University, where it is based, or from any government.
Mercatus is the academic end of the deregulation movement. In 2001 it supplied 44 of the 71 suggestions the White House budget office received on which federal rules to revise or scrap, and Adam Thierer's Mercatus book Permissionless Innovation made the case for letting new technologies launch before regulators step in. Economist Tyler Cowen chairs its board. Expect readable economics with a consistent scepticism of rule-making.
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Institute for Fiscal Studies
Orientation: independent of party, with no campaigning line; some critics on the left argue its analysis rests on conventional pro-market assumptions. Funding: research grants and contracts, notably from the Economic and Social Research Council, plus foundations and international organisations; Who Funds You? rates it A for transparency.
The IFS is the closest thing Britain has to a referee on tax and spending. Its Green Budget, first issued in 1982 and published each year ahead of the Chancellor's statement, sets out the choices facing the Treasury before ministers frame them. Helen Miller became director in 2025, succeeding Paul Johnson. Start here for what a fiscal announcement actually costs and who pays.
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Institute for Government
Orientation: independent and cross-party, concerned with how well government works rather than what it should do. Funding: founded in 2008 with about £15 million from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, set up by the former Labour minister Lord Sainsbury; Who Funds You? gave it a B in 2022.
The Institute for Government is the place to understand the machinery of Whitehall: how ministers, civil servants, Number 10 and the Cabinet Office actually operate, and why reforms stall. Its 2024 report Power with Purpose recommended merging the Prime Minister's Office and the Cabinet Office into a single department. Hannah White has been director since 2022. Worth checking before believing any promise to fix the civil service.
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Institute of Economic Affairs
Orientation: free-market; it describes its mission as promoting free-market thinking, and critics call it neoliberal or Thatcherite. Funding: private donors, who may choose whether to be named; Who Funds You? rated it E in 2022 and D in 2023, and tobacco companies have confirmed past donations while it campaigned on tobacco regulation.
Founded in 1955 after the businessman Antony Fisher took Friedrich Hayek's advice to fight a battle of ideas rather than stand for Parliament, the IEA is often described as the prototype free-market think tank. It was active in the Brexit debate, and in 2018 it removed a Brexit report after the Charity Commission found it insufficiently balanced. Daniel Hannan became director general in June 2026.
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