In an interview last year to promote Dark Money, her book-length polemic against Charles and David Koch, the New Yorker writer Jane Mayer characterizes the billionaire brothers and their philanthropic network as part of an outsize and unchecked force aimed at influencing public policy.
“Foundations are weird creatures in American politics — they’re perpetual forces of unaccountable money and influence,” Ms. Mayer told Rolling Stone. “And they’ve got tremendous private foundations on the right that have been built up purposely to try to change American politics, starting in about 1970. The Kochs’ foundations are among them, but they’re not the only ones, by any means. They’re funding think tanks, they’re funding university programs.”
Ms. Mayer is either unaware of or willfully ignoring the full picture of American philanthropy aimed at influencing public policy — brigades in what the political scientist Andrew Rich, author of Think Tanks, Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise, has termed the “war of ideas.”
And contrary to what Ms. Mayer asserts, it is a war in which the right is vastly outgunned financially and is likely to fall even further behind, thanks to a strategy among its major donors that is exactly the opposite of what Ms. Mayer implies.
Rather than organizing themselves to operate forever, as do Carnegie, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and other foundations, conservative grant makers are choosing to spend all their assets with relative speed and close their doors. Such major right-leaning philanthropies as the John M. Olin Foundation, the William E. Simon Foundation, and the Searle Freedom Trust have chosen this path. So, too, have a number of major left-of-center foundations, such as Atlantic Philanthropies. But the impact of the trend is likely to mean that the right will have fewer assets in the long run than the left.
Win Now
Such are the findings in my new study for the Manhattan Institute, “When Policy-Oriented Foundations Sunset.” The report examines the assets and spending of 64 foundations involved in public-policy-focused grant making.
The research indicates that the right, rather than planning a long march through American politics, has been pursuing what amounts to a “win now” strategy, spending its assets at a faster pace than foundations on the left, even those that are closing their doors. This is in part due to fear that, over time, right-leaning foundations will change ideological course, as has happened with many of the largest left-leaning grant makers, notably the Ford Foundation.
It’s certainly possible that the spending and strategy of the Kochs and others on the right have been as effective as Ms. Mayer contends — but there is no reason to conclude they have more resources than their counterparts on the left. In fact, the opposite is true. And, as a result of the trend toward foundation “sunset,” the right is falling further behind.
Of the 64 policy-focused foundations I reviewed, those on the left do not outnumber those on the right — but they control vastly more wealth.
According to Internal Revenue Service records, liberal foundations controlled assets totaling $38.4 billion in 2014, compared with $7.4 billion on the right. What’s more, total assets of those on the left are increasing by an average of $52.3 million a year, those on the right by just $12.8 million.
The numbers also undercut the notion that “perpetuity” is a tool of the right and provides it with an advantage. Among the groups I studied, eight right-leaning and seven left-leaning foundations have affirmed plans to shut down. But the conservative groups are doing so at a much faster pace, distributing nearly 15 percent of their total assets a year — far above the 5 percent legal minimum for foundation spending. Their counterparts on the left are moving toward the exit more slowly, distributing but 7.6 percent of assets annually.
Put another way, major foundations on the right are moving quickly to close their doors, even as the growth of overall assets on the left outstrips that on the right. Memo to Jane Mayer: This looks more like slow-motion unilateral disarmament than a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Leading From Behind
Clearly, right-wing philanthropy is not operating as if it’s in a position of strength. Rather, it has been quickly pushing money out the door — in part because it’s outgunned and in part out of fear that the assets it has may fall into the hands of the left. There is, after all, no prominent example of a major foundation that started on the left and moved to the right.
This is not to say the philanthropy of the right has been ineffective. As Andrew Rich wrote in a follow-up to his 2005 essay “War of Ideas.” “Assessed from just about any angle, conservative ideology appears to be dominating the policy agenda in the United States.”
If that was not true during the Obama years, it may be true today. The right-leaning foundation world — if one thinks it’s been effective — can be said to have been effectively leading from behind. Unless new right-leaning foundations emerge, that may not be a sustainable strategy.
More broadly, the very fact that the decision to sunset can be viewed as a strategic and tactical one raises the question of whether the playing field for foundations should be leveled — in other words, whether sunsetting should be required of all foundations. After all, the signal philanthropists of our era, Bill and Melinda Gates, have stipulated that their foundation close its doors 20 years after both have died.
It is difficult to make a case that the Ford and MacArthur foundations, their priorities long since evolved from the values of their founders, should persist in perpetuity without any particular accountability. As Congress examines the tax code as it affects charitable giving, this is a question well worth taking up.
Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a regular Chronicle contributor.