Federal agencies have awarded nearly $50 million over the past four years to the Aspen Institute and the Atlantic Council—well-funded liberal think tanks which between them boast 50 donors who have given them at least $1 million—for projects that include a $6 million program to provide "virtual exchanges" for students in the Middle East, and $300,000 to host a conference to empower women in Saudi Arabia.
The grants are but two examples of the taxpayer funds that flow to the country’s biggest think tanks. The State Department, USAID, and Department of Defense have awarded $15.3 million in grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts to the Atlantic Council since 2021, and $32.6 million to the Aspen Institute over the same span, according to federal spending records.
Taxpayer support for two deep-pocketed institutions could draw fresh scrutiny as the Trump administration—largely through the Department of Government Efficiency, the government unit led by Elon Musk—is scouring the federal government’s books for signs of fraud and wasteful spending. Trump this week moved to shut down USAID, an independent agency that has long worked with the State Department, over its funding for foreign aid programs deemed to be wasteful and nonessential.
The Aspen Institute and the Atlantic Council, among the largest think tank recipients of taxpayer funding, have received tens of millions of dollars in donations from an impressive roster of corporations, tech billionaires, philanthropies, foreign companies, and governments. In 2023 alone, the Atlantic Council received 12 donations of at least $1 million each from Meta, Goldman Sachs, the government of the United Arab Emirates, and the Rockefeller Foundation, according to its donor list.
The Aspen Institute disclosed that 38 donors gave at least $1 million in 2023, including Walmart, Google, the Ford Foundation, and the philanthropies of billionaires Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg.
Both organizations could present ripe targets for the administration’s cost-cutting measures, for not just their sizable warchests, but also their hostilities towards President Donald Trump.
"There is absolutely no reason that these research projects at the Atlantic Council and Aspen Institute should have even been considered for a government grant," said Parker Thayer, an investigator at Capital Research Center, a watchdog group that recently launched the DOGE Files to track federal spending. "Not only are the projects plainly ridiculous wastes of taxpayer money, but both organization have more than a few mega-donors to be getting along with."
Like many Beltway think tanks, the Aspen Institute and the Atlantic Council have been highly critical of Trump’s policies, both domestic and foreign.
Aspen Institute president Dan Porterfield said Trump "fomented" the "deadly insurrection" at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Katie Couric, the former TV journalist and co-chair of Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, has called Trump a "fascist" and compared a Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden last year to a "Nazi event."
Republicans have criticized both think tanks over their central roles in what’s been dubbed the "censorship-industrial complex," a network of university and think tank researchers that worked closely with federal agencies to censor content on social media.
In September 2020, the Aspen Institute organized a "tabletop" exercise with journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post, and executives from Facebook and Twitter to draft a plan for how to respond to a hypothetical scenario in which Russia leaked documents stolen from Hunter Biden, according to documents uncovered by reporter Michael Shellenberger. Many of the participants—most notably Twitter—censored an accurate New York Post story about Biden’s laptop in Oct. 2020.
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab is led by Graham Brookie, who served on the National Security Council in the Obama administration. In October 2020, Brookie claimed Trump’s "entire strategy" in the campaign that year was "based on process disinformation in this election." Days later, Brookie dismissed reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as "unverified misinfo." He cheered Twitter’s ban of Trump’s account and "influencers of the far right" after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots as a "welcome" decision.
The State Department awarded the DFRLab a $64,000 grant in September to host two workshops at the U.S. embassy in Vienna on "countering foreign information manipulation and interference," and $250,000 the same month for a project to counter disinformation in Moldova, according to spending records.
Other grants to the think tanks could land in the cost-cutters’ crosshairs.
On Jan. 1, the State Department gave the Atlantic Council $500,000 for a project slated to run through Oct. 2026, to "promote responsible trade" in the western Balkans—a region that includes Serbia and Albania—in order to "support the region’s alignment with a Euro-Atlantic path."
The State Department’s $6 million contract with the Aspen Institute in September will help fund an online exchange program with students and young people in North Africa and the Middle East, to teach them about "civic engagement," "climate change and sustainability," and other topics. The program involves the use of recorded messages exchanged between students in different countries.
In 2021, USAID struck a five-year, $9 million agreement with the Aspen Institute to "promote investment in Guatemalan entrepreneurs and innovators." Aspen selected one program participant that will help "rural communities increase investment capability and access new markets for specialty mushroom, honey, and coffee products."
In many cases, American taxpayers are funding programs that involve the think tanks’ major foreign donors.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—where the Atlantic Council held State Department-funded women’s empowerment conferences—are some of the think tank’s biggest donors. The Saudi-owned Aramco Americas and King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center donated $400,000 to the Atlantic Council in 2023, and the Emirates gave $1.85 million the same year.
The State Department gave $40,000 to the Atlantic Council last year for a study and presentation on the threats posed by Russia’s "shadow fleet" to Denmark. The Danish embassy donated at least $100,000 to the Atlantic Council in 2023.
A spokesperson for the Atlantic Council said the State Department has paused funding for a small number of its projects regarding Chinese and Russian influence in response to Trump's executive order to reevaluate foreign aid spending.
"If these sorts of programs are discontinued, the biggest beneficiaries will be America’s adversaries, who are eager to expand their influence in key regions," the spokesperson said. "However, the vast majority of our work continues as planned, and we remain committed to delivering on our mission of galvanizing U.S. leadership and engagement in the world, in partnership with allies and partners, to shape solutions to global challenges.
The Aspen Institute did not respond to a request for comment.