Conservative Think Tank Adjusts to Tough Times

Clockwise from bottom-left: Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik and The American magazine

AEI Keeps the Open Bar, But Trims Other Costs
By David Weigel
The Washington Independent

The buzz at this year’s American Enterprise Institute gala was, ironically enough, about how much easier it was to get inside. For eight years, entering the annual black tie dinner — put on by the influential conservative think tank that supplied the George W. Bush administration with dozens of high-level officials — meant sharing a vast hotel ballroom with the president or vice president, which meant extra scrutiny of your car and a security checkpoint to screen for weapons. This week, Dick Cheney was present, but armies of secret service agents were not.

“It’s much more fun without the metal detectors,” joked one libertarian think-tanker who’d been attending the galas for at least a decade.

There was also buzz about the size and style of the dinner, especially after Arthur C. Brooks, the new president of AEI, commented in his opening remarks about how the think tank was under some stress. Despite the international economic crisis, and despite the hand-wringing and rumor-mongering afoot at the city’s other think tanks, the event was at the same location, in the same scale, with the same open bar, that guests have grown accustomed to, with the same A-list guests: Ken Blackwell, Byron York, Doug Holtz-Eakin, Rep. John Shadegg, Tucker Carlson, John Fund, and Grover Norquist, to name a few.

These are trying times for most Washington, D.C. think tanks. Since the financial crisis began, the corporate and philanthropic foundations and donors who gird most think tanks have become stingier about their grants. In the case of AEI, the economic downturn has meant cutting back one prestige product and trimming some minor costs and low-level staff. AEI Outlooks are sent around digitally, instead of printed out en masse. Several long-time scholars have left for more complicated reasons. “I wouldn’t hear anything,” said one former staffer, “and then I’d notice that a name was off a door, or a scholar’s profile had been taken down from the web site.”

For liberals, a dip in AEI’s fortunes would be welcome news. This was the think tank that Slate’s Tim Noah called “the wellspring of President Bush’s worst ideas,” and its graduates include former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, former Treasury Secretary John Snow, and Dick Cheney himself. There has been a mini-exile of neoconservatives from AEI, but there is little evidence that a sudden drying up of executive branch access is hurting the think tank. There are more mundane problems to worry about.

(More here.)