When the Pentagon decided in 2009 to cut funding for Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor fighter jet — a weapons system with cost overruns in the billions of dollars that has rarely seen combat — the Heritage Foundation fought tooth and nail to restore taxpayer money for the planes.
Heritage depicted its support for the F-22 as a matter of vital national security. But what the public didn’t know is that Lockheed Martin, a corporate donor to the conservative think tank, met with Heritage officials on nearly a monthly basis to discuss the F-22 and other defense industry priorities.
Internal emails leaked online show at least 15 meetings in 2008 and 2009 between officials at Heritage and Lockheed Martin, including one with Bill Inglee, who at the time served as a senior lobbyist at Lockheed Martin.
The emails also suggest that Heritage continued courting Lockheed Martin for donations, listing the company repeatedly in Excel spreadsheets used to collect pledges from past donors. Lockheed Martin gave $40,000 to Heritage in 2008, bringing its total contribution to $341,000, according to those documents.
Heritage provides limited information about its donors to the public. But many were revealed in a cache of Heritage fundraising emails and attachments from 2008 and 2009 that somehow ended up getting posted online early last month. The documents detail how the group raises cash and builds relationships with its extensive donor network. Heritage carefully cultivated wealthy donors and corporate benefactors, maintaining extensive call sheets recording contributor demands and interests.
The F-22, which is optimized for air-to-air combat, had long been criticized for its hefty price tag and for lacking combat use. The plane was projected to take nine years and $12 billion to develop — at a cost of $149 million per plane. But as the Los Angeles Times reported, it actually took 19 years to produce at a cost of $26.3 billion — with an average cost per plane of $412 million. The jet has also faced numerous safety problems, including two fatal crashes and a faulty oxygen supply system.
In 2009, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates and then-Air Force Secretary Michael Donley forcefully requested that Congress end production of the F-22, capping the program at 187 planes, a shift designed to save the military $13 billion. Military officials called for F-22 money to be diverted to weapons that could be deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon request touched off a fierce, though ultimately fruitless, lobbying battle. Lockheed Martin directed its registered lobbyists to fight back against the cuts in Congress and took out full-page advertisements in D.C. publications. And the Heritage Foundation produced a flurry of reports and media outreach efforts to encourage Congress to overturn the Pentagon’s decision.
Emails show that the Heritage Foundation’s fundraising staff worked closely with Mackenzie Eaglen, a researcher at the think tank who authored several reports calling for restoring F-22 funding. According to Heritage’s internal weekly calendar, Eaglen was scheduled to participate in “a Lockheed Martin think tank delegation to visit their fifth-generation fighter production facilities in Fort Worth, TX” in April 2009.
“I had a very interesting 20 minute conversation this morning with Mackenzie Eaglen about the F-22 and defense spending in general. She gave me the sad update of defense spending on the hill, which provided good context for me to understand our activities during Protect America month,” wrote Jeffrey Trimbath, the assistant director of major gift planning at Heritage. Trimbath’s notes show that Eaglen said that Heritage had attempted to “convince the Congress to fund an Allied Variant of the F-22 so that the production lines stay open while retaining a critical aerospace industrial base,” but that the combined opposition of Secretary Gates and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., made the request difficult.
James Jay Carafano, the vice president of Heritage’s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, met several times with Lockheed Martin executives, even traveling to Marietta, Georgia, where the F-22 is produced, to participate in a “Lockheed Martin Tour of F-22 Programs.”
Some of the meeting documents list their topics, including one titled “Lockheed Martin Briefing on the Saudi Eastern Fleet Modernization Program.” But the documents do not go into detail about what was discussed at the meetings.
“We have no comment,” said Katherine Trinidad, Lockheed Martin’s director of worldwide media relations, when asked about the company’s relationship with Heritage. Officials at the Heritage Foundation did not respond to a request for comment. Eaglen, who now serves as a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute covering defense policy, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Heritage furiously opposed any effort to end production of the F-22. “The ability of America’s Air Force to dominate the skies is under attack from a different kind of enemy: a long-standing and widening fighter aircraft gap, which President Obama’s fiscal year (FY) 2010 defense budget fails to remedy,” claimed one Heritage report that called for restoring funding to the F-22. Another report from Heritage that year asked Congress to purchase 20 additional F-22 planes and to modify the planes for sale to Japan, Australia and “possibly South Korea.”
“Obama Just Made Us More Vulnerable… Again,” said a headline from Heritage’s blog, citing the end of F-22 production — one of several posts that year arguing that the Pentagon decision would threaten national security.
William Hartung, director of the Arms & Security Project at the Center for International Policy, said the documents provide “damning evidence of how hawkish think tanks do the bidding of powerful weapons contractors while posturing as objective national security analysts.”
Trimbath’s fundraising notes mention Heritage’s Protect America Month, an initiative calling for increased defense spending. Fundraising documents show that Northrop Grumman, another major defense contractor, had pledged money to support the initiative.
The fundraising documents list other programs at Heritage that got direct corporate support. IBM and Bayer both pledged money for Heritage’s Index of Freedom, an effort to rank the relative “freedom” of countries based solely on economic policy factors. Protection Life Corp, an Alabama-based insurance company, pledged $10,000 for Heritage’s Health Care Initiative.
Press accounts suggest Google Inc.’s donations to Heritage began in 2010, but the fundraising documents show that the search engine company contributed money in 2009 as well. Heritage would eventually warn regulators not to press the Mountain View, California-based company on alleged antitrust violations.
Corporations frequently donate to think tanks that share their policy agenda. Corinthian Colleges, a chronically underperforming for-profit college that relied on $1.4 billion in yearly loans backed by the federal government, funded Beltway think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute that helped oppose regulations on the company and other failing proprietary colleges. Alpha Natural Resources, a coal mining company, financed think tanks and political operatives working to counter the belief in man-made global warming. Donations from both companies were made public this year only after the firms declared bankruptcy.
Defense contractors are no different, and have historically played an outsized role in shaping the national security debate through think tank funding. Lockheed Martin in particular funds an array of other policy institutes and think tanks. The nexus of defense contracting money and think tanks is poorly understood, however, largely because detailed think tank financial disclosures are voluntary.
“Heritage and other think tanks that press for higher Pentagon budgets should come clean and give the full details of their contributions from weapons contractors,” said Hartung. “Otherwise their positions on what weapons to buy and what defense postures to adopt should be taken with a large grain of salt.”
Update: Eaglen responded in the comments on this article.
Caption: F-22 Raptor stealth fighter flies over Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, September 21, 2011.
Heritage – a front for Satanists.
This past week the above news story called into question my integrity as a defense analyst—a charge never before leveled at me in my 15 years working in defense policy, both in and out of government.
The heart of the story is that my support for the Lockheed Martin-built F-22 fighter while I worked as a defense fellow at a Washington think tank was tied to that think tank’s receiving a donation from Lockheed. The story is based on leaked emails from the development (fundraising) team of my former employer—what the reporter and a quoted analyst from a liberal organization call “damning evidence.”
To correct the record, here are the facts.
1. The foundation I worked at is funded primarily by small donors writing checks under $1,000. This means the think tank could boast of having over 750,000 supporters. Corporate donations amounted to roughly 3% of the think tank’s annual income. In short, if Lockheed Martin had never given a cent, it would have made hardly a blip on the institute’s finances.
2. More importantly, there was a firewall between specific donations to the think tank and the analysts – including myself. This was specifically intended to prevent the influence of donations on the analysis we produced, as well as to prevent even the illusion of collusion.
3. If my work had been truly influenced by corporate donations from Lockheed Martin, I would not have advocated cutting in half the planned buy of the Littoral Combat Ship, a ship being built by Lockheed Martin. Nor would I have continued to argue for maintaining the F-22 production line when the corporation itself was willing to kill the program in an effort to keep production robust for its other new stealth aircraft, the F-35.
My support for the F-22 began long before my employment at the think tank in question and has continued long after. And it has been validated repeatedly, most recently by the head of Air Combat Command who stated simply this week: “We don’t have enough F-22s. If you look at the way we’re using them today in the current fight we’re in, if you look at what we would do in a future fight, we flat don’t have enough F-22s. But we have what we have, and they’re doing incredible work, and what the airmen flying those things are doing is phenomenal.”
4. The story also contains a faux “gotcha” moment by noting that I had visited the manufacturing plant for the F-22. As anyone familiar with the work of defense analysts knows, trips to bases, production lines, training centers, and shipyards are part and parcel of one’s effort to learn as much as possible about what our defense dollars are buying—or not.
Scores of trips are made every year by analysts from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. Sure, corporations want to put their best foot forward. But a seasoned analyst knows how to cut the wheat from the chaff. And, frankly speaking, there is no better way to understand the capability about which I’m researching than to go “kick the tires.” I’ve similarly visited production lines for General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Sikorsky, and many smaller manufacturers.
5. The story’s bias also shows in ignoring that Lockheed Martin donates to many policy organizations in Washington. If the reporter had done his homework, he would have discovered that left-of-center think tanks typically received as much, or more, from defense corporations than the institute I previously worked at or work at now. Yet I would never suggest their defense work is somehow dictated by those donations.
The great thing about the American think tank system is that we all publish, and our arguments are out there to be discussed, dissected, and challenged. Even if one wanted to fix the analysis to suit the donors’ desires, it would become apparent, widely known, and would wind up being counterproductive for both the analyst and the donor.
Finally, I must note that the reporter contacted me within less than one hour before running with the story and while I was still hosting the Secretary of the Army for a public event with no chance of responding… Both he and his editors should know better.
I just find it appalling that Congress a bunch of lobbyists, and a contractor can effectively override the Pentagon’s own requests for resources. Who would know better than the Pentagon that they had sufficient F-22’s and wouldn’t need anymore?? So now, they are forced to take more planes they don’t need, while other vital resources needed for actual combat theater operations go begging?? This is the ultimate insanity.
Shoot! I was hoping that this article would disclose direct links inside the DoD – the 5 “Ws” plus how. It’s common knowledge think tanks lobby for corporations in the halls of both chambers.
Many high ranking retired military officers get plum jobs with corporations. Because they did the corporations favors while inside? Do the ex-military use contacts inside to benefit the corporations?
What we need to know – the 5 Ws plus how – is everything about the most powerful individuals deciding US priorities and manipulating the right nerve endings (rewards and penalties) to get what they want. Expose the details of those at the top who tried to slip through the secret North American Union and trade agreements, both designed to sacrifice US sovereignty and jobs to benefit the wealthiest.
America is no longer a democracy if you believe former President Carter and Martin Gilens and Benamin I. Page’s Princeton article that concludes we are an Oligarchy.
This is right out of the Louis Powell Play Book.
Read the memorandum that laid the ground work for the conservative movement of the last 40 years.
http://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=view&d=5971
Everyone should read the Powell memorandum! It is the genesis of the plutocracy that is snuffing out America’s democracy.
You can take each area Powell identified and match it with a corporatist takeover, e.g., news media: in 1983, 90% of the media was owned by 50 corporations, today 6 corporations control 90 % of the media and 75% of Americans get their news every day from those 6 corporations. Check out the CEOs of those 6 companies and you will find them to be the most conservative individuals. It is no wonder the news is far to the right, investigative journalism is dead and stories about inequality and America is an Oligarchy or Plutocracy get no air time.
Think tanks for tanks, while the economy tanks.
The now commonly accepted term, “Think Tank”, is in itself Orwellian. That our corporate monopolist media are suckling at the teat of the Tank is not a surprise considering the Mobius loop of the “Free Market” by which our vaunted captains of capitalism have found they can bridle the beast from which they leach. No symbiosis please.
Thus by Tank and teat, the beast is coddled by befuddlement and circus while it serves as a host,… the beast, witless by free market design, in that the U.S. is now an oligarchy where corruption is legalized for the wealthy and the machines of profit seek to feather their beds by whatever means.
Reality is not really a question, when profit is the only answer.
The two fatal crashes have rendered it optimal for air-to-air combat. It’s a
weapons system. It’s supposed to kill people. And behold.
Why quibble about minutiae like an oxygen supply….?
Thanks for this great article. We need more journalists investigating corruption in think tanks, irrespective of whether they are left-leaning or right-leaning.
This isn’t a surprise.
Taxpayer money goes from Congress to defense corporations (for boondoggle projects like this … or the Iraq invasion) to lobbyists and then back to elected officials. (Unelected officials are also on the take no doubt.)
That’s why they call political speech “spin”.
Spin is one cycle of laundering.
Nobody seems to notice.
Thanks for this article.
I always wonder about these grups — are they just storage places for politicians who last some race and need a job? Or like Concerned Women of America, do they just have about a 12-person firm that should be quoted by nobody — a modern day Potemkin Village.
A think tank is an outfit that churns out information by “experts” that adheres to a predetermined ideaogy. They twist the facts to conform to their agenda. It is no surprise that this involves corruption.
A good article. Exposing donors using a think tank to write papers to back their rent seeking behavior. That’s why I come to The Intercept. Heritage had been a credible organization. Now instead of limited government and good government policy they seem to be interested in helping donors get a piece of that federal pie. What a disappointment.
What is the difference between a think tank and a lobbying firm? I thought they essentially did the same thing?
A think tank puts out “white papers” smeared in shit. A lobbying firm eliminates the paper.
A think tank puts out “white papers” covered with excrement. A lobbying firm eliminates the paper.
Damn. Everything is so deceptive and so money- generated nowadays that it’s hard to believe anything.
Thanks for the great article.