Congressional hearings are an important part of the lawmaking process. Experts from outside government sit in front of committees and help them consider issues of national concern.
But money does shape ideas in Washington. In 1997, House Republicans implemented a “truth in testimony” rule that required congressional witnesses to divulge US government funding they or their group had received connected to the topic of the hearing. The idea was, well, transparency.
The New York Times revealed in 2014 that foreign government funding had influenced the research and policy recommendations of Washington’s preeminent think tanks, whose experts are regularly called to testify before Congress. In response, a bipartisan group strengthened the truth-in-testimony rule to include an organization’s foreign funding, with dollar amounts for the past three years. More recently, the form also includes a section, depending on the committee, to indicate whether the expert is a fiduciary to “any organization or entity that has an interest in the subject matter of the hearing” or has registered as an agent of a foreign government.
But experts consistently evade the spirit of the truth-in-testimony rule. Democratic and Republican staffers both complained to me that think tank experts flout it, often by filing as an “individual” to avoid mentioning their organization’s funding.
Take, for example, last week’s hearing at the House Foreign Affairs Committee on “Expanding the Abraham Accords,” the normalization deals between Israel and Arab states shepherded by the Trump administration. If an expert’s organization had received donations from, say, the United Arab Emirates, a powerful, repressive petro-state party to the accords, that would have been related to the hearing’s topic.
But one of the experts appearing there did not disclose their organization’s UAE funding.
Daniel Shapiro, a former ambassador to Israel who runs an initiative at the Atlantic…
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