Buying your experts

George Washington University's ostensibly neutral Regulatory Studies Center is in fact a "key cog" in how the billionaire Koch brothers use their immense wealth to influence university research and spread their corporate-friendly ideology  to slash government regulations designed to protect workers and the planet.

Taylor Lincoln, research director for Public Citizen's Congress Watch division and author of the new report, said his findings show that the Regulatory Studies Center (RSC) "is the Fox News of the regulatory policy world, except it still clings to the fiction that it is fair and balanced."

According to the report (pdf), much of RSC's work revolves around providing "scholarly rationales against government regulation" of corporate America, with a particular focus on the fossil fuel industry—where Koch Industries makes much of its profits while financing campaigns to spread doubt about the reality and urgency of the climate crisis.

While the RSC is not well-known among the American public, Lincoln noted that the organization's influence can be seen in "planks of President Donald Trump's deregulatory agenda."

"These include dramatically reducing the cost that the government attributes to carbon emissions," Lincoln wrote.

As one of the "leading emitters of toxic waste and greenhouse gases in the United States," Lincoln pointed out, Koch Industries stands to benefit financially from RSC's anti-regulation work.

"The RSC's primary output consists of written materials, including analyses of discrete regulatory proposals that are submitted to government agencies under the rubric of 'public comments,'" Lincoln noted. "Although public comments submitted by RSC researchers carry a disclaimer that they represent the views of the individual researchers, not the RSC, they are remarkably consistent in the antiregulatory views they express."

Between 2013 and 2018, the Public Citizen report found, "96 percent of public comments submitted to government agencies by RSC writers who opined on the stringency of specific regulatory proposals recommended less regulation than the status quo or proposal."

"When characterizing broad regulatory trends, RSC researchers habitually cite studies—some of dubious credibility—that feed a narrative that regulations are excessive and burdensome," Lincoln wrote. "Meanwhile, these researchers typically ignore or downplay the benefits of regulations or dangers of under-regulating. These omissions are especially notable because the RSC was formed in 2009, just as the nation was crawling out of a catastrophic recession that was almost indisputably caused by gaps in the regulation of financial derivatives."

The report also found that:

75 percent of public comments submitted by the RSC in this period were authored or co-authored by people with past or present ties to Koch-funded entities;

RSC researchers have been affiliated with at least 28 Koch-funded entities. Eight RSC researchers, including its director, Susan Dudley, have been affiliated with Koch-funded programs at George Mason University, the hub of the Koch university initiative;

Funders of the RSC, which are not fully disclosed, include the Charles Koch Foundation, the libertarian Searle Freedom Trust foundation, the far-right Sarah Scaife Foundation and ExxonMobil Foundation, along with anti-regulatory business trade associations including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the American Chemistry Council; 

Koch funding of university programs has roughly quadrupled in the past decade, to $60 million annually, and the family now helps fund more than 50 university centers.

It is not appropriate for George Washington University, or any university, to enable a corporate-funded, anti-regulatory group to masquerade as a neutral center of academic inquiry.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/03/report-shows-how-koch-brothers-bankroll-fox-news-regulatory-policy-world-help-push