A University’s Policy Center Consistently Advocates Against Regulation. A Consumer-Advocacy Group Thinks It Knows Why.

Is a George Washington University center that studies regulatory policy just a “cog in Charles Koch’s master plan”?

That’s the claim in a new report released on Monday by the nonprofit consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen, which says that the university’s Regulatory Studies Center has a suspiciously consistent message when it comes to regulations: They’re bad.

Public Citizen — which often makes pro-regulatory arguments — analyzed the public comments the center’s researchers submitted on proposed government regulations. (Government agencies solicit comments from the public when they propose new rules.)

The organization found that the vast majority of the researchers’ comments were anti-regulatory. Public Citizen also looked into five of the center’s funding sources, including the Charles Koch Foundation, a major donor to universities that backs libertarian causes.

According to Public Citizen, the researchers submitted comments on specific regulatory proposals 39 times from 2013 to 2018, and 26 of those comments advised against more regulation. For example, the researchers submitted comments that opposed a proposal to increase fuel-efficiency requirements and one meant to protect student-loan borrowers.

Only one comment was in favor of regulation — a 2018 Food and Drug Administration proposal to limit the nicotine in combusted cigarettes — and 12 comments were not clearly for or against more regulation, according to the report. In addition, the report said the researchers submitted nine comments about “overarching regulatory policy” that would most likely result in less regulation in the future.

Taylor Lincoln, the report’s author and director of research at Public Citizen, said it’s not necessarily wrong to advocate against government regulation. The problem with the Regulatory Studies Center, he said, is that it purports to be objective and unbiased, but its track record seems to lean consistently toward providing “scholarly rationales against government regulation,” according to the report.

Lincoln compared his findings to “when you flip a coin 50 times and it comes up tails every time.” His point was that it’s no coincidence that the researchers’ comments were so often anti-regulatory, given the center’s funders.

In a written statement a George Washington spokesman said that the Regulatory Studies Center’s scholars publish their research in peer-reviewed academic journals and that its events “feature insights on regulatory policy and practice from diverse individuals across the ideological spectrum.” The center “does not accept funding that is conditioned on hiring (or retaining) particular individuals, nor that influences the content or conclusions of its work,” the spokesman said.

The Regulatory Studies Center says on its website that it does not take institutional positions on issues. The center files public comments but never accepts direct funding for individual comments, it says.

“To maintain its independence and the quality and integrity of its products, the GW Regulatory Studies Center does not accept funding that stipulates predetermined results or that limits dissemination of its scholarly activity or research,” the website says.

When asked for comment on Public Citizen’s report, a Charles Koch Foundation spokeswoman said that the foundation speaks out against “tactics like this aimed at harassing scholars rather than engaging issues on their substance.”

“Faculty call the shots and follow their research wherever it may lead — as they should,” she said in a written statement. “That openness is characteristic of and imperative to academic discovery.”

Public Citizen’s report points to many of the connections that the Regulatory Studies Center scholars have to other Koch-funded institutions. The center’s director, Susan Dudley, for example, directed the regulatory-studies program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University from 2003 to 2007. The Charles Koch Foundation gave nearly $50 million to George Mason from 2011 to 2014, according to an Associated Press analysis. Much of that money went to the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank. Dudley did not respond to a request for comment.

Neither the representative from the university nor the one from the foundation said how much money George Washington had received from the Koch Foundation. In 2015 the university’s student newspaper, The GW Hatchet, reported that the foundation had donated $50,000 for the university’s Regulatory Studies Center and $12,000 to the business school. The paper also reported on a $100,000 donation in 2012 from the foundation to the same two places.

Lincoln thinks the foundation’s contributions to George Washington are much bigger than what the newspaper has reported. By analyzing the foundation’s tax forms, he said, he calculated that the university received $1.2 million from 2010 to 2017. In all but two of those years, the postal address that the foundation listed on its tax forms was the campus building that houses the Regulatory Studies Center. In 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2017 the university address on the foundation’s tax forms included the center’s suite number. The total amount that the foundation gave the university during those four years was $576,070, according to a Chronicle analysis of tax forms, which also found that the university had received about $1.2 million from the foundation.

For Lincoln, the case illustrates the need for colleges to be more transparent about their funding sources. He also said that while universities often have conflict-of-interest policies that require scholars to disclose where they received their research funding, they don’t necessarily have to say who funded the center or which institute they are affiliated with.
Such a policy, he said, should be the next incarnation of university ethics policies.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.