We’re learning a lot about how government can shape our lives by watching the second Trump Administration dismantle it. One lesson is that government’s capacity to do good runs on information no less than on funding and regulations. From weather and economic forecasts to the census to predictions of other countries’ military capabilities to vaccine monitoring, data and ideas generated inside and outside of the federal government have guided decisions in a world of profound complexity. But as the young men of Elon Musk’s DOGE figured out quickly, information is also a point of vulnerability for the entire workings of government, and it can be exploited by those like Musk and Trump who seek to disable government, concentrate its power, or redirect that power to private profit.

Dozens of small federal agencies devoted to information and ideas have been gutted; expert advisory commissions disbanded; and grants for libraries, museums, and scientific and health research cut off without review. Indicators such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which always had strong conservative support, have been cancelled, pared back, or delayed, often because contracts were arbitrarily canceled, advisory panels dissolved, and key staff fired.

Much of the loosely connected galaxy of information and data that guides policy falls outside the formal boundaries of government, in a pluralistic set of institutions that are independent of the administration or political parties. Along with universities, independent policy research organizations—think tanks—are key to the system of knowledge production and policy ideas, particularly in the United States. Every think tank, aside from the few that maintain an allegiance to the current Administration, now faces a test: How do they not only survive, but remain relevant when the assumptions and processes under which they were born have been wiped away? How can their capacities be put to good use at a moment when the idea of informed decision-making is itself under attack, when little matters other than the raw and often arbitrary exercise of power?

Most think tanks are nonprofits, so their immediate risks resemble those that confront higher education and other civil society organizations. Some receive federal grants for research projects and may have already received “stop-work orders” on those grants. Their tax-exempt status may be challenged, or they may be subjected to intrusive investigations by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); they may be called before congressional subcommittees such as the one chaired by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene; they may be sued for efforts to address racial disparities. Their funders, often large private foundations like the Ford and Gates Foundations (denounced by Vice President JD Vance as “cancers on American society”), face similar threats, which may provoke excessive caution. At an extreme, the Administration may seek to take control of independent think tanks, as it did the congressionally chartered Wilson Center and the U.S. Institute for Peace.

In response to these risks of loss of funding or autonomy, think tanks’ first obligation is to follow the principle that elite law firms and Columbia University learned too late: There’s no advantage or safety in bargaining with this Administration or conceding wrongdoing where none exists. While there’s little sense among think tanks of belonging to a sector—there is no “think tank association,” for example—they have to see a threat to one as a threat to all, even if the organization under attack represents a different ideological approach.

Beyond these shared legal and financial risks, think tanks face a deeper test. Not just their individual autonomy, but their role in a larger system of knowledge and idea production is at risk. For many institutions, their relationship with government—whether providing technical advice, conducting program evaluations, developing new policy ideas, or finding trends in public data—defines some or most of their purpose. Especially for older, technocratic organizations, the legislative and executive branches of government have been their primary constituency—for example, they might provide Congress or agencies with assessments of the likely effects of a new tax policy or regulation. That audience, or at least the majority that controls the federal government, is not interested in the analyses and recommendations of think tanks—with the exception of a handful of MAGA-identified institutions, such as the America First Policy Institute—and might not be for a while.

The idea of a “think tank” suggests a rarified air of technocratic analysis, aloof from political conflict and the realities of power. This is probably an accurate description of the earliest think tanks, such as the Brookings Institution and the National Bureau of Economic Research, that emerged alongside the modern federal government as it gained complexity in the years around World War I. It was during the Cold War era that the sector became essential to domestic, foreign, and defense policy. The spirit of that time is best reflected in a 1962 commencement speech at Yale by President John F. Kennedy: “What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies…. What we need is not labels and cliches but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.”

Hardly a decade passed before Kennedy was proven gravely wrong and the “grand warfare of rival ideologies” returned, not in the form of the global conflict between Marxian socialism and capitalism, but in a clash between two of America’s native traditions: a regulated New Deal economy and the conservatism that coupled an almost religious devotion to low taxes and an unregulated market with social conservatism.

Think tanks, in their role as developers and promoters of policy ideas, became instrumental to this warfare, beginning in 1973 with the establishment of the Heritage Foundation, which had an explicit goal of ideological combat, fired by the conviction that the business-minded American Enterprise Institute was too mild-mannered. By 1980, Heritage had made its mark with the first volume of its Mandate for Leadership series, setting an agenda for the Reagan Administration, when ideologically committed conservatives took the reins of government for the first time since before the New Deal. (The document known as “Project 2025” is actually the ninth edition of Mandate.)

Bow-tied young conservatives of that era used to proclaim that “ideas have consequences,” a phrase borrowed from the title of a 1948 book by the Southern agrarian conservative Richard Weaver and meant to indicate that the superior intellectual structure of the right was its secret to power. As Heritage grew to a budget in the hundreds of millions, other think tanks popped up with an explicit ideological tilt, mostly on the right, including state-level organizations (the right-wing State Policy Network had well more than 50 affiliates by the mid-2010s), legal organizations, and specialty think tanks, such as those opposing environmental regulation. Center-left think tanks were fewer, but powerhouses such as the Economic Policy Institute and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities had outsized influence because of their technical capacities and credibility, and over time, they built their own networks of state affiliates.

By the George W. Bush era, progressives fully joined the ideological fight, as donors and policy entrepreneurs responded to a 1997 report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy on right-wing funding of think tanks and to the 2005 article “War of Ideas” by political scientist Andrew Rich, which highlighted the ideological imbalance. The years that followed saw a think tank building boom, marked by the arrival of not only new anchor institutions such as the Center for American Progress, but also smaller and more versatile organizations that went beyond technical analysis to develop new frameworks for policy and messaging.

More recently, think tanks have generated new perspectives and frames of analysis that are harder to map onto a left-right or partisan spectrum. The Niskanen Center, for example, was created in 2015 by veterans of the libertarian Cato Institute who rejected climate denial; more recently it’s become one of several new institutions bolstering the “abundance” agenda. Some of the same organizations have expanded interest in “state capacity” as a cross-ideological theme—looking not just at what government should do, but how to do it well. The renewed interest in antitrust law as a solution to concentrated economic power has its origins in think tanks and has spawned several new ones. Strategic approaches to trade policy came out of the Roosevelt Institute and influenced the Biden Administration.

In the last few years, think tanks have shown that they can do more than analysis of “sophisticated and technical questions”; they can put forward new visions, along with frameworks, ideas, and arguments in support of those ideas. They’ve helped spur government at all levels to greater innovation and responsiveness, such as by helping states streamline their unemployment insurance systems. They’ve often found points of cross-ideological consensus, especially in collaborations, that have been elusive among elected officials. But the authoritarian age has put all that creativity on hold, along with the older technocratic practices.

So what can think tanks do during an authoritarian period in which their mode of operation, the data they often depend on, and the legislative or administrative agencies that in normal times seek their counsel are all under assault? The three suggestions that follow are primarily relevant to think tanks that work on domestic or economic policy. They are based on my own experience working at several think tanks—for the last decade, New America—and on a series of regular conversations across organizations.

First, and in the near term, of course, the bread-and-butter work of think tanks can provide the kind of analysis that helps show the dangers of Trump’s policies, such as the enormous transfer of wealth from the working class to the very wealthy in the Trump tax policy bill, or the cost in human lives of shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). This news may not break through to the legislators or policymakers currently in power, but eventually it shapes public and elite opinion and might ensure that there are consequences for the most dangerous and irresponsible policies.

But the more relevant capacity that some think tanks have is to focus on the future, on mid- and long-term possibilities. There is a need for organizations such as Democracy Forward and Indivisible that respond with the urgency that Trump’s executive orders require, filing overnight lawsuits or organizing mass protests; but there is also a place for those who can see past the authoritarian moment and construct a clear vision for—and the mechanisms to rebuild—a system that is both democratically responsive and committed to human dignity.

There’s more to that work than just writing a “Project 2029” platform on the model of Project 2025. It will require reconstructing the foundations of democratic governance in the wake of several years of nihilistic destruction, of which we’ve seen only the beginning. We won’t be able to just roll back the clock—bring back USAID, restore federal research funding, authorize vaccines, restore progressive taxation, reenter international agreements. We’ll have to revisit foundational assumptions, such as the arcana of administrative law and the structure of the judiciary. We’ll have to ask whether it makes sense to try to prop back up the edifice of Medicaid expansion and the Affordable Care Act exchanges, built over years of incremental progress, or to start from scratch on health care. There are similar questions in other policy areas.

There may be opportunities to do policy much better, to make government feel accessible and trustworthy, but mostly there will just be a lot of work to do and a lot of risks. Think tanks can help prepare for that moment, and by being prepared help create an appealing alternative.

Second, think tanks that once had elite partnerships with government should find new ways to instead engage with and support community-based organizations and social movement groups that are closer to the front lines of the fight for more vulnerable people and working at the local and state levels. That involves letting organizations and movement groups set an agenda that helps them build power and supporting that agenda with information and narrative. (To take an example from about a decade ago, think tank economists resisted the movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, but grassroots groups argued that only such a then-ambitious number would mobilize a broad constituency—and they were right.) Think tanks should not approach these relationships from the position of experts who will tell people what policies are good for them, but as peers, ready to listen and provide whatever help those communities find helpful. There’s often a cultural gap between movement groups and policy wonks, but we don’t have time for that now.

Finally, think tanks have a reputation for bringing in people who have served in government and might do so again. The halls of many policy organizations are lined with offices belonging to former ambassadors and undersecretaries, awaiting the call. We surely don’t need more of that. But we should provide a home for some of the less well-known people who have dedicated their careers to public service and improving the basic workings of government, particularly in the Biden Administration. Think of the people who developed the Direct File system at the IRS or the innovative coders in the office known as 18F, which was shut down by the less creative young men of DOGE. There were major steps toward a more responsive government, far more than in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, and that knowledge and talent will be especially useful in the rebuilding.

Even in an environment in which not much seems to matter other than the raw exercise of power, think tanks can serve as essential resources for those combatting the authoritarian tide, and for building the better world that we’ll reach eventually.