ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the unappreciated ways that public policy is developed in the United States. It focuses on five major Washington-based private nonprofit organizations commonly referred to as "think tanks." The five are the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), the Brookings Institution (Brookings), the Cato Institute (Cato), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and the Heritage Foundation (Heritage). As a group, they will be referred to occasionally in the pages that follow as the DC-5. Brookings is the grandfather of Washington-based think tanks and is the largest of the DC-5. Brookings' government studies program also has conducted research activities in collaboration with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. One of the most impressive evaluations of Heritage's impact on the Washington-based think tank community comes from Karlyn Bowman, long-term member of AEI's staff: "The Heritage Foundation's emergence on the think tank scene in 1974 changed the way all think tanks in Washington do business".
