There are countless think tanks in the U.S. seeking to influence local, state, and national policy. A relatively new one is making its mark in President Donald Trump’s Washington: the Texas-based Brownstone Institute.
Libertarian author Jeffrey Tucker created the institute in 2021, fueled by backlash against covid lockdowns and other pandemic-era policies. His institute’s covid contrarians seek to limit the government’s role in protecting people from disease. In recent months, people with ties to the group have catapulted to the highest levels of the U.S. government.
At least eight people with ties to the Brownstone Institute hold or recently held senior positions at federal health agencies or key roles advising the government, including at the National Institutes of Health, at the FDA, and on a key vaccine panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those people are already changing the direction of U.S. public health policy. For example, people with ties to the institute have sown doubt about covid vaccines and routine childhood immunizations, dismissing widespread evidence that they are safe and that the benefits outweigh the risks.
“They’ve successfully placed their ideology inside the mechanism that determines U.S. vaccine policy,” said Jake Scott, a physician at Stanford Medicine who specializes in infectious diseases. “It’s very, very troubling.”
The Brownstone Institute’s website says it works “to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times.”
“There’s a danger associated with a state-imposed orthodoxy,” Tucker told KFF Health News. “I think Brownstone has a moral obligation to care for dissidents and create settings in which they’re able to test their ideas against people with whom they disagree.”
Brownstone’s critics say its associates make extreme claims about vaccines and promote anti-vaccine messages.
“They’ve been willing to publish articles of some very extreme anti-vaccine people,” said Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California Law-San Francisco focused on vaccine-related legal and policy issues.
The nonprofit reported nearly $7.4 million in contributions, grants, and other payments from 2021 to 2024.
Despite the ascendance of those with ties to his group, Tucker said that “anybody who thinks that somehow Brownstone is some big plot, it’s crazy.” He said he is not in regular contact with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose department oversees the CDC, FDA, and NIH.
“I don’t have any influence,” Tucker said.
