New America

Primary sources or mainstream reporting. Used for organizational facts, funding disclosures, mainstream press reports, people pages, and visible institutional relationships.

Verified relationship that does not itself prove wrongdoing. Used when people, funders, fellows, boards, or partner organizations connect across institutions.

Social-media claims without corroboration. Used for claims such as “Fresnel,” alleged researcher feuds, and connective theories not backed by credible reporting.

New America was founded in Washington, D.C. in 1999 as the New America Foundation by Ted Halstead, founding president from 1999 to 2007, with Sherle Schwenninger, Michael Lind, and Walter Russell Mead. Mead appears in LittleSis as a founding board member.

The founding pitch was to bring “new voices and new ideas” into a policy debate the founders saw as ossified between liberal and conservative camps.

Halstead and Lind’s 2001 book The Radical Center was, per the New York Times, effectively the foundation’s mission statement.

LittleSis summarizes New America as a “centrist think tank,” while Wikipedia now calls it liberal. Early backers included Bill Moyers, Norman Lear, and members of the Rockefeller family.

Ted Halstead

1999–2007

Built a fellows-driven idea shop and stayed on the board after 2007.

Steve Coll

2007–2013

Deepened the national-security and journalism identity, then stayed as a senior fellow in the National Security Studies Program.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

2013–June 30, 2026

Former State Department Policy Planning director under Hillary Clinton. Rebranded the organization “New America” in 2015 and broadened it into technology, gender and care policy, and public interest technology.

The National Security Studies / International Security Program, long led by Peter Bergen, VP and program director and CNN analyst famous for interviewing bin Laden, built the widely cited drone-strike database and hosts the fellows discussed in sections 5–6.

The Future of War project is a three-way partnership with Arizona State University and the Center on the Future of War.

The ASU entanglement is structural: ASU president Michael Crow sits on New America’s board, LittleSis records the ASU center as a sponsor giving money to New America since 2014, and Future Tense with Slate is a co-led ASU venture.

The National Security Advisory Council includes finance and corporate figures: Tom Freston, Robert H. Niehaus, Chris Niehaus, Fred Hassan, and Charles R. Kaye.

The Open Technology Institute is the flagship, focused on public-interest broadband, privacy, and encryption policy. Kevin Bankston, formerly of EFF, served as policy director, with senior fellows including Rebecca MacKinnon.

Adjacent initiatives include TechCongress, DigiChina with Stanford, the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative, the Public Interest Technology University Network, and the Blockchain Trust Accelerator coordinated by Tomicah Tillemann, formerly of the State Department.

The Public Interest Technology program was run at VP level by Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s Domestic Policy Council director.

Fellows included former U.S. CTO Todd Park, ex-White House staffer Marina Martin, and Sara K. Hudson, whose interlock becomes relevant in the Project Birmingham section.

The Asset Building Program pioneered child savings accounts and wealth-building policy for low-income households.

The economy portfolio carries the fingerprints of two major donors. The first is the Bernard L. Schwartz fellowships: Schwartz, former Loral CEO, was simultaneously a director, a $1M-tier foundation donor, and a personal donor, making him the clearest example of a funder with a named program.

The second is the fiscal-austerity cluster. Maya MacGuineas directed the Fiscal Policy Program while running the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which LittleSis records as a child organization “housed at New America Foundation” and annotates as an “austerity think tank.”

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation gave $250,000 in 2009. The Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform was staffed through the same network: Coll, MacGuineas, and Redburn.

Education

Education Policy, with Kevin Carey as VP, is one of the field’s most quoted shops. It drew Gates, Lumina, and Walton funding, with the Early Education Initiative and Learning Technologies under Lisa Guernsey.

Health

Health work drew Blue Shield of California and Colorado Health Foundation money, plus board presence from surgeon-writer Atul Gawande and Helene Gayle, formerly of CARE.

Gender / Care

Gender and care policy lives in the Better Life Lab, associated with Brigid Schulte.

Energy

The Energy Policy Initiative was directed by journalist Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain. The program championed, among other things, a pragmatic view of the U.S. natural-gas boom, relevant to the fracking question below.

Individual donors overlap heavily with governance: Eric and Wendy Schmidt, Bernard and Irene Schwartz, Daniel Yergin, Leo Hindery Jr., Lenny Mendonca, Zachary Karabell, Francis Fukuyama, Richard Vague, and others.

Daniel Yergin is specifically noted as a director donating to the board he sits on.

This donor-director fusion is standard think-tank practice, but it is precisely what makes “independence” claims structurally fragile.

Eric Schmidt chaired the board from 2009, per LittleSis, through roughly 2016. Google plus the Schmidt family foundation ultimately gave about $21 million, and the conference space was named the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.”

In August 2017, days after Barry Lynn’s Open Markets program praised the EU’s $2.7 billion antitrust fine against Google, Slaughter expelled the ten-person program.

The New York Times reported Schmidt had conveyed displeasure. The Intercept published Slaughter’s email warning Lynn, “just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.”

Slaughter denied donor causation and cited collegiality violations. Lynn’s team relaunched as the Open Markets Institute, taking with it Lina Khan, whose New America/Open Markets years incubated the antitrust revival she later brought to the FTC chairmanship.

New America’s LittleSis page carries exactly one tag: fracking. This is a research filing label, not an accusation.

LittleSis is run by the Public Accountability Initiative, whose signature projects “Frackademia” and “The Oil Tanks” mapped fossil-fuel money and personnel across universities and think tanks.

“The Oil Tanks” found Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell funding at every major donor-disclosing think tank.

Entities get tagged when they surface in such a project.

1. ExxonMobil

The ExxonMobil $100,000 donation in 2009 sits in LittleSis’s own giving data.

2. Daniel Yergin

Board member Daniel Yergin, founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, IHS/S&P Global, was a prominent public champion of the U.S. shale boom, wrote “America Can’t Do Without Fracking,” served on a DOE advisory committee on fracking’s environmental impact, and was both director and personal donor.

3. Energy Policy

Lisa Margonelli’s Energy Policy Initiative treated the natural-gas boom favorably as an economic and geopolitical asset during the years PAI was mapping “frackademia.”

The online narrative says New America “hired McChrystal,” creating a conflict of interest tied to General Flynn. The record says otherwise: Stanley McChrystal was never hired by New America. His academic home is Yale’s Jackson Institute; he has only spoken at New America events.

Two structural bridges to the McChrystal world exist inside the International Security Program: Christopher Fussell, president of the McChrystal Group and McChrystal’s former JSOC aide, is a Senior Fellow; and Jeff Eggers, executive director of the McChrystal Group Leadership Institute, former Navy SEAL and NSC senior director, held a Senior Fellowship from July 2015 to September 2019.

McChrystal’s documented venture into influence operations is Defeat Disinfo, often garbled online as “Defusing Disinfo” or attached to a mystery entity called “Fresnel.”

It was a pro-Democratic PAC he advised in May 2020, reported by the Washington Post. It repurposed DARPA-funded counter-ISIS network-analysis AI, via founder Curtis Hougland, to counter Trump’s coronavirus messaging.

A retired general applying military-derived influence tooling to domestic politics is legitimately controversial, but it is a McChrystal story, not a New America program.

For “Fresnel”, no primary evidence connects any entity by that name to McChrystal or to New America. The claim traces to social-media threads and remains unverified.

Flynn was McChrystal’s JSOC intelligence chief in Iraq and Afghanistan, inner-circle and close to the “tribe of McChrystal guys.”

In October 2014, Flynn Intel Group was registered from the home of Stanley McChrystal in Alexandria, per reporting cited on the Flynn Intel Group record. Flynn’s own townhouse sat on the same street as McChrystal’s, according to New Republic.

FIG’s business office at Canal Center Plaza in Old Town Alexandria had, in New Republic’s phrase, “good line of sight to DIA headquarters across the river.”

That registration is a concrete personal business favor postdating both retirements, undercutting any clean “they split after 2010” narrative.

McChrystal has never clearly and publicly condemned Flynn by name. His December 2018 ABC interview called Trump immoral and dishonest; War on the Rocks reported he “quietly urged restraint” and declined Flynn interviews; and on-record “lock her up” rebukes came from Dempsey, Mullen, and Barno, not McChrystal.

No business overlap between McChrystal Group and Flynn’s ventures is documented, but a standing personal alliance is.

Flynn’s post-government web is genuinely troubling: a disclosed $40,280 payment from OSY Technologies, an affiliate of Israeli spyware maker NSO Group; advisory roles at GreenZone Systems and Brainwave Science; adjacency to the Psy-Group / Joel Zamel “Project Rome” social-media-manipulation pitch to the Trump campaign; and advocacy for Palantir in the Army’s DCGS-A procurement fight.

Project Birmingham was a real disinformation operation in the December 2017 Alabama Senate special election. It was run by New Knowledge, CEO Jonathon Morgan, and funded through American Engagement Technologies with $750,000 originating from Reid Hoffman.

Hoffman apologized in December 2018 and said he had not known. Operators posed as conservative Alabamians and planted a false flag of Russian bot support for Roy Moore.

Hoffman

Reid Hoffman sat on New America’s board.

INTERLOCK

Sara K. Hudson

Sara K. Hudson, reported in NYT-derived coverage as an Investing in US staffer who “worked on the project,” appears to be the same ex-DOJ Sara Hudson in New America’s first Public Interest Technology fellows class, 2017–2019, per LittleSis. LittleSis also records her at the Berggruen Institute, another Schmidt/Hoffman-linked node.

plausible but unverified identity match

Field Density

The fellows roster is dense with disinformation-research professionals. Brian Fishman went on to lead Facebook’s counterterrorism policy. This is the raw material from which coordination narratives get spun.

DOCUMENTED absence

Dave Troy

Dave Troy, the Baltimore network analyst behind sprawling threads on Flynn, disinformation networks, and the “big history” of January 6, is listed as a Future Frontlines fellow at newamerica.org.

DOCUMENTED

Mia Bloom

Mia Bloom, the Georgia State extremism scholar and Pastels and Pedophiles co-author, is an International Security Fellow at New America.

DOCUMENTED

Mina Chang

Mina Chang, a New America fellow, later resigned as a State Department deputy assistant secretary after NBC revealed inflated credentials, showing the fellowship vetting process can be gamed.

The Berggruen Institute / 21st Century Council node includes Schmidt, Hoffman, Zakaria, Fukuyama, Tyson, and Hudson.

The Atlantic tie includes owner David Bradley sitting on the board while fellows Fallows, Clemons, and Mounk wrote for it.

The Obama political operation overlaps through Schmidt, Rattner, Muñoz, Park, and Martin.

The security advisory council pulls in Warburg Pincus, GCP Capital, and pharma money.

Donor leverage over research

The Google/Open Markets affair has the paper trail. It exposes a structural template also visible in Exxon money coexisting with an energy program, Peterson money funding the deficit-hawk shop, Walton and Gates money behind the education program, and donors sitting as directors.

Interlock density

When a board chair’s company is the biggest funder, another board member unwittingly funded a disinformation operation that an apparent fellow worked on, and the security program houses two executives of a general’s consultancy, watchdogs will map the institution and bad-faith readers will connect dots into conspiracy.

• Post-2009 annual reports for continued ExxonMobil or other oil-major funding.
• Definitive confirmation of the Sara Hudson identity match.
• The full 85 source documents on the LittleSis references page.

• What, if anything, “Fresnel” refers to.
• Whether ASU’s sponsorship payments shaped Future of War output.

New America interlocks with the Atlantic Council through people, most concretely Robert J. Abernethy, an Atlantic Council vice-chair who joined New America’s board, confirmed by New America’s own press release.

Slaughter’s and Rita Hauser’s ties are recorded on LittleSis.

reported via LittleSis for the others

The comparison is instructive because the Atlantic Council is everything critics accuse New America of being, at higher intensity. Per the Quincy Institute, it took more foreign-government money than any U.S. think tank from 2019–2023: about $21M from about 15 governments including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

The Atlantic Council took Burisma money at $100K per year from 2016. Chevron is a documented top-tier donor whose Kazakhstan conference funding went undisclosed in issue briefs.

Facebook became a top donor in 2018 while partnering with the Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab on election-integrity work. DFRLab also took State Department Global Engagement Center grants.

DFRLab is the institution named as a “central coordination node” in Michael Shellenberger’s “censorship industrial complex” congressional testimony through the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project. That criticism comes from ideological opponents, but is anchored in real contractual relationships.

Jackie Singh, @hackingbutlegal, is a U.S. Army veteran turned cybersecurity professional with experience at Mandiant / FireEye, Intel Security / McAfee, and as founder of Spyglass Security.

She is best known as senior incident-response and threat analyst on the 2020 Biden campaign, later technology director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, and author of the Hacking, but Legal Substack.

She has been both target and combatant in the disinformation-research world’s public battles. Vice reported sustained harassment against her; the Washington Examiner, a partisan outlet, attacked her over alleged old IRC troll-group logs; and in November 2024 she broke with much of her professional cohort by publicly calling for a forensic audit of the 2024 election.

The key corrective: Jackie Singh’s published record on Dave Troy is favorable. She wrote an appreciative analysis of his social-capital framework, “Between Truth and Belief,” and has recommended his work.

No indexed Substack post by Singh attacks Troy, Bloom, New America, or anything called “Fresnel.”

No documented connection links Singh to New America, the Atlantic Council, New Knowledge, or Project Birmingham.

If a Singh-Troy or Singh-Bloom conflict exists, it lives in unindexed X threads and rates as an unverified social-media claim, as do separate academic-bullying allegations that have circulated about Bloom on social platforms.

The Social Media Intelligence Unit, a Munich-based outfit, is recorded on LittleSis with Neal Rauhauser, labeled “disinformation researcher,” James Patrick, ex-UK police intelligence analyst, and Libby Shaw, labeled “disinformation operative.”

Sources include SMIU’s July 2020 “Society Burning: Tactical Assessment” and a National Observer piece on the #TrudeauMustGo botnet.

LittleSis records SMIU delivering a 2020 “tactical assessment” to Alliance4Europe, whose managing director Omri Preiss is also vice-chair of the DISARM Foundation.

The DISARM Foundation is the MITRE-ATT&CK-style disinformation-countermeasures taxonomy by SJ Terp and Pablo Breuer, out of the MisinfosecWG / AMITT lineage, adopted as the EU’s FIMI standard and tested with NATO / EU hybrid-threat bodies.

Rauhauser’s history as the Weinergate-era “Beandogs” / TwitterGate operative is attested mainly in partisan-blog archives from 2011–12.

A critical Substack claims SMIU’s NETWAR work shaped the environment that produced DISARM, which DISARM’s own documented lineage contradicts.

UNVERIFIED

Connections to New America exist at two points: Craig Newmark funds DISARM and sits on New America’s advisory board; Dave Troy operates in the same overlapping researcher networks as Rauhauser, with no direct collaboration or feud documented.