Courant.com
Yankee Institute: Small Office, Big Influence
Labor Leaders, Liberals Warn Against Think
Tank's Agenda
By DANIELA ALTIMARI, altimari@courant.com
The Hartford
Courant
6:21 PM EDT, July 20, 2011
HARTFORD —The Yankee
Institute's plan to remake Connecticut's
political culture originates from the second floor of a nondescript,
multifamily house on a quiet Hartford
side street.
"The waterboarding happens in the basement,''
Executive Director Fergus Cullen jokes. In much the same vein, he mentions
mind-control machines and computers capable of hacking into state workers'
e-mail accounts.
To the Yankee Institute's ideological adversaries — largely labor leaders and
liberals — it is no laughing matter. They say the free-enterprise think tank is
part of a vast national movement, fueled by corporate donors and the
billionaire Koch brothers, to demonize public employees and rescind their
hard-won rights.
"They want you to believe they're just a handful of scholars working on
free market principals. That sounds so safe,'' says Matt O'Connor, a spokesman
for the coalition of unions representing 45,000 state workers. "But they
are [linked to] powerful corporate interests who have been able to hijack the
American dream. ... They are part of a well-orchestrated and well-funded effort
... to undermine working people in this country and further enrich and empower
the very few folks at the top who have rewritten the rules for their benefit.''
Union leaders allege that the Yankee Institute played a key role in helping to
scuttle a concession deal between state workers and Gov. Dannel
P. Malloy. Especially damning is the allegation that the institute illegally
tapped into the state e-mail system and spread misinformation about the
proposal.
The accusation has triggered an inquiry by Attorney General George Jepsen, who declined to comment. "The inquiry is
ongoing,'' says Jepsen spokeswoman Susan E. Kinsman. "We're working as quickly as possible to finish
it."
The hacking allegation is "unequivocally not true,'' Cullen says. "They're accusing us of having hacked into the
computer system, of having taken assumed identities, spreading misinformation
and covering up our electronic tracks. ... It sounds like something out of 'Mission: Impossible.' ''
In contrast to the union's depiction of a sophisticated organization with ties
to some of the nation's most influential conservative groups, Cullen paints the
Yankee Institute as a shoestring operation, with 3.5 employees and an annual
budget of about half a million dollars generated almost exclusively from
individual donors living in Connecticut. "They are ascribing powers of
influence to us that we wish we had,'' he says.
Cullen, a 39-year-old New Hampshire
native with dark hair and the lean build of a distance runner, says the unions
are having a "wag the dog" moment. The attack on the Yankee Institute
is motivated, he says, by a desire on the part of union officials to deflect
blame for their failure to sell the agreement to rank-and-file state workers.
"We're allowed to have honest disagreements about policy matters,'' Cullen
says. "Where it crosses a disturbing line is
where they can make accusations that have not a shred of evidence to support
them and that triggers a government investigation. It seems to me they're
trying to silence one of their most effective critics. We're basically the only
organization in Connecticut that has been talking about the damaging effects of
the public employee unions and the unsustainable impact it's having on taxes
and budgets.''
Founded in 1984, the think tank has long embraced a philosophy that government
should be small, taxes should be low, and a robust private sector is the key to
economic growth. For part of its history, the Yankee Institute was a small,
somewhat stodgy presence on the campus of Trinity College
known for churning out academic papers on education and health care policy.
Cullen and Heath W. Fahle, the institute's policy
director, arrived in 2009 with the charge of making the institute "more
practical and maybe a little bit less academic and theoretical,'' says Cullen,
who holds degrees from both Yale and Harvard,
Despite that Ivy League pedigree, Cullen is a veteran of the political
trenches. A few months before graduating from Yale in 1994, he wrote an op-ed
opposing higher gas taxes that ran in the New
Haven Register.
The piece caught the eye of someone on John Rowland's campaign staff and soon,
Cullen was "a junior mechanic" on the Rowland team. He worked for
Rowland in the governor's office and also on his 1998 re-election bid, but
Cullen says, "I wasn't from Waterbury
so I was never going to be a Rowland insider."
After receiving a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy
School, Cullen went back to New Hampshire and started
a home-contracting business. He also wrote editorials for the Union Leader,
which led to his recruitment as the Granite
State's Republican Party
chairman, an unpaid post.
Though he has held the Yankee Institute job for the past two years, he continues
to live in New Hampshire
with his wife and their three young children.
The institute bills itself as non-partisan despite Cullen's connections to the
Republican Party. Cullen says the group can be impartial — backing Malloy, a
Democrat, when he sought changes to union contracts, and opposing Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, when she "rolled over" on tax
increases.
The aim, says Cullen, is to have an impact.
"Politics is the art of the possible. … We aren't interested in pushing
pipe dreams,'' he says. "Are we in favor of getting rid of the income tax?
Yes, we are. Is it likely to happen anytime soon? No."
Since Cullen's arrival, the institute has hired investigative reporter Zachary Janowski, taken on a legal battle against publicly funded
political campaigns, and launched a website, CT Sunlight, which publishes the
salaries of state employees and other databases. It also runs the Raising Hale
website, where Janowski's works appears.
Technology has allowed advocacy groups such as the Yankee Institute to assume
some of the roles once filled by newspapers, said Rich Hanley, a professor and
director of the graduate journalism program at Quinnipiac University.
"Advocacy groups can now go in and data-mine just as reporters do,''
Hanley said, though he is quick to add that the blog
posts and stories produced by groups such as the Yankee Institute are
"more public relations than objective journalism.''
The institute is driven by a desire for transparency, Cullen says, and that
extends to its own finances. The Yankee Institute posts its financial
statements on its website. "We certainly aren't obligated to do that but
we believe in transparency for others and we believe in transparency for
ourselves,'' he says.
At least, to a point: Cullen demurred when asked what his own salary is. The
2009 financial disclosure form — the most recent filing available — shows that
he was paid $102,500, but that doesn't represent a full year's pay. "It's
a little more than that,'' Cullen says when asked about his annual salary. "It will be subject to disclosure."
Contrary to the union's assertions that the Yankee Institute is flush with
corporate donations, Cullen says the overwhelming majority of its
half-million-dollar annual budget comes from individuals. "I can't say we
receive zero corporate money because some of our supporters write a check from
their business accounts,'' he says, "but it's like 1 or 2 percent.''
According to an internal research document compiled by the unions, the Yankee
Institute received a $68,000 grant in 2006 from the Cato Institute, a
libertarian think tank funded by Charles Koch.
There are other connections as well: Andrew J. Cowin, chairman of the Yankee Institute's board of
directors, was affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, which has received
grants from Koch Industries, according to the union. And the Yankee
Institute's part-time director of operations, Jessica Buchanan, completed the
Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation Associate Program.
"If [the Yankee Institute] were just a hack and a blogger
and someone who answers the phones that would be one thing,'' the union's
O'Connor says, "but they have some powerful tentacles in Washington, Wall
Street and of all places Kansas, where the Koch brothers are located.''
Cullen scoffs at attempts to tie the Yankee Institute to the Koch brothers,
liberals' favorite villains. In blue state Connecticut, where powerful public employee
unions have long had a warm relationship with Democratic lawmakers, it is the
Yankee Institute that is the underdog, a lonely voice for the state's
beleaguered taxpayers.
"I really am offended at this idea that only the unions are standing up
for working people,'' Cullen says. "When the public employee unions are
asking for more in state spending, that money is coming out of the pockets of
working people across the state of Connecticut and we are standing up for
them."
Fergus Cullen
Executive Director, Yankee Institute for Public Policy
860-297-4271 o
603-520-5450 c
fergus@yankeeinstitute.org
Located on the campus of Trinity College
PO Box 260660
Hartford, CT 06126--0660