The Democratic Party-aligned think tank Center for American Progress recently added former Secretary of State Antony Blinken to their board of directors—quietly, with no public announcement.
In 2024, ProPublica reported, based on leaked documents, that two U.S. government bodies—USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration—concluded that Israel was intentionally blocking food and medicine deliveries to Gaza. Despite these findings, Blinken’s May 2024 report to Congress stated that Israel was not restricting U.S. humanitarian aid, a determination that allowed billions in U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel to continue under Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act.
The Center for American Progress (CAP) did not tout the addition of Blinken to its board, like it has in the past when other former administration officials joined. CAP did not respond to Sludge’s questions about how Blinken will help the group in its mission to “promote peace and shared global prosperity.”
In May 2024, CAP’s former president Patrick Gaspard faulted Blinken for his report to Congress claiming that Israel was not violating international law in its use of U.S. weapons. Gaspard said there was “overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces have violated international law through indiscriminate bombing that has killed thousands of civilians.”
A couple of months prior, Gaspard took aim at the State Department for its “gross disregard of overwhelming evidence and a dangerous precedent in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy” in its claim that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not violating international law. Gaspard’s statement went on to call for a halt to offensive weapons sales to Israel in the conflict: “The United States, by its own imposed standards, cannot heedlessly deliver offensive weapons as the Israeli government continues to bombard and starve innocents on a mass scale.”
Gaspard was replaced as CAP’s president and CEO this past February by the group’s former president and CEO Neera Tanden, after her time in the Biden administration. Two sources told Jewish Insider that the move was an involuntary demotion for Gaspard, who is now a CAP distinguished senior fellow. The sources drew attention to Gaspard's criticism of Israel’s military actions in Gaza as playing a part in the change at the think tank, whose 501(c)3 arm has a roughly $50 million annual budget.
Also recently, CAP posted a note saying it would no longer list its donors publicly, in what it calls a “temporary protective step” due to the appearance of retaliation by the Trump administration. Foreign policy watchdogs told Sludge that think tanks like CAP, which weighs in regularly on foreign policy and defense topics, should not be embracing “dark money” donations and their potential for conflicts of interest.
Blinken was previously a co-founder of corporate consultancy WestExec Advisors before being appointed to be President Biden’s top diplomat. At the firm, which piped more than 15 foreign policy staff into the Biden administration, Blinken’s former clients included defense contracting giant Boeing, private equity titan Blackstone, and Japanese tech investor SoftBank, according to his December 2020 financial disclosure.
