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Outlet profile

New America

U.S. center-left

Owned byIndependent nonprofit; governed by a board of directors with no single private owner
FundingPhilanthropic donations and foundation grants — major funders have included the MacArthur Foundation, Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Google (and Eric Schmidt personally, totaling nearly $20 million through 2017), and other corporate and private donors; annual revenue approximately $37 million as of 2024
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

New America was founded in 1999 by Ted Halstead, Sherle Schwenninger, Michael Lind, and Walter Russell Mead, with early backing from Bill Moyers and members of the Rockefeller family; it originally positioned itself as a centrist, post-partisan alternative to older Washington think tanks. Over time it shifted toward a more clearly center-left orientation, a change that accelerated after Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former State Department official under President Obama, became president and CEO in 2013 and recruited numerous Obama-era appointees. The organization's most significant controversy came in 2017, when it dismissed researcher Barry Lynn and shuttered his Open Markets team after Lynn publicly praised EU antitrust action against Google — a major New America funder. Reporting at the time indicated that Eric Schmidt had communicated displeasure with the research to Slaughter; Slaughter denied the firing was donor-driven, but the episode drew wide criticism and renewed scrutiny of think-tank donor influence. Google and Schmidt had donated nearly $20 million to New America by that point. Media Bias/Fact Check rates the organization left-center biased with a high score for factual reporting. In 2025 and 2026, New America's published work has characterized the Trump administration's rollbacks of labor protections, climate policy, and federal agency staffing as harmful, placing it in a broadly critical posture toward the current administration.

Sources

  1. New America (organization) — Wikipedia
  2. New America — Bias and Credibility, Media Bias/Fact Check
  3. New America (New America Foundation) — InfluenceWatch
  4. Has the New America Foundation Lost its Way? — Washingtonian
  5. New America Foundation Head Anne-Marie Slaughter Fires Anti-Trust Team at Eric Schmidt's Behest — Naked Capitalism
  6. A Labor Day Look at Trump's Harm to U.S. Workers — New America
  7. Holding onto Hope in 2025: Why Long-Term Policy Solutions Still Matter — New America
  8. New America Foundation — MacArthur Foundation

Profile compiled 2026-08-14; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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