Ideas die in silence: Trump has quietly killed the Wilson Center

Recently, a federal judge temporarily blocked one of President Trump’s efforts to fire federal employees. Similarly, independent agencies, one after another — including, most recently, the U.S. Institute for Peace — have been successful in court in blocking attempts to dismantle congressionally chartered institutions.

The one glaring exception is the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. For reasons only he can explain, Mark Green, the president of the Wilson Center when Elon Musk’s DOGE arrived, walked away without a fight.

Founded by President Richard Nixon and supported by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the Wilson Center was created to be part of the “Republic of Letters.” It was a window into America’s psyche at a time when the nation believed it would shape the world of ideas and win the global intellectual debate against communism. Great Republicans built the Wilson Center, and leaders from across the political spectrum sustained it. 

Admittedly, the work of the Wilson Center isn’t quite as tangible as that of, for example, U.S. Agency for International Development. The destruction of the center, however, marks the end of an ambitious, decades-long project to shape public debate and support unique scholarship worldwide — the slow-motion death of ideas. 

The Wilson Center helped shape the intellectual trajectory of thinkers who are now viewed as among the greatest of all time. Mario Vargas Llosa reimagined Brazil’s only historical famine, bringing Canudos to a global stage. “The War of the End of the World,” among his other books, helped earn him the Nobel Prize in Literature — a recognition for Vargas Llosa, but also for the idea that scholarship can shape national memory.

John Lewis Gaddis, already a Cold War historian of note, decided that the Wilson Center would house his exploration of different perspectives on that long struggle. With the Cold War International History Project, he searched high and low for primary-source documents behind the Iron Curtain that would enlighten and educate Americans on how others saw and explained the same events — altering our understanding of the Cold War and challenging our impulse to navel gaze.

The Wilson Center saved lives — literally. When Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program and a renowned Iranian American scholar, was held in solitary confinement in Iran’s Evin Prison in 2007, the center mounted a campaign to free her. President Lee Hamilton reminded the world of who she was and what she meant — to the U.S., to Iranian scholarship, to human dignity. A year later, the ayatollah himself relented and Esfandiari was freed.

The center wasn’t just where great thinkers came to work — it was where many staged their launch. When a young Tom Friedman returned from the Middle East, where he was the first Jewish correspondent for the New York Times in the region, he found a home at the center. There, he wrote “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” the book that set the stage for a new era of foreign affairs journalism. 

Decades later, a 20-something Ben Rhodes honed his craft at the center. Hired by Hamilton, he worked on the 9/11 Commission and Iraq Study Group Report. In the years to follow, Rhodes would come to reinvigorate American foreign policy and American values a few blocks up the street — at his desk inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as an Obama speechwriter and a deputy National Security Advisor. 

And then there were the women of the center: Gloria Steinem; Madeleine Albright, when she was still a scholar, not yet a diplomat; former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who served as the center’s president; and Nina Jankowicz, one of the most vocal and visible intellectuals against disinformation. Each left her mark and carried forward the Wilsonian ideal that scholarship and public service are not opposing callings, but one and the same. 

The Wilson Center’s demise under a second Trump administration was never a foregone conclusion. It operated primarily on private funding, costing the government a negligible amount. What’s more, the center has never been one to go gently into the dark night. In 1998, the House slashed its budget to the brink of closure, but the Senate stepped in. Ideas prevailed. 

And yet, this time is different. Without a leader to defend it in court, as many other congressionally chartered institutions have done, the Wilson Center is slowly being dismantled and picked for parts.

Other think tanks in Washington are attempting to keep the center’s scholarship alive by absorbing some of its programs. The private funding that supported it — tens of millions of dollars — will mostly end up in the Trump administration’s coffers, because donors are too afraid to ask for it back. Those donors who paid for programming that can no longer be implemented and asked for their unused funds back have been refused.

With the dismantling of the Wilson Center and the threats to universities across the country, the future of American scholarship is now uncertain. The impact of unrecognized talent, policy unpursued and unshared ideas will be felt most acutely in the coming years.

But this much we do know — the Wilson Center’s quiet dismantling is not just the story of one institution’s fall, but a warning about what we lose when we stop defending the spaces that nurture inquiry, elevate dialogue and believe in intellectual leadership. The lesson of the Wilson Center is that American global and intellectual leadership won’t end in a dramatic way, all at once. It will fade away into the background, unsupported.

Ideas die in silence. And this time, silence won.

Jana Nelson is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Western Hemisphere. She worked for the Wilson Center as an intern, research assistant and consultant between 2008 and 2010.