For many years, the right-wing Koch network has both funded and influenced George Mason’s Mercatus Center. More recently, George Mason’s law school was renamed in honor of Antonin Scalia, the right-wing Supreme Court justice who died on a 2016 hunting trip. The swift name change came after an anonymous donor with ties to the Federalist Society gave $20 million to George Mason, while the Koch network threw in another $10 million, Washingtonian Magazine reported.

Image Source: Chicago Pennant Company – George Mason University Archives – CC BY-SA 4.0

In researching a story for FAIR last month, I was reminded of a fast-forgotten scandal. It didn’t make sense to include the scandal in that story, but it’s worth recounting, if only because it provides a tiny window into the cornucopia of corruption that defines 21st-century America.

Not only has this scandal long since been forgotten, but the offender still has a prominent institute named after him, ensuring he’ll be remembered long after the rest of us. Here is how the game is played.

Quote someone else

I started reading the Washington Post two decades ago when I moved to DC. And among my earliest observations was that the Post must really like this fellow named Stephen Fuller, since he was constantly being quoted.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one who noticed — so had higher-ups at the Post, who quietly sought to curtail Fuller’s innumerable quotes. The Post mentioned this in passing in a 2015 story marking Fuller’s semi-retirement.

After noting that Fuller had been cited or quoted “in nearly every article about the DC-area economy over the past two decades,” the Post wrote: “At one point, his voice became so ubiquitous that Washington Post reporters were discouraged from quoting him, in hopes that they would find fresh analysts.”

Notwithstanding this guidance, Post reporters still found it hard to quit Fuller, as he always knew just the right thing to say. That Fuller’s views usually dovetailed neatly with the interests of developers only added to his appeal for the Post, a paper that has long sided with local elites.

Despite Fuller’s coziness with power, his quotes came cloaked in academic objectivity, owing to his dual titles as an economics professor at George Mason University and leader of the school’s Center for Regional Analysis. In 2017, the university bumped up his title, creating the Stephen S. Fuller Institute.

‘I didn’t sell out’

It took many years, but Fuller was finally dethroned in 2019 — by none other than the Post.

The Post’s reporting was all the more impressive in light of who Fuller’s secret dance partner was — Amazon, the company founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Here are the opening lines of the Post’s 2019 story by Dalton Bennett and Robert McCartney:

A prominent Washington-area economist wrote an opinion piece welcoming the arrival of Amazon’s new headquarters in Northern Virginia at the suggestion of a company official who hoped to build public support for the project before a key Arlington County Board vote, emails show.

Stephen S. Fuller, a professor at George Mason University, also showed the article to Amazon public relations staff before publication and invited them to suggest changes — although he rejected their revisions.

To recap: At Amazon’s behest, yet under his own name, Fuller drafted an op-ed favorable to the company. Then he submitted it to Amazon for review.

Rather than simply thanking Fuller (for crossing bright ethical lines on its behalf), Amazon asked the professor to make his column even more flattering still. “The content is really good,” an Amazon PR official wrote in response to the draft Fuller emailed the company, but “it could be punched up a bit.”

But this was a bridge too far, even for Fuller. The suggested edits “did not read at all like I had written it,” he emailed Amazon. “To protect the objectivity of my message, I determined I would stay with the earlier version.”

We only know of this exchange thanks to a Freedom of Information Act filed by the Post. When the paper contacted Fuller for a response, he was caught off guard — which makes sense, as he’d grown accustomed to softball questions from solicitous reporters.

He’d only coordinated with Amazon “as a courtesy,” a flummoxed Fuller told the Post, adding, “I was being transparent with them.”

But “being transparent” is not commonly understood to mean secretly coordinating with a company to pull one over on the public.

“It’s very complicated,” Fuller said as he ended his interview with the Post, “but I didn’t sell out.”

Editor’s Notes

While Fuller initially offered his Amazon op-ed to the Post, the paper surprisingly turned him down (it’d be interesting to know why). Fuller then turned to the Washington Business Journal, which published his op-ed in March 2019 under the headline “Don’t underestimate Amazon HQ2’s importance.” (HQ2 is short for second headquarters.)

Five months later, the Post published its exposé on Fuller. Before doing so, the Post reached out to the Journal for comment, and Journal editor-in-chief Vandana Sinha said all the right things.

Had the Journal known that Fuller had coordinated with Amazon, “We may have disclosed it in an editor’s note or asked him to disclose that within the column itself,” Sinha told the Post. “We may have reached out to Amazon directly to ask if they wanted to write an op-ed themselves. We may not have run it at all… [We] want to be as transparent as possible with our readers.”

After reading Sinha’s response, I was certain the Journal, having learned of Fuller’s coordination with Amazon, would have gone back and affixed an editor’s note to his op-ed. But I just checked, and six years later Fuller’s column remains online, without any mention of Amazon’s hidden hand.

Meanwhile, the Post also hasn’t affixed editor’s notes to any of its stories quoting Fuller. At least not according to my quick sampling of stories, which included three stories in which Fuller was quoted or cited specifically on Amazon’s HQ2.

In one of those stories, Fuller scolded Montgomery County, Maryland for losing the HQ2 fight to northern Virginia. (Combined, Montgomery County and the state of Maryland offered Amazon a staggering sum of up to $8.5 billion.)

‘We wouldn’t take money from the Mafia’

I take no pleasure in beating up on a man in his eighties, and I’d like to give Fuller the benefit of the doubt that he “didn’t sell out” with his op-ed.

But I’d be surprised if it hadn’t at least crossed Fuller’s mind that he might one day hit Amazon up. Private donations were, after all, how Fuller long funded his work.

“His center, which receives almost no support from George Mason, depends heavily on the generosity of the industry he informs,” Washington City Paper noted in a 2011 profile of Fuller.

And, as it happens, he typically finds himself with data that bolster the need for building more housing and better highways to knit the region together—imperatives that tend to please the industry. His research is used not only to inform and guide decisionmaking, but also to advance agendas, in a symbiotic relationship without which neither party would survive.

When asked if there were any funders the university would turn away, Roger Stough, the George Mason vice president who recruited Fuller, told City Paper, “We wouldn’t take money from the Mafia.” Stough added that foreign donors and political radicals would also receive extra scrutiny.

Amazon is, of course, none of those things. And the company has both donated to and partnered with George Mason. But it’s unclear if Amazon has given directly to Fuller’s institute, which doesn’t publicly disclose all its donors. In some ways, this is beside the point.

Antonin Scalia Law School

We’ve come to a pretty pass when our public universities are forced to sell themselves off to private donors. And there’s no better example of this than George Mason — and not just because of the Stephen S. Fuller Institute.

For many years, the right-wing Koch network has both funded and influenced George Mason’s Mercatus Center. More recently, George Mason’s law school was renamed in honor of Antonin Scalia, the right-wing Supreme Court justice who died on a 2016 hunting trip. The swift name change came after an anonymous donor with ties to the Federalist Society gave $20 million to George Mason, while the Koch network threw in another $10 million, Washingtonian Magazine reported.

Meanwhile, housed within the Antonin Scalia Law School is something called the Global Antitrust Institute, which works to ensure that Big Tech isn’t broken apart like the monopolists of over a century ago.

The institute “is bankrolled in large part by tech companies — corporate donors like Google, Amazon and Qualcomm — that are facing antitrust scrutiny,” the New York Times reported in 2020.

While Big Tech has benefited from the institute, students have been hurt. In 2023, the institute’s leader, Joshua Wright, resigned amid a slew of allegations over inappropriate relationships with students and conflicts of interest, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Like Fuller and Scalia

I realize that Stephen Fuller’s penning an op-ed at Amazon’s behest six years ago isn’t exactly earth-shattering news. But I think it says something about 21st-century America that students at a public university are now studying under his moniker, and presumably will be for years to come.

Some of those students will yearn to be remembered long after the rest of us. And George Mason’s implicit lesson is that they can be — so long as they cozy up to power, like Fuller and Scalia.

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