Every filing, briefing, and story the Forum produces starts with a record someone had to find, read, and check. In 2026 the Forum rebuilt that work as infrastructure: structured databases, monitors that read primary sources every day, and analyst desks that turn what they find into filings, Hill briefings, and stories. AI does the reading. Analysts make the calls.
The Stakes
The Forum’s opponents operate on budgets 8 to 10 times its own. It cannot outspend them. It can out-read them. A $4.6 million annual budget and about 50 staff, fellows, and contributors now run a research floor that reads foreign-agent filings, campus foreign-money disclosures, and the Arabic press as they appear. Capability per dollar is the argument of this briefing.
The Record
•The Counter-Islamism Database: 4 million-plus data points on 8,000-plus institutions, by our count as of August 2026, the evidence base behind Islamist Watch’s case files.
•A Campus Watch academic database: 9,000-plus academics indexed from 2 decades of reporting, with sourced statements and signed letters on record, refreshed weekly.
•A Section 117 foreign-gift database: every disclosure in the Education Department’s public release, 142,000-plus transactions and $75 billion as of July 2026, Qatar the largest funder at roughly $9 billion.
•Monitors: daily reading of Justice Department FARA filings for Middle East principals; a watch on federal dockets that bear on the mission; a daily Arabic-press digest of Al-Akhbar and Asharq Al-Awsat; and an Iran economy file that grades sanctions pressure channel by channel, with the Forum’s own satellite series.
•Publishing and mapping: an interactive investigations site that turns long reports into data-driven stories, and the MEF Map, a live picture of the region built on open feeds.
•People: a 20-lesson staff course on working with AI tools, and standing analyst desks under one rule: every number carries a source and a date, and a second reader checks every brief.
What Is Next
Names in the databases become dossiers; dossiers become filings, Hill briefings, and stories, on a schedule rather than when someone has time. In 2027 the monitors extend to state legislatures and more foreign-funding registries.
8,000+
Institutions mapped in the Counter-Islamism Database, on 4 million-plus data points, by our count as of August 2026.
What a Gift Funds
3 named gifts, priced at cost. $10,000 funds one monitor for a year: the data feeds, compute, and hosting behind a single daily feed (foreign-agent filings, campus foreign money, the Arabic press, or the Iran economy), plus the analyst hours to check it, roughly $800 a month; you receive its briefs for 12 months. $25,000 funds one analyst desk for a year: the review, drafting, and fact-checking time that converts the monitors’ output into filings, Hill briefings, and stories, a fraction of the cost of a traditional research hire because the machines do the reading. $100,000 funds the data infrastructure for a year: the databases (Counter-Islamism, campus foreign funding, and Section 117), their storage and compute, and the engineering that keeps them current, the foundation every monitor and desk stands on. Every named gift comes with a report on exactly what it did.
To Discuss a Gift
Gregg Roman
Executive Director
Leave-Behind
The print-ready one-pager of this briefing: one Letter page, PDF-exportable.
