on December 8, 1927. During the Great Depression, economists at Brookings embarked on a large-scale study commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to understand its underlying causes. Brookings's first president, Harold G. Moulton, and other Brookings scholars later led an effort to oppose Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration because they thought it impeded economic recovery. With the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941, Brookings researchers turned their attention to aiding the administration with a series of studies on mobilization. In 1948, Brookings was asked to submit a plan for administering the European Recovery Program. The resulting organization scheme assured that the Marshall Plan was run carefully and on a businesslike basis. In 1952, Robert Calkins succeeded Moulton as president of the Brookings Institution. He secured grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation that put Brookings on a strong financial basis. He reorganized it around the Economic Studies, Government Studies, and Foreign Policy Programs. In 1957, Brookings moved from Jackson Avenue to a new research center near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. Kermit Gordon assumed the presidency of Brookings in 1967. He began a series of studies of program choices for the federal budget in 1969 titled "Setting National Priorities." He also expanded the Foreign Policy Studies Program to include research in national security and defense. After Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, the relationship between Brookings and the White House deteriorated; at one point Nixon's aide Charles Colson proposed a firebombing of the institution. G. Gordon Liddy and the White House Plumbers actually made a plan to firebomb the headquarters and steal classified files, but it was canceled because the Nixon administration refused to pay for a fire engine as a getaway vehicle. Yet throughout the 1970s, Brookings was offered more federal research contracts than it could handle. After Gordon died in 1976, Gilbert Y. Steiner, director of the governmental studies program, was appointed the fourth and acting president of the Brookings Institution by the board of trustees. As director of the governmental studies program, Steiner brought in numerous scholars whose research ranges from administrative reform to urban policy, not only enhancing the visibility and influence of the Brookings program in Washington and nationally, but also producing works that have survived as classics in the field of political science. 1980–2022 By the 1980s, Brookings faced an increasingly competitive and ideologically charged intellectual environment. The need to