RAND Corporation
American research organization
The RAND Corporation, doing business as RAND, is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND engages in research and development (R&D) in several fields and industries. Since the 1950s, RAND research has helped inform United States policy decisions on a wide variety of issues, including the Cold War space race, the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the U.S.–Soviet nuclear arms confrontation, the creation of the Great Society social welfare programs, and national health care.
RAND originated as "Project RAND" (from the phrase "research and development") in the post-war period immediately after World War II. The U.S. Army Air Forces established Project RAND with the objective of investigating long-range planning of future weapons. The Douglas Aircraft Company was granted a contract to research intercontinental warfare. Project RAND later evolved into RAND, and expanded its research into civilian fields such as education and international affairs. It was the first think tank to be regularly referred to as a "think tank".
RAND receives both public and private funding. Its funding sources include the U.S. government, private endowments, corporations, universities, charitable foundations, U.S. state and local governments, international organizations, and to a small extent, foreign governments. In the 2024 fiscal year, the think tank's revenues and other support were $514 million, of which $328 million was provided by the U.S. federal government.
“RAND Corporation” enters the record as american research organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what RAND, Corporation and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q861141. VIAF identifies the subject as 136758914. The Library of Congress control number is n78083407. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “RAND Corporation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.