According to Emory University historian Harvey Klehr, writing in 1988, the IPS served "as an intellectual nerve center for the radical movement.

[11][8] Against the backdrop of the counterculture of the 1960s, the opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement, the IPS "became a brand name for its unabashedly left-wing tone", in contrast with RAND and the largely conservative think tanks.

[15][16] In 1964, several leading black activists joined the institute's staff and made IPS into a base for supporting the civil rights movement.

[citation needed] IPS also organized congressional seminars and published numerous books that challenged the national security state, including Gar Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy and Barnet's Intervention and Revolution.

[Notes 1] That year, the Transnational Institute (TNI), a progressive think tank based in Amsterdam, was established as the IPS's international program, later becoming an independent non-profit.

The target of the car bomb attack was Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean government minister and ambassador to the United States, one of Pinochet's most outspoken critics and the head of the Transnational Institute.

IPS Director Robert Borosage and other staff helped draft Changing Course: Blueprint for Peace in Central America and the Caribbean, which was used by hundreds of schools, labor unions, churches, and citizen organizations as a challenge to US policy in the region.

[citation needed] In 1985, Fellow Roger Wilkins helped found the Free South Africa Movement,[33] which organized a year-long series of demonstrations that led to the imposition of US sanctions.

In 1987, S. Steven Powell published his non-fiction Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies,[34] in which he provided "by far the single most compendious collection of facts about IPS that anyone has yet compiled", according to a lengthy critical review by Joshua Muravchik.

[35] In 1986, after six years of the Reagan administration, Sidney Blumenthal noted, "Ironically, as IPS has declined in Washington influence, its stature has grown in conservative demonology.

"[36] Conservative think tanks American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation described the IPS as the "far left" or "radical left" of the late 1980s,[37]: 177  In a mid-80s essay in the journal World Affairs, author Joshua Muravchik coined "communophilism" – an "eclectic and undisciplined" sympathy to communist movements and governments, "virulently anti capitalist and virulently critical of the capitalist democracies of the West" – to describe the IPS.

Currently, its main focus is in five areas: economic inequality, race and gender considerations, climate change, foreign policy, and leadership development.

According to The Nation, "Sanders gets some of his sharpest talking points about inequality from the Institute for Policy Studies, a more radical outfit that is usually ignored by the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

"[8][40] As of 2024, the IPS supports a number of independent projects, among them: Foreign Policy in Focus, a virtual think tank that seeks "to make the United States a more responsible global partner"; the Global Economy Program, aiming to "speed the transition to an equitable and sustainable economy while reversing today's extreme levels of economic and racial inequality and excessive corporate and Wall Street power"; the National Priorities Project, focused on the US federal budget and spending "that prioritizes peace, economic opportunity, and shared prosperity for all"; the New Internationalism project, working to "end wars and militarism, with a focus on U.S. policy"; and the Program on Inequality and the Common Good, addressing income inequality and "extreme wealth concentration".

[8] The 14-member IPS board of trustees in 2024 includes actor Danny Glover, Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans, Ford Foundation vice-president of US Programs Sarita Gupta, and editorial director and publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel.