They also fund widespread climate denial, federal court stacking, and the tea party (probably not this anymore), likely at many times the magnitude. So yes I am cautious.
No I've never encountered those efforts and have had no reason to evaluate them one way or another. Maybe they are too small to have reached any appreciable public notice? (or at least my notice).
To be honest though, I feel the opinions and speech of billionaires are amplified in our media so one should always be more critical and cautious of any of their projects, because money gives the ability to shortcut a more critical vetting of the effort.
There is noting wrong getting funded by Koch in principle.
What your source points out is that the agreements Cowen made as a general director of the Mercatus Center seem to violate standard academic norms and "fall short of the standards of academic independence I expect any gift to meet."
What I dislike about a lot of his writing is the weird "mostest contrarianist" vibe I sometimes get. It's kind of hard to describe, but here's an example:
The growing YIMBY movement calls for, among other things, some deregulation of our cities so that more housing can be built. A broadly left-leaning movement pushing for fewer regulations might be something the average libertarian might find encouraging, but galaxy-brain Cowen seems to take the opposite tack in some of his argumentation, that maybe all that regulation is good.
I much prefer his co-blogger, Alex Tabarrok, who seems much more a straight-shooting libertarian-ish econ guy. I mean, you can disagree with his conclusions or policy ideas, but it's much more "what you see is what you get". He's someone I'll read even if I disagree, since it's often reasonably well argued.
https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked-capitalism/2018/05/sco...