The Heritage Foundation
Based on Wikipedia: The Heritage Foundation
The Think Tank That Became a Shadow Government
In 1988, Ronald Reagan sat across from Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow. The Soviet leader had a complaint: Reagan was being influenced by something called the Heritage Foundation. Gorbachev wasn't wrong. By that point, the conservative think tank had essentially written the playbook for Reagan's presidency, and roughly sixty percent of its two thousand policy recommendations had already become administration policy.
That's an extraordinary number. Think about it—a private organization, funded by wealthy donors, managing to shape the majority of a sitting president's agenda within his first year in office.
The Heritage Foundation isn't just another policy shop churning out white papers that gather dust. It has become one of the most consequential political organizations in modern American history, a machine designed to translate conservative ideology into government action. And it didn't happen by accident.
The Memo That Started Everything
To understand Heritage, you need to understand the Powell Memorandum. In 1971, Lewis Powell—a corporate lawyer who would soon be nominated to the Supreme Court—wrote a confidential memo to the United States Chamber of Commerce. His message was blunt: American business was under attack from consumer advocates, environmentalists, and left-leaning academics. The corporate world needed to fight back, and it needed to do so strategically.
Powell's memo called for the creation of a new kind of infrastructure—think tanks, legal foundations, and media operations that could counter liberal institutions and advance pro-business policies. It was essentially a blueprint for building a parallel intellectual establishment.
Two men took this vision seriously: Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner. Both worked for Republican congressmen and both were frustrated. The American Enterprise Institute, the main conservative think tank at the time, moved too slowly. It produced academic research, but by the time its reports were published, legislative battles were already lost. Weyrich and Feulner wanted something faster, more aggressive, and more politically useful.
They found their financier in Joseph Coors—yes, that Coors, the beer magnate. Coors seeded Heritage with two hundred fifty thousand dollars in 1973. Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking fortune, followed up with tens of millions more over the next two decades.
The timing mattered. Heritage was founded on February 16, 1973, during the Nixon administration. Watergate was about to consume the presidency, and the conservative movement was in disarray. Heritage offered a new model: not just thinking about policy, but selling it aggressively to lawmakers, journalists, and the public.
How Heritage Changed the Game
What made Heritage different from older think tanks like Brookings or the American Enterprise Institute?
Speed, for one. Heritage pioneered what it called "backgrounders"—short, punchy policy briefs that could be delivered to congressional offices within days of an issue emerging. While other think tanks spent months on comprehensive studies, Heritage was getting its recommendations into the hands of decision-makers while debates were still happening.
Marketing was another innovation. Under Frank Walton, Heritage's second president, the foundation embraced direct mail fundraising. This was the late 1970s, when direct mail was revolutionizing political organizing. Heritage built a massive donor base of small contributors, which gave it both financial stability and a populist veneer.
But the most important difference was ideology. Brookings prided itself on nonpartisan analysis. The American Enterprise Institute, while conservative, maintained an academic tone. Heritage made no such pretenses. It existed to advance conservative policies, period.
The foundation also diverged from AEI by embracing the cultural concerns of Christian conservatives. It wasn't just about tax cuts and deregulation. Heritage talked about family values, traditional morality, and the erosion of American culture. This fusion of economic conservatism and social conservatism would become the defining formula of the modern Republican Party.
The Reagan Doctrine
In January 1981, Heritage delivered a three-thousand-page document to the incoming Reagan administration. They called it "Mandate for Leadership." Reagan liked it so much he gave a copy to every member of his cabinet.
The document was comprehensive to the point of being audacious. It covered every federal agency and included over two thousand specific recommendations for shrinking the government and advancing conservative priorities. By the end of Reagan's first year, administration officials estimated that about sixty percent of those recommendations had been implemented or initiated.
Reagan later called Heritage a "vital force" during his presidency. Several authors of the Mandate went on to take positions in his administration. The revolving door between Heritage and Republican administrations had begun.
Heritage was particularly influential in foreign policy. It helped develop and promote what became known as the Reagan Doctrine—the strategy of supporting anti-communist insurgencies around the world. Under this framework, the United States provided military and other assistance to rebel groups fighting Soviet-aligned governments in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, and Nicaragua.
The foundation also championed what Reagan called the Strategic Defense Initiative, a proposed system for shooting down incoming nuclear missiles. Critics dubbed it "Star Wars" and questioned whether it was technically feasible. Heritage didn't care about the technical debates—it cared about signaling American resolve in the Cold War.
The Policy Factory
By the mid-1980s, Time magazine was calling Heritage "the foremost of the new breed of advocacy tanks." The phrase "advocacy tank" captured something important. Heritage wasn't trying to be neutral. It was trying to win.
The foundation served as what one journalist called the "brain trust" for both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations on foreign policy. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Heritage studies helped lay the groundwork for the Bush administration's response. Frank Starr, Washington bureau chief for the Baltimore Sun, reported that Heritage research shaped administration thinking about the post-Soviet world.
Throughout the 1990s, Heritage continued growing. Its flagship journal, Policy Review, reached a circulation of twenty-three thousand. The foundation took on Bill Clinton's health care reform effort and helped kill it. When Republicans swept into control of the House of Representatives in 1994, their Contract with America drew heavily on Heritage ideas.
In 1995, Heritage launched the Index of Economic Freedom, an annual ranking of every country in the world based on criteria like property rights, trade freedom, and regulatory burden. The Wall Street Journal signed on as a co-publisher in 1997. The Index became a way of translating free-market ideology into seemingly objective metrics—countries could be ranked, compared, and pressured to "improve" their scores.
Even Bill Clinton ended up implementing some Heritage recommendations. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, which dramatically reformed welfare, incorporated ideas the foundation had championed for years.
The Contradictions
Heritage has always presented itself as a principled organization, guided by conservative philosophy rather than partisan convenience. But this self-image has been tested repeatedly.
Consider health care. In 1989, Heritage published a study called "Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans." It proposed an individual mandate—the requirement that everyone purchase health insurance. This was a conservative alternative to single-payer systems. The idea was that if everyone had to have insurance, the market could function efficiently.
In 2006, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney incorporated this Heritage idea into his state health care reform. Democrats took note. When the Obama administration designed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, they included an individual mandate partly because it had conservative pedigree.
Heritage opposed Obamacare anyway.
The foundation's position on the mandate had evolved. What was once a market-based solution became, in Heritage's telling, an unconstitutional government overreach. Critics saw opportunism—Heritage opposing a Democratic president for implementing Heritage's own idea.
There were other contradictions. In 2005, the Washington Post reported that Heritage had softened its criticism of Malaysia's government after foundation president Edwin Feulner developed business relationships with Malaysian interests through a Hong Kong consulting firm. Heritage denied any conflict of interest, saying Malaysia had improved its cooperation with the United States after September 11 and was moving in the right direction economically and politically.
Heritage Action and the Politicization
In 2010, Heritage created a sister organization called Heritage Action for America. The new group was structured as a 501(c)(4), which meant it could engage more directly in political advocacy and lobbying than the foundation itself.
Heritage Action quickly became a force in Republican politics. It scored members of Congress on their votes, pressured legislators to take harder-line positions, and mobilized grassroots conservatives. The group helped push the Republican Party to the right on issues like government spending, immigration, and health care.
The creation of Heritage Action represented a shift. Heritage had always been ideological, but it had maintained some distance from day-to-day political combat. Heritage Action erased that distance. The line between policy shop and political operation was now blurry at best.
This shift accelerated when Jim DeMint became president of Heritage in 2013. DeMint had been a United States Senator from South Carolina, known for his combative style and willingness to challenge Republican leadership. His hiring signaled that Heritage was moving from influence to activism.
DeMint made a million dollars a year at Heritage—the highest salary of any think tank president in Washington. He also made changes to how the foundation operated. Previously, Heritage policy papers were written by experts and reviewed by senior staff. Under DeMint, his team heavily edited papers and sometimes shelved them entirely if they didn't align with his political priorities.
Several Heritage scholars quit in response.
The Immigration Controversy
In May 2013, Heritage published a study criticizing proposed immigration reform legislation. The study, co-authored by Robert Rector and Jason Richwine, argued that reform would cost taxpayers trillions of dollars.
The methodology was immediately attacked from across the political spectrum. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank usually allied with Heritage on economic issues, criticized the study for not using dynamic scoring—a method Heritage itself had championed when analyzing other policies. Dynamic scoring attempts to account for how policy changes affect economic growth, which in turn affects government revenues. Heritage had used it to make tax cuts look better; it declined to use it when analyzing immigration.
Then reporters discovered Jason Richwine's doctoral dissertation from Harvard. In his thesis, Richwine had argued that Hispanic and Black Americans are intellectually inferior to whites with a supposed predisposition toward lower intelligence quotients. He had made similar arguments at a 2008 forum hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.
Richwine resigned from Heritage. The episode damaged the foundation's reputation and illustrated the tensions between serious policy analysis and ideological warfare.
The Trump Era
When Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign in June 2015, Heritage was skeptical.
Michael Needham, who led Heritage Action, appeared on Fox News in July 2015 and called Trump "a clown" who needed to "be out of the race." Stephen Moore, a Heritage economic writer, criticized Trump's policy positions as contradictory. Kim Holmes, then executive vice president of Heritage, wrote an essay arguing that Trump was "not a conservative" and comparing his supporters to alienated Marxist revolutionaries.
But Heritage is nothing if not pragmatic about power.
When Trump secured the Republican nomination, the foundation pivoted. Days before the 2016 election, Heritage's Restore America Project began emailing potential political appointees, asking them to submit resumes in case Trump won.
He did win. And Heritage was ready.
Since 2014, the foundation had been building a database of approximately three thousand conservatives it trusted to serve in a Republican administration. This database became invaluable during the Trump transition. CNN reported in January 2017 that no other Washington institution had the same "footprint" in the incoming administration.
At least sixty-six Heritage employees and alumni were hired into the Trump administration. Several hundred people from the foundation's database entered government. Five became cabinet members: Betsy DeVos at Education, Mick Mulvaney at the Office of Management and Budget, Rick Perry at Energy, Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, and Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.
Heritage had gone from critics to kingmakers in less than two years.
DeMint's Ouster
In May 2017, Heritage's board of trustees unanimously voted to fire Jim DeMint. The public statement cited "significant and worsening management issues" that had led to a breakdown in internal communications.
The move was unusual. Think tanks rarely fire their presidents publicly. But DeMint had alienated traditional donors, clashed with staff, and pushed Heritage toward a more populist, less intellectual direction that made some board members uncomfortable.
DeMint had also complicated Heritage's relationships on Capitol Hill. In 2013, the Republican Study Committee—a group of over one hundred seventy conservative House members—barred Heritage employees from attending its weekly meetings after disputes over the farm bill. The decades-old relationship between Heritage and House conservatives had frayed.
Project 2025
The most ambitious Heritage initiative to date is Project 2025, formally known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.
Project 2025 is essentially the "Mandate for Leadership" approach taken to its logical extreme. It's a comprehensive plan for the next conservative presidency, covering personnel, policy, and process. The project includes detailed plans for every federal agency, a database of vetted conservatives ready to serve, and training programs to prepare political appointees for government work.
The policy agenda is extensive. It includes plans to restrict abortion access, oppose LGBTQ rights, transform federal agencies for political purposes, and implement stricter immigration policies. Perhaps most significantly, it calls for replacing career civil servants with political appointees who are ideologically aligned with the president.
This last point represents a fundamental shift in how American government works. The professional civil service was created in the 1880s to replace the spoils system, where government jobs were handed out as political rewards. Project 2025 would effectively reverse that reform, at least for many senior positions.
Critics see this as an attempt to create a government of loyalists rather than experts. Supporters see it as necessary to overcome what they view as a hostile bureaucracy that sabotages conservative policies.
The Security Breach
In September 2015, Heritage announced that hackers had stolen donor information from its systems. The foundation released no further details about the breach.
The Hill, a Washington political newspaper, compared the attack to a massive breach at the Office of Personnel Management earlier that year, which had been attributed to China's Jiangsu State Security Department. That hack compromised security clearance information on millions of federal employees.
Whether the Heritage breach was similarly sophisticated remains unknown. The foundation's silence about the incident left many questions unanswered.
The Machine
The Heritage Foundation has survived and thrived for over fifty years by understanding something fundamental about American politics: ideas alone don't change policy. You need people in positions of power, messaging that reaches voters and legislators, and the persistence to keep pushing the same agenda for decades.
Heritage has all three. Its database of conservative personnel has supplied multiple administrations with hundreds of appointees. Its policy papers provide intellectual cover for legislative action. Its communications operation ensures that conservative talking points reach the right audiences at the right times.
The foundation has also shown remarkable adaptability. It pivoted from Reagan-era Cold War hawkishness to the cultural concerns of the 1990s, from Bush-era neoconservatism to Trump-era populism. The underlying commitment to shrinking government and advancing conservative social policies remains constant, but the packaging changes with the times.
Whether you see Heritage as a force for principled conservatism or a machine for plutocratic influence depends largely on your own political views. What's harder to dispute is its effectiveness. When Gorbachev complained to Reagan about the Heritage Foundation, he was acknowledging something important: this organization had changed American foreign policy and, through it, the world.
That complaint might be the best measure of Heritage's success. When your policy shop annoys a superpower, you've probably done something significant.