The Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation is an American right-wing think tank based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1973, it took a leading role in the conservative movement in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose policies were taken from Heritage Foundation studies, including its Mandate for Leadership.
The Heritage Foundation has had significant influence in U.S. public policy making, and has historically been ranked among the most influential public policy organizations in the United States. In 2010, it founded a sister organization, Heritage Action, an influential activist force in conservative and Republican politics.
Heritage leads Project 2025, also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, an extensive plan that includes appointing ideologically aligned civil servants, restricting abortion access, opposing LGBTQ+ rights, transforming federal agencies for political purposes, and imposing strict immigration policies.
History
Early years
The foundation was established on February 16, 1973, during the Nixon administration by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors. Growing out of the new business activist movement inspired by the Powell Memorandum, Weyrich and Feulner sought to create a conservative version of the Brookings Institution that advanced conservative policies.Coors was Heritage's earliest funding source, seeding the organization with an initial $250,000. Billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife followed up a year later, using the Scaife Family Charitable Trust to donate tens of millions to the foundation over the next two decades as its primary donor. Weyrich was the foundation's first president. Under Weyrich's successor, Frank J. Walton, the Heritage Foundation began using direct mail fundraising, which contributed to the growth of its annual income, which reached $1 million in 1976. By 1981, the annual budget was $5.3 million.
The foundation advocated pro-business policies and anti-communism in its early years, but distinguished itself from the American Enterprise Institute by also advocating for cultural issues important to Christian conservatives. But throughout the 1970s, the Heritage Foundation remained small relative to Brookings and AEI.
Reagan administration
In January 1981, the Heritage Foundation published Mandate for Leadership, a comprehensive report aimed at reducing the size of the federal government. It provided public policy guidance to the incoming Reagan administration, and included over 2,000 specific policy recommendations for the Reagan administration to use the federal government to advance conservative policies. The report was well received by the White House, and several of its authors went on to take positions in the Reagan administration. Ronald Reagan liked the ideas so much that he gave a copy to each member of his cabinet to review. About 60% of the 2,000 Heritage proposals were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan's first year in office. Reagan later called the Heritage Foundation a "vital force" during his presidency.The foundation was influential in developing and advancing the Reagan Doctrine, a key Reagan administration foreign policy initiative under which the U.S. began providing military and other support to anti-communist resistance movements fighting Soviet-aligned governments in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and other nations during the final years of the Cold War.
After Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in the 1980s, The Wall Street Journal reported, "the Soviet leader offered a complaint: Reagan was influenced by the Heritage Foundation, Washington's conservative think tank. The outfit lent intellectual energy to the Gipper’s agenda, including the Reagan Doctrine—the idea that America should support insurgents resisting communist domination."
The foundation also supported the development of a new ballistic missile defense system for the United States. In 1983, Reagan made the development of this new defense system, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, his top defense priority.
By mid-decade, the Heritage Foundation emerged as a key organization in the national conservative movement, publishing influential reports on a broad range of policy issues by prominent conservative thought leaders. In 1986, in recognition of the Heritage Foundation's fast-growing influence, Time magazine called the Heritage Foundation "the foremost of the new breed of advocacy tanks". It served as the brain trust on foreign policy for the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.
George H. W. Bush administration
The foundation remained an influential voice on domestic and foreign policy issues during President George H. W. Bush's administration. In 1990 and 1991, the foundation was a leading proponent of Operation Desert Storm designed to liberate Kuwait following Saddam Hussein's invasion and occupation of Kuwait in August 1990. According to Baltimore Sun Washington bureau chief Frank Starr, the Heritage Foundation's studies "laid much of the groundwork for Bush administration thinking" about post-Soviet foreign policy.Clinton administration
The foundation continued to grow throughout the 1990s. The foundation's flagship journal, Policy Review, reached a circulation of 23,000. In 1993, Heritage was an opponent of the Clinton health care plan, which died in the U.S. Senate the following year, in August 1994.In the 1994 congressional elections, Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and Newt Gingrich was elected as the new House Speaker in January 1995, largely based on commitments made in the Contract with America, which was issued six weeks prior to the 1994 elections. The contract was a pact of principles that directly challenged the political status quo in Washington, D.C. and many of the ideas at the heart of the Clinton administration.
In 1994, the foundation published The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators by William Bennett, arguing that crime, illegitimacy, divorce, teenage suicide, drug use, and 14 other social indicators had worsened since the 1960s.
In 1995, the Heritage Foundation published its first Index of Economic Freedom, an annual publication that assesses the state of economic freedom in every country in the world; two years later, in 1997, The Wall Street Journal joined the project as a co-manager and co-author of the annual publication.
In 1996, Clinton aligned some of his welfare reforms with the Heritage Foundation's recommendations, incorporating them into the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.
George W. Bush administration
Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Heritage Foundation supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the war on terror. The foundation challenged opposition to the war. They defended the George W. Bush administration's treatment of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.In April 2005, The Washington Post reported that the Heritage Foundation softened its criticism of the Malaysian government after Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner initiated a business relationship with Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. "Heritage's new, pro-Malaysian outlook emerged at the same time a Hong Kong consulting firm co-founded by Edwin J. Feulner, Heritage's president, began representing Malaysian business interests" through his relationship with Belle Haven Consultants. The foundation denied a conflict of interest, saying that its views on Malaysia changed following the country's cooperation with the U.S. after the September 11 attacks, and the Malaysian government "moving in the right economic and political direction."
Obama administration
In March 2010, the Obama administration introduced a health insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, which the foundation supported in its October 1989 study, "Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans". In 2006, the mandate proposed in the Heritage Foundation study was incorporated into Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's health care plan, known as "Romneycare," for Massachusetts. The foundation subsequently opposed the Affordable Care Act.In April 2010, partly inspired by the model of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, founded by the progressive Center for American Progress, the foundation launched Heritage Action as a sister 5014 organization designed to expand Heritage's political influence and reach. The new group quickly became influential.
In July 2011, the Heritage Foundation published a widely criticized study on poverty in the United States, which was denounced by The New Republic, The Nation, the Center for American Progress, and The Washington Post.
In December 2012, Jim DeMint, then a U.S. senator from South Carolina, resigned from the Senate to replace Feulner as the foundation's president. As Heritage Foundation president, DeMint was paid $1 million annually, making him the highest-paid think tank president in Washington, D.C., at the time. It was predicted that he would introduce a sharper, more politicized edge. DeMint led changes to a long-standing process for the publication of policy papers, which had been authored by policy experts and then reviewed by senior staff members. Under DeMint, policy papers were heavily edited and sometimes shelved entirely. This led several scholars affiliated with the foundation to resign.
In May 2013, Jason Richwine, a senior fellow at the foundation, resigned after his Harvard University Ph.D. thesis, authored in 2009, and comments he made at a 2008 American Enterprise Institute forum, drew extensive media scrutiny. In his thesis and at in the earlier American Enterprise Institute forum, Richwine argued that Hispanics and Blacks are intellectually inferior to whites with a supposed predisposition to lower IQs, leading them to struggle in assimilating. A foundation study that month by Richwine and Robert Rector also was widely criticized across the political spectrum for methodology the two used in criticizing immigration reform legislation. Reason magazine and the Cato Institute criticized it for failing to employ dynamic scoring, which Heritage previously incorporated in analyzing other policy proposals.
In July 2013, following disputes with the Heritage Foundation over the farm bill, the Republican Study Committee, which then included 172 conservative U.S. House members, reversed a decades-old tradition and barred Heritage employees from attending its weekly meeting in the U.S. Capitol, though it continued cooperating with the foundation through "regular joint events and briefings".