The story
Founded by Edwin Feulner, Joseph Coors and Paul Weyrich on Feb 16, 1973.1
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 (AEI) 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.
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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 (ACA), 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 501(c)4 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".
2015 cyberattack
In September 2015, the Heritage Foundation announced that it had been targeted by hackers, which resulted in the theft of donors' information stored in its systems. The Hill, a Washington, D.C.–based newspaper covering politics, compared the cyberattack on the foundation to a similar one against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management several months earlier by China's Jiangsu State Security Department, a subsidiary of the Ministry of State Security spy agency, which accessed security clearance information on millions of federal government employees. After announcing the hacking, the foundation released no further information about it.
2016 Trump candidacy
In June 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. In July 2015, appearing on a Fox News panel, Michael Needham, leader of Heritage Action, the foundation's advocacy arm, said, "Donald Trump's a clown. He needs to be out of the race."
The following month, in August, a Heritage Foundation economic writer, Stephen Moore, criticized Trump's policy positions, saying, "the problem for Trump is that he’s full of all of these contradictions. He’s kind of a tabula rasa on policy." In December 2015, then Heritage Foundation executive vice president Kim Holmes, authored an essay opposing Trump and his candidacy for Public Discourse, published by the Witherspoon Institute, a Princeton, New Jersey-based think tank, which criticized Trump as "not a conservative." Holmes also criticized Trump supporters, writing that, "they are behaving more like an alienated class of Marxist imagination than as social agents of stability and tradition. They are indeed thinking like revolutionaries, only now their ire is aimed at their progressive masters and the institutions they control," he wrote. Then Heritage president Jim DeMint "praised both Rubio and Cruz, but said that he couldn’t 'make a recommendation coming from Heritage'."
After Trump secured the Republican nomination and only a few days prior to the 2016 general election, the foundation's Restore America Project began emailing potential political appointees in the event Trump won the presidency. "I need to assess your interest in serving as a presidential appointee in an administration that will promote conservative principles," the email said. It asked that questionnaires and a resume or bio be returned to them by October 26, roughly a week prior to the general election.
First Trump administration
Following Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election, the Heritage Foundation obtained influence in his presidential transition and administration. The foundation had a say in the staffing of the administration with CNN reporting in January 2017 that, "no other Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition." One reason for the Heritage Foundation's disproportionate influence relative to other conservative think tanks, CNN reported, was that other conservative think tanks had "Never Trump" staff during the 2016 presidential election, while the Heritage Foundation ultimately signaled that it would be supportive of him.
Drawing from a database that the foundation began building in 2014 of approximately 3,000 conservatives it trusted to serve in a hypothetical Republican administration, at least 66 foundation employees and alumni were hired into the Trump's first presidential term. According to employees involved in developing the foundation's database, several hundred people from the database ultimately entered the Trump administration and at least five, Betsy DeVos, Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Scott Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, became members of Trump's cabinet. Jim DeMint, president of the foundation from 2013 to 2017, personally intervened on behalf of Mulvaney, who ended up heading the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and later served as Trump's acting White House chief of staff.
Jim DeMint termination
In May 2017, the foundation's board of trustees voted unanimously to terminate DeMint as its president. In a public statement, the foundation's board said that, following a thorough investigation of the foundation's operations under DeMint's management, they found "significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation." DeMint's firing was praised by some, including former U.S. representative Mickey Edwards (R-OK), who said he saw it as a step to pare back the foundation's partisan edge and restore its reputation as a pioneering think tank. In January 2018, Kay Coles James succeeded DeMint as the foundation's president. The same month, a year into the first Trump presidential term, Heritage said the Trump administration had embraced 64% of 334 policies in the foundation's agenda.
Biden administration
In February 2021, after Trump lost reelection, the Heritage Foundation hired three former Trump administration officials, Ken Cuccinelli, Mark A. Morgan, and Chad Wolf, who held various roles in immigration-related functions in the Trump administration. Cuccinelli and Wolf authored several publications in 2021 before leaving the foundation.
At the same time, Heritage also hired former U.S. vice president Mike Pence as a distinguished visiting fellow. The following month, in March 2021, Pence authored an op-ed column, which made false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, including numerous false claims about the For the People Act, a Democrat-supported bill designed to expand voting rights. Pence's false claims drew criticism and corrections from multiple media outlets and fact-checking organizations. Pence left the foundation in 2022.
The foundation's positions and management under Kay Coles James drew criticism from conservatives and Trump allies, which intensified in 2020 and 2021. "In the early days of the pandemic in spring 2020, Heritage leadership under James rejected an article from one of its scholars denouncing government restrictions, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The foundation's offices stayed closed for about three months, and signs urging masking became something of a joke for many conservatives who mocked the concept," The Washington Post reported in February 2022. Conservatives also began commenting publicly that the Heritage Foundation had lost the significant intellectual and political clout that led to the foundation's ascent as a global and national political and policy force in the 1980s and 1990s. Think-tank leader and commentator Avik Roy told The Washington Post, "People do not walk around in fear of the Heritage Foundation the way they did 10 years ago". In March 2021, in response to mounting criticism of her leadership of the foundation, James and executive vice president Kim Holmes resigned from the foundation.
In October 2021, the Heritage Foundation announced that Kevin Roberts, who previously led a state-based think tank, Texas Public Policy Foundation and was a member of Texas governor Greg Abbott's COVID-19 task force, would replace James as the foundation's new president. According to the foundation's filing with the Internal Revenue Service, Roberts was compensated $953,920 annually as of 2023.
In May 2022, the Heritage Foundation began opposing military aid to Ukraine designed to repel Russia's invasion of the nation, which the foundation previously supported. Following the reversal of its position on military aid to Ukraine, the foundation claimed, "Ukraine Aid Package Puts America Last". In September 2022, the foundation's foreign policy director said the foundation ordered him to retract his earlier statements supporting aid to Ukraine; he subsequently left the organization. In August 2023, Thomas Spoehr, the foundation's Center for National Defense director, resigned his position over the dramatic policy change.
In September 2022, Luke Coffey, then director of the Heritage Foundation's Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy, said he was "required by management to remove a Twitter post condemning the January 6 Capitol riots."
In March 2023, the Heritage Foundation established a cooperative relationship with the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based state-funded think tank founded in 2013.
In January 2024, Roberts told journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro in an interview that he sees Heritage's role as "institutionalizing Trumpism". Garcia-Navarro summarized this role as "leading Project 2025...[to] consolidate power in the executive branch, dismantle federal agencies and recruit and vet government employees to free the next Republican president from a system...stacked against conservative power." The Economist reported the following month that Heritage was incrementally embracing national conservatism as its guiding ideology.
In May 2024, the Heritage Foundation donated $100,000 to the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) for the purpose of AAF developing a website that features personal information of career civil servants, who AAF describes as "America's Most Subversive Immigration Bureaucrats". The website publicly features their photographs, small-dollar political donations, and screenshots of their personal social media accounts.
Promotion of conspiracy theory
In July 2024, according to the Associated Press, the foundation had promoted a conspiracy theory that Biden may attempt to use force to remain in office following the 2024 election if he lost, which ultimately never happened since Biden withdrew from the election nine days later, on July 21, and Trump ultimately defeated Kamala Harris in the general election and peacefully assumed the presidency in January 2025. The same month, in July 2024, The Washington Post reported that, four months before the general election was even held, Heritage had already declared the election illegitimate. In September 2024, The New York Times reported that the Heritage Foundation used deceptive videos during the 2024 US election campaign to falsely claim that noncitizen voting posed a major threat.
From Wikipedia’s article on The Heritage Foundation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5