The Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation's headquarters building, on Massachusetts Avenue on Capitol Hill.

The Heritage Foundation was founded on February 16, 1973, by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors.[5][6] Growing out of the new business activist movement inspired by the Powell Memorandum,[7][8] discontent with Richard Nixon's embrace of the "liberal consensus" and the nonpolemical, cautious nature of existing think tanks,[9] Weyrich and Feulner sought to create a version of the Brookings Institution that advanced conservative activism.[5] Coors was the primary funder of the Heritage Foundation in its early years.[5] Weyrich was its first president. Later, under president Frank J. Walton, the Heritage Foundation began using direct mail fundraising and Heritage's annual income grew to $1 million per year in 1976.[10] By 1981, the annual budget grew to $5.3 million.[5]

Heritage advocated for pro-business policies, anti-communism and neoconservatism in its early years, but distinguished itself from the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) by also advocating for the Christian right.[5] Through the 1970s, Heritage would remain small relative to Brookings and the AEI.[5]

In January 1981, Heritage published the Mandate for Leadership, a comprehensive report aimed at reducing the size of the federal government, providing public policy guidance to the incoming Reagan administration, including more than 2,000 specific suggestions to move the federal government in a conservative direction. The report was well received by the White House, and several of its authors went on to take positions in the Reagan administration.[11] Reagan liked the ideas so much that he gave a copy to each member of his cabinet to review.[12] Approximately 60% of the 2,000 proposals were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan's first year in office.[11][13] Ronald Reagan later said that the Heritage Foundation played a "vital force" in the successes during his presidency.[12]

Heritage was influential in developing and advancing of the so-called "Reagan Doctrine", a Reagan administration foreign policy initiative in which the U.S. provided 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.[14]

Heritage also advocated the development of new ballistic missile defense systems for the United States. Reagan adopted this as his top defense priority in 1983, calling it the Strategic Defense Initiative.[11] By mid-decade, The Heritage Foundation had emerged as a key organization in the national conservative movement, publishing influential reports on domestic and defense issues, as well as pieces by prominent conservative figures, such as Bob Dole and Pat Robertson.[15] In 1986, Time magazine called Heritage "the foremost of the new breed of advocacy tanks".[16] During the Reagan and Bush administrations, The Heritage Foundation served as the President's brain trust on foreign policy.[17]

The Heritage Foundation remained an influential voice on domestic and foreign policy issues during President George H. W. Bush's administration. It was a leading proponent of Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, and – according to Frank Starr, head of the Baltimore Sun's Washington bureau – the foundation's studies "laid much of the groundwork for Bush administration thinking" about post-Soviet foreign policy.[18] In domestic policy, the Bush administration agreed with six of the ten budget reforms contained in Mandate for Leadership III and included them in their 1990 budget proposal. Heritage also became involved in the culture wars of the 1990s with the publication of "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators" by William Bennett. The Index documented how crime, illegitimacy, divorce, teenage suicide, drug use and fourteen other social indicators had become measurably worse since the 1960s.[19]

Heritage continued to grow throughout the 1990s and its journal, Policy Review, hit an all-time-high circulation of 23,000. Heritage was an opponent of the Clinton health care plan of 1993. President Clinton's welfare reforms were analogous with Heritage's recommendations and were adopted in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. In 1995, Heritage published the first Index of Economic Freedom, co-authored by policy analyst Bryan T. Johnson and Thomas P. Sheehy. In 1997, the Index became a joint project between the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal.[19]

In 1994, Heritage advised Newt Gingrich and other conservatives on the development of the "Contract with America", which was credited with helping to produce a Republican majority in Congress. The "Contract" was a pact of principles that directly challenged both the political status-quo in Washington and many of the ideas at the heart of the Clinton administration.[20]

The Heritage Foundation supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.[21][22] According to a 2004 study in the journal International Security, the Heritage Foundation confused public debate by challenging widespread opposition to the Iraq War by international relations scholars and experts by contradicting them "with experts of apparently equal authority... this undermined the possibility that any criticisms [of the war] might be seen as authoritative or have much persuasive effect."[21] The organization defended the Bush administration's Guantanamo Bay practices.[21]

In 2005, The Washington Post criticized the Heritage Foundation for softening its criticism of Malaysia following a business relationship between Heritage's president and Malaysia's prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. The Heritage Foundation denied any conflict of interest, stating its views on Malaysia changed following the country's cooperation with the U.S. after the September 11 attacks in 2001,[23] and changes by Malaysia "moving in the right economic and political direction."[24][25]

Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Gary Roughead speaks at The Heritage Foundation.

The health insurance mandate in the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is an idea hatched in 1989 by Stuart Butler at Heritage in a publication titled "Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans".[26] This was also the model for Mitt Romney's health care plan in Massachusetts.[27]

In December 2012, an announcement was made that Senator Jim DeMint would resign from the Senate to head the Heritage Foundation.[28] Pundits predicted his tenure would bring a sharper, more politicized edge to the Foundation.[29] DeMint's eventual ouster in 2017 led some, such as Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.), to believe Heritage sought to pare back its partisan edge and restore its reputation as a pioneering think tank.[30]

On May 10, 2013, Jason Richwine, who co-authored the think tank's controversial report on the costs of amnesty, resigned his position following intensive media attention on his Harvard PhD thesis from 2009 and comments he made at a 2008 American Enterprise Institute forum. Richwine argued that Hispanics and blacks are intellectually inferior to whites and have trouble assimilating because of a supposed genetic predisposition to lower IQ.[31][32]

A 2011 study on poverty in America[33] was criticized for what critics called an overly narrow definition of poverty. Criticism was published in opinion editorials in The New Republic, The Nation, the Center for American Progress, and The Washington Post.[34][35][36][37]

A 2013 study by Heritage senior fellow Robert Rector on the 2013 Senate Immigration Bill (Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013) was criticized for its methodology by critics from across the political spectrum.[38] Notably, outlets like Reason magazine and the Cato Institute criticized the report for failing to employ dynamic scoring despite Heritage's support for such methodology in analyzing other policy proposals.[39] The study was also criticized because its co-author, Jason Richwine, said in his 2009 doctoral dissertation that immigrants' IQs should be considered when crafting public policy.[40]

In July 2013, following disputes over the farm bill, the Republican Study Committee of 172 conservative U.S. House members reversed a decades-old tradition of access by barring Heritage Foundation employees from attending its weekly meeting in the Capitol, but continues cooperation through "regular joint events and briefings".[41]

In September 2015, the Foundation stated publicly that it had been targeted by hackers and had experienced a breach in which donors' information was taken. The Hill publication compared the attack to another notable data breach at the Office of Personnel Management a few months before. The identity of those that attacked the Foundation and their motivations are unknown.[42]

The Heritage Foundation has been described as a major influence on the presidential transition of Donald Trump and the Trump administration.[43][44][45] The foundation had a powerful say in the staffing of the administration, with CNN noting during the transition that "no other Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition."[43] One reason for the Heritage Foundation's disproportionate influence relative to other conservative think tanks is that other conservative think tanks had members who identified as "never-Trumpers" during the 2016 election whereas the Heritage Foundation signaled early on to Trump that it would be supportive of him.[43][44] At least 66 foundation employees and alumni were given positions in the administration.[44]

In 2014, the Heritage Foundation began building a database of approximately 3,000 conservatives who they trusted to serve in a hypothetical Republican administration for the upcoming 2016 election.[44] According to individuals involved in crafting the database, several hundred people from the Heritage database ultimately received jobs in government agencies, including Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions and others who became members of Trump's cabinet.[44] Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation from 2013 to 2017, personally intervened on behalf of Mulvaney who would go on to head the Office of Management and Budget, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and later become acting White House Chief of Staff.[44]

In 2021, after Donald Trump lost re-election, the Heritage Foundation hired Chad Wolf, Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Morgan, all three of whom played a prominent role in the immigration policies of the Trump administration.[46] It also hired former Vice President Mike Pence.[47]