The Heritage Foundation (Redirected from Heritage Foundation)

The Heritage Foundation
AbbreviationHeritage
FormationFebruary 16, 1973
(50 years ago)
 (1973-02-16)
TypeNonprofit
Headquarters214 Massachusetts Avenue Northeast, Washington, D.C., U.S.
Location
President
Kevin D. Roberts
Chairman
Barb Van Andel-Gaby
Revenue (2018)
US$86,808,369
Expenses (2018)US$75,065,736
Websiteheritage.org Edit this at Wikidata

The Heritage Foundation (sometimes referred to simply as Heritage) is an activist American conservative 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 been ranked among the most influential public policy organizations in the United States. Its sister organization Heritage Action, founded in 2010, is an influential activist force in conservative and Republican politics.

History and major initiatives

Early years

The Heritage Foundation's headquarters on Massachusetts Avenue on Capitol Hill

The Heritage Foundation was founded 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, discontent with Richard Nixon's embrace of the "liberal consensus" and the nonpolemical, cautious nature of existing think tanks, Weyrich and Feulner sought to create a version of the Brookings Institution that advanced conservative activism. Coors was the Heritage Foundation's primary funding source in its early years. Weyrich was the foundation's first president. Later, under Weyrich's successor, Frank J. Walton, the Heritage Foundation began using direct mail fundraising and its annual income grew to $1 million per year in 1976. By 1981, the annual budget grew to $5.3 million.

The Heritage Foundation 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. 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 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. Ronald Reagan liked the ideas so much that he gave a copy to each member of his cabinet to review. Approximately 60% of the 2,000 proposals were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan's first year in office. Reagan later said that the Heritage Foundation was a "vital force" in the successes during his presidency.

The Heritage 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.

The Heritage 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 had 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 labeled the Heritage Foundation "the foremost of the new breed of advocacy tanks". During the Reagan and subsequent George H. W. Bush administrations, the Heritage Foundation served as the brain trust for foreign policy to both administrations.

George H. W. Bush administration

The Heritage 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 August 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait. According to Baltimore Sun Washington bureau chief Frank Starr, the foundation's studies "laid much of the groundwork for Bush administration thinking" about post-Soviet foreign policy. In domestic policy, the Bush administration agreed with six of the ten budget reform proposals the Heritage Foundation proposed in Mandate for Leadership III and included them in its 1990 budget proposal.

Clinton administration

The Heritage Foundation continued to grow throughout the 1990s. The foundation's flagship journal, Policy Review, reached a circulation of 23,000. Heritage was an opponent of the Clinton health care plan of 1993, which ultimately died in the U.S. Senate. In 1994, the foundation 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 in the 1994 United States elections. The Contract was a pact of principles that directly challenged both the political status quo in Washington, D.C. and many of the ideas at the heart of the Clinton administration.

Beginning in 1994, the Heritage Foundation also became engaged in the culture wars 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 measurably worsened since the 1960s.

In 1995, Clinton aligned some of his welfare reforms with the foundation's recommendations, which became part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. The same year, the Heritage Foundation published its first Index of Economic Freedom, an annual publication assessing the state of economic freedom in countries of 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.

George W. Bush administration

Following the September 11 attacks, the Heritage Foundation supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to a 2004 International Security study, 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." The organization defended the George W. Bush administration's controversial policies of detaining and harshly interrogating suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

In April 2005, The Washington Post criticized the Heritage Foundation for softening its criticism of Malaysia following a business relationship between then Heritage president Edwin Feulner and Malaysia's prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. The Heritage Foundation responded by denying 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, and changes by Malaysia "moving in the right economic and political direction."

Obama administration

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead speaks at The Heritage Foundation in May 2010

The health insurance mandate in the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, is an idea the Heritage Foundation initially developed and supported in "Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans", a study the foundation released on October 1, 1989. The mandate also served as a model for then Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's health care plan in Massachusetts, commonly referred to as Romneycare. The Heritage Foundation opposed the ACA.

Heritage leaders founded Heritage Action in April 2010 as a sister 501(c)4 organization to expand Heritage's reach in Washington, D.C. The new group quickly became influential in Republican politics.

In July 2011, the Heritage Foundation released a study on poverty in America that was criticized for too narrowly defining poverty. The New Republic, The Nation, the Center for American Progress, and The Washington Post all criticised the conclusions of the foundation's study.

In December 2012, Jim DeMint, then a U.S. Senator representing South Carolina, announced that he intended to resign from the Senate to head the Heritage Foundation. Pundits predicted his tenure would bring a sharper, more politicized edge to the foundation. Under DeMint's leadership, the foundation's process for publishing policy papers changed. Prior to DeMint, senior staff reviewed policy papers by authors. Under DeMint, however, his team heavily edited policy papers or shelved them entirely. In response to DeMint's new practice, several scholars at the foundation quit.

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 University 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.

A 2013 study by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Robert Rector on the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 was criticized for its methodology by critics from across the political spectrum. 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. 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.

In July 2013, following disputes over conflicts 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 of access and barred Heritage employees from attending its weekly meeting in the U.S. Capitol, but continued cooperation through "regular joint events and briefings".

2015 cyberattack

In September 2015, the Heritage Foundation stated publicly that it had been targeted by hackers and that it had experienced a breach in which donors' information was taken. The Hill, a Washington, D.C.-based newspaper covering politics, compared the attack to another notable data breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management a few months earlier that was ultimately determined to have been launched from China, likely by the Jiangsu State Security Department, a subsidiary of China's Ministry of State Security spy agency. No further information was released by the foundation about the hacking.

Trump administration

In the first year of Donald Trump's candidacy for the presidency, the Heritage Foundation did not embrace his candidacy, and even mocked it. "Donald Trump's a clown," then Heritage Action leader Michael Needham said on a Fox News panel in July 2015.

Once Trump won, however, the Heritage Foundation's position shifted, and they sought and obtained a major influence in his presidential transition and administration. 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." 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 ultimately signaled that it would be supportive of him. At least 66 foundation employees and alumni were given positions in the administration.

The Heritage Foundation drew from a database it began building in 2014 of approximately 3,000 conservatives who they trusted to serve in a hypothetical Republican administration for the upcoming 2016 election. 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. Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation from 2013 to 2017, personally intervened on behalf of Mulvaney who headed the Office of Management and Budget, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and later become acting White House Chief of Staff.

In 2017, the foundation's board of trustees voted unanimously to terminate DeMint as its president. A public statement by the board said a thorough investigation of the foundation's operations under DeMint found "significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation." "While the organization has seen many successes," the board statement said, "Jim DeMint and a handful of his closest advisers failed to resolve these problems." DeMint's firing was praised by some, including former U.S. congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK), who saw it as a step by the foundation to pare back its partisan edge and restore its reputation as a pioneering think tank. In January 2018, DeMint, in turn, was succeeded by Kay Coles James, who was appointed president of the foundation.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, former Heritage Foundation adjunct scholar Dov Zakheim was one of over 130 former Republican national security officials to sign a statement that asserted that Trump was unfit to serve another term. "To that end," the statement said, "we are firmly convinced that it is in the best interest of our nation that Vice President Joe Biden be elected as the next President of the United States, and we will vote for him."

In 2021, after Trump lost re-election, the Heritage Foundation hired three former Trump administration officials, Chad Wolf, Ken Cuccinelli, and Mark Morgan, who played a role in the Trump administration's immigration policies. Heritage also hired former U.S. vice president Mike Pence as a distinguished visiting fellow from 2021 to 2022.

Biden administration

The Heritage 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 in the 1980s and 1990s. "People do not walk around in fear of the Heritage Foundation the way they did 10 years ago," one conservative told The Washington Post. In December 2021, in response to mounting criticism of her leadership of the foundation, James resigned from the foundation.

In October 2021, the Heritage Foundation announced James would be replaced by Kevin Roberts, who previously led a state-based think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and participated as a member of Texas Governor Greg Abbott's COVID-19 task force.

In 2021, Pence, then a Heritage Foundation distinguished fellow, published an op-ed on a Heritage Foundation website that made false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, including numerous false claims about For the People Act, a Democratic bill to expand voting rights. Pence's false claims drew criticism and corrections from multiple media outlets and fact-checking organizations.

The Heritage Foundation also completely reversed its position supporting military aid to Ukraine in its attempt to repel the Russian invasion of the nation, which it had supported up to at least October 2022. By May 2023, however, the foundation reversed its position entirely on Ukraine, claiming, "Ukraine Aid Package Puts America Last". In August 2023, Thomas Spoehr, the foundation's Center for National Defense director, resigned his position over the dramatic policy change. Earlier, 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 2023, the Heritage Foundation also established a cooperative relationship with Hungary's state-funded Danube Institute.

Activities

The Heritage Foundation has been considered one of the world's most influential think tanks. In 2020, the Global Go To Think Tank Index Report, published by the University of Pennsylvania, ranked the foundation sixth on its list of "top ten think tanks in the United States" and thirteenth worldwide.

The Heritage Foundation published a 1981 book of policy analyses, Mandate for Leadership, that offered specific recommendations on policy, budget, and administrative action for all Cabinet departments. The Heritage Foundation also publishes The Insider, a quarterly magazine about public policy. Until 2001, the Heritage Foundation published Policy Review, a public policy journal; the journal was then acquired by the Hoover Institution. From 1995 to 2005, the Heritage Foundation ran Townhall.com, a conservative website that was subsequently acquired by Salem Communications.

In partnership with The Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation publishes the annual Index of Economic Freedom, which measures a country's freedom in terms of property rights and freedom from government regulation. The factors used to calculate the Index score are corruption in government, barriers to international trade, income tax and corporate tax rates, government expenditures, rule of law and the ability to enforce contracts, regulatory burdens, banking restrictions, labor regulations, and black market activities. A British-born academic, Charles W. L. Hill, after discussing the international shift toward a market-based economic system and Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, said "given that the Heritage Foundation has a political agenda, its work should be viewed with caution."

In 2002, the Heritage Foundation began publishing "Index of Dependence", an annual report on federal government programs in five areas: housing, health care and welfare, retirement, higher education, and rural and agricultural services that, in its view, constrain private sector or local government alternatives and impact the dependence of individuals on the federal government. The 2010 Heritage report concluded that each year the number of Americans who pay nothing in federal personal income taxes had increased, while the number who rely on government services increased. The 2010 report stated that in the previous eight years, the index of government dependence has grown by almost 33 percent. The foundation's conclusions have been questioned; Rex Nutting of MarketWatch wrote in February 2012 that the report was "misleading" and "alarmist", that the percentage of Americans "dependent" upon government had remained essentially the same as it was in the 1980s, and that a small increase was attributable to the Great Recession and an aging population with proportionally more retirees.

In 2005, the Heritage Foundation established the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in honor of the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher herself maintained a long relationship with the Heritage Foundation. Shortly after leaving office, Thatcher was honored by the foundation at a September 1991 dinner. Seven years later, Thatcher delivered the keynote address during Heritage's 25th anniversary celebration. In 2002, Thatcher was again honored by the foundation as the recipient of its annual Clare Boothe Luce Award.

In November 2011, The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) co-hosted a debate among the candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination on foreign policy and national defense. The first presidential debate to be sponsored by either Heritage or AEI, During the debate, Heritage fellows Edwin Meese and David Addington were among the moderators. Conservative commentator Michael Barone praised the debate as "probably the most substantive and serious presidential debate of this election cycle."

In 2014, the Heritage Foundation phased out its blog, The Foundry, replacing it with The Daily Signal.

The Heritage Foundation is an associate member of the State Policy Network, a network of conservative and libertarian organizations financed by the Koch brothers, Philip Morris, and other corporate sources.

Project 2025

The foundation also leads a constellation of groups named Project 2025, preparing for the possible election of Donald Trump in 2024. The project seeks to recruit thousands to come to Washington and prepare to dismantle and reshape the federal government closer to Trump's vision. Former Trump administration official Russell Vought, who is involved in the project, said, "The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state." It includes changes "for nearly every agency across the government", specifically undoing the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, shutting down the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office, boosting the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and other measures that could have significant effect on how the administration approaches global warming and climate change.

Positions

Anti-critical race theory legislation

In 2021, the Heritage Foundation said that one of its two priorities, along with tightening voting laws, was to push Republican-controlled states to ban or restrict critical race theory instruction. The Heritage Foundation sought to get Republicans in Congress to put anti-critical race theory provisions into must-pass legislation such as the annual defense spending bill.

Black Lives Matter

In September 2021, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow, Mike Gonzalez, released a book, BLM: The New Making of a Marxist Revolution. Gonzalez's book characterizes the Black Lives Matter protest movement as "a nationwide insurgency" and argues that its leaders are "avowed Marxists who say they want to dismantle our way of life".

Climate change denial

The Heritage Foundation rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. The foundation is one of many climate change denial organizations that have been funded by ExxonMobil; an oil and petroleum company with over $413 billion in revenue as of 2022 that is currently the eighth-largest corporation in the world.

The Heritage Foundation strongly criticized the Kyoto Agreement to curb climate change, saying American participation in the treaty would "result in lower economic growth in every state and nearly every sector of the economy." They projected that the 2009 cap-and-trade bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, would result in a cost of $1,870 per family in 2025 and $6,800 by 2035, which clashed with the conclusions of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which projected that legislation would only cost the average family $175 in 2020.

Transgender rights opposition

The Heritage Foundation has engaged in several activities in opposition to transgender rights, including hosting several anti-transgender rights events, developing and supporting legislation templates against transgender rights, and making claims about transgender youth healthcare and suicide rates based on internal research, which are contradicted by numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies.

Ukraine

In May 2022, Heritage Action, the Heritage Foundation's political activism organization, announced its opposition to the $40 billion military aid package for Ukraine passed that month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, completely reversing the organization's previous position of support for such aid. The Heritage Foundation's foreign policy director at the time, Luke Coffey, said he was ordered to retract his earlier statements supporting aid to Ukraine, and Coffey then subsequently left the Heritage Foundation.

In August 2023, newly installed Heritage president Kevin Roberts stated in an op-ed that Congress was holding victims of the 2023 Hawaii wildfires hostage "in order to spend more money in Ukraine". The op-ed was followed by a public-messaging campaign with the same message and with a tweet by Heritage vice president Victoria Coates, in which she stated, "It's time to end the blank, undated checks for Ukraine." This, in turn, led the foundation's second senior official, director for Center for National Defense Lt. Gen. (Ret) Thomas Spoehr, to submit his resignation.

Voter fraud claims

The Heritage Foundation has promoted false claims of electoral fraud. Hans von Spakovsky, who heads the Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative, has played an influential role in elevating alarmism about voter fraud in the Republican Party, despite offering no evidence of widespread voter fraud. His work, which claims voting fraud is rampant, has been discredited.

Following the 2020 presidential election, in which President Donald Trump made baseless claims of fraud after he was defeated for reelection, the Heritage Foundation launched a campaign in support of Republican efforts to make state voting laws more restrictive.

In March 2021, The New York Times reported that the Heritage Foundation's political arm, Heritage Action, planned to spend $24 million over two years across eight key states to support efforts to restrict voting, in coordination with the Republican Party and allied conservative outside groups, including the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, American Legislative Exchange Council, and State Policy Network. Almost two dozen election bills introduced by Republican state legislators in early 2021 were based on a Heritage letter and report. Heritage also mobilized in opposition to H.R. 1./S. 1, a Democratic bill to establish uniform nationwide voting standards, including expanded early and postal voting, as well as automatic and same-day voter registration, reform campaign finance law, and prohibit partisan redistricting.

In 2021, Heritage Action spent $750,000 on television ads in Arizona to promote the false claim that "Democrats...want to register illegal aliens" to vote, even though the Democrats' legislation creates safeguards to ensure that ineligible people cannot register. In April 2021, Heritage Action boasted to its private donors that it had successfully crafted the election reform bills that Republican state legislators introduced in Georgia and other states.

Funding

In 1973, businessman Joseph Coors contributed $250,000 to establish the Heritage Foundation and continued to fund it through the Adolph Coors Foundation. In 1973, it had trustees from Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Mobil, Pfizer, and Sears.

In the 1980s, the Heritage Foundation reportedly received a $2.2 million donation from South Korea's National Intelligence Service, South Korea's intelligence agency then known as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

Heritage is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization as well as a BBB Wise Giving Alliance accredited charity funded by donations from private individuals, corporations, and charitable foundations.

As a 501(c)(3) organization, the Heritage Foundation is not required to disclose its donors and donations to the foundation are tax-deductible. The foundation is a grantee of the Donors Trust, a nonprofit donor-advised fund.[importance?] As of 2010, Heritage reported 710,000 supporters.

For the fiscal year ending December 31, 2011, CharityWatch reported that Edwin Feulner, past president of the Heritage Foundation, received the highest compensation in its top 25 list of compensation received by charity members. According to CharityWatch, Feulner received $2,702,687 in 2013. This sum includes investment earnings of $1,656,230 accrued over a period of 33 years.

The foundation's total revenue for 2011 was $72,170,983 and its expenses were $80,033,828.

Notable board of trustees members


This page was last updated at 2024-02-04 05:57 UTC. Update now. View original page.

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