Early years on
Capitol Hill 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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 Admiral
Gary Roughead speaking at the Heritage Foundation in May 2010 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. 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. 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 Mike Pompeo addressing the Heritage Foundation in May 2018 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." 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.
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 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." 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. ==Influence==