Last updated on September 16th, 2024 at 10:26 pm
Heritage Foundation has a long history of shaping GOP policy. Project 2025 is extensive, but not their first policy plan.
Zany: Prior to reading this piece by Professor Alberts, I had only known about Heritage because of its association with Project 2025. I had never heard of them before the 2024 election, so it was interesting to learn that this same group provided Ronald Reagan with a mandate after he was elected into office. He implemented 60% of the policies and ideas in that mandate.
This is a great example to help more people become familiar with Project 2025 and the ways in which it will destroy democracy and take away the freedoms that have shaped the lives we’re used to living. One of the mandates might not seem that destructive at first glance, but if you look deeper, you’ll see just how many people will lose their jobs and certain small businesses will cease to exist.
The law that will make pornography illegal and jail anyone producing or distributing it will destroy the careers of adult film stars, companies that produce the films, the directors, etc. It doesn’t stop there, however. There is a chain store in my state called Excitement Video where customers can rent and buy adult films along with sex toys and products. Will this law make those things illegal as well? The policies that intrude on our personal lives, especially when it comes to the bedrooms of consenting adults, go way too far in the opinion of most Americans. The ban on abortion is just the first of many personal, private rights and freedoms we will lose.
I hope that we successfully beat Donald Trump and take the Senate and House as well. I also hope that after this very close call to losing democracy and freedom, Americans will have learned that we can never again allow a Republican to gain access to the White House. You might wonder why Republicans have shown so much of their hand this time around. I believe it’s because they were extremely confident about winning in 2024 and in their minds, once they did, they would never have to try to win again.
As the 2024 presidential election heats up, some people are hearing about the Heritage Foundation for the first time. The conservative think tank has a new, ambitious and controversial policy plan, Project 2025, which calls for an overhaul of American public policy and government.
Project 2025 lays out many standard conservative ideas – like prioritizing energy production over environmental and climate-change concerns, and rejecting the idea of abortion as health care – along with some much more extreme ones, like criminalizing pornography. And it proposes to eliminate or restructure countless government agencies in line with conservative ideology.
While think tanks sometimes have the reputation of being stuffy academic institutions detached from day-to-day politics, Heritage Foundation is far different. By design, Heritage was founded to not only develop conservative policy ideas but also to advance them through direct political advocacy.
—Zachary Alberts, Professor of Politics, Researcher
All think tanks are classified as 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations, which are prohibited from engaging in elections and can take part in only a small amount of political lobbying. But some, like Heritage Foundation, also form affiliated 501(c)(4) organizations that allow them to participate in campaigns and lobby extensively. Heritage Foundation is one of the sponsors of the Republican National Convention, which wraps up in Milwaukee on July 18, 2024.
In research for my forthcoming book, “Partisan Policy Networks,” I’ve found that a growing share of think tanks are explicitly ideological, aligned with a single political party, and engaged in direct policy advocacy.
Still, Heritage Foundation stands out from all of the groups I investigated. It is much more conservative and more closely aligned with former President Donald Trump’s style of Republicanism. Heritage is also more aggressive in its advocacy for conservative ideas, pairing campaign spending with lobbying and large-scale grassroots mobilization.
Americans should expect to hear a lot more about its ideas, like those outlined in Project 2025, if Trump is reelected in November 2024.
A new type of think tank
Two Republican congressional staffers, Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich, formed Heritage Foundation in 1973 as an explicit rebuke to existing think tanks that they thought were either too liberal or too meek in advancing conservative ideas.
Feulner and Weyrich were particularly incensed about how a preeminent conservative think tank at the time, the American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, timed its release of a policy report in 1971 on whether to approve government funding for supersonic transport airplanes, which can fly faster than the speed of sound. AEI published its recommendations several days after Congress voted on the issue, because it “didn’t want to try to affect the outcome of the vote.” Zany: I wish that was the way think tanks still operate today.
Heritage Foundation turns this philosophy on its head. Rather than producing policy research for its own sake, Heritage conducts research, as one employee told me in 2018, “to build a case, to make the argument for policy change.”
For example, Heritage’s affiliated 501(c)(4) advocacy organization, Heritage Action for America, and Sentinel Action Fund, a Super PAC set up by Heritage Action in 2022, spend money to influence elections and lobby elected officials on issues as diverse as taxation, abortion, immigration and the environment.
For this reason, some scholars and politicos call Heritage Foundation and other similar groups “do tanks” rather than “think tanks.”
Because Sentinel Action Fund is a Super PAC, it can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections so long as they do not coordinate with candidate campaigns. Sentinel Action Fund then spent more than US$13 million on voter outreach and advertising in the 2022 midterm elections. The fund’s self-described aim was to ensure GOP majorities in the House and Senate by aiding “key conservative fighters” in “tough general elections.” Sentinel Action Fund Vice President of Communications Carson Steelman said that in 2024, “the Sentinel Action Fund is totally legally separate from Heritage Action.”
People, not just money
But it’s the people, even more than money, that make Heritage Foundation influential, my research shows.
Heritage has directly worked to place former and current employees in congressional offices and the executive branch. More than 70 former and current Heritage staffers began working for the Trump administration by 2017 – and four current Heritage staffers were members of Trump’s cabinet in 2021.
Heritage Foundation also says that it has more than 2 million local, volunteer activists and roughly 20,000 “Sentinel activists” who receive information from Heritage and take part in organized campaigns to push for conservative policies. My interviews show that activists who partner with Heritage take part in strategy calls, contact elected representatives with coordinated messages and amplify the organization’s messaging on social media.
In one example from 2021, Heritage Foundation developed a report on election fraud and voter integrity. Heritage Action for America, meanwhile, coordinated volunteers to deliver this report to Georgia legislators, had staffers meet with these legislators to advise them on passing new voting restrictions, and paid for television advertising urging citizens to support such laws.
Heritage, Trump and Project 2025
All these efforts add up to a great deal of influence within the Republican Party. Heritage has played a key role in pushing Republicans toward more conservative policies since its creation.
When former President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, for example, the Heritage Foundation had a ready-made conservative agenda for the new administration. By the end of his first term, Reagan executed more than 60% of the think tank’s policy recommendations.
When Trump took office in 2016, Heritage was again ready with friendly staffers and a handy policy agenda, called the Blueprint for Reorganization. By the end of Trump’s first year in office, Heritage boasted that he “had embraced 64 percent of our 321 recommendations,” among them key conservative priorities like tax reform, regulatory rollback and increased defense spending.
Project 2025 is similar to these other sets of recommendations for Republican politicians and presidential candidates. It outlines an agenda for a new president to adopt and a team of experts to help them.
But Project 2025 has taken on a different bent compared with earlier blueprints. Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage Foundation, has described the group’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
This is probably why Project 2025, and Heritage, have received such an unusually large amount of attention in recent months. The fact that a wonky, 900-page policy memo has been the focus of countless news articles and hundreds of Biden campaign tweets, especially before the 2024 election, is a telling indication of its expected influence.
For its part, the Trump campaign has maintained distance from the project, as Trump himself has implausibly claimed that he knows nothing about it.
He is likely keeping his distance from Project 2025 because parts of the agenda are far too extreme for all but the most die-hard conservative activists. But even if Trump isn’t campaigning on these policies, Americans should expect Heritage ideas to matter greatly in a second Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation is built for this goal.
This story has been updated on July 18, 2024, to describe the current legal status of the Sentinel Action Fund.
Zachary Albert does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The article featured in this post is from The Conversation and republished here under a Creative Commons License. Read the original article.
