Feulner took over the Heritage leadership in 1977, doubling its operational budget by 1979. As the group’s president for nearly four decades, Feulner grew Heritage from a midsized operation to an organization with 300 employees and a $90 million annual budget.
Heritage did not create new scholarship. Feulner and Heritage put ideology, not ideas, first. Heritage “was a secondhand dealer in ideas,” Feulner said. It took conservative gospel and translated it into “policy concepts.” In doing so, Stahl argues, Heritage contributed to a decline in standards and rigor in policymaking.
Instead, the key to the “Heritage model” was relevance and aggression. “We don’t just stress credibility,” Feulner once said. “We stress timeliness. We stress an efficient, effective delivery system. Production is one side; marketing is equally important.” Perhaps the logical endpoint for defenders of free markets was to treat ideas as a consumer product. Heritage focused on brief reports that reached politicians and aides. Feulner turned Heritage into a massive provider of right-wing information for time-poor Washingtonians, with an exhaustive network of experts, contacts, and media products. Conservatives imagined a grand left-wing conspiracy to turn ideas into legislation. Feulner built a real one for the right.
Feulner’s most ambitious gambit along these lines was 1980’s Mandate for Leadership—a 3,000-page tome that aimed to define the policy agenda for the Reagan administration. Although the Reagan White House was occasionally ambivalent toward it, Mandate for Leadership provided a blueprint for conservative governance and—due to the major media coverage—serious cachet for Heritage. Heritage claims Reagan enacted two-thirds of Mandate for Leadership’s recommendations. Project 2025 is the ninth iteration of the series.
Since the 1980s, Heritage has presented itself as the premier conservative think tank. Its hardline conservatism set it apart from the likes of the libertarian Cato Institute or the more moderate AEI. Heritage, for example, issued report cards on politicians’ conservative purity. Reagan once scored 62 percent.
Feulner really was a true believer. Under his stewardship, Heritage shifted away from Weyrich’s Christian right social conservatism and toward a bigger-tent conservatism. The think tank had something for the social conservatives, but also something for defense hawks, something for neoconservatives, and something for supply-siders.