The Heritage Foundation Turns Away from Conservatism
By 2013, the Heritage Foundation no longer served as the visionary light of conservative thought. Instead, its focus had shifted from generating new policy ideas to politicking for increasingly intransigent policy positions. As it lost its intellectual footing, it succumbed to the cult of Trump.
As reported by Molly Ball in The Atlantic, the think tank’s flagship Mandate for Leadership guidance document had slimmed down from 3000 pages in 1980 to a paltry 156 pages in 2005. The latter edition prompted the National Review to compare it to Cliff’s Notes. And in 2010, as President Obama led passage of the Affordable Care Act (the Democrats’ version of Romneycare), Heritage created Heritage Action, an advocacy arm that began the organization’s shift in focus from generating conservative policy ideas to politicking for increasingly intransigent policy positions.
One of the new group’s first actions was to campaign for the defunding of Obamacare. It also initiated the congressional Scorecard, which it continues to use to assess and score the “conservativeness” of each member of Congress; scores are sometimes used to pressure congressmen on legislation and to target less partisan members for primarying.
The think tank’s growing activism, reported Ball, prompted one of its founding trustees, Congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK), to accuse the organization of looking “like just another hack Tea Party kind of group”.
In addition to reversing its position on healthcare reform, Heritage also flipped on immigration. Whereas during the Reagan years it viewed immigration as important to the nation’s constant renewal, it now viewed immigrants and any policy favoring immigration with open hostility. Such reversals led to criticism that the think tank was, Ball wrote, willing “to discard analytical integrity in favor of partisan red meat.”
Heritage Action and the shift to advocacy had begun under the guidance of the organization’s original president, Edwin Feulner. It accelerated under its second president, former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, who took over from Feulner in 2013. DeMint’s tenure proved to be too radical for the Heritage board of trustees, who unanimously voted to terminate DeMint’s contract in 2017 and bring back the 75-year-old Feulner on an interim basis.
The organization’s next president, Kay Cole James, who had served in each Republican administration since Reagan before joining President Trump’s transition team, took over in 2018. When she announced her resignation in March 2021, Andrew Kloster, a former Heritage attorney under Fuelner and DeMint, White House official in the Trump administration, and general counsel to Matt Gaetz (R-FL), expressed his good riddance in The American Conservative. He questioned her claim to accomplishments, noting only “there was really only one event that brought Heritage into the national spotlight: Google placed James on its new Advanced Technology External Advisory Council”, which was set up to offer guidance to the company’s new AI projects.
James’ appointment was immediately controversial and received pushback from members of the new council and from almost 2400 Google employees. On in-house message boards, according to a report on The Verge, “employees described James as ‘intolerant’ and the Heritage Foundation as ‘amazingly wrong’ in their policies on topics like climate change, immigration, and, particularly, on issues of LGBTQ equality.” Within two weeks, Google disbanded the council.
James was replaced with Kevin Roberts, an election denier who previously served as president of Wyoming Catholic College and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. As he told the New York Times, he established Project 2025 to institutionalize Trumpism, an admission that Heritage had all but abandoned its conservative roots and intellectual integrity.
