This article is republished from The Conversation with a Creative Commons license. Read the original article, “The Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025’ is just the latest action plan from a group with over 50 years of history guiding GOP legislation.” It was published before President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race.
With Zachary Albert
As the 2024 presidential election heats up, some are hearing about the Heritage Foundation for the first time. The conservative think tank has a new, ambitious and controversial policy plan, Project 2025which requires a review of US public policy and government.
Project 2025 spreads out many standard conservative ideas—like prioritizing energy production over environmental concerns and climate change, and rejecting the idea of abortion as health care—along with some much more extreme ones, like criminalizing pornography. And suggests to eliminating or restructuring countless government services; according to conservative ideology.
While think tanks sometimes have a reputation for being stuffy academic institutions cut off from day-to-day politics, Heritage is very different. By design, Heritage was founded not only to develop conservative political ideas but also to promote them through direct political advocacy.
All think tanks are classified as 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizationswhich are prohibited from participating in elections and can only participate in a small percentage of political lobbies. But some, like Heritage, are also connected 501(c)(4) organizations which allow them to campaign and lobby extensively. Inheritance is one of the sponsors of the Republican National Conventionwhich ended in Milwaukee on July 18.
In researching my upcoming book, Networks of Party Politics, I have found that a growing share of think tanks they are explicitly ideological, aligned with a single political party, and engaged in direct policy advocacy.
However, Heritage stands out from all the groups I researched. It is much more conservative and more closely aligned with former President Donald Trump’s style of Republicanism. Heritage is also more aggressive in championing conservative ideas, combining campaign spending with lobbying and large-scale grassroots mobilization.
Americans should expect to hear a lot more about her ideas, like those outlined in Project 2025, if Trump is re-elected in November.
A new kind of think tank
Two Republican congressmen, Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich, formed Heritage in 1973 as an explicit rebuke to existing think tanks which they felt were either too liberal or too moderate in promoting conservative ideas.
Feulner and Weyrich were particularly incensed at how a prominent conservative think tank at the time, the American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, timed the release of a policy report in 1971 on whether to approve the Govt. funding for supersonic transport planesthat can fly faster than the speed of sound. AEI released its recommendations several days after Congress voted on the issue because “he did not want to try to influence the outcome of the vote.”
Heritage 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 case for policy change.”
For example, the Heritage-affiliated 501(c)(4) advocacy organization Heritage Action for America and the Sentinel Action Fund, a Super PAC created by Heritage Action in 2022, they spend money to influence elections and lobbying elected officials; on issues as diverse as taxation, abortion, immigration and the environment.
For this reason, some scholars and politicians call the Legacy and other similar groups “they make tanksrather than “think tanks”.
Because the Sentinel Action Fund is a Super PAC, it can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections as long as they don’t coordinate with candidate campaigns. The Sentinel Action Fund then spent more than 13 million dollars on voter outreach and advertising in the 2022 midterm elections. The fund’s self-described goal was to secure GOP majorities in the House and Senate by helping “key conservative campaigners” in a “tough general election.” Sentinel Action Fund Vice President of Communications Carson Steelman said that in 2024, “the Sentinel Action Fund is completely legally separate from Heritage Action.”
People, not just money
But it’s the people, even more than the money, that make Heritage influential, my research shows.
The legacy has immediate worked on placement of former and current employees in congressional offices and the executive department. More than 70 former and current Heritage executives began working for the Trump administration by 2017—and four current Heritage executives were Trump members cabinet in 2021.
Heritage also says it has more than 2 million locals, volunteer activists and about 20,000 Sentinel activists“WHERE they receive information from Heritage and take part in organized campaigns to push for conservative policies. My interviews show that activists who work with Heritage take part in strategy calls, contact elected representatives with coordinated messages, and amplify the organization’s messages on social media.
In an example from 2021, the Heritage Foundation developed a report on election fraud and voter integrity. Heritage Action for America, meanwhile, coordinated volunteers to deliver that petition to Georgia lawmakers, had staff meet with those lawmakers to advise them on enacting new voting restrictions, and paid for television ads which urge citizens to support such laws.
Heritage, Trump and Project 2025
All of these efforts add up to great influence in the Republican Party. Heritage 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 he had a conservative agenda ready for the new administration. By the end of his first term, Reagan had accomplished more than 60 percent of the think tank’s policy recommendations.
When Trump took office in 2016, Heritage was ready again with friendly staff and a handy political agenda, called Reorganization plan. 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 adopting a new president and a team of experts to assist them.
But Project 2025 has taken a different slant compared to previous plans. Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s chairman, has described the group’s role as “institutionalization of Trumpism.”
This is probably why Project 2025 and Heritage have received so much unusual attention in recent months. The fact that a strange 900-page policy memo has been the focus of countless news and hundreds of tweets from the Biden campaignespecially before the 2024 elections, is a telling indication of his expected influence.
For its part, the Trump campaign has distanced itself from the project, as Trump himself has unsubstantiatedly claimed to know nothing about it.
He is likely distancing himself from Project 2025 because parts of the agenda are too extreme for all but the most hard-line conservative activists. But even if Trump doesn’t campaign on these policies, Americans should expect Heritage’s ideas to carry a lot of weight in a second Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation has been built for this purpose.
