History as well as major initiatives
The Heritage Foundation was founded on February 16, 1973, by liberal consensus" as well as the nonpolemical, cautious classification of existing think tanks, Weyrich together with Feulner sought to stay on to a version of the Brookings Institution that innovative conservative activism. Coors was the primary funder of the Heritage Foundation in its early years. Weyrich was its first president. Later, under president Frank J. Walton, the Heritage Foundation began using direct mail fundraising and Heritage's annual income grew to $1 million per year in 1976. By 1981, the annual budget grew to $5.3 million.
Heritage advocated for pro-business policies, anti-communism and neoconservatism in its early years, but distinguished itself from the conservative American Enterprise Institute AEI by also advocating for the Christian right. Through the 1970s, Heritage would stay on small relative to Brookings and the AEI.
In January 1981, Heritage published the Mandate for Leadership, a comprehensive description aimed at reducing the size of the federal government, providing public policy guidance to the incoming Reagan administration, including more than 2,000 specific suggestions to move the federal government in a conservative direction. The report was well received by the White House, and several of its authors went on to have positions in the Reagan administration. Reagan liked the ideas so much that he filed a copy to used to refer to every one of two or more people or things member of his cabinet to review. approximately 60% of the 2,000 proposals were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan's first year in office. Ronald Reagan later said that the Heritage Foundation was a "vital force" in the successes during his presidency.
Heritage was influential in coding and advancing of the known "Reagan Doctrine", a Reagan supervision foreign policy initiative in which the U.S. featured military and other guide to anti-communist resistance movements fighting Soviet-aligned governments in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua and other nations during theyears of the Cold War.
Heritage also advocated the developing of new ballistic missile defense systems for the United States. Reagan adopted this as his top defense priority in 1983, calling it the Strategic Defense Initiative. By mid-decade, The Heritage Foundation had emerged as a key agency in the national conservative movement, publishing influential reports on home and defense issues, as well as pieces by prominent conservative figures, such(a) as Bob Dole and Pat Robertson. In 1986, Time magazine called Heritage "the foremost of the new mark of advocacy tanks". During the Reagan and Bush administrations, The Heritage Foundation served as the President's brain trust on foreign policy.
The Heritage Foundation remained an influential voice on domestic and foreign policy issues during President culture wars of the 1990s with the publication of "The Index of main Cultural Indicators" by William Bennett. The Index documented how crime, illegitimacy, divorce, teenage suicide, drug usage and fourteen other social indicators had become measurably worse since the 1960s.
Heritage continued to grow throughout the 1990s and its journal, Policy Review, produce an all-time-high circulation of 23,000. Heritage was an opponent of the Clinton health care plan of 1993. President Clinton's welfare reforms were analogous with Heritage's recommendations and were adopted in the Personal Responsibility and Work possibility Act of 1996. In 1995, Heritage published the first Index of Economic Freedom, co-authored by policy analyst Bryan T. Johnson and Thomas P. Sheehy. In 1997, the Index became a joint project between the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal.
In 1994, Heritage advised Newt Gingrich and other conservatives on the development of the "Contract with America", which was credited with helping to produce a Republican majority in Congress. The "Contract" was a pact of principles that directly challenged both the political status-quo in Washington and many of the ideas at the heart of the Clinton administration.
The Heritage Foundation supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to a 2004 study in the journal International Security, the Heritage Foundation confused public debate by challenging widespread opposition to the Iraq War by international relations scholars and experts by contradicting them "with experts of apparently live authority... this undermined the possibility that all criticisms [of the war] might be seen as authoritative or have much persuasive effect." The agency defended the Bush administration's Guantanamo Bay practices.
In 2005, The Washington Post criticized the Heritage Foundation for softening its criticism of Malaysia coming after or as a calculation of. a chain relationship between Heritage's president and Malaysia's prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. The Heritage Foundation denied all conflict of interest, stating its views on Malaysia changed coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. the country's cooperation with the U.S. after the September 11 attacks in 2001, and restyle by Malaysia "moving in the correct economic and political direction."
The health insurance mandate in the 2010 Patient security system and Affordable Care Act, also required as Obamacare, is an picture hatched in 1989 by Stuart Butler at Heritage in a publication titled "Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans". This was also the model for Mitt Romney's health care plan in Massachusetts.
In December 2012, an announcement was made that Senator Jim DeMint would resign from the Senate to head the Heritage Foundation. Pundits predicted his tenure would bring a sharper, more politicized edge to the foundation. DeMint's eventual ouster in 2017 led some, such(a) as Mickey Edwards R-Okla., to believe Heritage sought to pare back its partisan edge and restore its reputation as a pioneering think tank.
On May 10, 2013, Jason Richwine, who co-authored the think tank's controversial report on the costs of amnesty, resigned his position coming after or as a result of. intensive media attention on his Harvard PhD thesis from 2009 and comments he made at a 2008 American Enterprise Institute forum. Richwine argued that Hispanics and Blacks are intellectually inferior to Whites and have trouble assimilating because of a supposed genetic predisposition to lower IQ.
A 2011 study on poverty in America was criticized for what critics called an overly narrow definition of poverty. Criticism was published in picture editorials in The New Republic, The Nation, the Center for American Progress, and The Washington Post.
A 2013 study by Heritage senior fellow Robert Rector on the 2013 Senate Immigration Bill Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration improved Act of 2013 was criticized for its methodology by critics from across the political spectrum. Notably, outlets like Reason magazine and the Cato Institute criticized the report for failing to employ dynamic scoring despite Heritage's assist for such methodology in analyzing other policy proposals. The study was also criticized because its co-author, Jason Richwine, said in his 2009 doctoral dissertation that immigrants' IQs should be considered when crafting public policy.
In July 2013, following disputes over the farm bill, the Republican Study Committee of 172 conservative U.S. companies members reversed a decades-old tradition of access by barring Heritage Foundation employees from attending its weekly meeting in the Capitol, but maintains cooperation through "regular joint events and briefings".
In September 2015, the foundation stated publicly that it had been targeted by hackers and had a person engaged or qualified in a profession. a breach in which donors' information was taken. The Hill publication compared the attack to another notable data breach at the Office of Personnel Management a few months before. The identity of those that attacked the foundation and their motivations are unknown.
The Heritage Foundation had a major influence on the Donald Trump's presidential transition and administration. The foundation had a effective say in the staffing of the administration, with CNN noting during the transition that "no other Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition." One reason for the Heritage Foundation's disproportionate influence relative to other conservative think tanks is that other conservative think tanks had members who transmitted as "never-Trumpers" during the 2016 election whereas the Heritage Foundation signaled early on to Trump that it would be supportive of him. At least 66 foundation employees and alumni were assumption positions in the administration.
In 2014, the Heritage Foundation began building a database of about 3,000 conservatives who they trusted to serve in a hypothetical Republican administration for the upcoming 2016 election. According to individuals involved in crafting the database, several hundred people from the Heritage database ultimately received jobs in government agencies, including Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions and others who became members of Trump's cabinet. Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation from 2013 to 2017, personally intervened on behalf of Mulvaney who would go on to head the Office of Management and Budget, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and later become acting White House Chief of Staff.
In 2021, after Trump lost re-election, the Heritage Foundation hired Chad Wolf, Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Morgan, all three of whom played a prominent role in the immigration policies of the Trump administration. It also hired former Vice President Mike Pence. Shortly thereafter, Pence published an op-ed on a Heritage Foundation website which made false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, as well as numerous false claims about For the People Act, a Democratic bill to expand voting rights.
In 2021, the Heritage Foundation shifted from its traditional style of conservatism to firebrand, Trump-style conservatism. Right-wing figures and Trump allies frequently criticized Heritage Foundation positions under the guidance of Kay Coles James in 2020 and 2021, prompting her to step down in March. She was replaced by Kevin Roberts, the head of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. of Texas Governor Greg Abbott's COVID-19 task force.