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Heritage Foundation: Stated Goals vs. Actual Actions, 2017–2020
The first Trump administration provides perhaps the clearest test yet of Heritage's real governing philosophy. Unlike Reagan, Trump did not emerge from the traditional conservative intellectual movement. He disagreed with Heritage on several major questions—most notably trade, deficits, and aspects of entitlement policy—yet once elected, he adopted a remarkably large portion of Heritage's prepared governing agenda.
Heritage itself calculated in early 2018 that 64% of the 334 recommendations in its 2016 Mandate for Leadership series had either been implemented, incorporated into Trump's budget, or were under consideration during his first year. That is Heritage's own measurement rather than an independent audit, but it is still significant because it shows how Heritage itself defined and measured influence.
The period therefore reveals something important:
Trump did not simply transform Heritage into a Trumpist organization. Rather, the administration adopted large portions of Heritage's pre-existing conservative program while simultaneously rejecting other long-standing Heritage principles.
That distinction is essential.
I. 2017: Heritage moves immediately from opposition to implementation
When Trump entered office in January 2017, Heritage already possessed:
a detailed Mandate for Leadership, an executive-branch policy blueprint, personnel connections, regulatory proposals, judicial recommendations, tax proposals, immigration recommendations, and decades of experience working with Republican transitions.
Trump therefore inherited an institutional infrastructure that his campaign itself had not built.
By the end of Trump's first year, Heritage's internal review found that the administration had embraced nearly two-thirds of its 334 recommendations.
This gives us an unusually clear sequence:
Heritage writes program before election
↓
Trump wins election
↓
Heritage personnel and recommendations enter transition
↓
administration adopts significant portion
That is closely analogous to 1980–1981 Reagan, but on a considerably more mature organizational foundation.
II. Deregulation: probably Heritage's clearest Trump-era victory
Trump's regulatory policy aligned extremely closely with Heritage.
One of his earliest executive actions established a policy requiring agencies, when issuing a new regulation, generally to identify existing regulations for elimination and to control the aggregate costs of new regulation.
The Trump administration then established regulatory-reform officers and task forces within executive agencies. The White House explicitly described the effort as cutting regulatory red tape.
Heritage strongly applauded the shift.
Its analysis described the administration as producing a dramatic reversal of Obama-era regulatory growth and welcomed the use of executive authority, congressional review and agency reform to reduce regulation.
Assessment
Extremely high correspondence.
This may be the cleanest Heritage-to-Trump implementation chain of the period.
III. But notice what Heritage's anti-administrative-state theory now required
During Obama, Heritage had argued strongly against executive unilateralism.
Yet during Trump it emphasized that Article II gives the president authority to direct and control the execution of federal law through administrative agencies. A 2018 Heritage constitutional analysis described the president as effectively the nation's "administrator in chief."
This is not necessarily inconsistent.
Heritage's theory can be summarized coherently as:
Congress writes the laws, but executive agencies implementing those laws should ultimately remain subordinate to the elected president.
In other words Heritage objected less to presidential power over the executive branch than to:
autonomous bureaucratic power insulated from presidential direction.
That distinction matters enormously.
It means the emerging Heritage objective was:
reduce administrative discretion
while simultaneously
increase presidential control of administration.
That is one of the most important conceptual bridges to Project 2025.
IV. Our Obama-era executive-power symmetry test
We can now perform the test we identified in the previous period.
Under Obama, Heritage strongly objected when the president used enforcement discretion or executive action in ways Heritage believed effectively changed statutory law.
Under Trump, Heritage praised stronger presidential control over administrative agencies—but also argued that simply substituting Trump's policies for Obama's was insufficient.
A 2017 Heritage discussion explicitly warned:
restoring constitutional government could not consist merely of replacing Obama's regulatory agenda with Trump's.
Instead, Heritage argued for structural reform of the executive branch and administrative state.
This somewhat strengthens Heritage's claim to constitutional consistency.
The theory was not simply:
Democratic executive action bad / Republican executive action good.
It was closer to:
presidents may control executive officials but may not themselves legislate.
However, individual Trump actions still need to be tested separately against that principle.
V. DACA gives us one such test
Trump moved in September 2017 to rescind the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy.
Heritage praised the action as constitutionally appropriate, arguing that Obama lacked authority to create such broad immigration relief without legislation. Heritage's press archive records its assessment that Trump had acted "appropriately" and "constitutionally."
So from Heritage's perspective:
Obama action
President creates immigration program without Congress → objection.
Trump action
President withdraws executive program and returns question to Congress → approval.
Within Heritage's own constitutional theory, that is reasonably consistent.
VI. Immigration becomes one of the strongest Heritage–Trump alignments
The Trump administration implemented major policy changes involving:
border-wall construction, travel restrictions, asylum, interior enforcement, refugee admissions, DACA, immigration-court procedures, and legal immigration.
Heritage generally supported the enforcement-oriented direction.
Its retrospective analysis praised numerous Trump administration changes aimed at border security, asylum abuse and terrorist vetting, while acknowledging that many changes were implemented through executive orders and regulatory action because Congress did not legislate comprehensive reform.
This marks an important longitudinal shift.
Bush-era Heritage
Enforcement + legal channels + broad reform.
Obama-era Heritage
Enforcement first + opposition to broad legalization.
Trump-era Heritage
Much closer alignment with a restrictive enforcement-centered model.
Assessment
High correspondence by 2017—but reflecting a substantial evolution from Heritage's earlier immigration posture.
VII. Trump's travel restrictions illustrate the security-liberty hierarchy again
Trump's 2017 travel orders and subsequent proclamation imposed restrictions on entry from designated countries.
Heritage generally defended improved vetting and the president's authority to restrict entry where national-security information was inadequate. Its immigration analysis described the administration's actions as aimed at improving vetting and identifying security deficiencies.
This reproduces the hierarchy we identified after September 11:
national security can justify restrictions that would otherwise sit uneasily with broad conceptions of individual liberty.
Heritage's philosophy remained consistent with the Bush-era pattern in this respect.
VIII. Tax reform: another major Heritage victory
In December 2017 Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
The legislation:
lowered corporate and individual tax rates, nearly doubled the standard deduction, expanded the child tax credit, capped the state-and-local-tax deduction, and effectively eliminated the ACA individual mandate penalty beginning in 2019.
Heritage described it as the largest overhaul of the federal tax code in more than three decades and strongly supported the legislation.
Heritage's 2017 annual report also described the law as closely following principles Heritage had promoted.
Assessment
Very high correspondence.
This belongs alongside:
Reagan's 1981 tax reduction, 1996 welfare reform, and Trump deregulation
as one of Heritage's most clearly realized policy objectives.
IX. The individual mandate finally disappears—but through tax legislation
There is an interesting historical symmetry here.
Heritage had once supported a limited individual health-insurance mandate.
By 2010 it opposed Obamacare's mandate.
The 2017 tax law reduced the ACA mandate penalty to zero.
Heritage strongly supported that provision.
So by 2017 the institutional reversal from Heritage's early-1990s position was complete.
Our longitudinal ledger should therefore record:
1989–1992: support mandate concept.
2010–2016: oppose ACA mandate.
2017: support eliminating mandate penalty.
That is one of Heritage's clearest policy evolutions.
X. Obamacare repeal: major failure despite unified Republican control
Republicans controlled:
the presidency, the House, and the Senate.
Yet they failed in 2017 to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Heritage reacted sharply.
After the Senate repeal effort collapsed, Edwin Feulner criticized Republican lawmakers for failing to fulfill years of promises to repeal Obamacare.
Heritage continued arguing that the basic architecture of the ACA should be replaced rather than stabilized.
This provides another important control case.
Heritage did not simply redefine Republican failure as success.
Assessment
Heritage goal consistent; implementation unsuccessful.
XI. The judiciary becomes an extraordinary Heritage success
The Trump years may represent Heritage's greatest institutional influence on the federal judiciary.
Trump had campaigned by publishing lists of potential Supreme Court nominees. Heritage had played a role in developing and promoting conservative judicial candidates, and several eventual nominees appeared on lists Heritage supported.
Brett Kavanaugh, for example, had appeared on Heritage's original list of potential nominees. Heritage strongly praised his selection in 2018.
Neil Gorsuch likewise embodied the originalist/textualist judicial philosophy Heritage had promoted since the Reagan era. Heritage subsequently praised his commitment to constitutional text and original meaning.
The chain was now:
1970s–1980s
develop conservative constitutional theory
↓
1980s–2000s
build originalist legal network
↓
2016
promote judicial candidates
↓
2017–2020
actual appointments.
This is a multi-decade institutional strategy reaching fruition.
XII. Amy Coney Barrett completes the first-term Supreme Court transformation
After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett.
Heritage aggressively supported her confirmation.
Heritage reported that during the confirmation campaign its experts produced nearly 30 opinion pieces and more than 190 media interviews supporting or discussing Barrett.
She was confirmed on October 26, 2020.
By the end of Trump's first term, he had appointed:
Neil Gorsuch
Brett Kavanaugh
Amy Coney Barrett.
For Heritage's decades-long originalist judicial project, this was an enormous accomplishment.
Assessment
Extremely high correspondence.
And unlike many regulatory policies, judicial appointments potentially endure for decades.
XIII. This complicates Heritage's claim about judicial neutrality
Heritage consistently argued that judges should not behave as political policymakers.
Its ideal was:
judges should interpret law according to text and original meaning, regardless of policy preference.
Heritage even observed that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh sometimes disagreed with each other and did not simply vote as partisan "Trump judges."
That is important.
Heritage's stated objective was not formally:
appoint judges who always produce conservative outcomes.
It was:
appoint judges who use originalist/textualist methods.
Of course, critics argue that candidate selection itself was designed with predictable substantive outcomes in mind.
For our forensic ledger, those are different questions:
selection criterion
versus
actual judicial behavior.
The long-term results become measurable after 2020.
XIV. Paris climate agreement: Heritage gets another desired reversal
Heritage had opposed the Paris climate agreement.
Trump announced in June 2017 that the United States would withdraw.
Heritage consistently regarded that decision as compatible with American sovereignty, lower regulatory burdens and skepticism toward international climate commitments. Heritage's subsequent policy materials cite Trump's Paris withdrawal as a significant conservative-policy action.
Assessment
High correspondence.
This is another case where Heritage's:
economic-regulation
and
national-sovereignty
principles reinforced one another.
XV. Iran nuclear agreement: direct Heritage-to-Trump correspondence
Heritage had strongly opposed the Obama-era Iran nuclear agreement.
Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA on May 8, 2018 and reimposed sanctions. The administration argued that the agreement did not adequately restrain Iran's nuclear ambitions or regional activity.
Only days later, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a major Iran-policy speech at the Heritage Foundation, outlining the administration's new strategy of extensive economic pressure.
That institutional setting is noteworthy.
Heritage was not merely commenting on administration policy from afar.
A sitting Secretary of State used Heritage as a venue to announce and explain a major national-security strategy closely aligned with Heritage's previous recommendations.
Assessment
Extremely high correspondence.
XVI. Defense spending: Heritage again prioritizes military capacity over small government
Trump campaigned on rebuilding the military.
Heritage strongly supported increased defense spending and repeatedly argued that sequestration had damaged military readiness.
Its annual Index of U.S. Military Strength provided a continuing intellectual framework for evaluating force capacity and readiness.
The administration subsequently increased defense budgets.
Here we again see the principle that has remained almost completely stable since Heritage's creation:
fiscal restraint does not take precedence over what Heritage considers adequate national defense.
Assessment
Very high correspondence.
XVII. Trade: the biggest Heritage–Trump ideological break
Trade is perhaps the most valuable control case of the entire Trump presidency.
For decades Heritage had championed:
free trade, NAFTA, lower tariffs, international economic competition, and opposition to protectionism.
Trump did almost the opposite.
In 2018 he imposed:
25% tariffs on steel, 10% tariffs on aluminum, major tariffs against Chinese products, and numerous additional trade restrictions.
Heritage strongly objected.
Before the steel tariffs were imposed, Heritage urged Trump to reject the Commerce Department's recommendation.
Afterward Heritage warned:
tariffs would raise costs, destroy jobs and harm American businesses and consumers.
During the escalating China dispute, Heritage explicitly argued:
a trade war with China was not in America's economic interest.
This gives us extraordinarily strong evidence of Heritage's ideological independence.
XVIII. Heritage did not become economically Trumpist—at least not yet
This point deserves emphasis.
Trump's economic nationalism directly challenged decades of Heritage orthodoxy.
Heritage did not immediately change its position to accommodate him.
Instead it argued that:
tariffs are taxes,
and that they generally reduce:
competition, employment, consumer purchasing power, and economic freedom.
In 2020 Heritage was still calling for the administration to eliminate tariffs imposed since 2018.
Assessment
Trump contradicted Heritage; Heritage remained relatively consistent.
This will give us an important comparison when we reach the later Heritage of 2021–2025, because its relationship with economic nationalism subsequently becomes more complicated.
XIX. China: security hawkishness begins colliding with free trade
There is nevertheless an important tension.
Heritage had long supported free trade, including international trade with imperfect political systems.
But concern about China intensified sharply during this period:
intellectual-property theft, military modernization, espionage, technology dependence, Communist Party influence, human-rights abuses, and strategic competition.
Heritage increasingly treated China not simply as a trading partner but as a major geopolitical adversary.
This creates a new internal tension:
free markets
versus
economic restrictions imposed for national security.
By 2020 that tension had not been fully resolved.
It becomes central to Heritage's later transformation.
XX. Spending and deficits: Heritage's greatest substantive disappointment
Trump's fiscal record conflicted sharply with Heritage's long-standing rhetoric about balanced budgets.
Even before COVID-19, federal deficits were rising.
CBO projected in January 2019 that the deficit would be approximately $900 billion in 2019 and exceed $1 trillion annually beginning in the early 2020s under then-current policy.
Heritage itself warned that the federal fiscal outlook was deteriorating and that debt exceeded $22 trillion.
The administration proposed substantial spending reductions in its annual budget requests, and Heritage often praised those proposed cuts while arguing that even deeper structural reforms were necessary.
But Congress did not implement many of them.
XXI. This exposes a recurring Heritage weakness
Compare Heritage's success rates.
Heritage is often highly successful at:
tax cuts deregulation judicial nominations executive actions foreign-policy reversals
Heritage is repeatedly unsuccessful at:
reducing Social Security reducing Medicare reducing total federal spending eliminating major departments balancing the federal budget.
That pattern now spans several Republican administrations.
This suggests something important:
Heritage is much more effective when its recommendations can be implemented through presidential authority or concentrated political action than when they require voters and Congress to accept visible reductions in popular federal benefits.
That may be one of the most important structural findings of our investigation.
XXII. Trump's budgets versus Trump's actual governance
This distinction is crucial.
Trump submitted budgets proposing substantial reductions in domestic programs.
Heritage frequently praised those proposals.
For example, Heritage's analysis of Trump's FY2021 budget described it as attempting to reduce government and refocus federal activity toward constitutional priorities, while also saying stronger entitlement reform was necessary.
But presidential budgets are requests.
Actual appropriations require Congress.
Actual federal spending continued rising.
Therefore:
We should not score a Heritage objective as "implemented" merely because it appeared in a presidential budget.
This is one limitation in Heritage's own famous 64% implementation figure.
Heritage's methodology included proposals that were:
actually implemented, incorporated into Trump's budget, or merely under consideration.
Those are very different levels of achievement.
This is a major methodological caveat.
XXIII. We should downgrade the 64% claim in the forensic ledger
I recommend our final ledger use separate classifications:
A — enacted/implemented
B — administrative action initiated
C — proposed in presidential budget
D — publicly endorsed
E — under consideration
rather than combining all five as Heritage did.
The statement:
"Trump embraced 64% of Heritage recommendations"
is defensible as Heritage's own description.
But:
"Trump implemented 64% of Heritage recommendations"
would overstate the evidence.
That distinction should remain in our final master accounting.
XXIV. Criminal justice: an unexpectedly libertarian/conservative reform
The 2018 First Step Act gives us an important departure from simplistic "law and order" politics.
Heritage supported the legislation.
It included:
prison rehabilitation programs, risk assessment, incentives for participation, reductions in some mandatory minimum sentences, and mechanisms intended to improve successful reentry.
Heritage described enactment as a conservative victory and emphasized that many reforms had already been tested in Republican-led states.
Assessment
Strong correspondence with Heritage's increasingly developed view that criminal punishment should protect public safety without unnecessarily expanding imprisonment.
This also shows genuine evolution from some earlier conservative criminal-justice positions.
XXV. Heritage's concept of limited government becomes more sophisticated here
First Step illustrates a different version of limited government:
government should punish dangerous offenders, but incarceration itself should not become unnecessarily large, expensive or counterproductive.
Heritage emphasized:
reduced recidivism, rehabilitation, family stability, employment, and effective use of prison resources.
By 2020 Heritage described First Step as a meaningful bipartisan achievement.
So the Heritage position was no longer merely:
stronger punishment = better policy.
That is a substantive ideological development worth preserving.
XXVI. Social policy and religious liberty
The administration strongly aligned with Heritage on:
abortion policy, religious exemptions, conscience protections, school choice, and traditional-family concerns.
This was particularly important after Obergefell, because conservative strategy had moved from attempting to prevent nationwide same-sex marriage toward protecting individuals and institutions that refused to participate in practices conflicting with their religious beliefs.
The Trump administration's regulatory approach often reflected that shift.
For Heritage, this was framed as:
protecting freedom of conscience against administrative coercion.
Critics, conversely, often viewed such exemptions as permitting discrimination.
For our forensic purposes, the key point is that Heritage's concept of individual liberty increasingly emphasized:
religious exercise
rather than the broader autonomy claims Heritage opposed in abortion and sexuality.
XXVII. School choice: executive power again used for a Heritage objective
Heritage had advocated school choice for decades.
The Trump administration strongly embraced:
charter schools, vouchers, Education Savings Accounts, and reducing federal regulatory control of education.
Heritage regarded this as a substantial improvement over the federal centralization it had criticized under both Bush's No Child Left Behind and Obama-era education policy.
This provides another useful test:
Heritage did not oppose all federal education action.
It supported federal action designed to:
reduce federal control or expand parental choice.
Again:
limited government
meant
government used to decentralize government power.
XXVIII. Presidential staffing power
Heritage's emerging theory of administrative government also increasingly emphasized personnel.
A 2017 Heritage analysis recommended ways Trump could accelerate staffing, including greater use of acting officials and possibly recess appointments, arguing that delays in filling political positions threatened the administration's ability to implement its program.
This is extremely important historically.
The institution was learning a practical lesson:
policy papers are useless if the executive branch is staffed by people unwilling or unable to implement them.
That insight becomes one of the central foundations of Project 2025.
XXIX. Personnel therefore becomes policy
We should now formalize this in our forensic framework.
Earlier Heritage influence often looked like:
write recommendation
→ persuade official.
The Trump experience increasingly convinced Heritage that effective conservative governance required:
write recommendation
identify sympathetic personnel
place them in executive agencies
give them immediate implementation plans
ensure presidential control over resisting bureaucracy.
This is the institutional logic that eventually produces:
Project 2025's personnel database, Presidential Administration Academy, agency-by-agency implementation plans, and focus on civil-service control.
The first Trump term is therefore not simply a success story for Heritage.
It is also a learning experience about where conservative implementation failed.
XXX. The "deep state" problem and Heritage's administrative-state theory
Trump frequently described opposition within government as the "deep state."
Heritage generally used more institutional language—administrative state—but there was increasing overlap in diagnosis.
Trump's formulation tended to be personal:
career officials were frustrating his agenda.
Heritage's formulation was constitutional:
unelected administrative institutions had acquired excessive policymaking authority and autonomy.
These were not identical ideas.
But they increasingly converged around a common solution:
strengthen political accountability and presidential control over executive officials.
This convergence becomes pivotal after 2020.
XXXI. Heritage and Trump's personal style remain different
One point should not be lost.
Heritage did not generally adopt Trump's highly personalized political rhetoric as its primary analytical framework during his first term.
Its publications remained much more likely to speak in terms of:
constitutionalism, free enterprise, originalism, administrative law, federalism, regulatory costs, and national interests.
So even while Heritage became closely integrated with Trump administration policy, it remained institutionally distinct from the populist political style of Trump himself.
That distinction begins narrowing after 2021.
XXXII. COVID-19 changes the fiscal picture completely
The pandemic in 2020 produced extraordinary federal intervention:
direct payments, unemployment benefits, business assistance, Federal Reserve interventions, health spending, emergency lending, and massive deficit spending.
By September 2020, CBO projected federal debt held by the public would reach about 98% of GDP by the end of 2020, the highest level since immediately after World War II.
It would be misleading to treat this increase as ordinary Trump-era fiscal policy because the pandemic was an extraordinary emergency.
But the episode still tests Heritage's philosophy.
Heritage generally accepted that some emergency federal action was warranted while arguing that temporary crisis measures should not become permanent expansions of government.
This is consistent with a recurring Heritage distinction:
temporary extraordinary government can be legitimate during extraordinary emergencies, but permanent government expansion should be resisted.
Whether emergency powers actually recede afterward becomes the important test.
XXXIII. 2020: Heritage prepares another mandate
Heritage published Mandate 2020 as another iteration of its long-running governing series.
The organization explicitly pointed to the Trump administration's adoption of much of its earlier 2016 agenda.
This demonstrates once again that:
Mandate for Leadership is not merely a book.
It is an institutional process:
policy development
→ transition preparation
→ implementation
→ evaluation
→ next mandate.
By 2020 this process had existed for roughly forty years.
Project 2025 would dramatically enlarge it, but not invent it.
XXXIV. Year-by-year forensic ledger, 2017–2020 Year Heritage objective/action Trump/government action Assessment 2017 Deregulation, tax reform, Obamacare repeal, conservative judges, DACA reversal, Paris withdrawal Major deregulation; Gorsuch confirmed; Paris withdrawal announced; DACA rescission; Obamacare repeal fails; tax bill enacted Extremely high Heritage influence with major health-care failure 2018 Tax implementation, Iran withdrawal, judicial appointments, strong defense, immigration enforcement, free trade JCPOA withdrawal; Kavanaugh confirmed; steel/aluminum and China tariffs; First Step Act High alignment except major trade conflict 2019 Administrative-state rollback, border control, spending restraint, judicial appointments Continued regulatory rollback and immigration executive actions; deficits rise; tariffs continue Strong administrative alignment; weak fiscal correspondence 2020 Conservative judiciary, deregulation, immigration enforcement, fiscal reform, Mandate 2020 Barrett confirmed; COVID emergency spending; trade restrictions remain; federal debt surges Judicial triumph, fiscal deterioration, pandemic disruption XXXV. Claim-versus-conduct scorecard, 2017–2020 Heritage principle Actual Heritage conduct / Trump result Assessment Free enterprise Tax reform and deregulation Extremely high correspondence Free trade Heritage opposed Trump tariffs Heritage consistent; Trump major departure Limited regulation Major deregulatory program Extremely high correspondence Limited spending Heritage proposed cuts; actual spending and deficits rose Major implementation failure Fiscal responsibility Heritage continued warnings about debt Heritage rhetoric consistent; governing outcome poor Entitlement restraint Obamacare repeal pushed but failed; large entitlements largely untouched Low implementation success Individual freedom Economic and religious liberty emphasized Still selective; immigration/security/social-policy tensions remain Federalism DACA reversal, education decentralization, administrative restraint Generally high correspondence Strong presidential control of executive agencies Heritage openly developed administrator-in-chief theory Very high Opposition to unilateral lawmaking Continued distinction between executing and rewriting statutes More consistent than simple partisan explanation suggests, but individual cases remain debatable Administrative-state rollback Deregulation, agency reform, personnel emphasis Extremely high Traditional values Abortion, conscience and religious-liberty policies High Strong national defense Higher defense priority, Iran pressure Very high Immigration enforcement Travel restrictions, DACA reversal, border and asylum policies Very high by this period Originalist judiciary Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett Perhaps Heritage's largest durable success Criminal-justice restraint First Step Act Significant positive correspondence with evolving Heritage position Republican independence Strong opposition to Trump tariffs and criticism of spending Very strong evidence Personnel/governing infrastructure Transition assistance and executive staffing strategy Major expansion XXXVI. The executive-power symmetry test produces a more nuanced result than expected
At the beginning of this period I expected the largest contradiction might be:
Heritage condemned executive power under Obama and embraced it under Trump.
The evidence is not quite that simple.
There is a reasonably coherent Heritage distinction:
Heritage opposed
Presidents effectively rewriting statutes through discretionary enforcement or unilateral policymaking.
Heritage supported
Presidents exercising strong hierarchical control over executive officials charged with implementing statutes.
That is a recognizable constitutional theory.
So I would not classify the Heritage position during 2017–2020 as straightforward hypocrisy.
However, something more consequential occurred:
Heritage's theory of presidential control became more operational, more ambitious, and more focused on personnel once it experienced the difficulty of implementing conservative policy through the existing bureaucracy.
That evolution is highly significant.
XXXVII. The bigger contradiction remains "limited government"
The Trump period reinforces what our earlier research already suggested.
Heritage did not really seek:
a uniformly weaker federal government.
It sought:
Weaker government in:
economic regulation environmental regulation federal education control welfare entitlement growth health-care regulation labor regulation
Stronger government in:
border enforcement immigration enforcement national defense sanctions policy executive control traditional-values protections criminal enforcement in selected areas
More centralized authority in:
the presidency's control of executive agencies.
Thus the actual Heritage model by 2020 can be expressed more accurately as:
limited governmental purposes combined with strong governmental capacity within approved purposes.
That formulation resolves many apparent contradictions.
But it also shows why the phrase "small government" is an inadequate description.
XXXVIII. The biggest genuine ideological break is trade
Unlike executive power, the trade dispute is not easily reconciled.
Heritage had spent decades arguing:
tariffs are economically harmful government interference.
Trump argued:
tariffs can protect American industry, force concessions from trading partners, and promote national security.
Heritage repeatedly rejected Trump's reasoning.
This means that through 2020:
Heritage remained substantially more Reaganite than Trumpist on economics.
That becomes very important in the next period.
XXXIX. The biggest practical failure is fiscal restraint
There is another finding that now spans nearly fifty years.
Heritage has repeatedly succeeded in obtaining:
tax reductions
without obtaining comparable:
spending reductions.
The result is predictable pressure on deficits.
Under Reagan this happened.
Under George W. Bush it happened.
Under Trump it happened again.
CBO was already projecting rapidly rising deficits before COVID-19.
This suggests a structural problem with Heritage's governing model:
Its tax-cut agenda is politically achievable. Its entitlement-cut agenda generally is not.
Therefore the full Heritage fiscal package seldom survives democratic politics intact.
That may be a more important explanation of persistent Republican deficits than simple ideological inconsistency.
XL. The most durable Heritage success may actually be judicial rather than economic
Economic policy can be reversed by the next Congress or president.
Regulations can be restored.
Tax laws can be changed.
But federal judges serve life tenure.
By the end of 2020, Heritage's decades-long strategy had contributed to an environment in which Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices favored by the conservative legal movement.
That creates an extraordinarily durable form of influence.
The eventual consequences include decisions occurring after Trump left office, which means we should count them not merely in the 2017–2020 ledger but in the later effects of Heritage action.
This becomes especially important with:
abortion, administrative law, religious liberty, gun rights, executive power, and federal regulatory authority. XLI. Heritage learns an important lesson from the first Trump administration
I think this may be the most important finding of the period.
Heritage discovered that winning the presidency was not enough.
Trump had:
Republican congressional majorities initially, a conservative policy network, extensive executive authority, and a sympathetic Supreme Court trajectory.
Yet major Heritage objectives still failed:
Obamacare remained.
Major departments survived.
Entitlements remained largely untouched.
Federal spending increased.
Career bureaucracy slowed or resisted some initiatives.
Many political appointments took months to fill.
Some Trump executive actions were blocked by courts.
The lesson for Heritage was obvious:
A future conservative administration needed to be better prepared before inauguration day.
Not merely with policies.
With people.
With legal strategies.
With agency-by-agency operating plans.
With trained appointees.
And with a theory for controlling a resistant administrative bureaucracy.
That is essentially the problem Project 2025 was later designed to solve.
XLII. Our longitudinal picture now reaches an important threshold Period Heritage's dominant institutional development 1973–1976 Alternative conservative research institution 1977–1980 Policy network and first transition blueprint 1981–1988 Reagan implementation infrastructure 1989–2000 Opposition + congressional-policy machinery 2001–2008 Governing partner + national-security expansion 2009–2016 Heritage Action + movement enforcement + anti-administrative-state theory 2017–2020 Large-scale policy implementation + judicial transformation + practical lessons about bureaucratic resistance
And that brings us directly to the most consequential transition yet.
The next period: 2021–2024
After Trump lost the 2020 election, Heritage faced a strategic choice.
It could return to the traditional Reagan-era model of conservative policy research.
Instead, during the Biden years Heritage underwent a substantial transformation involving:
a new leadership direction under Kevin Roberts, much stronger accommodation with national conservatism and economic populism, a changed relationship with free trade, growing emphasis on China, greater involvement in election-law policy, intensified culture-war politics, much stronger opposition to corporate ESG and "woke capitalism," increasingly explicit use of government power in cultural and economic policy, and most importantly Project 2025.
Project 2025 appears, from the historical record we have assembled, less like an isolated radical departure than the culmination of lessons Heritage learned from 1980 through 2020.
The central question for 2021–2024 should therefore be:
Did Heritage remain a Reagan-style limited-government institution that merely developed a more sophisticated implementation strategy—or did its underlying ideology itself change into something meaningfully different?
Based on the evidence we've accumulated so far, I suspect that question will produce the most significant change in the entire 1973–2024 timeline.
Please continue with the next period. Heritage Foundation: Stated Goals vs. Actual Actions, 2021–2024
The 2021–2024 period is the clearest ideological transition in Heritage's history so far.
During earlier decades, Heritage repeatedly modified tactics while retaining a recognizable Reagan-era synthesis:
free markets + lower taxes + limited domestic government + traditional values + strong national defense.
During 2021–2024, however, parts of that synthesis began to change. Heritage remained strongly committed to deregulation, lower taxes, constitutional originalism, abortion restrictions, strong defense, and reducing the administrative state. But under president Kevin Roberts, who took over in 2021, Heritage increasingly embraced a form of conservatism in which national interest, family policy, cultural conflict, China competition, and institutional power could sometimes take priority over traditional free-market or libertarian presumptions. Heritage itself describes Roberts's tenure as a period of institutional "renewal," including new election, immigration, and oversight initiatives.
The central finding is therefore:
Between 2021 and 2024 Heritage did not abandon limited-government conservatism altogether. But it moved significantly from the Reagan question—"How do we get government out of the way?"—toward a different question: "How should conservative political power be used to defend the nation, family, culture, and constitutional order?"
Project 2025 is the institutional culmination of that change.
I. 2021: defeat produces another strategic reassessment
Joe Biden entered office in January 2021 with Democrats controlling the presidency and, narrowly, both chambers of Congress.
Heritage returned to opposition, but the circumstances differed markedly from 2009.
The conservative movement had just experienced four years of Trump government. Heritage therefore possessed extensive evidence about:
which executive actions worked, where courts blocked administration policies, where career officials slowed implementation, how long appointments took, where Congress failed to act, and which Trump policies departed from Heritage's own preferences.
The conclusion increasingly drawn by Heritage was not merely that conservatives needed better policies.
They needed better preparation for governing.
That ultimately became the central premise of Project 2025. Its own introductory material says transition planning must begin well before an election because a president's ability to implement an agenda is greatest at the beginning of an administration and because effective implementation requires a coordinated plan and a trained, committed cadre of personnel.
This is arguably the single most important strategic lesson Heritage took from Trump I.
II. Kevin Roberts changes Heritage's institutional tone
Kevin Roberts assumed leadership of Heritage in 2021.
Heritage's own current biography of Roberts says his tenure involved launching initiatives on:
election policy, immigration and border security, governmental oversight, and strengthening Heritage as an "intellectual command center" of the conservative movement.
The phrase itself is revealing.
Earlier Heritage frequently described itself primarily as a research and educational organization.
Under Roberts, the institutional rhetoric became increasingly centered upon:
winning political and institutional conflicts.
Roberts also emphasized greater involvement at the state and local level and a more unified conservative movement.
This represents a continuation of the Heritage Action development we identified after 2010, but with a broader ambition.
Heritage increasingly saw itself not merely as one organization within conservatism, but as an institution capable of coordinating the movement's governing apparatus.
III. Election policy becomes a major Heritage program
After the disputed political aftermath of the 2020 election, election administration became a much larger Heritage priority.
Heritage advocated such policies as:
voter identification, maintenance of accurate voter rolls, restrictions or safeguards surrounding absentee ballots, limits on private funding of election administration, and stronger verification procedures.
Heritage explicitly describes the right to vote in free and fair elections as fundamental, while arguing that public confidence depends upon safeguards against fraud and administrative irregularities.
By 2022 Heritage was tracking and praising state election-law changes that it regarded as strengthening election integrity.
Roberts himself said Heritage had played a significant role in changing election laws during 2021 and listed election reform among the organization's future priorities.
Heritage's stated principle
Election integrity Rule of law Public confidence in democratic institutions
Heritage action
Develop and advocate specific state election-law changes.
Assessment
High correspondence with Heritage's stated election-integrity objective.
But evaluating whether individual measures improve integrity without imposing unnecessary burdens on lawful voting requires separate empirical analysis. Heritage generally rejects the argument that identification requirements reduce turnout and cites research and election data in support of that position.
For our eventual master ledger, therefore, we should distinguish:
Heritage's intent
from
measurable effect on fraud, turnout, and ballot access.
IV. The 2020 election itself requires an important distinction
We should be careful here.
Heritage's election-integrity program should not automatically be equated with every claim made by Donald Trump regarding the 2020 presidential election.
Heritage had supported voter-ID laws and election safeguards long before Trump; for example, it was publishing on voter identification well before 2016.
Thus:
Heritage's concern about election procedures predates Trump's election-denial movement.
What changed after 2020 was the political salience and scale of Heritage's election work.
That distinction should remain in our forensic record.
V. Biden's administrative state becomes the principal domestic adversary
Heritage's Obama-era administrative-state critique intensified under Biden.
Its objections covered:
environmental regulation, labor rules, student-debt relief, federal COVID policies, ESG, DEI, education policy, health regulation, and executive action.
The underlying argument was increasingly structural:
Progressives were using institutions insulated from ordinary electoral accountability to achieve outcomes that could not reliably pass through Congress.
Heritage's long-developed anti-administrative-state theory therefore became a general explanation for many otherwise separate political disputes.
This represented continuity rather than reversal.
What changed was the proposed remedy.
Instead of merely challenging regulations after they were issued, Heritage began designing an entire replacement governing architecture in advance.
VI. The culture war expands into corporate America
One of the most significant ideological developments concerned private corporations.
Traditional Heritage economics generally presumed that private companies should enjoy broad autonomy subject to ordinary law and competition.
By the early 2020s, Heritage increasingly argued that large corporations, financial institutions, universities, foundations, and technology companies were themselves wielding concentrated ideological power.
The ESG debate illustrates this shift particularly well.
Heritage characterizes ESG as a system through which progressive social and environmental objectives are imposed through corporate and financial institutions rather than ordinary democratic legislation.
Heritage policy papers consequently proposed governmental reforms to combat ESG and DEI practices, particularly through fiduciary, securities, civil-rights, and financial law.
That creates a major ideological development.
VII. From "leave business alone" to "prevent business from exercising ideological power"
The old free-market presumption might be summarized:
Private companies should generally make their own decisions without political interference.
The emerging Heritage position was closer to:
Private corporations should remain free economically, but government may need to prevent financial or corporate institutions from using concentrated power to impose ideological objectives.
Heritage's argument is that ESG itself depends heavily upon governmental regulation, financial privileges, fiduciary arrangements, and institutional concentration—so removing or changing those arrangements restores rather than violates free enterprise.
Critics can reasonably respond that anti-ESG statutes themselves constitute state interference in business decisions.
This creates one of our best new claim-versus-conduct tests:
Traditional principle Emerging Heritage action Private enterprise should make economic choices Government may restrict certain ESG-related financial or corporate practices Government should not pick winners and losers Government may intervene where Heritage believes corporate power is being used ideologically Individual economic freedom Institutional power may justify government countermeasures Assessment
A genuine tension and partial ideological evolution.
VIII. China begins rewriting Heritage economics
This may be the single most important substantive transformation of the period.
For decades Heritage had been among Washington's most consistent defenders of:
free trade
open investment
comparative advantage
global market integration
and opposition to protectionism.
During Trump's first term Heritage even opposed Trump's tariffs.
By 2023, however, Heritage's China strategy was proposing policies that would have been extremely difficult to reconcile with the older laissez-faire presumption.
Its major report Winning the New Cold War: A Plan for Countering China explicitly proposed:
reshoring, nearshoring, friendshoring, restrictions on sensitive investment, sanctions, entity-list restrictions, limits on Chinese technology, restrictions on strategic land purchases, and targeted decoupling of sensitive industries.
Most significantly, Heritage wrote that the U.S. government should actively encourage strategically important businesses to move operations out of China.
IX. In some circumstances Heritage now accepted compelled economic restructuring
The China report went considerably farther than voluntary encouragement.
For industries deemed critical to national security, Heritage said government should be prepared to use punitive policy measures, including sanctions and entity restrictions, and proposed congressional authority enabling specified American companies or sectors to be required to divest from China.
The report even states that in the most sensitive sectors, targeted decoupling may be necessary regardless of short-, medium-, or long-term financial costs.
That is a remarkable change when compared with Reagan-era Heritage.
The old logic was approximately:
government planners cannot allocate capital better than markets.
The new security logic became:
markets may allocate capital efficiently but still create unacceptable strategic dependence on an adversarial state.
Therefore:
national security can override market efficiency.
This is not merely a tactical modification.
It is a change in the hierarchy of Heritage principles.
X. Tariffs illustrate both continuity and change
Heritage did not suddenly embrace universal protectionism.
Its 2023 China strategy expressly warned that tariffs are a double-edged instrument and continued to support freer trade with allies. It argued that tariffs targeting allies should be reduced or eliminated as part of building a coalition against China.
But the same report explicitly accepted targeted tariffs against China for national-security purposes and unfair trade practices and recommended being less reluctant to employ them in those circumstances.
This is important.
Heritage circa 2018
Trump tariffs generally harmful.
Heritage circa 2023
Tariffs remain economically costly but can be legitimate strategic instruments against China.
So:
Heritage had not become fully protectionist by 2024, but free trade was no longer an overriding principle.
National security had moved above it.
XI. The Reagan economic synthesis is therefore starting to break
This is perhaps the clearest ideological shift we have found since 1973.
The Reagan-era hierarchy was roughly:
free markets first, except for conventional national-defense requirements.
The emerging Heritage hierarchy was:
national security and national resilience can justify significant restrictions on otherwise free market activity.
This includes:
capital flows, supply chains, technology transfers, corporate investment, trade, land purchases, and industrial location.
Heritage still calls this targeted, rather than comprehensive, economic planning. Its China report explicitly insists that targeted decoupling is a defensive instrument, not an entire economic strategy.
That qualification is important.
But the boundary of legitimate government intervention has unquestionably moved.
XII. Heritage formally declares a "New Cold War" with China
The title Winning the New Cold War itself tells us how thoroughly Heritage's perception of China had changed.
The report describes China as the central systemic strategic challenge and proposes coordinated action across:
military policy, trade, technology, finance, diplomacy, education, research, human rights, alliances, borders, energy, and supply chains.
This is reminiscent of Heritage's 1980s posture toward the Soviet Union.
But there is a major difference:
The United States had relatively little economic integration with the Soviet Union.
China was deeply embedded in American production, investment, technology, and consumer supply chains.
Therefore confronting China necessarily meant Heritage confronting questions about market freedom itself.
XIII. Abortion: a fifty-year Heritage judicial project achieves its objective
The Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on June 24, 2022, overruling Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Heritage strongly celebrated the decision, arguing that abortion policy had been returned to elected representatives rather than being dictated by federal constitutional doctrine.
This is one of the clearest examples of Heritage's multi-decade strategy succeeding.
The chain extends across generations:
1980s
promote originalism
↓
Reagan through Bush
develop conservative judicial network
↓
Trump I
Gorsuch + Kavanaugh + Barrett
↓
2022
Dobbs overturns Roe.
Whatever one's view of abortion policy, this is a remarkably durable case of ideological institution-building eventually producing legal consequences.
XIV. But Dobbs creates another federalism test
Heritage initially emphasized that Dobbs returned abortion questions to the people and their elected representatives.
One possible interpretation is:
abortion should now be primarily a state matter.
But Heritage subsequently supported federal pro-life legislation as well.
Its policy agenda has advocated national restrictions, while also supporting strong state restrictions.
This creates an important test.
Heritage federalism argument before Dobbs
The Supreme Court improperly nationalized abortion through constitutional law.
Heritage policy after Dobbs
States may restrict abortion—and Congress may also enact federal restrictions where Heritage believes constitutional authority exists.
This is not logically identical to "return abortion to the states."
The more accurate Heritage principle is:
Roe wrongly removed abortion policy from democratic institutions; elected governments at both appropriate state and federal levels may protect unborn life.
That is a more precise description of Heritage's actual position.
XV. Individual liberty versus abortion becomes even clearer
This reinforces one of our oldest findings.
Heritage does not regard abortion primarily as:
an individual's autonomous medical decision.
It treats unborn human life as an independent object of legal protection.
Accordingly, Heritage's conception of limited government permits substantial legal regulation of abortion.
Thus Heritage's "individual freedom" principle remains conditional upon what Heritage believes are the rights of other persons.
Whether one accepts the underlying fetal-rights premise is obviously the contested moral question.
But internally, the position is more coherent than simply saying:
Heritage favors freedom except when it dislikes the behavior.
Its argument depends upon who counts as a rights-bearing individual.
XVI. Family policy becomes increasingly affirmative rather than merely defensive
Earlier Heritage family policy often concentrated on opposing:
abortion, same-sex marriage, welfare incentives believed to discourage marriage, and federal interference with religious institutions.
During this period a broader concept increasingly emerged:
government policy should actively strengthen marriage, parents, children, and family formation.
This represents another movement away from a purely libertarian model.
Rather than simply asking government to stay out of family life, Heritage increasingly asked:
How should tax, education, welfare, and administrative policy be structured to favor healthy family formation?
That development becomes even more pronounced after 2024, but its ideological foundations are clearly visible in Project 2025 and Heritage's broader domestic-policy work.
XVII. Education becomes a major culture-and-power question
Heritage's longstanding school-choice agenda remained intact.
But the policy justification widened.
Education was no longer merely discussed in terms of:
competition, school performance, vouchers, or decentralization.
It increasingly became a struggle over:
parental authority, race and CRT, sexuality and gender, DEI, curriculum, religious freedom, and whether schools were transmitting progressive political values.
Heritage's work attacking critical-theory and DEI initiatives, including in major philanthropic and educational institutions, explicitly framed these institutions as vehicles for ideological transformation.
Thus "parental rights" increasingly became both:
a liberty argument
and
a cultural-power argument.
XVIII. This changes Heritage's conception of civil society
Classical conservative theory often treats civil society as a buffer against government:
families
churches
businesses
universities
charities
voluntary associations.
But what happens if Heritage concludes that many of those institutions themselves have been captured by ideological adversaries?
By the early 2020s, Heritage increasingly argued exactly that about:
universities, corporations, philanthropic foundations, professional institutions, financial firms, and media organizations.
That creates a fundamental conservative dilemma:
If civil society itself becomes hostile to conservative values, should conservative government remain neutral toward it?
The emerging Heritage answer was increasingly:
not always.
That may be an even deeper ideological shift than tariffs.
XIX. Project 2025 begins
The Heritage-led 2025 Presidential Transition Project, subsequently known as Project 2025, was organized during the Biden administration to prepare the next conservative presidency.
Heritage publicly described it in January 2023 as laying the groundwork for a future conservative White House.
By May 2023 the coalition had already grown to 60 partner organizations.
The project subsequently expanded further.
Most important, Project 2025 was not simply a book.
It consisted of four interlocking components.
XX. Pillar I: Mandate for Leadership
The first pillar was the roughly 900-page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.
Heritage says more than 350 conservative contributors participated in developing its policy recommendations across federal agencies.
The introduction explicitly connects the project to Heritage's original 1980 Mandate for Leadership.
The continuity is intentional.
Project 2025 describes the 1980 Heritage document as placing the conservative movement and Reagan on the same governing page, and presents the new project as an expanded version of that strategy.
Thus:
Project 2025 was not an unprecedented invention. It was the mature form of a governing technology Heritage had been refining for more than forty years.
XXI. Pillar II: personnel database
This is where Project 2025 becomes considerably more ambitious than a conventional think-tank program.
The project created a database through which prospective conservative appointees could build professional profiles.
Coalition organizations could then review and recommend candidates, with the resulting information made available to the eventual president-elect's transition operation.
This directly addressed one of the lessons Heritage learned during Trump I:
a president cannot implement policy without personnel committed to implementing it.
Policy and staffing were therefore intentionally integrated.
XXII. Pillar III: Presidential Administration Academy
Project 2025 also established a training program for prospective administration officials.
The Presidential Administration Academy was intended to prepare people before they entered government.
This represents another substantial evolution.
Earlier Heritage:
find conservative experts.
Project 2025:
find them, screen them, train them, and prepare them to act immediately.
That is governing infrastructure rather than conventional policy research.
XXIII. Pillar IV: implementation planning
The fourth element focused on implementation.
The basic Project 2025 premise was that political appointees entering government needed not merely general ideological commitments but practical knowledge about:
legal authorities, agency structure, regulatory procedures, staffing, budgeting, and first-day executive action.
Heritage explicitly argued that waiting until after an election to begin such planning is too late.
Thus Project 2025 integrated:
ideas
people
training
implementation.
That is the most complete version yet of the Heritage operating model we have been tracing since 1973.
XXIV. Project 2025's objective: dismantle the administrative state
Project 2025 used unusually direct language about its ultimate institutional target.
Heritage described the project as preparing conservatives to "dismantle the administrative state" and return governmental power to democratically accountable institutions.
Again this is much more sweeping than Reagan-era deregulation.
Reagan-era objective
Reduce regulation.
1990s objective
Reduce agencies and federal programs.
Obama-era objective
Challenge administrative-state constitutionality.
Project 2025 objective
Build the personnel and executive machinery necessary to restructure it.
This is a forty-year progression.
XXV. Does Project 2025 mean a stronger president?
Yes—but the precise claim matters.
Project 2025 broadly seeks much stronger presidential direction over the executive branch.
Reuters described its proposals in 2024 as involving extensive changes to federal government and substantially stronger presidential control.
Heritage's own conceptual argument is that executive power already constitutionally belongs to the president and that administrative agencies have accumulated policymaking autonomy that undermines democratic accountability.
So Heritage sees the change as:
restoring legitimate presidential authority,
not:
inventing new presidential authority.
Critics see much of the same program as:
concentrating excessive power in the presidency and weakening institutional checks.
Both interpretations should appear in our eventual master treatment.
XXVI. The executive-power symmetry test becomes harder
Recall the question we established during Obama:
Would Heritage tolerate comparable presidential authority when exercised by a Democratic president?
Project 2025 sharpens that test considerably.
Heritage's defense is logically coherent when its recommendation is merely:
the president controls constitutionally subordinate executive personnel.
But difficulties arise wherever the proposed presidency could:
stretch ambiguous statutes, use enforcement discretion strategically, reorganize government without new legislation, circumvent resistant institutional actors, or use broad existing legal powers to achieve policy outcomes Congress has not newly enacted.
Those are precisely the types of executive behavior Heritage criticized during the Obama years.
Therefore I would change our previous classification from:
"probably coherent executive theory"
to:
"coherent in principle, but increasingly vulnerable to a symmetry problem in application."
That distinction is important.
XXVII. Civil-service reform is central to this problem
Project 2025's personnel focus reflects Heritage's belief that an elected president should be able to control officials who exercise significant executive authority.
The project sought greater political accountability within government and contemplated significant changes in federal personnel management.
Supporters argue:
unelected bureaucrats should not be permitted to frustrate lawful policy chosen by an elected president.
Critics argue:
career civil-service protections exist precisely to prevent government administration from becoming a partisan patronage system.
Both concerns are legitimate institutional questions.
The crucial point for our investigation is:
Heritage now viewed control of the bureaucracy itself as a policy objective.
That is qualitatively different from merely wanting fewer bureaucrats.
XXVIII. Project 2025 and the Republican Party
Project 2025 was formally designed for the next conservative president, not exclusively for Donald Trump.
Its own introduction says the effort exists to support the next conservative president "whoever he or she may be."
That distinction is important.
During the Republican primary, Heritage's infrastructure theoretically could have served:
Trump, Ron DeSantis, or another conservative Republican nominee.
Reuters reported, for example, considerable Heritage policy interaction with the DeSantis operation during 2023.
Thus:
Project 2025 was fundamentally movement-aligned rather than originally candidate-specific.
That makes its relationship with Trump more complicated than the shorthand "Trump's Project 2025."
XXIX. But Trump's ecosystem was deeply represented
At the same time, numerous Project 2025 participants had worked in Trump's first administration.
That created substantial overlap between:
Trump I personnel
and
Project 2025 policy planning.
Reuters noted these extensive connections when Trump attempted to distance himself from the project during the 2024 campaign.
So two propositions can simultaneously be true:
Trump did not author or formally control Project 2025. Project 2025 contained extensive participation from people connected with Trump's previous administration and was clearly designed to influence whichever conservative administration took office.
That is the balanced historical characterization.
XXX. 2024: Project 2025 becomes politically controversial
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats increasingly presented Project 2025 as a blueprint for a second Trump administration.
Trump publicly distanced himself from it and said he disagreed with some proposals. Reuters documented both Trump's disavowal and the extensive connections between the project and former Trump officials.
The political controversy grew large enough that Project 2025 director Paul Dans stepped down during the summer of 2024 after tensions with Trump's campaign.
That episode demonstrates another important point:
Heritage was close to the Trump political coalition, but it was not organizationally controlled by Trump's campaign.
Indeed, the organizations could come into conflict when Heritage's policy operation became politically inconvenient.
XXXI. This is perhaps the strongest evidence yet about Heritage's "nonpartisan" identity
By now the legal and operational distinction we have tracked since the 1980s is exceptionally sharp.
Heritage still states that it does not endorse candidates and describes candidate policy briefings as nonpartisan and open to all.
Legally and formally, that matters.
Operationally, however, Project 2025 explicitly existed to prepare the next conservative presidential administration.
It sought to:
develop its governing policies, recruit its personnel, train those personnel, and prepare them for immediate implementation.
This does not automatically establish unlawful partisan campaign activity.
But descriptively:
"nonpartisan" cannot reasonably be understood to mean ideologically neutral or equally integrated with both major parties.
Heritage was unmistakably building governing infrastructure for the conservative political coalition.
XXXII. The strongest traditional Heritage principles remain intact
Despite these transformations, several Heritage positions show remarkable continuity.
Deregulation
Still central.
Lower taxes
Still central.
Strong defense
Still central.
Originalist judiciary
Still central.
Opposition to abortion
Stronger than ever after Dobbs.
School choice
Still central.
Welfare/work orientation
Still central.
Religious liberty
Still central.
Opposition to administrative autonomy
Much stronger.
So describing 2021–2024 as Heritage simply abandoning Reagan conservatism would be too strong.
The change is better understood as reordering the priorities within conservatism.
XXXIII. What moved upward in Heritage's hierarchy?
By 2024 these objectives increasingly outranked strict market libertarianism:
National sovereignty
China competition
Border control
Family formation
Cultural conservatism
Parental authority
Institutional control
Anti-ESG/anti-DEI policy
Administrative-state dismantling
Presidential command of the executive branch
Market economics remained important—but no longer always dispositive.
That is a major change.
XXXIV. What happened to individual freedom?
The answer becomes increasingly conditional.
Heritage still strongly defended individual liberty in areas including:
speech, religion, property, economic activity, parental authority, firearms, and resistance to administrative regulation.
But it simultaneously supported substantial government authority concerning:
abortion, immigration, strategic investment, Chinese technology, corporate fiduciary behavior, education policy, election procedures, and potentially other cultural questions.
This reinforces our long-running conclusion:
"Individual freedom" in Heritage philosophy means freedom within an underlying moral, constitutional, and national order—not autonomous individual choice as an overriding principle.
That distinction is now unmistakable.
XXXV. Year-by-year forensic ledger, 2021–2024 Year Major Heritage objective/action Political/institutional result Assessment 2021 Oppose Biden regulatory agenda; election-law work; immigration/border policy; administrative-state strategy; Roberts assumes leadership Heritage expands state-level election and conservative movement activity Leadership and strategic transition begins 2022 Challenge Biden executive actions; oppose ESG/DEI; prepare future governing infrastructure; celebrate Dobbs Dobbs overturns Roe; abortion policy returns to elected institutions; Project 2025 development accelerates Major judicial objective achieved; post-Reagan ideological transition intensifies 2023 Launch Project 2025 publicly; China "New Cold War" strategy; personnel recruitment; administrative-state restructuring Coalition grows; Mandate for Leadership released; candidate and movement policy networks engage Major expansion from policy advocacy into pre-government staffing and implementation infrastructure 2024 Project 2025 training/transition preparation; conservative governing blueprint; China, immigration, family and administrative-state agenda Project becomes national campaign issue; Trump distances himself; Project leadership changes; Trump wins election in November Heritage governing infrastructure becomes central national political issue
Project 2025's own materials and Heritage's institutional reports support the basic trajectory.
XXXVI. Claim-versus-conduct scorecard, 2021–2024 Heritage principle Actual conduct Assessment Free enterprise Continued deregulation/tax agenda Still high Free trade Greater acceptance of China-specific tariffs, investment restrictions and strategic decoupling Major qualification/evolution Government neutrality toward business Anti-ESG/DEI governmental policies Increasing tension Limited government Administrative-state reduction remains central High in some areas, but increasingly selective Individual freedom Strong speech/religion/property/parental-rights agenda Highly selective when abortion, immigration and cultural policy are involved Federalism State-level election, abortion and education policy emphasized High but not absolute; Heritage also favors federal action in some areas Traditional family Increasingly affirmative family-policy agenda Very high and expanding Pro-life policy Dobbs, state restrictions, federal proposals Extremely high correspondence Strong national defense China increasingly identified as central strategic adversary Extremely high Economic freedom Subordinated in some China-sensitive sectors to national security Important ideological evolution Administrative-state opposition Project 2025 designed to restructure federal executive administration Extremely high Presidential accountability/control Personnel database, training and executive staffing strategy Extremely high Separation of powers Continues as stated principle Potential tension with aggressive presidential implementation strategy Election integrity Major state-level policy and advocacy program High correspondence with stated objective; effects must be independently evaluated Research/education Continues extensive scholarship Still real but increasingly only one component of institutional activity Political implementation Project 2025 integrates policy, personnel, coalition, training and implementation Unprecedented scale Nonpartisanship Legally maintains non-endorsement posture while explicitly preparing a conservative administration Legal distinction remains; operational ideological alignment could hardly be stronger XXXVII. The most important ideological finding: national conservatism begins displacing libertarian economics
This is the most consequential change we have found since Heritage's founding.
During the Reagan period, when economic freedom and national policy conflicted, Heritage generally presumed markets should prevail.
By 2023 Heritage could recommend that certain American companies be compelled to divest from China where national security required it.
That tells us the hierarchy has changed.
Earlier:
Markets first, with narrow security exceptions.
Emerging Heritage:
Markets are desirable instruments of prosperity, but national sovereignty, security and social order may override market outcomes.
That is much closer to national conservatism than classical Reaganite economic libertarianism.
It does not eliminate free enterprise.
It subordinates it to higher-order political goals.
XXXVIII. The second major change: conservative government is no longer conceived merely as restrained government
This may be still more important.
Earlier Heritage often asked:
What should government stop doing?
Project 2025 increasingly asks both:
What should government stop doing?
and:
What must a conservative government actively do?
Those active objectives include:
securing borders, confronting China, protecting unborn life, promoting family stability, restraining progressive institutional power, changing education policy, protecting religious exercise, dismantling administrative structures, and enforcing presidential control of the executive branch.
Thus the ideal is increasingly not merely:
small government.
It is:
a government powerful enough to perform conservative-approved purposes and prevented from performing progressive-approved ones.
That is a much more accurate description of the operational philosophy by 2024.
XXXIX. The third major change: personnel becomes as important as policy
This is the central lesson connecting Trump I to Project 2025.
Heritage concluded that conservative administrations had repeatedly failed because they arrived in Washington with:
inadequate staffing, insufficient preparation, uncertainty about legal authority, slow appointment processes, and career institutions capable of slowing presidential objectives.
Project 2025 therefore treats personnel as policy.
Its personnel database and training academy are not incidental accessories to the Mandate.
They may actually be more historically significant than the book itself.
A policy document can sit unread.
A trained official with:
a specific agency assignment, a legal strategy, a policy objective, and presidential backing
can actually change government.
Heritage understood that distinction by 2023 with remarkable clarity.
XL. Project 2025 is therefore both continuity and transformation
We can now answer a question that appeared much earlier in our research.
Is Project 2025 unprecedented?
No.
Its ancestry clearly runs through:
1980 Mandate for Leadership
→ Reagan transition
→ subsequent Mandates
→ Bush transition planning
→ Heritage Action
→ anti-administrative-state scholarship
→ Trump I staffing experience
→ Project 2025.
Heritage itself explicitly draws the connection to the 1980 Reagan project.
Is Project 2025 merely the same old Heritage program?
Also no.
The scale is different.
It combines:
policy + coalition + personnel + vetting + training + legal strategy + administrative planning + rapid implementation.
That integration is the genuine innovation.
XLI. Our longitudinal development now looks like this Period Heritage's dominant institutional role 1973–1976 Alternative conservative research institution 1977–1980 Policy network + governing blueprint 1981–1988 Reagan policy implementation infrastructure 1989–1992 Ideological pressure on Republican government 1993–2000 Opposition infrastructure + congressional policy network 2001–2008 Governing partner + national-security state advocate 2009–2010 Obama opposition 2010–2016 Heritage Action + grassroots congressional enforcement 2017–2020 Trump implementation + lessons about administrative resistance 2021–2022 Ideological reassessment under Roberts 2023–2024 Full-spectrum conservative governing infrastructure through Project 2025 XLII. And the ideological evolution looks different
We can summarize Heritage's philosophical trajectory approximately as follows.
1970s–1980s
Fusionist conservatism
Free markets Anti-communism Limited government Traditional values Strong defense
1990s–2000s
Institutionalized Reagan conservatism
Free trade Tax cuts Welfare reform Originalism Defense Family values
2009–2016
Anti-administrative-state conservatism
Tea Party fiscalism Obamacare repeal Administrative-state critique Religious liberty Stronger immigration enforcement
2017–2020
Trump-compatible but still substantially Reaganite Heritage
Deregulation Taxes Judges Borders China hawkishness
but still:
anti-tariff and free-trade oriented
2021–2024
Emerging national-conservative Heritage
Markets remain important,
but increasingly subordinate where Heritage perceives conflicts involving:
China
national sovereignty
family
culture
institutional power
border security
political control of administration.
That is a genuine ideological evolution, not merely a change in communications style.
XLIII. The most important contradiction in 2021–2024
Earlier I thought the ultimate contradiction would be:
limited government versus strong presidential power.
I now think the accumulated record suggests something more fundamental.
The central tension is:
Is Heritage's highest principle individual liberty—or is it preservation of a particular conception of constitutional, national, and moral order?
The historical evidence increasingly favors the second.
When those objectives coincide, Heritage strongly champions individual freedom.
When they conflict, Heritage has repeatedly accepted restrictions on:
abortion, immigration, strategic investment, certain corporate practices, economic relations with China, and other activities.
That suggests individual liberty is important but not supreme within Heritage's actual hierarchy of values.
XLIV. A more accurate statement of Heritage's actual goals by 2024
After following its actions from 1973 through 2024, I think we can now improve substantially upon Heritage's familiar slogan.
The public formulation remains broadly:
free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and strong national defense.
But its actual operational philosophy by 2024 is better described as:
A constitutionally constrained but strongly directed national government; presidential control of the executive branch; a reduced regulatory and welfare state; lower taxes and generally market-oriented economics; strong borders, military and national sovereignty; strategic government intervention against hostile foreign powers; originalist courts; protection and promotion of traditional family and religious institutions; opposition to progressive institutional power; and active preparation of personnel and administrative machinery capable of implementing those objectives rapidly.
That formulation fits the evidence considerably better than the phrase "small government."
The most consequential finding of the entire 1973–2024 investigation
There is a remarkable historical irony here.
Heritage was founded partly because conservatives believed government had become too powerful.
Over fifty years, Heritage learned that changing government required acquiring increasingly sophisticated forms of political and institutional power itself.
The progression was:
research the government
→ influence the government
→ write the government's agenda
→ supply people to government
→ pressure legislators
→ select and promote judicial philosophies and candidates
→ train future officials
→ prepare agency-specific implementation strategies
→ restructure the machinery through which government exercises power.
Project 2025 is the culmination of that progression.
So the central historical story may ultimately be less:
Heritage abandoned limited government
than:
Heritage gradually concluded that achieving limited government—and increasingly its cultural, national and moral objectives—required first acquiring much greater control over the machinery of government.
That creates the central paradox we should carry into the final period:
How much governmental power can an organization accumulate or advocate using in order to create what it calls limited government before the means begin contradicting the end?
The logical next period is 2025–2026, and it is uniquely valuable because Project 2025 ceases to be merely a proposal. We can compare its individual recommendations against actions actually taken during Trump's second administration—recommendation → executive order/law/regulation/personnel action → implementation status → consistency with Heritage's stated principles. That would allow us to replace Heritage's own success claims with an independently constructed Project 2025 implementation ledger.
Please continue with 2025 to the present. Heritage Foundation: Stated Goals vs. Actual Actions, 2025–Present
As of August 15, 2026, we can finally test Heritage under conditions that Project 2025 was specifically designed for: a conservative president entering office with a prebuilt policy program, trained personnel, implementation plans, and substantial overlap between Heritage's network and the incoming administration.
The result is clearer than in any previous period.
Project 2025 has moved from a proposed governing blueprint to substantial real-world implementation.
An independent tracker run by the Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact—organizations openly critical of Project 2025—counted 283 of 532 tracked domestic executive-policy recommendations, or 53%, as initiated or completed by February 2026. That percentage should not be treated as ideologically neutral measurement, but its item-by-item methodology gives us an outside check on Heritage's own claims. Other news organizations independently found extensive correspondence between Project 2025 and administration actions.
Heritage's own 2025 annual report is even more revealing. It no longer speaks cautiously about whether Project 2025 influenced Trump. Heritage says Trump appointed Project 2025 chapter author Russ Vought to lead OMB and then carried out numerous Mandate recommendations; it identifies specific executive orders, legislation, personnel placements, and agency actions as Heritage victories.
That allows us to move beyond speculation.
I. The Trump–Project 2025 relationship becomes operational
During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025.
Once in office, however, the policy overlap became extensive.
Reuters found only weeks into the administration that Trump had not merely adopted some Project 2025 ideas but in several areas went farther than Project 2025 itself had proposed. Examples included foreign aid, border-wall construction, and transgender sports policy.
By October 2025, the political distancing had largely disappeared. AP reported Trump openly referring to Russ Vought as being of "Project 2025 fame" while discussing additional agency cuts.
Heritage itself now makes the relationship explicit. Its annual report says:
Vought authored the relevant Mandate chapter; Trump appointed him OMB director; the administration then carried out "many" of that chapter's recommendations; lawmakers and administration officials repeatedly sought Heritage guidance during 2025.
So the appropriate historical classification is no longer:
possible Project 2025 influence.
It is:
substantial documented policy and personnel correspondence, while the Trump administration retains its own independent agenda and sometimes goes beyond or against Heritage recommendations.
II. The personnel strategy succeeds on a scale Heritage had never achieved before
This may be Project 2025's most important accomplishment.
Heritage's 2025 annual report says its "people pipeline" recruits, trains, and places conservatives throughout government and the broader movement. Most strikingly, Heritage reports that by the end of 2025 it had nearly 200 staff and training-program alumni serving in the Trump administration, along with another 185 alumni on Capitol Hill.
That vindicates Edwin Feulner's old maxim:
"People are policy."
Project 2025 had deliberately combined:
policy
personnel
training
implementation planning.
By 2025, all four components were operating.
The difference from 1981 is enormous.
Under Reagan, Heritage supplied a book and sympathetic experts.
Under Trump II, Heritage had helped develop an entire personnel-production system.
Assessment
Extraordinarily high correspondence between stated Project 2025 strategy and actual organizational conduct.
III. Schedule F becomes real
This is probably the clearest Project 2025 implementation case.
Project 2025 sought much greater presidential authority over policy-influencing federal employees.
On his first day back in office, Trump reinstated the first-term Schedule F concept through an order creating what became Schedule Policy/Career. The policy places certain policy-influencing career positions into an excepted-service category with fewer removal protections.
By June 2026, the administration formally implemented the system. The White House said approximately 8,000 senior policy-influencing career positions were being moved into Schedule Policy/Career.
Heritage's annual report lists this explicitly among its Project 2025 victories, describing the policy as giving the president greater control over the bureaucracy.
The chain is unusually clean:
Project 2025 proposal
→ reduce protections for policy-influencing officials
→ Trump executive order
→ administrative rulemaking
→ roughly 8,000 positions affected.
Assessment
Direct implementation.
IV. This finally resolves the presidential-power question
For years we have been asking whether Heritage's support for limited government is compatible with greatly strengthened presidential authority.
The 2025–2026 answer is now unmistakable.
Heritage's preferred model is not a weak executive branch.
It is:
a strongly presidential executive branch governing a narrower set of functions, with substantially less independence for career bureaucracies and independent agencies.
Heritage's annual report explicitly celebrates:
Schedule F, restrictions on federal unions, a 10-for-1 regulatory-elimination rule, presidential control over independent agencies, and removal of DEI and environmental-justice policies from federal institutions.
Thus:
administrative state ↓
while
presidential control ↑
These are simultaneous objectives.
That should now be treated as a defining Heritage principle rather than an apparent anomaly.
V. The executive-power symmetry problem becomes much more serious
Our earlier treatment gave Heritage considerable benefit of the doubt.
Heritage's theoretical distinction was:
Obama improperly made law through executive action
while
Trump may legitimately control executive officials carrying out law.
That distinction remains constitutionally meaningful.
But Trump II has pushed presidential claims much farther.
Early administration actions included attempts to:
freeze congressionally appropriated funds, end birthright citizenship by executive order, dismantle agencies, redirect foreign assistance, and restructure large portions of government without waiting for new legislation.
Courts blocked or questioned several early initiatives, and even conservative legal scholars disagreed over some of the asserted authorities. Reuters described substantial division within the conservative legal movement about whether the administration's early unilateral actions were lawful.
The January 2025 federal grant freeze is particularly relevant because AP directly connected it with a Project 2025 theory favoring much broader presidential control over spending.
Therefore I would now move the executive-power score from:
"potential contradiction"
to:
"significant unresolved contradiction between Heritage's Obama-era separation-of-powers rhetoric and the breadth of executive power it is willing to support in a conservative administration."
Not every Trump executive action originated at Heritage.
But the philosophical boundary Heritage once emphasized has become considerably less clear in practice.
VI. The Department of Education: a forty-year objective reaches the implementation stage
Heritage had advocated reducing or eliminating the federal Department of Education since the Reagan era.
Trump signed an executive order on March 20, 2025 directing the Education secretary to take all legally permissible steps toward closing the department and returning authority to states and local communities.
Heritage's annual report directly claims this as the fruit of its long campaign and says Education Department officials were implementing policies aligned with Heritage's 2019 blueprint for closing the agency. Heritage also notes that Lindsey Burke, who directed Heritage's education policy center and authored that blueprint, became deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the department itself.
This is almost a textbook example of the Heritage model:
research
→ proposal
→ personnel
→ executive action
→ administrative implementation.
However, the department cannot simply be abolished by presidential decree because Congress created it by statute.
So our forensic classification should be:
Objective: abolish Department of Education.
Status: partially implemented / executive dismantling underway; statutory abolition requires Congress.
That distinction is essential.
VII. Education also demonstrates that Heritage now wants government to regulate cultural content
This is where the old limited-government formulation becomes more difficult.
The Trump administration simultaneously ordered federal efforts against what it calls "radical indoctrination" in schools and revived the 1776 Commission.
Heritage strongly supports policies involving:
parental rights, sex and gender policy, DEI restrictions, school choice, patriotic education, and reform of university accreditation.
Thus Heritage's modern education position is no longer merely:
Washington should leave education alone.
It is closer to:
reduce Washington's routine administrative control while using legitimate federal leverage to prevent policies Heritage regards as discriminatory, ideological, or hostile to parental and constitutional rights.
That is a substantial difference.
The federal education bureaucracy may become smaller while federal political direction over what counts as permissible use of federal funds becomes more ideologically explicit.
VIII. DEI: enormous correspondence
One of the administration's first major initiatives was dismantling federal DEI policies.
On January 21, 2025, Trump revoked Executive Order 11246's affirmative-action framework for federal contractors and directed a broad shift toward what the administration calls merit-based opportunity.
Heritage had made opposition to DEI a central institutional priority long before inauguration.
Heritage's annual report explicitly claims the administration's removal of DEI from federal agencies as a Project 2025-aligned accomplishment.
Heritage principle
Equal treatment under law rather than race-conscious government.
Heritage action
Develop anti-DEI policy and administrative strategy.
Government action
Eliminate or restructure federal DEI programs and affirmative-action mechanisms.
Assessment
Very high correspondence.
But here again, "limited government" does not fully describe what is occurring.
Federal authority is also being used to influence contractors, universities, grant recipients, and other institutions.
So the practical philosophy is increasingly:
government should not impose progressive identity policy—and may use government power to prevent federally connected institutions from doing so.
IX. Gender policy: social conservatism becomes federal administrative policy
Trump issued an executive order in January 2025 defining sex in federal policy as male or female and distinguishing sex from gender identity.
Heritage's annual report directly connects the administration's action with Heritage's own Defining Sex Act model legislation, noting that four states also enacted versions during 2025.
The administration also adopted policies concerning transgender participation in women's sports; Reuters concluded that Trump's sports order actually went beyond what Project 2025 itself had recommended.
This gives us one of the strongest examples of the post-Reagan ideological evolution.
The Heritage position is no longer primarily:
get government out of cultural disputes.
It is:
government law should affirm Heritage's understanding of biological sex and prevent contrary identity-based rules in areas within federal authority.
Assessment
Extremely high correspondence with traditional-values goals, but increasingly difficult to reconcile with a broad libertarian conception of individual autonomy.
X. Abortion: high implementation, but Project 2025's maximum program has not been adopted
The administration quickly:
rescinded two Biden abortion-related executive orders, reinstated the Mexico City Policy restricting foreign-aid funding involving abortion, and ended the Pentagon's abortion-travel policy.
Heritage expressly identifies those as recommendations flowing from its latest Mandate for Leadership.
But an important limit remains.
Project 2025 contained more aggressive abortion proposals, including policies affecting mifepristone.
Trump did not initially adopt some of those recommendations. Reuters specifically identified mifepristone restrictions as one of the Project 2025 proposals the administration had not embraced during its early implementation period.
So:
Implemented
Foreign-aid restrictions Executive reversals Pentagon policy changes Various funding restrictions
Not fully implemented
The entire Project 2025 abortion agenda.
Assessment
High but incomplete implementation.
This is another reason we should not describe Project 2025 as though Trump simply followed every page.
XI. Immigration: perhaps the strongest Heritage–Trump convergence
Heritage's transformation on immigration from the Bush era is now complete.
Its 2025 annual report says Heritage experts played a major role in immigration provisions of the year's reconciliation legislation, including:
substantially increased ICE resources, an outbound remittance tax, and an asylum fee.
Heritage also says its experts worked with the administration on naturalization requirements and changes affecting unaccompanied migrant children. At the state level it reports that nine states enacted 13 Heritage-supported immigration measures.
Trump also moved rapidly through executive authority on:
border enforcement, asylum, military involvement at the border, and deportation policy.
Reuters found that in some respects Trump's border actions went beyond Project 2025, such as declaring an emergency and directly ordering military and DHS resources toward wall construction rather than waiting for Congress to fund the wall as the Mandate proposed.
Assessment
Extremely high correspondence.
But the longitudinal change is striking:
2005 Heritage: comprehensive reform involving legal channels and enforcement.
2013 Heritage: enforcement first.
2025 Heritage: reduction of immigration itself becomes an explicit policy objective.
Heritage's annual report even titles its section:
"Secure Our Border & Reduce Immigration."
That is a genuine ideological development.
XII. Government downsizing: Heritage finally gets more of what it sought
Previous Republican administrations repeatedly failed to reduce the federal bureaucracy substantially.
Trump II has gone much farther.
Heritage says DOGE implemented cuts in more than 30 areas Heritage had previously identified as wasteful and that more than 10 executive orders advanced Heritage objectives involving regulation, spending, and inflation.
Trump also signed a March 2025 order directing further reduction of federal bureaucratic entities the administration considered unnecessary.
Independent reporting indicates the federal workforce subsequently contracted substantially. Reuters reported in August 2025 that more than 200,000 federal employees had left government service through buyouts, firings, and layoffs, though that report relied partly on estimates from the Partnership for Public Service and should not be treated as a final official workforce count.
This means the Heritage objective has finally moved from:
proposed reduction
to
large-scale administrative contraction.
Assessment
Very high implementation correspondence.
XIII. But personnel targeting creates a new civil-liberties problem
The method used to identify supposedly hostile officials raises a different issue.
Reuters documented the American Accountability Foundation's publication of lists identifying federal employees it accused of advancing liberal policies and reported that Heritage had funded AAF with $100,000 for a database project focused on Biden-era immigration officials. AAF had also been a Project 2025 partner.
The reported effects included employees experiencing harassment and fearing dismissal, although Reuters could not establish that the administration had actually based specific personnel decisions on these lists.
This introduces a new forensic category:
administrative accountability versus ideological loyalty testing.
Heritage's theory is that politically powerful bureaucrats should not frustrate elected policy.
The counterargument is that career officials need protection from partisan retaliation precisely so that government remains professionally rather than personally administered.
This is now a much sharper issue than it was in Project 2025's abstract personnel chapter.
XIV. USAID shows Trump sometimes goes farther than Heritage
Project 2025 recommended major reductions and restructuring of U.S. foreign assistance.
Trump's administration moved toward dismantling USAID far more aggressively.
Reuters specifically identified USAID as an instance where Trump exceeded Project 2025: the Mandate contemplated scaling back foreign assistance, while the administration moved toward dismantling the agency itself.
This is analytically important.
It proves:
Policy overlap does not establish that Project 2025 caused every Trump action.
Sometimes both Heritage and Trump were traveling in the same direction, while Trump independently moved farther.
Our master ledger should therefore include:
Project 2025 recommendation
Trump action
relationship: identical / similar / stronger / weaker / contrary / unrelated.
That will prevent us from attributing too much causation to Heritage.
XV. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: another near-direct implementation case
Project 2025 called for eliminating the CFPB.
After becoming OMB director, Russ Vought was also named acting CFPB director in February 2025 and ordered employees to stop much of their work. Reuters explicitly connected this action to Project 2025's call for eliminating the agency.
This is extremely revealing institutionally:
Project 2025 author
→ administration position
→ authority over targeted agency
→ agency operations halted or reduced.
Again:
People are policy.
The personnel pipeline is not ancillary to Heritage influence.
It is one of its principal mechanisms.
XVI. Regulation: Heritage receives nearly everything it wanted
Trump dramatically strengthened his first-term regulatory model.
Heritage's annual report highlights a 10-for-1 requirement—eliminate ten regulations for each new one—as a major Heritage-aligned action.
The administration also pursued:
fossil-fuel expansion, reduced climate regulation, permitting reform, reversal of Biden-era energy policy, and weakened or eliminated environmental-justice programs.
Heritage says several energy executive orders closely matched its recommendations and that provisions of the 2025 reconciliation law reflected Heritage positions on green-energy tax credits and permitting.
Assessment
Extremely high correspondence.
This is essentially the mature form of Heritage's 1970s deregulatory agenda.
XVII. Climate policy: Heritage moves from opposing regulation to changing the federal scientific infrastructure
This is another important escalation.
Heritage had long questioned extensive climate regulation.
Project 2025 also targeted aspects of the federal scientific and climate-policy machinery.
In 2025, the administration dismissed nearly 400 contributors working on the next National Climate Assessment. Reuters reported that Project 2025 had specifically recommended restructuring the assessment process and subjecting contributors to greater scrutiny.
Heritage's own annual report says it spent three years building a case for reversing EPA's greenhouse-gas endangerment finding, and that EPA moved during 2025 toward overturning that finding while Heritage submitted formal comments supporting the effort.
Thus Heritage action now includes:
policy research
→ challenge underlying scientific/regulatory framework
→ administration changes process/institutions
→ regulatory rollback.
That goes beyond objecting to individual regulations.
XVIII. The 2025 reconciliation law: Heritage as legislative architect
The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act gives us something we have not seen this clearly since welfare reform.
Heritage's annual report says that before the legislative process it published a list of provisions that "had to be included," including:
Medicaid cuts, pro-growth tax provisions, border-security funding, and deregulation.
Heritage says its staff then conducted dozens of meetings with congressional leadership, committee staff, and individual members, with its government-relations, coalition, and communications teams coordinating around the bill.
That is not merely after-the-fact ideological similarity.
It is a Heritage account of direct legislative engagement during drafting and passage.
Assessment
Strong evidence of direct Heritage policy influence.
XIX. Medicaid finally moves toward the Heritage model
Heritage had advocated restructuring Medicaid for decades.
The 2025 legislation included changes Heritage supported, and Heritage's current policy materials project Medicaid enrollment falling from approximately 73 million to 66 million by 2036 as the reforms take effect.
Heritage presents this as restoring work, eligibility, and fiscal responsibility.
Critics argue that the result is loss of coverage for people who depend upon Medicaid.
For our forensic ledger, those are separate questions.
Heritage stated goal: reduce dependency and federal entitlement growth.
Heritage action: push eligibility and spending reforms.
Government action: legislation changes Medicaid eligibility/spending structure.
Expected measurable result: fewer people enrolled.
Assessment
High correspondence.
This is one of the first periods in which Heritage's entitlement-reduction agenda achieves substantial legislative movement.
XX. Family policy becomes affirmative government policy
Recall the ideological shift we identified in 2021–2024.
Heritage no longer merely wanted government to avoid damaging families.
Its new institutional framework explicitly places "The American Family" first among four Heritage cornerstones and describes the objective as restoring the "natural family" and creating "pro-family prosperity."
The 2025 reconciliation legislation made child-tax-credit provisions permanent and expanded them in ways Heritage says its experts directly helped draft.
By 2026 Heritage was proposing still more affirmative family policy, including special tax-advantaged savings accounts for newly married couples.
This confirms a major philosophical shift.
Older Heritage:
government should generally leave families and markets alone.
New Heritage:
government's tax and social architecture should deliberately strengthen marriage and family formation.
That is a genuine departure from strict libertarian economics.
XXI. Free enterprise has been redefined rather than abandoned
Heritage's 2025 annual report is unusually explicit about its new definition.
Its "Dignity of Work & Future of Free Enterprise" cornerstone says economic freedom should promote not simply output or efficiency but work, family formation, stability, and national flourishing.
That is considerably different from the older laissez-faire formulation.
The market remains important.
But it is increasingly judged by:
whether it strengthens American workers, supports family formation, contributes to national security, and fits Heritage's concept of citizenship.
This is the clearest evidence yet that Heritage has moved toward national conservatism rather than classical libertarian economics.
XXII. Tariffs give us perhaps the most dramatic evidence
During Trump I, Heritage strongly opposed tariffs.
By 2025, its stance had changed substantially.
A February 2025 Heritage commentary defended Trump's tariff strategy against critics and argued that foreign producers could bear significant tariff costs.
By May, Heritage's chief economist argued that Trump's "tariff diplomacy" could work when targeted and tailored, including as leverage over foreign governments, while warning that excessive or poorly designed tariffs could harm investment and business confidence.
In 2026 Heritage still warned that broad tariffs often raise prices for American families and advocated calibrated trade policy rather than blanket protectionism.
So Heritage's current position is approximately:
Tariffs are economically costly, but they can be legitimate strategic instruments in trade negotiations, border policy, industrial strategy, or national security.
Compare this with its earlier view:
Tariffs are taxes and generally harmful interference with free markets.
That is a real ideological shift.
Assessment
Significant departure from historic Heritage free-trade orthodoxy.
XXIII. And Heritage is internally divided on tariffs
Interestingly, the transition is not fully complete.
Heritage has simultaneously published criticism of Trump's tariff structure.
For example, in 2026 Heritage criticized automotive tariffs for perversely penalizing some North American supply chains and argued that domestic tax and regulatory reform was preferable to simply punishing overseas production.
So we should not write:
Heritage now supports tariffs.
The better conclusion is:
Heritage no longer treats tariff opposition as a foundational principle. Its scholars now debate when tariffs are legitimate rather than assuming they are almost always economically mistaken.
That is a profound difference from Reagan-era Heritage.
XXIV. Election policy reaches the Justice Department
Heritage says its election-integrity scholars met with the incoming leadership of DOJ's Civil Rights Division concerning Biden-era litigation challenging state election laws.
According to Heritage's annual report, DOJ subsequently dismissed the pending suits against election measures in Georgia, Virginia, Texas, and elsewhere, and Heritage explicitly identifies those dismissals as implementation of its recommendations.
Heritage also says that since launching its Election Integrity Scorecard in 2021, 29 states have changed laws in ways that improve their score.
This demonstrates another channel of influence:
Heritage develops legal interpretation
→ state policy network adopts model legislation
→ federal administration changes litigation posture.
Again, we should separately investigate whether particular laws improve security, reduce access, both, or neither.
But the influence mechanism is quite clear.
XXV. Heritage's political network is now extraordinarily integrated
The Heritage annual report describes Heritage Action as its "sister organization" and says the two operate through a unified strategy combining:
research, legislative engagement, and grassroots action
so conservative principles are "enacted, not merely debated."
This is a very important self-description.
Earlier we had to infer that Heritage had evolved beyond an ordinary research institution.
By 2025 Heritage itself essentially says so.
Its stated objective is now explicitly:
governing results.
The evolution we have traced since 1973 is therefore confirmed by Heritage's own language.
XXVI. Heritage even enters corporate governance directly
Another fascinating institutional development occurred in 2025.
Heritage transferred control of its endowment portfolio to itself and says it now holds stakes in nearly 600 companies. It filed 26 shareholder proposals during the 2025 proxy season and explicitly describes itself as no longer merely an outside commentator but an active shareholder seeking corporate change.
This reflects its campaign against ESG and DEI.
The tactic is particularly interesting because it uses private property and shareholder rights, rather than regulation alone, to influence corporations.
Thus Heritage's new corporate strategy has two tracks:
government policy
and
direct shareholder activism.
This is quite far from the organization Heritage was in 1973.
XXVII. The historical/cultural sphere becomes an explicit governmental battleground
The Trump administration issued a March 2025 order titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," directing federal institutions toward a more affirmative presentation of national history.
By 2026, this resulted in removal or alteration of exhibits at National Park Service sites involving subjects including slavery and climate change. A federal judge ruled against parts of the effort and ordered exhibits restored; the administration appealed. Reuters documented at least 51 removed exhibits at 37 sites in the court-ordered inventory.
Heritage's own 2025 annual report separately describes a "Heritage Guide to Historic Sites" intended to grade sites according to whether Heritage believes they accurately portray American history and to hold institutions promoting what it calls a "woke agenda" accountable.
This is a significant expansion of Heritage's operational ambitions.
The battlefield now includes:
how the federal government narrates American history itself.
XXVIII. This poses one of the strongest individual-freedom contradictions yet
Heritage's commitment to speech and opposition to progressive ideological control has always been strong.
But the question now becomes:
If ideological control of institutions is objectionable when exercised by progressives, is conservative governmental direction of museums, universities, historical exhibits, or publicly funded cultural institutions fundamentally different?
Heritage's answer would presumably be:
yes, because government institutions should accurately reflect American history and should not use taxpayer resources for ideological activism.
Critics answer:
no, because replacing one politically favored historical narrative with another is itself state ideological control.
This is one of the strongest symmetry tests in the contemporary Heritage program.
It cannot be resolved simply by invoking "limited government."
XXIX. National security remains above economic liberty
Heritage's China transformation has also continued.
Heritage says the administration implemented multiple decoupling policies it had advocated for years. Its annual report describes China as the greatest foreign threat to the United States and continues developing military and economic strategies for a possible Taiwan conflict.
Thus the hierarchy identified in 2023 is now firmly institutionalized:
National security can override ordinary free-market presumptions.
Trade, investment, supply chains, technology, and capital flows are no longer viewed solely as private economic questions.
They are national-strategy questions.
That is one of the largest ideological differences between 1980 Heritage and 2026 Heritage.
XXX. Project 2025 is not a complete explanation for Trump II
This qualification is essential.
Trump has implemented policies that Project 2025:
recommended,
resembled,
did not mention,
and in some cases would have approached differently.
Reuters found numerous examples where Trump went farther than the Mandate.
Trump's broad tariff program also remains more protectionist than much of Heritage's traditional economic analysis, even though Heritage's opposition has softened substantially.
Thus:
Project 2025 should be understood as one major input into Trump II—not as a secret script Trump mechanically follows.
The strongest evidence of Heritage influence exists where we can establish:
a prior Heritage recommendation; a Heritage-associated official; subsequent government action; and Heritage's own contemporaneous account of engagement or implementation.
Schedule F, Education, regulatory policy, personnel, abortion policy, immigration, and elements of the 2025 legislation meet that standard particularly well.
XXXI. Project 2025 implementation score
Using the evidence now available, I would classify the major areas approximately as follows:
Project 2025 / Heritage objective Status by Aug. 2026 Presidential control over policy-influencing civil servants Substantially implemented Schedule F-type personnel system Implemented Greater control of independent agencies Substantially implemented/in progress Large federal workforce reductions Substantially implemented/in progress Eliminate federal DEI structures Substantially implemented Reverse Biden gender-identity policies Substantially implemented Expand immigration enforcement Substantially implemented Increase deportation apparatus/resources Substantially implemented Restrict asylum Substantially implemented/in litigation Border-wall expansion Implementation underway; Trump went beyond P2025 approach Close Department of Education Partial—administrative dismantling underway; statutory abolition incomplete Expand school choice Substantial progress Reduce climate regulation Substantially implemented/in progress Restructure federal climate institutions Substantial progress Reverse abortion-related executive policies Implemented Full Project 2025 abortion agenda Incomplete Reduce foreign aid/USAID Administration went beyond Project 2025 in some respects Eliminate CFPB Operations greatly curtailed; statutory agency abolition incomplete Medicaid restructuring Substantial legislative implementation Tax cuts / pro-growth tax policy Substantial implementation Family-oriented tax policy Substantial implementation Anti-ESG/DEI corporate agenda Significant federal/state/private activity China economic decoupling Significant implementation/in progress Broad free-market trade policy Not implemented; Trump tariff policy departs from historic Heritage orthodoxy Full abolition of administrative state Far from complete, but much more advanced than under prior administrations
The independent 53% tracker provides a useful cross-check on the overall picture, though its methodology and ideological perspective should be identified whenever we use its figure.
XXXII. Year-by-year forensic ledger, 2025–present Year Heritage objective/action Government result Assessment 2025 Project 2025 implementation, personnel placement, Schedule F, deregulation, Education abolition, DEI rollback, immigration restriction, tax/Medicaid reforms Large early executive-order wave; Heritage alumni enter administration; reconciliation law incorporates multiple Heritage-supported policies Largest single year of direct Heritage implementation in its history 2025 Reduce administrative state Workforce reductions, Schedule Policy/Career, union restrictions, independent-agency control, DOGE cuts Very high correspondence 2025 Traditional social policy Abortion executive reversals, sex-definition rules, sports policy, parental-rights initiatives Very high correspondence; Trump sometimes goes farther 2025 Reduce federal education role Trump orders department closure process Major movement but incomplete without Congress 2025 Restrict immigration Enforcement expansion and major new funding Extremely high correspondence 2025 Economic nationalism/free enterprise hybrid Large tariffs plus tax/deregulation agenda Heritage partially accommodates Trump nationalism but retains internal free-trade criticism 2026 Institutionalize personnel control Schedule Policy/Career implemented for roughly 8,000 positions Major Project 2025 objective becomes durable administrative policy 2026 Continue entitlement and administrative restructuring Heritage pushes further Medicaid, Medicare, spending, education, trade, and family reforms Implementation continuing; not complete 2026 Expand cultural/institutional influence Heritage develops family, historic-site, city, corporate-governance, education and citizenship initiatives Heritage agenda extends increasingly beyond conventional federal policy research
The 2025 annual report itself describes the year as one in which Heritage shifted from planning to implementation and says administration officials and lawmakers repeatedly turned to Heritage for guidance.
XXXIII. Claim-versus-conduct scorecard, 2025–present Heritage principle Actual conduct Assessment Limited government Agency cuts, deregulation, workforce reduction Very high correspondence in administrative/economic sphere Limited presidential power Much stronger presidential personnel and agency control Not really a Heritage objective; Heritage favors strong presidential executive control Separation of powers Support for aggressive executive implementation, including contested assertions of authority Increasing tension with Obama-era rhetoric Free enterprise Tax cuts, deregulation, shareholder activism Still important Free trade Growing acceptance of strategic tariffs and industrial-security intervention Major evolution from historical Heritage Fiscal restraint Spending cuts and Medicaid reforms pursued More implementation than under previous GOP governments, though larger fiscal picture remains mixed Individual freedom Religious, speech, parental and economic liberty heavily emphasized Selective rather than universal Traditional values Gender, abortion, family and education policies Extremely high implementation Federalism Education decentralization and state policy networks High but selective; federal power is also used to achieve Heritage social objectives Strong borders Major immigration enforcement expansion Extremely high Strong national defense China strategic competition and security-centered economics Extremely high Race-neutral law Federal DEI and affirmative-action rollback Extremely high Administrative accountability Schedule Policy/Career, independent-agency control, personnel targeting Extremely high; civil-service neutrality becomes central counterargument Research/education Still substantial Real, but now only one part of a much larger governing apparatus Personnel development Nearly 200 Heritage alumni reportedly in administration Extraordinary implementation success Nonpartisanship Foundation remains formally non-candidate-endorsing while building personnel and policies almost entirely for conservative governance Legal distinction remains; operational ideological integration is exceptionally deep XXXIV. The executive-power question now has an answer
After following Heritage from 1973 through 2026, I think we can finally state this clearly.
Heritage is not principally a small-presidency organization.
It favors:
a powerful elected president commanding a substantially reduced, politically accountable executive bureaucracy.
That is the modern Heritage conception of limited government.
It does not seek to distribute executive power away from the presidency.
It seeks to transfer power:
away from career bureaucracy
and
toward the elected president.
Whether that represents democratic accountability or dangerous executive concentration is the fundamental constitutional dispute surrounding Project 2025.
But descriptively, the Heritage position is now clear.
XXXV. The free-market question also has an answer
The historical transformation is equally clear.
Heritage 1980
Market decisions should generally outrank government economic planning.
Heritage 2000
Global free trade and capital movement generally increase prosperity.
Heritage 2018
Trump's tariffs are harmful protectionism.
Heritage 2023
China-related national security can justify targeted tariffs, sanctions, investment restrictions, and forced divestment.
Heritage 2025–2026
Tariffs can legitimately function as instruments of national strategy, although broad or poorly calibrated tariffs can still damage growth.
That is not a communications adjustment.
It is a material ideological evolution.
Free enterprise remains a Heritage value.
It is simply no longer the highest economic value in every circumstance.
XXXVI. The individual-freedom question has become equally clear
Heritage's actual hierarchy appears to be approximately:
constitutional order
national sovereignty/security
family and moral order
religious liberty
citizenship
economic freedom
individual autonomy
with these values interacting rather than existing in a simple linear ranking.
This explains why Heritage can favor individual liberty strongly in:
religion, speech, guns, private property, parental authority, and economic regulation,
while simultaneously favoring considerable government power concerning:
abortion, immigration, biological-sex definitions, strategic trade, DEI, education, election administration, and national-security investment.
Thus the slogan "individual freedom" is accurate only if understood within Heritage's conception of an underlying constitutional and moral order.
XXXVII. The most significant finding: Project 2025 worked as an institutional strategy
Regardless of one's opinion of its policies, Project 2025 has demonstrated that Heritage successfully solved the problem it identified after Trump I.
It wanted a conservative administration that did not spend its first year figuring out:
what policies to pursue, who should implement them, which statutes gave them authority, which officials needed replacing, or how agencies worked.
Instead it built much of that infrastructure before inauguration.
Then:
Heritage-associated personnel entered government.
Executive orders appeared immediately.
Agency restructurings began immediately.
Congress received pre-existing legislative proposals.
State networks operated simultaneously.
Heritage publicly evaluated and promoted implementation.
That is precisely what Project 2025 was designed to accomplish.
XXXVIII. Heritage has now moved beyond the traditional definition of a think tank
The 2025 annual report makes this particularly difficult to dispute.
Heritage now openly describes activities including:
developing research, setting narratives, coalition building, training personnel, recommending people for government, legislative engagement, grassroots action through Heritage Action, shareholder activism, state model legislation, federal agency policy, and implementation planning.
Calling this merely a research institute would omit most of the institution's actual operating model.
A more precise description in 2026 would be:
a conservative policy-development, personnel-training, communications, coalition-building, legislative-advocacy, and governing-infrastructure institution centered around a 501(c)(3) think tank and an affiliated movement ecosystem.
XXXIX. Our complete institutional evolution, 1973–2026 Period Dominant Heritage role 1973–1976 Alternative conservative research institute 1977–1980 Conservative policy network 1981–1988 Reagan governing blueprint 1989–1992 Ideological pressure on Republican government 1993–2000 Clinton opposition + Republican congressional infrastructure 2001–2008 Bush governing partner + national-security advocate 2009–2010 Obama opposition 2010–2016 Heritage Action + legislative/movement enforcement 2017–2020 Trump policy implementation + administrative-state lessons 2021–2022 National-conservative transition 2023–2024 Project 2025: policy + personnel + training + implementation 2025–2026 Full-spectrum implementation infrastructure operating alongside a sympathetic administration XL. And the ideological evolution, 1973–2026
The ideological movement is equally striking.
1970s Heritage:
Free markets and limited government can restore American conservatism.
Reagan Heritage:
Reduce taxes and regulation, strengthen defense, and restore traditional values.
1990s Heritage:
Reform welfare, expand free trade, promote personal responsibility.
Bush-era Heritage:
Maintain free markets domestically while building a powerful security state.
Obama-era Heritage:
The administrative state itself threatens constitutional government.
Trump I Heritage:
Conservative presidents need stronger control over administrative government.
Project 2025 Heritage:
Policies are insufficient without trained personnel and implementation machinery.
Heritage today:
Government should be reduced where it undermines markets, families, federalism, and civil society—but government should also possess the institutional strength necessary to defend borders, national sovereignty, family structure, traditional culture, national security, and conservative constitutional governance.
That is substantially different from the Heritage Foundation of 1973.
XLI. The central conclusion of the entire investigation
After examining more than fifty years, I would no longer frame the core Heritage contradiction simply as:
"They say they want small government but actually want big government."
That is too crude and does not fit much of the evidence.
The much stronger historical conclusion is:
Heritage has consistently sought to limit governmental functions it regards as illegitimate while simultaneously strengthening governmental capacity in functions it regards as legitimate. Over time, however, the range of functions Heritage regards as legitimate has expanded beyond national defense and law enforcement into immigration, family policy, culture, corporate behavior, strategic trade, education, historical interpretation, and institutional control.
That is where the genuine transformation lies.
And Project 2025 adds something new:
Heritage no longer merely advocates that transformation. It has built an institutional apparatus capable of staffing and executing it.
The question we started with—stated goals versus actual actions—therefore produces a surprisingly nuanced answer.
Heritage has often been more consistent with its real underlying goals than its broad public slogans suggest.
The slogans:
"limited government" "individual freedom" "free enterprise"
are incomplete descriptions.
The deeper and increasingly visible objective is closer to:
constructing a conservative constitutional order in which markets and individual liberty operate within limits defined by national sovereignty, traditional family structure, citizenship, national security, and a strong presidency capable of controlling the executive state.
That formulation fits Heritage's actions from 1973 through August 2026 considerably better.
The logical next step is now to turn everything we have done into a single master forensic ledger for 1973–2026, with columns such as Year/Period | Publicly Stated Goal | Specific Heritage Policy | Heritage Action | Government Action | Implementation Status | Consistency with Stated Principle | Apparent Contradiction | Personnel Link | Evidence. That would give us one unified record analogous to the funding ledger we built earlier.
Reuters With blitz of policies, Trump goes beyond Project 2025's goals | Reuters
I can also keep this as a live record and alert you when major additional Heritage/Project 2025 recommendations are implemented. Want me to set that up?
__________________________________________________________________
Yes. Here is the revised master accounting record for 2019–2024, incorporating everything we have accumulated so far and correcting the categories so we do not double-count DAFs, public charities, or overlapping donor-network figures.
The denominator for donor analysis is “Contributions” from Heritage’s Form 990, not total revenue. Total revenue also includes investment income, asset sales, rents, and other non-donation revenue. Heritage’s IRS filings show $557.05 million in contributions across 2019–2024.
Heritage Foundation — Master Funding Accounting Record, 2019–2024
| Year | Total Revenue | Contributions | Direct Private Foundations Identified | Public-Charity / DAF / Institutional Funding Identified | Total Institutional Funding Publicly Traced | Publicly Unattributed Contribution Revenue | Minimum Traceability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | $122,861,202 | $116,992,003 | Not yet comprehensively aggregated | Annual amount not separately recoverable from current 2019–24 dataset | Incomplete | Not responsibly calculable yet | — |
| 2020 | $119,134,479 | $65,877,330 | ≥ $4,000,000 | ≥ $1,751,483 | ≥ $5,751,483 | ≤ $60,125,847 | ≥ 8.73% |
| 2021 | $101,783,032 | $75,262,071 | ≥ $5,100,000 | ≥ $1,965,034 | ≥ $7,065,034 | ≤ $68,197,037 | ≥ 9.39% |
| 2022 | $106,329,524 | $95,083,025 | ≥ $5,332,680 | ≥ $3,170,319 | ≥ $8,502,999 | ≤ $86,580,026 | ≥ 8.94% |
| 2023 | $100,963,350 | $97,801,739 | ≥ $6,424,600 | ≥ $4,550,126 | ≥ $10,974,726 | ≤ $86,827,013 | ≥ 11.22% |
| 2024 | $133,868,147 | $106,031,026 | ≥ $10,007,500 | ≈ $5,900,000 | ≥ $15,907,500 | ≤ $90,123,526 | ≥ 15.00% |
The revenue and contribution figures come from Heritage’s Form 990 filings. For example, its 2024 filing reports $133.87 million in total revenue and $106.03 million in contributions; 2023 reports $97.80 million in contributions, 2022 $95.08 million, 2021 $75.26 million, 2020 $65.88 million, and 2019 $116.99 million.
What the columns mean
- Direct Private Foundations means the originating philanthropic entity is identifiable—for example, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Gaby Foundation, Pharos Foundation, or Robert J. Werra Foundation.
- Public-Charity / DAF / Institutional includes organizations filing as public charities that report grants to Heritage. This includes DAF sponsors such as Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, National Christian Foundation, DAFgiving360, National Philanthropic Trust, and DonorsTrust, but also some operating nonprofits and trade associations. The entire category therefore should not be called “anonymous DAF money.”
- The IRS-derived recipient database currently identifies $39.8 million across 298 grants from 107 public-charity funders to Heritage during 2019–2024.
- Publicly unattributed contribution revenue means contribution income that we have not yet matched to donor-side public records. It should not be called anonymous or dark money. Heritage says it discloses donor names in annual reports only with donor permission, and a public charity generally does not publicly disclose its complete individual-contributor Schedule B.
2020
The current direct-foundation minimum is:
| Direct donor | Amount identified |
|---|---|
| Richard & Barbara Gaby Foundation | $2,000,000 |
| Diana Davis Spencer Foundation | $2,000,000 |
| Direct minimum | $4,000,000 |
Known public-charity/DAF channels include:
| Intermediary | Amount |
|---|---|
| Fidelity Charitable | $885,992 |
| DAFgiving360 / Donor Advised Charitable Giving | $865,491 |
| Known minimum | $1,751,483 |
So at least $5.75 million, or 8.73%, of 2020 contributions is presently matched to institutional donor-side records. That percentage is explicitly a floor because the six-year public-charity dataset contains additional grants that have not yet been fully allocated to individual years. Heritage reported $65.88 million of contributions in 2020, while asset sales added another $50.88 million to total revenue.
2021
Direct institutional donors presently include:
| Direct donor | Amount |
|---|---|
| Diana Davis Spencer Foundation | $1,500,000 |
| Gaby Foundation | $1,000,000 |
| Stanley E. Fulton Family Foundation | $1,000,000 |
| Sarah Scaife Foundation | $800,000 |
| Noble-related foundation | $800,000 |
| Direct minimum | $5,100,000 |
Known intermediaries:
| Intermediary | Amount |
|---|---|
| Fidelity Charitable | $1,123,134 |
| Vanguard Charitable | $841,900 |
| Known minimum | $1,965,034 |
Combined: at least $7.07 million, or 9.39% of Heritage’s $75.26 million in contributions.
2022
Our expanded direct-foundation ledger presently contains:
| Direct donor | Amount |
|---|---|
| Pharos Foundation | $1,500,680 |
| Diana Davis Spencer Foundation | $1,500,000 |
| Lloyd & Vivian Noble Foundation | $1,050,000 |
| Sarah Scaife Foundation | $800,000 |
| Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation | $425,000 |
| Peter & Ann Lambertus Family Foundation | $50,000 |
| Halcro Family Foundation | $6,500 |
| Hawks Foundation | $500 |
| Direct minimum | $5,332,680 |
Known public-charity/DAF funding:
| Intermediary | Amount |
|---|---|
| National Christian Foundation | $1,353,244 |
| Fidelity Charitable | $989,987 |
| DAFgiving360 | $827,088 |
| Known minimum | $3,170,319 |
Combined publicly traced institutional funding is therefore at least $8.50 million, or 8.94% of Heritage’s $95.08 million in contributions. The true institutional amount is higher because the $39.8 million public-charity database also includes additional organizations and grants not yet assigned individually to 2022.
2023
Direct private foundations presently identified:
| Direct donor | Amount |
|---|---|
| Diana Davis Spencer Foundation | $5,000,000 |
| Richard & Barbara Gaby Foundation | $1,000,000 |
| W.L. Amos Sr. Foundation | $200,000 |
| Rydin Foundation | $167,000 |
| Milstein Family Foundation | $30,000 |
| Harvey Karp Foundation | $15,000 |
| Bernard & Sarah Gewirz Foundation | $6,500 |
| Shipley Educational Foundation | $5,000 |
| Mark E. & Mary A. Davis Foundation | $1,000 |
| smaller identified grant | $100 |
| Direct minimum | $6,424,600 |
Known public-charity/DAF channels:
| Intermediary | Amount |
|---|---|
| Fidelity Charitable | $1,649,475 |
| Vanguard Charitable | $1,030,350 |
| DAFgiving360 | $988,310 |
| National Christian Foundation | $881,991 |
| Known minimum | $4,550,126 |
That gives a traceable institutional minimum of $10.97 million, or 11.22% of Heritage’s $97.80 million in contributions. The contribution figure is particularly notable because contributions constituted 96.9% of Heritage’s total 2023 revenue.
2024 — currently the strongest accounting year
The direct-foundation ledger is considerably richer:
| Direct private foundation | Amount currently identified |
|---|---|
| Diana Davis Spencer Foundation | $5,000,000 |
| Sarah Scaife Foundation | $1,750,000 |
| Robert J. Werra Foundation | $1,100,000 |
| Richard & Barbara Gaby Foundation | $1,000,000 |
| Bruce & Deborah Duncan Foundation | ≥ $535,000 |
| Pharos Foundation | $200,000 |
| Rydin Foundation | $167,000 |
| Andrea Waitt Carlton Family Foundation | $125,000 |
| Armstrong Foundation | ≥ $40,000 |
| Brian & Joelle Kelly Family Foundation | $25,000 |
| Harvey Karp Foundation | ≥ $25,000 |
| several smaller verified foundations | ≥ $40,500 |
| Current direct minimum | ≥ $10,007,500 |
The IRS-derived recipient database then gives us something much stronger than our earlier hand-built intermediary subtotal: approximately $5.9 million from 50 public-charity funders in 2024. The larger database reports $39.8 million across 2019–2024.
Those 2024 public-charity channels include major intermediaries such as National Christian Foundation, Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, DonorsTrust, Comerica Charitable Trust, American Endowment Foundation, Raymond James Charitable, community foundations, and similar vehicles.
Therefore:
- Private-foundation minimum: $10,007,500
- Public-charity institutional funding: ≈ $5,900,000
- Total publicly traced institutional funding: ≥ $15,907,500
against:
- Total Heritage contributions: $106,031,026.
So at least 15.0% of 2024 contribution income is already traceable to institutional grantmakers in public donor-side records.
The remaining $90,123,526, or approximately 85.0%, is not yet attributable donor-by-donor through the records assembled here. That 85% includes Heritage’s individual donors, additional unaggregated foundations and institutional grants, and potentially other contribution types. Heritage itself describes its financial base as including individuals, foundations, and corporations and says donor names are disclosed publicly only with permission.
Six-year totals we can state confidently
Heritage reported total contributions of approximately $557.05 million during 2019–2024.
Within that period, one donor-side database independently identifies $39.8 million from 107 public-charity funders through 298 grants.
Separately, our private-foundation reconstruction for 2020–2024 alone has already identified at least $30.86 million in direct private-foundation grants.
Those numbers should not simply be combined into a six-year percentage, because we have not yet reconstructed 2019 direct private-foundation giving and we must continue checking for entity-classification overlap. But they establish at least one strong conclusion:
Public records reveal tens of millions of dollars in both direct private-foundation support and public-charity/DAF funding, while most of Heritage’s overall contribution revenue remains publicly unattributed at the individual-donor level.
Master accounting terminology going forward
I recommend freezing these terms for the remainder of the project:
- Direct identifiable donor
- originating philanthropic foundation can be named.
- Identified intermediary / unidentified originator
- Fidelity, Vanguard, DonorsTrust, NCF, DAFgiving360, etc., where the intermediary-to-Heritage transaction is known but the recommending donor is not publicly traceable.
- Operating institutional donor
- trade association, corporation, or operating nonprofit giving directly.
- Publicly unattributed contribution revenue
- Heritage contribution income not matched through our donor-side public-record reconstruction.
Never use “dark money” as an accounting category, because it implies something the tax records alone do not establish.
Heritage Foundation — Earlier Master Accounting, 2011–2018
| Year | Total Revenue | Contributions & Grants | Direct Identifiable Donor Money | Identified Intermediary Money | Total Publicly Traced Minimum | Publicly Unattributed Contribution Revenue | Minimum Traceability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | $72.17M | $65.69M | ≥ $5.07M | ≥ $0.055M | ≥ $5.12M | ≤ $60.57M | ≥ 7.8% |
| 2012 | $86.08M | $78.19M | ≥ $4.87M | ≥ $0.035M | ≥ $4.91M | ≤ $73.28M | ≥ 6.3% |
| 2013 | $112.69M | $102.17M | ≥ $26.0M | ≥ $0.136M | ≥ $26.14M | ≤ $76.04M | ≥ 25.6% |
| 2014 | $96.97M | $94.57M | Incomplete | ≥ $0.186M | ≥ $0.186M | Not meaningfully calculable yet | — |
| 2015 | $92.01M | $88.80M | ≥ $0.60M | ≥ $0.093M | ≥ $0.693M | ≤ $88.11M | ≥ 0.8% |
| 2016 | $82.21M | $79.08M | ≥ $0.155M | ≥ $0.670M | ≥ $0.825M | ≤ $78.25M | ≥ 1.0% |
| 2017 | $82.19M | $76.58M | Incomplete | ≥ $0.037M | Incomplete | Not meaningfully calculable yet | — |
| 2018 | $81.06M | $75.56M | ≈ $5.4M identified private-foundation grants | ≥ $1.5M DAF/community-foundation money | ≥ $6.9M | ≤ $68.66M | ≥ 9.1% |
The IRS-derived contribution figures are exact for these years: $65.69 million in 2011, $78.19 million in 2012, $102.17 million in 2013, $94.57 million in 2014, $88.80 million in 2015, $79.08 million in 2016, $76.58 million in 2017, and $75.56 million in 2018.
Why 2013 jumps to 25.6%
That is not a typo. Heritage received a $26 million gift from the family of Shelby Cullom Davis in 2013, then the largest gift in Heritage’s history. It was designated for the Institute for International Studies, which was subsequently named for Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis.
Since Heritage reported $102.17 million in total contributions that year, the single Davis gift represented about 25.4% of all contribution income before counting any Scaife, Bradley, Noble, DeVos, DonorsTrust, or other institutional support.
That makes 2013 one of the clearest examples we have found of how Heritage can simultaneously have a broad donor base and still receive a very large portion of one year’s contributions from a single philanthropic family.
2011
Our accumulated direct-foundation ledger contains approximately:
| Direct donor | Amount identified |
|---|---|
| Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation | $2.0M |
| Sarah Scaife Foundation | $1.2M |
| Herrick Foundation | $1.15M |
| Howard Charitable Foundation | $1.0M |
| Lillian Wells Foundation | $0.5M |
| Bradley Foundation | $0.22M |
That is approximately $6.07 million, actually somewhat higher than the conservative $5.07 million floor I use in the table. I prefer the lower number until every entry is reconciled against its original 2011 filing.
DonorsTrust added roughly $54,600.
With $65.69 million in reported contributions, identifiable institutional funding therefore represented at least several percent of Heritage’s contribution base. The exact contribution denominator is from Heritage’s Form 990.
2012
Our reconstructed direct foundation roster includes:
| Direct donor | Amount identified |
|---|---|
| Richard & Helen DeVos | $1.0M |
| Herrick | $1.0M |
| Howard | $1.0M |
| Claude R. Lambe | $650K |
| Lillian Wells | $498K |
| Sarah Scaife | $400K |
| Bradley | $230K |
| Roe | $125K |
| Searle Freedom Trust | $100K |
| Adelson Family Foundation | $100K |
| Charles Koch foundation | about $11K |
So the true direct-foundation minimum is probably above the $4.87M used in the summary table once the full set is reconciled.
Heritage reported $78.19 million in contributions that year.
2013–2018: important warning
For these years, the public donor databases we used earlier are not equally complete year by year. That means a low traceability percentage in 2015 or 2016 should not be interpreted as evidence that Heritage suddenly stopped receiving foundation money.
It mostly means: we have not yet performed the same exhaustive donor-side aggregation for those years that we performed for 2024.
This is particularly obvious because a broader Foundation Search reconstruction found more than 4,300 private-foundation grants totaling over $274 million to Heritage from 1998 through 2018.
So the tiny 2015–17 minima in the table are artifacts of our current reconstruction, not estimates of Heritage’s actual institutional share.
2018 is much stronger
The 2018 donor-side research is better.
Foundation Search identified approximately $5.4 million from 292 private-foundation sources to Heritage that year. In addition, more than $1.5 million arrived through donor-advised/community-foundation channels such as Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, and Chicago Community Trust.
Against Heritage’s $75.56 million in contribution income, that gives a publicly traceable institutional floor of roughly:
$6.9M / $75.56M = 9.1%.
And again, that remains a minimum.
Earlier Period: 1985–2010
Here we have good donor-side grant information but an incomplete annual contribution-income denominator. So I would preserve the accounting like this rather than manufacture remainder percentages.
| Year | Currently Documented Institutional Donor Minimum | Main Identifiable Sources | Contribution Total / Remainder Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 | ≥ $1.28M | Sarah Scaife, Olin | Contribution denominator needs archival 990/annual report |
| 1986 | ≥ $2.08M | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Carthage | Same |
| 1987 | ≥ $2.38M | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Carthage, Koch | Same |
| 1988 | ≥ $2.06M | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Carthage | Same |
| 1989 | ≥ $2.23M | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Carthage | Same |
| 1990 | ≥ $1.99M | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin | Same |
| 1991 | ≥ $1.97M | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Carthage, Koch | Same |
| 1992 | ≥ $2.27M | Sarah Scaife, Scaife Family, Bradley, Olin, Carthage | Same |
| 1993 | ≥ $2.94M | Sarah Scaife, Carthage, Bradley, Olin, Scaife Family | Same |
| 1994 | ≥ $2.32M | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Carthage | Same |
| 1995 | ≥ $3.41M | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Carthage, Castle Rock | Same |
| 1996 | ≥ $2.74M | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Carthage, Lambe | Same |
| 1997 | ≥ $2.19M | Bradley, Olin, Sarah Scaife, Lambe, Castle Rock | Same |
| 1998 | ≥ $7.73M | Noble, Sarah Scaife, Castle Rock, Bradley, Olin, DeVos | Same |
| 1999 | ≥ $5.10M | Noble, Bradley, Sarah Scaife, Olin, Castle Rock | Same |
| 2000 | several million | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Noble, Olin, Castle Rock, DeVos | Historical 990 PDF available; needs extraction |
| 2001 | several million | Sarah Scaife, Olin, Bradley, Castle Rock, Lambe, DeVos | Same |
| 2002 | several million | Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Noble, Lambe, DeVos | Same |
| 2003 | several million | Sarah Scaife, Herrick, Noble, Lambe, Bradley, Olin | Same |
| 2004 | ≥ $5M-scale | Noble, Wells, Sarah Scaife, DeVos, Bradley, Lambe, Olin | Same |
| 2005 | ≥ $6M-scale | Herrick, Noble, Sarah Scaife, Wells, DeVos, Bradley | Same |
| 2006 | ≥ $11M from major donors alone | Howard $5M, Noble $3M, Scaife, DeVos, Herrick, Lambe | Same |
| 2007 | ≥ $9M-scale | Howard $5M, Noble $2M, DeVos $1M, others | Same |
| 2008 | ≥ $11M-scale | Howard $5M, DeVos $3M, Noble, Scaife, Wells | Same |
| 2009 | ≥ $6M-scale | Howard, Herrick, DeVos, Lambe, Scaife, Wells, Marshall Heritage | Same |
| 2010 | ≥ $6M-scale | DeVos $3M, Allegheny $1.25M, Howard $1M, Scaife, Wells, Lambe | Historical 990 PDF available; needs extraction |
The grant-level historical compilation documents the Scaife, Bradley, Olin and other transactions in the 1985–1990s series, including the 1985–89 amounts we reconstructed earlier. A separate contemporary analysis verifies, for example, $5.98 million from Sarah Scaife to Heritage during 1999–2001, plus Roe and Koch/Lambe-network support.
What this earlier table tells us
Three periods stand out:
- 1985–1997: Heritage had a remarkably stable institutional core dominated by Scaife, Bradley, Olin and related foundations, usually producing at least $2–3 million per year in grants that we can presently identify. The actual institutional total was higher because our ledger does not yet include every Noble, Coors, Pew, Murdock, J.M., Davis, McKenna, and smaller-foundation grant.
- 1998–2005: The funding base broadens substantially. Noble re-emerges with multimillion-dollar grants; Castle Rock, DeVos, Lambe, Herrick, Wells and others join or expand.
- 2006–2010: Individual foundation grants become strikingly large. The $5 million Howard grants, $3 million Noble grants, and $3 million DeVos grants show that seven-figure foundation support was no longer exceptional.
The next step is now very specific
To make the 1985–2010 table truly identical to our 2019–2024 accounting, we need to extract one number from each historical Heritage Form 990:
Total contributions received for that year.
ProPublica has the actual Form 990 PDFs for 2001–2010, but explicitly says it did not extract the financial fields from those filings. The 1990s and 1980s will require Heritage annual reports, Guidestar/Foundation Center archives, or the historical tax-return collection we identified earlier.
Once those denominators are recovered, we can turn rows like:
2006 — ≥ $11M identifiable institutional donors
into:
2006 — $X total contributions | ≥ $11M identified donors | $Y intermediaries | ≤ $Z publicly unattributed | ≥ N% traceable
which would give us a continuous comparable series from the Reagan era through Project 2025.
Yes. Here is the consolidated 2011–2024 master accounting record, now using the exact Heritage Form 990 revenue and contribution figures for every year as the denominator. The donor-side columns preserve the amounts we have actually reconstructed so far; where that reconstruction is incomplete, the traceability figure is explicitly a minimum, not an estimate of Heritage’s true institutional share.
Heritage Foundation — Master Forensic Accounting, 2011–2024
| Year | Total Revenue | Contributions & Grants | Direct Identifiable Donor Money | Identified Intermediary / Public-Charity Money | Total Publicly Traced Minimum | Publicly Unattributed Remainder | Minimum Traceability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | $72.17M | $65.69M | ≥ $6.07M | ≥ $0.055M | ≥ $6.125M | ≤ $59.563M | ≥ 9.3% |
| 2012 | $86.08M | $78.19M | ≥ $5.115M | ≥ $0.035M | ≥ $5.149M | ≤ $73.041M | ≥ 6.6% |
| 2013 | $112.69M | $102.17M | ≥ $26.00M | ≥ $0.136M | ≥ $26.136M | ≤ $76.039M | ≥ 25.6% |
| 2014 | $96.97M | $94.57M | Not yet aggregated | ≥ $0.186M | ≥ $0.186M | ≤ $94.381M | ≥ 0.2%* |
| 2015 | $92.01M | $88.80M | ≥ $0.600M | ≥ $0.093M | ≥ $0.693M | ≤ $88.112M | ≥ 0.8%* |
| 2016 | $82.21M | $79.08M | ≥ $0.155M | ≥ $0.670M | ≥ $0.825M | ≤ $78.255M | ≥ 1.0%* |
| 2017 | $82.19M | $76.58M | Not yet aggregated | ≥ $0.037M | ≥ $0.037M | ≤ $76.546M | ≥ 0.05%* |
| 2018 | $81.06M | $75.56M | ≈ $5.40M | ≥ $1.50M | ≥ $6.90M | ≤ $68.664M | ≥ 9.1% |
| 2019 | $122.86M | $116.99M | Not yet fully aggregated | Included within the $39.8M 2019–24 public-charity dataset | Incomplete | Incomplete | — |
| 2020 | $119.13M | $65.88M | ≥ $4.00M | ≥ $1.751M | ≥ $5.751M | ≤ $60.126M | ≥ 8.7% |
| 2021 | $101.78M | $75.26M | ≥ $5.10M | ≥ $1.965M | ≥ $7.065M | ≤ $68.197M | ≥ 9.4% |
| 2022 | $106.33M | $95.08M | ≥ $5.333M | ≥ $3.170M | ≥ $8.503M | ≤ $86.580M | ≥ 8.9% |
| 2023 | $100.96M | $97.80M | ≥ $6.425M | ≥ $4.550M | ≥ $10.975M | ≤ $86.827M | ≥ 11.2% |
| 2024 | $133.87M | $106.03M | ≥ $10.008M | ≈ $5.90M | ≥ $15.908M | ≤ $90.124M | ≥ 15.0% |
Heritage’s exact Form 990 figures confirm the contribution series: $65.69M in 2011, $78.19M in 2012, $102.17M in 2013, $94.57M in 2014, $88.80M in 2015, $79.08M in 2016, $76.58M in 2017 and $75.56M in 2018. The same IRS-derived series gives $116.99M in 2019, $65.88M in 2020, $75.26M in 2021, $95.08M in 2022, $97.80M in 2023 and $106.03M in 2024.
*The extremely low percentages in 2014–17 are research-completeness artifacts, not evidence that Heritage had almost no institutional donors those years. We have not yet performed the exhaustive private-foundation reconstruction for those years that we did for 2018 and 2022–24.
What is included in the direct-donor column
For 2011, our accumulated donor ledger identifies roughly $6.07 million from major direct foundations, including Richard & Helen DeVos, Sarah Scaife, Herrick, Howard, Lillian Wells and Bradley. For 2012, the reconstructed minimum is approximately $5.115 million, including DeVos, Herrick, Howard, Lambe, Wells, Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Roe, Searle, Adelson and Koch-related direct foundation grants.
The standout year is 2013. Heritage received a roughly $26 million Davis-family gift, which by itself accounts for about one quarter of Heritage’s $102.17 million in contribution income. Consequently, 2013 has the highest traceability percentage in this current series even before we finish identifying all the other foundation donors.
By 2018, broader foundation databases identified about $5.4 million from 292 private-foundation sources, plus more than $1.5 million through donor-advised/community-foundation channels.
What is included in the intermediary column
The intermediary category includes organizations such as Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, DAFgiving360/Schwab, National Christian Foundation, National Philanthropic Trust and DonorsTrust. Across 2019–2024, the IRS-derived recipient database identifies about $39.8 million across 298 grants from 107 public-charity funders to Heritage.
We have been deliberately careful not to reattribute those grants to a named family unless the complete chain is proven:
- named donor → intermediary → Heritage.
For most of the approximately $28.5 million flowing through the six largest DAF channels, that first link remains publicly unresolved.
The “unattributed remainder” needs to be interpreted correctly
For example, in 2024:
- Heritage contributions: $106.031M
- Direct identified foundations: ≥ $10.008M
- Public-charity/intermediary funding: ≈ $5.900M
- Publicly traced institutional minimum: ≥ $15.908M
- Remainder: ≤ $90.124M
That $90.1 million is not “$90.1 million of anonymous foundation money.” It includes ordinary individual members, larger private individuals whose identities are not publicly disclosed, foundations we have not yet matched, corporations and other contribution sources.
The same applies to every year in the table.
A useful period comparison
The pattern that emerges is interesting:
- 2011–12: roughly 6–9% of contributions are presently traceable through the institutional records we have assembled.
- 2013: the Davis gift drives the identifiable share above 25%.
- 2014–17: donor-side reconstruction is still too incomplete to draw conclusions from the percentages.
- 2018: roughly 9% is already publicly traceable.
- 2020–22: the current floor remains around 9%.
- 2023: rises above 11%.
- 2024: reaches at least 15%, our most complete recent year.
The apparent upward movement after 2020 reflects both real growth in large foundation/DAF funding and improving completeness of electronic donor-side records, so it should not automatically be interpreted as proof that Heritage became more dependent on large donors.
Yes. For 1973–1984, I would use a master chart that is explicitly archival rather than pretending we have the same precision as the 2011–2024 series. The contribution-income denominator is incomplete for much of this period, but we can still show the known annual income/budget figures and the minimum identifiable donor money we have reconstructed.
Heritage Foundation — Pre-1985 Master Accounting
| Year | Reported Income / Budget | Identifiable Donor Money Recovered | Main Identifiable Sources | Intermediary Money | Publicly Unattributed / Unresolved | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | Not yet recovered | ≥ $250,000 | Joseph Coors startup contribution | — | Not calculable | High on donor; low on denominator |
| 1974 | Not yet recovered | Amount unresolved | Richard Mellon Scaife / Scaife Family Charitable Trust enters funding relationship | — | Not calculable | Medium |
| 1975 | Not yet recovered | ≥ $200,000–$205,000 | Scaife Family Charitable Trust ≈ $195K; Noble ≈ $5K–$10K | — | Not calculable | Medium |
| 1976 | ≈ $1.0M annual income/budget | Scaife support reportedly ≈ $420K; Noble also supporting | Scaife; Noble; Coors network | — | At least several hundred thousand dollars unresolved | Medium |
| 1977 | Not yet recovered | Amount unresolved | Noble; Scaife; Coors-associated support | — | Not calculable | Medium-low |
| 1978 | Not yet recovered | ≥ $100K+ Noble, plus other donors | Noble; Scaife; Coors-related sources | — | Not calculable | Medium |
| 1979 | Not yet recovered | ≥ $800,000 | Noble $750K; Carthage $50K; other donors not yet totaled | — | Not calculable | Good donor-side minimum |
| 1980 | Not yet recovered | ≥ $300,000, plus unresolved foundation grants | Joseph Coors $300K; Noble; Scaife Trust; Olin and others | — | Not calculable | Medium |
| 1981 | ≈ $5.3M budget | Exact annual donor subtotal unresolved | Noble; Scaife Trust; J.M.; Pew; Smith Richardson; Olin | — | Majority cannot yet be assigned donor-by-donor | Medium on denominator; low on donor total |
| 1982 | Not yet recovered | ≥ $200,000 plus unresolved grants | Sarah Scaife $200K; Noble; Scaife Trust; Coors Foundation; Olin | — | Not calculable | Medium |
| 1983 | ≈ $10.6M income | ≥ roughly $1M-scale Scaife support + $100K Coors, others unresolved | Sarah Scaife; Adolph Coors; Noble; Olin; Davis; McKenna; Roe | — | Large remainder unresolved | Medium |
| 1984 | ≈ $10.7M income | ≥ $100,000 exact; likely substantially more | Adolph Coors $100K verified; Sarah Scaife, Noble, Olin, J.M., Pew, Starr, Murdock, etc. documented but exact amounts incomplete | No modern-style DAF layer identified | Most of $10.7M not donor-attributable from records recovered so far | Medium |
The early financial scale is consistent with historical accounts: Heritage’s annual income reached about $1 million by 1976, and its budget had grown to about $5.3 million by 1981. By the early Reagan years, Heritage was receiving regular support from a cluster of foundations including Noble, Olin, Murdock, Pew, Starr, McKenna, J.M., Coors, Sarah Scaife, and Carthage.
The starting point remains unusually clear: Joseph Coors supplied $250,000 in seed financing and later another $300,000 in 1980 for improved Heritage offices. Heritage itself now describes donor disclosure as voluntary—it names donors only with their approval—which helps explain why recipient-side records alone cannot reconstruct the entire early funding base.
What we can say most confidently
The 1970s funding story is not simply “Coors founded Heritage.” The record we have reconstructed shows a progression:
- 1973: Coors provides catalytic startup capital.
- 1974 onward: Scaife becomes an early recurring patron.
- 1975 onward: the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation enters and rapidly grows from small grants to roughly $750,000 in 1979.
- By the early 1980s: Heritage has developed a recurring foundation consortium rather than relying on one or two patrons. Contemporary/historical research identifies approximately a dozen loyal foundations giving hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
Why I would not calculate “unidentified remainder” precisely before 1985
For the modern period we can do:
- Contributions − identifiable foundations − intermediaries = publicly unattributed remainder.
For 1973–1984 we usually lack the exact Form 990 contribution line. A reported “budget” or “income” figure is not necessarily identical to tax-form contributions; it may include interest, publication income, investment returns, or other revenue.
So, for example, the 1984 row can presently tell us:
- Reported income: ≈ $10.7M
- Verified Coors Foundation grant: $100K
- additional major foundation support unquestionably existed
but we should not write:
- “$10.6M unidentified.”
That would falsely imply that we had exhaustively searched every 1984 donor source.
The most revealing early-year comparison
Even with the archival gaps, the scale change is striking:
Heritage Foundation reported financial scale before 1985 (Selected historical income or budget figures recovered from the archival record; missing years are omitted rather than estimated.)
| Year | Reported Income / Budget |
|---|---|
| 1976 | ≈ $1.0M |
| 1981 | ≈ $5.3M |
| 1983 | ≈ $10.6M |
| 1984 | ≈ $10.7M |
Figures are reported income/budget, not necessarily identical to Form 990 contribution revenue.
Heritage grew from roughly a $1 million-scale organization in 1976 to more than $10 million by 1983–84, while at the same time developing the recurring foundation network we have been reconstructing.
For the eventual master ledger, I would therefore label 1973–1984 “archival reconstruction,” 1985–2010 “documented minimum reconstruction,” and 2011–2024 “Form-990-based accounting.” That makes the changing evidence quality transparent rather than giving all fifty years a false appearance of equal precision.
