The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation

Like Icarus, Heritage got way too close to the sun.

Photo by Lucie Hošová on Unsplash

The 21st century has been a long, strange trip for the Heritage Foundation. It was once viewed as the most effective and influential conservative think tank in America. After Jim DeMint replaced Ed Feulner as the president of Heritage, however, the think tank’s reputation began to suffer — something I chronicled in The Ideas Industry. However, while Heritage’s intellectual reputation suffered, its bottom line flourished, as it was able to raise considerable sums of money from its GOP base.

After Trump was elected, Heritage decided to get into bed with the new administration. And over the years the hard-working staff at Spoiler Alerts wrote a lot about the devolution of the Heritage Foundation — as did the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World. Curiously, Heritage only went full MAGA after Trump lost in 2020. And as I noted a few years ago, “the patina of intellectual freedom at Heritage appears to have been completely scrubbed away…. back in the day Heritage had a solid reputation for producing quality policy analysis. Now… it seems to be the think-tank equivalent of Newsweek.” If anything, the intellectual situation worsened in the last two years, with Heritage proffering blinkered foreign policy ideas. Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, is an election denier and sure seems to employ violent rhetoric when talking about the 2024 election.

Still, it’s clear that neither Heritage nor Roberts cares about how any of this looks. It cares about exerting influence within the GOP and MAGA movements. And by spearheading Project 2025, Roberts seemed as though it had hit the motherlode. A conservative playbook for running the federal government, Project 2025 had at least 140 former Trump staffers assist in its drafting. A few years ago Donald Trump flew with Roberts to deliver a keynote address to a Heritage conference. In the speech, Trump thanked Heritage for their Project 2025 efforts, saying, “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance has even closer ties to Heritage; he wrote the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book.

So I guess the joke is now on me, right? Well…. the arc of history may be long, but it does bend towards Heritage’s continued fall from grace.

The Democrats vigorously attacked Project 2025 during much of 2024, and boy oh boy did it work. It turns out that a detailed plan to abolish multiple cabinet departments, ban abortions, and restrict contraceptive coverage, outlaw pornography, end the professional civil service and the independence of the Justice Department is a pretty unpopular!! NBC News Faith Wardwell has polling numbers to back up the previous sentence:

About 57% of registered voters report feeling negatively about Project 2025, with 51% saying they see the proposal “very” negatively and 7% more saying they view it “somewhat” negatively. Just 4% of voters reported viewing the conservative policy plan positively.

Among independents, 52% report feeling negatively about the plan, while 85% of Democrats say the same. About 33% of Republicans say they also view the plan negatively, with just 7% saying they have positive views of the plan, which Trump has criticized since Democrats ramped up efforts to tie him and Project 2025 together….

It was the least popular of all the subjects tested in the September NBC News poll — a battery that included socialism, capitalism, both presidential and vice presidential candidates, the Republican and Democratic parties, Taylor Swift and Elon Musk.

Oof. You know you’re unpopular in the United States when you fail to outpoll socialism.¹

Still, Trump does and says controversial stuff all the time. That does not mean he would turn a cold shoulder on Heritage, right?

Well… this Politico story by Robin Bravender about Trump’s nascent transition plans says otherwise:

Former President Donald Trump’s transition operation is compiling lists of names of people to keep out of a second Trump administration.

The lists of undesirable staffers include people linked to the Project 2025 policy blueprint….

“Clearly people working on Project 2025 are blacklisted,” said a second former official….

Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, told the New York Post this month that an incoming Trump administration wouldn’t consider recruits tied to Project 2025, the administration playbook organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 is “radioactive,” Lutnick told the outlet.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Trump has sought to distance himself from the policy blueprint as it has come under fire from Democrats who portray its ideas as extreme.

Well that seems super-awkward for Heritage. You know what makes it even more awkward? The former head of Project 2025 speaking out against Heritage. According to the Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, however, that is exactly with Paul Dans is doing:

The former director of the right-wing policy and personnel blueprint known as Project 2025 is condemning what he sees as “violent rhetoric” from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and calling on Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance to retract the foreword he wrote for Roberts’s book.

“If we’re going to ask the left to tone it down, we have to do our part as well,” Paul Dans, who led Project 2025 until July, said in an interview. “There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts.”….

Dans and Roberts disagreed over the direction of Project 2025, a collaboration among more than 100 right-wing groups that was convened by Heritage and run by Dans. Dans blames Roberts for much of the backlash that the effort has received. He said he warned Roberts against provocative media interviews and hyperbolic language, especially after the Trump campaign repeatedly disavowed Project 2025 and warned participants to stop talking to reporters about plans for a second Trump administration. Over the summer, Democrats turned Project 2025 into a byword for Trump’s second-term agenda and argued that voters should oppose it.

“There’s really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august think tank,” Dans said. “And by doing that, he’s essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.”

So, to sum up: Kevin Roberts positioned Heritage to be the key policy planner for the next Republican administration. In pushing Project 2025, however, Heritage wound up owning a set of ideas deemed more politically toxic than socialism. The Trump campaign has disavowed Project 2025 to the point of blackballing any of its contributors. And now the leader of that initiative has criticized Roberts’ promotional strategy, arguing that it made things far worse.

In theory, a think tank is support to be the conduit between those with policy ideas and those in government who need those ideas. Under Roberts, however, Heritage has made itself toxic to the Republican Party. In trying to maximize its influence, Heritage flew too close to the sun and paid the reputational price.

I suppose there is an upside for Heritage. According to Arnsdorf, “the notoriety surrounding Project 2025 has been a fundraising boon for Heritage, helping the foundation collect a record $150 million in 2023, according to the group’s public disclosures.”

Roberts might find itself cut off from policymaking circles. His think tank, however, is crying all the way to the bank.

1. Nor is the NBC News result a polling outlier, as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted last month: “a New York Times/Siena College poll from earlier this month… showed, of people who had heard of Project 2025, voters disliked it 65 percent to 13 percent. A YouGov poll from after the Sept. 10 debate showed American adults disliked it 52-11.”