As the 2024 presidential election becomes an increasing number of exciting, some persons are hearing in regards to the Legacy Foundation for the primary time. The conservative think tank has a brand new, ambitious and controversial political plan, Project 2025which calls for an overhaul of American public policy and government.
Project 2025 lays many standard conservative ideas – comparable to prioritizing energy production over environmental and climate concerns and rejecting the concept of abortion as health care – together with some rather more extreme ones, comparable to criminalizing pornography. And it proposes abolish or restructure countless government agencies in step with conservative ideology.
While think tanks sometimes have a fame for being stuffy academic institutions, detached from day-to-day politics, Heritage is sort of different. Heritage was founded not only to develop conservative policy ideas, but in addition to advance them through direct political advocacy.
All think tanks are classified as 501(c)(3) Tax-Exempt Organizationswho’re prohibited from participating in elections and who’ve only limited political lobbying power. However, some, comparable to Heritage, also form affiliated 501(c)(4) Organizations that enable them to take part in campaigns and lobby extensively. The legacy is one among the Sponsors of the Republican National Conventionwhich ends on July 18, 2024 in Milwaukee.
While researching my forthcoming book “Partisan Policy Networks” I actually have noticed that a growing proportion of think tanks are explicitly ideologically oriented, affiliated with a single political party and directly committed to political interests.
Still, Heritage stands out amongst all of the groups I studied. It is rather more conservative, and more closely aligned with the Republican variety of former President Donald Trump. Heritage also more aggressively promotes conservative ideas, combining campaign spending with lobbying and large-scale grassroots mobilization.
Americans can expect to listen to rather more about these ideas, comparable to those outlined in Project 2025, if Trump is re-elected in November 2024.
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A brand new sort of think tank
Two Republican congressional staffers, Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich, founded Heritage 1973 as an explicit rejection of existing think tanks who, of their opinion, were either too liberal or too reluctant to advertise conservative ideas.
Feulner and Weyrich were particularly outraged by how a number one conservative think tank of the time, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), banned the publication of a political report in 1971 on government approval rankings. Financing for supersonic transport aircraftthat may fly faster than the speed of sound. AEI released its recommendations several days after Congress voted on the difficulty because “did not want to try to influence the outcome of the vote.”
Heritage turns this philosophy on its head. Rather than doing policy research for its own sake, Heritage does research, as one staff member told me in 2018: “build a case, make arguments for a change in policy.”
For example, the 501(c)(4) advocacy group related to Heritage, Heritage Action for AmericaAnd Sentinel Action FundA Super PAC it was founded in 2022, Spending money to influence elections And Lobbying elected officials on issues as diverse as taxes, abortion, immigration and the environment.
For this reason, some scientists and politicians seek advice from Heritage and other similar groups as “Making tanks’ and never ‘think tanks’.
Because the Sentinel Action Fund is a Super PAC, it may possibly raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash to influence elections so long as it doesn’t coordinate with candidates' campaigns. The Sentinel Action Fund spent greater than US13 million US dollars to achieve out to voters and advertise within the 2022 midterm elections. The fund's self-declared goal was to secure Republican majorities within the House and Senate by “necessary conservative fighters” in “tough parliamentary elections.”
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People, not only money
But as my research shows, it’s people, not money, that make Heritage influential.
The inheritance has directly has been committed to the position of former and current employees within the offices of Congress and that executive. More than 70 former and current Heritage employees began working for the Trump administration in 2017 – and 4 current Heritage employees were members of Trump’s Cabinet in 2021.
Heritage also says that there are greater than 2 million local volunteer activists and around 20,000 “Sentinel activists” WHO Receive information from Heritage and participate in organized campaigns to advance conservative policies. My interviews show that activists working with Heritage take part in strategy meetings, contact elected officials with coordinated messages, and amplify the organization's messages on social media.
In an example Starting in 2021, the Heritage Foundation produced a report on voter fraud and voter integrity. Heritage Action for America, meanwhile, coordinated organizing volunteers to deliver that report back to Georgia lawmakers, had staff meet with those lawmakers to advise them on passing recent voting restrictions, and paid for television ads urging residents to support such laws.
Heritage, Trump and Project 2025
All these efforts result in a fantastic influence throughout the Republican Party. The legacy has played a key role in push Republicans to adopt more conservative policies since its founding.
When former President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the Heritage Foundation had a ready-made conservative agenda for the brand new government. At the tip of his first term, Reagan had greater than 60% of the think tank’s policy recommendations.
When Trump took office in 2016, Heritage was ready again with friendly staff and a practical political agenda, called Blueprint for reorganization. At the tip of Trump's first 12 months in office Heritage praised He said he had “accepted 64 percent of our 321 recommendations,” including key conservative priorities comparable to tax reform, reducing regulations and increasing defense spending.
Project 2025 is comparable to those other recommendations for Republican politicians and presidential candidates. It outlines an agenda for a brand new president and a team of experts to assist him achieve it.
But Project 2025 has a unique direction in comparison with previous plans. Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage, described the group's role as follows:Institutionalization of Trumpism.”
This might be why Project 2025 and Heritage have received a lot unusual attention in recent months. The proven fact that a 900-page, slanted political memo has been the main target of countless news articles and Hundreds of tweets from the Biden campaignespecially before the 2024 elections, is a transparent indication of the expected influence.
The Trump campaign team, for its part, has kept its distance from the project, as Trump himself has implausibly claimed that he knows nothing about it.
He's probably staying away from Project 2025 because parts of its agenda are far too extreme for all but essentially the most hardcore conservative activists. But even when Trump doesn't campaign on these policies, Americans can expect Heritage's ideas to play an enormous role in a second Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation was founded for this goal.
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