The Heritage Foundation

Founded in 1973, the Heritage Foundation set out to do for the political right what older research institutions had long done for the establishment: supply ideas, arguments, and detailed policy plans. It became the flagship of the conservative movement's intellectual infrastructure, built on the conviction that winning elections was not enough without a ready blueprint for governing once in power.

Heritage pioneered a new and more aggressive kind of think tank, one that marketed its ideas as briskly as a campaign. Its landmark 1981 volume Mandate for Leadership, a thousand-page policy blueprint, was handed to the incoming Reagan administration and became a template for turning conservative principles into concrete federal action on taxes, defense, and the size of government.

For half a century the foundation remained a central hub of the conservative policy world, its analysts moving in and out of Republican administrations and its research shaping debates over welfare, deregulation, and the courts. Like the think tanks of the left and center, it blurred the line between scholarship and advocacy, a model that critics called the packaging of a political agenda in the language of research.

The Heritage Foundation's rise helped transform how policy is made in Washington, where organized networks of think tanks now supply much of the intellectual ammunition for both parties. Its history illustrates the growing power of these institutions to shape a governing agenda before an election is ever won.