INFLUENCERS
Since the earliest days following the establishment of the United States, there have been those out of government working to influence the policies which are the foundation of our government’s activities.
Just a dozen years after our Declaration of Independence, such founders as John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton with others, published what became known as the Federalist Papers- 85 position papers explaining and urging the States to formally vote to accept the new nation’s Constitution.
Today, centuries later, we have what we call “think tanks” such outside policy influencers as the Brookings Institute, the Rand Corporation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment and 1,200 more. Most provide data, focus and considerable brain and financial power to specific areas of government and American life, seeking to assist the nation in moving forward in one direction or another. (There is even one in NYC, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.)
Among all of these is the Heritage Foundation. This one is special and very much upper mind.
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
Founded in 1973 during the Richard Nixon Administration, the foundation focused on a conservative, big business, small government approach to governing America.
The foundation has had a significant influence in US public policy in ways that are very revealing.
It showed its stern conservative focus when it abandoned Nixon after the development and passage of the Environmental Protection Agency, which Heritage described as the “liberal consensus” of the Nixon Administration.
Heritage found the very existence of the EPA to be free from the policies, activities and control of big business.
The Mandate included 2,000 specific policy recommendations – based largely on reducing the size of the Federal government even as they used the Federal government to advance conservative policies.
And so, the government’s policies on welfare led to Reagan’s essentially racist views about “welfare Queens riding around in Cadillacs”.
And his strong and very public relationship with the Christian conservative alliance proceeded without concern for the separation of powers specifically found within the Constitution.
By the end of Reagan’s first term, 60% of the Heritage proposals had been implemented or initiated and Reagan said that the Foundation had been a” vital force” in his presidency.
The 1980’s were the Republican Party at its conservative best…a “best” not seen for fifty years under Roosevelt and Truman as they used liberal policies to develop programs which led to the World’s first middle class. Reagan became the icon of conservative Republicanism which sought to restore the power of big business in government.
The long-lasting influence of the Heritage Foundation on Republican policies and practices would be to replace the middle class with a safety net…pretty much where we are today.
In addition to its involvement in domestic policy decisions, Heritage developed and advanced the Reagan Doctrine on foreign policy under which America began supplying military and other support to openly anti-communist resistance movements in such areas as Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua and other nations in the midst of the Cold War.
Heritage also supported the development of a new ballistic missile defense system for the US. In 1983, Reagan made its Strategic Defense Initiative his top defense priority.
In 1986, Time Magazine labeled the Heritage Foundation “the foremost of the new breed of advocacy think tanks”.
It was only the beginning.
In the George HW Bush administration, Operation Desert Storm, designed to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation in 1990, was the Heritage Foundation’s leading push – one which sent America into the subsequent conflict.
Its domination of the thinking behind America’s foreign policy was at its peak as was its thinking about the country’s domestic policies with many of its budget proposals included in the Bush Administration’s national budget in 1990.
As political fortunes changed, the Heritage Foundation was a chief opponent of Bill Clinton’s health care plan which died in the U. S. Senate in 1994.
In Congressional elections that year Republicans took control of the House. Newt Gingrich became the new House Speaker in January,1995 largely based on commitments made in his Contract with America, a Heritage Foundation creation, which was issued six weeks prior to the 1994 elections. The Contract directly challenged the political status quo in Washington and many of the liberal ideas of the Clinton Administration.
The Heritage Foundation then broadened its scope of interests engaging in the culture wars. Its Index of Leading Cultural Indicators documented how crime, illegitimacy, divorce, teenage suicide, drug use and fourteen other social indicators had seriously worsened since the 1960s.
Those on welfare had to have a job before receiving payments. Women on welfare could not be living with a man who was not their husband.
And so, predictably, men would appear at night and leave in the morning and predictably, more babies were born without a Father to welfare Mothers than ever before in that period of time.
Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Heritage Foundation supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and challenged all opposition to the war. They also defended the Bush Administration’s treatment of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay despite wide-spread criticism of the torturous tactics used to gain information.
In July 2011, the Heritage Foundation released a study on poverty in the United States which was criticized by a series of liberal publications and studies as well as by the Washington Post as having little to do with the facts regarding poverty.
In May 2013, Jason Richwine, a Heritage scholar, resigned his position after intensive media scrutiny of his 2009 PhD thesis at Harvard, where he argued that Hispanics and Blacks were intellectually inferior to Whites and had trouble assimilating because of a supposed genetic disposition to lower IQs.
HERITAGE AND TRUMP
“Donald Trump’s a clown. He needs to be out of the race for President.”
“The problem for Trump and policy positions is that he’s full of all these contradictions. He’s kind of a tabula rasa on policy.”( an absence of preconceived ideas or predetermined goals)
“Trump’s not a conservative and his followers behave more like an alienated class of Marxist imagination than as social agents of stability and tradition. They are indeed thinking like revolutionaries, only now their ire is aimed at their progressive masters and the institutions they control.”
All of these remarks came from the Heritage Foundation’s top leadership in 2015 following Donald Trump’s entry into the race for the Republican Party’s nomination for the Presidency. The Foundation’s President praised both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz but said he couldn’t make a recommendation coming from Heritage.
But then when Trump won the nomination, in a move that fully illustrated the deep relationship between Heritage and the Republican Party, it began emailing potential political appointees in the event that Trump won the election.
The email was specific “I need to assess your interest in serving as a presidential appointee in an administration that will promote conservative principles.”
The questionnaire and a resume or bio were to be returned to Heritage one week prior to the election.
When Trump became President, the Foundation obtained influence in both his transition team and in the administration itself.
Reporting from CNN about the staffing in the new administration was on target: “no other Washington institution has Heritage’s footprint in the transition because too many think tanks have ‘never Trumpers’ on staff while Heritage has signaled its support of him.”
Heritage had put together a list of 3,000 conservatives who they trusted to serve in any Republican administration; 66 of the Foundation’s employees and alumni were hired by the Trump administration. According to former Heritage employees, several hundred of its databases were hired by the administration.
Among them were those who would eventually join the Trump cabinet including Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education and Mick Mulvaney who was appointed head of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and later would serve as Trump’s acting White House Chief of Staff.
In May of 2017 Heritage claimed the Trump Administration had embrace 64% or two-thirds of 334 proposed policies from the Foundation’s agenda.
It completely reversed its position supporting military aid to Ukraine claiming that the “Ukraine aid package puts America last.” Several major experts on foreign aid within the Foundation resigned including the head of the foundation’s Center for National Defense opposing the sudden policy change.
In September 2022 Heritage removed a twitter post condemning the January 6 storming of the Capital.
In March, the following year, Heritage established a cooperative relationship with a Hungarian think tank.
On July 12 of this year, just a week ago, Heritage stated a conspiracy theory that President Biden could attempt to remain in office following this year’s Presidential election by force and that this election was illegitimate in advance.
PROJECT 2025
This is being written after Donald Trump’s involvement in an unsuccessful attempt to kill him, his 20 minute narrative reconstruction of this stunning event and his return to normalcy in the 70 minute rest of his acceptance speech at the MAGA convention in Wisconsin.
He has disavowed any interest or involvement in the Heritage Foundation’s 900 page description of its plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s influence on American society and by doing so indicated that he will never know all the details and will have little to do with their implementation in any case
And the Foundation, which has a very influential group of Trump’s closest people on its staff, knows and expects just that result and is counting on it.
The highlights of the Project have been recounted on several occasions: putting an end to Civil Service, which is in essence the very bureaucracy that runs the government by ending 660,000 civil service jobs and replacing them with political appointees. The result of such a move would take us back to the 1800’s when we had what was called a “spoils system” in which jobs were given to those who did what they were told without the knowledge or experience to do what had to be done.
Heritage’s Project would end the work of the Federal Reserve to control the flow of money so that we maintain a non-political role for those who can influence our economy and keep it strong and working; getting rid of the FBI and other investigative elements of the Justice Department and reducing the influence of the Justice Department and its supposed independence from any administration.
There is much more like the end of abortion and even the end of contraception. More and more of the Project report will become available as media discloses it and the foundation is pushed to provide it.
But one thing remains true. The Heritage Foundation sees a second Trump Administration as the perfect vehicle for its total involvement in making the Federal Government far less influential while it uses the government to uphold an American life of strict conservatism.
There might be some in America anxious for such a result…most likely big businesses which will profit from a freedom that makes control much easier for them.
As for the rest of America? We will have to build a larger, stronger safety net.