As the 2024 presidential election heats up, some people are hearing about the Heritage Foundation for the first time. The conservative think tank has a new, ambitious, and controversial policy plan, Project 2025, the impacts of which include an overhaul of American public policy and government.

Project 2025 lays out many standard conservative ideas — like prioritizing energy production over environmental and climate-change concerns, and rejecting the idea of abortion as health care — along with some much more extreme ones, like criminalizing pornography. And it proposes to eliminate or restructure countless government agencies in line with conservative ideology.

Project 2025's Impacts in the Context of Think Thanks

While think tanks sometimes have the reputation of being stuffy academic institutions detached from day-to-day politics, Heritage is far different. By design, Heritage was founded to not only develop conservative policy ideas but also to advance them through direct political advocacy.

All think tanks are classified as 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations, which are prohibited from engaging in elections and can take part in only a small amount of political lobbying. But some, like Heritage, also form affiliated 501(c)(4) organizations that allow them to participate in campaigns and lobby extensively. Heritage is one of the sponsors of the Republican National Convention, which wraps up in Milwaukee on July 18, 2024.

In research for my forthcoming book, “Partisan Policy Networks,” I’ve found that a growing share of think tanks are explicitly ideological, aligned with a single political party, and engaged in direct policy advocacy.

Still, Heritage stands out from all of the groups I investigated. It is much more conservative and more closely aligned with former President Donald Trump’s style of Republicanism. Heritage is also more aggressive in its advocacy for conservative ideas, pairing campaign spending with lobbying and large-scale grassroots mobilization.

Americans should expect to hear a lot more about its ideas, like those outlined in Project 2025, if Trump is reelected in November 2024.

Two Republican congressional staffers, Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich, formed Heritage in 1973 as an explicit rebuke to existing think tanks that they thought were either too liberal or too meek in advancing conservative ideas.

Read the full article about Project 2025's impacts by Zachary Albert at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.