The Heritage Foundation, the massive and increasingly MAGA-minded think tank at the center of the right-wing political infrastructure in the U.S., hauled in more money last year than ever before. The right-wing Washington Times reported Thursday that Heritage raised more than $150 million in 2023.
As Right Wing Watch has reported, Heritage is leading Project 2025, a massive coalition of right-wing and MAGA movement organizations that are planning to ‘take the reins of government’ after—they hope—Trump or another like-minded Republican gets elected president this year. They have a 900-page battle plan for purging the civil service, weakening federal agencies’ ability to regulate corporations and protect Americans, and give (presumably) Trump dictatorial powers to indulge his authoritarian fantasies and turn the FBI and Justice Department into weapons of personal revenge against his political opponents.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has dragged the institution firmly into Trump’s camp, so much so that he recently told The New York Times that the organization’s current mission is “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Roberts himself has seemingly internalized Trumpism, which is evident in his disdain for the media, his enthusiastic embrace of anti-democratic strongmen like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and the cavalier way he smears political opponents as “communists.”
When Heritage celebrated its 50th anniversary last April, Right Wing Watch published “6 Ways the Heritage Foundation Makes America Less Free, Less Just, and Less Safe.” An excerpt:
Making American Less Equal
Heritage has opposed virtually every advance toward legal equality for LGBTQ Americans and portrayed those advances as dire threats. Immediately after the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in 2015, Heritage promoted a plan to overturn it. Heritage’s role in the far right’s current war on the rights of trans people includes model legislation that exposes the right’s hypocrisy in claiming to act on behalf of “parents’ rights” while undermining parents who affirm their trans kids.
Making America Less Welcoming
Heritage brags that it played a leading role to “crush” bipartisan immigration reform in 2007. Heritage founder Ed Fuelner backed Trump’s controversial claim that he could use an executive order to eliminate the birthright citizenship guarantee of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In a 2017 email, Fuelner called birthright citizenship “just another form of amnesty” and claimed (wrongly and contrary to Supreme Court precedent) that Congress could eliminate it simply by passing a resolution. Heritage infamously published a report making bogus claims about immigrants’ cost to society, written by a fellow who had argued in a previous paper that immigration policy should take into consideration that Hispanic people have lower IQs than white people.
Making America Less Free
Heritage backed the long right-wing campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs and Republicans taking a House majority that same year, Heritage called for anti-choice lawmakers to “go on offense,” calling on Congress to “restrict or prohibit” the availability of abortion medication by mail and telemedicine.
Making America Less Democratic
Heritage has aggressively promoted bogus election-fraud claims as justification for states to pass more restrictive voting laws. Heritage Fellow Hans von Spakovsky, a longtime promoter of debunked claims about voting fraud, was a member of Trump’s short-lived sham “election integrity” commission to which he urged that no Democrats or moderate Republicans be appointed. (The commission shut down a short time later after failing to find any instances of widespread fraud.) Von Spakvosky also denounced a 2021 federal voting rights bill—the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—as “an invasion of state sovereignty.” In 2018, a federal judge slammed von Spakovsky for making “myriad misleading statements” about purported voting by noncitizens.
Making America Less Just
Heritage played a key role in the long right-wing campaign to take dominion over the Supreme Court and federal judiciary. Heritage Action helped identify and then promote Trump’s Supreme Court nominees; it called Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination “our chance to secure the Supreme Court for decades to come.” Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s current president, has said that the hard-right court majority cemented with Trump’s justices “could open new avenues of constitutional entrepreneurism.”
Making America Less Safe
Heritage has pushed to limit the ability of the federal government to regulate corporate behavior in ways that protect workers, consumers, communities, and the environment. In his address to Heritage on Thursday, Sen. Mike Lee argued that regulation by federal agencies is contrary to the Constitution and amounts to “tyranny.” Heritage aggressively opposed the Affordable Health Care Act and the expansion of Medicaid, both of which have granted millions of Americans access to health care. Heritage officials have also pushed climate change denialism, ignoring the plight of Americans facing extreme weather and climate change in favor of energy companies’ bottom line.
