Edwin Feulner Retires as Heritage Foundation President After 36 Years Building Conservative Movement Infrastructure

Edwin J. Feulner Jr. retired as president of the Heritage Foundation on April 3, 2013, after an extraordinary 36-year tenure that transformed Heritage from a small Capitol Hill operation with 9 staff members and a $1 million budget into the most influential conservative think tank in Washington, with over 240 staff members and annual revenue approaching $80 million. Feulner’s retirement marked the end of an era in which one individual’s vision and leadership built the intellectual and policy infrastructure that enabled the conservative movement to translate electoral victories into systematic policy implementation across federal, state, and local governments.

When Feulner assumed Heritage’s presidency in 1977, the organization operated out of a rented office with minimal staff and resources. By the time of his retirement in 2013, Heritage had become what Newt Gingrich described as “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis”—the central institution in an ecosystem of conservative think tanks, advocacy organizations, and donor networks that collectively constituted a shadow government capable of staffing Republican administrations and developing comprehensive policy agendas. Feulner’s achievement lay not merely in building one successful organization, but in demonstrating a replicable model for conservative institution-building that would be copied at state and local levels through the State Policy Network and other coordinating mechanisms.

Under Feulner’s leadership, Heritage produced policy blueprints that shaped four Republican administrations. The 1981 “Mandate for Leadership” provided the Reagan administration with over 2,000 specific policy recommendations, approximately 60% of which were implemented during Reagan’s first term. Heritage produced subsequent Mandate editions for the George H.W. Bush administration (1989), the George W. Bush administration (2000), and would eventually develop Project 2025 for a potential second Trump administration. This “government-in-waiting” function—developing comprehensive policy agendas during Democratic administrations so that incoming Republican presidents could immediately begin implementing conservative priorities—represented one of Feulner’s most significant strategic innovations.