Richard Mellon Scaife Dies After Investing $620 Million in Conservative Movement Infrastructure

Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire heir to the Mellon banking and aluminum fortune who became the most important financial architect of the modern conservative movement, died on July 4, 2014, one day after his 82nd birthday, after a battle with cancer. Scaife’s death marked the end of a remarkable philanthropic career in which he directed an estimated $620 million specifically toward “influencing American public affairs”—and more than $1 billion total when adjusted for inflation—building the institutional infrastructure that enabled conservative capture of American policy-making, legal interpretation, and political discourse over four decades.

The Washington Post, in a 1999 profile, called Scaife “the funding father of the right,” while confirming that by that point he had contributed $620 million to “conservative causes and institutions.” This extraordinary investment funded the development, growth, and coordination of the think tanks, legal organizations, advocacy groups, academic programs, and media outlets that collectively transformed American politics from the 1970s forward. Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese III described Scaife as “the unseen hand” of the conservative movement—an apt characterization of a donor who deliberately avoided public attention while systematically funding the infrastructure that would reshape American governance.

Scaife’s most consequential investment was in the Heritage Foundation, to which he contributed more than $23 million between 1975 and 1998. In 1976, he gave Heritage $420,000, representing 42 percent of the organization’s million-dollar budget—a transformational gift that enabled Heritage’s rapid expansion from a small Capitol Hill operation to the preeminent conservative think tank in Washington. Scaife served as vice-chairman of Heritage’s board of trustees, providing not just funding but strategic guidance that helped Heritage develop its “government-in-waiting” model of producing comprehensive policy blueprints for incoming Republican administrations.