Heritage Foundation
A conservative think tank located in Washington, DC, the Heritage Foundation is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential public policy research institutes. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 and has been widely praised by notable conservatives. Its initial funding came from Joseph Coors, a political conservative and owner of the Coors brewery in Colorado. Conservative activist Paul Weyrich was its first head and, since 1974, its president has been Edwin Feulner.
The Heritage Foundation is known for the wide-ranging nature of its work. However, it is perhaps best known for the following two efforts:
First, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the Heritage Foundation was a key champion of the Reagan Doctrine, under which the U.S. government channelled overt and covert (and often times illegal) support to anti-communist governments and resistance movements in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua and otherwise supported global anti-communism.
Unlike traditional think tank advocacy, however, Heritage foreign policy analysts didn't restrict their support for the Reagan Doctrine to work from Washington. During the 1980s and early 1990s, many also were deeply intertwined players in these wars against Marxist regimes, visiting regularly with rebel forces in Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua to provide these rebel movements with valued political and military guidance. Heritage's support for these anti-communist movements drew praise from these resistance movements, and some conservative historians believe it was a contributing factor in Moscow's decision to ultimately retreat from these nations. In the view of Reagan Doctrine opponents, however, Heritage's engagement in these conflicts vastly inflamed Third World hostilities, fueling unnecessary death and destruction.
The foundation also supported former President Ronald Reagan's belief that the former Soviet Union was an "evil empire" and that its defeat, not its mere containment, should be America's foreign policy objective. Consistent with this thinking, Heritage also played a key role in building support for Reagan's plans to build a balistic missile shield for the United States.
Second, in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation publishes the annual Index of Economic Freedom. The Index measures how free a country's citizens are in terms of property rights, control over their money, freedom from regulation, and so on. The factors used to calculate the Index score are corruption in government, barriers to international trade, income tax and corporate tax rates, government expenditures, rule of law and the ability to enforce contracts, regulatory burdens, banking restrictions, labor regulations, and black market activities. Deficiencies in any of these areas will result in a lower score on the Index.
Many Heritage Foundation personnel have held, or gone on to hold, influential roles in American business and government, including Richard V. Allen, L. Paul Bremer, Elaine Chao, Michael Johns and Edwin Meese.
Other current and former Heritage Foundation fellows of note include legal scholar Todd Gaziano, right-wing journalist turned left-wing activist David Brock, journalist Stephen Glass (who served as the basis for the movie "Shattered Glass)," education analyst and Bush administration staffer Nina Rees, health care analyst Robert Moffitt, law enforcement guru Eli Lehrer, and foreign policy expert Larry Wortzel.
Until 2001, when it was acquired by the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation also published Policy Review, one of the world's leading conservative public policy journals.
Financial Support
Though it boasts of enormous clout on Capitol Hill, the Heritage Foundation insists that it doesn't "lobby." So, Heritage remains tax-exempt ? a status that helped it collect $29.7 million last year. Core funding comes from just a few places: In 1995, a total of 31 checks accounted for $8.5 million; another 123 donors supplied $2.6 million more. Through direct mail fundraising, however, Heritage gets millions more from ordinary people. Among Washington's major think tanks, it is the only one with a large, popular base of support.
In 1973, beer baron Joseph Coors contributed a quarter-million dollars to get the project rolling. Since then, money has come from the founders of Amway Corp. and a slew of right-leaning foundations, as well as wealthy families with names like Scaife, Mellon and Coors.
With a long history of receiving large donations from overseas, Heritage continues to rake in a minimum of several hundred thousand dollars from Taiwan and South Korea each year.
In autumn of 1988 the South Korean National Assembly uncovered a document revealing that Korean intelligence gave $2.2 million to the Heritage Foundation on the sly during the early 1980s. Heritage officials "categorically deny" the accusation.
Heritage's latest annual report does acknowledge a $400,000 grant from the Korean conglomerate Samsung. Another donor, the Korea Foundation, which conduits money from the South Korean government, has given Heritage almost $1 million in the past three years.
In an attempt to counter the powerful influence of the Heritage Foundation a number of noted liberals, such as John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton, recently founded the progressive organization Center for American Progress.
