If you want to understand how American politics ended up where it is today, with presidential transitions pre-scripted and government blueprints drafted before a single vote is cast, you need to understand the Heritage Foundation. They call themselves a think tank.
A think tank? Hardly. This is a shadow government many years in the making.
Heritage was born in 1973, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, and nobody had heard of it. Conservative elites built it on one conviction, that whoever owns the ideas owns the future, and they turned out to be dead right.
January 1981. Reagan walked into the Oval Office and Heritage handed him Mandate for Leadership, a massive report built around two ambitions, shrink the federal government and bake conservative ideology into every corner of federal policy. Reagan ate it up.
The report functioned as a to-do list, and the items got checked off. He later described Heritage as a "vital force" during his presidency.
Trickle-down economics, the private prison boom, all of it traces back to that moment when Heritage first got its hands on a White House. Fast forward to Project 2025, officially titled Mandate for Leadership 2025, and they're running the same play. This round comes with more power and fewer guardrails.
So how did a no-name policy shop end up designing the modern American right? Time to go back to where it started.
It began with a memo
In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell Jr, just months before being nominated to the Supreme Court, penned a confidential memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
His message was urgent, almost apocalyptic: American business, he warned, was under siege.
Not from socialists with guns, but from professors, journalists, civil rights lawyers, and environmentalists. The enemy had taken the universities. The airwaves. The courts.
If capitalism didn’t fight back, it would die.
The Powell Memorandum was a blueprint for ‘counterrevolution.’ Not in the streets, no, no… they had far too much money for that kind of behavior. It would be in the boardrooms. In the universities. On Capitol Hill.
The solution? A permanent, well-funded infrastructure that would shape public opinion, pressure politicians, and seed every level of government with loyal ideologues for generations to come.
Two years later, in a office just blocks from the Capitol, three men put the Powell plan into action.
Paul Weyrich, a hardline Catholic activist with a flair for strategy.
Edwin Feulner, a policy wonk with a Georgetown pedigree and a taste for empire.
Joseph Coors, heir to the Coors brewing fortune, and a man with the money to turn ideology into machinery.
They called their new organization the Heritage Foundation.
It was unlike anything else in Washington. Not a university. Not a lobby. Not a party apparatus. Heritage was something far more dangerous: a think tank that didn’t just think. It planned. It trained. It recruited. It attacked.
While traditional think tanks like Brookings issued scholarly reports designed for debate, Heritage wrote policy guides that read like war manuals.
Every issue, from school prayer to tax policy, was recast as a battlefield. The federal government wasn’t a system to advise. It was a regime to infiltrate and reshape.
At first, few took them seriously.
In 1973, the Foundation’s annual budget was barely a blip compared to its peers. But they had something the others didn’t: Coors money. Heritage was seeded with generational money, and while most of Washington wrote for the next news cycle, Heritage wrote for the next administration. The Reagan Administration.
The Reagan Administration
When Ronald Reagan stepped into the White House, the transition team wasn’t scrambling to find direction. The direction had already been drafted in a 3,000-page manual called Mandate for Leadership. It wasn’t a recommendation. It was an order and Reagan followed it.
He handed copies to his cabinet like marching papers. By the end of his first year, over 60% of its policies had been implemented or were underway. Not debated. Not negotiated. Implemented. Heritage didn’t just influence the presidency, no, it operated it.
What did some of those policies look like?
They slashed taxes for the rich and called it freedom.
The top income tax rate was gutted, dropping from 70% to 50%, and eventually to 28%. Meanwhile, the poor and middle class were told to wait for wealth to “trickle down.”
It never did.
Instead, corporate profits exploded, CEO salaries skyrocketed, and wealth was vacuumed upward while wages for everyday workers flatlined for the next 40 years. This was the beginning of the end of the still-shrinking middle class.
They Defunded the Social Safety Net
Reagan’s first federal budget, guided by Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership, launched an all-out assault on domestic spending. In 1981 alone, more than $30 billion was slashed from federal programs that served the poor and working class. This wasn’t trimming the fat.
These were deep, surgical cuts: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was gutted, food stamp eligibility was narrowed and work requirements were placed, public housing funds were decimated, and job training programs were left to rot.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) lost more than 75% of its funding between 1981 and 1987.
Homeless Men Asleep in Grand Central Station, 1985
But the most effective weapon wasn’t even the cuts. It was the block grant scam… something Heritage called “New Federalism.” On paper, it sounded empowering.. give the states more control over their programs. In practice, it was a bait-and-switch.
The feds handed over smaller checks, with fewer rules, and then walked away. States especially the poorest, were forced to decide who to abandon.
When they slashed services to balance their budgets, the federal government shrugged and said, “Not our fault.”
Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” isn’t new; it’s Reagan’s old playbook, dusted off and loaded with even sharper blades. Just like in 1981, it guts the social safety net under the pretense of “fiscal responsibility,” slashing Medicaid, food stamps, and job programs while handing states block grants that come with less money and more strings.
It’s a setup: force states to choose who to abandon, then blame them when people suffer. Add in work requirements designed to kick people off the rolls, and you’ve got a blueprint for mass abandonment.
This isn’t reform. It’s strategic neglect, and if we don’t call it out, they’ll collapse the safety net and convince the public it collapsed on its own, just like they did last time.
All the while, a coordinated messaging campaign was underway to justify the destruction. Reagan, echoing Heritage’s talking points, reframed poverty as a moral failure. He trotted out the now-infamous myth of the “welfare queen,” stoking racial resentment and casting social programs as scams.
The imagery was deliberate: a Black woman, living large on taxpayer dollars.
It didn’t matter that the story was fabricated. The message landed.
Welfare wasn’t seen as a lifeline anymore, it became a dirty word. The right used it to fracture working-class solidarity and make cruelty politically profitable.
They Came for Mental Health
In what can only be described as policy euthanasia, Reagan signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which eliminated direct federal funding for community mental health centers.
These centers were the last remaining lifeline for people with psychiatric disorders after the mass closures of state hospitals in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Without funding, they shut their doors. Thousands were dumped onto the streets, confused, untreated, and invisible. Others ended up in jails, and this wasn’t an accident. It was design. Anything to take money from the public and line the pockets of the rich. After all, how was that their problem?
In 2025, there have been renewed calls to cut, fold into other agencies, or even eliminate SAMHSA, the current federal agency that funds mental health and addiction services across the country.
Far-right think tanks like the Heritage Foundation claim it’s bloated, too “woke,” or better handled by states, echoing Reagan’s 1980s cuts to community mental health. If SAMHSA loses funding, suicide prevention, addiction treatment, and trauma programs could vanish… especially in states that are already underfunded.
Just like in the Reagan era, they’re setting up a collapse, and when it happens, they’ll blame the people who needed help the most.
Reagan’s policies didn’t just hurt in the moment, they rewired the country to keep hurting.
Poverty didn’t fall like they promised; by the end of his presidency in 1988, it was right back at 13%, the same as when he took office.
Child poverty actually got worse, rising from 18.3% to 19.5%. While the bottom 20% of Americans saw their share of income drop from 4.2% to 3.8%, the top 5% gained their share rose from 16.5% to 18.3%.
Cities were gutted: federal aid to urban budgets plummeted from 22% to just 6%, forcing schools, clinics, and sanitation departments to shut down.
Homelessness nearly doubled between 1984 and 1987, flooding streets with people left behind. And none of this was accidental.
They slashed support systems, funneled the money upward, and left the rest of us to fend for ourselves, then had the audacity to call it economic recovery. We’re still digging out from the wreckage.
Reagan Declared War on Public Education
One of the Heritage Foundation’s core goals in the 1981 Mandate for Leadership was simple: get the federal government out of education.
They argued it was too “centralized,” too “liberal,” and too expensive. What they really meant was: too many poor kids, too much integration, too much equity. And they had a plan to change that.
When Reagan took office, he tried to abolish the Department of Education altogether, a direct Heritage recommendation.
Reagan called the Department of Education a “bureaucratic boondoggle.”
Heritage called it “unconstitutional.”
Congress wouldn’t let him kill it, but Reagan gutted its budget, slashed funding for federal education programs, and pushed control back to the states, where segregationist and conservative forces had more power.
Here’s what actually happened:
Title I funding for low-income schools was cut.
Federal student aid was slashed, making college harder to access for poor and working-class families.
Desegregation orders were rolled back, allowing schools to become more racially and economically segregated again.
Funding for bilingual education, arts, and special ed programs was reduced.
Reagan also helped shift the narrative: public schools were painted as failing, bloated, and full of “liberal indoctrination.” Sound familiar?
That’s because this same talking point is still used today.. in school board fights, in book bans, in attacks on DEI and history education. It was the same talking point used by Trump himself when he signed an unconstitutional executive order dismantling the Department of Education (DOE).
The long-term effect?
School funding became wildly unequal across districts.
Wealthy areas thrived; poor, often Black and brown communities were left behind.
Children with disabilities were not able to have equitable educations as they could not be accommodated
The federal government stopped holding states accountable.
The groundwork was laid for charter schools, vouchers, and privatization, which Heritage continues to push today. Which Trump pushed in his EO.
This was never about improving education. It was about controlling it, who gets taught, what they get taught, and who gets left behind.
Where We Are Now
Trump is only a few months into his second presidency, and already his administration has implemented over half of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda. That’s a staggering pace that makes Reagan’s first year look slow by comparison.
But this time, it’s even more dangerous.
The House and Senate aren’t just Republican-controlled; they’re stacked with hardline loyalists who treat Trump’s orders like gospel.
There’s no opposition, no friction, no brakes. Under Reagan, Heritage wrote the plan and watched it unfold piece by piece. Now, they’re watching their full authoritarian blueprint come to life in real time.
We saw what happened in the 1980s: public services gutted, the poor punished, wealth hoarded. But this isn’t a rerun.
It’s the sequel with a bigger budget, fewer restraints, and no intention of leaving survivors. If Reagan broke the system, Trump is here to finish the job, and this time the machine has no off switch
What You Can Do Before It’s Too Late
Back in the 1980s, Congress didn’t stop Reagan entirely, but it slowed him down. Lawmakers, under pressure from the public, blocked the worst of the Heritage Foundation’s plans. That pressure came from people like you, showing up, speaking out, and refusing to let the country be remade behind closed doors.
Now in 2025, we need that fight again. Louder, faster, and more relentless than ever.
Because this time they are moving quickly. The House and Senate are filled with loyalists. They are trying to abolish the Department of Education, slash Medicaid, erase civil rights protections, and shut down federal oversight. And they are doing it right now. You are not watching a plan form. You are watching a plan unfold.
Here’s what you can do starting today:
Contact Your Representatives
Use the 5 Calls App or call directly. Tell your senators and House reps: You work for us, not the Heritage Foundation. We demand you oppose Project 2025 and any legislation connected to it.
Even if they are Republican. Especially if they are Republican.
Join a Protest or Organize One: Go to Mobilize.us to find rallies, marches, and local events. No event near you? Light a candle. Make a sign. Stand outside your courthouse. One person can still spark a crowd.
There are nationwide protests scheduled on June 14th, 2025 against the Trump Regime and what they are doing. Find one and attend. Bring friends!
Donate to Legal Defense and Civil Rights Groups: They will be on the frontlines in court. Give anything you can to organizations like:
Talk About It Loudly: Post. Text. Tell your coworkers. Bring it up at dinner. Do not let them quietly erase rights while the country scrolls past.
Hold the Line Locally: School boards. City councils. County elections. These are the first places Heritage is targeting. Show up. Run for something. Protect your town before they rewrite it.
This is the plan, in motion. But it is not inevitable.
Be ungovernable.
The big beautiful budget finishes the job on the Department of Education. People are so outraged over Medicaid that they don't know that it's going to completely destroy the Department of Education. The budget does everything that was outlined in the EO.
The issues they are debating at 1am are deeper cuts, not saving the DOE or preserving Medicaid. Call if it helps you feel better. However, state legislators in Indiana and Louisiana, for example, are already enacting all of the same cruel policies at the state level that are going to ensure the further destruction of public services at state and local levels.
In red states, it's just over; it's too late now. It was over in November. Punishment for blue states is coming. FEMA is already ignoring emergencies in red states, in another example. States cannot handle the withdrawal of federal funding at this scale.
I'm sorry to strike such a hopeless note but the budget cuts are already a done deal. Lock in. It's going to be a bumpy night.
This is essential reading. The American people have been robbed of our democratic process and rights by a wealthy 501C3. A “charity” disguised Christo fascist organization literally funding the demise of democracy. They are eroding our constitution 1 elected official at a time. We need financial disclosure by our elected leadership. We need term limits and we need limits on political private funding. Only the sinister hide behind anonymity.