One of the most consequential visionary leaders in modern conservatism has died

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Edwin Feulner, the founder and longtime president of the Heritage Foundation, died last month. He will be remembered as one of the most consequential visionary leaders in modern conservatism.

Feulner founded the Heritage Foundation with two other Republican congressional staffers in 1973. At the time, they saw the Republican Party of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and the party's congressional leadership as conservatives in name only who paid lip service to conservative ideas but, in their view, acted like Democrats in office.

He decided that the core problem turning Republicans away from conservatism in office was the policy advice they were receiving. When the policy agenda darted toward a new problem, Republican leaders would consult the same experts in think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, the federal bureaucracy and universities that Democratic leaders consulted. Their advice was often to address the problem with a new government program.

For example, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in response to rampant pollution in industrial America and staffed it with environmental experts. It was remarkably successful at reducing air and water pollution in the 1970s, but at the cost of new intrusions into the economic lives of everyday Americans. Feulner and his peers saw not a success, but a betrayal caused by what he saw as liberal experts whispering into the ears of would-be conservatives.

Heritage would solve this problem by providing Republicans with their own experts. The think tank created a roster of policy analysts who would promote conservative ideas. They would whisper into the ears of Republican policymakers instead.

Feulner was a true innovator. Before Heritage, most think tanks were structured either as contractors such as the RAND Corp., providing policy analysis at the request of the federal government, or universities without students, where individual scholars pursued their own intellectual priorities.

Feulner organized the Heritage Foundation like an interest group. They closely aligned their reports with the congressional policy agenda, marketed their findings aggressively in the media and placed dozens (if you ask Heritage, hundreds) of conservative experts in the executive and legislative branches. Almost all think tanks founded since were modeled on how Feulner chose to run Heritage.

He made an early alliance with Ronald Reagan. When Reagan became president in 1981, Heritage handed him a 20-volume, 3,000-page policy planning document called the "Mandate for Leadership." The document laid out hundreds of specific conservative policy recommendations that the administration could quickly implement. Many "Mandate" chapter authors were hired into senior positions in the agencies they wrote about. If that sounds familiar, it is because they have published a similar document every presidential election since, including "Project 2025" last year.

Heritage quickly grew into one of the largest think tanks in Washington, D.C. By the time Feulner stepped down in 2013, the think tank had become an $80 million organization. It could claim credit for numerous major conservative policy changes across many areas of federal policymaking, ranging from Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative to Newt Gingrich's Contract with America and welfare reform to the health care reform architecture that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama used to save America's private health care insurance system.

E.J. Fagan is an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is the author of "The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics."

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