Edwin J. Feulner Jr., a right-wing congressional aide who felt himself in the ideological “wilderness” in the 1970s, but who, as the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and its leader for most of its existence, became one of the most influential figures of a resurgent conservative movement, died on Friday. He was 83.
The Heritage Foundation announced his death in a statement that did not specify where he died or the cause.
Mr. Feulner (pronounced FULL-ner) created Heritage with a friend, Paul Weyrich, in 1973. They wanted to go beyond informing public debate, as other think tanks did at the time, to influencing votes on legislation. Heritage would produce its work before big bills were introduced in Congress distill its findings into easily digestible blurbs, called “backgrounders,” for harried politicians and their aides.
Mr. Weyrich went on to found several other conservative groups. Mr. Feulner ran Heritage from 1977 until 2013, and he became interim head again for a brief period in 2017. Two years ago, during a 50th anniversary celebration at Mount Vernon, the organization’s current president, Kevin Roberts, called Mr. Feulner “the Heritage Foundation’s George Washington.”
As Mr. Feulner described it, the foundational principles of Heritage included “free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional values and a strong national defense,” The New York Times reported in 2018.
The group was in the news during the last presidential election, when Kamala Harris and other Democrats argued that a Heritage document called Project 2025 would become a shadow agenda for Donald Trump’s second term. Mr. Trump strenuously sought to disassociate himself from the nearly 900-page list of policies, which included doctrinaire right-wing positions on such politically delicate subjects as abortion.
What rarely came up during the public debate is how Project 2025 belonged to a long tradition of striking success that Heritage has enjoyed in shaping Republican presidential administrations.
The document was the latest iteration of the Mandate for Leadership, a wish list for new presidents that Heritage has habitually issued around election cycles since Ronald Reagan took power in 1981.
Mr. Feulner explained how the tradition got started in Project 2025’s afterword, which he wrote, titled “Onward!”
In the fall of 1979, senior officials of the Nixon and Ford administrations, William E. Simon and Jack Eckerd, told Mr. Feulner that, upon assuming office, they had received no practical guidance on how to institute conservative policies on issues like free markets, government size and national security. They added that their briefings came from liberal predecessors or career civil servants who favored the status quo.
Mr. Feulner and others at Heritage were early supporters of Ronald Reagan. Long before he beat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, Heritage decided to spend $250,000 to put together a guidebook for a Reagan presidency. The result, weighing in at 1,093 pages, was distributed by Mr. Reagan at his first cabinet meeting, Edwin Meese, later Mr. Reagan’s attorney general, told The Times in 2018.
Mr. Feulner described the document to The Washington Post in 1983 as “the nuts and bolts of how you make the kind of changes that philosophers and academics have been talking about.” Heritage soon reported that about 60 percent of its suggestions had been acted on by the new administration in its first year in power.
The foundation was generally a booster of Republicans, but also saw its mandate as condemning Republicans when they failed to live up to principle.
In 1987, after Mr. Reagan signed an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union and praised reforms undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr. Feulner told The Times that conservatives felt “Ronald Reagan walked away from them in the end.” He was harsher still on George H.W. Bush, whose tax increases constituted a cardinal sin.
Mr. Meese discovered what inducements were possible by staying loyal to the cause. After Mr. Reagan’s second term, Mr. Meese joined Heritage as a fellow making an annual salary of $400,000.
Soon after George W. Bush assumed office, Mr. Feulner dispensed the ultimate praise. “More Reaganite than the Reagan administration,” he told The Times. He added that he and Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s top political adviser, spoke a couple of times a week.
A new measure of the power of the Heritage Foundation came in 2013, when Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina, resigned in order to succeed Mr. Feulner.
“There’s no question in my mind that I have more influence now on public policy than I did as an individual senator,” he told National Public Radio in 2013.
Mr. DeMint was associated with the Tea Party, which Heritage had helped to finance and organize. During the 2016 presidential campaign, as other members of the Republican establishment turned against Donald Trump, Mr. DeMint pursued a collaborative relationship with the campaign.
When Mr. Trump won, Mr. Feulner became head of domestic policy for the incoming president’s transition team. Heritage was ready with a database of thousands of loyal conservatives to appoint to political offices.
”By betting long odds on Trump, he succeeded,” Daniel Drezner, then a columnist at The Washington Post, wrote of Mr. DeMint. “Heritage has easily been the most influential think tank in the Trump era.”
In 2017, during a White House dinner for grass roots leaders of the conservative movement, Mr. Feulner was the only think tank official invited — and he sat next to Mr. Trump.
“In some respects, Trump the nonpolitician has an incredible advantage, even over Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Feulner told The Times in 2018. Mr. Reagan “knew there were certain things government couldn’t do,” he continued. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has had a different mentality: “Hell, why can’t we do that? Let’s try it.”
Edwin John Feulner Jr. was born in Chicago on Aug. 12, 1941. His father was a self-made success in real estate, getting a college degree in night school and later helping to develop downtown Chicago. His mother, Helen (Franzen) Feulner, doted on Eddie, the eldest son, as her favorite, his three younger sisters later told Lee Edwards, the author of “Leading the Way: The Story of Ed Feulner and the Heritage Foundation,” a biography.
He grew up saying grace before meals and serving as an altar boy at a local Catholic church.
In 1963, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English and business from Regis University, a Jesuit institution in Denver. While there, he experienced an ideological awakening while reading Russell Kirk’s book “The Conservative Mind” and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s “Liberty or Equality.”
In his spare time in Washington, he studied by correspondence for a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Edinburgh. He earned the degree in 1981.
As a young man, he was an aide to two Republican members of the House of Representatives: Melvin Laird, from Wisconsin, and Philip Crane, from Illinois.
The Heritage Foundation was launched by a $260,000 donation from the beer baron Joseph Coors. His seed money for Heritage was “arguably the most consequential that’s ever been spent in the world of public policy,” John J. Miller wrote in a remembrance for The Wall Street Journal in 2003.
Richard Mellon Scaife, the banking and oil scion, became another major early donor. But wary of charges that Heritage was a tool of a few rich men, Mr. Feulner built a substantial membership list with the help of Richard Viguerie, a conservative marketer.
By 1984, The Washington Post described Heritage’s annual budget of over $10 million as “the biggest of any think tank in Washington, left or right.” In 2023, its revenue was $101 million. The Times reported that Mr. Feulner’s 2010 salary was $1,098,612.
In 2005, The Washington Post found that Heritage swerved from criticizing the government of Malaysia to praising it around the time that a Hong Kong consulting firm co-founded by Mr. Feulner and advised by his wife, Linda Feulner, began representing Malaysian companies. In a statement, the Heritage Foundation denied that its reports were influenced by Feulner family business interests or any other external factor.
Mr. Feulner’s survivors include his wife; his children, Edwin III and Emily V. Lown; and several grandchildren.
Flush with power in 1984, Mr. Feulner told The Times about the value of political irrelevance.
“The years in the wilderness gave us the time to work out challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy,” he said. He saw “intellectual ferment” happening on the left — new ideas, new institutional energy. “Now we are in the mainstream,” he cautioned, “and we will suffer for that like the liberals before us.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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