Overview
The Heritage Foundation is a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank that has operated for more than 50 years. Heritage said its mission is to “formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”
Notable former presidents of the Heritage Foundation include former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, who served as the president of the Heritage Foundation from 2013 until 2017. During this time, the Heritage Foundation adopted a more overtly political posture, which was continued by DeMint’s successors.
According to POLITICO, DeMint was removed from Heritage Foundation leadership because “some Heritage board members believe that DeMint…made the think tank too bombastic and political — to the detriment of its research and scholarly aims.” DeMint founded the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) after he was ultimately forced out in 2017 by the Board of Trustees on a unanimous vote.
Kevin Roberts, who has been the Heritage Foundation’s president since 2021, has sought to replace Heritage’s more traditional conservative orientation with a “MAGAfied national conservatism.”
The Heritage Foundation reported $133.9 million in revenue for 2024.
Tax classification — 501(c)(3), research and public policy analysis
Location — Washington, DC
Founded — 1973
Annual revenue — $133,868,147 (FY 2024)
EIN — 23-7327730
Notable connections — Barb Van Andel-Gaby, Chairman of the Board; Michael Gleba, Vice Chairman of the Board; Edwin Feulner, Founder and Former President; Heritage Action for America
Activities
Mandate for Leadership
Among Heritage’s longest-running initiatives is Mandate for Leadership, a series of policy blueprints prepared for incoming Republican administrations. Heritage says the Reagan administration adopted 60 percent of the 2,000 recommendations in the first edition, which was published in 1981. In January 2018, Heritage said the first Trump administration had embraced 64 percent of its policy recommendations during Trump’s first year in office.
In 2023, Heritage published Project 2025, the ninth edition of Mandate for Leadership. While other Mandates received less news coverage, Project 2025’s policy proposals were part of the narrative in the 2024 presidential election. According to the Washington Post, Project 2025’s lead Paul Dans urged Roberts to avoid “provocative media interviews” and “hyperbolic language” after the Trump campaign disavowed Project 2025. Subsequently, the Post said, Democrats “turned Project 2025 into a byword for Trump’s second-term agenda,” arguing voters should oppose it. Trump’s campaign thus “repeatedly disavowed Project 2025 and warned participants to stop talking to reporters about plans for a second Trump administration.”
After Trump was inaugurated, he appointed Project 2025 authors and contributors to high-ranking posts in his second administration. Project 2025 authors who assumed leadership roles included Brendan Carr, who became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); Peter Navarro, who was named a senior counselor after being released from prison on contempt of Congress charges; and Russ Vought, who became director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), among others. Vought had previously served as OMB director under Trump’s first term. In a fundraising email sent in June 2026, Heritage said the administration had implemented 53 percent of the plan’s proposals.
Heritage Action / The Sentinel Action Fund
Heritage Action for America is an affiliated 501(c)(4) social-welfare nonprofit that can lobby and engage in some electoral activity. The Sentinel Action Fund is a super PAC affiliated with Heritage Action.
Oversight Project
In March 2025, the Heritage Foundation announced that the Oversight Project, an initiative that requested federal government records, would operate as a separate 501(c)(4) organization. In March 2025, Heritage said the Oversight Project had filed over 100,000 government records requests and nearly 100 lawsuits since its establishment in 2022.
Innovation Prize/Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prize/Salvatori Prize
The Heritage Foundation created the Innovation Prize program in 2022 to fund nonprofits, paying approximately $1 million annually. The Heritage Foundation created the Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prize in 2023 to “support those in higher education who advance research aligned with Heritage’s values and mission” with awards between $5,000 and $25,000. Heritage also annually awards a Salvatori Prize for American Citizenship to individuals or organizations who “advance America’s founding principles or embody the virtues of the American Founding.”
Structure and Affiliations
Related Organizations
The Heritage Foundation’s 990 filings indicate that it is related to three tax-exempt organizations: Heritage Action for America, a 501(c)(4); The Heritage Institute, a 501(c)(3); and The Daily Signal Institute, a 501(c)(3).
Heritage’s filings also indicate that it is related to organizations taxable as a corporation or trust: The Daily Signal Media Group Inc. and American Dream Broadcasting Inc.
In addition, Heritage’s filings indicate that it has been related to the following disregarded entities: Intern Housing LLC, Massachusetts Avenue Properties LLC, 3rd Street Properties LLC and Education Freedom LLC.
“Related organizations” is a legal classification established by the Internal Revenue Service that is indicative of “organizations that stand in a parent/subsidiary relationship, brother/sister relationship, sponsoring organization of or contributing employer to a [Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Association], or supporting/supported organization relationship.”
Heritage Action for America
In 2010, Heritage created Heritage Action for America, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization. Heritage Action advocates for specific legislation in line with the policies published and promoted by the Heritage Foundation. It also organizes a grassroots network with nearly 20,000 trained “Sentinels.” The Heritage Foundation provided Heritage Action with $1.6 million in grant funding between 2020 and 2024. Heritage Action subsequently reimbursed Heritage $4,575,105 in 2024.
The Daily Signal
The Daily Signal began as the Heritage Foundation’s media publication, launched on June 3, 2014, as “an alternative to the establishment press.” A decade later, the Daily Signal announced that it was “officially an independent media organization with our own leadership team and board of directors,” and that it would “complete the process of separating from The Heritage Foundation.” Heritage Foundation’s 990 filing for 2024 reported that the Daily Signal Institute received a $3.5 million grant from the Heritage Foundation that year. The Daily Signal Institute is noted by Daily Signal media company as its “affiliate.”
Controversies
Roberts’s defense of Carlson interviewing white nationalist Fuentes
In a video posted on October 30, 2025, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts defended conservative news commentator Tucker Carlson against criticism that Carlson received from the American public for his interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Roberts said, “The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians.” Roberts decried what he called the “venomous coalition” attacking the organization’s “friend” Carlson. Roberts said that he “disagree[s] with and even abhor[s] things that Nick Fuentes says,” but Roberts added, “canceling him is not the answer either.”
Following the release of Roberts’s video defending Carlson, the Washington Post reported of an “open revolt” against Roberts. As part of this revolt, there were at least five members of Heritage’s antisemitism task force who resigned in protest. Those members included distinguished fellow Chris DeMuth and senior visiting fellow Stephen Moore, who had been with Heritage for 12 years.
Roberts’s chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, whom Roberts credited with writing the script for the video, was moved into a lower-ranking role and then tendered his resignation. Roberts said Neuhaus was a “good man” who “made a mistake” in drafting the Carlson defense script.
Roberts later apologized to the Heritage Foundation staff at an all-hands meeting on November 5, 2025, for his video defending Carlson.
On December 21, 2025, law professor Josh Blackman published an open letter to Roberts in which he resigned as senior editor of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution. “Your initial remarks were indefensible. Your apology was underwhelming,” Blackman wrote to Roberts. “And the lack of any meaningful followup over the past three months has been telling. For reasons only you know, you aligned the Heritage Foundation with the rising tide of antisemitism on the right.”
Blackman also wrote that “the Heritage brand, once iconic, instantly became toxic,” that contributors had withdrawn from a planned signing of nearly 1,500 donated copies of the guide at the Federalist Society National Convention and that judges had told him they would no longer recommend that their clerks attend Heritage’s clerkship academy. Heritage’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, he wrote, “cannot survive under Heritage’s current leadership.” The next day, Advancing American Freedom (AAF) — Mike Pence’s organization — announced that the Meese Center’s director John Malcolm would be leaving Heritage to found the new Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at AAF. Two other “senior Heritage Foundation leaders,” Richard Stern and Kevin Dayaratna, along with ten members of their team would also leave to join AAF.
Allegations of demeaning treatment towards women
On November 6, 2025, the Washington Post wrote that women staffers had reported “demeaning treatment” during Roberts’s tenure. The Post’s account drew from the allegations made by 22 current and former employees and senior Republican figures, recordings of Heritage meetings, drafts of policy papers and internal chat logs.
An anonymous letter sent to Heritage Foundation board members in February 2025, drafted by three employees of the Heritage Foundation and obtained by the Post, alleged that Roberts “favored Catholic employees and humiliated female employees by saying single women without children had ‘no skin in the game,’” as characterized by the Post. A Heritage Foundation spokesperson claimed that the information in the letter was “neither new nor noteworthy” and that “no real reporter would take it seriously,” dismissing the letter as a “malign[ed] and coordinated effort to silence Heritage and defame Dr. Roberts.”
In a separate instance, Roger Severino, the Heritage Foundation’s vice president of domestic policy, allegedly suggested to a former employee “that she and her husband should have six children, according to people familiar with the meeting.” Additionally, a former intern told the human resources department that Severino had “allegedly suggested during a mentorship session that she consider skipping law school in favor of motherhood.” Heritage declined to comment on the allegations. Severino told the Post: “When people ask me what I’m all about, I brag about my brilliant wife and the blessings of our six wonderful children and gladly share whatever life wisdom I have to those who seek my advice.”
In another instance, Derrick Morgan, an executive vice president who was Roberts’s chief of staff after Neuhaus’s ouster, called for summer interns to “make yourselves marriageable and go out and seek marriage” during a meeting with all of the Heritage staff. Shortly thereafter, the Heritage Foundation executive team received feedback from an attorney who advises on labor law who warned that “those kinds of remarks created significant legal liability for Heritage.” Morgan defended his statements by referring to a quote from Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk encouraging marriage and children. Heritage displayed the quote at its headquarters. The Heritage Foundation declined to comment on the alleged actions of Morgan and Severino.
A draft Heritage policy paper reviewed by the Washington Post reflected similar views. The Post reported that the draft called for “robust incentives” for heterosexual married couples to have more children, even including proposals that would award “straight married couples an additional ‘half vote’ in federal elections for each of their children.” A Heritage Foundation spokesman denied that such a policy had been “announced” and claimed that Heritage “debated” “ideas and proposals…every day.”
The Heritage Foundation has also hired staff members with a history of deploying misogynistic rhetoric. Hires that received criticism include political scientist Scott Yenor, chair of Heritage’s American Citizenship Initiative. Four years before Heritage hired Yenor, he told a 2021 conference that women focused on their careers were “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.” In recorded remarks reported by the Guardian, Yenor said the “optimal conditions for family formation” require laws under which “divorce would be difficult to get or proscribed.”
The Heritage Foundation also employs EJ Antoni as the chief economist at the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies. Antoni was present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reportedly ran an anonymous account from about 2017 to 2020 that “sexually denigrated” Kamala Harris. The Trump administration nominated Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in 2025, but the White House withdrew his nomination after it drew scrutiny. Roberts continued to support Antoni despite the controversies, saying in a statement to POLITICO that Heritage was “proud to have him.” Antoni maintained his position with the Heritage Foundation after his nomination was withdrawn.
False Claims of Noncitizen Voting
In 2024, the Oversight Project, at the time still part of the Heritage Foundation, amplified misleading claims that there had been large-scale noncitizen voting in Georgia. The Oversight Project’s claims rested on a video recorded by two men affiliated with the organization who wore a hidden camera while knocking on doors at an apartment complex outside Atlanta. According to The New York Times, the men “claimed to represent a company helping Latinos navigate the election system” and recorded seven residents who claimed they were registered to vote despite not being citizens. Heritage then posted the footage to X and claimed that it was “‘staggering’ evidence” that more than 47,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in Georgia and that “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.”
At the time of The New York Times story’s publication, Georgia state investigators had found no evidence that any of the seven people filmed by the Oversight Project had registered to vote. Three of the seven interviewees later told The New York Times that they had “misspoken.” Weighing in on behalf of Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, a spokesman called the video “a stunt.”
Mike Howell, Heritage employee and president of the Oversight Project, doubled down on the footage, saying, “I am not surprised that when an individual admits to a crime on camera that they would later retract it when that video is made public.” Election experts told The New York Times that the methodology used in the research was “deeply flawed,” noting that the project appeared to have spoken to about 50 people before concluding that one in seven noncitizen residents of Georgia might be illegally registered. Georgia election officials said the state’s 2024 election was secure and that there was no evidence of widespread or election-altering fraud.
Roberts’s rhetoric: A “second American Revolution” and a “controlled burn” of America’s institutions
During a July 2, 2024, episode of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Roberts, commenting on the 2024 election, said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” After an assassination attempt against Donald Trump later that month, Roberts again invoked similar rhetoric. Roberts said that Americans “are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats,” that “these patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box” and that “it’s the Left that has a long history of violence, so it’s up to them to allow a peaceful transfer of power.”
Paul Dans, who was the head of Project 2025 until he left the Heritage Foundation in July 2024, condemned the language in an interview published by the Washington Post on October 16, 2024. Dans criticized Roberts for using “violent rhetoric” and called on JD Vance, then the Republican vice-presidential nominee, to withdraw the foreword he had written for Roberts’s book. “There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts,” Dans said. Dans added that there was “really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august think tank,” and that Roberts had “essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.” According to the Post, a lawyer for the Heritage Foundation rejected Dans’s characterization of Roberts’s remarks, claiming Dans was motivated by a dispute preceding his departure from working on Project 2025.
An earlier promotional version of Roberts’s book “Dawn’s Early Light” had the subtitle “Burning Down Washington” and featured an image of a match on the cover. According to drafts of the book reviewed by the Post, Roberts advocated for “a political revolution” to “overthrow today’s incarnation of the ruling class,” argued that the nation “must be destroyed and replaced,” and supported eliminating institutions including “the Ivy League, the FBI, Fairfax County (Va.) Public Schools and the Boy Scouts.” After the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, the tone of the book’s promotional materials changed: The reference to overthrowing the ruling class was removed, the revolution was specified as “peaceful,” the language in the subtitle became “Taking Back Washington,” and the image of the match was removed from the cover. In August 2024, Roberts said he would delay release of the book by two months, which would be after the November election.
In the end, Roberts’s book did include JD Vance’s foreword. In the book, Roberts repeated his language that we were living “at the dawn of the Second American Revolution” and called for a “long, controlled burn” of many of America’s institutions. (For more, see Civil Defense’s profile of Kevin Roberts.)
Claims of election fraud
The Heritage Foundation has promoted claims of large-scale noncitizen voting that its own evidence does not support. Heritage first published its Election Fraud Map in 2017, presenting what it calls “a sampling of proven instances of election fraud.” As of December 12, 2025, the map recorded election fraud across states over the span of more than four decades.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan democracy-focused think tank, reviewed the database shortly after its initial publication and found it “includes an assortment of cases, many unrelated or tangentially related, going back decades, with only a handful pertaining to non-citizens voting or impersonation at the polls.” Brennan concluded that Heritage’s data “undermines its claim of widespread voter fraud.” In an October 2020 statement published by Heritage, Hans von Spakovsky — then the manager of the Heritage Election Law Reform Initiative — said that the media had made false claims about the data and “mischaracterized its purpose.”
Later analysis from the Brennan Center indicated that the Heritage Foundation had “turned to desperate measures” to locate voter fraud and that it had been at the “forefront of pushing the lie that noncitizens are registering and voting in significant numbers.”
Investigation into January 6 and subsequent pardons
In June 2022, when discussing the House January 6 Committee, Kevin Roberts said, “What happened on Jan. 6 was wrong, but unlike the violent riots that did so much damage to our country during the summer of 2020, the events of Jan. 6 were subject to one of the largest investigations in our history.” Roberts called the committee hearings “made-for-TV” political theater and urged that Black Lives Matter protests be investigated.
On January 20, 2025, the day President Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 defendants, a Heritage Foundation statement praised the move as “a clear rejection of the politicized double standards that have plagued our nation under left-wing leadership.” Roberts described the investigation as a “glaring double standard that turned peaceful dissent into a partisan witch hunt.” However, the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was not peaceful. The chairman of the Capitol Police officers’ union said in January 2021 that approximately 140 police officers had been injured by January 6 rioters.
Finances
In 2024, the Heritage Foundation reported nearly $133.9 million in revenue — compared to roughly $101 million in revenue in 2023. Heritage Foundation’s 990 filing for 2024 noted more than $142.2 million of expenses and a more than $8.3 million deficit. Heritage’s revenue increased by more than $30 million in 2024, the same year when its Project 2025 was being widely circulated and discussed on the campaign trail.
Notable Donors
Joseph Coors, the president of the Coors Brewing Company, was an early donor to Heritage in the 1970s, donating $250,000 in seed funding and providing Heritage with $300,000 annual sums in the years that followed, according to reporting from the Guardian. Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire heir to the Mellon gas, aluminum and banking fortune, who was also former vice chairman of the Heritage Foundation board, provided “tens of millions” in funding for the organization starting in 1974 until his death in 2014. According to the Washington Post, in the first two years after Heritage’s founding alone, Scaife gave more than $500,000.
Heritage reported more than $632.6 million in contributions from 2018 through 2024. Among institutional funders identified in public filings, donor-advised funds provided the largest amounts; their filings name the recipient but generally not the original donor who recommended each grant.
The Sarah Scaife Foundation was one of the largest donors to the Heritage Foundation throughout Heritage’s history, giving the Foundation nearly $2 million in 2024. In 2023, Heritage announced a $25 million commitment from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, released in annual increments of $5 million from 2023 to 2027, which it called one of the largest gifts in its 50-year history. The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation is led by Abby Spencer Moffat, who resigned from the Heritage board on December 16, 2025, after Roberts defended Carlson’s interview with Fuentes.
Primary Grant Recipients
Heritage gave out approximately $9 million in grants in 2024. Its 2024 990 filing reports grants of $3.5 million to the Daily Signal Institute, $1 million to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee and $1 million to the host committee of the 2024 Republican National Convention. Additional grantees included the Claremont Institute (whose senior fellow John Eastman helped devise Trump’s plan to block certification of the 2020 election), Heritage Action for America and Forge Leadership Network (“Developing future Christian conservative leaders”).
Heritage allocated $1.7 million in grants in 2023. Notable grantees, in addition to Heritage Action, include the American College of Pediatricians (which welcomed HHS Secretary Kennedy’s replacement of the CDC vaccine advisory panel and called for a “fresh look” at vaccine safety), Forge Leadership Network (“Developing future Christian conservative leaders”) and the National Association of Scholars (which advocates against multiculturalism, diversity policies and courses focused on race and gender issues in higher education).
The Heritage Foundation allocated nearly $1.7 million in grants for 2022. Notable grantees, in addition to Heritage Action, include Moms for Liberty (a conservative group focused on electing school board officials), the Texas Public Policy Foundation (which Heritage president Roberts had previously led),Forge Leadership Network (“Developing future Christian conservative leaders”) and the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Revenue and expenses
Assets and liabilities
Gifts of publicly traded securities
Heritage reported receiving 95 noncash contributions of publicly traded securities valued at $2,335,513 in 2024.
501(c)(4)
See our analysis of Heritage Action for America here.
Notable Vendors / Contractors
Heritage reported paying DPR Construction $8,916,586 in 2024. Its filing identifies DPR as one of Heritage’s five highest-paid independent contractors.
Board of Trustees
In its 2024 990 filing, Heritage reported 19 individuals on its Board of Trustees, including president Kevin Roberts, board chairman Barb Van Andel-Gaby and prominent Republican donor Rebekah Mercer.
Four new trustees were elected to the Heritage Foundation board in May 2026 following continued fallout from an internal dispute regarding Roberts’s defense of Tucker Carlson interviewing white nationalist Nick Fuentes. The new trustees included: the conservative political philosopher Yoram Hazony; Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of conservative online magazine The Federalist; J.C. Huizenga, who owns manufacturing and packaging companies, and founded a charter school management organization; and Lawrence Blanford, former chief executive of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. The Hill described the Heritage Foundation board elections as a step in an organizational “recalibration” known internally as “Heritage 2.0.”
Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.