Heritage Foundation’s Ed Feulner: You don’t know his name, but he shaped your life | Opinion
Last weekend, a guy you never heard of died. He has as much to do with the way you live your life as your parents.
Ed Feulner, one of the founders of the conservative Heritage Foundation, did more to shape our nation over the last 50 years than anyone in government, academia, business, technology or entertainment. Presidents, Federal Reserve chairmen, CEOs, movie stars, professors and tech billionaires came and went over that half-century, but the whole time Feulner was there, filling the heads of Republicans with practical ways to turn their principles into conservative governance.
It started with about 2,000 ideas in a book released a few weeks after Ronald Reagan won the White House in 1980, seven years after Heritage was founded. “Mandate for Leadership” was the bible of that revolutionary era. In its words was the outline for what the government would do to decide the rules for how you get hired, educated, save and retire, educate your kids, drive to work and choose what’s on the shelf at the grocery store. If you don’t think that’s big enough, Feulner literally spread the ideas that control what is in the air you breathe.
When “Morning in America” came around in 1984 and Reagan was reelected in a landslide, Feulner and the ideas his Heritage Foundation espoused might have had as much to do with it as Reagan himself. And when Reagan’s administration soldiered on in 1985, the bespectacled former congressional staffer from Chicago was there with “Mandate for Leadership II: Continuing the Conservative Revolution” — another 1,700 ideas on how the Reagan administration could continue the conservative advance.
You might have heard of something liberals were terrified of in 2024 — Project 2025. That detailed plan for the Trump administration was just the latest in the “Mandate” series. Like what came before, many of those ideas have become part of our reality, but some of the biggest and boldest will fail.
I never had the chance to read “Mandate I.” I was 9 when it came out. But for the last 25 years, I’ve had an original copy of “Mandate II” from 1984 sitting on my desk.
Reading it today, you can see both the outlines of political battles of the moment and why we ended up with Donald Trump as our president. If Reagan was a tornado tearing through the halls of 1960s and ‘70s consensus liberalism, Trump is a hurricane tearing down the buildings.
Conservative anger, frustration led to Trump
Reagan wasn’t big enough for the ideas he and Feulner espoused. Over the last 50 years as generation after generation of young conservatives breathed those policy ideas in and dreamed of making them real, the anger and frustration at conservative leaders for failing to get the job done allowed Trumpism free reign to abandon the principles of conservatism in order to finally implement the conservative ideas Feulner and Reagan unleashed.
Reagan and “Mandate I” argued for the abolition of the Carter-era Department of Education. As the fragile pages of 1984’s “Mandate II“ on my desk put it: “to break the stranglehold of centralized special-interest control over education policy and return responsibility for education to its rightful place: the states and localities.”
The pages of Feulner’s bible are replete with unfinished business on the agenda’s of both D.C.’s House and Senate as well as state legislatures. Vouchers to “afford parents greater control over education.” Block grants to “free the state and local levels of crippling regulatory burdens and high administrative costs.” Reforms to require those on the government dole, such as recipients of Pell Grants, to work to earn such federal largesse.
Many of the ideas were defeated time and time again by entrenched liberalism and inertia. Frustration grew. Republican presidents such as George W. Bush gave up and tried to make the Department of Education work for them instead of the education unions. Frustration grew more. Now Trump is moving to kill the Department of Education with or without Congress. Conservative values of the Founding Fathers such as separation of powers be damned.
You can see the same arc of big “Mandate” ideas, decades of failure and compromise by Republicans in office frustrating the base and today’s Trump agenda bleeding off the pages of “Mandate for Leadership II” that I have kept with me for so long.
The headlines over “Drill baby, drill,” trade deficits and Elon Musk’s defenestration of the U.S. Agency for International Development were all presaged in 1984. Even Trump’s loud push for Europeans to bear more of their own defense burden is there in black and white on page 272.
I met Ed briefly only a couple of times in my years in D.C. He seemed like a regular guy you could have a beer with. But he was much more. With his death it is hard to overstate how much we live in the world that his political entrepreneurialism created, both in the ideas that have already become policy and in Trump’s battles on today’s front page.
This story was originally published July 23, 2025 at 7:08 AM with the headline "Heritage Foundation’s Ed Feulner: You don’t know his name, but he shaped your life | Opinion."
