type: timeline_event
Edwin J. Feulner Jr. retired as president of the Heritage Foundation on April 3, 2013, after a 36-year tenure that transformed Heritage from 9 staff members with a $1 million budget into a 240-person organization with annual revenue approaching $80 million. When Feulner assumed the presidency in 1977, Heritage operated out of a rented Capitol Hill office. By his retirement, it had become what Newt Gingrich called "the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis" — the central institution in an ecosystem of conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, and donor networks capable of staffing Republican administrations and developing comprehensive policy agendas.
Under Feulner's leadership, Heritage produced policy blueprints that shaped four Republican administrations. The 1981 "Mandate for Leadership" provided the Reagan administration with over 2,000 specific recommendations, approximately 60 percent implemented in Reagan's first term. Subsequent Mandate editions were produced for the George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, with Project 2025 eventually developed for a potential Trump second term. Feulner also helped establish the State Policy Network, replicating the Heritage model at the state level through conservative think tanks in all 50 states, and cultivated a talent pipeline moving analysts between Heritage and Republican administrations through a revolving door that translated movement priorities into government action.
The Heritage Foundation board selected Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), who had resigned his Senate seat in January 2013, to succeed Feulner as president effective April 4, 2013. Feulner remained with Heritage as Chancellor. He later served on President Trump's 2016 transition team, ensuring Heritage's institutional continuity into a new administration. Feulner's retirement marked not an ending but a transition: the infrastructure he built continued expanding, culminating in Heritage's most ambitious project — providing the policy blueprint for a systematic transformation of the federal government under a second Trump term.