Edwin J. Feulner Jr.

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Biography

Edwin J. Feulner Jr. was a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the dominant figure in its leadership for nearly four decades. After a decade as a congressional staffer and the first executive director of the Republican Study Committee, he co-founded Heritage in 1973 with Paul Weyrich and Coors-brewing-fortune heir Joseph Coors, who supplied an initial $250,000 in seed funding; Richard Mellon Scaife became a co-primary funder by 1976. Feulner took over as president in 1977, when the organization had nine employees, and ran it until 2013, returning as interim president from 2017 to 2018 (Washington Examiner obituary, July 20, 2025; Wikipedia).

Under Feulner, Heritage was built as an explicitly partisan, rapid-response operation designed to influence votes rather than maintain scholarly neutrality — what policy scholars have called the “second-generation think tank” model (Journal of Policy History, 2005). Its signature 1981 product, “Mandate for Leadership,” was a 20-volume, 3,000-proposal governing blueprint handed to the incoming Reagan administration; Reagan distributed copies at his first Cabinet meeting, and Heritage has claimed that roughly 60% of its recommendations were adopted or attempted in the first term. Feulner himself was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by Reagan in 1989. Decades later, he wrote the “Onward!” afterword to Project 2025’s own “Mandate for Leadership,” explicitly framing the 2025 playbook as a continuation of the 1981 effort (The Nation, July 2024; Washington Examiner, 2025).

Feulner’s career placed Heritage inside a broader network of coalition and movement infrastructure. He joined the Mont Pelerin Society in 1972 — a year before Heritage’s founding — and served as its president from 1996 to 1998, connecting Heritage to the international free-market think-tank circuit associated with Antony Fisher’s Atlas Network and the London Institute of Economic Affairs, where Feulner had interned (DeSmog, November 2017; chafuen.com tribute, 2025). He also held Board of Governors seats on the Council for National Policy (1982, 1996), the secretive, no-press body where religious-right, corporate, and neoconservative factions coordinated (Wikipedia, Council for National Policy). In the 2020s, Heritage extended this template internationally, signing a cooperation agreement with Budapest’s Danube Institute (March 2023) and engaging with Hungary’s Orbán-aligned Mathias Corvinus Collegium (Hungarian Conservative, July 2025). Feulner died on July 18, 2025, in Alexandria, Virginia.

Sources

• “Edwin Feulner,” Wikipedia, July 20, 2025 — birth, death, education, and positions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Feulner
• “Edwin J. Feulner Jr., 1941-2025,” Washington Examiner, July 20, 2025 — career summary, Heritage tenure, Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025 afterword (tier 1). https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/3480280/obituary-edwin-j-feulner-heritage-foundation/
• “The Heritage Foundation: A Second-Generation Think Tank,” Journal of Policy History (Cambridge University Press), 2005 — Heritage operating model under Feulner (tier 1, scholarly). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-policy-history/article/abs/heritage-foundation-a-secondgeneration-think-tank/CA2246E84985F004A29800B5DAB9EC5B
• “How the Mont Pelerin Society ‘Neoliberal Thought Collective’ Is Influencing Donald Trump’s Presidency,” DeSmog, November 29, 2017 — MPS membership and network placement (tier 1). https://www.desmog.com/2017/11/29/how-mont-pelerin-society-neoliberal-thought-collective-influencing-donald-trump-s-presidency/
• “The Mandate for Leadership, Then and Now,” The Nation, July 2024 — 1981-to-2025 Mandate continuity (tier 1). https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-conservative-promise/
• “Heritage Foundation Founder Edwin Feulner Passes Away at 83,” Hungarian Conservative, July 19, 2025 — Hungary cooperation and death (tier 2). https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/culture_society/edwin-feulner-heritage-foundation-passes-away/