By Jim Heffernan
I guess I missed it, but the election seems to be over before it began. The Heritage Foundation has released a massive “2025 Mandate for Leadership” plan that details in excruciating detail what their plans are for 2025. When I say massive, I mean 925 pages. Of course I read it all, not.
I’ve developed a fondness for conservative writers, particularly American Enterprise Institute (AEI) authors, David C. Brooks, Jonathan Rauch, David French and Yuval Levin. I was very relieved that nobody from AEI or any author I recognize had anything to do with the plan.
The Heritage Foundation was founded with $250K from Joseph Coors, the beer guy, in 1973. Since then it has been nurtured by him and like-minded cronies. In 2022 its revenue was $106 million and they spent $93.7 million. They’re called contributions, but I’m sure at heart they’re looked on as investments.
Coors is in my memory. I grew up about 8 miles east of the brewery and we always drove past it on the way to the mountains. Each year the brewery got bigger, construction was a constant. I remember them making a tasty beer, but I haven’t drunk any since 1977 when they broke the union that grandad Coors had invited in during the 1930’s.
I did try to get a job with Coors in the mid 70’s and it’s a little different than the normal job application. They warn you to expect the application to take 3 or 4 hours. 90% of that time is answering a lot (maybe 300) of questions on a multi-page form. They’re not testing math or knowledge; they’re generating a psychological profile to see if you match their political mind-set. I took the test, but oddly enough I wasn’t hired. I usually do pretty good on tests, but I suspect I failed that one miserably.
But I digress, the goal of the piece was to look at what they’re showing us.
Make no mistake, the plan has a lot a padding and is replete with a lot of “word salad” writing which I suspect is generated by A.I. (Artificial Intelligence). I truly believe 925 pages could have been condensed into the following paragraph.
We the rich are determined to undo all the sins of Joe Biden, also Woodrow Wilson, Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt for good measure. This country belongs to the “makers” and the rest are worthless parasites who deserve no more than a shrinking share of the pie.
I may be overly harsh. But when I look at how the share of the economic wealth of the nation shifted in the 40 years, when “movement conservatism” held power, I don’t think so.
Here’s an excerpt, page 268, judge for yourself. To me, it’s grains of truth mixed with gallons of “alternative facts” negativism. Beware, the excerpt is 500+ words long and some might find it upsetting.
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise
Short of this, the Secretary of Education should insist that the department serve parents and American ideals, not advocates whose message is that children can choose their own sex, that America is “systematically racist, “that math itself is racist, and that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal of a colorblind society should be rejected in favor of reinstating a color-conscious society. The next head of this department will have a lot to do-hopefully culminating in the department’s closure and the salutary restoration of educational control to states, localities, and parents.
The next Secretary of Energy will similarly have much work to do. Under the next President, the Department of energy should end the Biden Administration’s unprovoked war on fossil fuels, restore America’s energy independence, oppose eyesore-windmills built at taxpayer expense, and respect the right of Americans to buy and drive cars of their own choosing, rather than trying to force them into electric vehicles and eventually out of the driver’s seat altogether in favor of self-driving robots. As former commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Bernard L. McNamee says in Chapter 12,,.A conservative President must be committed to unleashing all of America’s energy resources and making the energy economy serve the American people, not special interests.”
In Chapter 10, Daren Bakst writes that the Biden Administration’s Department of Agriculture claims to be ”’transforming the food system as we know it. “But the government “does not need to transform the food system”; instead, .,.it should respect American farmers, truckers,” and families. In Chapter 13, former chief of staff at the Environmental Protection Agency Mandy Gunasekara writes that the EPA’s “current activities and staffing levels far exceed its congressional mandates and purpose,” whereas its “initial success” in its “infancy” (in the 1970s) was a product of “clear mandates, a streamlined structure, and recognition of the states• prominent role.” Having since become a coercive” agency, full of embedded activists, its “structure and mission should be greatly circumscribed.”
Former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development Or. Benjamin S. Carson writes in Chapter 15 that HUD is beset with “mission creep” and regularly crosses the line into exercising quasi-legislative powers. In the next Administration, it should refocus on its core duties and keep “noncitizens from living in federally assisted housing,” provide enhanced “‘oversight of foreign ownership of U.S. real estate,” and “‘reinvigorate paths to upward economic mobility” and economic “self-sufficiency.,. In Chapter 18, former acting assistant secretary of policy at the Department of Labor Jonathan Berry writes that the department and related agencies should pursue pro-family, pro-worker policies to help “restore the family-supporting job as the centerpiece of the American economy,” in lieu of the current Administration’s “left-wing social-engineering agenda”- …the most assertive” in history-which empowers race, gender, and climate-change activists at the expense of American workers.
If you have the stomach for it, you can access the entire document at (if link doesn’t work for you, contact me and I can send PDF. It almost 7 megabytes)
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-2025s-mandate-for-leadership-the-conser
As always, discussion is welcome at codger817@gmail.com and as always, feel free to share and use as you like.
