The Mandate for Leadership, Then and Now

After Ronald Reagan was elected president in November 1980, the Heritage Foundation—then an upstart think tank—released a pre-publication draft manuscript of Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration to the presidential transition team and to the press. Written over the course of 1980, the 3,000-page manuscript (1,093 pages when published as a book) reflected the aspirations of a surging political movement about to take power. When Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, let alone when Barry Goldwater ran for the presidency in 1964, there had been no comparable intellectual infrastructure that could have produced anything like Mandate. There were a handful of free-market intellectual societies and anti-communist propaganda outfits, but most were broadly ideological, offering sweeping political and economic visions rather than a detailed policy program.

By 1980, though, conservatism had come to Washington, and the entire organizational landscape had changed. Not only was there Heritage, founded in 1973 with the support of beer magnate Joseph Coors, but also the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the American Conservative Union, and more. Edwin Feulner, then the president of Heritage, recalls that the inspiration for Mandate was a meeting at which former treasury secretary William Simon complained that when he got to Washington to serve under Nixon, he had no guidance on any “practical plans” for enacting a conservative agenda. The Heritage Foundation set to work to make sure this wouldn’t happen again under Reagan in 1981.

The idea was to offer the new administration a manual on how to restrain the federal government, in the belief that doing so would lead to an explosion of entrepreneurial activity that would power the United States back to dominance in global affairs. Reagan passed out copies of Mandate at his first cabinet meeting, and many of its contributors would win posts in his administration (most notably James Watt as secretary of the interior). The book itself became a bestseller.

This year, Heritage—through Project 2025, its umbrella coalition of conservative organizations—has released a new Mandate for Leadership, intended to guide the presidency of Donald Trump should he win the election. While Heritage does this every time a new president enters office, and twice for Republican administrations, the current Mandate—at more than 880 pages—is far more ambitious than most of the earlier versions. As in 1980, the document is supposed to indicate the “new vigor of the right,” and to this end it marshals “more than 350” conservative thinkers and “45 (and counting)” conservative organizations to provide policy advice to a new administration. Feulner himself wrote the afterword (which he retitles “the ‘Onward!’”), in which he notes that the current “economic, military, cultural, and foreign policy turmoil” echoes that of the Carter years (“actually, even worse”).

But despite the invocation of 1980, this new Mandate reflects a very different phase of American conservatism. While the right may be hoping to recapture the élan of the early Reagan administration, in tone and substance the document reveals a fractious, internally divided movement. It does so even as it suggests the real ideological transformation of the right as it has struggled to integrate Donald Trump’s electoral successes into its broader political vision.

In his foreword to the 1980 Mandate, Feulner wrote, “Political imagination and conservative philosophy are not ‘strange bedfellows,’ as some political commentators claim,” but rather “necessary and equal partners in the business of government.” Indeed, many of the authors were people with some history in Washington themselves, as congressional or cabinet staff members; out of 32, there was only one woman.

To show how conservatives would govern, the 1980 Mandate began with descriptions of the various cabinet departments and provided detailed agendas for each. The net effect was a blueprint for how American government could work if many of the executive agencies that had been created during the New Deal and the Great Society were cut back or eliminated. The Department of Education should be “completely restructured” to return decision-making to state and local levels. The entire Soviet bloc should be embargoed (“all trade with the U.S.S.R., as the major world outlaw, is immoral”). Economic regulation “threatens to destroy the private competitive free market economy it was originally designed to protect” and so should be overhauled. The section on the Department of Labor called for right-to-work bills for particular groups of employees, like students or journalists, and took an especially harsh stance toward public workers, foreshadowing Reagan’s retaliation against the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981. Influenced by supply-side economics, the report recommended ending the capital gains tax and the corporate income tax to give people a greater incentive to “work, save, invest, and produce real output.”

Reflecting the fears of the right after the American defeat in Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 1980 Mandate called for a revived anti-communist campaign. The chapter on the Department of Defense warned that the US was “moving toward a state of military inferiority” vis-à-vis the USSR and that the military budget had to be drastically expanded. The section on the State Department was especially harsh toward Jimmy Carter’s Central America policies, urging the United States to “discourage the Soviets in their attempts to establish another communist country in this hemisphere.”

The 1980 Mandate’s call for a new embrace of capitalism through supply-side economics and anti-communism could tolerate some nuance. On immigration, for example, the 1980 Mandate was ecumenical, pointing out that some conservatives saw the “entrance of illegal aliens” as a good way to find people to do jobs that Americans would not do at the “market price,” while others believed that “a large unassimilable foreign culture” would create “unsustainable burdens.” Although the section on the Environmental Protection Agency described its regulations as “crippling,” it also conceded that there had been “remarkable progress” in controlling pollution. There is scant mention of abortion, family values, crime, religion, or sexuality. The agenda was sweeping, but the rhetorical tone was, for the most part, cool.

Compare all this to the Project 2025 Mandate (subtitled “The Conservative Promise,” as opposed to “Policy Management in a Conservative Administration”). Where in 1980 the focus was on the structure of the federal government and on refocusing the state on national security, the current Mandate begins by depicting the problems facing America today: inflation “ravaging” family budgets, drug overdoses, the “toxic normalization” of transgenderism, “pornography invading” school libraries, and most of all the “Great Awokening,” which it likens to a “totalitarian cult.” Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, warns against “globalist elites” and the “strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War” being waged by the “totalitarian Communist dictatorship” in Beijing, with TikTok as one of its major weapons.