What do the Heritage Foundation, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and Governor Ron DeSantis share in common?
Like the failed presidential candidate, neither think tank has caught the formula that enabled former President Donald Trump to sink Hillary Clinton in 2016. By flipping the GOP post-Cold War era playbook, the New York real-estate developer sailed right-of-center on social and cultural concerns but center-left on issues fiscal and economic.
Trump’s instincts were anchored in the upper quadrants of Lee Drutman’s chart below. But nine years after Donald and Melania crashed the party, the Heritage and AFPI policy mavens still resist the winning coalition’s economic priorities, even as the 2016 campaign speechwriter Frank Buckley explained Drutman’s tracking in The Republican Workers Party.
Each competing for the captain’s ear in navigating policy in a second Trump administration, Heritage and AFPI seem uncomfortable, as did DeSantis, with economic statecraft, or the “statesman view of the national interest” per Nathan Hitchen: using statecraft instruments to integrate foreign and domestic policies into a political economy to “steward, reform, and preserve” the American Way. Rooted in American thought and practice—from Alexander Hamilton and Henry Charles Carey to Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—the American System’s industrial policy offends the patron saints of right-wing economists, the Austrians Fredrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.
DeSantis should have grasped the imperatives of economic statecraft. His parents and grandparents hail from Northeast Ohio, once dubbed the Ruhr Valley of America, as its production of steel, cars, and tires popped off the charts.
Had his campaign launched from the Mahoning Valley, the married father of three—who worked right out of high school as an electrician to pay college bills—would have had multiple opportunities to identify the darkened fortunes of the industrial powerhouse that once defined Akron, Canton, and Youngstown. The two-term governor could have positioned himself the natural heir to The Donald, a champion of GOP’s growing racially mixed working-class base.
The Iraq War Navy JAG officer instead played it safe: running on his Florida record and the anti-woke agenda, a stance conservative populist intellectuals applauded but doesn’t speak as Trump does to national economic issues—or kitchen-table concerns of everyday Americans.
The think tanks haven’t learned the central lesson much better than DeSantis, judging from their not easily comparable blueprints. Heritage has published policy Bibles quadrennially since 1980; its institutional resources and relationships—reflected by its transition-project advisory board of 54 organizations with a legion of experts—reaped a more comprehensive game plan, one geared to policymakers.
The relatively newly minted AFPI, whose 55 unauthored chapters catalogued under ten “pillars”—each featuring a symposium YouTube video—of The America First Agenda, appears to be marketed to voters; its portal resembles a substantive but manageable and interactive PowerPoint presentation.
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the ballast of Heritage’s Project 2025, delivers enormous horsepower for the procedural and administrative side of governing, recommending nuts-and-bolts reforms of every federal department, commission, agency, and office. An overwhelming 919 pages, the impressive encyclopedia also elevates cultural and social issues, a strategic move, as Buckley and Drutman concur: whereas social liberalism is the Democrats’ raison d’être, GOP leadership sides with social conservatism reluctantly.
Missing the Economic Boat
Yet with all their conservative bona fides, neither Mandate nor America First champions statecraft to steer the full ship of federal power through the waves of globalization. Or maps a governing agenda with bullish industrial policies to restore places like Northeast Ohio to their former glory.
Both competitors literally miss the boat; neither rallies for U.S. commercial shipbuilding, the ticket to rebooting our industrial base and achieving a sorely needed 355-ship Navy. Heritage flags the ship count but misdiagnoses the collapse of an American industry necessary for the fleet’s revival, which will not happen unless Uncle Sam leads.
Overlooking the legal imperatives of this generational undertaking—an absolute necessity to check China, the geo-political threat both think tanks take seriously—Mandate argues for “repealing or substantially reforming” the legislation popularly known as the Jones Act. Weighing costs, not benefits, the gaffe betrays libertarian ignorance; the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 is our version of the Navigation Acts of England. In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith christened the legislation the foundation of Britain’s maritime power and vital exception to the political economist’s free-trade critique of mercantilism.
America First wants more trade-policy reforms like the USMCA to level the playing field “for American businesses and workers.” Yet Heritage pits four authors against each other debating trade, including the Export-Import Bank (while three other authors propose eliminating the U.S. Trade and Development Agency). The point-counterpoint may represent a big step for Heritage as Peter Navarro delivers “the case for fair trade.” But policies dear to the former president since writing The Art of the Deal should now be platform planks.
Perhaps because their respective presidents were groomed by the Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation, both think tanks fall prey to lazy supply-side habits: elevating tax policy and deregulation as the be-all and end-all of economic growth. An argument can be made for competitive corporate tax rates. But the love affair with slashing taxes, particularly on capital, and charming delusions that small business drives rather than thrives from GDP reflect the spent ideology of Paul Ryan and former Vice President Mike Pence. Those passions also sway Heritage and America First to overstate the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
Neither organization acknowledges how the tax code favors, per David Goldman, capital-light knowledge sectors over capital-intensive industries, from manufacturing and agriculture to resource extraction and refining. Nor do they therefore contemplate forcing Big Tech and Big Finance, sectors that have looted like pirates since Congress deemed Communist China a “Most Favored Nation,” to carry their weight taxwise.
Or Washington’s traditional role: boosting R&D to pioneer defense-related gamechangers that could be channeled to private-sector commercial development and production. Dismissing industrial policy, the D.C. shops remain mum about border-adjustable taxes and the inverse: credits to—or subsidies for—U.S. exporters, a dire need to offset governments’ support of foreign manufacturers. AFPI settles for “tariffs where appropriate.”
Mixed Policies on Big Tech and Labor
Deferring too much to the market, Heritage and AFPI also pull their punches against Big Tech—namely, five of the six U.S.-based multinationals ranked among the seven corporate wonders of the world. In bed with financial and retail giants, the mega-leviathans are creating a plutocracy that alienates Middle America, warns Joel Kotkin, while its hyper-digital consumerism victimizes children and teens, per Jonathan Haidt.
Robust trust-busting or midcentury Ma Bell-type regulation could downsize these virtual sovereigns—divorcing digital platforms from content producers and further divvying up content venues (browsers, social-media portals, cloud storage, and payment gateways). And bar the Big Five from banking and finance while divesting these global conglomerates of subsidiaries. Until Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, the stay-in-your-lane principle kept the Big Banks from getting too big to fail.
Yet the Mandate Treasury Department chapter, edited by in-house libertarians, favors less financial oversight, assailing the New Deal safeguard and mistakenly claiming banking law “remains stuck in the 1930s.” But without outlining a “Glass-Steagall Act for Big Tech,” as Senator Josh Hawley calls it, the FTC and FCC chapters dampen Heritage’s “new urgency” of “reining in” the sector to—like America First—limiting Section 230 immunity, ensuring platform transparency, thwarting political censorship, and protecting minors online.
More promisingly, the Labor Department chapter recommends a wider scope of policies than anything Heritage previously supported. Several arise from subordinating labor policy to “the good of the family,” among them Sabbath or Lord’s Day protections that count labor-law amendments to mandate a perk already enjoyed by union members: time-and-a-half wages for the sacred day.
Aside from reversing the neo-Marxist takeover of human resources—particularly the policy “DEI revolution,” including critical-race Orwellian reclassifications and retraining—the section also declares that the government “must put the interests of American workers first,” from limiting or phasing out foreign-worker visa programs to federal-contracting legislation that “make hiring Americans a priority,” stronger pitches than those from America First.
But in a weak moment, Mandate confuses “family-sustaining work” with the “gig economy.” As corporate America betrayed its loyalties—becoming globalist lackeys following GE under Jack Welch—workers have been increasingly forced into “at will” labor setups. Yet peddling flexibility for employers as flexibility for workers, Heritage overstates the popularity of “independent work,” including free-lancing, seasonal or part-time, third-party outsourcing, and makeshift arrangements lacking trade-union protections.
The chapter likewise assumes states need “experimentation and reform” waivers from the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act and supports allowing businesses and corporations, already cutting employee count and obligations wherever possible, to downgrade more employees into independent contractors.
Such flexibility may please Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk but does not bode well for a recovery of the family wage, the Frances Perkins legacy the Labor chapter otherwise endorses, another laudable Heritage shift. The Treasury chapter further recommends capping tax-free employer benefits (with exceptions for HSAs, another libertarian crusade); that ploy would wreak havoc with employer-provided healthcare insurance.
These shortcomings raise questions: instead of channeling voter-class concerns, are Heritage and AFPI too shaped by donor-class economics? Do they agree with Lincoln, who advised Congress that labor “deserves much the higher consideration” than capital? In February, the Teamsters maxed-out to the Republican National Committee after meeting with Trump, the union’s first RNC contribution in 20 years. But neither policy organization stands with private-sector unions nor the structure of American labor law as checks on corporate power and leverage for American workers.
Shipmen to Help Trump Stay the Course
Because his heart remains in the right place, Trump may not be distracted by Heritage’s and AFPI’s economic disaffections. His campaign has already downplayed their personnel-and-policy designs as “purely speculative and theoretical.”
The presumptive nominee may need to bring other shipmen onboard to stay the course, including the indefatigable writing machine David Goldman, the Asia Times columnist who first pleaded for moonshots to push America’s technological edge eleven years ago, or Oren Cass, who defends Trump’s 10-percent, across-the-board tariffs while his no-frills operation, American Compass, calls for Rebuilding American Capitalism. And whose broaching of family considerations became a silver lining to the labor section of the Heritage volume.
Saluting these two standouts over the many Mandate bylined economic contributors save Navarro does not discount Project 2025. More than AFPI and more than Heritage a decade ago, The Conservative Promise frames our national crisis as a moral one, even a crisis of faith. Much like the American Cold War hero Whittaker Chambers, who beheld his defection from Communism in providential terms: to bear Witness to the nature of Marxism’s century-long onslaught against the West.
Among the four “conservative promises” that Kevin Roberts signs in his foreword, the first pledges to Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. That commitment is woven throughout, especially in the chapters covering the Departments of Defense, Education, HHS, and Labor, signaling Heritage is no longer your grandfather’s conservative think tank.
Respecting the natural family as not a social construct births policies galore to reverse the “long march through the institutions” under the euphemisms of DEI, reproductive health, and gender-affirming care while exposing the “noxious tenets” of critical-race and gender-bender ideologies to the utmost. Regarding “America is not an economy; it is a country,” the Heritage president defends outlawing pornography and “robust [federal] protections for the unborn,” paralleling America First state-focused pro-life prescriptions.
But dislodged from economic statecraft, these fundamentals aren’t sufficient; they do not by themselves resonate with displaced workers, families, and communities in places like Northeast Ohio. After the latest shot in the bow, the closing of Cleveland-Cliffs Steel in West Virginia’s northern panhandle, Salena Zito lamented: “Very few people in Washington truly understand how remarkably devastating this mill closure is.” Her observation, echoing Robert Lighthizer’s that “most people in DC [don’t] care” about U.S. industrial decline, seems fitting of the conservative movement’s best and brightest.
For the 45th president to become the 47th, recharting and rebuilding the United States—steering her to lead as the greatest of world powers—his policy advisors will have to, unlike DeSantis, ditch completely the old GOP game plan, the one globalization and deindustrialization rendered null and void. As Trump demonstrated eight years ago and may again this November: Americans voting Republican are the ultimate deciders of his policy agenda.
Mr. Patterson was an associate commissioner for communications at the Social Security Administration, 2017–19. He also served as a senior speechwriter at HHS and the Small Business Administration under President George W. Bush. Bracketing his service to President Trump, Patterson was the Republican nominee in New Jersey’s 1st congressional district in 2016 and a candidate in 2nd congressional district in 2020.