Edwin Feulner

Edwin John Feulner Jr. (/ˈfʊlnər/; August 12, 1941 – July 18, 2025) was an American political scientist, think tank executive, congressional aide and foreign relations consultant who was co-founder of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in 1973. He served as the Heritage Foundation's president from 1977 to 2013 and again from 2017 to 2018.

Feulner was born in Chicago, Illinois, on August 12, 1941, to Helen Joan (née Franzen) and Edwin John Feulner, the owner of a Chicago real estate firm. He had three sisters: Mary Ann, Joan, and Barbara. The family were devout Roman Catholic German Americans. Three of his maternal uncles were parish priests.

Feulner attended Immaculate Conception High School in Elmhurst, Illinois, and Regis University in Denver, where he graduated with a BA degree in English in 1963. He attended the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a MBA in 1964. He was a Richard M. Weaver Fellow at Georgetown University and the London School of Economics.

In 1981, he received a PhD in political science from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where his doctoral thesis, The Evolution of the Republican Study Committee, was on the Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Feulner began his career as an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (then called the Center for Strategic Studies). He later became a congressional aide to Wisconsin Republican Melvin Laird. Feulner subsequently became a long-serving executive assistant to Illinois Republican congressman Phil Crane. He also served as executive director of the Republican Study Committee.

Feulner was a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation from its founding in 1973 until 1977. Four years after its founding, in 1977, he left Representative Crane's office to become the foundation's president. At the time, the foundation had only nine employees.

As president of the foundation, Feulner made the foundation more aggressive, market-driven, and less ivory tower, and began publishing easily-accessible, concise studies. By focusing the foundation's marketing, he helped transform the foundation from a small operation into a booming enterprise of conservative ideals, eventually creating a think tank that Newt Gingrich, in a New York Times column, called "the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis." The new marketing strategy was called the "briefcase test", a concept that revolutionized the influence of think tanks on public policy and boosted Heritage's popularity, referring to a focus on easily accessed, timely, concise research that could fit in a briefcase. Additionally, the foundation's policy reports and papers were published ahead of related legislation rather than after it had been passed, as most think tanks did at the time. Feulner told The Washington Examiner: "it doesn't do us any good to have great ideas if we are not out there peddling our products."

Within a year and a half of Feulner becoming president, Heritage's budget increased to $2.5 million and its donor pool grew to about 120,000. Under his leadership, Heritage ultimately grew to 250 employees and, with annual income of about $80 million and a donor pool of about 600,000, became one of the world's largest think tanks.