A year ago, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation dismissed Donald Trump as a big-government enthusiast and left-wing sympathizer.

Now, the Heritage Foundation has emerged as one of the most influential forces shaping President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, embedding the veteran Washington group into the operation of a candidate who ran loudly against the Beltway.


Part gatekeeper, part brain trust and part boots on the ground, Heritage is both a major presence on the transition team itself and a crucial conduit between Trump’s orbit and the once-skeptical conservative leaders who ultimately helped get him elected.

Heritage is “absolutely the fulcrum, and essential to staffing the administration with people who reflect Trump’s commitments across the board,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of Susan B. Anthony List, a prominent group that opposes abortion rights. “I can say it’s been a source of great confidence during the election to know that principled people were planning for a Trump administration.”

Three sources from different conservative groups said that Heritage employees have been soliciting, stockpiling and vetting résumés for months with an eye on stacking Trump’s administration with conservative appointees across the government. One source described the efforts as a “shadow transition team” and “an effort to have the right kind of people in there.”

A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation didn’t respond to requests for comment. Spokespeople for the Trump campaign also did not respond to requests for comment.

But there’s no question that the organization is recognized, among other conservative movement leaders, as the entry point into the Trump transition team.

After Heritage Action, the foundation's political arm, offered a bruising assessment of Trump last November, Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint went on to meet with Trump during the campaign. Although there were certainly many tied to Heritage who preferred other candidates in the primary, the main organization largely steered clear of anti-Trump rhetoric throughout the rest of the election, instead assisting the candidate and his team with matters like determining potential Supreme Court justice nominees. That dynamic has helped pave the way for a relationship with an incoming administration that so heavily prizes loyalty.

Now, the transition is getting an assist from Heritage Foundation officials including Becky Norton Dunlop, a distinguished fellow at the foundation; former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, a distinguished fellow emeritus at Heritage; Heritage national security expert James Carafano; and Ed Feulner, who helped found Heritage. Rebekah Mercer, a Heritage board member and major pro-Trump donor, is on the transition team’s 16-member executive committee, and a transition team source said she is working with Heritage to recruit appointees for positions at the undersecretary level and below (though she has struggled to find people interested in taking lower-level jobs, according to a New York Times report).

The transition team also includes other prominent activists and thinkers with close ties to Heritage, such as former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the activist involved with several conservative groups who is running Trump’s domestic transition team. He has written for Heritage and has personal relationships with many at the organization.

“How do we get names that are important to us, how do we get those names to transition? Every time, it’s, ‘You need to get that to Ken Blackwell,’” said one source at a major conservative organization.

There are also staffers at the foundation with close connections to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump’s pick for attorney general, whose team has also played a key role on the Trump transition. DeMint, a former senator from South Carolina, quickly took to Twitter on Friday morning to back up his onetime colleague after the Trump team made his selection official.

Also on Friday, the Trump transition announced its “landing teams” for key agencies — and Justin Johnson of the Heritage Foundation was listed on the Defense Department team, the only person listed who was identified with a think tank. On Monday, two other people associated with Heritage were listed in the latest installation of Trump’s landing team build-out.

Heritage, as a think tank, cannot engage in partisan campaign activity — it makes its research available to everyone, staffers stress — but that doesn’t mean its members can’t advise candidates on both political and policy matters.

“Heritage has been very involved with this transition, and the people that work at Heritage have been very involved with the people who work on the transition,” said James Wallner, the organization’s vice president for research. “We’re a nonpartisan organization; our entire purpose is to do good, solid public-policy research and get our ideas into the hands of people who need them.”

Perhaps Heritage’s most significant involvement during the campaign was its experts’ shaping of Trump’s list of Supreme Court choices, ultimately resulting in a selection of conservative thinkers who oppose abortion rights.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of that list, which was created in conjunction with the Heritage Foundation and the conservative Federalist Society.

Prior to Trump’s release of the list — the first installment came in May — many conservative activists and leaders were vehemently and vocally opposed to his candidacy. A significant number of them had supported Ted Cruz — an early Heritage darling who fared much better than Trump did in Heritage Action’s assessments of the candidates last year. They had serious reservations about backing Trump, with his inconsistent record on social issues and a flamboyant personal life that was often splashed all over the tabloids.

Trump announces executive actions for Day One A new video from President-Elect Donald Trump.

“Trump supports some conservative ideas to promote opportunity but appears sympathetic to leftwing rhetoric on issues like higher education,” Heritage Action wrote in its report on the Republican presidential candidates, adding that he often veered “off script in ways that suggest he is not a conservative.”

But Trump’s list of potential judicial appointments gave movement leaders space to crystallize the contest into a binary choice between Hillary Clinton, who would certainly appoint liberal Supreme Court justices, and Trump, who promised to appoint only conservative, anti-abortion rights justices.

Certainly, there were vocal dissenters within the socially conservative movement who were grievously disappointed in the decision to back up Trump, unconvinced that he could be trusted to appoint conservative justices. But many of the biggest names among grass-roots conservative leadership ultimately got on board, buoyed by the list.

Ultimately, Trump won 81 percent of the evangelical vote, a higher percentage than even George W. Bush — himself a devout born-again Christian — earned in 2004.

Part of the reason the list made such a splash was because Heritage and DeMint are hugely influential in deeply conservative circles, often appearing at the nexus of conservative power structures.

For example, DeMint and the Heritage Foundation served as sponsors of the July gathering of the secretive but important Council for National Policy, which Trump transition members with ties to Heritage, including Dunlop and Meese, have also served as past presidents. At the most recent CNP meeting, held over the weekend at the Ritz-Carlton in suburban Washington’s Tyson’s Corner, people with ties to Heritage including Meese and Heritage economics expert Stephen Moore were spotted in attendance.

“We’re just thrilled with what we see from the transition; it gets better every day. To the extent Heritage is involved in it, hats off to Heritage,” said Richard Viguerie, a denizen of the conservative movement who has been involved in CNP for more than 30 years. “Conservatives would expect Heritage to be at the center of anything that’s important to dealing with conservative issues, causes, the movement.”

But outside of that world, Heritage is a controversial name in Washington Republican circles, and many congressional Republicans, all the way up to Mitch McConnell, have slammed DeMint and Heritage’s political arm for their tendency to criticize others in the GOP not considered conservative enough — a dynamic that threatens to undercut some of their broader influence on behalf of Trump.

“They’ve really hurt themselves among Republicans in Congress,” said Brian Walsh, a veteran GOP strategist. “They have some work to do in repairing relationships with members on the Hill.”

It’s also unclear how much Trump, who maintains a very tight circle of trusted advisers — his family makes up a significant portion of that circle — can actually be influenced by outside forces. The Trump administration’s ultimate commitment to conservative approaches on a host of issues, including spending, is very much an open question.

“The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan,” said Steve Bannon, the president-elect’s newly named chief strategist, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published last week. He went on to add, “It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

And daylight between traditionally conservative policy prescriptions and some of Trump’s campaign rhetoric is especially apparent on the issue of foreign policy.

“In order to defend Europe against Russia and deter Russian threats, the U.S. needs to reinvest in its relationships with European allies and insist that NATO focus on checking Russian aggression,” read a section in Heritage’s “Blueprint for Reform: A comprehensive policy agenda for a new administration in 2017.” The report, co-authored by several members of Trump’s transition team, went on to outline steps to “embolden NATO and send a strong message to Russia.”

Meantime, Trump has been complimentary of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and has in the past questioned U.S. commitments to NATO countries that don’t sufficiently contribute, in his view, to the organization (a position he has since deemphasized, although countries that rely on NATO as a bulwark against Russia aren’t reassured).

On some domestic issues, however, there appears to be more agreement — or at least more room for influence, given how vague Trump has been on key policy positions. Trump skeptics who don’t see him as a consistent conservative —even those who have had plenty of disagreements with Heritage, too — would be glad to see organizations like it filling in those gaps, Walsh said.

“If there’s any outside groups, including Heritage, that can have a positive influence in installing conservatives and individuals who would help reform government,” said Walsh, who has criticized both Trump and Heritage, “I think that’s a good thing.”

Kenneth P. Vogel contributed to this report.