The Heritage Foundation’s exodus of experts

Under Kevin D. Roberts, the Heritage Foundation is unraveling the remarkable legacy Edwin Feulner built. Once known as “the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement,” Heritage’s moral and philosophical clarity has yielded to confusion, populism and personality-driven politics. The damage to Heritage’s mission and credibility is becoming irreparable.

Much of the recent outcry focuses on Roberts’s decision to maintain Heritage’s partnership with Tucker Carlson after Carlson’s now-infamous interview with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes. During that exchange, Carlson ridiculed Christians who affirm the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, sneering that figures such as Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Senator Ted Cruz were “seized by this brain virus.” He derided Christian Zionism as “heresy” and declared, “I dislike them more than anybody.” Carlson even proposed stripping US citizenship from young Americans serving in the Israel Defense Forces.

The record is long and damning. In March 2025, Carlson hosted Qatar’s prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who defended his regime’s financial support for Hamas as a “mediation tool.” Carlson offered virtually no challenge. In February 2024, he traveled to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin, allowing the Russian dictator to justify his invasion of Ukraine as a response to NATO expansion and to describe Ukraine as “an artificial state.” Carlson listened approvingly. In July 2025, he sat down with Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian, who denied nuclear ambitions and whitewashed his regime’s repression.Rather than condemn Carlson’s antisemitic tirades, Roberts chose to defend him – blaming “the globalist class” and “their mouthpieces in Washington” for supposedly forcing conservatives to “reflexively support” Israel. He dismissed those alarmed by Carlson’s anti-Semitic rhetoric as part of a “venomous coalition.” This is not an isolated misstep. For years, Roberts has aligned Heritage with Carlson even as the broadcaster has platformed dictators, historical revisionists and antisemites hostile to American interests and values.

Equally revealing is Roberts’s claim that he doesn’t keep up with Carlson’s content because of his sports-viewing habits – as if ignorance excused negligence. A CEO who neglected developments in his own industry would be dismissed. The Heritage board’s duty of care requires ensuring that its president is informed and aligned with the organization’s founding principles.

This builds on other troubling decisions by Roberts threatening the reputation of the institution. Its sprawling “Project 2025” document places pro-market and interventionist ideas side by side, creating ideological confusion rather than clarity. Even more troubling, Roberts has weaponized Heritage’s “one-voice” policy to pressure fellows to remove social-media posts defending capitalism or criticizing unconstitutional executive overreach. In doing so, he has effectively “canceled” Heritage’s own scholars.

Under Roberts, Heritage has abandoned much of the philosophical fusionism that once defined modern conservatism: the Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, social conservatism and a strong national defense. Roberts’s Heritage now flirts with tariffs, industrial policy and even capital controls – positions antithetical to economic freedom. He condemned tariff critics as “globalist elites” and celebrated Trump-era protectionism as a “tool of statecraft.” That is a sharp break from the tradition that rightfully regards economic liberty as inseparable from political liberty. Roberts threatens to replace Reagan conservatism with Buchanan’s nativism, protectionism, isolationism and central planning.

The exodus of respected experts on free trade, financial regulation and macroeconomics, international relations and first principles speaks volumes. Their departures symbolize not only a collapse of institutional expertise but the silencing of the intellectual backbone that once made Heritage formidable. Meanwhile, Kevin Roberts hired Mario Enzler, who was forced to resign as Dean of the St. Augustine Business School after the university became aware of multiple falsified academic degrees. Roberts also hired Mark Meador, a critic of both the “consumer-welfare” antitrust standard and the esteemed Judge Robert Bork who championed it.

Roberts proudly claims he “does not take direction from members or donors.” In the corporate world, a CEO with such arrogance would face swift action from the board and shareholders. Roberts’ alliances and rhetoric have damaged Heritage’s reputation and alienated its donor base. He is using Heritage as a personal platform for ideological experimentation and personal self-aggrandizement.

Donors have entrusted Heritage with hundreds of millions of dollars, often through endowments meant to safeguard Western civilization and the US-Israel alliance. Those intentions deserve respect, not betrayal.

A continued institutional alliance between Heritage and Tucker Carlson normalizes the antisemitism promoted weekly on Tucker’s show. It’s for this reason leading members of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism (NTFCA) publicly announced their departures from this Heritage project including Combat Antisemitism Movement, Young Jewish Conservatives, Coalition of Jewish Values, ZOA and the Israel Innovation Fund. The loss of the organization’s moral and intellectual capital under Kevin Roberts is increasingly clear.

The Heritage Foundation once stood as a bulwark of principled conservatism by confronting Soviet tyranny, championing tax reform and deregulation, and defending the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization. Today, Kevin Roberts aligns Heritage with a demagogue who flatters dictators and scorns allies, and he muzzles Heritage fellows from speaking out. In so doing, Roberts is dismantling not just a think tank’s reputation but a generation’s work of conservative institution building.