SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
When it comes to President Trump's second term in office, The Heritage Foundation has had a pretty big influence. That is the conservative think tank that published Project 2025, widely seen as the blueprint for many of Trump's recent actions, like cracking down on immigration, gutting the federal workforce and ending funding for public media, among other things. More recently, Trump picked The Heritage Foundation's chief economist to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The appointment surprised many people because the BLS is traditionally nonpartisan agency or seen as one. We wanted to learn more about this influential group and its relationship to President Trump, so we called up E.J. Fagan. He's a political science professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and author of "The Thinkers: The Rise Of Partisan Think Tanks And The Polarization Of American Politics." Welcome to the show.
EJ FAGAN: Thanks for having me on.
DETROW: Before we get to everything that's happening right now, is there one specific moment you could point to where The Heritage Foundation starts to make the shift from a Mitt Romney/George W. Bush-style conservative organization to fully embracing the current MAGA Republican Trump-era party?
FAGAN: I can. Although I'd say, you know, I don't think they ever were truly on the George W. Bush/Mitt Romney side.
DETROW: Yeah.
FAGAN: I think it was the Newt Gingrich/Ronald Reagan side...
DETROW: Sure.
FAGAN: ...What you'd point to, and they very often were on the outs with certain types of Republicans. Republican Party is a coalition, and they were a piece of that coalition. But I think the moment that you see this real shift, there's a leadership transition in 2013, when kind of the old guard of The Heritage Foundation that had founded it, their president Ed Feulner - who recently died - leaves, retires, and Jim DeMint, Republican senator, actually retires from the Senate in order to take a very large salary to be the new president of The Heritage Foundation. And you see this rapid shift from that organization kind of beginning at that point.
DETROW: Yeah. So what's the best way to think about the relationship right now between Heritage and the Trump administration? So much focus was made of Project 2025. But what's the way to think about how they're interacting with each other? Who's taking cues from who?
FAGAN: Sure. I think that The Heritage Foundation is playing a role for Donald Trump in that his first administration was staffed by kind of the coalition of the Republican Party - a lot of people who had worked in previous Republican administrations who were, you know, pretty well-qualified for their jobs and some people from Heritage's side of the Republican Party. And that was very normal for a Republican Party administration. And what Heritage did with Project 2025 is they organized a Trump administration that could just elbow out pretty much the entire other side of the party, the Mitt Romney side of the party, the George W. Bush side of the party.
DETROW: Like, what's the chicken-and-egg way to think about this? Was this Heritage seeing what Trump's inner orbit wanted to do and putting policy scaffolding around it, or was it suggesting, like, if you get back in office, start here, here's some ideas?
FAGAN: I think there's less policy scaffolding than Heritage would want you to believe right now. The bargain that Heritage has been making, really since about 2022 or so, is that they're willing to be the lowest common denominator, right? They're willing to be the organization that enables a more authoritarian Republican Party.
DETROW: What's one or two specific examples you would point to?
FAGAN: Sure. I mean, if you read Project 2025, I mean, it's arguing for the complete abolishing of, you know, whole cabinet departments. It's arguing for - it's employing people who were at January 6. It is just - as somebody who's read a lot of Heritage Foundation reports over the decades, I mean, it really becomes much more of an advocacy group, right? You start seeing much more op-eds about radical change. For example, in 2017, 2018, they're not publishing things that are pro-tariff. E.J. Antoni, who is the BLS commissioner nominee from The Heritage Foundation...
DETROW: Yeah.
FAGAN: ...He's publishing what are essentially blog posts praising Donald Trump, calling him a genius for tariffs, right? That's a real shift, and it's a shift away from what we traditionally think of a Ronald Reagan conservatism at Heritage.
DETROW: Yeah. Let's talk about him for a moment. We noted this in the intro. You just noted it now. He has now been tapped to take over the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There is an opening because President Trump fired the head of BLS because he did not like the monthly economic data that was published by BLS, which raised a lot of alarms because this is supposed to be nonpartisan data that we can all trust, and Trump is signaling he doesn't want it to be that. How are you thinking about this nomination given the context of how it happened?
FAGAN: Antoni is incredibly unqualified for that job. I mean, I think it's a sign of the decline of Heritage that they couldn't find somebody better. BLS is a real job, right? This is - the BLS commissioner is responsible for gathering data. I mean, this is not a traditional highly political position for a reason. I think he's going to be a disaster over there. It's already an understaffed department, a department that got hit very hard in the first part of 2025. And, you know, I'm just very skeptical that they're going to continue putting out the current population survey, which is one of the most important data sets in not just, you know, the study of American economics but of the actual practice of American economics.
DETROW: And I think you've touched on this here and there, but what do you think the role of a think tank is in a world where the people in charge don't have much respect for expertise?
FAGAN: I think the - it depends on the think tank, right? So the premise of The Heritage Foundation was always that the experts are wrong, and we're going to give you the other answer. The idea being that, you know, the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and Republicans in Congress in the 1970s, they're talking to the same people Democrats are talking to. They're coming up with very similar ideas. And so, you know, they go out and they betray conservatives. And so we're going to provide you experts, people who can give you a conservative answer to a question, not the answer that those experts, who we think are liberal, are going to give you.
The dangerous thing is that they're still an influential organization, and so they've replaced the real policy wonks with enablers. And I think that's really - if I were, you know, someone who's concerned about the conservative policy world, I'd be very concerned about that. I think that it's actually - in some ways, they're both their strongest and their weakest right now.
DETROW: That is E.J. Fagan, political science professor and author of the book, "The Thinkers: The Rise Of Partisan Think Tanks And The Polarization Of American Politics." Thank you so much.
FAGAN: Thanks for having me.
DETROW: We reached out to the White House for comment on Fagan's criticisms of E.J. Antoni, Trump's pick for BLS commissioner. A spokesperson sent a response which reads in part, quote, "Antoni's education and vast experience as an economist has prepared him to produce accurate public data. In addition to being the chief economist at The Heritage Foundation, he has frequently testified before Congress on economic issues, and his research has been featured by many think tanks and advocacy groups." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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