In 1973, Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich, two young staffers working for a Republican congressman in Washington, D.C., decided to establish a new and different kind of think tank in the nation's capital. Feulner and Weyrich envisioned an activist organization with an independent research operation that would be dedicated to influencing policy debates in a way that the venerable and well-established American Enterprise Institute did not. Within a few years, thanks largely to seed money provided by the Coors Foundation, the Heritage Foundation emerged as the first and arguably most effective of a new breed of "advocacy think tanks."

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1803