Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
Dr. Edwin J. Feulner has served as President of The Heritage Foundation since 1977. He was a founding Trustee of Heritage in 1973. As a result of Dr. Feulner’s vision and leadership, The Heritage Foundation has grown from a nine-person policy shop in rented office space to what The New York Times has called “the beast of [all think tanks], the almost mythical Heritage Foundation…the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis.” Having guided Washington’s premier think tank through more than three decades of national influence, Dr. Feulner is widely credited with establishing The Heritage Foundation as the most dynamic and far-reaching public policy research organization in the world. Presidents, Vice Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, governors, ambassadors and other public figures have worked directly with Ed Feulner and The Heritage Foundation to implement effective public policies based on the principles articulated in Heritage’s mission statement: free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. Dr. Feulner began his career as a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and went on to serve as a Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Chief of Staff to Representative Phil Crane, and founding director of the Republican Study Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. He advised President Ronald Reagan on domestic policy issues. As Chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on three occasions. In 1989, President Reagan honored Dr. Feulner by awarding him the Presidential Citizens Medal for his work as “a leader of the conservative movement.” More recently, Dr. Feulner was named one of the “Seven Most Powerful Conservatives in Washington” by Forbes magazine. He has also been featured on Fox News Sunday as the program’s “Power Player of the Week.” The Daily Telegraph in London named Dr. Feulner one of the “100 Most Influential American Conservatives” in 2010, and GQ magazine included him in its list of the “50 Most Powerful People in D.C.” He was included in a 2010 Washingtonian list of the “45 Who Shaped Washington.” Dr. Feulner has served as Chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and President of the Mont Pelerin Society and the Philadelphia Society, of which he is a Distinguished Member. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Public Diplomacy Collaborative at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Arthur B. Laffer, Ph.D.
Arthur B. Laffer is founder and chairman of Laffer Associates, an economic research and consulting firm that provides investment-research services to institutional asset managers. Since its inception in 1979, the firm’s research has focused on the interconnecting macroeconomic, political, and demographic changes that affect global financial markets. Dr. Laffer’s economic acumen and influence in triggering a worldwide tax-cutting movement in the 1980s have earned him the distinction in many publications of being “The Father of Supply-Side Economics.” One of his earliest successes in shaping public policy was his involvement in Proposition 13, the groundbreaking initiative that drastically cut property taxes in California in 1978. In addition to being a member of President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board from 1981–1989, Arthur Laffer was a member of the Executive Committee of the Reagan/Bush Finance Committee in 1984 and a founding member of the Reagan Executive Advisory Committee for the presidential race of 1980. Dr. Laffer’s economic achievements have been widely acknowledged. He was noted in Time’s March 29, 1999, cover story “The Century’s Greatest Minds” for inventing the Laffer Curve, one of “a few of the advances that powered this extraordinary century.” He was listed in “A Dozen Who Shaped the ’80s” in the Los Angeles Times on January 1, 1990, and in “A Gallery of the Greatest People Who Influenced Our Daily Business” in The Wall Street Journal on June 23, 1989. Arthur Laffer’s creation of the Laffer Curve was deemed a “memorable event” in financial history by the Institutional Investor in its July 1992 Silver Anniversary issue, “The Heroes, Villains, Triumphs, Failures and Other Memorable Events.”