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the President-elect in just 16 months, what could be done by an outside group to prepare for these new opportunities?

The staff at Heritage took this idea on as a challenge, and it would become the defining policy decision in the early history of this upstart think tank. Task forces of knowledgeable volunteers were formed with specific expertise in the whole range of policy issues—from welfare reform to national defense reform.

The vision for Mandate for Leadership was that it would serve as a guidebook of specific policy recommendations for reducing the size and scope of the federal government and for ensuring that it stayed within its constitutional bounds. Positive plans for freeing the private sector from overblown government interference and regulation could, we believed, result in an explosion of entrepreneurial activity that would reassert America’s leading role in the world’s economy.

Thus, if conservatives finally gained control in Washington, they were prepared to answer the question, “What is the conservative agenda?”

Candidate, then President-elect, then President Ronald Reagan’s “feisty new kid on the conservative block—The Heritage Foundation”— had the answer, and it was Mandate for Leadership.

First published in January 1981, the original Mandate served as a conservative plan of action for the Reagan Administration, providing much of the blueprint for the Reagan Revolution. It contained more than 2,000 detailed, actionable policy recommendations to move the federal government in a conservative direction.

The recommendations ranged from internal bureaucratic reorganizations to plans to implement specific, fundamental changes in every imaginable policy area— from tax and regulatory reform to strengthening national defense to reforming social programs. All were carefully crafted, vetted, and pieced together.

On January 21, 1981, at the first meeting of his Cabinet, President Reagan distributed copies of Mandate, and many of the study’s authors were recruited into the Administration to implement its recommendations.

In the foreword of that first edition, I wrote, “What is offered by the authors is a series of proposals which, if implemented, will help revitalize our economy, strengthen our national security, and halt the centralization of power in the federal government.”

The conservative movement had found in Ronald Reagan a President who shared that vision and who had the will to go against the established political grain in Washington. He also had the ability to speak directly to the American people and convincingly show them how those ideas could work for the benefit of all.

Mandate’s proven ideas and President Reagan’s skill at communicating their benefits led to his Administration implementing almost half of the reeommendations by the end of his first year in office.

Those recommendations led to tax cuts and other economic policies that gave America one of the longest periods of peacetime economic growth in its