Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

WASHINGTON, Jan. 10, 2005—Voters again have delivered a mandate to Washington policy-makers to govern conservatively—and a new guidebook from The Heritage Foundation demonstrates how.

“‘Mandate for Leadership’ outlines policies designed to limit government, expand freedom and strengthen America,” says Ed Feulner, president of the Washington-based think tank. “It provides a brief yet comprehensive road map for everything from reforming the federal budget process and eliminating needless and costly regulations to fixing Medicare, homeland security and the federal courts.”

With only 156 pages, this latest edition in Heritage’s “Mandate” series is the smallest, by far. That’s because it serves a different purpose, Feulner explained. The original version, published in 1980, was written for a new administration just gaining widespread support for its ideas. Dubbed the “bible” of the Reagan White House by The Washington Post, it provided a step-by-step guide to how to transform conservative principles into government policy.

“Today, those principles are well established in Washington, well accepted by American voters and well understood everywhere in terms of how they translate into policy,” Feulner said.

Consequently, the new Mandate for Leadership takes a different tack: It lays out the principles and programs conservative candidates pledged to work for during their campaigns. “The book can serve as a policy checklist to help hold conservative politicians to their promises,” he noted.

The opening chapter addresses how to limit the size and role of government, presenting policy benchmarks for efforts to curb federal spending, reform regulation, restrict judicial usurpation of power and strengthen federalism.

A chapter entitled “Combining Freedom with Responsibility” presents principles for improving welfare reform, revising 2003’s massive Medicare entitlement, expanding affordable achieving health-care coverage and reforming Social Security.

Homeland security and defense transformation are among the issues addressed in the chapter “Securing America Efficiently and Effectively.” A chapter entitled “Creating Foreign Policy to Protect National Sovereignty and Security” presents principles to guide public diplomacy initiatives, energy policy and relations with Europe and Asia.

The book also addresses challenges involved in expanding economic freedom, an area in which the United States is losing ground to its global competitors. In this year’s “Index of Economic Freedom,” a publication produced jointly by Heritage and The Wall Street Journal, the United States for the first time failed to rank among the world’s 10 most economically free countries. “Mandate” outlines steps the U.S. can take to climb back among the world’s elite in economic freedom and help spread that freedom abroad.

The complete “Mandate for Leadership” may be downloaded, free, from mandateforleadership.org. Print copies, which may be ordered by calling 800-544-4843, are available for $4.95 (includes shipping and handling).