Kevin Roberts

Kevin D. Roberts is president of The Heritage Foundation and of Heritage Action. Heritage announced his selection on October 14, 2021, describing him as the seventh president in the organization’s then 48-year history and as the successor to Kay C. James, who had held the post since 2018. He has also served as a Heritage trustee since 2023.

Career Before Heritage

Roberts holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Texas at Austin, a master’s degree in history from Virginia Tech, and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

According to Heritage’s account, he left university teaching in 2006 to found John Paul the Great Academy, a K–12 Catholic liberal arts school in his hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana, and served as its president and headmaster for seven years. He resigned in 2013 to become the second president of Wyoming Catholic College, where the college adopted a policy of declining federal student loans and grants. Before joining Heritage he was chief executive officer of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based research institute, where Heritage says he opened a Washington, D.C. office to extend the organization’s work into federal policy debates.

In its announcement, Heritage’s board chairman said Roberts would bring “a different perspective as a D.C. outsider.” Roberts described himself in the same release as “a lifelong, movement conservative.”

Project 2025

Roberts wrote the foreword, titled “A Promise to America,” to Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the 2023 policy volume published by The Heritage Foundation and edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves. The volume’s own text describes it as “the opening salvo of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, launched by The Heritage Foundation and our many partners in April 2022,” running to 30 chapters drawn from “more than 400 scholars and policy experts.”

In the foreword Roberts sets out four numbered commitments the volume’s authors are said to share: restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect children; dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people; defend the nation’s sovereignty, borders and “bounty” against global threats; and secure “our God-given individual rights to live freely — what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’” He frames the effort as a successor to Heritage’s 1979–1981 Mandate for Leadership project, which he credits with supplying policy adopted by the incoming Reagan administration.

Project 2025’s own site described four pillars: a policy agenda, a Presidential Personnel Database, a Presidential Administration Academy, and a playbook for the first 180 days of a new administration. The project announced in February 2024 that it had reached 100 coalition partners. Paul Dans stepped down as the project’s director in July 2024.

Public Statements

In early July 2024, on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Roberts said: “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The remark was reported by the Associated Press on July 4, 2024. In a follow-up statement to the AP, Roberts said Americans “are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats,” adding that “these patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box. Unfortunately, it’s the Left that has a long history of violence, so it’s up to them to allow a peaceful transfer of power.”

On October 30, 2025, Roberts released a video defending Tucker Carlson after Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, whom CBS News described as a white nationalist and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency described as an antisemitic influencer. Roberts said Heritage “didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people,” that “their attempt to cancel him will fail,” and that he “disagree[s] with, and even abhor[s], things that Nick Fuentes says.” Fuentes publicly thanked Roberts.

The video drew resignations from Heritage. At least five members of the organization’s antisemitism task force resigned, as did Roberts’ chief of staff; the economist Stephen Moore resigned as a senior visiting fellow after twelve years, citing the episode. On October 31 Roberts said Heritage “denounces Fuentes’ vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial.” In early November he apologized at an all-staff meeting, saying, “I made a mistake and I let you down.” He remained in post as president through 2026.

Writing and Broadcasting

Heritage’s staff page lists Roberts as the author of Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America and as host of The Kevin Roberts Show, a weekly podcast. He publishes commentary regularly under the Heritage byline.

What Is Not Established Here

The page previously said only that Roberts “has served as President of the Heritage Foundation since 2021” and that “under his leadership, the foundation launched Project 2025 and has been an influential voice in shaping Republican policy priorities.” Two things in that were not carried forward. First, the assertion of influence over Republican policy priorities is an evaluation, not a documented fact, and no source consulted here measures it; the page now records what Roberts wrote and said and leaves the assessment to the reader. Second, Roberts is the foreword author of Mandate for Leadership, not its author or editor — Paul Dans and Steven Groves are named on the title page as editors, and Dans directed the project — so “launched Project 2025” is stated here in the terms the volume itself uses: the project was launched by The Heritage Foundation and its partners in April 2022, during Roberts’ tenure.

Also not carried onto the page: Roberts’ birth year, which no primary or first-party source consulted here states; the claim on Heritage’s own staff page that annual revenue grew 27 percent under him, which is not visible in the organization’s reported IRS Form 990 total revenue (2019, $122.9 million; 2020,$119.1 million; 2021, $101.8 million; 2022,$106.3 million) and may rest on a different measure Heritage does not identify; the exact date he took office, which Heritage’s announcement gives only as “later this year”; and publication details for Dawn’s Early Light beyond its title and authorship, which could not be confirmed against a library or publisher catalogue — the Library of Congress, Google Books and OpenLibrary all failed to return a matching record.