# Council for National Policy Founding (May 1981) In **May 1981** — four months into [[Ronald Reagan]]'s first term — Southern Baptist pastor **[[Tim LaHaye]]** (author of the just-published *Battle for the Mind* and, two decades later, the *Left Behind* series), in cooperation with [[Paul Weyrich]], **[[Howard Phillips]]**, **[[Richard Viguerie]]**, and Texas oilman **[[Nelson Bunker Hunt]]**, established the **Council for National Policy** (CNP) as a private membership organization for the senior leadership of the American conservative movement. The Council's founding premise, modeled explicitly on the **[[Council on Foreign Relations]]**, was that the right needed a **closed, secret, dues-paying coordinating body** where think-tank presidents, donors, political operatives, religious leaders, and elected officials could meet three times a year, away from the press, to set strategy across institutional lines. The founding matters for the KB as the **moment movement conservatism's component parts acquired a strategic coordinating layer**. By 1981 the right's institutional ecosystem — Heritage (1973), ALEC (1973), the [[Moral Majority]] (1979), the *[[Mandate for Leadership]]* template (January 1981), the [[Koch Network]], the Olin/Scaife/Bradley foundation infrastructure — had been built. What did not yet exist was a **single forum** where the leadership of every component could meet privately and align strategy. The Council was that forum. [[Project 2025]] — which observers from across the political spectrum have described as "the Council for National Policy made visible" — is the direct institutional output of forty-four years of CNP coordination. ## The Founding Story ### The Strategic Problem By spring 1981, conservatives had accomplished a great deal in eight years: - [[Heritage Foundation Founding]] (1973) — federal policy infrastructure - [[ALEC Founding]] (1973) — state-policy infrastructure - [[Moral Majority Founding]] (1979) — evangelical electoral mobilization - *Mandate for Leadership* (January 1981) — implementation template - Reagan administration (January 1981) — executive-branch beachhead But the institutions were not *coordinated*. Heritage and the Moral Majority drew on overlapping but distinct donor pools and worked in adjacent but un-integrated issue spaces. The Koch network, the Scaife foundations, the [[Bradley Foundation]], and the DeVos and Coors families each had their own institutional preferences and were not always aligned. Reagan's executive branch needed to know whom to call when it needed a coalition delivered. Conservative donors needed to know which institutions to fund without duplication. State-level operatives needed to know what the federal-level strategy was. **LaHaye, Weyrich, Phillips, and Viguerie** — the four core "[[New Right]]" organizers — and Hunt, the donor — designed the Council for National Policy explicitly to solve this coordination problem. Their model was the **Council on Foreign Relations**, the elite foreign-policy membership organization that had played the same coordinating role for the post-WWII liberal-internationalist establishment. ### The Players - **Tim LaHaye** — Founding president; Southern Baptist pastor; co-founder (with Beverly LaHaye) of [[Concerned Women for America]]. His 1980 book *The Battle for the Mind* had laid out a conspiratorial-secularist frame that became foundational to the religious right's political theology. - **Paul Weyrich** — Strategic architect of every major right-wing organization of the decade; brought the operational expertise and the cross-institutional Rolodex. - **Howard Phillips** — Founder of the Conservative Caucus (1974); later founded the U.S. Taxpayers Party / Constitution Party. Phillips's role at CNP was to keep the libertarian-paleoconservative wing represented. - **Richard Viguerie** — Direct-mail pioneer; the New Right's principal fundraiser; published *Conservative Digest*. Viguerie ran a Wednesday-morning conservative-leader meeting at his Virginia home that was a CNP precursor. - **Nelson Bunker Hunt** — Texas oil heir and silver speculator; one of the largest individual donors to right-wing causes in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Hunt provided substantial founding capital and became the Council's second president. - Additional founding members (varying lists across sources): **[[Phyllis Schlafly]]** ([[Eagle Forum]] / anti-ERA), **T. Cullen Davis**, **William Cies**, **[[Joseph Coors]]** (Coors Brewing / Heritage seed donor), **Morton Blackwell** (Leadership Institute). The membership grew quickly. Within five years, the Council reached roughly 500 members — a number it has maintained ever since. Senior leadership of every major right-wing organization is or has been represented. ### The Founding Premise: Secrecy as Strategy The Council's most distinctive feature is its **operational secrecy**. Members are formally instructed not to reveal their membership; the membership list is not public; the meeting agendas are not public; the locations of the three annual meetings (typically at hotels under non-CNP names) are not publicized in advance. Press and observers are excluded. The premise is that **frank strategic conversation across institutional lines requires the absence of public scrutiny** — because the strategic calculations under discussion (whom to fund, whom to attack, which candidate to elevate, which legal frontier to push) would not survive contact with daylight. This is the single feature that distinguishes the Council from a conventional policy-conference body. It is also the feature most directly inherited from the Council on Foreign Relations and from elite-coordinating-body practice generally — the "Chatham House Rule" framework reproduced for the conservative movement. Periodic leaks (the Southern Poverty Law Center has obtained partial membership rosters; the Center for Media and Democracy and Mother Jones have published agendas from individual meetings) have established that the Council's discussions are extensive, candid, and strategically significant. The 2014 leak of attendee lists from multiple meetings is the most comprehensive single source. ## The Operational Pattern The mature Council, by the 1990s, operated on a stable pattern that has continued for thirty-five years: ### Three Annual Meetings The Council meets three times a year — typically late winter, spring/early summer, and fall — at rotating hotel locations. Each meeting runs three to four days, includes plenary sessions, off-the-record panels with high-level political figures, working-group breakouts, and substantial informal networking time (the meetings' actual strategic work is widely understood to take place outside the formal program). ### The Three-Tier Membership - **Executive Committee** (~12–20 people): The organization's strategic core - **Gold Circle / Major-Donor Members** (~50–100): Top-dollar donors - **General Members** (~400–500): Senior leadership of allied organizations and individual movement figures ### The Speaker Roster Active and former Republican presidents, presidential candidates, Supreme Court justices, attorneys general, senators, governors, cabinet secretaries, and high-profile movement figures speak at CNP meetings. Trump has addressed CNP multiple times. Pence is a former member. Multiple sitting Supreme Court justices have spoken to the Council, though usually without naming the venue publicly. ### The Membership Profile A representative cross-section of CNP membership (compiled from leaks across multiple decades): - Think-tank presidents: Heritage, [[Family Research Council]], FRC Action, [[Center for Security Policy]], [[Claremont Institute]] leadership - Religious-right principals: Falwell (and [[Falwell Jr.]]), Dobson, Robertson, Mohler, Perkins, Jeffress, Reed - [[Federalist Society]] leadership: [[Leonard Leo]] (long-running CNP member) - Major donors: DeVos, Coors, Bradley, Friess, Mercer, Wilks, Uihlein family members - State-policy operators: ALEC executive-committee members - Political operators: [[Steve Bannon]], [[Cleta Mitchell]], [[Ginni Thomas]], [[Charlie Kirk]], [[Stephen Miller]] - Movement intellectuals: Various Claremont- and Heritage-adjacent figures - Sitting and former officeholders: A revolving cast of senators, governors, cabinet members ## "Project 2025 is the Council for National Policy made visible" Among observers of right-wing politics, the most common gloss on **Project 2025** is that it is the institutional output of CNP coordination newly published rather than newly originated. The point is structurally correct. Project 2025's advisory board reads as a roll call of CNP membership. The personnel database is staffed substantially by CNP-network appointees. The training program is delivered by CNP-affiliated faculty. The 920-page *Mandate for Leadership* is a Heritage product but its substantive priorities — the anti-trans agenda, the [[Schedule F]] revival, the [[Department of Education]] dissolution, the immigration restrictionist agenda, the religious-liberty maximalism — represent the cumulative output of CNP cross-institutional coordination over four decades. What changed in 2024 was *visibility*, not *existence*. The political messaging requirement to **disavow** Project 2025 during the 2024 campaign was a fight over the Council's traditional secrecy: Project 2025 had partially blown the Council's cover, and the political response was to retreat to the older posture of plausible deniability. ## The Through-Line | Strand | How the founding connects | |--------|--------------------------| | [[Powell Memo]] (1971) | CNP is the **coordinating layer** that the Powell Memo's institutional infrastructure required | | [[Heritage Foundation Founding]] (1973) | Heritage produces policy; CNP coordinates Heritage with the other movement institutions | | [[ALEC Founding]] (1973) | ALEC's state-level work is integrated into CNP's overall strategy through its leadership's CNP membership | | [[Moral Majority Founding]] (1979) | The Moral Majority needed coordination with the donor and policy infrastructure; CNP provided the venue | | [[Federalist Society Founding]] (1982) | Leonard Leo's long-running CNP membership is the connective tissue between judicial selection and the broader movement | | [[Bob Jones University v. United States]] (1983) | The IRS-tax-exemption mobilization that produced the religious right's political coalition was substantially coordinated through pre-CNP precursor groups; CNP gave it permanent infrastructure | | Project 2025 (2024) | Direct institutional output of forty-four years of CNP coordination | ## Legacy The Council for National Policy is, in the words of the New York Times (writing in 1981), "a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country." Forty-five years later, that description is essentially unchanged — except that the club's members now occupy, between them, a Supreme Court supermajority, most of the senior personnel of a second Trump administration, the leadership of every major movement institution, and the political-strategic command of the largest donor coalition in American history. The Council itself remains, by design, almost entirely invisible in mainstream political coverage. Most Americans have never heard of it. This is exactly the operational mode its founders designed. The Council's founding in May 1981 is, in this sense, the **closing keystone** of the institutional architecture the right built between 1971 (Powell Memo) and 1982 (Federalist Society). After May 1981, the conservative ecosystem had its think tanks, its legal infrastructure, its state-policy mechanism, its religious-right voter mobilization, its donor network — and now its private coordinating body. The architecture was complete. Everything since has been operations. ## See Also - [[Council for National Policy]] — The organization profile - [[Tim LaHaye]] — Founder and first president - [[Paul Weyrich]] — Strategic architect (also Heritage, ALEC, Moral Majority) - [[Howard Phillips]] — Co-founder; Conservative Caucus founder - [[Richard Viguerie]] — Co-founder; direct-mail pioneer - [[Nelson Bunker Hunt]] — Co-founder, donor, second president - [[Heritage Foundation Founding]] — The federal-policy infrastructure CNP coordinates - [[ALEC Founding]] — The state-policy infrastructure CNP coordinates - [[Moral Majority Founding]] — The voter-mobilization arm CNP coordinates - [[Federalist Society Founding]] — The judicial-pipeline arm; Leonard Leo's CNP membership is the connective tissue - [[Powell Memo]] — The blueprint CNP's coordinating layer completed - [[Movement Conservatism]] — The coalition CNP is built to coordinate