Stuart M. Butler has guided The Heritage Foundation's domestic policy research for more than 30 years.
As Vice President of Domestic and Economic Policy Studies, Butler's steady hand has helped shape the debate on critical issues from health care and Social Security to welfare reform and tax relief.
By the 1980s, National Journal, Washington's premier magazine of politics and policy, had named him as "one of 150 individuals outside government who have the greatest influence on decision-making in Washington." Two decades later, Butler continues to be in the thick of the action.
In a recent example, he is a regular speaker on the national Fiscal Wake-Up Tour. He joined a group of nonpartisan, ideologically diverse budget realists who travel the country seeking to build public support for tackling the growing threat posed by runaway federal spending on the "Big Three" entitlement programs-Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.
Featuring former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker and experts from Heritage, the Brookings Institution and the Concord Coalition, the tour has visited dozens of cities to meet with editorial boards, business leaders, academics and town hall gatherings of regular citizens. Even before the recession took hold, regional and national media--including CBS' 60 Minutes--devoted attention to the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour.
Butler joined Heritage in 1979, when it was a relatively obscure conservative think tank, as a policy analyst specializing in urban issues.
His first widely recognized policy proposal was the concept of "enterprise zones" to encourage development in blighted neighborhoods. How? By offering tax and regulatory relief to entrepreneurs who were willing to start businesses there.
Butler introduced the idea in an early paper for Heritage. It caught the attention of then-Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY), who co-sponsored legislation implementing the concept with then-Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat from the South Bronx. Today, at least 70 zones exist in cities across the country.
Butler grew up in Shropshire, in the west midlands of England. The son of a mechanic who left school at age 13, he says his modest roots strongly influenced both his personal values and his approach to policy. Although he holds bachelor's degrees in physics and math, and also economics, and a doctorate in American economic history from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, Butler believes that empowering ordinary people--not experts or government officials--is the best way to solve social problems.
Butler became a U.S. citizen in 1996. In his early days as a policy analyst, he visited tenements in the South Bronx and Washington, D.C., to discuss with residents how best to address the festering problems of public housing. The encounters led him to help design such approaches as tenant ownership and school choice.
Butler's abiding passion is health care reform. He has argued for a restructured system based on consumer choice and state-led innovation. In 1989's "A National Health System for America," Butler and Heritage colleague Edmund F. Haislmaier explained how distortions in the tax code created a health care system that denies individual choice and drives up costs.
When President Clinton began his bid to federalize health care upon taking office in 1993, Butler was one of the nation's most-quoted experts on why the Clinton proposal wouldn't work. But he also consulted with lawmakers to develop an alternative reform.
At the time, liberal pundits were among those who thought the Butler approach was superior. Michael Kinsley, then editor of The New Republic, called it "the simplest, most promising, and in an important way, the most progressive idea for health care reform."
More recently, National Journal again noted Butler's influence, calling him one of Washington's 12 "key players" on health care. In the debate over President Obama's health proposals, Butler again argued for an alternative based on consumer choice and state-led efforts, not federally directed ones.
In health care as in other areas of policy, Butler has been a leading proponent of reaching across the ideological spectrum to find bipartisan ways to achieve reform. For instance, Butler and Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution authored a major article that encouraged some of the most liberal members of Congress, as well as some of the most conservative, to craft and introduce House and Senate bills to foster bold state initiatives to reduce the number of uninsured Americans.
Butler has been published in leading academic journals, including Journal of the American Medical Association and Health Affairs, and in leading newspapers, including The New York Times. He is also a member of the editorial board of Health Affairs. He has testified before Congress dozens of times, been the subject of a profile in The Washington Post, and appeared as a guest commentator on all of the major television networks.
In addition to dozens of research papers for Heritage, Butler is the author of three books: Enterprise Zones: Greenlining the Inner Cities (1981), Privatizing Federal Spending (1985) and--with Anna Kondratas--Out of the Poverty Trap (1987).
In 2002, he accepted an invitation to spend a semester as a fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics. He currently is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Graduate School.
Butler, who is married and has two children, resides in Washington, D.C.