Steve Soukup is a Visiting Fellow for the Free Enterprise Initiative at The Heritage Foundation.
Soukup is the Vice President and Publisher of The Political Forum, an “independent research provider” that delivers research and consulting services to the institutional investment community, with an emphasis on economic, social, political, and geopolitical events that are likely to have an impact on the financial markets in the United States and abroad.
He is also the CEO and Director of The Political Forum Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting community among investment professionals and all those interested in the intersection of politics and commerce, as well as the preservation of free and fair capital markets.
Soukup has followed politics and federal regulatory policy for the financial community since coming to Washington in 1996, when he joined the award-winning Washington research office of Prudential Securities. While at Prudential, he was part of the Washington team that placed first in Institutional Investor magazine’s annual analyst survey for eight years in a row.
He left Prudential to join Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2000 and stayed there for just over two years, before leaving early in 2003 to become a partner at The Political Forum. While at Lehman, Soukup authored macro-political commentary and followed policy developments in the Natural Resources sector group, focusing on agriculture and energy policy. He also headed Lehman’s industry-leading analysis of asbestos litigation reform efforts.
Since August 2025, Soukup has been the Scholar in Residence at the State Financial Officers Foundation, responsible for the creation and coordination of educational content at SFOF’s Public Fiduciary Network. He is also a columnist for American Greatness.
Soukup is the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, published by Encounter Books in February 2021 and named one of The Wall Street Journal’s Top 5 books about politics for that year. The Journal called it, “an exceptionally useful presentation of the intellectual origins and present-day lunacies of woke capitalism.”
In addition to his weekly column at American Greatness, Steve’s work has appeared in National Review Online, The New York Post, The Spectator, The Hill, The Federalist, RealClearPolitics, MarketWatch, and Newsweek, among others.
