Reminding Corporations What They Are For

Edmund Burke, defending the “little platoons” of civil society against the leveling ambitions of revolutionary abstraction, would have found some to admire but little to recognize in the modern American corporation, an institution that has, in recent decades, developed an un-Burkean appetite for causes well beyond its charter. The Heritage Foundation’s Free Enterprise Initiative has taken up the overdue project of reminding corporate America what corporations are for.

The particular mechanism I want to focus on here is unglamorous: the shareholder proposal, that most procedural of instruments, filed and often quietly withdrawn once management gets the point. Heritage is, by virtue of its portfolio, a shareholder in a great many companies, and it has discovered what any student of institutions eventually learns: that influence exercised through patient engagement can be more durable than influence extracted through public confrontation.

Last proxy season, our initiative filed proposals at 26 companies; half were withdrawn, not because we lost interest but because the companies, upon inspection, either altered course or persuaded Heritage that no alteration was needed because the problem had already been remedied.

Consider Dell Technologies, which, in January 2026, found itself the subject of a proposal seeking transparency about its diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus. Dialogue ensued. Then Dell confirmed that DEI metrics play no role in executive compensation, that hiring and promotion proceed on merit there rather than on racial or sexual arithmetic, and that its employee resource groups remain open to all comers—commitments the company has indicated will surface in its public disclosures. Heritage, satisfied that enough of the more glaring DEI-related risks to shareholder value targeted by the proposal had been addressed, withdrew.

A more curious episode involved Meta, Salesforce, and Mastercard, each of which had been routing its employee charitable-matching program, administered through a platform called Benevity, through the diagnostic apparatus of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization whose “hate map” has, over the years, done more to discredit its own judgment than to illuminate anyone else’s. The companies prevailed upon Benevity to abandon its screens of conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty, Alliance Defending Freedom, and Family Research Council.

One is tempted to conclude that it took a think tank’s proxy proposal to accomplish what ordinary managerial common sense might have accomplished unprompted; institutions, alas, rarely audit their own assumptions until someone else insists on it.

While shareholder proposals are routinely attacked as costly distractions, it is difficult to overstate how often we have presented material facts to a corporation that had apparently simply not made it onto the corporation’s radar screen. When the leadership of corporations like Apple apparently give 35 times more to Democrat causes than Republican ones, it should come as no surprise that blind spots exist (willful or otherwise) that The Heritage Foundation can illuminate.

Heritage’s fastidiousness extended to engaging one of its own largest corporate donors—corporate giving being, in any case, a modest sliver, under 2%, of our support—on matters of governance, a detail worth noting for those who assume we reserve our scruples for other people’s benefactors.

Not every engagement succeeded. Proposals concerning unmitigated corporate exposure to China and the retirement of environmental, social, and governance and DEI criteria from executive pay went to a vote and lost at several firms, as did efforts to persuade Starbucks and Amazon to abandon the SPLC’s diagnostic tools.

Although the proxy voting industrial complex raises red flags about how to interpret low vote counts on conservative proposals—including conflicts of interest—Heritage returns this season with dozens more proposals, undeterred by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s evolving approach to Rule 14a-8, which governs which shareholder proposals companies must include on proxy ballots and when they may exclude them.

The animating premise is neither novel nor, properly understood, ideological: A public corporation is a commercial enterprise, not a legislature, a congregation, or a tribune of the aggrieved. Its obligations run to shareholders. (To fulfill this obligation, corporations must, of course, treat their customers, employees, and suppliers well.)

When corporations drift into adjudicating contested social questions—underwriting gender-transition interventions for minors, for instance, or outsourcing moral judgment to organizations of dubious rigor (yes, I mean the SPLC)—they are not exercising some novel form of civic virtue; they are neglecting their own.

We’re not issuing a summons to convert the boardroom into a battleground for every cultural quarrel, which could invert the problem Heritage is trying to correct. We’re suggesting, through the ordinary medium of the proxy statement and shareholder proposal, that institutions perform best when they remember what they are.

James Madison thought factions inevitable and that checked power was the optimal solution. The Free Enterprise Initiative, more modestly, treats corporate mission creep as likewise inevitable, and shareholder vigilance a suitably and uniquely American remedy for it. Limited, accountable institutions doing their actual jobs well: This was once considered unremarkable. That it now requires a proxy season’s worth of proposals to say so is the real story here.