Doug Elmets was out of his element when he stepped on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in 2016. The registered Republican had worked on the 1984 Ronald Reagan re-election campaign and served as press secretary in Reagan’s Department of Energy. He mimicked the Gipper in taking aim at Republican candidate Donald Trump: “I knew Ronald Reagan....Donald Trump, you are no Ronald Reagan.” Elmets’ line echoed in the cheers of the Democratic crowd and in the punditry that surrounded Trump’s campaign and Presidency. Ronald Reagan was cemented in the public memory the archetype of a genteel conservatism gone populist and vulgar in the hands of Trump whose every promise and move was cast as a break from conservatism’s past. Unlike Trump, Reagan had embraced the politics and economics of free trade. The Reagan administration’s political genius was his ability to unite the fractious conservative coalition, not allowing any constituency from libertarians to evangelicals to get too close to or alienated from the White House. And the Reagan administration would never have flouted public health expertise in the face of a pandemic. This panel calls each of these assumptions into question, offering new research necessary for rethinking the Reagan administration, and better understanding the conservative movement he left behind from the late 20^th century to the present. Michael Franczak’s paper reevaluates the Reagan administration’s relationship with the New International Economic Order, showing that the administration deviated from its initial economic ideology and created, in the process, an economic embrace of “domesticism” that contrasted with the “globalism” of the Democratic Party. Whitney Alycia McIntosh’s paper uncovers the paradox at the root of libertarian influence on the Reagan administration. Even as libertarians shaped key Reagan policies, they articulated dissatisfaction with the administration to propel their causes forward, influencing American politics through a blend of insider and outsider claims. Austin Steelman’s paper argues that Edwin Meese, Reagan’s close advisor and second Attorney General was an evangelical whose ties to the Religious Right reached into the White House and shaped policy, most notably in the conservative movement’s embrace of constitutional originalism. Rick Perlstein analyzes the tension between the conservative search for an unchanging ideological anchor and the constantly evolving nature of modern science. As Surgeon General C. Everett Koop emphasized public health expertise instead of moral condemnation of homosexuality during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the evangelical backlash highlighted this tension that has resurfaced during the COVID-19 epidemic. Steven Teles, whose work on the “transformative bureaucracy” of the Reagan administration serves as a theoretical foundation for much of this panel, will chair and commentate. While much scholarship has emphasized the political battles of the 1970s that culminated in the so-called Reagan Revolution of 1980s, this panel joins a growing body of new scholarship to evaluate the pivotal changes in American politics that emerged from a rapidly changing executive branch and conservative movement from 1980-1988.