After visiting tenements in the South Bronx and Washington, D.C., to discuss with residents how best to address problems with public housing, Butler published a paper for Heritage that introduced the idea of Urban Enterprise Zones in the United States.

[4] During the 1980s, Butler wrote three books on issues central to his work: Enterprise Zones: Greenlining the Inner Cities (1981), Privatizing Federal Spending (1985), and Out of the Poverty Trap (1987), co-authored with Anna Kondratas.

[7] Michael Kinsley, then editor of The New Republic, called the Heritage proposal "the simplest, most promising, and in an important way, the most progressive idea for health care reform".

[10] Starting in 2005,[11] Butler was a major participant in the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour[12] – a group traveling the country to build public support for reforming Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

[15] In September 2014, Butler left the Heritage Foundation and joined the Brookings Institution's Economic Studies program as a senior fellow.

[17] Butler is a board member of the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution, an organization that brings stakeholders together on contentious issues and uses professional facilitation to seek common ground.