Fighting With Liberty, For Liberty
Thoughts from the 2025 Cicero Courage Awards
Dear Readers,
Earlier this month we had our third annual Cicero Courage Awards in Austin. Over 250 friends and leaders from the public and private sectors helped us honor state legislators who partnered with us at the Cicero Institute to advance bold reforms in healthcare, public safety, and government accountability.
Our special guest was Michael Kratsios, who was CTO of the United States in the previous Trump administration, and now has an even bigger job as Director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy and Assistant to the President for Science & Technology. David Sacks and other leaders are doing critical work on his team: AI and technology policy is a particularly key issue at the moment.
There is a growing surge of populism on the left and right embracing bad ideas about the economy and liberty. These ideas are reactions to very real crises, like the surging cost of healthcare. In our major cities, housing costs (driven not by markets but by a lack thereof) have shut out families and younger generations. One shouldn’t be surprised that a figure like Zohran Mamdani emerged in such an environment.
Some are inclined to either ignore or scorn those who feel left out of the American system. But that is a losing strategy. We can and must channel the anger productively to overcome special interests and actually fix things.
What so many young people think of as oppressive capitalism is actually a web of broken, statist systems driven by special interest regulatory capture. We must go to war against those systems, not just to achieve better results for our citizens, but to remind them that the founding principles of our country actually work!
If we don’t want to wake up in a Marxist country, we all must act. That is the fight we are waging every day at Cicero. Our work puts us up against some of the largest and most well-funded special-interest groups, who have protested at our office and attacked us in the media. Their opposition signals that we’re making a difference.
Fighting for our Republic is deeply important to me. I have given tens of millions of dollars to Cicero and will continue to chair and support the organization. By helping courageous leaders who believe in the founding principles of the USA to fight harder and in more clever ways, we can improve the lives of millions and inspire Americans young and old to believe in our country, and not want to tear it down.
I am proud of the tremendous momentum behind our work as more continue to join the fight. Every time a check is written to our research, whether for $100 or $1,000,000, it represents an optimistic bet on our country’s future and a belief in its principles. This support is more important than ever as broken systems threaten to undermine citizens’ confidence in the values that make America great.
A number of attendees asked for the slides from the presentation I gave at the awards, so I’m sharing them publicly here. They outline our structure, how we turn ideas into policy wins, and the progress we’ve made on our key battles—fixing our cities, reforming healthcare, holding bureaucracies accountable, and ensuring AI strengthens the American worker.
This week alone brought two major wins in Washington that Cicero actively helped shape:
HUD ended Housing First, a failed policy that fueled historic homelessness and diverted resources from the real drivers – severe addiction and untreated mental illness.
President Trump came out strongly in favor of a single federal AI standard, rejecting a patchwork of 50 conflicting state regimes that would strangle American innovation.
With boots on the ground in 25 states, 87 bills passed in 2025 alone, and a world-class policy team, we are more optimistic than ever. I hope this presentation gives you a deeper understanding of the battles we’re fighting, the scale of these challenges, and maybe even inspires you to get involved. Join us here.
Bravo, Joe. Wish we had you here in Illinois.
Inspiring; keep up the good fight!