Founder’s Letter
By Oren Cass
It has been five years since we founded American Compass with a mission to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.
A blind faith in markets had come to dominate right-of-center economic thinking, at great cost to conservatism’s political prospects and the common good. This market fundamentalism left policymakers and pundits unable or unwilling even to admit the serious challenges that Americans were facing, let alone craft a responsive agenda. Tax cuts, deregulation, and free trade were the only items on the menu, cheap labor and rising corporate profits were the goals. Government’s only task was to get out of the way, and anyone who suggested otherwise was, as former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley put it, taking “the slow path to socialism.”
The legacy institutions of establishment conservatism—think tanks, editorial pages, congressional offices, and so on—had become complacent, preferring to suppress or gloss over disagreement in the interest of preserving their existing arrangements. A wide variety of lazy platitudes, indefensible assumptions, and unacknowledged tradeoffs demanded exploration and debate.
New questions had emerged that demanded new answers.
We believed that, like the boy calling attention to the emperor’s state of undress, a simple willingness to speak clearly about the obvious weaknesses in the unchallenged orthodoxy could have immediate and dramatic effect. An enormous opportunity to construct a compelling new agenda lay untapped. But we needed to apply conservative principles to contemporary problems, rather than page repeatedly through a dog-eared 1980s playbook.
None of us would have dared predict we would come this far this quickly.
Continue reading the Founder’s Letter…
Year in Review
Something remarkable happened in conservative economic thinking this year: it changed. Not gradually or incrementally, but suddenly and dramatically. The shift had been building for years, of course—in journal articles and policy proposals, in speeches from forward-thinking senators, in survey data showing what voters really wanted. But 2024 was the year the dam finally broke.
We laid the intellectual groundwork in July, with the publication of Oren Cass’s 3,000-word essay in the New York Times, “This Is What Elite Failure Looks Like.” The piece provided a comprehensive articulation of our case for a more thoughtful and responsive conservatism—one that recognizes the inherent validity of Americans’ preferences for family stability, community cohesion, and productive enterprise over pure economic efficiency. And its high-profile publication triggered a flood of overwhelmingly positive commentary, confirming that our framework for understanding America’s economic challenges had moved firmly from the margins to the mainstream.
Within days, theory became reality. President Trump’s selection of Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate represented more than standard political calculation; it signaled the Republican Party’s decisive break with Reagan-era orthodoxy and a commitment to building a movement that can last beyond the next four years. As Politico observed, Vance “would bring focus to the issues while Trump might not be as concentrated on policy” and “would also bring along [his] networks of staff and policymakers (plus American Compass).”
“Most Washington think tanks were stuck in the past when Donald Trump challenged Republican orthodoxy back in 2016. We’ve seen new institutions emerge since then, with American Compass being among the most impactful.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
Back to Work
In the wake of the 2024 election, we released our Back to Work agenda, laying out a blueprint for American economic renewal. This comprehensive framework shattered the market fundamentalist orthodoxy, equipping the incoming Trump-Vance administration with a precise roadmap for deploying executive authority to strengthen working families, revitalize domestic industry, and secure America’s economic sovereignty.
Building on the realignment in conservative economic thinking that started during President Trump’s first term, the Back to Work agenda provided concrete, department-by-department guidance for immediate executive action. It was a document that only American Compass could have produced. Over nearly five years of rigorous research, policy development, and intellectual exploration, we have systematically challenged prevailing economic orthodoxies while developing a new conservative agenda. The Back to Work agenda distilled this extensive body of theoretical and empirical work into precise, actionable executive recommendations—and is already making waves in the new administration.
Growing the Coalition
In 2024, the American Compass membership grew to over 230, spanning media, leading law firms, academia, conservative institutions, and Capitol Hill. This expanding network represents the nation’s premier assembly of rising New Right leaders—a testament both to our movement’s momentum and the value of our membership program.
Over the course of the year, members came together at happy hours, a summer barbecue, holiday party, and more. A highlight was a series of small dinners where we discussed and debated issues ranging from techno-futurism to family policy to antitrust.
Membership
This year saw the successful launch of our Policy Working Group, leveraging our members’ diverse expertise to produce the “Back to Work” blueprint for the incoming administration.
This comprehensive framework outlines concrete executive actions designed to strengthen American families, counter Chinese influence, rebalance trade relationships, and revitalize domestic industrial capacity.
The project exemplifies our ability to translate sophisticated policy thinking into actionable governance solutions.
The Annual Retreat on Maryland’s Eastern Shore proved our most substantive gathering to date, bringing together over 80 members and their families. Participants engaged in intensive policy discussions and a strategic immigration policy wargame, while fostering the kind of meaningful relationships that drive our community’s continued success. The event highlighted our unique ability to combine rigorous policy analysis with genuine fellowship—a hallmark of our approach to movement building.
On the Hill
Especially fun, Americans for Tax Reform (Grover Norquist’s famous anti-tax group) sent staff to distribute anti-Compass material outside a session on trade policy. Hats off to them—they knew where to find the largest crowds of future conservative leaders!
This summer, we transformed our “Compass Crash Course” trainings for Hill staff into a weekly series targeting interns who can bring what they learn back to their campuses in the fall. The sessions were regularly standing-room-only and reached nearly 500 attendees over the six weeks of presentations.
Understanding America
The June 2024 launch of Understanding America, Oren Cass’s newsletter, marked another step forward in our mission to reshape conservative economic thinking.
This new publication quickly established itself as an essential resource for those following—and driving—the transformation in conservative economic thought.
Oren’s weekly dispatches examine the shifting terrain of political economy, interrogating the assumptions behind policy proposals and measuring them against the real needs of American workers and communities. The publication’s thoughtful analysis and strategic timing positioned it to become an influential voice in policy debates throughout the year. In just six months, Understanding America steadily expanded its reach, surpassing 10,000 readers by year’s end while maintaining consistently strong engagement.
Particularly noteworthy has been the newsletter’s success in reaching beyond traditional policy audiences. While maintaining deep engagement with key decision-makers in Washington, Understanding America has cultivated a diverse readership that includes local community leaders, business executives, and engaged citizens across the country.
Globalization
Our work on globalization, trade, and immigration reached new levels of influence in 2024, fundamentally reshaping the conservative approach to international economic engagement. Our framework for understanding trade relationships—emphasizing productive capacity alongside consumption and national security alongside economic efficiency—became the dominant paradigm in policy circles on both sides of the aisle.
Tariffs are now the center of debate as the Trump administration takes office. And with key cabinet-level officials in support of serious tariffs to rebalance American trade, it is likely we will see action soon. The culmination of our work this year came in October with our release of “Disfavored Nation,” which provided the first comprehensive roadmap for resetting U.S.-China economic relations through the revocation of China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status. The paper arrived just as Senators Cotton, Rubio, and Hawley introduced legislation to do exactly that, demonstrating how thoroughly our analytical framework has penetrated mainstream conservative thinking.
Our survey research revealed an American public far more attuned to globalization’s consequences than most economists acknowledge.
When the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip profiled Ambassador Robert Lighthizer, a member of our board of directors and former U.S. Trade Representative, he highlighted how our emphasis on the downsides of dollar dominance was gaining traction in both Republican and Democratic circles. Even longtime free-trade advocates have begun acknowledging the need for serious action to decouple from China.
The intellectual transformation was perhaps best captured in Oren’s Atlantic essay on tariffs, which quickly became the primary flashpoint in the tariff debate, prompting engagement everywhere from the Financial Times and Washington Post to National Review and Reason. More importantly, it sparked serious reconsideration of long-held assumptions about trade policy among conservative economists and policymakers.
Tax & Budget
On fiscal issues, 2024 saw deep erosion of decades-old conservative orthodoxy around taxes and spending. Our research and advocacy played a decisive role in beginning to move the Republican Party beyond its reflexive support of any and all tax cuts and toward a more nuanced understanding of fiscal responsibility.
In June, we released Return of the Fiscal Conservatives, a collection laying out the case for taking both sides of the fiscal ledger seriously and getting the federal budget under control.
Featuring an essay by Oren on the difference between anti-tax zealotry and actual fiscal conservatism alongside a budget model that provides a blueprint for fiscal sanity, the collection paved the way for conservative leaders to push back against what has passed for conservative fiscal policy for too long. The transformation became impossible to ignore when Congressman Jodey Arrington, GOP chair of the House Budget Committee, declared, “It’s only fair to have both revenue and expenditures on the table.” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole followed with similar comments, and Ways & Means Chairman Jason Smith even broached the possibility of corporate tax increases—positions that would have been unthinkable just months earlier.
The American people agree. Our survey research on “The American Appetite for Government” revealed little daylight between Republicans and Democrats on their support for government generally and their desire to preserve and expand entitlements, safety-net programs, and health care spending. The second phase of this research, focused on taxes, demonstrated that only a small minority of Republicans believed deficits should be closed entirely through spending cuts. Everyone else sees the importance of fiscal sanity and is ready to make tough choices to right the ship.
The impact of our work was perhaps best captured when a reporter asked a top Washington lobbyist about supply-siders’ goals for the 2025 tax fight. The response was telling: “Stop Oren Cass.” This shift represents a fundamental break with the Grover Norquist-enforced commitment to never raise taxes, which has dominated Republican politics for decades and helped push the deficit through the roof. As the Wall Street Journal put it, we are now the “counterweight to supply-side groups such as Americans for Tax Reform (keeper of the no-tax pledge Republicans are expected to sign) and the Club for Growth.”
Industry
Our work building the case for robust industrial policy achieved unprecedented acceptance within conservative circles in 2024. The success of the CHIPS Act, which we strongly supported, provided empirical validation of our framework.
In August, on the law’s second anniversary, policy director Chris Griswold provided a comprehensive assessment of its implementation, helping shape the conversation around its early wins while acknowledging its challenges. Senator Todd Young, the bill’s conservative champion, joined the American Compass Podcast to discuss the first two years of CHIPS and why he believes in a role for government in critical industries like semiconductors.
“The new American “golden age” that [Trump] spoke of at the Republican National Convention and on election night could become reality if he takes the steps that help the nation to build.”
Oren Cass, Financial Times
Even traditional free-market voices began acknowledging the necessity of industrial policy. AEI senior fellow James Pethokoukis, long skeptical of government intervention in markets, conceded there was “some reason for optimism” about CHIPS outcomes. Senator Marco Rubio’s extensive citation of our research in his National Affairs essay on “Industrial Policy Right and Wrong” demonstrated how thoroughly our framework had penetrated conservative thinking.
The conversation shifted definitively from whether industrial policy could work to how it should be structured. Our research highlighted the distinction between capital efficiency and actual productive capacity, challenging the notion that market signals alone can guide optimal industrial development. As policymakers grapple with how to reshore critical industries and build resilient supply chains, our insights are shaping the translation of industrial policy from theory to the real world.
Financialization
The financial sector’s continued failures in 2024 fueled an increasing conservative acceptance of the need to address financialization. Our examination of how capital markets increasingly extract rather than create value found unexpected allies, including traditionally market oriented voices like Manhattan Institute economist Allison Schrager, who highlighted the risks the private-equity industry poses to the American economy. In October, we released an update to our ongoing Coin-Flip Capitalism project that showed how, despite posting profitable returns in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the leveraged-buyout private equity and venture capital industries have since faltered, providing returns comparable to public markets.
Our most impactful intervention came in the debate over credit card network competition. Policy director Chris Griswold’s analysis exposed how the Visa-Mastercard duopoly exploits both small businesses and working-class consumers through excessive interchange fees while cynically positioning reward programs as a “lifeline” for struggling Americans. This work provided intellectual ammunition for the bipartisan Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA), which would require cards to operate on at least one payment network outside the dominant duopoly.
For the first time in decades, there is space for a more nuanced conservative approach to market regulation that distinguishes between productive financial services and purely extractive activity. The CCCA debate exemplified this evolution, with traditional conservative advocates like the National Federation of Independent Business strongly supporting reform despite Wall Street’s predictable accusations of “price controls” and “market intervention.”
Our work helped reframe financial regulation as a conservative priority, demonstrating how targeted reforms can enhance market competition, support small businesses, and prevent powerful incumbents from exploiting working Americans.
Labor
The transformation in the conservative attitude toward organized labor, initiated by American Compass in 2020, reached completion in 2024, culminating in the unprecedented appearance of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien at the Republican National Convention. Our years of work rebuilding conservative support for workers helped create the intellectual framework for this rapprochement between organized labor and the GOP. And it paid dividends, with a Secretary of Labor nominee who is keen to continue building bridges between conservatives and organized labor.
As conservatives continue to figure out how to deliver for a multi-ethnic working class coalition, our research highlighted how nearly three-quarters of potential union members prefer organizations focused exclusively on workplace issues rather than broader political activism. Rather than simply support the same labor law framework that has failed American workers for years, our work has helped shape proposals for alternative forms of worker representation, including worker board representation and industrywide bargaining frameworks.
Our work also focused on immigration, connecting labor market dynamics to trouble at the border. “Labor shortages” often mask an unwillingness to raise wages and improve working conditions for American workers— much easier, and cheaper, to grow the labor pool by boosting lowskill immigration.
This work challenged both progressive open-borders advocacy and libertarian market fundamentalism, advancing instead a distinctly conservative case for immigration reforms that would strengthen rather than subvert domestic labor markets. By connecting immigration policy directly to worker prosperity and family stability, we helped reshape the conservative economic agenda toward prioritizing broad-based economic security over theoreticalmarket efficiency, offering a compelling vision for how limited immigration and tight labor markets can serve foundational conservative principles.
Education
Both the mounting crisis in American higher education and the accelerating push toward expanding domestic industrial capacity have built strong momentum behind American Compass’s case for rethinking the purpose of public education. Public confidence in traditional universities is plummeting, employers are turning away from degree requirements, and everyone is looking for ways to build non-college pathways that equip young people with the skills and values to build decent lives.
Conservatives have settled on our flagship proposal, the Workforce Training Grant, as the best concrete model for redirecting federal resources away from the failed “college-for-all” paradigm toward employer-led training programs. Broad enthusiasm for its structure led to its inclusion in the Project 2025 agenda assembled by dozens of conservative organizations. Senator Tom Cotton has codified it in legislation, the American Workforce Act, which he re-introduced in 2024 with then-Senator J.D. Vance as a co-sponsor and with companion legislation in the House of Representatives co-sponsored by Representatives Miller, Van Orden, and D’Esposito.
This progress has come thanks to the holistic approach that we take in all our policy work. Our quantitative research documenting that fewer than one-in-five young Americans goes smoothly from high school to college to career, combined with our survey research showing that an overwhelming majority of parents and students would prefer alternatives, has built the compelling case for change. Our innovative team generated creative and compelling ideas.
Family
Our framework for family policy achieved another vital milestone with passage of Child Tax Credit reforms championed by House Ways & Means Committee chairman Jason Smith. The overwhelming margin of support—357-70 overall, with Republicans voting 169-47 in favor—demonstrated how thoroughly our approach had penetrated conservative thinking.
Our research consistently showed that Americans prioritize family economic security over abstract notions of market efficiency or GDP growth. Nearly three times as many parents said schools should prioritize helping students “develop skills and values needed to build decent lives in the communities where they live” over maximizing academic achievement for college admission.
This work helped reshape conservative family policy around direct support rather than indirect subsidies, challenging both progressive preferences for universal child care and traditional conservative resistance to family assistance. The result was a distinctively conservative approach to family policy that emphasizes parental choice and family stability.
Support American Compass
Help us build a strong foundation.
American Compass launched five years ago with the goal of charting a new course for conservative economics—supplanting a blind faith in free markets with a focus on workers, their families and communities, and the nation. During that time we’ve published countless essays, policy briefs, surveys, podcasts, and more, establishing Compass as the pre-eminent alternative to the Old Right’s market fundamentalism. Publications from The New York Times to The Economist to The American Conservative all use the same word to describe us: “influential.”
We are succeeding in our mission to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity. We humbly invite you to join us in this cause.
The Navigators Guild
We established the Navigators Guild to raise the funds we need to support our work and to cultivate a network of ambassadors. Guild members become part of a community of leaders and philanthropists helping us craft economic policies that support family, community, and domestic industry.
Membership grants exclusive access to American Compass’s experts and initiatives and provides an unparalleled opportunity to help navigate the future of conservative thought and policy for the good of all Americans.
Members of the Guild
Daniel Alpert
Jess Crawford
Mr. Jamie Bryan Hall
and Mrs. Ae Suk Kim
Dr. John R. Hansen
Jim Hemenway
Sergei A. Korol
Trey Lackey
Mark Miskell
Chas Schlaack
Arturo and Talya Silva
Amy L. Wax and
Dr. Roger B. Cohen
Byron and Beth Smith Family
John David Soriano
Derek Webb
Dwight and Carolyn Yoder
We gratefully acknowledge those members of our Guild who give permission for us to highlight their vital role in supporting our work.
To learn more about opportunities to participate please visit americancompass.org/guild.
