To preserve and advance the prosperity that America has enjoyed since the republic was founded, Cato defends Americans’ right to choose, trade, associate, and experiment without needing permission from a central planner or politician.

Ryan Bourne, Scott Lincicome, and Cato’s general economics team are champions of free-market principles, debunking the new socialist and nationalist arguments for government control. Whether critiquing the hollow promises of Zohran Mamdani or denouncing the Trump administration’s plans to acquire 10 percent of Intel stock, Cato’s scholars connect the dots between government overreach and how it harms everyday Americans.

Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy studies, spent a large part of 2025 at the Department of Energy working under the direction of Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. At the department, Fisher helped establish and oversee a group of nonpartisan scholars: the Climate Working Group (CWG). With Fisher’s guidance, the CWG produced a 150-page report that was cited extensively in an Environmental Protection Agency rulemaking. The report proposed rescinding the finding that greenhouse gases are harmful pollutants (known as the “endangerment finding”). The CWG document, Fisher stated, finally allowed top scientists to challenge the climate gatekeepers and write “freed from the shackles of climate cancel culture.”

The Environmental Protection Agency reversed the endangerment finding in February 2026, removing the basis for all the heavy-handed and arbitrary regulations of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Fisher has also been a leading voice for Consumer-Regulated Electricity (CRE), which would dismantle the natural monopoly structure of utilities by enabling the creation of private and independent electricity grids. This simple policy change would drive energy entrepreneurship, lower consumer costs, and accelerate innovation to deliver more affordable, reliable, and scalable power that meets the demands of the modern era. It would demonstrate to policymakers that the heavy regulations on today’s electricity sector are unnecessary and harmful to America’s long-term economic growth and flourishing.

Fisher’s efforts have already resulted in CRE advancing at the state level, including New Hampshire, whose CRE law was signed by the governor in August 2025.

In a crowded political environment, Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies, and Fisher advanced compelling research, testimony, and briefings that resulted in the repeal of nearly half the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy subsidies—likely one of the largest corporate tax subsidy rollbacks in US history, saving American taxpayers an estimated $543 billion over the next 10 years. Michel additionally played a key role in advancing principled, pro-growth tax provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), while also helping prevent the introduction of harmful additions that would slow growth or increase debt. Many of the best provisions in the OBBBA reflect Cato’s economic scholarship. Since joining Cato in 2023, Michel has testified four times before Congress, published a detailed Cato Tax Plan, and had more than 100 educational meetings with congressional staff and members.

On Inauguration Day 2025, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the government to “notify the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] that any commitments made by the prior administration on behalf of the United States with respect to the Global Tax Deal have no force or effect within the United States.”

This executive order was consistent with recommendations from Michel, who was a leading voice on the issue in Cato policy analysis and testimony for the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Tax in 2023.

Within 48 hours of taking office, President Trump issued 22 executive orders aligned with Cato’s recommendations in the Cato Handbook on Executive Orders and Presidential Directives, edited by Alex Nowrasteh, who was promoted to senior vice president for policy in 2025.

To mark Social Security’s 90th anniversary, Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy, published a new Cato book with Ivane Nachkebia, Reimagining Social Security: Global Lessons for Retirement Policy Changes. Drawing on international reform experience, the book demonstrates how policymakers can free workers from rising tax burdens and mounting debt.

Boccia hosted a major conference convening top experts in October 2025 to promote the book and unveil Cato’s new in-house Social Security model, which is now being used to assess outcomes of proposed reforms, thus ensuring more accurate and effective reform proposals.

More than half (55 percent) of respondents to Cato’s August 2025 Social Security Survey could not correctly identify how the program is funded. Fewer than half (45 percent) understood that today’s workers pay for current retirees and that their own benefits will depend entirely on future workers doing the same. Nearly a quarter (23 percent) believe their payroll taxes are held in a personal account on their behalf. These misunderstandings matter: Americans cannot make informed judgments about a program’s future—or its reforms—if they don’t understand how it works today. Cato’s research and modeling aim to close that gap.

Boccia and Policy Analyst Dominik Lett have sparked a conversation about the abuse of emergency spending by Congress, highlighting its long history and shocking scale. Their proposals on emergency spending reform have already resulted in 10 bills introduced in Congress.

Their research reveals a striking trend: Emergency funding in the United States rose from 3 percent of the annual budget in 2000 to 18 percent in 2009 and 32 percent in 2020. Boccia’s newsletter, the Debt Dispatch, has grown to more than 5,000 subscribers, including numerous members of Congress.

Chris Edwards, the Kilts Family Chair in Fiscal Studies, tallied $181 billion in corporate welfare within the federal budget and provided a dozen reasons for ending such subsidies.

Senior Vice President for Policy Alex Nowrasteh and Krit Chanwong found that “DOGE did not reduce spending, but it did reduce federal employment by 9 percent in less than 10 months. A decline that large has not happened since the military demobilizations at the end of World War II and the Korean War.” On X, Elon Musk shared a chart made by Nowrasteh and Chanwong, which attracted 11 million views and citations by the New York Post and MS NOW.

Robust financial markets have played a critical role in America’s prosperity for nearly 250 years. The CMFA seeks to build on that legacy by challenging Washington’s overreach in financial markets.

For decades, lawmakers and unelected officials have chipped away at Americans’ financial privacy with laws designed to counter terrorism, catch money launderers, and collect taxes. The CMFA’s work has put Bank Secrecy Act reform at the center of the policy debate, urging Congress to revisit the act with the purpose of protecting and restoring Americans’ constitutional rights.

Over the past few years, both chambers of Congress have introduced legislation to restore financial privacy rights consistent with CMFA scholars’ recommendations. This marks the first time in decades that there are bills in both the House and the Senate, with cosponsors, that would radically reform the Bank Secrecy Act and restore Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Research Fellow Nicholas Anthony and Norbert Michel, vice president and director of the CMFA, also hosted an October event marking the 55th anniversary of the act.

For years, Michel and Anthony have been two of the most prominent voices in the country warning that a government-issued digital currency would threaten financial privacy, enable surveillance, and expand federal control over Americans’ everyday transactions.

That work has paid off. In July, the House of Representatives passed a CBDC prohibition, a significant legislative milestone. Shortly after taking office, President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting the creation of a CBDC, promoting stablecoins as a dollar-compatible alternative, and protecting Americans’ direct ownership of cryptocurrency. The CMFA’s scholarship was foundational to both.

Trump also issued an executive order targeting debanking—the practice by which regulators use “reputational risk” guidelines to pressure financial institutions into cutting off disfavored businesses, from gun shops to cryptocurrency firms. Michel and Anthony had spent years documenting and criticizing this regulatory overreach, making the CMFA’s case central to the broader debanking debate that finally reached the White House.

The annual CMFA financial regulation conference featured Rep. French Hill (R‑AR), chair of the House Financial Services Committee, in conversation with Jeb Hensarling—a Cato economics fellow and former chair of the same committee—on anti–CBDC legislation and crypto regulation transparency. Commissioner Hester Peirce of the Securities and Exchange Commission joined Jennifer Schulp for a fireside chat on the challenges of unwinding existing financial regulations.

Michel testified before the House Committee on Financial Services and appeared on 60 Minutes to call for closing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), making the case that the bureau’s structural insulation from congressional, presidential, and judicial oversight makes it constitutionally indefensible. Michel also debated the bureau’s first director, Richard Cordray, on the subject, saying, “The CFPB was designed to be unaccountable to Congress, the president, and the courts—its closure is a victory for constitutional governance.”

Cato’s health care scholars make both the moral and the practical case for the freedom to make our own health decisions and control our incomes and health care spending. As Congress wrestled with how to address rising Obamacare premiums, Director of Health Policy Studies Michael F. Cannon played a leading role in advising policymakers in Congress and the administration. In 2025, Cannon marked a fifth consecutive year as one of Washingtonian magazine’s 500 most influential people in Washington, DC.

In December 2025, at Trump’s request, Cannon visited the White House to meet with the president and discuss health care reform. One month later, Trump commended Cannon’s prescriptions to end health care subsidies in a Truth Social post.

Cannon argues that Congress should make permanent Trump’s 2018 removal of barriers to Obamacare-exempt plans and give all US residents access to Obamacare-exempt plans that are available in the US territories. Cannon published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal making this case, titled “How Trump Lowered Medical Premiums and Expanded Choice.” James Freeman, assistant editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, cited Cannon extensively in two op-eds and praised his “brilliant proposal.”

Dr. Jeffrey Singer published a new book, Your Body, Your Health Care, arguing that the government should not interfere in individuals’ autonomy to make their own health care decisions.

For decades, Cato scholars have advocated ending federal intervention in education. In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order to begin dismantling the Department of Education.

In May, Cato hosted Secretary of Education Linda McMahon for a fireside conversation on eliminating the department—filling the F. A. Hayek Auditorium and airing on C‑SPAN—to discuss why it should be abolished, the steps taken so far to do so, and what schools could look like without it.

The end of Grad PLUS loans, the worst of all the federal student loan programs, in the OBBBA marked a major victory in higher education policy. Just two months earlier, Cato’s Andrew Gillen had testified in Congress, urging their elimination. Gillen has long argued that the loans waste taxpayer dollars, encourage overborrowing, and inflate tuition.