Our Founders knew war well, and precisely because they did, they were determined to ensure that no single man could plunge the republic into one. They gave Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. Two hundred fifty years later, that constitutional guardrail has been all but abandoned, with consequences the Founders had foreseen.

Constant and costly intervention abroad aggrandizes the executive branch, erodes civil liberties, and worsens the nation’s fiscal health at a moment when the country’s staggering debt and deficit are growing at rates that both hawks and doves can recognize as unsustainable. More Americans than ever say they want a restrained foreign policy, yet executive branch policymakers remain reluctant to relinquish the unchecked authority they have accumulated.

Defense and Foreign Policy Studies Director Justin Logan, Research Fellow Brandan P. Buck, and Research Fellow Jon Hoffman are among the most prominent voices in the country making the case for restraint and for restoring Congress’s rightful constitutional role in questions of war and peace. Their work has appeared in leading outlets across the media landscape and ideological spectrum, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal; CNN, MSNBC’s The Weekend: Primetime, Fox News, NPR’s Morning Edition, and BBC World Service’s Newshour; HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher; and Politico.

The team also frequently brought its arguments to Capitol Hill. A June briefing on “NATO 2025 Summit: Rebalancing the Transatlantic Relationship,” for example, drew scores of in-person attendees from congressional staff on key committees.

The Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity explores and promotes the central role that freedom plays in human progress and in solving the world’s most pressing problems, including global poverty. The center’s scholars seek to advance policies that protect human rights and extend the range of personal choice.

The 11th annual Human Freedom Index, copublished by the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute in December 2025, revealed that the state of human freedom worldwide remained depressed four years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The index measures economic, civil, and personal freedom in 165 countries encompassing 98 percent of the world’s population.

AP News reported the Human Freedom Index’s finding that 89.6 percent of the world’s population experienced a decline in freedom between 2019 and 2023. Switzerland ranked as the freest country this year; Syria remained in last place. The United States, which ranked 8th in 2000, is ranked 15th in the current index.

Students and young professionals from six Latin American countries gathered in Lima, Peru, October 3–5, for an edition of Universidad ElCato, where they learned from prominent classical liberal scholars including Cato’s Vásquez, Gabriela Calderón de Burgos, and Marcos Falcone.

Calderón de Burgos, a fellow in Latin American Studies, published a timely new book with Grupo Planeta in 2025: En busca de la libertad. Vida y obra de los próceres liberales de Iberoamérica (In Search of Freedom: The Life and Work of the Liberal Heroes of Latin America). It tells the story of important classical liberals in Latin American history, exploring sometimes-forgotten thinkers and their contributions to history, including how some of the founders in Latin America inspired our own Founders in the United States.

Calderón de Burgos is also the editor of Elca​to​.org, the Cato Institute’s Spanish-language website, which has received more than half a million views in the past year.

Cato’s global reach extends further still. Senior Fellow Mustafa Akyol—one of the world’s most prominent Muslim reformers and a leading voice at the intersection of Islam, liberty, and modernity—brought Cato’s case for religious freedom to the United Nations General Assembly, speaking at the official event on the Taliban’s weaponization of religion. Challenging the Taliban on their own terms, Akyol argued that their oppression of women violates the Quranic principle of La ikraha fi-din (“There is no compulsion in religion”) and that even the Ottoman caliphate, which the Taliban invokes for legitimacy, opened modern schools for women and advanced their rights.

The United States is a nation of immigrants. Over the course of centuries, immigrants in pursuit of the American dream have turned the republic into an unparalleled force on the global stage. Now politics is putting that progress on hold when expanding legal immigration pathways would be an obvious antidote to chaos and immigration backlogs.

Both David J. Bier, The Selz Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy, and Alex Nowrasteh, senior vice president for policy, produce original research highlighting the economic and social benefits of immigration and prescribing reforms that would simplify the legal system, strengthen enforcement against noncitizens with serious criminal convictions, and limit immigrant use of public benefits programs. Our immigration scholars were invited to testify before Congress four times in 2025 alone, including at a hearing alongside four major-city mayors.

Nonpublic Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data leaked to Cato in November revealed that 73 percent of people booked into ICE custody this fiscal year had no criminal conviction, contradicting the Trump administration’s claims of deporting “millions and millions of criminal aliens.”

Since his appointment to the chair in July 2025, Bier has:

• Reframed the fiscal debate on immigration with groundbreaking research showing that immigrants reduced combined federal, state, and local budget deficits by $14.5 trillion—including $1.7 trillion attributable to undocumented immigrants—between 1994 and 2023. The findings upended conventional assumptions and commanded national attention.
• Taken his research to Capitol Hill more than any other nongovernment, pro-immigration witness in recent years, testifying before the House Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration in February 2026 and before the Senate Budget Committee in March 2026. At the latter hearing, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D‑MD) thanked Bier on the record: “Mr. Bier, thank you for emphasizing the big lie that what the Trump administration is doing is going after the ‘worst of the worst.’… As you’ve shown, that’s just not true.”
• Exposed the reality of ICE enforcement using agency data leaked directly to him showing that just 5 percent of ICE detentions between October 1 and November 15, 2025, involved someone with a violent criminal conviction—whereas 73 percent of detainees had no criminal conviction at all. The findings were cited on ABC’s The View, read into the record on C‑SPAN 2 by Sen. Tim Kaine (D‑VA), and cited by both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal editorial boards on the same day.
• Documented ICE’s escalating tactics in the Wall Street Journal and appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition to discuss agents’ stopping and questioning bystanders and demanding proof of citizenship—a legal boundary Bier has been instrumental in holding visible.
• Revealed that the administration has labeled people who film ICE agents “domestic terrorists.” In a direct response to Bier’s report, ICE subsequently admitted to Reason magazine that it considers such individuals to be criminals.
• Informed debate in the Senate, with senators from both parties citing Bier’s analysis of how immigration enforcement is diverting critical law enforcement resources.
• Earned praise from the press, including New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel, who posted on X, “You don’t have to be a libertarian to learn from Cato’s often surprising research on immigration.”

“David has helped shape the national immigration conversation with clarity, rigor, and humanity,” said Peter Goettler, president and CEO of Cato. “David’s work exemplifies the policy leadership and moral seriousness that this debate requires, and we are deeply thankful to the Selz Foundation for their support.”

Cato’s immigration team has long produced some of the most rigorous and widely cited research in the field. Grounded in data, historical perspective, and constitutional principles, that work has informed the national debate and policymakers across the political spectrum. The Selz Foundation’s support ensures that scholarship of this caliber can keep shaping the debate when it matters most.