FREOPP’s Next Chapter
FREOPP's new president, Akash Chougule, will build on the accomplishments of the last 9 years.
I’m delighted to announce that, after nine years of serving as FREOPP’s president, our board of directors has appointed Akash Chougule as our new CEO. Akash started in March, and I will stay involved at FREOPP as chairman of the board. I’m grateful to Akash for taking this role on, and to our outgoing chairman, Jonathan Bush, for his extraordinary service to FREOPP and our mission.
I’ve known Akash from pretty much his entire decade-plus career in the public policy world, and you’re going to love what he brings to FREOPP. Every time I’m in a room with Akash, I learn something. He has exactly the qualities you’d want in a FREOPP leader: someone with the right values; someone who is a listener and a bridge builder; and someone with a great strategic sense of how to move the needle on challenging issues. You’ll be hearing from Akash directly, soon.
I’m writing this note to you during a significant moment in U.S. economic history: the White House’s colossally destructive decision to impose large tariffs on nearly all imported goods.
The subject of tariffs is a perfect window into why FREOPP’s work is so essential. We share with the Trump administration the goal of improving the lives of American workers. But tariffs won’t help us achieve that goal. In fact, the opposite is true: American workers will suffer from higher consumer prices at home, and fewer opportunities to sell the products they make in America around the world.
For decades, the defenders of free trade have neglected to make a persuasive case for how blue-collar workers in America benefit from global trade. FREOPP exists to end this neglect: on this and many other issues.
Why did America need another think tank?
We founded FREOPP in 2016, at exactly the same time that Donald Trump was rolling through the Republican presidential field of that year. I had a front row seat to Trump’s success, having worked as a senior policy advisor to two of the people he defeated, former Texas governor Rick Perry and then-Florida senator Marco Rubio.
There were plenty of things Trump was saying and doing that I and my colleagues disagreed with. But when it came to his beef with the traditional GOP, Trump got one core thing right. He correctly identified that lower- and middle-income Americans were facing economic anxieties that Republican politicians were ignoring, that traditional statistics like gross domestic product were concealing.
FREOPP’s founders shared the view expressed by people across the political spectrum, from Trump to Elizabeth Warren, that it has become too hard for Americans earning the median household income or below to build a better future for themselves and their children.
But critically, we also believed—and sought to prove—that this problem was caused by government interventions that increased the cost of living, and made it harder for Americans to take advantage of new economic opportunities.
As Jim Tankersley put it when profiling FREOPP’s launch for the Washington Post, there are plenty of free-market think tanks already, and plenty of organizations focused on inequality. But we “surveyed the policy landscape and saw no groups that blended the two: a grounding in market principles, but a focus on harnessing them—and bending them, when needed—to aid Americans struggling in the country’s transition to an information economy.”
It was high time, we believed, to devote the tools of individual liberty, free enterprise, and technological innovation to the specific challenges faced by Americans on the bottom half of the ladder.
It is free enterprise that has made food, clothing, and technology so much more affordable today than it was 25 years ago. And it is government intervention that has made health care, housing, and higher education so much more expensive. Americans’ wages have grown considerably over the last generation, at a time when wages in Europe have stagnated. But Americans don’t feel richer, because a larger share of what they earn is eaten up by health care premiums and rent.
Importantly, the FREOPP approach isn’t only good because it achieves better outcomes for lower- and middle-income Americans. It’s valuable because it allows us to expand the constituency for freedom. We’ve been able to bring our philosophy and policy ideas to both Democrats and Republicans, transcending party divides. We’ve engaged with both blue states and red states. And we’ve persuaded a lot of young people to consider free-market solutions to problems like health care, education, and energy.
FREOPP’s success since 2016
I think the most surprising thing about FREOPP over the last nine years has been the caliber of scholars we’ve been able to recruit. It turns out that FREOPP’s unique mission filled a void for them, too. It offered a certain type of policy wonk—one who was passionate about social mobility and the role of freedom in achieving it—a true home, and a place to be around like-minded colleagues and leaders.
Our tireless work reopening schools and the economy during the COVID pandemic is the best example of how FREOPP’s model works. In 2020, it wasn’t enough to simply argue, as many libertarians did, that lockdowns were a restriction on freedom. It was essential to marshal the scientific evidence—with experts credible to both parties—to show how we could reopen society safely. As a result, we were able to help 49 million kids regain in-person learning in the 2020–21 academic year.
In 2005, FREOPP Senior Fellow Dan Lips invented the concept of universal Education Savings Accounts. ESAs put control of education funding in the hands of parents, who can use it for everything from specialized tutoring to Khan Academy to private schools. Today, ESAs are the law of the land in 18 states, with our home state of Texas poised to become the 19th.
We’ve not only built the policy plan—but actual legislation that has been introduced in the U.S. House and Senate—to make health insurance affordable for every American, and permanently solve the entitlement crisis caused by Medicare and Medicaid spending. Much of our work on veterans’ health reform has made it into law, helping millions of veterans receive better access to care when and where they need it.
We’ve built a higher education resource that allows parents and their kids to look up the return on investment of every course of study at every institution of higher education in America. Most importantly, we are now using our ROI database to design new federal reforms to the taxpayer-funded subsidies and student loan bailouts that incentivize colleges to continually raise their prices.
In other areas, FREOPP’s success has been in moving the Overton window, of reshaping the contours of our policy debate. For seven years, FREOPP’s Roger Valdez has been explaining how zoning restrictions and other housing regulations have made housing too expensive, and why simply subsidizing “affordable housing” actually makes housing less affordable. His views, once on the fringe, have now attracted mainstream champions like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
FREOPP led the push to explain why nuclear energy—not wind and solar—is the only way we can produce reliable, abundant, and affordable energy while reducing carbon emissions, supplemented by the greater use of natural gas. In 2020, when we started advancing this idea, people told us that we were crazy, that we’d never persuade people that nuclear energy was safe. Today, nuclear energy is undergoing a renaissance, fueled by startups like Oklo and Last Energy, and by a policy environment that increasingly understands that nuclear energy is the only way to meet the AI-fueled energy demands of the 2020s.
I could go on. FREOPP’s work on bitcoin policy and criticism of central bank digital currencies led directly to the creation of a federal bitcoin strategic reserve, and continues to inform crypto policy thinking in Washington. We were warning policymakers about how inflation disproportionately harms the poor with novel, never-done-before analyses. Michael Tanner’s landmark paper reimagining the way we think about homelessness is advancing the conversation beyond housing to how we provide institutionalized mental health to those who can’t take care of themselves.
What’s next?
It has been an incredible run, and I can’t wait to see where Akash will take FREOPP over the next decade.
I’m especially grateful to our donors, without whom none of what FREOPP has achieved would have been possible, and to the merry band of scholars and staffers who brought our vision to life.
As for me, I’ll continue to be involved in FREOPP as Chairman. Now that I’m freed from day-to-day management duties, my main FREOPP-related goal is to write more: to lend my own voice to the important debates of our time. This year, that will include tariffs, the big tax and spending fights of 2025, and other topics. I look forward to spending more time engaging with you, our stakeholders and supporters, about how we can continue to advance the American idea.
What is the American idea? The phrase was coined by Jack Kemp, a former star quarterback for the Buffalo Bills who became a congressman, and served as Bob Dole’s Vice Presidential nominee in 1996. Kemp described the American Idea this way: “The Declaration of Independence applies to every individual; everyone should have the opportunity to rise as high as their talents and efforts can carry them; and while people move ahead, we should endeavor to leave no one behind.”
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve our country through FREOPP!
