‘Startup Nation' Groups Say They're Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities'

WIRED

07-03-2025

Photo-Illustration:Several groups representing 'startup nations'—tech hubs exempt from the taxes and regulations that apply to the countries where they are located—are drafting Congressional legislation to create 'freedom cities' in the US that would be similarly free from certain federal laws, WIRED has learned.
According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Trey Goff, the chief of staff of the startup nation known as Próspera, tells WIRED that he and other Próspera representatives working under an advocacy group called the Freedom Cities Coalition have been meeting with the Trump administration about the idea in recent weeks. He claims the administration has been very receptive. In 2023, Trump floated the idea of creating 10 freedom cities. Now, Goff says that Próspera's vision is to create 'not just 10, but as many as the market can handle.' They hope to have drafted legislation ready by the end of the year.
'The energy in DC is absolutely electric,' Goff says. 'You can tell in meetings with the people involved that they have the mandate to do some of the more hyperbolic, verbose things Trump has mentioned.' Three Paths Forward
According to Goff, Freedom Cities Coalition has briefed White House officials on three options for creating freedom cities. One is through 'interstate compacts.' In this scenario, two or more states could set aside territories with shared tax and regulation policies, with some state-specific carve-outs. Under existing law, these compacts can't be revoked, though they can be dissolved under certain circumstances.
If an interstate compact is approved by Congress, it becomes valid under federal law. Goff says the coalition is considering Congressional legislation that would give 'advanced consent' to any freedom city compacts. That way, Congress wouldn't need to approve each individual city.
Two other options are creating federal enclaves with special economic and jurisdictional zones, or having Trump issue executive orders to create each new freedom city.
'It depends on what Trump and the White House want to do,' Goff says. 'Whatever pathway they want to take, we want to help them make that a reality.'
The White House did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED. A Network of Backers (and Detractors)
Freedom Cities Coalition was created by an entity called NeWay Capital LLC, which owns several trademarks for Próspera. Since opening on the Honduran island of Roatán in 2020, Próspera has been attracting tech workers and startups by promising low taxes, few regulations, and a businesslike government that considers its citizens to be akin to customers. Its financiers include Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and Coinbase.
Startup nations outside the US have largely relied on the creation of special economic zones (SEZs), where the regular rules governing businesses are waived, often in order to attract foreign investment. The hope, it appears, is to bring a similar model to the US.
Notably, the current government of Honduras considers Próspera and its special economic status to be illegal. The country's previous president, Juan Orlando Hernández, gave Próspera a permanent charter to operate on its own terms. However, many Honduran citizens opposed Próspera, arguing that it has increased poverty and worsened biodiversity in the area. The Honduran Congress passed a law in 2022 repealing the allowance of SEZs, and Próspera sued the Honduran government shortly after. The lawsuit is ongoing.
President Donad Trump mentioned the idea of freedom cities on the campaign trail in March 2023. He promised that if he was elected president, he would hold a contest to pick 10 winners to build their own freedom cities on federal land. Trump hasn't referred to the idea in public since, but Goff says he's confident that it wasn't a throwaway line from the president.
'It's not just a marketing tactic—they take it very literally,' Goff adds, referring to members of Trump's team. 'They intend to follow through with all of the promises they made on the campaign trail.' A Second Legislative Push
Freedom Cities Coalition isn't the only group currently lobbying the Trump administration. Frontier Foundation, a 501c4 organization, is working in partnership with the nonprofit Charter Cities Institute to bring freedom cities to the US.
Jeffrey Mason, the head of policy at the Charter Cities Institute, tells WIRED that several other groups have recently joined their effort, including the Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for American Innovation. They're drafting legislation that Mason says should be ready 'hopefully sometime in the next several months.'
He adds that members of these groups are having 'casual conversations with people in the White House,' in addition to Republican and Democratic members of Congress.
In a 2025 memo shared with WIRED, the Frontier Foundation argues that 'domestic innovation and production has been significantly impeded for decades by outdated and unnecessarily restrictive federal regulation.'
Allen tells WIRED that using federal land would lower the cost of development for startup cities. The Frontier Foundation suggests that federally owned land outside western cities like Boise, Idaho; Grand Junction, Colorado; and Redmond, Oregon would be suitable candidates. 'If we're able to get a legislative transfer of land from the US government to make a public-private partnership, or a trust, or even a private corporation, then it's a lower cost of capital,' he explains.
The Frontier Foundation memo also recommends allowing private landowners to become freedom cities and to 'allow municipalities to vote to become Freedom Cities, allow Freedom Cities to expand with the consent of the contiguous land owners.'
When asked why the Freedom Cities movement has chosen not to focus on revitalizing existing post-industrial cities like Detroit or Toledo, Ohio, Allen tells WIRED that 'when you're building these new facilities, you need to sort of start from scratch.' He noted that Joe Biden signed an executive order instructing the federal departments to lease federal lands to be used as data centers in the final days of his administration.
'There's so much capital and there's so much political will, but yet there's an inability to develop these technologies,' says Allen. 'And the inability comes from lack of space and too many regulations.'
But Gil Duran, a former political consultant and author of the Substack newsletter Nerd Reich, warns that building new cities from scratch could have negative consequences. 'To be outside of the law and above the law, what does that mean for the rest of the country?' he asks. 'It seems like you're going to start hollowing out other places in order to have these places where the rules are suspended and don't apply anymore to certain people.'
Goff says that unlike Próspera, which has an entirely different tax structure from surrounding Honduras, freedom cities in the US would likely pay a similar amount in state and federal taxes as other American cities. The main difference would be how the cities are regulated. American Dynamism
One company that stands to benefit from the rise of freedom cities is Minicircle, a longevity biotech company focused on developing gene therapies to extend human lifespans. The company's seed funding came from Thiel and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and it currently has offices in both Austin, Texas, and Próspera. Minicircle cofounder Mac Davis is also working with the Frontier Foundation.
Davis says that Minicircle's gene therapy clinical trial on the protein follistatin—which he claims increases muscle mass without side effects, and also has life-extending benefits in mice—was only possible in Próspera, but noted he'd like to see that change.
'I'd like a 'longevity city' where everyone and their dog is on gene therapy,' Davis says.
Davis adds that he can imagine many other companies benefiting from freedom cities, including SpaceX, the defense hardware and software company Anduril, and Oklo, a nuclear fission startup chaired by Sam Altman.
Many of the industries Allen says he hopes to foster in Freedom Cities–energy, nuclear, semiconductors, and defense technology–are, not coincidentally, ones 'a lot of venture [capital] is going towards' as funding moves away from SaaS, digital, and internet consumer brands.
'The theme is American Dynamism,' he says, referencing the 2022 manifesto from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which argues that 'the scientific and operational excellence of consequential technology companies made up for the shortfall of our flailing governmental institutions.' Since 2021, venture capitalists have plowed more than $100 billion into defense tech startups alone.
Some tech companies have been considering revitalizing nuclear power in order to sustain AI data centers, which use a huge amount of energy. Amazon signed several nuclear power agreements last year, Google made a deal with a nuclear power company in October 2024, and Meta is asking for proposals on how the company can leverage nuclear power.
Goff tells WIRED that he thinks freedom cities could also be used as manufacturing hubs and shipbuilding ports, allowing builders to bypass the environmental review process. Mason says the American Enterprise Institute, which is partnering with the Frontier Foundation and Charter Cities Institute, is eager to find ways to use freedom cities to increase housing.
Mason says he's most excited about speeding up innovation in sectors like biotech and using nuclear power to power AI data centers.
'There's a lot of exciting opportunities here, especially as we need a lot of data centers,' Mason says. 'There's a lot of land that you can tap.'
But Duran says that the same deregulation that could be seen as pro-business will likely not favor those outside Freedom Cities' ultrawealthy backers. 'These are going to be cities without democracy,' he claims. 'These are going to be cities without workers' rights. These are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power. That's what's so attractive about these sovereign entities to these people, is that they will actually be anti-freedom cities.'