Thoughts on “startup nations”, deregulated cities?

Could be a good idea to compete with Silicon Valley, also revive cities left behind after outsourcing led to the decline of manufacturing jobs.

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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.

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.

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.


“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.

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.”