Welcome
The Boyd Institute is a policy lab for America’s future. We are nonpartisan, heterodox thinkers with a firm belief that most solutions to public problems can be ascertained using free market first principles. Our mission is to advance bold, asymmetric ideas for the decades ahead, and to build a political culture focused on solving real problems rather than partisan noise.
Our core audience is what we call “Let’s Fucking Go Americans.” These are intelligent, mostly young, driven people who want to “just do things” — build and solve problems, not fight culture wars. They exist across every profession and background, and most of them lack an on-ramp into having a real say in public policy conversations. We’re building that on-ramp at Boyd.
We take our name from John Boyd, the military strategist who argued that the key to victory is orientation — seeing reality clearly and acting on it.
The Problem
We focus on three interconnected forces holding America back:
Gerontocracy. Our institutions are increasingly oriented around the preferences of an older electorate at the expense of a prosperous future America. We spend a growingly and unsustainable share of national wealth on entitlements, while housing affordability, family formation, and investments in the next generation are treated as afterthoughts.
Overregulation. There are, in many ways, two Americas. A private sector which remains the most dynamic in the world, and a public sector frozen in the 20th century. The core issue is the accumulation of veto points, litigation risk, and perverse incentives created by the sclerotic state. The goal is not to tear it all down — it’s to unleash the parts that already work.
Social fragmentation. America used to have binding and shared civic norms that made democracy work: a baseline of institutional trust, assimilation as an expectation, and, more generally, a common story about what this country is. This social infrastructure undergirding the once-shared American project has eroded. Without it, every policy debate turns existential, compromise becomes betrayal, and the basic trust required for collective action disappears.
These forces reinforce each other. Overregulation binds private sector dynamism while gerontocracy produces a stagnant state. Stagnation then leads to social fragmentation, intensifying zero-sum conflict, and accelerating legitimacy decay. The system, in turn, accumulates still more procedural safeguards and rent-seeking behavior, further slowing production and compounding the problem. Our options now are intentional renewal, or managed decline.
Why Us
There is no shortage of libertarian and center-right organizations making pro-free markets arguments. Many do excellent work. But collectively they are losing the argument — especially among young people, where statism is surging on both left and right.
Most existing organizations run on a think tank-to-Congress pipeline: produce research, brief staffers, and shape legislation. This still matters, but it ignores where public opinion actually forms today: in the information environment that people see before they ever encounter a policy paper.
The programs that do target young people in the libertarian sphere mostly attract the already convinced, looking for a credential. Meanwhile it remains trivially easy to be, say, a journalist, while also being a leftist. Alternatively, if you want to be liberty-aligned in America today, you essentially have to do it full-time, which creates an enormous power imbalance in public discourse.
The libertarian ecosystem has invested heavily in policy research and direct political action. What it has not built is legitimacy nor the cultural infrastructure for normal people — an on-ramp for the engineer, the small business owner, the curious 25-year-old consultant who favors markets but is politically independent and perhaps even skeptical of the right.
What We Do
We are not trying to reach everyone. We are trying to find and connect the most agentic 10% — people who think critically, seek the truth, and want to act on it.
We publish differentiated research and analysis on problems that matter to America’s future. Recent topics include housing policy, drones and autonomy, U.S.-Africa strategy, maritime modernization, space exploration, and technology statecraft.
We run an essay contest that invites people to compete for financial rewards and fellowships by submitting real policy solutions related to our current topic.
And we are building an online community of people committed to honest diagnosis, freedom, and a prosperous American future — the beginning of a distributed network that doesn’t yet exist in the off-campus libertarian space.
Contact
The Boyd Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. All donations are tax-deductible. Reach us at [email protected].
