When we talk about the Founding Fathers, we’re usually just talking about the Big Five: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. Of course, these men deserve our veneration. But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington are synonymous with the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and presidency, respectively. Adams and Hamilton both have award-winning Broadway musicals and popular 20th century biographies that keep them top of mind. But what of the other Founders, the men who thought, fought, and wrote this country into existence? In honor of America’s 250th birthday, The Daily Wire asked lawmakers, writers, and historians to draft a new Founding Father starting lineup. The only rule: they couldn’t choose one of the Big Five. Here are their picks. Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives Frederick Muhlenberg was elected to serve as the very first Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives by the First Congress in 1789, and was the first signer of the Bill of Rights. An ordained Lutheran minister, Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress, and former 3rd Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, he was well prepared to accept the great privilege and challenge of leading and establishing a brand new institution. Shepherding our great deliberative body through its formative days was no small task and required tremendous vision, skill, and patience. Muhlenberg was up to the task, and effectively crafted the rules, procedures, and protocols of Congress while actively serving in it. Because he and his colleagues had to travel treacherous or nonexistent roads on horseback, he was forced to delay the first meeting of Congress by a month until a quorum was reached. In August 1789, he cast the deciding vote for the location of the nation’s new capital. While the speakership has changed considerably since Muhlenberg wielded the gavel, his efforts to construct a Congress capable of governing itself, debating openly, and exercising a check on the other branches of government were essential. As we celebrate America’s 250th, we do well to remember the wisdom and invaluable contributions of our founders and the unsung heroes who set our nation on its course to become the greatest in history. Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus, The Daily Wire Robert Morris was the greatest entrepreneur of the Founding generation. He bet his entire fortune — the largest in the country — on the riskiest startup the world has ever seen: the United States of America itself. Morris lived out the saying “freedom isn’t free”: you can proclaim your self-evident truths, but if you can’t pay your army, the British win. Morris had every reason in the world to sit the Revolution out, hedge his bets, and stay rich. Instead, he became one of only two men to sign the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Morris risked it all because he understood the American experiment was worth more than his own fortune, or even his own life. That’s not a businessman’s calculation. That’s closer to love than anything else. WATCH: BEN SHAPIRO ON ROBERT MORRIS Dr. Ben Carson, president, American Cornerstone Institute George Mason doesn’t come off the bench; he’s a starter. Mason’s thinking about liberty and the best way to structure government had an outsized impact on the Founding. To take just one example, the Virginia Declaration of Rights might be the most important but least appreciated document from the time. Too few Americans have even heard of that document. If you have never read it, take a minute and do it now; you’ll see that it was basically the first draft of both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. True, Mason did not support the Constitution, but his objections to the Constitution — based on concern about too powerful a federal government — seem prescient given how much power Washington has aggregated for itself. George Mason isn’t the B-team; he should be talked about in the same breath as the other giants of the Founding. Dr. Larry P. Arnn, president, Hillsdale College You could no more put together an alternative starting five for the American Founding than you could for the 1991 championship Chicago Bulls. But if asked what secondary founders deserve attention, Benjamin Rush and Robert Morris come to mind. Rush, a Philadelphia physician, was a leading opponent of slavery and a great advocate of education in addition to being an ardent revolutionary. Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, took on the impossible job of Superintendent of Finance during the Revolution and played a critical role in getting arms to American troops in the field. But these men themselves recognized the superiority of those on the starting team. Rush said of Washington, “There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chambre by his side.” Morris, when asked by Washington to serve as the country’s first treasury secretary, declined and recommended Hamilton. READ MORE: HILLSDALE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS HOW DONALD TRUMP COULD KILL THE DEEP STATE Daniel McCarthy, distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the Heritage Foundation No one can replace the greatest of our Founding Fathers, but if we lost all record of them tomorrow, we might try to approximate the effect of their ideas and sensibilities in combination by looking to James Otis and Samuel Adams in place of Jefferson; Robert Morris, who was Washington’s first choice for Treasury secretary, in place of Hamilton; Roger Sherman, a wise constitutionalist, in Madison’s or John Adams’s stead; and James Wilson instead of Benjamin Franklin to supply some Pennsylvania principle. No one can compare to Washington, but John Marshall might occupy the place of a great Virginian profoundly committed to the Union. These less appreciated figures would give us a strong sense of our founding, though they would also remind us of what we were missing without the most renowned names available. Richard Brookhiser, author, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution For all the brilliance of the founders, not many of them understood economics. Tench Coxe, a Philadelphia merchant, did. He assembled facts and figures for Alexander Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures,” and might have filled his shoes had Hamilton not existed. He later became a supporter of Thomas Jefferson, so he was also adroit politically. Nathanael Greene was also widely acknowledged for his military brilliance, losing every battle he fought against Cornwallis in the Carolinas yet driving him to Virginia and ultimate defeat at Yorktown. Georgia awarded Greene a plantation for his services, where he died of heat stroke after the war. Had he lived he might have made an excellent Secretary of War. Troy Senik, author, A Man Of Iron: The Turbulent Life And Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland John Dickinson is always portrayed as a coward, the jittery man blind to the glory of the moment. The irony is that he walked into the Second Continental Congress arguably the most prominent advocate for colonial rights in America. Dickinson did not oppose independence. He opposed declaring it before the preconditions for sustaining it were in place. No foreign alliance had been secured. The Articles of Confederation were nowhere near complete. The military situation was uncertain at best. His argument was methodical, not ideological: do these things first, then declare. What happened next proved him right about virtually everything save the final outcome. The country barely survived the early days of the war, and only through a sequence of events so improbable that it would have been folly to plan for them. Had things gone south, Dickinson would have been remembered as Cassandra. Instead, he became a footnote in a story he helped write. John Dickinson knew he was destroying his reputation by resisting the rush to declare independence. But he did so anyway because he believed the country’s long-term survival mattered more than the passions of the moment. It’s a sober patriotism to ask the questions nobody wants to hear rather than to give the hosannahs that everyone expects. Dickinson asked those questions, was overruled, and was later proven right. What had he done in the interim? Put on a uniform and fought for the cause anyway. We could use more cowards like that. Brian Anderson, editor-in-chief, City Journal That’s easy: If Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Hamilton were unavailable, my first draft pick would be James Wilson. One of the Constitution’s principal architects but now less well-known than the Big Five, Wilson argued that America’s liberties rest on more than individual rights; they also grow out of a moral order discoverable through reason and grounded in natural law. Big themes: Rights and duties are inseparable, liberty means self-government rather than license, and political authority flows directly from the people because all persons are naturally equal before that higher law. Wilson offers a distinctly American synthesis of natural rights, civic responsibility, and constitutional self-government that in my view deserves renewed attention. Ryan Williams, president, the Claremont Institute John Quincy Adams was only 11 years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed, but he would go on to a long career as senator, Secretary of State, Minister to Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia, and finally, president. After Washington’s peerless inaugural example, JQA remains, to this day, the greatest foreign policy strategist and diplomat of American history. For a continued restoration of a truly America First foreign policy, all roads lead through JQA. READ MORE: THE CLAREMONT INSTITUTE’S CHARLES KESLER ON WHY THE FEDERALIST PAPERS MATTER Daniel Gullotta, assistant professor at the Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society While I’m sad most people don’t know who Gouverneur Morris is, it’s a lot of fun telling people who he was. Just mentioning he had a peg leg usually gets people’s attention. But his role in the Constitution, crafting the opening “We the People,” is something people should know just as commonly as they know Jefferson was the drafter of the Declaration. He was also arguably the most anti-slavery Founding Father (just read some of his speeches during the compromise debates). He also refused to leave France during the Reign of Terror while serving as our minister, despite the danger. Then there’s the crazy way he died, trying to clear a urinary blockage with a piece of whalebone from his wife’s corset. I know everyone says this person or that person needs a movie or miniseries, but come on, there’s just no part of his life that isn’t compelling. Mark Helprin, author, “Elegy In Blue” We’re sorely in need of Benjamin Franklin, maybe a few dozen of him, to correct the abysmal ignorance and inexperience of today’s “Yutes,” who know virtually nothing and yet are powered by the energy of the young and destined to run the zoo. And it is a zoo. Franklin made use of his long experience and inherent brilliance to take under his wing Adams, Jefferson, and a lot of others, guiding them with practical and long-lasting results. Maybe I say this about the younger generations because I’m in my 80th year and am falling prey to chasing them off the lawn. But, really, they can hardly speak English, the girls’ speech sounds like frying eggs, and they know so little that they buzz around communism and fascism like moths around a flame. You know what happens with moths and flames. READ MORE: A CONVERSATION WITH MARK HELPRIN, AMERICA’S GREATEST LIVING WRITER. Brenda Hafera, Assistant Director and Research Fellow, B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies Mercy Otis Warren was an exceptional woman who contributed to the founding of an exceptional nation. A staunch republican, she depicted the happenings in her native Boston through plays and poems intended to drum up support for the patriot cause. The list of her correspondence was a “Who’s Who” of the Founding generation, including John and Abigail Adams, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, enabling her to write the only Anti-Federalist account of the War of Independence. That opus, along with her thoughtful and uncompromising defense of the importance of morals and manners, justly earned her the designation, “The Conscience of the American Revolution.” Anastasia Boden, Director of Constitutional Scholarship at Pacific Legal Foundation and the host of the In Dissent podcast James Wilson has largely been forgotten. He deserves better. Wilson’s argument that the people, not the government, are sovereign justified not only rejecting Parliament’s taxes but breaking with Britain altogether. A Scottish immigrant steeped in the Scottish Enlightenment, Wilson helped popularize the radical idea that the people — not kings or Parliament — are the ultimate source of political authority and are fully capable of governing themselves. Wilson also played a leading role in shaping Article II of the Constitution, strengthening the presidency with the counterintuitive goal of protecting liberty. In an era of debates over democracy, federal power, and constitutional government, few Founders have more to teach us. James Patterson, author, “Why Postliberalism Failed” The Founders we admire today were stark personalities and prolific writers, men who overshadowed impressive figures we tend to forget. One is John Witherspoon, the only member of clergy to sign the Declaration of Independence and teacher to James Madison, who gave both a religious and intellectual heft to the Revolutionary cause. As a Catholic, I have to recommend Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, a major financier of the Revolution, and a fierce advocate for republican politics and religious liberty. And then there’s Roger Sherman, who was something of an unsung workhorse from the start of the Revolution through the early Republic years. He opposed slavery, and he was the chief author of the Connecticut Compromise that gave us the bicameral Congress we have today.

On October 28, 1886, then-President Grover Cleveland spoke at the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. “The people of the United States accept with gratitude from their brethren of the French Republic the grand and completed work of art we here inaugurate,” Cleveland began: This token of the affection and consideration of the people of France demonstrates the kinship of republics, and conveys to us the assurance that in our efforts to commend to mankind the excellence of a government resting upon popular will, we still have beyond the American continent, a steadfast ally. Cleveland, the only president other than President Donald Trump to serve two non-consecutive terms in the White House, went on to talk about the statue itself and what it represented: We are not here to day to bow before the representation of a fierce and warlike god, filled with wrath and vengeance, but we joyously contemplate instead, our own deity keeping watch and ward before the open gates of America, and greater than all that have been celebrated in ancient song. Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and of death, she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement. We will not forget that liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires, and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister republic in the East. Reflected thence and joined with answering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression, until liberty enlightens the world. The massive copper structure, designed by French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi and engineered by Gustav Eiffel, had been promised more than 20 years earlier in 1865 — as a gift celebrating the abolition of slavery, the end of the American Civil War, and the centennial celebrations of 1876. Bartholdi began work on the statue in 1875, and it was officially presented to U.S. Minister to France Levi P. Morton nine years later, on July 4, 1884. It was not until late 1886 that it was finally delivered, assembled, and unveiled at its permanent home on Liberty Island. On July 3, 1986 — 100 years after the statue was first revealed — then-President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech rededicating the statue and celebrating the lighting of Lady Liberty’s torch. We are the keepers of the flame of liberty. We hold it high tonight for the world to see, a beacon of hope, a light unto the nations. And so with joy and celebration and with a prayer that this lamp shall never be extinguished, I ask that you all join me in this symbolic act of faith, this lighting of Miss Liberty’s torch.

Free speech is America’s greatest protection against tyranny. It also creates one of our greatest vulnerabilities to foreign enemies. Our challenge is to defend that freedom without letting our enemies turn it against us. The First Amendment protects free speech for good reason. Once government gets to decide which opinions are allowed, every other freedom becomes less secure. But the same openness that lets Americans criticize the government, organize movements, and argue for radical ideas can also be exploited by enemies who would never permit that freedom at home. In America and the West, people are free to fund nonprofits, organize protests, build campus movements, and use social media to shape public opinion, even against the country’s own institutions. You wouldn’t be allowed to use those same tools to undermine the regime in China, Iran, Russia, or North Korea. Those governments keep a tight grip on their universities, media, and public square. That asymmetry is how a free society becomes vulnerable. Every society produces fringe ideas. That’s normal. But potentially harmful ideas usually remain harmless as long as they stay fringe. They become dangerous and divisive when someone gives them money, legitimacy, and a way to spread. Right now, self-destructive beliefs that once remained on the fringe are growing in popularity across America and the West. Some of these ideas surely started organically. But that doesn’t mean these ideas are spreading at this scale on their own. They can also be magnified by foreign money flowing into the universities, nonprofits, and platforms that shape the worldview of millions of Americans. Take energy. Radical activists push to block pipelines, shut down nuclear plants, and eliminate coal in the name of saving the planet, while China keeps burning cheap coal to power its economy. Taken to its extreme, this agenda, dressed up as climate virtue, becomes a form of industrial self-destruction while handing our competitors a massive economic advantage. Or take immigration. Done right, legal and controlled with real integration, it’s a strength. Done wrong, an unchecked open-borders policy is a recipe for national self-destruction. No rational state would allow indiscriminate migration on a scale that destabilizes its own society. Yet many Western constituencies now treat basic self-preservation as something shameful. We don’t need to prove that foreign money is the main driver of every self-destructive belief spreading through America. The vulnerability itself is the problem. Hostile governments don’t need to invent these ideas from scratch. They only need to find the radical ideas already capable of tearing us apart and fund their growth. Adversaries who have spent decades studying how to weaken America would be foolish to pass up such an obvious opening. Why spend trillions trying to beat America militarily when a fraction of that can get Americans to do the work for them? What can we actually do about this? Not censorship of Americans. That would be the most dangerous response. Americans have every right to argue and protest against America itself. That’s part of the deal free speech gives us. If we answer foreign manipulation by giving the government the power to police what Americans believe, we expose ourselves to something worse than foreign influence: a government powerful enough to turn against its own citizens. The First Amendment has to stay fully intact. The better answer is to extend a principle America already accepts: foreign money should not be allowed to shape American public life from the shadows. Foreign nationals already can’t donate to American elections. FARA requires certain foreign agents to register and disclose their activities here. Those laws exist because America understands that foreign money can be weaponized, and that foreign influence can be restricted or exposed without touching any American’s right to speak. We should apply that same logic more broadly to nonprofits, universities, and advocacy groups that shape American culture and politics. The distinction should stay simple: ordinary commerce is fine. Foreign money financing domestic influence is not. Foreigners can buy products, hire American companies, or pay full price for their own children’s education here. That is foreign money exchanged for real goods and services, and it’s not the problem. The problem is foreign governments, foreign nationals, or foreign-controlled groups endowing chairs, funding programs, or financing research in ways aimed at shaping our culture, our politics, or how young Americans are educated. If Americans want to fund radical climate activism or open-border movements, that’s their right. The First Amendment protects them. Americans are free to be wrong and free to be radical. But the First Amendment does not require us to let foreign adversaries bankroll our national self-destruction. Perhaps a broad restriction is too blunt an instrument. We would welcome any narrower solutions that actually work. At the very least, full transparency about which foreign governments, foreign nationals, and foreign-controlled entities are funding our nonprofit institutions would be a good first step. But transparency alone may not be enough. According to the Department of Education’s 2025 foreign-funding disclosures, Qatar was the largest foreign source of reportable gifts and contracts to American universities, including Harvard and Carnegie Mellon, with China third. Qatar alone accounted for more than $1 billion. That fact is already public, since federal law requires universities to report large foreign gifts and contracts. Yet the money keeps flowing anyway. At some point, transparency must be followed by real restrictions on foreign money flowing into causes designed to reshape American society. America does not need to become less free to protect itself. It needs to stop being naive. Our enemies understand that free speech in an open society can be used against it. We are under no obligation to give them the tools to turn our freedom against us. If we want free speech to survive, we need to defend not just our right to speak, but the society that makes that right worth having in the first place. *** Rabbi Elie Feder, PhD, and Rabbi Aaron Zimmer host the “Physics to God” podcast.

My Dearest America, From across your northern border, from a nation that has enjoyed the serene luxury of your shadow and your shelter, I write to you on the occasion of your 250th birthday — as a grateful beloved and not some moralistic scold or resentful neighbor. For I am acutely aware that the liberties I enjoy, and the clarity with which I know myself free, are gifts of your thought, your daring, and your existence. I am a Canadian woman, yes, but in the profoundest sense that matters — one which appeals to nature and not to passports — I am your daughter. Others will say you are a “propositional nation,” while some still cling to the hope that you are a “heritage nation.” Both miss the point, because each misunderstands the revolution behind what you really did and who you really are. The radicalism of your proposition lies in its claim to be true by nature. In brief, you are and will be true in all times and places. You did something unprecedented: you took equality and liberty out of the realm of myth, custom, and historical accident, and you wrote them on the tablet of nature itself. “All men are created equal.” You said that what you claim depends not on particular English habits, Protestant temperament, or colonial grievances; it depends on the soul. That is why I, a foreigner, can claim you with gratitude and seriousness. The moment you say “created equal,” you obliterate the boundary between your citizens and the rest of mankind — not politically, but philosophically. You announce that the standard by which regimes are to be judged is man’s eternal nature and not tradition, blood, or geography. And if that is true, any regime — yours, mine, or any other — that repudiates that standard becomes an enemy not merely of Americans, but of humanity itself. This is why your existence is more than a political fact; it is a philosophical revolution. You are called arrogant for speaking of yourselves as a “city on a hill.” But your most profound audacity is your humility before nature. You dared to assert that the truths upon which you rest are not yours. They do not belong to Boston or Philadelphia. They are not an American custom; they are a human truth. You did not create the equality of men; you discovered it. You did not grant inalienable rights; you recognized them. That is why you are, and must be, a light to other nations. The light you bear is not the sentimental glow of humanitarian feeling, which rises and falls with fashion. It is the light of nature—a light that flattens false hierarchies and exposes tyrannies as both false and unjust. It is the light by which a peasant in China, a dissident in Iran, and a woman in Canada can quietly measure her rulers and know whether they are legitimate. It whispers to the soul: You were not born to be a subject. You were not born to be a means. That whisper is your greatest weapon. You are the New Zion and its new chosen people. This is not to say God prefers your soil or your accents, but rather that you have been chosen for a specific task. You are chosen to live with the burden of having declared to the world that there is a standard above tribe, throne, party, and epoch. The burden is that you cannot retreat into the consolations of relativism without betraying your foundation. You cannot comfortably say, “Well, every culture has its own truths,” without also sawing off the branch on which you sit. If equality and liberty are not true by nature, then your founding is a magnificent illusion, and you are only one more tribe defending its prejudices. But if they are true by nature, then their reach is universal, their demand inescapable. You carry that demand. You carry it in your institutions, but more profoundly, you carry it in your self-understanding. You are condemned, by your own first principles, to care about the fate of liberty everywhere — out of philosophic consistency and not of imperial ambition. This is the burden of being New Zion. You cannot hide your light under a bushel without ceasing to be yourselves. From my vantage point, in a nation that has grown accustomed to retreat — to the modest comfort of thinking we can live as if history has ended and geography will protect us — I see you for what you are: the keystone of Western civilization. Remove you, and the arch collapses. Your military power is the result of this reason. The real keystone is that in you, the philosophy of natural rights did not remain an abstraction in a book or a lecture, but took the frightening step into reality. You wagered that men, understood as by nature free and equal, must govern themselves. The West’s greatest achievement — the union of reason and liberty—has its most concrete home in you. That is why your crises are never local matters. When you grow weary of yourself, when you tire of the old words and regard them as empty slogans, it is not only you who are endangered. A world already suspicious about reason looks on and concludes that even the noblest attempt to found politics on nature is a failure. Your decadence is offered as proof that the longing for liberty must submit at last to some new form of gentle despotism, administrative and “scientific,” tidy and soulless. The world is always looking for an excuse to give up on the demand that regimes justify themselves by appealing to something higher than power. Your failure would be that excuse. This is why — on this 250th anniversary — I write to thank you, not simply to flatter. You are tempted today by two opposite forms of forgetfulness. One is the temptation of heritage idolatry: to imagine that what makes you is a mere continuity of blood and custom, an ethnic story dressed up as philosophy. The other is the temptation of pure proceduralism: to see yourself as nothing but an empty framework in which any “culture”, any “values,” any “identity” may be poured. Both are evasions. The first reduces you to a tribe among tribes and abandons the universality at your essence. The second strips you of all substantive claims and abandons the truth by nature that gave you birth. Between these lies the hard road of self-knowledge: to remember that you are, in origin, argument and not blood — the argument that there are truths about man and justice that are true everywhere and always. As a Canadian, I have been spared many of your struggles. But I have not been spared the consequences of your ideas. I live in a world fundamentally shaped by the fact that, in 1776, a group of men on the eastern edge of a vast continent dared to write that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that when any form of government becomes destructive of the ends of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it may be altered or abolished. Whether my own nation remembers it or not, I know, because you taught me, that any regime which denies the equal natural freedom of its citizens is illegitimate. That knowledge is a liberation and a wound. It liberates because it tells me that I am not crazy when I feel outraged by injustice; I am simply judging by the nature of things. It wounds because it leaves me no refuge in the cozy lie that “this is just the way we do things here.” Your universalism leaves me cosmopolitan in the deepest sense, unable to be satisfied with local excuses. So today, on your 250th birthday, I thank Providence that my quiet, conciliatory nation has been blessed to share a border with you and not with a despot. I thank Nature’s God that your existence keeps alive the possibility of politics grounded in nature and not will. I thank you that your flag, mocked and burned in some quarters, still stands as a symbol that there is such a thing as a rational standard by which the mighty may be called to account. My love, the chosen people of natural right, you remain the one great nation that staked everything on the claim that man is by nature free and equal, and that government must humble itself before that fact. For that, a woman across your 49th parallel can know, without permission or apology, that she is free and equal by nature. That knowledge is your gift to me. Do not renounce it. In awe and wonder, An eternally grateful Canadian *** Dimpee Brar currently serves as the Director of Engagement for Allies for a Strong Canada. She is a writer whose work can be found in the Federalist, American Spectator, the Western Standard, and the Toronto Sun. She appears frequently on various podcasts and radio shows. You can follow her on X: @isthisdimpeeb

As our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, Americans are rightly reflecting on the extraordinary journey that made us the freest, most prosperous, and most innovative nation in human history. On Florida’s Space Coast, that reflection feels especially vivid. The Space Coast is not just a collection of launch pads and rockets — it is ground zero for America’s quest to maintain technological dominance and outpace our global adversaries. It is living proof of American ingenuity, vision, and leadership. Here on the Space Coast, we did not just witness history; we helped shape it. And with the investments and momentum we are building today, America’s next great chapter is already being written. Our story began in 1950, when the first rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral. Eight years later, Explorer 1 became America’s first satellite. In 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, and just months later, President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to do what many thought was impossible: put a man on the Moon. By 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humanity’s first steps on the lunar surface. The Space Shuttle program carried American innovation from 1981 to 2011, and in 2020, American astronauts once again launched to space from American soil aboard a SpaceX rocket. Today, the Artemis program is writing the next chapter of American exploration and leadership. Kennedy Space Center, which opened its gates in 1962, has been at the heart of it all — home to the mighty Saturn V, the Apollo program, the Space Shuttle, and now Artemis. These achievements were not accidents of history. They were the result of American risk-takers, pioneers, engineers, and patriots who refused to accept limits and chose to push the boundaries of what was possible. The Space Coast helped America win the Space Race, put boots on the Moon, and inspire generations of innovators who built the modern world. That same spirit of excellence and exceptionalism is needed now more than ever. The new space race is already underway. In an era of great-power competition, space is not a luxury — it is a critical domain of national security, economic strength, and technological superiority. Advances in space drive breakthroughs in communications, defense systems, manufacturing, and scientific discovery. Meanwhile, China is aggressively investing in its own space capabilities and openly challenging American leadership beyond Earth. We cannot afford to surrender the high ground. Every launch supports thousands of high-paying jobs, strengthens local economies, and reinforces America’s strategic advantage. The Space Coast is not simply part of our history; it is the launchpad for America’s future. I have fought to keep that momentum strong in Congress. I was proud to witness the successful launch of Artemis II, a historic milestone that brought America one step closer to returning astronauts to the Moon and ushering in a new era of exploration. As Chairman of the House Space & Aeronautics Subcommittee, I have worked to advance the NASA Reauthorization Act and support policies that strengthen America’s leadership in space. Just as importantly, I fought to secure critical investments in our future, including $250 million for Kennedy Space Center infrastructure upgrades and more than $10 billion for NASA through the One Big Beautiful Bill. Along the way, I have worked closely with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, agency leadership, and our commercial space partners to ensure the Space Coast remains at the forefront of innovation, discovery, and economic growth. As the space economy continues to expand, we are also advancing reforms such as the Department of Commerce’s Mission Authorization proposal to streamline regulations, encourage investment, and keep America the world’s premier destination for space innovation. These are not abstract investments. They are investments in American strength. With Artemis III on the horizon and American astronauts preparing to return to the lunar surface, we are once again proving that free people pursuing bold goals can accomplish what others only imagine. As America celebrates 250 years of freedom, the Space Coast stands as a powerful reminder of what makes this nation exceptional. When Americans dream big, build boldly, and refuse to back down from a challenge, there is no limit to what we can achieve. The next era of space exploration — lunar bases, missions to Mars, and technologies that will transform life here on Earth — is already taking shape right here in Florida. The Space Coast helped America win the Space Race. It will help America win the next one, too. The best is yet to come. Let us continue building, launching, and leading — showing the world that American exceptionalism is not a relic of the past, but a force that still drives humanity forward. As we celebrate 250 years of freedom, America is once again reaching for the stars, and the world is watching. *** Congressman Mike Haridopolos represents Florida’s 8th Congressional District.