Oren Cass

Oren M. Cass (born 1983) is an American public policy commentator and political advisor. He works at American Compass, a conservative think tank which he founded in 2020.

He previously worked on the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012. According to a 2015 article in Politico, he is a "general policy impresario of the emerging conservative consensus on fighting poverty." From 2015 to 2019, he was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He authored a book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. In February 2020, Cass established American Compass, an organization aimed at the question of "what the post-Trump right-of-center is going to be." His parents were both immigrants from Israel into the United States. He attended Williams College, where he received a B.A. in political economy.

Career After graduating from Williams College, Cass joined Bain & Company as an associate consultant, The following year, in 2015, he joined the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research as a senior fellow, and was named to Politico list of the top 50 "thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2015". Jason Furman, chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, described it as "a thoughtful, provocative, carefully argued book that made me change my mind on some issues that I thought I'd thought about quite a lot." The book was reviewed in The New Yorker, The Economist, Foreign Affairs and by French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd.

Donald J. Boudreaux of the American Institute for Economic Research disputed some of the book's positions, asserting that Cass focuses too heavily on the importance of production over consumption, to the point of extolling measures such as tariffs that coerce society into purchasing goods that would not be the first choice of uncoerced consumers.

American Compass

In February 2020, Cass founded American Compass, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, which is self-described as focusing on "what the post-Trump right-of-center is going to be." Later, ahead of the 2024 election, American Compass laid out a set of economic policies intended for a second Trump administration.

, American Compass was a member of the advisory board of Project 2025, a collection of conservative policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican nominee win the 2024 presidential election. Cass is thanked for his contribution to Chapter 18: "Department of Labor and Related Agencies."

Political positions

Cass has argued for several changes to conservatism, including: Free markets and tariff Under Cass, the group has strongly questioned the belief that free markets should be given primacy when setting public policy. Cass has described this "free market fundamentalism" as "pathetically simplistic." He was a guest speaker on 'Interesting Times' with Ross Douthat and spoke about how he agrees with Trump's approaches to tariffs. However, Cass prefers a phase-in period because factories take time to build. Industry and trade Cass has advocated for unionization that enables workers to collectively bargain for sector-wide pay standards and working conditions. He argues that local industry should be protected by an across-the-board 10% tariff on imported goods, which would increase by 5% annually until trade deficits are brought to zero, while investment in local industry would be funded by a national development bank.