Goldwater Institute

Patients with rare and ultra-rare diseases are one step closer to accessing the personalized treatments that could save their lives.

Today, Rep. Diana Harshbarger and Sen. Ron Johnson introduced the Right to Try for Individualized Treatments Act, landmark legislation that would create a clear legal pathway for patients to access individualized gene and cell therapies without unnecessary bureaucratic barriers.

The original Right to Try, championed by the Goldwater Institute and enacted into federal law in 2018, empowered terminally ill patients to pursue promising investigational treatments. But medicine has evolved. Increasingly, groundbreaking therapies are being developed for a single patient based on that individual's unique genetic profile—yet outdated regulatory systems have struggled to keep pace.

This legislation modernizes the law for the era of personalized medicine, ensuring that patients and their doctors—not government bureaucrats—can make critical healthcare decisions when time is running out.

For families facing devastating rare diseases, this isn't a policy debate. It's a lifeline.

"No American should be forced to beg the government for permission to try to save their own life, and no bureaucrat should prevent a patient from accessing cutting-edge therapies." — Victor Riches, President & CEO, Goldwater Institute

The future of medicine is individualized. Our laws should be, too.

Congress Introduces Right to Try for Individualized Treatments Act to Expand Patients' Access to Gene Therapies Patients desperately waiting to access cutting-edge, life-saving treatments have new hope today with the introduction of the Right to Try..

Now is the time! Arizona can take the lead.

HCR2044 would enshrine the strongest state protections against DEI and race-based “affirmative action” of any state in the country.

We need House Speaker Steve Montenegro and Senate President Warren Petersen to move on HCR2044.

Arizona students, state employees, and state contractors shouldn’t have to suffer from the whiplash of Washington D.C., nor watch their state universities devolve further into hotbeds of DEI (or whatever surface-level rebrand it subsequently undergoes).

HCR2044 would turn this dynamic on its head, forcing our universities to stand against federal extortion and discriminatory DEI initiatives—now and always, regardless of the euphemisms used.

It’s no wonder that leading national conservative voices who’ve been in the trenches of higher education policy have echoed the call for Arizona lawmakers to pass HCR2044.

Labor unions are pushing for laws that would require a human driver in the cab of every self-driving truck, even if that driver has nothing to do.

They’re calling it a safety measure. But with the advent of self-driving trucks, whose core purpose is to improve safety, along with efficiency, the Goldwater Institute’s Brian Norman writes that we should embrace innovation, not turn away from it.

“These bills are not isolated safety measures but part of a coordinated campaign to slow a technology that threatens an entrenched labor model.”

Read more in the link below.

The City of Phoenix is at it again... and so are we.

Phoenix is trying to sell a parcel of downtown land to a private, out-of-state developer at a $3.3 million discount with no real public benefit in return.

That's Illegal, and Goldwater is suing the city to put a stop to it.

The Arizona Constitution requires government entities to receive a direct and proportionate return when they sell public assets. But Phoenix leaders are attempting to give Pennrose, LLC a massive discount on prime downtown real estate, agreeing to sell property worth at least $4.8 million for only about $1.5 million.

That’s not proportionate, and there are no other public benefits in the agreement to make up the difference.

Simply put, Arizona law does not give way just because city officials find a particular project desirable.

Public property belongs to the public. When government officials transfer millions of dollars in public value to a private developer, the Arizona Constitution requires a genuine public purpose and a proportionate exchange—not deep discounts justified by speculative or illusory benefits that taxpayers will never see.

History is being buried, and it's all because of political correctness.

A new Goldwater Institute report shows how ideological activists are twisting a federal law with disastrous consequences for science.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss, Ph.D., writes in the report that activists are stretching the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, beyond its intended purpose.

That's restricting research, removing artifacts from public view, and burying evidence that helps us understand the ancient Southwest.

Museums and universities should preserve and study history, not hide it. The past belongs to future generations and should be protected from political pressure and ideological agendas.

Read The Reburial of the Southwest: Closing Off Native History and Archaeology in the link below.

Goldwater Institute | Defending and Strengthening Freedom The Goldwater Institute is the nation’s preeminent liberty organization working to defend our freedoms nationwide.

Can the government force a private business to fund speech it disagrees with?

The Constitution says no.

But Santa Barbara County has created a mandatory wine "Business Improvement District" requiring wineries to pay a 1% assessment and join a private trade association that controls how those funds are spent.

For Flying Goat Cellars, a family-owned winery that has spent decades building its own brand and business model, that means being compelled to support marketing and advocacy efforts it does not endorse.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that Americans cannot be forced to subsidize speech they disagree with or compelled into private associations against their will.

That's why Flying Goat Cellars, represented by the Goldwater Institute, has filed suit to defend its First and Fifth Amendment rights.

Government should protect freedom of association and free expression—not force citizens to bankroll someone else's message.

This Memorial Day weekend, we remember the men and women who sacrificed everything to defend American freedom and liberty.

“America was founded on the revolutionary truth that our rights are inherent and inalienable – they do not come from government, but belong by nature to every person,” writes Jon Riches, a commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve and the Goldwater Institute’s vice president for litigation.

“The Constitution was established to secure those liberties, and every servicemember swears an oath not to a ruler or political party, but to support and defend that Constitution and the freedom it protects.”

Throughout American history, brave heroes have given their lives to ensure that freedom would endure. Memorial Day is an annual reminder that freedom is never free.

Liberty In Action: They Sacrificed All for Freedom This Memorial Day weekend, we remember the men and women who sacrificed everything to defend American freedom and liberty. “America..

A permit application shouldn't disappear into a bureaucratic black hole.

With the signing of House Bill 2552, Tennessee has taken a major step toward restoring accountability and common sense to its permitting process.

It's a win for housing, property rights, and good government.

Tennessee Cuts Red Tape and Speeds Up Housing Permits Red tape has long been one of the most stubborn barriers to increasing the housing supply and reducing costs in..

"Liberty means the individual’s right to make the operative choices in his or her own life without interference from other people or from the state."

Goldwater's Timothy Sandefur spoke with USA Today about his new book, "Proclaiming Liberty" and America's 250th.

"We often in today’s world speak of government as if it’s our parent — that it’s government’s job to keep us good and mind what we do and all these sorts of things," Sandefur said. "The American revolutionaries would have said, no, government is not our parent. Government is our child. It’s our job to supervise it. It’s our job to teach it the right things to do. After all, we’re the ones paying its bills."