WASHINGTON, D.C., February 24, 2026 — Five years ago today, American Moment was founded.

What started as an open letter to the conservative movement entitled “We Will Not Go Back,” a scrappy team of three twenty-somethings “who had never run an organization in their lives,” built what would become “part of the conservative infrastructure here in Washington, DC,” as former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows later said.

Founded in 2021, American Moment now exists to identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all. As Politico Magazine put it in 2023, “American Moment is quietly reshaping the conservative establishment in Washington.”

How? We’re replacing mediocre and unfit operatives in D.C., “one junior staff position at a time.” 

We use a constellation of professional, policy, and social programming to find talent, train them in what they need to know, place them with teams that matter, knit them into a united community, provide them with lifelong mentorship, and equip them to advance an agenda to restore American greatness. 

---

Last month, American Moment released a video commemorating one year since the President’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, and ahead of its five-year anniversary today.

The video showcases American Moment’s four flagship programs: Foundations, Fellowship, Frontiers, and AMFridays, and features leaders, alumni, and senior officials describing the stakes of building a bench of staff in Washington that put American interests first.

This morning, American Moment released another video, this time with its CEO, Nick Solheim, who offered some thoughts on this milestone.

On our origin story:

“Nobody handed us a million-dollar check and said “go build something.” We had laptops, cell phones, and a very long list of problems that nobody else seemed interested in solving. The first meetings happened in living rooms. The first events were standing-room-only not because we were popular, but because the rooms were small.

And when we told people in Washington what we were trying to do—build a serious personnel pipeline for the America First movement from scratch—most of them smiled politely and wished us luck. Some of them laughed. A few told us it couldn’t be done. The conservative establishment had its institutions, its think tanks, its credentialing systems, and they didn’t see a need for what we were building. The problem, of course, was that their system had produced decades of failure. But that’s a hard thing to say to people who are making a very comfortable living inside a failing system.

We said it anyway and got to work.”

On recent wins:

“One of our Fellows came to us from a state university where he played college football. Nobody in Washington had ever heard of him. Just a few weeks into the program, he got pulled for a role in one of the most senior offices in the executive branch. Another Fellow—a woman who watched the first term and saw the President get betrayed by his own staff—decided she couldn’t just be angry about it from the outside. She came to us. She’s now running communications for some of the most important people in the administration.

These are not Ivy League kids with family connections. These are Americans from all over the country who care about their nation and were willing to make the sacrifice—low pay, long hours, thankless work—to serve it. They just needed someone to open the door. That’s what we do.

Beyond placements, we took direct legal action in 2025. We joined a coalition to overturn the Luevano consent decree—a forty-four-year-old agreement from the Carter era that had effectively banned the federal government from using merit-based exams to hire civil servants. For over four decades, there was no serious way to test whether someone was actually qualified for a government job. We stepped into that fight alongside America First Legal and others. And in August, we won. The decree was vacated. For the first time in over forty years, the government can hire based on merit. That’s a generational win.

We also grew our team—seven new full-time hires—relaunched our Study Guide series, hosted several parties that have become infamous here in Washington, joined the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, and brought our podcast into the White House and the State Department. It was, by any measure, the most consequential year in our history.”

and on the future:

“Over the next three years, we are going to scale everything. We’re expanding Frontiers into new policy tracks—reindustrialization, energy, immigration, technology, the federal budget. We’re running the Fellowship three times a year. We’re growing AMFridays. We’re deepening the Study Guide series. We’re building out the alumni network so that our people aren’t just placed—they’re supported for the long haul, for careers that span decades, not just one administration.”

“If you want to win this fight, the country is not going to be saved by people who are depressed and have given up,” said Vice President JD Vance, who was on American Moment’s Founding Board of Advisors, in our five year anniversary video. “It’s going to be saved by people who believe in the future.”

Cheers to the first five years, and on to the next five—and many more. Learn more about our mission here.

---

About American Moment 

Founded in 2021, American Moment exists to identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all.

American Moment trains policy staff and young minds through its four core programs: the Fellowship for American Statecraft, Foundations of American Statecraft, Frontiers of American Statecraft, and AMFridays. American Moment is also the publisher of monthly policy-specific Study Guides, and producer of its flagship podcast, Moment of Truth. 

American Moment’s work has been featured by Politico Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Examiner, The Atlantic, Semafor, Axios, The Washington Post, The Daily Wire, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Tech Crunch, and many others. 

Media contact: [email protected] 

###