A billionaire-backed push to develop libertarian enclaves in Central America is being imported back to the United States, where its proponents want to lay the groundwork for their own privately run, corporately governed cities. A new lobbying group, dubbed the Freedom Cities Coalition, wants to convince President Trump and Congress to authorize the creation of new special development zones within the U.S. These zones would allow wealthy investors to write their own laws and set up their own governance structures which would be corporately controlled and wouldnt involve a traditional bureaucracy. The new zones could also serve as a testbed for weird new technologies without the need for government oversight. Wired recently reported that the Coalition was drafting congressional legislation that would allow it to establish a network of its new cities. One of the chief motivations for the creation of these communities is so that new scientific and technological development initiatives can be carried out without the need for regulatory oversight. The outlet writes: According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Freedom Cities Coalition is a project of NeWay Capital, a company that has been centrally involved in the development of Prospera, a private, free market, crypto-friendly enclave in Honduras. Prospera was made possible by a special regulatory setup, dubbed a special economic zone (or ZEDE), that was established in the country in 2013 in the wake of a U.S.-backed coup. ZEDEs allow for private actors to essentially move into geographically partitioned areas and write their own regulatory and judicial rules. Prospera is also part of something called the Network State, an anarcho-capitalist ideological movement, backed by tech-billionaires, that seeks to create privately run cities with native cryptocurrencies.Wired reports on the efforts of the Freedom Cities Coalition to encourage President Trump and Congress to enshrine their project into federal law. Currently, the lobbyists are pursuing a number of different strategies to get some kind of law authorizing the cities development on the books: Trey Goff, the chief of staff of the startup nation known as Prspera, tells WIRED that he and other Prspera representatives working under an advocacy group called the Freedom Cities Coalition have been meeting with the Trump administration about the idea in recent weeks. He claims the administration has been very receptive. On its website, the Freedom Coalition claims that while other nations are creating new centers of innovation, Americas regulatory environment is holding back progress. The site continues:Freedom Cities are Americas boldest solution to unleash our nations full potential. By creating zones of regulatory clarity and economic dynamism, these specially designated areas strip away decades of bureaucratic buildup while maintaining essential protections, allowing entrepreneurs and builders to move at the speed of human ingenuity rather than the pace of paperwork. Where will Americas new Freedom Cities be built? It seems quite possible that the Network Staters want to build them in our national parks. On its website, the Freedom City Coalition notes that 28 percent of U.S. land is federally owned and ready for innovative development. It doesnt specify what kind of federal land is ready for this innovation, but most of the government land that isnt used for farming and energy development is used for wildlife conservation. Its also worth noting that, in a video released during the presidential campaign, Trump openly spoke about using protected federal lands to build Freedom Cities. Past generations of Americans pursued big dreams and daring projects that once seemed absolutely impossible, Trump said in the video. They pushed across an unsettled continent and built new cities in the wild frontier. Trump then called for the use of protected federal lands to develop ten new urban metropolises. These developments, he said, would re-open the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people a new shot at home ownership and, in fact, the American dream.