# Cicero Institute [[Joe Lonsdale]]'s policy shop — founded in Austin in 2018 (incorporated 2020) to apply what he calls the operating methods of [[8VC]] and [[Palantir]] to state government, and the clearest case in the vault of a single donor rewriting policy across a dozen states on a budget he describes as "very small": under $15 million a year. It is the policy layer of Lonsdale's parallel-institution strategy, beside the [[University of Austin]] (education) and his political giving ([[Joe Lonsdale Political Donations]]); [[Joe Lonsdale Ideology]] has the worldview. ## The homelessness campaign Cicero's signature product is a model bill, the "Reducing Street Homelessness Act," that bans camping on public land statewide, makes violation a misdemeanor, withholds state funds from cities that decline to enforce it, and redirects money from permanent supportive housing toward short-term shelter and mandated treatment. Texas passed the first version in 2021; by 2024 it had been introduced in fifteen states and passed in eight (Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Missouri — the last struck down by that state's supreme court on procedural grounds), and by 2026 the count of states with Cicero-influenced camping or homelessness laws was sixteen. The legal ground was cleared by *Grants Pass v. Johnson* (June 2024), in which the Supreme Court held that punishing sleeping outside is not cruel and unusual punishment; Cicero filed a brief and Lonsdale thanked [[Leonard Leo]] for his "advice and support" on it. The federal version arrived in July 2025 with the executive order "Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets," which Lonsdale says Cicero's work was "one of the main influences" on. The argument on the other side — from the researchers whose "Housing First" model Cicero set out to displace — is that the model trades an evidence base for enforcement; the argument for it is that the evidence base produced a decade of rising street homelessness in the cities that followed it. ## Everything else The same method — model bill, in-state lobbyists, a senior fellow to testify — runs on hospital price transparency, certificate-of-need repeal, occupational licensing, and criminal-justice "accountability" bills. Its political arm has spent over a million dollars on state lobbying. The through-line for the vault is the [[Watching]] file's point about Lonsdale generally: the venture investor's playbook (find the lever, ship the product, scale by state) applied to legislation, with results that would take a national advocacy group ten times the budget. [[OpenGov]], the government-software company Lonsdale co-founded, is the commercial cousin. ## See Also - [[Joe Lonsdale]] · [[Joe Lonsdale Ideology]] · [[Joe Lonsdale Holdings]] · [[Joe Lonsdale Political Donations]] · [[Joe Lonsdale Dossier]] - [[8VC]] · [[Palantir]] · [[OpenGov]] · [[University of Austin]] · [[Leonard Leo]] - [[Watching]]