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Vance and Rubio Headline the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala, Jun. 3, 2025

June 3, 2025 · The White House · 0:51:45

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

The American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala in Washington, D.C., on June 3, 2025, paired the administration’s two leading economic nationalists. Secretary of State Marco Rubio keynoted with an argument that the loss of American industrial capacity “is a national security impairment and a very significant one”: the United States, he said, made a policy decision to be “okay with 80-something percent of the active ingredients and most of our generic pharmaceuticals coming from another country,” while China “cornered the market” in processing critical materials. The first priority of American foreign policy, Rubio said, “needs to be the United States and what’s in the best interest of the United States. That’s not isolationism. That’s common sense.”

Vice President JD Vance then sat for a conversation with American Compass founder Oren Cass. Vance recalled that he first met Rubio in a Senate office conference room with Cass and Mike Needham, talking about the same ideas — “it’s kind of amazing to see it come full circle.” He summarized the administration’s agenda as, “we just want normal people to have a good life,” called the rebuilding of common-sense economic policy “a 20 year project,” and warned that the country has “lost critical skills” it was not even aware it had lost. On universities, he said institutions confronting the administration faced a choice — “you can accept democratic accountability and you can reform, or you can accept that the government is not going to treat you kindly. We’re not going to fund your garbage” — and pointed to the $9 billion Harvard funding announcement discussed at the gala. He advised the young policy professionals in the room to ignore Washington’s credential gatekeepers and to “get out there and know the country that you serve.”

Why it matters

The gala is the clearest single record of the Vance-Rubio economic doctrine in the administration’s first months — industrial capacity as national security, national interest as the stated first principle of foreign policy — delivered at the think tank whose network, as Cass noted, had placed dozens of staff across the administration and Capitol Hill.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the administration’s stated program as Vance framed it on June 3, 2025 — a roughly 20-year project to rebuild industrial capacity and common-sense economic policy, and the reform-or-lose-funding choice put to universities. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: The White House, “Vice President JD Vance Attends the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala” (official upload, embedded above; Washington, D.C.). Remarks as delivered at the event.