About Chris McCoy

Where he came from

McCoy grew up on food stamps, free lunch, and Medicaid in Kelso and Longview, Washington.

Reynolds Metals sponsored his youth baseball team; the jerseys said Reynolds on the front. When the plant closed in 2001, more than 900 workers lost their jobs. There was no rule that kept a share of what new activity generated in the town that generated it.

When Chris aged off Medicaid at 18, his grandfather Jack, a 36-year US Postal Service mail carrier, made one phone call to the Washington State Department of Health and found him a $25-a-month health plan. Postal workers know how to find people. Jack solved the problem. The research that followed showed that most families don't have a Jack: in 46 states at the time, there was nothing equivalent within reach of a working family.

Fund #4 of the 20 Trusted Funds, Trusted Healthcare, is named for him: the Jack McCoy Fund. The same problem, twenty years apart.

The land in Kelso

In 2019 and 2020, McCoy worked to buy 227 acres at the I-5 interchange in Kelso, the site where he believed a data center campus and small business zone could bring that activity back.

• The bid: his $7 million bid was accepted, then topped at $14 million the week before signing.
• What happened next: Trammell Crow Company built a 1,185,327-square-foot warehouse on 82 acres of the site, finished in December 2024. It sat empty for more than a year. In February 2026, Amazon announced it would lease it.

The math made leaving more profitable than building, and nothing in the current system changes that calculation. That is the problem Trusted America proposes to solve.

The question he started with

McCoy founded Data4America in 2014 to research one question: how do you engineer sound money back into America? How do you create jobs, wages, and real opportunity without driving up the prices of food, housing, and electricity that hit working families hardest?

Over the years that followed, teams of researchers worked across blockchain, cloud computing, AI, and how each is governed as it relates to national economies. Along the way, Data4America published research on the cost of living in American cities, education reform, automation, and universal basic income. It also hosted long-form conversations with guests including Bradley Tusk, Ramez Naam, and Michael Gibson.

In December 2017, the research connected two traditions that never cited each other:

• The Founders, 1787: they wrote supermajority rules into the Constitution, so no faction could take over by winning a simple majority.
• Leslie Lamport, 1982: he and his colleagues proved that a network of computers exchanging unsigned messages can stay in agreement only while fewer than one-third of them fail or cheat.

McCoy named the connection the Hamilton-Lamport Convergence. The two are connected, not identical.

Community work

Long before Data4America, McCoy was building community institutions in Kelso.

• I Love Baseball: he co-founded it in 2006 in Barahona, Dominican Republic, so young players could chase baseball without giving up school. Since 2008 it has been a program of Children of the Nations, which reports 96 children in the program, with school fees, daily nutrition, medical care, and baseball training.
• NaShuntae's Gift: he founded this scholarship for student leaders in DECA, a national business and leadership program with 225,000 members. Every $5 donated counts as one vote on who receives it.
  • It is named for NaShuntae Pleasant-Miles, a Pasco, Washington student who won the Washington State DECA presidency in 1999 and inspired Chris to follow the same path a year later. She died of a brain tumor in 2003, at 23.
  • Chris co-founded the scholarship with her father, Nate Miles, who had been Washington State DECA President in 1978.
• The Hilander Hall of Fame: in 2012, in his final days, his great-uncle Kirby McCoy, who had built concession stands and facilities for Kelso Baseball and Softball, asked Chris to "do something great for the kids of Kelso." The Hall of Fame is the answer: a community-governed recognition program for Kelso High School graduates, where residents vote on who is inducted. Running it fairly took the same math as STORE, so it also became a test network for STORE. That was never the intent. The kids were.
  • July 2024: its democratically elected trustee board adopted the governance rules with 97.22% approval.
  • The first season's vote: 60 voters. The first induction ceremony followed on February 8, 2025, in the Kelso High School auditorium.
  • The second season's vote: 187 voters, more than triple the first. The ceremony followed on February 7, 2026.

He was elected Washington DECA State Parliamentarian (1999-2000) and State President (2000-2001), then, at 18, National DECA President (2001-2002), helping lead a student organization of 165,000 members run by elected officers and votes, years before he read the math behind governance. He put his spot on the University of Washington baseball team on hold to serve.

Why the center keeps growing

Every network that grows pulls toward its center. The telephone did it. Social media did it. The cloud did it, and AI is doing it now. The more people join, the more valuable the network becomes, and the more value flows to whoever sits in the middle.

A country works a little like a network. That is an analogy, not a law: budgets grow with population, prices, and promises, not with connections. But the pattern rhymes.

• Most federal money comes back as payments to people. As the economy grew, federal spending grew, and about two-thirds of it now goes out that way, up from about one-third in 1970.
• The part Congress votes on each year has shrunk. It is on track to be the smallest share of the economy since the records began in 1962.
• Places like Kelso don't decide. A town does not vote on Social Security, Medicare, or most grant rules. Those choices are made in Washington.

In a network with a strong center, whoever holds the center holds a great deal. Voters seem to feel it: in 2024, 69% said it really matters who wins the presidency. Is that because more is decided in Washington? It may be. Polarization and close elections play a part too.

The Founders never tried to stop the country from growing. They wrote rules so that growth could not be captured. Trusted America asks what those rules would look like for the economy.

A rising tide lifts all boats. The problem is we don't all have boats. Trusted America is designed to build the boats, through incentives rather than mandates, and then the tide does the work.

Sources: Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables; Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 (February 2026); Pew Research Center (April 2024).

Trusted America, at national scale

Trusted America is McCoy's research proposal to apply the math that keeps any single actor from taking over to the national economy. It is a sibling of STORE, built on the same math (named, not identical), not a product built on STORE.

In practical terms:

• An employer that hires Americans at a real wage pays a lower corporate rate.
• Up to a third of the extra federal tax that new hiring generates stays in the town that generated it, in a locally governed fund.

Not a grant program. Not a mandate. A formula that makes the right choice the profitable choice, the way Reynolds should have stayed in Kelso if the math had been different.

The experiment is small. The math, if correct, is not.

The Pauling connection

McCoy is a second cousin three times removed of two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling (Chemistry 1954, Peace 1962). Genealogical research traced both lines to Oregon Trail pioneers Calvin Harvey Neal Sr. and Alcy Bilyeu Neal, who crossed in 1844. Pauling spent decades mastering the fundamentals of chemistry before applying that precision to peace and the structure of cooperation. McCoy's path runs the other way: governance practiced first, the math understood after.

McCoy graduated from the University of Washington, where he studied technology entrepreneurship and commercial real estate development.