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February 20, 2025
Why Cutting Basic Science Funding May Amount to Economic Unilateral Disarmament
Earlier this month, Eric Berger of Ars Technica reported that the White Houses’ first budget request of Donald Trump’s second term could be a fiscal reckoning for America’s government scientific enterprise. The National Science Foundation, a cornerstone of the country’s research infrastructure with its annual $9 billion purse, might face particularly savage cuts. According to Berger, Intelligence…
February 19, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms IV
Networks shape modern life. From roads to the internet to global supply chains, they enable movement, exchange, and value creation. But networks also suffer from congestion, a problem driven by both physical limitations and the difficulty of defining and enforcing property rights. In some networks, pricing mechanisms can help mitigate congestion, but political and regulatory…
February 19, 2025
Trump’s Tariffs Would Prime Prices at the Gas Pump
Donald Trump promised tariffs, and he delivered, imposing by executive fiat tariffs of 25 percent on imports from Canada (10 percent on Canadian energy) and Mexico and 10 percent on imports from China. His justifications are “the major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs killing our Citizens, including fentanyl,” and our “major trade deficits with those countries.” According…
February 19, 2025
Regional Transmission Organizations as Market Platforms IV
Networks shape modern life. From roads to the internet to global supply chains, they enable movement, exchange, and value creation. But networks also suffer from congestion, a problem driven by both physical limitations and the difficulty of defining and enforcing property rights. In some networks, pricing mechanisms can help mitigate congestion, but political and regulatory…
February 19, 2025
Will the Department of Justice Break the Internet?
There were many contradictions in antitrust enforcement under Biden. But what if Trump’s administration follows the same path? In a striking irony, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust case against Google, which was decided last summer, may reduce competition—both in search and in access to the World Wide Web. The DOJ’s proposed remedies would stifle…
February 19, 2025
Practical Steps Towards Data and Software Resilience
The trade-off between resilience and efficiency in cloud-based data storage models begs consideration. Cloud-based models make an individual’s data available seamlessly, regardless of the device used. Data—and even the software used to process it (such as Microsoft Office 365)—are no longer tied to a specific location. The IT landscape has been revolutionized as almost all…
February 18, 2025
Another Step Forward in NEPA Reform
America’s system of environmental reviews has been choking progress for a half-century. A key culprit: the National Environmental Policy Act, once a seemingly sensible safeguard that has metastasized into a bureaucratic quagmire that can entangle projects for years at great cost. As I write in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi…
February 18, 2025
The Dilemmas of Democracy
In his classic 1960 book, The Semisovereign People, political scientist E.E. Schattschneider identified a dilemma of democracy: All of us are ignorant about most things, making each of us unsuitable to govern — yet we also have a belief that everyone should be allowed to participate in governance, with our political leaders chosen from among the…
February 13, 2025
The Intel Challenge and Trump’s Foolhardy Plans for Semiconductor Tariffs
Intel, the nation’s putative semiconductor “national champion” has fallen on hard times. Having led technologically for some decades, Intel fell behind demands for advanced chips after the iPhone emergence and most recently on the burgeoning demand for chips needed for artificial intelligence training. The Biden administration, and now the incoming Trump administration, seem determined to support and…
February 12, 2025
The North American Fire Deficit
An important new paper published this week in Nature Communications looks at the historical record of fire in North America — A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned. Parks et al. find that large fires of recent decades in North America are not unprecedented: Our study of 1851 tree-ring fire-scar…