President Donald Trump fired two Democratic commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last Tuesday, a move that raises important questions about the independence of regulatory agencies. If challenged in…
By Mark Jamison | April 4, 2025
For years, scientists kept the debate about risky virus research among themselves. Then Covid happened. As President Trump prepares to crack down on virology research, the expert community must face…
By M. Anthony Mills | April 3, 2025
The recent release of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson has brought much needed attention to the problem of sclerotic government, especially vetocracy. Vetocracy is an emergent property of…
By Will Rinehart | April 3, 2025
First Amendment law entails tradeoffs. Consider Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a case the US Supreme Court heard in January. It involves an online age-verification statute that ostensibly is designed…
By Clay Calvert | April 2, 2025
Earlier this month, I previewed the arguments in Federal Communications Commission v Consumers’ Research. The case asks the Supreme Court whether the FCC’s Universal Service Fund (USF) violates the nondelegation…
By Daniel Lyons | April 1, 2025
Last month, a federal appeals court confirmed what most legal regimes around the world—patent offices, administrative judges, and even supreme courts—have long held: Machines cannot themselves create. Readers of this…
By Michael M. Rosen | April 1, 2025
If there has been one inexorable trend in the telecommunications industry over the past 30 years, it has been the decline of the household landline phone connection. While Figure 1 illustrates the…
By Bronwyn Howell | March 26, 2025
A burgeoning battle among academics and attorneys involving a centuries-old communications technology––the printing press––could impact journalists’ current claims to constitutional protection against President Trump’s ceaseless attacks on news organizations. Indeed,…
By Clay Calvert | March 25, 2025
My most recent post “Haste Controls Waste!” sought to reconcile my misgivings about the speed of current government reforms with decades of staunch and thoroughgoing resistance. Now let’s talk about…
By Jim Harper | March 20, 2025
Policymakers are rushing to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), but the economic impact of these regulations remains largely unexplored. While the European Union and the United Kingdom have produced cost estimates, recent developments in the…
By Will Rinehart | March 19, 2025
If you study Fourth Amendment law and jurisprudential trends, you can—at least in a figurative, tentative, hopeful, and possibly illusory sense—see the future. Subject to all those caveats, I have…
By Jim Harper | March 18, 2025
Recent posts by fellow AEI scholars Klon Kitchen and Claude Barfield separately highlighted two important issues that must be considered together if the United States is to truly benefit from—and…
By Bronwyn Howell | February 28, 2025
President Donald Trump increasingly is playing the role of information gatekeeper, striving to control access to venues—technological and physical—where important expressive activities occur. By dictating access on his terms, Trump…
By Clay Calvert | February 25, 2025
Last year, I published a report, The Age of Uncertainty, on the challenges in understanding and estimating the job and skill impacts of artificial intelligence. One of the big problems was…
By Brent Orrell | February 24, 2025
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…
By James Pethokoukis | February 20, 2025