February 28, 2025
Connecting the Dots on the Chips
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 lead—the inevitable revolution driven by artificial intelligence technologies. Klon Kitchen articulately laid out the argument that the Trump Administration vision for AI as a pillar of…
February 27, 2025
Is the EPA “Endangerment Finding” Endangered?
Earlier today, The Washington Post reported that head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, has urged the Trump administration to rescind the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases. The Post reports: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has privately urged the White House to strike down a scientific finding underpinning much of the federal government’s push to combat…
February 27, 2025
Innovating Future Power Systems: From Vision to Action
The electricity sector is at an inflection point. The historical model of centralized, monopoly-provided electric service is under pressure from technological change, shifting market forces, evolving policy objectives, and changing consumer expectations. This transformation is accelerating. One fundamental question looms: how can power systems evolve to balance desired outcomes like reliability, resilience, affordability, and decarbonization…
February 25, 2025
Trump as Information Gatekeeper: Controlling Access, Controlling Narratives
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 seeks to ensure that narratives serving his agenda can flourish, while speakers––for example, Associated Press and broadcast journalists––who don’t amplify it are punished. In doing…
February 24, 2025
AI and American Dynamism
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 One of the big problems was how quickly expert estimates become outdated, not due to any fault on the part of the experts, but because of how rapidly AI is evolving….
February 20, 2025
Innovating Future Power Systems: From Vision to Action
Key Points Executive Summary The global energy landscape is transforming, and nowhere is this more evident than the electricity sector. Technological advancements, shifting economic conditions, and evolving environmental policies are converging to reshape the way power systems operate. This report explores the implications of these changes for the future of power systems, focusing on the…
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 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…