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…
February 12, 2025
America Must Lead the AI Revolution—for Ourselves and Our Allies
Vice President JD Vance’s remarks at the AI Action Summit weren’t just another policy speech—they were a declaration of intent. The Trump administration is staking out a coherent vision: AI as a pillar of economic growth, national security, and American technological dominance. This approach recognizes that AI leadership isn’t just about research and development; it’s…
February 11, 2025
AI and the Future of Work Looks Bright
One of the hottest guessing games in workforce development is figuring out how generative artificial intelligence will affect jobs and how to prepare students and workers for an AI-infused economy. The future of work looks bright, but the full potential of AI to increase productivity and raise wages and incomes will only be realized if…
February 11, 2025
Trump v. CBS: When Politics, Journalism, Business, and FCC Authority Collide
Shortly after Donald Trump sued CBS in October over what he called “false, misleading, deceptive, and, therefore, unconscionable and detrimental news distortion” in editing a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, I contended that the lawsuit was likely meritless. While explaining that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is responsible for enforcing a rule against news distortion by over-the-air broadcasters, I questioned the lawsuit’s…
February 10, 2025
Hits and Misses
The term “scenario” was introduced by a group of researchers at the RAND Corporation in the 1960s. Herman Kahn explained its origin in 1979: “We deliberately chose the word [scenario] to deglamorize the concept . . . There is no a priori concept that a scenario should be taken seriously or that it is intended to reflect aspects…
February 10, 2025
The Deeper Question Raised by the NIH Grant Overhaul
Last week, in a classic Friday evening news dump, the Trump administration set off one of those frantic controversies that seem to be our fate for the next few years. A tweet from the official X account of the National Institutes of Health declared: The tweet was backed up by a more formal memo justifying the new policy on…
February 10, 2025
New FDA Policies Could Limit the Full Value of AI in Medicine
The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine is expanding at an astonishing pace, mirroring the rapid advances in AI technology itself. Some experts within the field predict that in the next several years, developers may realize artificial general intelligence (AGI)—a revolutionary form of AI capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge across various tasks with…