American Enterprise Institute

Amid the frenzied food fight in Washington to define which AI risks are real and how seriously to weigh them, the U.S. interagency is breaking—quickly and visibly— toward treating AI as an abnormal technology. Next week, it will ask China to do the same. choosingvictory.com/p/ai-coordinat…

"Spirit’s demise spurs finger-pointing as rivals survey remains," by @crsdavies & @mylesmccormick_. The bailout plan “does indicate just how far the Trump White House is from previous Republican White Houses”, said Michael Strain. ft.com/content/47d68b…

Partisan political advocacy by authoritative institutions comes at a heavy price paid in diminished overall public confidence — not just among conservatives but also independents — as well as increased polarization, writes AEI's @RogerPielkeJr aei.org/articles/the-p…

READ: Closing the US-China Military Balance of Power Gap in the Pacific by Elaine McCusker & Richard Sims of @AEI aei.org/foreign-and-de…

A timely piece from @ProfClayCalvert, on how Comey’s indictment trivializes serious online attacks against politicians. Read his full analysis here: aei.org/technology-and…

Updated numbers from AEI’s Elaine McCusker estimate the cost of Operation Epic Fury to be $26.5–$36 billion. Read her breakdown of the numbers and explanation of the supplemental request below. aei.org/foreign-and-de…

Fortunately for all Americans and investors around the world, Powell stuck to his guns in dispassionately pursuing the Fed’s dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment, writes AEI’s Desmond Lachman. aei.org/op-eds/jerome-…

Federal funding for NPR and PBS is not coming back, nor should it. But conservatives need to think about how to compensate for the left-leaning support for a publicly created media network that is not going away, writes AEI’s Howard Husock. washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-amer…

As Americans spend more time online, the neighborhood is playing less of a central role than ever before. Read the latest report from AEI’s @dcoxpolls and @amersurveyctr for new data on the decline of neighborhood socialization. aei.org/research-produ…

On May 13, join @AEI's @MichaelRStrain for a panel discussion alongside @MIT experts on the frontier technologies and critical industries that will define the next decade. Register for the event here: aei.org/events/priorit…

AEI’s @PrestonCooper93 explains the data behind student loan caps on the nation’s most elite education schools. educationnext.org/new-caps-on-fe…

What Now for Federal Education Research? Join @rickhess99 & Amber Northern on May 14 for a discussion about the future of IES. RSVP below ⬇️ aei.org/events/what-no…

Want to understand what's happening in West Africa right now, and why it matters to the United States? Tune into the Space below for insight from AEI's @liam_karr and @mikedeangelo25

The reality is that governments run the U.N. and set its agenda, not the secretary-general. Too many want to ignore this, seeking to use the office to promote various causes, writes AEI's @BrettDSchaefer aei.org/op-eds/the-rac…

Thanks, Jennifer Rooks, for having me on Maine Public Radio to discuss the financial troubles of the US Postal Service. Congress is going to need to pass a law to avert a Post Office liquidity crisis and shut down. mainepublic.org/show/maine-cal…

AEI’s Glenn Hubbard: The immediate effect of AI is the aggregate demand effect of building datacenters, the investment numbers that showed up so robustly in GDP. All else equal, that raises, not lowers, the real interest rate and inflation is stuck.

🚨NEW EPISODE🚨 This week, @SeanTrende and @jaycost tackle the Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Catch the episode below, and let us know what you think in the comments! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bay…

I had the privilege to testify last week before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Intelligence, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, on “US Accountability at the United Nations: Challenges and Opportunities for Reform.” My testimony: aei.org/research-produ…

Our baseline estimate implies that preserving trust in the integrity and quality of official statistics generates economic benefits of about $25 for every $1 spent on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics's budget. On August 1, 2025, President Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of the BLS, alleging that she “faked the Jobs Numbers” and was “incompetent.” This event provides a rare opportunity to study something that is otherwise difficult to measure: the value of trustworthy official statistics. In social media posts on August 1, President Trump argued that BLS overstated job growth in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, posting this: “I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000.” He wrote: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Economic policy uncertainty spiked in the wake of the president’s efforts to undermine public trust in BLS data, as you would expect to see if trust in a crucial source of information about the economy had been eroded. Previous research finds that spikes in uncertainty have effects on the real economy (e.g., Bernanke 1983, Bloom 2009, Fernandez-Villaverde 2011, and Cascaldi-Garcia 2023). Under our baseline scaling assumptions, the increase in uncertainty associated with McEntarfer’s firing implies a reduction in output of roughly $20 billion. We interpret this as an estimate of the value the public placed on the marginal decrease in trust operating through the elevated-uncertainty channel. As a point of perspective, the budget for BLS in FY2025 was $704 million. Applying our baseline estimate of the impact of about $20 billion (Panel C in Table 3) suggests that the marginal erosion in public trust in the quality and integrity of BLS data cost the nation about $25 for every $1 of direct government spending on the agency. Alternatively, trust in BLS raises GDP by at least one order of magnitude more than the agency’s budget, just through the channel of supporting investor confidence. We believe this estimate to be conservative for at least two reasons. First, to be sure, the public did not lose complete faith in BLS statistics even for one week. Markets continued to trade on BLS inflation and employment data and businesses continued to rely on BLS data to make important decisions about investment, production, and expansion, and the like. Second, the total social benefits of BLS data extend far beyond the marginal change we have estimated. For example, other BLS products estimate productivity, facilitate better matches between workers and employers (via occupational projections, the Occupational Employment and Wage Survey, and the Occupational Outlook Handbook), help formulate better public policy (Eberstadt, Nunn, Schanzenbach, and Strain, 2017), and ensure accurate cost-of living adjustments to federal benefits (e.g., a 0.1 percentage point mistake in the Consumer Price Index could cost Social Security beneficiaries or the U.S. Treasury about $1 billion). In short, our calculations suggest that maintaining trust in federal statistical agencies likely generates returns that are large relative to their budgetary cost. "The Value of Reliable Statistics," by @I_Am_NickBloom, @EricaGroshen, Duncan Hobbs, and me. Link: nber.org/papers/w35135