In recent years, congressional confrontations over the debt ceiling and annual spending have failed to produce legislation that comes anywhere close to confronting the seriousness of the United States’ growing public debt burden. Philip Wallach argues that Congress will be unable to produce a solution until it seriously reforms its budget processes.

In the 1960s and ’70s, major universities across the country established public policy schools to train students for high-level government jobs, but today the federal government is struggling to attract talent as fewer and fewer public policy graduates go into the public sector. In a new essay for National Affairs, Howard Husock explores the causes and consequences of this educational failure.

Rural America features some of the lowest levels of opportunity and highest barriers to economic development in the country, but current federal grants and programs do not effectively address these problems. In a new AEI report from the Workforce Futures Initiative, Anthony F. Pipa, A. J. Rodriguez, and Stan Veuger assess how new place-based funding programs could better boost local economies.

On March 22, an Islamic State terror attack in Moscow killed 143 people. In an interview for AEIdeas, Leon Aron and Frederick W. Kagan answer key questions about why Russia was targeted and how this will affect the war in Ukraine.

In January, AEI launched a new Center for Technology, Science, and Energy to strengthen our scholarship on science and energy policy. Robert Doar interviews the new director of the center, M. Anthony Mills, about how the relationship among science, the media, and politics needs to change after COVID-19.