This week, AEI launched The American Enterprise, a new monthly publication that will explore issues and ideas critical to a thriving democracy and prosperous America through long-form essays. Our first edition features Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on the existential economic challenge facing the US, Christine Rosen on the looming era of artificial friendship, Hal Brands on the threat posed by conflicts in Europe and Asia, and Robert P. George on the comeback of classical education. Subscribe to its monthly newsletter here.

At the AI Action Summit, Vice President JD Vance outlined a vision for advancing American leadership in artificial intelligence to fuel economic growth, national security, and technological dominance. AEI defense technology expert Klon Kitchen praises this approach as an essential step forward and lays out what the administration must do for it to succeed.

In implementing its agenda, the administration has exerted unprecedented power over the direction and removal of federal agencies, officials, and employees. Jack Landman Goldsmith shows how the 2024 decision Trump v. United States has enabled the administration to advance a “maximalist” theory of executive power that might give the Supreme Court pause.

Last week, the Trump administration suddenly announced it was lowering the maximum indirect cost rate research institutions can charge the government to 15 percent for National Institutes of Health grants. Writing in The New Atlantis, Yuval Levin explains why the design and implementation of this change, characteristic of many of Trump’s executive actions, is squandering a real opportunity for reform.

As Republicans advance their legislative agenda in Congress, they will rely on the Congressional Budget Office’s and Joint Committee on Taxation’s official estimates of the budgetary costs and savings, known as “scoring.” By design, these estimates exclude the likely effects on labor, capital, productivity, and other economic outcomes, but in a new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, R. Glenn Hubbard and coauthors explore the potential of “dynamic scoring” to incorporate these features and produce more accurate projections.