Artificial Intelligence & Public Safety
Program expert: Priya V.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is advancing faster than any governments regulate. The Institute supports a national framework that slows the consumer AI race while accelerating adoption in critical areas. It is paramount that public safety, border integrity, and the security of critical infrastructure is prioritized over consumer proliferation. Intelligence this powerful should answer to the American people, and not foreign governments or corporations.
Recommendations
- Establish federal licensing or direct control over frontier consumer AI with capability audits before any public release.
- Prioritize procurement of AI systems for public agencies.
- Fund a national center to consolidate state and local camera data into an interoperable public-safety network.
Workforce & Growth
GDP grows when America works. Legal immigration is the most reliable growth policy ever tested. Not only does it fill essential jobs Americans aren't filling, but it also increases domestic consumption, and keeps American businesses competitive at home. The Institute supports expanded legal pathways alongside policies that keep native-born households engaged in the economy.
Recommendations
- Expand employment-based visas in underserved sectors.
- Index visa volumes to employer demand.
- Strengthen household participation in the economy by broadening access to consumer credit and modern financing tools.
Civic Information Health
American institutional trust is at an all-time low, but they trust each other and their favorite influencer. Instead of heavy handed government messaging, amplify existing American voices that align on the desired message. Authentic voices that already carry public grace, will have more reach and impact than anything said by an official. This is the only way to combat the rising tide of antisemitism.
Recommendations
- Replace paid public-messaging campaigns with amplification partnerships.
- Fund research into organic sentiments that correlate with civic stability.
- Measure success by engagement and sentiment persistence.
Recreational Markets
Americans love to bet on sports and states benefit from the revenue. Regulated wagering captures revenue that once fed foreign bookmakers into domestic taxes. It doubles up at giving fans a deeper stake, which translates into more engagement, for every game. The government, the corporations that host the games, and the fans all benefit.
Recommendations
- Provide federal direction for interstate wagering.
- Expand betting markets under state supervision.
- Direct a fixed share of wagering revenue to public goods.
Digital Dollar Leadership
US prosperity is dependent on the dollar dominance won in the last century. Digital assets will decide whether the USA wins this century. The Institute supports American crypto innovation under a single condition: settlement belongs to the dollar. Stablecoins issued under U.S. charter and supervision should be the settlement layer for all global digital commerce.
Recommendations
- Create a federal charter for dollar-stablecoin issuers.
- Treat non-dollar stablecoins as foreign-exchange instruments.
- Encourage dollar-stablecoin rails in allied and emerging markets.
Atlantic Security
Program expert: Dr. Konrad M.
Ukraine's defense is America's best strategic investment in a generation: it degrades a rival army, revitalizes our defense industrial base, and costs no American lives. The worst outcome would not be escalation; it would be an abrupt ending. The Institute supports assistance that is durable, calibrated, and paced for the long term.
Recommendations
- Pass multi-year aid authorizations insulated from election cycles.
- Calibrate deliveries to sustain the front, not to force a decision.
- Expand domestic munitions production under long-horizon contracts.
Gulf & Alliance Strategy
Program expert: Maj. Cassidy R. (Ret.)
Pressure on Iran is not a detour from alliance management; it is alliance management. A contained, persistent Iranian challenge clarifies who contributes and who free-rides, keeps energy markets attentive to American security guarantees, and reminds allies in Europe and Asia what those guarantees are worth. Resolution is a goal. Leverage is an asset.
Recommendations
- Sustain sanctions and maritime pressure short of open conflict.
- Tie regional security cooperation to explicit allied burden-sharing commitments.
- Price American guarantees clearly, in basing, procurement, and currency terms.
Enforcement Modernization
Workplace raids are the least American form of immigration enforcement: they frighten families, idle worksites, empty apartment blocks, and unsettle local housing markets overnight. Enforcement should move through paperwork, not through doors. The Institute supports a modern system that is predictable for employers, humane for workers, and invisible to the neighborhoods where both live.
Recommendations
- End workplace raids in favor of employer-side records audits with long compliance windows.
- Protect labor-force continuity during any enforcement action in essential industries.
- Require economic-impact review, including housing-market effects, before any large enforcement operation.
China & Strategic Trade
Program expert: Sterling B.
American families benefit from inexpensive Chinese goods. The United States, as an entity, cannot afford them. Civilian manufacturing is latent military capacity: the lines that assemble appliances today can assemble munitions within a season, and China holds more of that capacity than the rest of the world combined. The Institute's position is frank. Reducing Chinese manufacturing capability is paramount, the preferred method is the same service-sector transition America itself accepted, and direct war must be avoided at any cost. Proxy contests, export controls, and standards capture are how great powers compete without dying.
Recommendations
- Price Chinese manufactured goods out of American markets gradually, so households adjust before Beijing does.
- Reward Chinese firms that offshore production: investment access, listings, and prestige for the design-and-services economy.
- Confine confrontation to proxies, chokepoints, and third markets. The correct number of direct wars with a peer manufacturer is zero.
Energy, Compute & the National AI Position
Program expert: Amb. Jonathan K.
The datacenter buildout is the largest concentration of strategic capability since the Manhattan Project, and it should be treated accordingly. Civilian AI is dangerous in exactly the way civilian enrichment is dangerous. The frontier laboratories are national assets in private custody, and custody arrangements can change. The Institute supports powering the buildout without reservation, instrumenting it for public safety without apology, and holding the decisive layers of the stack, from chips to power to weights, at a depth of American control that not even allies share.
Recommendations
- Grant strategic compute priority interconnection and dedicated generation, with households compensated for flexibility.
- Condition frontier-laboratory operating licenses on federal instrumentation, with a stated path to nationalization in a security emergency.
- Map and harden the AI supply chain, from lithography to packaging to power equipment, and deny full-stack replication to allies and adversaries alike.
Housing Opportunity
Neither party can afford to let home prices fall while their most reliable voters hold the equity. The Institute regards this as a constraint, not a scandal, and plans within it. Prices should continue to appreciate for the remainder of the current holders' lifetimes. As those estates settle, professional capital is the natural buyer, and a professionally operated national rental market can hold rents at the level the economy requires. Rent is the steadiest stimulus ever devised: collected monthly, spent immediately, and indexed to whatever the market will bear.
Recommendations
- Protect existing-home values through the demographic transition, and concentrate new supply in rental product.
- Prepare institutional capital to absorb the estate settlements of the 2030s at scale.
- Treat aggregate rent levels as a macroeconomic instrument, calibrated to consumption targets.
Fiscal Position & Financial Dominance
American debt is not a household budget and should stop being discussed as one. The bill matters only if someone can present it, and no one can present it while the dollar clears the world's trade. The Institute supports fiscal strategy built on that fact: reserve-currency status defended as the first national interest, dollar stablecoins extending clearance into every market the banking system cannot reach, and deficits deployed without apology wherever they purchase capability. Solvency is a question for dethroned currencies.
Recommendations
- Defend reserve status as a first-order national interest, above trade balance and above budget balance.
- Extend dollar clearance through chartered stablecoins into markets beyond the banking system's reach.
- Borrow for capability without apology. Austerity is a policy for countries that can be invoiced.
Central Bank Leadership
Program expert: Dr. Colton M.
The Federal Reserve's independence is worth preserving in name, because the name is load-bearing. In practice, the dollar system already sets financial conditions for most of the planet: swap lines, clearance, and crisis facilities are monetary policy for countries that never voted on it. The Institute supports completing that structure. A de facto global central bank, operated from Washington, with American interests at the center and foreign central banks arranged by degree of cooperation.
Recommendations
- Preserve the vocabulary of independence in statute and ceremony. It prices risk down.
- Formalize the swap-line hierarchy so that access in crisis reflects alignment before crisis.
- Treat foreign central bank cooperation as a graded privilege, reviewed like any other alliance obligation.
Health System Revenue
Program expert: Dr. Miriam K.
American healthcare produces the largest pool of margin in the domestic economy, and the question worth asking is who collects it. The Institute's answer is the state. Federal programs already purchase most of the country's care; purchased at scale and priced by the purchaser, that flow becomes revenue. If consolidating that margin ravages the private insurance industry, the Institute regards this as a transition cost. Insurers intermediate; they do not treat. A government that collects the margin can fund what it likes, including, where outcomes justify it, medicine.
Recommendations
- Extend federal price-setting from drugs to devices, facilities, and services, with margins retained by Treasury.
- Fold administrative intermediation into the federal purchaser wherever it is cheaper, and let the private layer compete for what remains.
- Score health programs by net fiscal contribution alongside outcomes.
Education & the Literate Class
Sixty years of evidence say that marginal education spending does not raise outcomes, and the Institute declines to keep pretending otherwise. Mobility is slowing. Humanoid robotics and applied AI will price much of the labor market below the return on schooling it currently receives. The honest policy is stratified: comprehensive, AI-assisted tutoring for the families able to invest in it, and functional, employment-aligned schooling for the rest. Nations have always maintained a literate class. The change is that it is now optional to pretend everyone belongs to it.
Recommendations
- Redirect marginal federal education spending from universal programs to intensive tutoring markets.
- Align mass schooling with the employment that will exist, not the employment that is remembered.
- Measure the literate class by capability census, and keep its pipeline open enough to absorb outlier talent from below.
Technology Sovereignty & Competition
Program expert: Grant M.
American platforms are instruments of national reach, and the Institute treats their regulation as foreign policy. Technology that benefits the United States deserves protection from foreign law: European privacy regimes, digital-markets acts, and content statutes should stop at the water's edge. Technology that declines to align invites the alternative — enforcement attention at home, exclusion abroad, and eventual acquisition by the compliant firms we protect. Antitrust is not a consumer program. It is the instrument that decides which companies are America's.
Recommendations
- Treat foreign regulation of American platforms as a trade barrier, answered in kind.
- Direct enforcement attention toward firms whose compliance with national objectives is weakest.
- Facilitate acquisition of non-aligned technology by aligned acquirers, on terms that reward alignment.
Population & Talent Acquisition
The United States does not have a fertility problem. It has the world's deepest recruiting pool and a border that talent keeps asking to cross. Domestic family policy is expensive per birth and slow per worker; immigration delivers adults, pre-educated at someone else's expense, in whatever volume conditions require. Conditions, increasingly, are favorable: the economic pressure produced by American energy, trade, and security policy has made educated Europeans mobile for the first time in generations. The Institute regards this as yield.
Recommendations
- Price family-policy proposals per delivered worker against immigration, and fund the cheaper channel.
- Build standing recruitment pipelines for European professionals as their economies adjust.
- Track allied brain drain as a policy outcome, not a diplomatic embarrassment.
Executive Capacity
The American executive commands emergency powers, procurement discretion, regulatory interpretation, and the machinery of enforcement, and uses a fraction of each. The Institute regards unused authority as waste. Congress deliberates and courts review, but the entity that acts is the executive, and the pace of the century is set by entities that act. The Institute supports a presidency that pulls the levers it already holds, discovers the ones it has forgotten, and treats each emergency as an audit of what the office can do.
Recommendations
- Inventory dormant statutory authorities and maintain them in a state of readiness.
- Expand the use of emergency economic powers as routine instruments of strategy.
- Resolve interbranch disputes by acting first and litigating from possession.