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I’m a Physician Who Has Looked at Hundreds of Studies of Vaccine Safety, and Here’s Some of What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong
In the five months since he began serving as secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made many public statements about vaccines that have cast doubt on their safety and on the objectivity of long-standing processes established to evaluate them. Many of these statements are factually incorrect. The evidence is clear and publicly available: Vaccines have dramatically reduced childhood illness, disability and death on a historic scale.
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Incentives for U.S.-China Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation Across Artificial General Intelligence’s Five Hard National Security Problems
The prospect of either the United States or the People’s Republic of China —or both—achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) is likely to heighten tensions and could even increase the risk of competition spiraling into conflict. But the emergence of AGI could also create incentives for risk reduction and cooperation. We argue that both will not only be possible but essential.
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Securing South Korea's Critical Minerals Supply Chains Through Trilateral Cooperation
South Korea, Japan, and the United States’ trilateral partnership has expanded to include collaboration on economic security, including on critical minerals supply chains (CMSCs). A new report offers analysis and tools for supply chain net assessment, supply chain cooperation, and economic security.
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As AI Worsens WMD Threat, Australia Must Lead Response
When dealing with AI-enabled CBRN threats, we cannot afford to wait until the first catastrophic incident occurs. AI companies have acknowledged that frontier models have capabilities that, without adequate safeguards, could enable novices to create biological and chemical weapons.
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Geological Mapping Project Supports Critical Mineral Explorations, Enhances Public Safety in the Southeast
A key focus of a new USGS mapping project is to identify where critical minerals vital to the economy and national security might be located. As demand for rare earth elements and other critical minerals grows for use in technology, energy, and defense sectors, this project can provide vital data that helps the U.S. secure domestic sources of critical minerals, thus reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign sources.
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Europe Is Significantly Boosting Its Defense Spending. Can the Continent Become a Military Superpower?
Military spending across the European Union is ramping up in what observers have noted is a significant and “extraordinary” pivot from the comparatively placid postwar decades. Mai’a Cross thinks Europe’s shift toward an “era of rearmament” will be in its long-term interest.
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Justice Department Demand for State Voter Lists Underscores Their Importance
DOJ is demanding that states turn over their voter registration lists and other election information, citing unspecified concerns with voter list maintenance. Power over voter registration lists is the power to shape the electorate.
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Denying Quorum Has Been a Texas Political Strategy Since 1870
While the Democrats could technically derail the GOP’s redistricting map, such efforts have been largely symbolic and had limited success blocking past legislation, experts say.
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How Special Interests Keep Bad Laws on the Books: The Case of the Jones Act
The 1920 Jones Act restricts intra-U.S. water transport to vessels that are U.S.-flagged, U.S.-owned, and built in U.S. shipyards The law serves as a tribute to how entrenched interests can hijack public policy and make the repeal of failed, costly laws among the heaviest of political lifts.
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Plugging America's Forgotten Wells: Study Addresses Decades Long Problem
Since the drilling of the first oil well in 1859, millions more oil and gas wells have been drilled across the nation. Today, millions of wells – bout 3.4 million of them — sit idle, some for decades. One option for limiting the environmental and health impacts of orphaned wells is to plug them. But the question remains, with so many orphaned wells in the United States, what’s the best way to address this issue?
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Attacks on the U.S. Innovation Ecosystem Are an Attack on a Wellspring of American Prosperity
The Trump administration’s attacks on the country’s science and innovation ecosystem — its cuts to federally funded R&D; its war on higher education; and its aggression toward immigrants, including skilled immigrants — are dismantling America’s science and technology advantage—putting the country’s future prosperity at risk. This frontal assault on the key source of U.S. industry’s competitive advantage is not a recipe for American greatness; it is a recipe for long-term decline.
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Why the U.S. Is Letting China Win on Energy Innovation
The frontiers of global technology have pivoted to AI and next generation energy. In AI, the U.S. has far outpaced any other nation, but in energy, the U.S. has just tied its shoelaces together. The reason isn’t technology, economics or, despite the administration’s misleading official line, even national security. Rather, it is politics. The fact is, the U.S. does not have an energy security problem. It does, however, have an energy cost problem combined with a growing climate change crisis. These issues will only be made worse by Trump’s enthusiasm for fossil fuels.
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Partisan Hostility, Not Just Policy, Drives U.S. Protests
Partisan animosity is a powerful driver of protest participation—sometimes nearly matching or even exceeding concern about the actual issues.
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Building Nevada’s Cyber Future One Summer Camp at a Time
UNLV’s Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering launched GenCyber Camp to create awareness of college and career pathways in cybersecurity among Nevada’s youth. The program has secured an impressive share of success stories. Organizers search for funding to keep the momentum going.
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U.S. Moves Decisively to Avoid Dependence on China’s Rare Earths
The Pentagon’s package of support for rare earths company MP Minerals, announced on 10 July, should free the US military and eventually much of US industry from dependence on Chinese supply chains for rare earth magnets.
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The long view
Laughing Through the Storm: How Humor Can Help Us Not Only Survive but Thrive in Turbulent Times
The world feels heavy again. In a time such as this, laughter can seem almost obscene. Who dares to joke while the world burns? Yet, perhaps the better question is: how can we not?
Technology Evolves the Tactics: Preparing for the Rise of Terrorist AI Harms
Terrorist groups, like the societies they emerge from, adapt to new technologies. As AI capabilities evolve, so too do the tactics of extremist actors. While the full effects may take years to observe, as the technologies continue to develop, we are starting to see them directly alter extremism tradecraft.
Trump’s National Guard Deployments Raise Worries About State Sovereignty
In two instances – Portland and Chicago – President Trump’s campaign to send the National Guard into Democratic-leaning cities he falsely describes as crime-ridden, has turned to out-of-state National Guard troops. Presidents who have federalized National Guard forces in the past, even against a governor’s will, have done so in response to a crisis in the troops’ home state. But the decision to send one state’s National Guard troops into a different state without the receiving governor’s consent is both extraordinary and unprecedented, experts on national security law.
Correctly Assessing Left-Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States
A recent CSIS report, making sweeping claims about a supposed rise in leftwing terrorism in the United States, risks feeding false narratives about political violence and polarization. Michael Jensen and Amy Cooter write that the evidence used to sound this alarm consists of just five plots and attacks, and that these five events not only “are doing a lot of heavy lifting” in the report, but that they are given “an unwarranted level of causal and predictive power.” This tiny sample “simply does not justify inducing panic with eye-popping headlines.”
What Just Happened? Dismantling the Intelligence Community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that the functions of the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC) would be significantly reduced. Gabbard has thus dismantled the last remaining U.S. federal government organ dedicated to tracking and analyzing state-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society – following the Trump administration’s shutting down of related units at the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and Department of Justice earlier this year.
Silencing America’s Voice
The Trump administration has taken a series of steps which have substantially weakened U.S. government-funded media outlets whose task it was to tell the American story and counter the global propaganda and disinformation efforts of U.S. adversaries. These moves greatly benefit the anti-American propaganda efforts of Russia and China, which will now go unchallenged.