Digital Government

States have moved many public services online, but the legal steps to get married remain largely paper-based. Modernizing marriage licensing, recording, and certificates would reduce costs, save time, and make the major life event easier for American families.

Governments are entering a critical phase in the adoption of AI. It is already contributing to everyday public sector work, and the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to do so both effectively and responsibly. The Public Sector AI Adoption Index 2026 focuses on the human side of AI adoption, examining how it is experienced by public servants every day.

The EU’s “payment sovereignty” push is a misdiagnosed, protectionist project that would benefit incumbent banks rather than consumers. Europe should instead pursue regulatory reform and use existing tools like interchange caps and PSD2 to promote competition and lower costs.

Real sovereignty in digital systems isn’t about where servers sit. Canada should build sovereignty into contracts and cryptography, embedding control and security through procurement rules, Canadian-cleared personnel, and encryption safeguards.

Rather than following the UK’s lead on children’s online safety, U.S. policymakers should learn from their mistakes and chart a better path that skillfully preserves user privacy, limits collateral damage, and removes the incentives for online services to over-remove lawful content.

Europe’s pursuit of digital sovereignty rests on a flawed premise: that competing with the United States, rather than China, should be the central priority. To advance this goal, Brussels has embraced the so-called “Airbus model”—the belief that the government-led coordination that created an aerospace champion can be replicated to achieve dominance in semiconductors, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI). The idea is seductive and gaining traction, but the analogy is unproven and misguided.

Iran’s growing cyber capabilities, combined with recent geopolitical tensions, pose a serious threat to U.S. critical infrastructure, requiring urgent federal action to strengthen digital defenses and build long-term resilience.

In its push for digital sovereignty, the European Commission is reportedly planning to replace Microsoft Azure with the French cloud provider OVHcloud or another European alternative. But this move, while politically symbolic, would be costly. Far from enhancing security, this migration would sacrifice sound procurement and EU legal obligations in service of a hollow vision of digital nationalism.

Schleswig-Holstein’s move to drop Microsoft for open-source tools reflects costly digital protectionism driven by politics, not practicality. EU governments should focus on evidence-based tech procurement over nationalist agendas.

Texas's new Cyber Command Center strengthens defenses against rising cyber threats and builds a long-term cybersecurity workforce—offering a model other states can follow.