Publications

It should be clear to everyone that unless Western, democratic, market-based economies start working together instead of against each other, China will dominate.

Cutting federal investments in R&D may appear to save billions in the budget, but it could cost the economy trillions. In fact, ITIF estimates that cutting federal R&D by 20 percent would cost the U.S. economy up to almost $1.5 trillion compared with China’s growth pace.

In a ranking based on the total number of high-quality research articles they publish over the calendar year, Chinese universities claim 9 of the top 10 spots in the academic category.

While distribution reform is the best way to shrink the contribution factor, Congress should also reform USF funding to come from general appropriations, or some other method of encompassing the entire U.S. tax base.

Congress should reform and refocus the Universal Service Fund. It spends too much money, prioritizes the wrong problems, and funds it all with a high, sector-specific tax rate. Congress should reduce the overall size of the program and fund it with general revenue.

There are many technology policy issues where states have created a patchwork of regulation that impose duplicative costs on businesses, cause confusion for consumers, and act as a drain on the U.S. economy. In order to address these issues, federal preemption would streamline regulation and decrease costs and confusion.

Lawmakers in Montana, New Hampshire, and Idaho are advancing “right to compute” laws to protect individuals and businesses from limits on their ability to use computational tools and AI systems.

If the United States fails to keep pace with China in cultivating the next generation of researchers, it risks ceding ground in the very sectors that will define economic and geopolitical leadership in the 21st century.

Trade policy should focus first and foremost on defense, dual-use, and enabling sectors and largely ignore nonstrategic sectors.

States are starting to reveal how they’ll spend their $42 billion in BEAD broadband funds—and the early results show both promise and pitfalls. Some states are driving down costs and saving billions for adoption and affordability, while others risk burning through their budgets on expensive deployments. The stakes are high: BEAD will only succeed if it closes the digital divide on both access and affordability.