The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaps in society’s digital readiness for social distancing. If policymakers seize the opportunity to address these gaps, they can make it easier to manage the next pandemic while providing significant long-term social and economic benefits.
Reports & Briefings
April 6, 2020
April 2, 2020
Geothermal energy has yet to follow the trajectory of rapidly expanding, cheap renewables like wind and solar. To unlock the enormous potential of this clean, reliable source of energy, the federal government can drive innovation and address barriers to adoption.
March 31, 2020
The failure of small venture-backed businesses to qualify for Paycheck Protection Loans could cost more than 275,000 jobs this year directly and more 1 million jobs in total, including indirect losses. The Trump administration should waive the Small Business Administration’s “affiliation rule” in this crisis to prevent these mass layoffs and furloughs.
March 30, 2020
Lawmakers should make energy innovation a national imperative, and at least double U.S. investment in clean energy RD&D by 2025.
March 23, 2020
To support digital trade, countries must eliminate regulatory barriers—big and small, new and old, obvious and hidden—that prevent firms from using technology and the Internet to achieve critical economies of scale. Electronic invoices are a great example.
March 6, 2020
Encryption plays an important role in improving data protection for businesses and consumers. The U.S. government has long invested in R&D of encryption and set standards that define best practices for commercial and government use of encryption—and it should continue this role in the future.
February 24, 2020
Working together, firms from different parts of the digital economy can disrupt the supply side of the digital piracy equation to make it harder and costlier for illicit operators to function.
February 14, 2020
Congress has soundly rejected the administration’s previous budget proposals in this area, instead putting forward a positive vision for U.S. innovation that invests in a future of clean, reliable, low-cost energy. Lawmakers should do so again in fiscal year 2021.
February 3, 2020
Separating the cost of biopharmaceutical research and development from the final market price of medicines would misalign incentives, raise bureaucratic costs, and limit innovation.
January 27, 2020
A close look at data from a new NIST report reveals that the best facial recognition algorithms in the world are highly accurate and have vanishingly small differences in their rates of false-positive or false-negative readings across demographic groups.