American Enterprise Institute

During the Reagan administration, several AEI staff were hired by the administration.

Christopher DeMuth (1986–2008)

In December 1986, AEI hired Christopher DeMuth as its new president, and DeMuth served in the role for 22 years.

In 1990, AEI hired Charles Murray (and received his Bradley Foundation support for The Bell Curve) after the Manhattan Institute dropped him. During DeMuth's tenure, the organization turned further to the political right.

AEI had severe financial problems when DeMuth began his presidency. During the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, AEI's revenues grew from $10 million to $18.9 million. Academic David M. Lampton writes that DeMuth was responsive to the financial power of "America's hard right".

The institute's publications Public Opinion and The AEI Economist were merged into The American Enterprise, edited by Karlyn Bowman from 1990 to 1995 and by Karl Zinsmeister from 1995 to 2006, when Glassman created The American.

AEI was closely tied to the George W. Bush administration. More than 20 staff members served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions, including Dick Cheney and John R. Bolton. In an address to the institute, Bush said "I admire AEI a lot—I'm sure you know that", Bush said. "After all, I have been consistently borrowing some of your best people." In 2002, Danielle Pletka joined AEI to promote the foreign policy department. AEI and several of its staff—including Michael Ledeen and Richard Perle—became associated with the start of the Iraq War. Bush used a February 2003 AEI dinner to advocate for a democratized Iraq, which he said would inspire the remainder of the Mideast. In 2006–07, AEI staff, including Frederick W. Kagan, provided a strategic framework for the 2007 surge in Iraq. The Bush administration also drew on AEI scholars Leon Kass, who was appointed as the first chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics and Norman J. Ornstein, who headed a campaign finance reform working group that helped draft the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.

Arthur C. Brooks (2008–2019)

When DeMuth retired as president at the end of 2008, AEI's staff numbered 185, with 70 scholars and several dozen adjuncts, and revenues of $31.3 million. Arthur C. Brooks succeeded him as president at the start of the Late-2000s recession. In a 2009 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Brooks positioned AEI to be much more aggressive in responding to the policies of the Barack Obama administration. Under his leadership, AEI identified itself with "compassionate conservativism" and the maximisation of happiness. Politico said that Brooks "helped elevate [AEI] into a bastion of free-market orthodoxy and center-right policy wonkery during the Obama years", before leaving to become a "happiness expert" and self-help guru. In 2018, Brooks announced that he would step down effective July 1, 2019.

Termination of David Frum's residency

On March 25, 2010, AEI resident fellow David Frum announced that his position at the organization had been "terminated." Following this announcement, media outlets speculated that Frum had been "forced out" for writing a post to his FrumForum blog called "Waterloo", in which he criticized the Republican Party's unwillingness to bargain with Democrats on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In the editorial, Frum claimed that his party's failure to reach a deal "led us to abject and irreversible defeat."

After his termination, Frum clarified that his article had been "welcomed and celebrated" by AEI President Arthur Brooks, and that he had been asked to leave because "these are hard times." Brooks had offered Frum the opportunity to write for AEI on a nonsalaried basis, but Frum declined. The following day, journalist Mike Allen published a conversation with Frum, in which Frum expressed a belief that his termination was the result of pressure from donors. According to Frum, "AEI represents the best of the conservative world... But the elite isn't leading any more... I think Arthur [Brooks] took no pleasure in this. I think he was embarrassed."

Robert Doar (2019–present)

In January 2019, Robert Doar was selected by AEI's board of trustees to be AEI's 12th president, succeeding Arthur Brooks on July 1, 2019. In October 2023, Doar led an AEI delegation (including Kori Schake, Dan Blumenthal, Zack Cooper, and Nicholas Eberstadt, among others) to visit Taiwan to meet with President Tsai Ing-wen.

The Housing Center

The Housing Center publishes recurring housing market indicators and mortgage market research used by researchers, journalists, and policymakers.

The Survey Center on American Life

The Survey Center on American Life conducts nationally representative public opinion surveys on American social attitudes, religion and civic life. The center's survey datasets are archived through the Roper Center for Public Opinion.

The Center for the Future of American University

This Center was established in 2025 to support research and discussion on higher education, academic culture and university reform. It has collaborated with the Johns Hopkins University on initiatives relating to higher education, including faculty exchanges, collaborative research projects and programs intended to promote intellectual diversity.

Economic policy studies

Economic policy was the original focus of the American Enterprise Association, and "the Institute still keeps economic policy studies at its core". According to AEI's annual report, "The principal goal is to better understand free economies—how they function, how to capitalize on their strengths, how to keep private enterprise robust, and how to address problems when they arise". Michael R. Strain directs economic policy studies at AEI. Throughout the beginning of the 21st-century, AEI staff have pushed for a more conservative approach to aiding the recession that includes major tax cuts.

In 2002, John H. Makin, an AEI resident scholar, published a report supporting President Bush’s tax cuts, writing that the cuts "played a large role in helping to save the economy from a recession". In the report, Makin suggested that further taxes were necessary in order to attain recovery of the economy and that Democrats in Congress who opposed the Bush stimulus plan were foolish for doing so.

2008 financial crisis

As the 2008 financial crisis unfolded, The Wall Street Journal stated that predictions by AEI staff about the involvement of housing GSEs had come true. In the late 1990s, Fannie Mae eased credit requirements on the mortgages it purchased and exposed itself to more risk. Peter J. Wallison warned that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's public-private status put taxpayers on the line for increased risk. "Because of the agencies' dual public and private form, various efforts to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to fulfill their public mission at the cost of their profitability have failed—and will likely continue to fail", he wrote in 2001. "The only viable solution would seem to be full privatization or the adoption of policies that would force the agencies to adopt this course themselves."

In 2006, Wallison moderated a conference featuring James B. Lockhart III, the chief regulator of Fannie and Freddie. In August 2008, after Fannie and Freddie had been backstopped by the US Treasury Department, Wallison outlined several ways of dealing with the GSEs, including "nationalization through a receivership," outright "privatization," and "privatization through a receivership." The following month, Lockhart and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson took the former path by putting Fannie and Freddie into federal "conservatorship." As the housing crisis unfolded, AEI sponsored a series of conferences featuring commentators including Desmond Lachman, and Nouriel Roubini. Makin had been warning about the effects of a housing downturn on the broader economy for months. Amid charges that many homebuyers did not understand their complex mortgages, Alex J. Pollock crafted a prototype of a one-page mortgage disclosure form.

Tax and fiscal policy

Kevin Hassett and Alan D. Viard are AEI's principal tax policy experts, although Alex Brill, R. Glenn Hubbard, and Aparna Mathur also work on the subject. Specific subjects include "income distribution, transition costs, marginal tax rates, and international taxation of corporate income... the Pension Protection Act of 2006; dynamic scoring and the effects of taxation on investment, savings, and entrepreneurial activity; and options to fix the alternative minimum tax". Hassett has coedited several volumes on tax reform.

Viard edited a book on tax policy lessons from the Bush administration. AEI's working paper series includes developing academic works on economic issues. One paper by Hassett and Mathur on the responsiveness of wages to corporate taxation was cited by The Economist; figures from another paper by Hassett and Brill on maximizing corporate income tax revenue was cited by The Wall Street Journal.

Center for Regulatory and Market Studies

From 1998 to 2008, the Reg-Markets Center was the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, directed by Robert W. Hahn. The center, which no longer exists, sponsored conferences, papers, and books on regulatory decision-making and the impact of federal regulation on consumers, businesses, and governments. It covered a range of disciplines. It also sponsored an annual Distinguished Lecture series. Past lecturers in the series have included William Baumol, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Alfred Kahn, Sam Peltzman, Richard Posner, and Cass Sunstein.

Research in AEI's Financial Markets Program also includes banking, insurance and securities regulation, accounting reform, corporate governance, and consumer finance.

Energy and environmental policy

AEI's work on climate change has been subject to controversy. Some AEI staff and fellows have been critical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international scientific body tasked to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity. According to AEI, it "emphasizes the need to design environmental policies that protect not only nature but also democratic institutions and human liberty". American historian of science Naomi Oreskes notes that this idea became prominent during the conservative turn towards anti-environmentalism in the 1980s. Corporations claimed to uphold a kind of laissez-faire capitalism that promoted individual rights by pushing for deregulation. To do this successfully, companies would fund think tanks like AEI to cast doubt on science and spread disinformation by arguing that environmental dangers were unproven.

In an essay from the AEI outlook series of 2007, the authors discuss the Kyoto Protocol and state that the United States "should be wary of joining an international emissions-trading regime". To back this statement, they point out that committing to the Kyoto emissions goal would be a significant and unrealistic obligation for the United States. In addition, they state that the Kyoto regulations would have an impact not only on governmental policies, but also the private sector through expanding government control over investment decisions. AEI staff said that "dilution of sovereignty" would be the result if the U.S. signed the treaty.

In February 2007, a number of sources, including the British newspaper The Guardian, reported that the AEI had offered scientists $10,000 plus travel expenses and additional payments, asking them to dispute the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. This offer was criticized as bribery. The letters alleged that the IPCC was "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent, and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and asked for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

In 2007, The Guardian reported that the AEI received $1.6 million in funding from ExxonMobil, and further notes that former ExxonMobil CEO Lee R. Raymond is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees. This story was repeated by Newsweek, which drew criticism from its contributing editor Robert J. Samuelson because "this accusation was long ago discredited, and Newsweek shouldn't have lent it respectability." The Guardian article was disputed in a The Wall Street Journal editorial. The editorial stated: "AEI doesn't lobby, didn't offer money to scientists to question global warming, and the money it did pay for climate research didn't come from Exxon."

In 2007, AEI scholars published a report promoting carbon taxation as an alternative to cap-and-trade regimes. "Most economists believe a carbon tax (a tax on the quantity of CO2 emitted when using energy) would be a superior policy alternative to an emissions-trading regime," wrote Kenneth P. Green, Kevin Hassett, and Steven F. Hayward. "In fact, the irony is that there is a broad consensus in favor of a carbon tax everywhere except on Capitol Hill, where the 'T word' is anathema." AEI also backs the carbon taxation policy due to an incentive to reduce the use of carbon-intensive energy that would result. "The increased costs of energy would flow through the economy, ultimately giving consumers incentives to reduce their use of electricity, transportation fuels, home heating oil, and so forth". Along with consumers reducing their use of carbon-energy, they will be inclined to buy more efficient appliances, cars, and homes that apply "more attention to energy conservation".

Other AEI staff have argued for similar policies. Thernstrom and Lane codirected a project on whether geoengineering would be a feasible way to "buy us time to make [the] transition [from fossil fuels] while protecting us from the worst potential effects of warming". Green, who departed AEI in 2013, expanded its work on energy policy. He has hosted conferences on nuclear power and ethanol With Aparna Mathur, he evaluated Americans' indirect energy use to discover unexpected areas in which energy efficiencies can be achieved.

In October 2007, resident scholar and executive director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies Robert W. Hahn commented:Fending off both sincere and sophistic opposition to cap-and-trade will no doubt require some uncomfortable compromises. Money will be wasted on unpromising R&D; grotesquely expensive renewable fuels may gain a permanent place at the subsidy trough. And, as noted above, there will always be a risk of cheating. But the first priority should be to seize the day, putting a domestic emissions regulation system in place. Without America's political leadership and economic muscle behind it, an effective global climate stabilization strategy isn't possible.

AEI visiting scholar N. Gregory Mankiw wrote in The New York Times in support of a carbon tax on September 16, 2007. He remarked that "there is a broad consensus. The scientists tell us that world temperatures are rising because humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Basic economics tells us that when you tax something, you normally get less of it." After Energy Secretary Steven Chu recommended painting roofs and roads white in order to reflect sunlight back into space and therefore reduce global warming, AEI's magazine The American endorsed the idea. It also stated that "ultimately we need to look more broadly at creative ways of reducing the harmful effects of climate change in the long run." The American's editor-in-chief and fellow Nick Schulz endorsed a carbon tax over a cap and trade program in The Christian Science Monitor on February 13, 2009. He stated that it "would create a market price for carbon emissions and lead to emissions reductions or new technologies that cut greenhouse gases."

Former scholar Steven Hayward has described efforts to reduce global warming as being "based on exaggerations and conjecture rather than science". He has stated that "even though the leading scientific journals are thoroughly imbued with environmental correctness and reject out of hand many articles that don't conform to the party line, a study that confounds the conventional wisdom is published almost every week". Likewise, former AEI scholar Kenneth Green has referred to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as "the positively silly idea of establishing global-weather control by actively managing the atmosphere's greenhouse-gas emissions", and endorsed Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear for having "educated millions of readers about climate science".

Christopher DeMuth, former AEI president, accepted that the Earth has warmed in recent decades, but he stated that "it's not clear why this happened" and charged as well that the IPCC "has tended to ignore many distinguished physicists and meteorologists whose work casts doubt on the influence of greenhouse gases on global temperature trends". Fellow James Glassman also disputes the scientific consensus on climate change, having written numerous articles criticizing the Kyoto accords and climate science more generally for Tech Central Station. He supported the views of U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who claims that "global warming is 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,'" and, like Green, cites Crichton's novel State of Fear, which "casts serious doubt on global warming and extremists who espouse it". Joel Schwartz, an AEI visiting fellow, stated: "The Earth has indeed warmed during the last few decades and may warm further in the future. But the pattern of climate change is not consistent with the greenhouse effect being the main cause."

In 2013, the magazine of the UK's Institute of Economic Affairs published an article by AEI fellow Roger Bate entitled "20 years denouncing eco-militants", in which he argued that "evidence of climate impact is still hard to prove, and harm even more difficult to establish", and dismissed calls for a ban on the insecticide DDT as "green alarmism". In 2018, British investigative website openDemocracy repeated that AEI "has long been funded by ExxonMobile", an allegation repeated by Esquire the same year, describing AEI's Danielle Pletka of spreading disinformation about climate change on the Meet the Press TV show.

Foreign and defense policy studies

AEI's foreign and defense policy studies researchers focus on "how political and economic freedom—as well as American interests—are best promoted around the world". AEI staff have tended to be advocates of a hard U.S. line on threats or potential threats to the United States, including the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Russia, and terrorist or militant groups like al Qaeda and Hezbollah. Likewise, AEI staff have promoted closer U.S. ties with countries whose interests or values they view as aligned with America's, such as Israel, the Republic of China (Taiwan), India, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Colombia, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and emerging post-Communist states such as Poland.

In 2015, AEI gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu its Irving Kristol Award.

AEI's foreign and defense policy studies department, directed by Danielle Pletka, is the part of the institute most commonly associated with neoconservatism. According to Vanity Fair, in 2002 it was seen "as the intellectual command post of the neoconservative campaign for regime change in Iraq". Prominent foreign-policy neoconservatives at AEI include Richard Perle, Gary Schmitt, and Paul Wolfowitz. Joshua Muravchik and Michael Ledeen (the latter seen as an "ultra neo-conservative") spent many years at AEI, although they departed at around the same time as Reuel Marc Gerecht in 2008 in what was rumored to be a "purge" of neoconservatives at the institute, possibly "signal[ing] the end of [neoconservatism's] domination over the think tank over the past several decades", although Muravchik later said it was the result of personality and management conflicts.

U.S. national security strategy, defense policy, and the "surge"

In late 2006, the security situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate, and the Iraq Study Group proposed a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops and further engagement of Iraq's neighbors. Consulting with AEI's Iraq Planning Group, Frederick W. Kagan published an AEI report entitled Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq calling for "phase one" of a change in strategy to focus on "clearing and holding" neighborhoods and securing the population; a troop escalation of seven Army brigades and Marine regiments; and a renewed emphasis on reconstruction, economic development, and jobs.

While the report was being drafted, Kagan and Keane were briefing President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other senior Bush administration officials behind the scenes. According to Bob Woodward, "[Peter J.] Schoomaker was outraged when he saw news coverage that retired Gen. Jack Keane, the former Army vice chief of staff, had briefed the president on December 11 about a new Iraq strategy being proposed by the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank. 'When does AEI start trumping the Joint Chiefs of Staff on this stuff?' Schoomaker asked at the next chiefs' meeting."

Kagan, Keane, and Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman presented the plan at a January 5, 2007, event at AEI. Bush announced the change of strategy on January 10. Kagan authored three subsequent reports monitoring the progress of the surge.

AEI's defense policy researchers, who also include Schmitt and Giselle Donnelly, also work on issues related to the U.S. military forces' size and structure and military partnerships with allies (both bilaterally and through institutions such as NATO). Schmitt directs AEI's Program on Advanced Strategic Studies, which "analyzes the long-term issues that will impact America's security and its ability to lead internationally".

Area studies

Its Asia studies program is directed by Dan Blumenthal. The program covers "the rise of China as an economic and political power; Taiwan's security and economic agenda; Japan's military transformation; the threat of a nuclear North Korea; and the impact of regional alliances and rivalries on U.S. military and economic relationships in Asia". Blumenthal and his team wrote several articles for ForeignPolicy.com and other outlets during the Obama presidency advocating for military support and funding for Taiwan.

Papers in AEI's Tocqueville on China Project series "elicit the underlying civic culture of post-Mao China, enabling policymakers to better understand the internal forces and pressures that are shaping China's future".

AEI's Europe program was previously housed under the auspices of the New Atlantic Initiative, which was directed by Radek Sikorski before his return to Polish politics in 2005. Leon Aron's work forms the core of the institute's program on Russia. AEI staff tend to view Russia as posing "strategic challenges for the West".