American Enterprise Institute

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The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is a conservative think tank, founded in 1943. It is associated with neoconservative domestic and foreign policy views.^[1]^[2]^[3] According to the institute its mission is "to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism — limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate."^[4] AEI is an independent, non-profit organization. It is supported primarily by grants and contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. It is located in Washington, D.C.

AEI has emerged as one of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy.^[5] More than twenty AEI alumni and current visiting scholars and fellows have served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions.^[6] Former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is a visiting scholar, and Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a senior fellow.^[7]

1 Political stance
2 President and trustees
3 Scholars and fellows
4 Global warming
5 Funding
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Political stance

AEI is often cited as a right-leaning counterpart to the left-leaning Brookings Institution.^[8]^[9] In 1998, AEI and Brookings established the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies.^[10] In 2006, the two organizations jointly launched the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project.^[11]

AEI has connections with the neoconservative movement in American politics.^[12] Irving Kristol, widely regarded as the movement's founder, is a Senior Fellow at AEI.

[edit] President and trustees

Christopher DeMuth, who served in the Reagan administration,^[13] has been president of AEI since 1986.
Bruce Kovner is the chairman of the board of trustees.
Lee Raymond, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil, is the vice chair of AEI's board of trustees.

Current members of the board are: Gordon Binder, Harlan Crow, Chris DeMuth, Morton Fleischer, Chris Galvin, Raymond Gilmartin, Harvey Golub, Robert Greenhill, Roger Hertog, Martin Koffel, John Luke, Ben Lytle, Alex Mandl, Robert Pritzker, Joe Ricketts, Kevin Rollins, John W. Rowe, Edward Rust, William Stavropoulos, Wilson Taylor, Marilyn Ware, and James Q. Wilson.

Emeritus trustees of the organization are: Willard Butcher, Richard Madden, Robert Malott, Paul McCracken, Paul Oreffice, and Henry Wendt.

[edit] Scholars and fellows

AEI lists their scholars and fellows on their web site.^[14] Some prominent current or former AEI scholars and fellows include the following:

David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale University; a victim of the Unabomber.
John R. Bolton, former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
Lynne Cheney, wife of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, AEI senior fellow.
Ted Frank, serves on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society's Litigation Practice Group
David Frum, an author and former speechwriter for Bush, is a resident fellow.
Jeffrey Gedmin, former resident scholar and Executive Director of AEI’s New Atlantic Initiative, current President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow. He is the director of the Project for the New American Century's Middle East Initiative and a former Middle East specialist at the CIA.
Newt Gingrich, member of the Republican Party and Speaker of the United States House of Representatives between 1995 and 1999, is a senior fellow at AEI focusing on health care (he has founded the Center for Health Transformation), information technology, the military, and politics.
James K. Glassman, author of Dow 36,000, is a resident fellow.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fellow, is a former Dutch politician, women's rights activist and critic of Islamism & Shar'ia Law.
Frederick Kagan is a military historian and signatory of Project for the New American Century manifesto titled Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000) along with his brother Robert (co-founder of the PNAC) and his father and fellow neo-conservative, Donald Kagan.
Alan Keyes, former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, was an AEI resident scholar.
Jeane Kirkpatrick was the former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations and was an AEI senior fellow until she died in 2006.
Michael Ledeen was previously involved in the transfer of arms to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair — an adventure that he documented in his book, Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair.
Allan Meltzer is one of the foremost academics studying monetary policy and the Federal Reserve Bank. He, along with economist Milton Friedman, pioneered monetarism, the now widely accepted theory that inflation is entirely the result of the growth of the money supply. Meltzer is currently working on the second volume of his History of the Federal Reserve.
Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar. He researches Middle East politics, democracy, neoconservatism and the history of socialism.
Charles Murray, an influential policy writer and a researcher, is the W.H. Brady Scholar in Culture and Freedom. He is best known as the co-author of the controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve.
Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy and Public Policy and Director of Social and Political Studies at the institute. He has written extensively about the role of faith in government.
Norman Ornstein has been a Congressional analyst and political commentator for more than thirty five years.
Richard Perle served on the United States Defense Policy Board and is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Danielle Pletka, Vice President, her research areas include the Middle East
Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and author of PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a critic of the feminist movement. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys.
Fred Thompson, Television and film actor, currently appearing on the television show Law & Order, former U.S. Senator, and former Republican presidential primary candidate, is a visiting fellow.
Ben Wattenberg, a speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson, is a senior fellow.
Paul Wolfowitz (Visiting Scholar), A "major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and, within the [George W. Bush] Administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate."^[15]
John Yoo, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel, and a professor at Boalt Hall, is a visiting scholar.

[edit] Global warming

AEI staff and fellows have been frequent critics of the prevailing scientific view of global warming and especially of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international scientific body tasked to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity.^[16]^[17] In February 2007, a number of sources, including the British newspaper The Guardian, reported that the AEI had sent letters to scientists offering US$10,000 plus travel expenses and additional payments, asking them to critique the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. 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."^[18]^[19]^[20] According to the Guardian article, the AEI received $1.6 million in funding from ExxonMobil. The article further notes that former ExxonMobil CEO Lee R. Raymond is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The Guardian article was disputed both by AEI^[21] and in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.^[22] The rebuttals claimed factual errors and distortions, noting the ExxonMobil funding was spread out over a ten-year period and totaled less than 1% of AEI's budget. The Wall Street Journal 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."

AEI denies that the organization is skeptical about global warming. Criticizing the story as part of a "climate inquisition" published in "the left-wing press", the AEI's Steven Hayward and Kenneth Green wrote in the The Weekly Standard:

[I]t has never been true that we ignore mainstream science; and anyone who reads AEI publications closely can see that we are not "skeptics" about warming. It is possible to accept the general consensus about the existence of global warming while having valid questions about the extent of warming, the consequences of warming, and the appropriate responses. In particular, one can remain a policy skeptic, which is where we are today, along with nearly all economists.^[23]

Hayward has described efforts to reduce global warming as being "based on exaggerations and conjecture rather than science."^[24] He also 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."^[25] 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." ^[26]

AEI President Chris DeMuth accepts that the earth has warmed in recent decades, but states that "it's not clear why this happened" and charges 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."^[27] AEI fellow James Glassman also disputes the prevailing scientific opinion on climate change, having written numerous articles criticizing the Kyoto accords and climate science more generally for Tech Central Station.^[28] He has supported the views of U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe, an outspoken skeptic of human-caused climate change,^[29] and, like Green, cites Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear which "casts serious doubt on global warming and extremists who espouse it."^[30] Joel Schwartz, an AEI Visiting Fellow, states: "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."^[31]