Washington’s policy shops produced an unusually cross-cutting slate of research in the week of July 13, 2026, with reports spanning artificial intelligence and the future of expertise, the architecture of America’s alliances, state tax burdens, the summer’s minimum-wage increases, and the design of legal cannabis markets. The Investigative Journal read the underlying papers from institutions across the ideological spectrum. Below is a survey of the most consequential findings, with each organization’s orientation and principal sources of funding noted so readers can weigh the analysis for themselves.
As always, we link directly to the original papers and data releases. Think tanks are research organizations with points of view; their funding and worldview shape the questions they ask. We flag those affiliations not to discount the work — much of which is rigorous and data-driven — but to give readers the context that public records provide.
Brookings: AI’s productivity boom may be “borrowed” from a generation that is aging out
The week’s most provocative paper came from the Brookings Institution, where Niam Yaraghi, a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies, argued on July 10 that the measurable productivity gains from generative AI rest on a “hidden assumption” that is “becoming less true every day.” His essay, titled “Borrowed expertise,” contends that today’s gains are produced largely by experts who built deep judgment before AI existed — and that the pipeline meant to replace them is quietly draining.
Yaraghi marshals recent field studies to make the point. Research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond found AI assistance lifted the productivity of novice customer-service agents by 34 percent while barely moving the most experienced; a Boston Consulting Group experiment showed similar gains on routine tasks but a roughly 19-percentage-point deterioration when consultants leaned on AI for problems beyond its “jagged frontier” and could not detect its confident errors. The tools compress the skill gap at the bottom, he writes, while widening it at the top, “where the work is dominated by judgment under uncertainty and the creation of new knowledge.”
The paper’s most concrete warning is about hiring. Citing Stanford payroll research showing a roughly 16 percent relative employment decline for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations, Yaraghi describes a “seniority-biased technological change” in which firms stop hiring the juniors who would have become tomorrow’s senior experts. Brookings describes itself as nonpartisan and is generally regarded as centrist to center-left; according to its own disclosures it is supported by a diverse array of foundations, corporations, and governments. The workforce-development implications — for training, credentialing, and education policy — cut across party lines.
American Enterprise Institute: keep the alliances, contest China
On July 8, the American Enterprise Institute published “Reassessing the US Alliance System,” a long-form report arguing that a “genuinely realistic policy that preserves regional balances of power and does not disengage from existing alliances overseas would better serve American strategic interests against the rising threat of China.”
The report credits the administration’s second-term efforts on allied burden sharing, defense, deterrence, and a strengthened economic base as “worthwhile,” while cautioning that those efforts could be “offset by potential downsides” if they tip into disengagement. Its framing is unapologetically great-power: “We live in a bipolar world, but the US remains the sole superpower with truly global military reach,” the authors write, concluding that alliance policy “must always be conducted to ensure the maintenance of American primacy.”
AEI is a conservative-leaning institution; records and its own disclosures indicate it is funded largely by corporate donors, individual philanthropists, and foundations, and — like many think tanks — it does not publish a full donor list. Its emphasis on preserving alliances as instruments of competition with Beijing places it, on this question, closer to the traditional internationalist right than to the non-interventionist strain now ascendant in parts of the coalition.
RAND: the administration’s own goals are colliding with “NATO 3.0”
The RAND Corporation posted a companion assessment on July 15. In “How to Deliver on NATO 3.0,” Miranda Priebe of RAND’s Global and Emerging Risks division examines the administration’s concept of shifting primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense onto European allies while the United States redirects resources elsewhere and pursues diplomacy with Russia.
Priebe’s analysis is that Washington’s competing objectives are undercutting that vision. The pursuit of territorial concessions from allies, tariffs, involvement in allies’ domestic politics, and operations against Iran that depend on a robust U.S. presence in Europe have, she writes, “eroded the perception of shared interests,” added friction to European rearmament, and delayed the very posture changes the strategy seeks. To deliver on the concept, she recommends Washington set aside those competing objectives, continue reducing the U.S. military role in the region, and adjust force structure to move resources to higher priorities.
RAND is nonpartisan and derives much of its funding from U.S. government contracts, particularly with the Defense Department, alongside foundation and philanthropic support; the NATO paper appeared in the journal Orbis. Read alongside AEI’s report, it captures a live intramural debate on the right and center about how far to press allied burden-shifting without fracturing the alliances themselves.
Tax Foundation: where sales-tax burdens are highest at midyear
The Tax Foundation released its midyear survey of state and local sales-tax rates on July 6. Louisiana again carries the highest combined state-and-local rate at 10.13 percent, followed by Tennessee (9.61), Washington (9.57), Arkansas (9.48), and Alabama (9.46). The national population-weighted average stands at 7.53 percent.
Since January, the report finds, most movement came from local adjustments rather than statewide changes — no state altered its statewide rate in the first half of 2026. Notable combined-rate increases occurred in North Carolina (a four-place jump in the rankings), Georgia, Washington, California, and Vermont; Wyoming was the only state to see a reduction. The analysis, by senior policy analyst Abir Mandal, also flags Illinois’s elimination of its 1 percent grocery tax on January 1, a change many localities offset by imposing their own local levies.
The Tax Foundation, founded in 1937, is a free-market-oriented group funded by individual, corporate, and foundation donors. It generally favors broad-based, low-rate consumption taxes, and the report reiterates that view — noting that sales taxes account for about 32 percent of state tax collections and arguing they are “generally considered more pro-growth than income taxes.” Readers should weigh that normative frame against the descriptive data, which the group draws from the Sales Tax Clearinghouse and state revenue departments.
Economic Policy Institute: a summer of minimum-wage increases — and a rejected ballot measure
From the left, the Economic Policy Institute tallied the summer’s wage-floor changes in a June 29 analysis by Sebastian Martinez Hickey and Emma Cohn. On July 1, minimum wages rose in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., lifting pay for more than 361,000 workers and raising their combined earnings by an estimated $221 million, the institute reports; 14 additional cities and counties — including Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — also increased local minimums.
EPI estimates the average full-time, year-round worker affected will see an annual raise ranging from about $573 in Oregon to $811 in Alaska. Accounting for “spillover” effects, the institute finds women make up 56.3 percent of affected workers, that the increases disproportionately reach Black and Hispanic workers, and that nearly 90 percent are 20 or older. Most of the July raises stem from automatic inflation “indexing” written into state and local law — Oregon’s floor rose to $15.55 and D.C.’s to $18.40 — rather than from new legislation.
The countervailing story, EPI notes, is in Oklahoma, where voters rejected State Question 832 — which would have lifted the state minimum to $15 an hour by 2029 — in a June primary with roughly 26 percent turnout, after the governor scheduled the measure for that low-turnout election and the legislature tightened signature-gathering rules. EPI is a progressive, labor-aligned institute founded in 1986 (its staff is unionized) that has historically drawn significant support from organized labor and progressive foundations; it favors higher statutory minimums, a point still contested among economists. The underlying estimates come from its minimum-wage simulation model and tracker.
Niskanen Center: a playbook for fixing legal cannabis markets
Occupying the reformist center, the Niskanen Center published a full-length study on July 9 by Samantha Pérez-Dávila, Clarissa Iliff, and Richard Hahn diagnosing why many state adult-use cannabis markets are struggling and how policymakers might repair them.
The study identifies a cluster of problems: regulatory fragmentation and market fragility, the persistence of illicit markets that undercut licensed operators, compliance barriers and business limitations, distortions from prices and taxes, and health risks. Its guiding principles urge policymakers to align rules with how the market actually behaves, build social equity into program design, set clear harm-reduction objectives, and help legal operators transition and compete. The recommendations run to both the federal and state levels.
The Niskanen Center describes itself as a moderate think tank pursuing market-oriented reform; it is funded by foundations and individual donors and is named for the late economist William Niskanen, a former chairman of the Cato Institute. Its cannabis work is characteristic of its niche: technocratic, regulation-focused, and aimed at making legalization function rather than relitigating it.
What it means for the accountability beat
Several threads in this week’s research bear directly on the questions The Investigative Journal follows. The Brookings and Niskanen papers are, at bottom, about capacity — whether firms and governments are building the human and administrative infrastructure their strategies assume. The Tax Foundation and EPI releases are the raw material of fiscal-transparency reporting, quantifying who bears which burdens as consumption taxes and wage floors shift beneath voters. And the AEI–RAND pairing frames a defense-policy debate — how to get allies to shoulder more without breaking the alliances — that will shape appropriations fights through the fall.
For readers tracking the cost of higher education, a recent companion is worth flagging: the libertarian Cato Institute published a briefing paper in June by Andrew Gillen arguing, against the conventional narrative, that inflation-adjusted state funding per student rose modestly between 1980 and 2025 and that the statistical link between state “disinvestment” and rising tuition is weak. Cato — co-founded in 1977 by Charles Koch and Edward Crane, and, it says, accepting no government funding — reports that tuition revenue has actually fallen in six of the last seven years. The claim is contested by other researchers, and we note it as one data-driven entry in an unresolved debate.
The through-line across the spectrum this week is measurement: each of these institutions is arguing, in its own idiom, that the numbers policymakers rely on are incomplete — whether the metric is AI productivity, allied burden-sharing, a state’s tax rank, a worker’s paycheck, or a college’s balance sheet. That is a healthy preoccupation, and a useful reminder that the sourcing behind a statistic matters as much as the statistic itself. Links to every paper discussed above are provided so readers can examine the evidence directly.