[14] During the 1950s and 1960s, AEA's work became more pointed and focused, including monographs by Edward Banfield, James M. Buchanan, P. T. Bauer, Alfred de Grazia, Rose Friedman, and Gottfried Haberler.

[15][16] In 1962, AEA changed its name to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) to avoid any confusion with a trade association representing business interests attempting to influence politicians.

"Even though Baroody and his staff sought to support Goldwater on their own time without using the institution's resources, AEI came under scrutiny of the IRS in the years following the campaign," author Andrew Rich wrote in 2004.

Ford brought several of his administration officials with him, including Robert Bork, Arthur Burns, David Gergen, James C. Miller III, Laurence Silberman, and Antonin Scalia.

[41][42] 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.

"[43][44] Following this announcement, media outlets speculated that Frum had been "forced out"[45][46][47] 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.

[50] 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.

[53] AEI has a Council of Academic Advisers, which includes Alan J. Auerbach, Eliot A. Cohen, Eugene Fama, Aaron Friedberg, Robert P. George, Eric A. Hanushek, Walter Russell Mead, Mark V. Pauly, R. Glenn Hubbard, Sam Peltzman, Harvey S. Rosen, Jeremy A. Rabkin, and Richard Zeckhauser.

For instance, Sajid Javid, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss have all made regular appearances at its World Forum and other events,[55] and Suella Braverman and Liam Fox have been hosted by it.

[65] In 2015, a working group consisting of members from both institutions coauthored a report entitled Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream.

In her book, Dark Money (2016), American investigative journalist Jane Mayer writes that contrary to their claims, AEI took the "lead role" in crafting a revisionist narrative about the financial crisis, promoting what equities analyst Barry Ritholtz called "Wall Street's 'big lie'".

Past lecturers in the series have included William Baumol, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Alfred Kahn, Sam Peltzman, Richard Posner, and Cass Sunstein.

[100][101] 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".

[109][110] Thernstrom and Lane are codirecting 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".

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.

"[118] 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.

[121] 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".

[123] 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".

"[128] 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".

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.

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.

For several years, AEI and the Federalist Society cosponsored NGOWatch, which was later subsumed into Global Governance Watch, "a web-based resource that addresses issues of transparency and accountability in the United Nations, NGOs, and related international organizations".

[citation needed] Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair, focusing on demographics, population growth and human capital development; he served on the federal HELP Commission.

[citation needed] In 2008, Dora Akunyili, then Nigeria's top drug safety official, spoke at an AEI event coinciding with the launch of Bate's book Making a Killing.

[160][non-primary source needed] In 2004, as Purdue Pharma, a company known as the maker of OxyContin, one of the many drugs abused in the opioid epidemic in the United States, was facing a threat to its sales due to rising lawsuits against it, resident fellow Sally Satel wrote an op ed for the New York Times.

According to Jonathan Rauch, in 2005, Greve convened "a handful of free-market activists and litigators met in a windowless 11th-floor conference room at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington" in opposition to the legality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

Notable speakers in the series have included Kristol, Novak, Allan Bloom, Robert Bork, David Brooks, Lynne Cheney, Ron Chernow, Tyler Cowen, Niall Ferguson, Francis Fukuyama, Eugene Genovese, Robert P. George, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Samuel P. Huntington (giving the first public presentation of his "clash of civilizations" theory in 1992), Paul Johnson, Leon Kass, Charles Krauthammer, Bernard Lewis, Seymour Martin Lipset, Harvey C. Mansfield, Michael Medved, Allan H. Meltzer, Edmund Morris, Charles Murray, Steven Pinker, Norman Podhoretz, Richard Posner, Jonathan Rauch, Andrew Sullivan, Cass Sunstein, Sam Tanenhaus, James Q. Wilson, John Yoo, and Fareed Zakaria.

Hess co-directs AEI's Future of American Education Project, whose working group includes Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and Michael Feinberg, the cofounder of KIPP.

[191] In a 2024 report co-authored with the Heritage Foundation, AEI argued that higher education institutions should not give faculty stipends to join or attend conferences of professional organizations because these groups make statements on political issues.

[194] Purdue Pharma, a company known as the maker of OxyContin, one of the many drugs abused in the opioid epidemic in the United States, donated $50,000 a year to the AEI from 2003 through 2019, plus contributions for special events, adding to a total greater than $800,000.