Think Tank Quickies (#332)

• Brookings launches institution-wide effort to generate recommendations for sharpening America's edge in competition with China. 
• RAND Corp. report: On the Extinction Risk of Artificial Intelligence. 
• Mike Needham, former CEO of Heritage Action for America, has been promoted to White House deputy national security adviser.  Dan Holler, Sec. Marco Rubio's chief of staff at the State Department, will take Needham's job as counselor and serve as acting director of policy planning. 
• Senior Democrats are rebooting an influential foreign policy group (National Security Action) to help potential 2028 presidential candidates and bring together national security specialists who could staff the next Democratic administration.  Maher Bitar will lead NSA, which was founded in 2018.
• The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is discouraging its employees from online betting platforms.  "I strongly recommend that colleagues eschew participation in prediction markets, especially on matters of politics, world affairs, and other topics on which Carnegie provides expertise," Carnegie Senior Vice President Daniel Baer wrote in an April 2026 email to staff.
• The Inclusive Abundance Initiative is among several groups that is part of the growing center-left "Abundance" movement assembling a 2028 policy agenda targeting regulations it believes hurt Democrats' efforts on healthcare, housing, energy, and more. 
• A number of potential Democratic presidential candidates got to test-drive their policy prescriptions for the party at the Center for American Progress' 2026 Ideas Conference on May 19.  California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, and Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) are among the headliners that CAP is brought back after a 3-year hiatus. 
• James Baker, the former head of DoD's Office of Net Assessment, often referred to as the "Pentagon's Think Tank," is joining AI company Anthropic as a strategist-in-residence. 
• Think tanks have defeated democracy. 
• Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI): "A nonpartisan think tank that analyzes the risk of events that could significantly harm or even destroy human civilization at the global scale."