Kent Lassman

1 week ago | cei.org | Iain Murray |Kent Lassman |Ryan Young

President Trump’s Liberation Day trade tariff policies are failing, just as economists predicted. What can stop the tariff-imposed pain of higher prices, fewer choices, and risk to businesses and jobs? A new CEI report by Kent Lassman, Ryan Young, and Iain Murray offers Congress a blueprint for reclaiming a say in U.S. trade policy. “A trade war, like all war, destroys,” said Kent Lassman, CEI president and report co-author.

1 week ago | cei.org | Iain Murray |Kent Lassman |Ryan Young

President Donald Trump threw the world trading system into disarray with his “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2, 2025. The principles behind the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1947, where 23 nations agreed to minimize barriers to trade, were abandoned. In its place was a system of baseline tariffs and “reciprocal tariffs” (purported to reflect the level of tariffs, non-tariff barriers, and “cheating” by other nations against American exports) on goods entering the United States.

1 month ago | cei.org | Kent Lassman |Ondray Harris

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is pleased to announce that attorney Ondray Harris is CEI’s new General Counsel. Harris joins CEI from law firm Gordon Rees, where he served as legal adviser beginning in 2020 and helped clients with regulatory compliance issues as Counsel from June 2023. From 2018 to 2020, Harris worked on the federal contracting practice at Hunton Andrews Kurth, LLP as Special Counsel. As General Counsel, Harris will oversee CEI’s legal and litigation teams.

2 months ago | cei.org | Kent Lassman |Sean Higgins

President Trump signed an executive order on March 27 to end collective bargaining with public sector unions in certain agencies with national security missions. CEI President Kent Lassman and labor policy expert Sean Higgins commented on drawbacks associated with government unions that led to this decision. Kent Lassman, CEI president;Collective bargaining by public sector unions is a bad idea that is due for the dustbin. James Madison observed that no man can be a judge in his own case.

Mar 6, 2025 | cei.org | Daren Bakst |Kent Lassman |Marlo Lewis

Kent Lassman, President of the Competitive Enterprise InstitutePresident Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through the Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970. At the time. the quality of the environment in America had suffered and the public was taking notice. There are so many negative stories today about the environment that one might mistakenly believe our air and water is as dirty as it was more than 50 years ago.