Институт конкурентоспособного предпринимательства: Отрицание изменения климата и лоббирование свободы рынка.

American libertarian think tank
infobox organization
|name = Competitive Enterprise Institute
|image =
|image size = 250px
|caption =
|abbreviation = CEI
|formation =
|founder = Fred L. Smith Jr.
|type = Public policy think tank
|headquarters = 1310 L Street NW,Washington, DC 20036
|location =
|leader title = President and CEO
|leader name = Kent Lassman
| revenue = $7,703,763
| revenue year = 2015
| expenses = $7,811,133

Academic research has identified CEI as one of the think tanks funded to overturn the environmentalism of the 1960s, central to promoting climate change denial. It was involved in assisting the anti environmental climate change policy of the George W. Bush administration. CEI promotes environmental policies based on limited government regulation and property rights, rejects what it calls "global warming alarmism", and denies the science of climate change. CEI is an opponent of government action by the Environmental Protection Agency that would require limits on greenhouse gas emissions. It favors free market environmentalism and supports the idea that market institutions are more effective in protecting the environment than is government. In 2016, CEI President Kent Lassman wrote on the organization's blog that, "there is no debate about whether the Earth's climate is warming", that "human activities very likely contribute to that warming", and that "this has long been the CEI's position". In March 1992, CEI's founder Fred Smith said of global warming: "Most of the indications right now are it looks pretty good. Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we're moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture." In May 2006, CEI's global warming policy activities attracted attention as it embarked upon an ad campaign with two television commercials. These ads promote carbon dioxide as a positive factor in the environment and argue that global warming is not a concern. One ad focuses on the message that CO2 is misrepresented as a pollutant, stating that "it's essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breathe it in They call it pollution. We call it life." It cites Science articles to support its claims. However, the editor of Science stated that the ad "misrepresents the conclusions of the two cited Science papers by selective referencing". The author of the articles, Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri, said CEI was misrepresenting his previous research to inflate their claims. "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," Davis said. In 2009, CEI's director of energy and global warming policy told The Washington Post, "The only thing that's been demonstrated to reduce emissions is economic collapse". In 2014, CEI sued the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy over a video that linked the polar vortex to climate change.

CEI advocates for regulatory reform on a range of policy issues, including energy, environment, business and finance, labor, technology and telecommunications, transportation, and food and drug regulation. Its annual survey of the federal regulatory state "Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State," documents the size, scope, and cost of federal regulations, and how the U. S. regulatory burden affects American consumers, businesses, and the economy. CEI's Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. coined the phrase "regulatory dark matter," referencing astrophysics to distinguish between ordinary government regulations or "visible matter," and "regulatory dark matter," which consists of "thousands of executive branch and federal agency proclamations and issuances, including memos, guidance documents, bulletins, circulars and announcements with practical regulatory effect." CEI has argued against using antitrust regulation to break up big technology companies such as Facebook and Google.

CEI has a longstanding project to recapture what they term "the moral legitimacy of capitalism" through research, writing, events, and other outreach activities. In 2019, CEI's vice president for Strategy Iain Murray argued, in an op ed for The Wall Street Journal, that advocates of capitalism and free markets had taken the support of social conservatives for granted.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute "is one of a small number of think tanks that have a litigation arm to their organization, according to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal."

From 2015 to 2019, the Center for Class Action Fairness (CCAF) was part of CEI. It has since spun off as part of the new Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, a free market nonprofit public interest law founded by former CEI attorneys Ted Frank and Melissa Holyoak. CCAF represents class members against what it calls, "unfair class action procedures and settlements." CEI and Frank argued Frank v. Gaos before the U. S. Supreme Court on October 31, 2018, opposing a proposed class action settlement involving Google, who paid out an $8.5 million settlement including $6 million in cy près funds and more than $2 million for class action lawyers. Class members were not awarded any part of the settlement. In 2015, CEI and Frank successfully appealed a class action settlement in a case about the length of Subway's "footlong" sandwiches. CEI argued that the proposed settlement benefited only nine people in the class but awarded more than half a million dollars to the class attorneys. Judge Diane Sykes’s ruling rejected the settlement in the Subway case that would have paid plaintiffs' attorneys $525,000 and left the class with nothing. The court's decision included the statement that "[a] class settlement that results in fees for class counsel but yields no meaningful relief for the class is no better than a racket."

CEI funded and coordinated King v. Burwell and Halbig v. Burwell, two lawsuits that challenged the Internal Revenue Service's implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The strategy of bringing such lawsuits was pioneered by Michael S. Greve, former chairman of CEI's board of directors, who stated: "This bastard [the act] has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it's dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it, and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it." The King v. Burwell suit alleged that the IRS's implementation violated the statute and sought to block "a major portion of Obamacare: the subsidies that more than 6 million middle income people, across more than 30 states, now receive to buy health insurance." The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which is a 6–3 decision rejected the challenge and upheld the ACA subsidies. The CEI also contends that President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray as CFPB director was unconstitutional and that the powers of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, created by Dodd Frank, are unconstitutional. 1993–1994 Ronald Bailey 1994–1995 Michael Fumento 1995–1996 Michelle Malkin 1996–1997 James Bovard 1997–1998 Jesse Walker 1999–2000 Brian Doherty 2000–2001 Sean Paige 2001–2002 Eileen Ciesla Norcross 2002–2003 Hugo Gurdon 2003–2004 Neil Hrab 2004–2005 John Berlau 2005–2006 Timothy P. Carney 2006–2007 Jeremy Lott 2007–2008 Lene Johansen 2008–2009 Silvia Santacruz 2009–2010 Ryan Young 2010–2011 Kathryn Ciano 2011–2012 Matt Patterson 2012–2013 Matthew Melchiorre 2013–2014 Bill Frezza 2014–2015 Carrie Sheffield

Bureaucrash was a special outreach and activist project of CEI described as an international network of pro freedom activists working to promote a political ideology based on personal and economic freedom. It conducted political activism using new media, creative marketing, and education campaigns. The project maintained a website (bureaucrash. com), which as of November 2023 is now only a web redirect to CEI's main website.

CEI is funded by donations from individuals, foundations and corporations. Donors to CEI include a number of companies in the energy, technology, automotive, and alcohol and tobacco industries. CEI's revenues for the fiscal year ending on September 30, 2015, were $7.5 million against expenses of $7.4 million. ExxonMobil Corporation was a donor to CEI, giving the group about $2 million over seven years. In 2006, the company announced that it had ended its funding for the group.