This week, President Trump went to Iowa in America's heartland to start the countdown to the nation's 250th Independence Day next year.

To mark the anniversary, the nonpartisan Center for the study of the presidency in Congress is looking at 250 years of U.S. innovation.

Earlier, I spoke with Glenn Nye, the center's president and CEO.

Mr. Nye, why innovation? Why picked that as the topic? Well, thanks for having me, John.

We started thinking about this project about a year ago. We really wanted to root our work

on this idea that the arc of the American story over the first 250 years really is a story of

innovation and renewal. The country was founded on some somewhat innovative principles at the time,

but they knew they wanted to create a more perfect union, a union that would get better and better over time

as we refreshed, as we revisited, as we innovated on those founding moments.

So what sorts of innovations are we talking about? Well, we're focused on a couple of sets of

innovation, one in science and technology and the other in democracy.

And what we wanted to start with, first, John, was we created a set of modules called Life in 1776,

which we featured on our website, all these aspects of just regular life back in 1776

that help us ground the beginning of the story. But then we wanted to look at the

arc of the 250 years since. We wanted to look at innovations in science and technology. So we started

looking at things, everything from Benjamin Franklin's bifocals through to assembly lines and

interchangeable parts, all the way through to modern technologies

like cell phones and genetic sequencing and even chat GPT. And we created a visual timeline

on our website where Americans can go and reflect on how these innovations have kind of built on

each other over time. Soon we're going to release a new timeline, which is going to

include innovations in democracy. So taking the starting point back from the Constitution and the

creation of the Bill of Rights and all the way through those changes over time, like the increase

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