  The RG improvement of the screened massive expansion is studied at one loop
in two renormalization schemes, the momentum subtraction (MOM) scheme and the
screened momentum subtraction (SMOM) scheme. The respective Taylor-scheme
running couplings are shown not to develop a Landau pole, provided that the
initial value of the coupling is sufficiently small. The improved ghost and
gluon propagators are found to behave as expected, displaying dynamical mass
generation for the gluons and the standard UV limit of ordinary perturbation
theory. In the MOM scheme, when optimized by a matching with the fixed-coupling
framework, the approach proves to be a powerful method for obtaining
propagators which are in excellent agreement with the lattice data already at
one loop. After optimization, the gluon mass parameter is left as the only free
parameter of the theory and is shown to play the same role of the ordinary
perturbative QCD scale $\Lambda_{\text{QCD}}$.
