Jassi Pannu joined our team as a Senior Biotechnology Fellow with a focus on policies and technologies that improve health and prevent disease. Jassi is a licensed physician and completed her M.D. and medical residency at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Arnab Datta also joined the team as Director of Infrastructure Policy to lead our work on energy, transportation, and housing. Arnab previously worked for Senator Bennet and is also a senior counsel with Employ America.

And we welcomed Patrick Collard as a Non-Resident Fellow, focusing on metascience and high-skilled immigration research topics.

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Here’s what we’ve been tackling this month:

✍️ Written Work

• Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D’Souza and Co-founder Alec Stapp led a coalition letter to Congress, calling for specific reforms to the Federal Select Agent Program that would improve effective oversight of US laboratories that work with biological select agents and toxins.

  • “Together, these provisions establish a pathway to regulate synthetic, chimeric, and modified select agents, and create an anonymous and voluntary no-fault reporting system. They comprehensively modernize FSAP, ensuring emerging biosecurity and biosafety risks are mitigated.”

• Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld and Immigration Fellow Lindsay Milliken released an interactive tool that lets you “Create Your Own Data-Driven Update to Schedule A,” the Department of Labor list that enables immigrants in key fields to more quickly enter the country.

• Lindsay wrote a Boston Herald op-ed with Aidan Enright, on how Schedule A reforms can kickstart economic growth. 

  • “The Biden administration should prioritize not only enhancing Schedule A but modernizing it to ensure that we take advantage of its benefits for years to come.”

• Senior Editor Santi Ruiz reviewed a new book on “conservative futurism” for The Dispatch. 

  • “Belief in the power of markets, therefore, may be a necessary piece of a forward-looking conservative movement. But it surely can’t be the only piece. If futurists want to build that movement, they’ll have to justify their vision of human flourishing to a skeptical audience.”

• Senior Fellow Chris Snyder has a new working paper with co-authors that estimates the social value of a universal COVID vaccine.

  • “We estimate the incremental value to the U.S. population of a universal COVID-19 vaccine to be $1.5–$2.6 trillion greater than variant-specific boosters (depending on how the arrival rate of variants is modeled). This social value eclipses the cost of an advance market commitment to incentivize the universal vaccine by several orders of magnitude.”

🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• “No inventions; no innovations": A History of US Steel 

• On Yglesias on Manufactured Homes

• What Progress Has There Been in Industrial Robots?

• What Happened to the US Machine Tool Industry?

🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• How to Make Immigration Regulations

• How to Replicate Operation Warp Speed

• How to Pass the CHIPS and Science Act

🎤 Interviews & Events

• Lindsay did the rounds, joining The Sophie Alcorn Podcast and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s This Week in Immigration to discuss Schedule A reform.

📰 Media

• Reason quoted Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter on the sale of US Steel:

  • "Arguably, US Steel has been a disappointment since the day it was formed," writes Brian Potter, a senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, in his Construction Physics Substack newsletter. "The company's large size made it unwieldy to manage, and it was late to every major advance in steelmaking technology of the last 100 years, from continuous rolling to the basic oxygen furnace to the minimill…As far as I can tell, no major steelmaking technology over the last century came out of US Steel."

• The Dispatch also recommended Brian’s excellent history of US Steel, as did Economic Innovation Group Fellow Conor O’Brien.

• TechCrunch highlighted IFP’s new Schedule A report.

• AEI scholar James Pethokoukis discussed our series on the future of geothermal energy in his newsletter, Faster Please! 

👋 Tweet for the Road

• Matthew Esche, Metascience Fellow

• Tim Hwang, Senior Technology Fellow

• Amy Nice, Distinguished Immigration Counsel

• Brian Potter, Senior Infrastructure Fellow

• Santi Ruiz, Senior Editor

As well as our new Non-Resident Senior Fellows Chad Jones (Stanford University) and Chris Snyder (Dartmouth College) and our Non-Resident Fellows Maxwell Tabarrok, Patrick Collard, Janika Schmitt, and Hamidah Oderinwale. You can explore the rest of the team here.

Without further ado, here are 10 of our biggest moments this year:

1. IFP signed an exciting partnership with the National Science Foundation to test new mechanisms for funding research and innovation.

   • Co-founder Caleb Watney spoke with Nature about the types of questions our team will tackle in collaboration with NSF.

2. Caleb testified before Congress on how best to deploy federal R&D funds for artificial intelligence.

3. Immigration Fellows Lindsay Milliken and Jeremy Neufeld released a major report that developed the “Help Wanted Index,” a data-driven way to measure labor shortages and target employment-based green cards with co-author Greg Wright.

   • The authors also wrote an associated op-ed in The Washington Post, explaining how this new method could inform the update of the Department of Labor’s “Schedule A” shortage occupation list.

4. Senior Editor Santi Ruiz launched Statecraft, an interview series about how policymakers actually get things done. Start with these three:

   • How to Run Good DARPA Programs

   • How to Use Challenge Prizes

   • How to Save Twenty Million Lives

5. Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter continued crushing it with his Construction Physics newsletter. Here are a few great posts:

   • The Story of Titanium

   • Building Apollo

   • The Birth of the Grid

6. Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang started Macroscience, a newsletter on the political economy and grand strategy of science policy. Some recommended articles:

   • Antitrust in the Marketplace of Ideas

   • Long Science

   • Will Funders Have the Patience to Reform Science?

7. Our biosecurity team continued to formalize the lessons of Operation Warp Speed to see how we can achieve the same success in other policy areas:

   • Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D’Souza explained ​​How To Reuse the Operation Warp Speed Model.

   • Arielle had a related Washington Post op-ed with Co-founder Alec Stapp about Project NextGen.

   • Along with 1Day Sooner, we hosted the second annual Operation Warp Speed 2.0 conference.

8. Our infrastructure team drilled into the potential of geothermal energy with our friends at Employ America in a 4-part series called “Hot Rocks,” explaining how policymakers can jumpstart the next-gen geothermal revolution by applying lessons learned from shale.

   • Part I: The Technological Innovations that Produced the Shale Revolution

   • Part II: How Public Policy Accelerated the Shale Revolution

   • Part III: Barriers to Next-Gen Geothermal

   • Part IV: The Policy Interventions that Could Boost Geothermal

9. With our friends at the Economic Innovation Group, we hosted the #EconTwitterIRL conference at Adam Ozimek’s bowling alley in Lancaster, PA.

10. Brian and Biosecurity Fellow Juan Cambeiro wrote a landmark report arguing that indoor air quality is the next great public health challenge, and laid out a roadmap for tackling it.

    • And here’s their op-ed in STAT News.

We want to wish a deep and heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped make our work possible this year. We’re excited to build on this momentum in 2024 and continue making… progress.🫡

👋 Tweet for the Road

We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Some exciting announcements:

1. Vox put out its “Future Perfect 50,” a list of people “making the future a better place for everyone,” and six IFP team members made the cut: Co-founders Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney, Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams, Senior Biosecurity Fellow Nikki Teran, Senior Fellow Paul Niehaus, and board member Tamara Winter.

2. Amy Nice has joined our team as Distinguished Immigration Counsel, in addition to her role as Distinguished Immigration Scholar at Cornell Law. We welcomed her on board with a Statecraft interview, which you can read here. 

3. Chad Jones is joining us as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow. He’s a professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, noted for his research on long-run economic growth.

4. We’re offering our “Economics of Ideas, Science, and Innovation” course again for students who have completed at least one year of a PhD program in economics or related fields. Apply here!

5. You may have also noticed our website has a new domain: ifp.org is the new home for all of our projects and research.

Here’s what else we’ve been tackling this month:

✍️ Written Work

• Alec wrote a piece for American Affairs, reviewing a new book by Jennifer Pahlka, on “How to Be a Policy Entrepreneur in the American Vetocracy.”

  • “America’s state capacity is hobbled by more than just poor implementation. We can build on Pahlka’s framework by examining the deeper forces in American political institutions that prevent new policies, such as permitting reform, from ever making it to the implementation stage.”

• Our series with Employ America continues, laying out how policy can shape the future of next-gen geothermal energy. 

  • In “How Public Policy Accelerated the Shale Revolution,” Senior Infrastructure Advisor Arnab Datta and Employ America’s Skanda Amarnath detail the muscular policy choices that made America an energy powerhouse.

  • In “Barriers to Next-Gen Geothermal,” Arnab, Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie, and Employ America Policy Associate Ashley George explain why geothermal energy faces regulatory and financial roadblocks. The piece was flagged by the Financial Times.

• Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D’Souza responded to a request for information from Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, on ways to reform the CDC and its practices.

• Arielle also submitted a letter to leaders in Congress on PAHPA reauthorization, highlighting how the bill can be used to mitigate biosecurity risks.

• Former Biosecurity Fellow Juan Cambeiro also responded to a request for information, this time from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), on ways Project NextGen could ensure future COVID-19 vaccine technologies bolster preparedness against future variants.

• Fellow Janika Schmitt responded to a request for information from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), providing feedback on its Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) initiative.

• IFP co-signed a letter urging Congress to reauthorize the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) before the end of the calendar year.

• And we also co-signed a letter calling for the extension of visa interview waiver authorities that are set to expire at the end of the year.

🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• How the Gas Turbine Conquered the Electric Power Industry

• Welding and the Automation Frontier

• Could We Boost Housing Construction by Permitting ADUs Under the HUD Code?

🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• How to Predict the Future

• How to Reform High-Skilled Immigration

• Statecraft November Roundup

• How to Treat Schizophrenia

🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Fellow Tim Hwang

• A Census for Science, co-authored with Caleb

🎤 Interviews & Events

• Heidi joined The Innovation and Diffusion Podcast to discuss medical innovations, incentives and disincentives, patents, exclusivities, and more.

• Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang joined the Idea Machines podcast for a conversation on how we measure the health of scientific fields.

📰 Media

• The Economist highlighted IFP’s partnership with the National Science Foundation.

  • “This turning of science’s methods back on itself has been dubbed “meta-science”... Dr. Myers calculates that since 2015 there have been an average of nearly 60 randomised experiments studying the scientific process. Two decades ago that number would have been in the single digits. More are coming: on September 28th the NSF announced a partnership with the Institute for Progress, a science-and-technology think-tank, to conduct metascientific experiments.”

• Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was asked for his opinion on a tweet by Alec, which pointed out that "We would never have allowed the Soviet Union to own CBS, NBC, or ABC during the Cold War. But we let the Chinese Communist Party control the black box algorithm." 

  • “I would have included it in any agenda when I sat down with President Xi, because what we have to take into consideration is that Big Tech in so many different ways is becoming a dominant force in our society and our personal lives and the lives of our families and children. We've got to be extra careful what is broadcast and information that is collected and the disinformation that is disseminated. It is a serious charge, and I certainly am suspect of these Chinese operations. I would have included it in that agenda.”

👋 Tweet for the Road

A brief announcement: If you’re interested in applying economic policy research to encourage scientific progress, innovation, and economic growth, please consider applying for this Economics Research Specialist role, working closely with our Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams.

Here’s what else we’ve been tackling this month:

✍️ Written Work

• We’re partnering with Employ America on a new series laying out how policy can shape the future of geothermal energy, called “Hot Rocks: Commercializing Next-Generation Geothermal Energy.”

• Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter wrote the first installment of Hot Rocks for Construction Physics, on the technological innovations that produced the shale revolution and the lessons that history holds for geothermal.

  • “It’s difficult to predict the trajectory of technology, and what some capability will ultimately be used for. Over and over again, we see technology spillovers, where technology developed in one industry for some particular purpose ends up spreading to other industries, often to solve very different problems. Oil and gas drilling technology repurposed to create geothermal power systems is of course one example, but there are many others.”

• Co-founder Alec Stapp and Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D’Souza presented a roadmap for mitigating risks from dual-use research.

  • “Recent advances in life science research, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence tools could have enormous medical and public health benefits, but these advancements also increase risks of misuse.”

• Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld and Immigration Fellow Lindsay Milliken both commented on a proposed modernization of the H-1B program.

• Jeremy also highlighted key immigration-related features of a new executive order on AI:

  

🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines

• The Long, Sad History of American Attempts to Build High-Speed Rail, Part I

• The Long, Sad History of American Attempts to Build High-Speed Rail, Part II

• The Technological Innovations that Produced the Shale Revolution

🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• How to Secure Weapons-Grade Uranium

• How to Procure Advanced Military Tech

🎤 Interviews & Events

• Co-founder Caleb Watney testified before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, in a hearing titled “Balancing Knowledge and Governance: Foundations for Effective Risk Management of AI.”

  • “Ultimately, it will be up to the public sector to shape the direction of cutting-edge AI development in accordance with the public interest. The full might of the American R&D engine has been a powerful force for aligning these interests in the past, and it can be now.”

• Senior Editor Santi Ruiz joined The Dynamist podcast to discuss how policy entrepreneurship can succeed in government bureaucracies.

📰 Media

• American Bazaar quoted Jeremy on the “big proposed overhaul of the H-1B program.”

  • “The changes he was “most excited about” included expanded H-1B cap exemptions that would make it easier for research organizations to qualify for cap-exempt H-1Bs. This would be especially helpful for new regional innovation hubs. ‘Automatic cap-gap extensions will make it easier for international students to stay here after they graduate,’ he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. The new rule would also make it easier for immigrant founders to stay here on H-1Bs to grow their companies, Neufeld wrote.”

• NPR Marketplace quoted Jeremy on the same topic.

  • “If you know of a scientist or doctor or engineer who emigrated to the United States, chances are pretty good that they came through the H-1B program,” said Jeremy Neufeld at the nonprofit Institute for Progress. But, he said, the visas are hard to get, especially to work at a for-profit company.”

• And Bloomberg Law got in on the action as well: 

  • “Jeremy Neufeld, a senior immigration fellow at the Institute for Progress, said the H-1B program’s structure makes competition with US workers more likely. That’s because employers have little incentive to pay more to an H-1B worker than the prevailing wage for an occupation in their geographic area, he said. ‘As long as you meet that minimum eligibility requirement, then your application is just as likely to get a visa as any other application,’ Neufeld said. ‘Paying a worker more doesn’t actually increase your chances of getting a visa.’ As a result, he said, companies have an incentive to file as many petitions for H-1B visas as possible for minimally qualified workers rather than prioritize the most highly qualified candidates.”

• The Daily Caller referenced a report by Fellow Adin Richards, calling for Congress to fully fund AgARDA. 

  • “The 2018 Farm Bill designated $50 million annually for the AgARDA program with the goal of spurring innovation and developing breakthrough technology. For the next three years, Congress did not appropriate funds for AgARDA and only directed $1 million to the program in fiscal year (FY) 2022, according to a report from the Institute for Progress.”

• Dan Lips, head of policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, flagged IFP’s partnership with the NSF as a potential roadmap for reforming the American education R&D system.

  • “The National Science Foundation announced a new partnership with the Institute for Progress aiming to improve how the agency supports research and innovation. The agreement highlights the opportunity for government R&D agencies to review their processes for awarding grants to increase their return on investment, offering another glimmer of hope that improvements may be coming to the federal R&D enterprise.”

👋 Tweet for the Road

On Wednesday, IFP Co-founder and Co-CEO Caleb Watney testified before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, in a hearing titled “Balancing Knowledge and Governance: Foundations for Effective Risk Management of AI.”

You can read Caleb’s testimony below:

I plan to focus my comments today on two key questions: 

1. What are high-impact areas of research for advancing AI that the federal government is uniquely positioned to advance?

2. What are mechanisms, partnerships, or processes that federal agencies may adopt to advance research priorities for safe and trustworthy AI systems?

To put it more succinctly: what should the federal government fund in AI, and how should it be funded?

Globally, the private sector is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. It would be fair to ask why the government should invest in this space at all. Doesn’t it seem like the private sector has this area handled? 

It’s useful to distinguish between the amount of money being spent in a research area, and the types of research that are being prioritized. The federal government has always recognized that it has an essential role to play in shaping the direction of technological development, and that federal R&D dollars are a key leverage point. For instance, the federal government has invested in clean energy technologies for decades, culminating in the massive advancements in solar and wind energy we see today. If we had left investment decisions purely to the private sector, there is little doubt that we would be much further behind in our goals of an abundant and clean energy future. Similarly, the federal government has shaped the direction of early internet and satellite technologies through DAPRA, biomedical technology through the NIH, and genomic research through the Human Genome Project. 

Within the field of AI, we have seen the fundamental performance capabilities of frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) grow rapidly without equivalent advances in model robustness, interpretability, fairness, and security. While LLMs today are no doubt impressive, public concerns about their embedded biases, potential inaccuracies, and lack of transparency are entirely justified.

Why are AI capabilities so strong in some ways and so behind in others? Because there are market failures within technology research fields. Private companies naturally spend less time developing a general understanding of model decision-making than on discovering commercial applications. Similarly, AI labs are inclined to publicize benchmarks (or create new ones) that make their models look better, leading to a splintering effect across the industry. But the American public has a strong interest in making sure that models are trustworthy in their application throughout the economy and that we have standardized benchmarks for their flaws and capabilities. Ultimately, it will be up to the public sector to shape the direction of cutting-edge AI development in accordance with the public interest. The full might of the American R&D engine has been a powerful force for aligning these interests in the past, and it can be now.

AI R&D Research Priorities

While many areas within the AI ecosystem would merit additional public funding, I would like to highlight four key priorities: 

Interpretability

Today, we have limited methods for understanding how advanced AI systems produce the outputs that they do. No matter what your concerns about current or future AI systems might be, developing a better understanding of how LLMs and other advanced AI models make decisions at a fundamental level will be enormously important. As we consider integrating AI in healthcare, financial markets, the criminal justice system, national security information loops, transportation networks, and many other sectors, it will be difficult to have trustworthy systems unless we understand on a deep technical level how they are making decisions. 

Thankfully, there are some early signs that we are beginning to make theoretical breakthroughs on this problem. But the scope and importance of the issue demand a level of ambition that goes well beyond our existing grant programs in this area. While not a perfect analogy, an initiative on the scale of the Human Genome Project to map the inner workings of advanced systems today would be a major step toward making AI more reliable and trustworthy. 

Defensive Cybersecurity

Large Language Models and other advanced AI systems have the potential to dramatically change the balance between offense and defense in cybersecurity. This matters both for safeguarding frontier AI models from international adversaries and for the application of frontier models to offensive cyber capabilities.

In a recent interview, the CEO of Anthropic acknowledged that if state actors were determined to steal the model weights from its most advanced systems, Anthropic would be unable to stop them. This is highly concerning, especially given the tremendous policy investment the US national security community has made through export controls to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) AI models. To be clear, this vulnerability doesn’t necessarily imply negligence on the part of any specific company. Instead, it shows the inherent difficulty of the field.

While more enforcement of cybersecurity best practices would surely help, we ultimately need a better set of technologies that favor defense. There are exciting techniques broadly described as “confidential computing," which involve both hardware and software innovations, that could enable AI model weights to be encrypted throughout all parts of the training and deployment process — effectively turning a cybersecurity challenge into a physical security challenge. But these techniques are still immature, and typically entail a dramatic efficiency tradeoff. If federal investments in this area led to breakthroughs in the viability and efficiency of these techniques, the U.S. could enforce higher cybersecurity standards across the board and thereby decrease the likelihood of SOTA models falling into the hands of malicious actors. 

On the flip side, we should consider how these models might be misused. It seems entirely possible that small groups of malicious actors could paralyze regional electricity grids or hospital systems at a much greater scale with the aid of advanced AI systems. The federal government can anticipate these risks and proactively shift the terrain back to the advantage of defenders through an ambitious R&D program focused on defensive cybersecurity innovation, including using AI to proactively monitor and patch vulnerabilities.

Benchmarking and Evaluations

Creating prudent policy around AI is difficult in part because observers disagree not only about the future path the technology might take, but also about current capabilities. One reason for this uncertainty is that benchmarking and evaluating the performance of SOTA models is quite difficult. Benchmarks today are often simple multiple-choice tests that are rapidly aced or struggle to make apples-to-apples comparisons across leading models. Additionally, AI companies can cherry pick the standards or the implementation that make their models look best, leaving consumers and policymakers with huge question marks. More fundamentally, we have a dearth of benchmarks that test for AI capabilities in the real world — in open-ended environments, in detailed sector-specific applications, or when humans can be part of the action loop. This is a clear example of an area that would benefit from additional federal investment and coordination. 

Especially for benchmarks that measure bias, inaccuracy, or other sociotechnical evaluations, we would ideally be able to move toward a system like NIST’s Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) where a public leaderboard incentivizes companies to perform better on widely publicized and agreed-upon benchmarks. A more granular understanding of the real-world capabilities and weaknesses of today’s models would help build a shared set of facts that can inform tomorrow’s policy discussions. 

Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

Privacy concerns in AI are mounting as machine learning algorithms often require access to massive datasets that could contain sensitive information. These concerns are particularly acute in healthcare, finance, and areas involving personal identifiers. Government investment could be instrumental in advancing technologies for privacy-preserving machine learning, which would enable the development of accurate models without direct access to sensitive data.

• Differential privacy: This well-studied approach introduces mathematical guarantees that ensure individual data points cannot be reverse-engineered from the model's output. Additional investment could explore applications for synthetic data, accelerate the implementation of differential privacy in large-scale systems, and make it a viable option for any federally funded projects that handle sensitive data.

• Homomorphic encryption: While still computationally expensive, fully homomorphic encryption allows for computations to be performed on encrypted data, offering the promise of privacy-preserving analytics and machine learning. Federal R&D funding could accelerate the development of efficient algorithms and hardware optimized for homomorphic operations.

• Federated learning: This approach trains models across multiple decentralized devices holding local data samples without exchanging them. The government can invest in R&D to make federated learning more efficient, secure, and applicable to a wider array of data types and machine learning models.

• Model assurance and forensics: These techniques could enable developers of a model (or outside auditors) to prove with certainty that particular characteristics of a model are true; for instance, that a model does not contain an individual’s sensitive information in its training data set, or that it was developed in accordance with certain safeguards.

Federal funding in these areas would not only advance the state of the art, but also provide public-sector organizations with the tools they need to securely leverage machine learning. By investing in privacy-preserving machine learning technologies, the government can lay the groundwork for a better equilibrium between AI progress and privacy.

AI R&D Partnerships and Mechanisms

Given the dual-use nature of AI and the massive commercial market that already exists, government funders will have to use a broader set of tools and partnerships to shape the frontiers of this field. Below are some suggestions and examples: 

• Public compute for academics: As the House Science Committee has already been considering, proposals like the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) would enable academics to access computational resources that are currently accessible only to large industry actors. Many efforts to utilize the large academic network of AI experts to shape AI R&D will have limited effect until they have access to infrastructure like the NAIRR.

• Infrastructure for model sharing: Federal agencies should invest in research to establish frameworks and infrastructure for AI model sharing. This initiative could tackle unresolved questions surrounding the types of models shared, the stakeholders involved, and the cost distribution. For instance, it could specify whether base models or deployed models should be shared depending on the risk evaluation needs. Part of this should also involve research on the protocols involved in red-teaming models for sensitive national security risks. This broader investment area will be critical for auditing purposes, policy decision-making, and risk assessment.

• Co-funded public goods: There may be opportunities for government funders to co-invest with philanthropies and/or industry labs on the provision of important public goods. For instance, earlier this year, OpenAI launched a small defensive cybersecurity grant program aimed at a number of important research questions. However, the size of the grant pool was only one million dollars — orders of magnitude too small to effectively shape research. NSF could consider bringing together a coalition of funders to dramatically scale this grant funding opportunity while taking advantage of the technical expertise at labs like OpenAI.

• Technical expertise in grant reviews: Additional efforts could be made to bring in technical leaders from industry to serve on review panels for relevant grant funding rounds. Adding this expertise into the reviewer pool could surface important considerations for the viability of technical proposals that could otherwise be missed.

• Field building exercises: Federal agencies should continue developing ecosystems of technical talent working on understaffed research areas in AI. The recent DEF CON event was a promising example of bootstrapping a community of individuals who are developing expertise at red-teaming advanced AI models. 

• Other Transaction Authority: As a legal mechanism, Other Transaction Authority (OTA) provides a flexible template for innovative agency partnerships. Both the NSF and NIST recently received OTA authorization in the CHIPS and Science Act, a promising development. However, agencies often feel hesitant to use newfound OTA flexibility creatively without explicit prodding from Congress. This committee could impress upon the federal agencies the need to meet this challenge using all the tools at their disposal.

Conclusion

There are lots of difficult tradeoffs in AI governance. What’s the proper balance between regulation and international competition? Between privacy and transparency? Between interpretability and performance? Between security and compliance costs? To be sure, innovation will not allow us to avoid these tough questions entirely. But breakthroughs in interpretability, cybersecurity, benchmarking, and privacy-preserving machine learning can make these tradeoffs much less severe. 

At a fundamental level, governance is downstream of technological feasibility. In other words, the standards that we can set are directly influenced by what we can technologically achieve. Our investments in research today will set the stage for policy decisions tomorrow.

Through targeted federal funding and creative partnerships, we can advance research that not only pushes the boundaries of what AI can do but also ensures that it is developed and deployed in a manner that is ethical, secure, and beneficial for all of society.

You can watch Caleb’s oral testimony here:

In case you missed it, a major announcement: the National Science Foundation is partnering with IFP to design and execute experiments to explore how the agency funds and supports research and innovation. We will consult with NSF on the current funding mechanisms and review processes used by the agency to decide which proposals to award, and recommend tests for different ways to fund high-risk and high-reward proposals.

Here’s what else we’ve been tackling this month:

✍️ Published Work

• Co-founder Alec Stapp, Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie, and Arnab Datta laid out a potential deal Congress can strike on permitting reform.

  • “A grand bargain, in which Democrats secure meaningful transmission reform and Republicans obtain meaningful reforms to judicial review, would have genuine bipartisan appeal: reforms to interregional transmission will promote energy security and reliability, while balanced reforms to judicial review will accelerate clean energy deployment.” 

🎤 Interviews & Events

• Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter joined The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson to discuss why it’s so expensive to build things in America.

  • “At a very high level, it’s basically a case of we’ve steadily made it more and more difficult to build things in the U.S. with rules and regulations, and have not had commensurate technology and productivity increases that have been able to offset that.”

• Several IFP team members based outside of Washington, DC were in town last week, so we hosted a happy hour at Red Bear Brewery — thanks to everyone who was able to make it!

📰 Media

• AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis gave our grand bargain a shoutout in his newsletter Faster, Please!

  • “Oh, and by the way, Aidan Mackenzie, Arnab Datta and Alec Stapp at the Institute for Progress just released a super-interesting proposal, ‘A Grand Bargain for Permitting Reform.’ Broadly, Democrats would get reforms to both shorten siting and permitting timelines for large interregional transmission lines to accelerate renewable energy, while Republicans get judicial reforms to NEPA to limit legal obstruction, such as caps on injunctions against projects.”

• Crain’s New York Business interviewed Aidan in a piece on the lawsuits over congestion pricing. 

  • “Aidan Mackenzie, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, a Washington-based, non-partisan think tank, said lawsuits as a result of NEPA have become a ‘shadow over the whole process.’ Mackenzie said that such lawsuits can be born out of genuine concern over a project’s impact but may sometimes be employed for a sort of political theater… ‘The review for congestion pricing is already considerably longer than the average,’ he said, noting that it exceeds what’s required of the more exhaustive review the state is seeking. ‘So, are they really saying that they would have been fine with it if it was 5,000 pages or 6,000 pages? I really doubt it.’”

• Vox cited work from Aidan on the future of geothermal.

  • “Geothermal drilling, unlike some oil and gas projects, is subject to challenge under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which can lead to years-long regulatory delays in getting projects off the ground. (Yes, you’ve read that right — it’s legally easier to permit an oil or gas well that will add further greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere than it is to drill geothermal wells that can provide near-zero-carbon electricity.)”

• The World quoted Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld on visa waiver times.

  • “‘Wait times for visas across the board have exploded, partially because of COVID,” Neufeld said. ‘But they were also increasing before COVID-19.’ ... To make matters worse, Neufeld said, the US is lagging in its adoption of technology. ‘Our processing system is based on paper records, it's based on in-person interviews,’ he explained. ‘Our peer countries — Canada, the UK, Australia — have started to increase their experimentation with digital technology.’”

• Heatmap used analysis from Brian to explain why building nuclear plants costs so much.

  • The vast majority of the costs of nuclear power come from the expense of building its generators, according to an analysis by Brian Potter.

• The Bulletin wrote up a congressional staff delegation trip to the Bay Area led by Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D’Souza.

  • “The field trips were part of programs run by Stanford University and the Institute for Progress that bring policy makers — like these congressional staffers — to labs and university campuses and immerse them in the biosecurity issues they need to understand if they are to develop effective policy about, for instance, identifying when research has the possibility to make pathogens dangerous, or the development of US biomanufacturing and efforts to expand the resilience of our medical supply chain.”

• Science|Business referenced Biosecurity Fellow Juan Cambeiro’s work on AI risks in biology.

  • “AI tools could have allowed Iraq to overcome the lack of technical expertise that limited its biological weapons programme, warns the Institute for Progress, a Washington DC based think tank, in a recent submission to help shape the US’s national AI strategy.”

🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• Why Do We Need Infrastructure Policy?

• Contribute to the US Megaprojects Database!

• How Washington DC Got Its Metro

🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang

• Funding Against the Tide

• Will Funders Have the Patience to Reform Science? 

🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• How To Reverse a Coup, with Todd Moss

• How To Salvage the VA, with Marina Nitze 

👋 Tweet for the Road

Summer is winding down (gasp), and we have a couple new non-resident fellows joining the IFP team: Hamidah Oderinwale is joining us for the fall to work on immigration policy, and Maxwell Tabarrok will be working with our metascience team.

We just launched a new interview series, Statecraft, about how policymakers actually get things done. It’s a bimonthly newsletter of interesting stories, like how the US extracted weapons-grade uranium from post-Soviet states, or (in our first interview) how the US saved more than 20 million lives in Sub-Saharan Africa. Check out the introductory essay from Senior Editor Santi Ruiz and subscribe!

Here’s what else we’ve been tackling this month:

✍️ Published Work

• Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post on how Congress can help federal science agencies speed up scientific progress.

  • “The NSF and NIH are often criticized for delays. But at the end of the day, these agencies are constrained by what Congress allows them to do… Rather than throw up roadblocks, lawmakers should send the agencies — and the public — a message: Their paramount goal should be to accelerate scientific progress.” 

• A powerhouse team including Heidi, Co-founder Caleb Watney, Board Member Dan Correa, and Senior Fellows Matt Clancy and Paul Niehaus wrote in Nature about ways to bridge the scientist/policymaker divide. 

  • “Just as Louis Pasteur’s work on pasteurization was inspired by observing manufacturers struggling with bacterial contamination of wine and milk, we see value in use-inspired research on science policy.”

• Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie argued that geothermal energy needs permitting reform.

  • “Geothermal energy presents an opportunity for American clean energy production that is almost too good to be true… It would be a shame if regulations originally designed to protect the environment killed geothermal energy while shielding oil and gas.”

• For IFP, Jassi Pannu and Jacob Swett joined Fellow Janika Schmitt in analyzing how the new ARPA-H can accelerate progress in health tech by focusing on pandemic prevention.

  • “Creating a DARPA-style agency opens doors for transformative breakthroughs, but it does not guarantee them… We interviewed more than twenty experts from government, academia, and industry to discuss how ARPA-H can successfully commercialize technologies that benefit us all, while mitigating downside risks.”

• In Matt Yglesias’ Slow Boring, Heidi and former CBO director Doug Elmendorf made a case for reconsidering rules about when to use dynamic budget scoring, focused on an example of how dynamic scoring would more correctly capture the positive federal budget impacts of high-skilled immigration

  • “For policies like increasing high-skilled immigration that induce economically meaningful changes in employment and productivity, conventional scores misrepresent the true effects on the federal budget implied by existing evidence. Rather than seeing dynamic scoring as a conservative agenda, those invested in spurring economic growth should pay attention to cases where dynamic scoring would help align the incentives of Congress with the policies that are best for society.”

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🎤 Interviews & Events

• Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D’Souza and Co-founder Alec Stapp led a congressional staff delegation trip to the Bay Area to tour a community biolab and participate in discussions with biosecurity experts on topics such as gene synthesis, medical countermeasures, advanced PPE, indoor air quality, wastewater surveillance.

  • The trip included five Republican and five Democratic staffers, half from the House of Representatives and half from the Senate.

• Co-founder Caleb Watney joined R Street’s Adam Thierer on the “Tech Roundup” podcast to explore the United States’ approach toward high-skilled immigration.

📰 Media

• Heatmap cited Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter’s work in a piece on government pull mechanisms.

  • “The government has previously used its power as a purchaser to speed up the development of semiconductors, titanium, and — most recently — COVID-19 vaccines. As a piece of industrial strategy, the new program will give the government a lever to shape the market and set standards for the emerging climate technology.”

• IFP’s work on the costs of NEPA was referenced in a Semafor piece about permitting reform. 

• In his newsletter Faster, Please!, AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis interviewed Aidan about geothermal energy and the regulatory roadblocks it faces.

• The New York Times also cited Aidan’s work on geothermal in a piece on the race to deploy advanced drilling techniques.

  • “Permitting is tough. While enhanced geothermal could, in theory, work anywhere, the best resources are on federal land, where regulatory reviews take years and it’s often easier to win permission for oil and gas drilling because of exemptions won by fossil fuel companies.”

🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• The Worst US Bridges Are Getting Fixed

• How the Car Came to LA

• How Fast Can a City Grow?

🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang

• Does a Better Science Need the State?

• It’s So Over. Now What?

• The Frontier of Scientific Plausibility

🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• Introducing Statecraft

• How To Save Twenty Million Lives, with Dr. Mark Dybul

👋 Tweet for the Road

July was blazing hot in DC — hope you’ve been staying cool wherever you are! Two quick announcements before our regular updates:

Chris Snyder is joining our team as a Senior Fellow to work on policy projects related to market-shaping mechanisms. Chris is the Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. And Janika Schmitt is joining IFP as a Fellow with a focus on biosecurity-related projects.

Here’s what the IFP team has been up to in the swamp over the last month:

✍️ Published Work

• Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie and Senior Editor Santi Ruiz wrote a guest post for Noah Smith’s Substack explaining how the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) stops the development of clean energy. 

  • “We have no way of measuring the cost of not building — only the cost of slowing and killing projects that have already started. But an honest look at the data we have makes an overwhelming case for reforming NEPA. If we want to see a clean energy transition in our lifetimes, we’ll need to let the infrastructure be built.”

• Aidan also wrote about the impressively quick repairs to I-95, and what they tell us about the government's ability to build infrastructure faster. 

  • “To improve state capacity at delivering infrastructure on time, we’ll need to both reward politicians for speedy action, and remove the endless procedural requirements that enable obstruction.”

• Fellow Janika Schmitt wrote an op-ed in STAT News with Jacob Swett and Jassi Pannu on how ARPA-H can become better at taking risks. 

• Contributor Ryan Remmel authored a white paper describing how the federal government can loosen restrictions on at-home rapid tests to help prevent future pandemics.

• In a new piece, contributor Maxwell Tabarrok investigated why the NSF was able to move so much faster than the NIH at disbursing pandemic research funding, and found that flexible funding authority may be the secret. 

  • Maxwell’s piece was written up on Marginal Revolution.

• Biosecurity Fellow Juan Cambeiro responded to a request for information from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, outlining the potential benefits and risks of AI tools for biosecurity.

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🎤 Interviews & Events

• Senators Markey (D-Mass.) and Budd (R-N.C.) released legislation to assess the health security risks of AI, and quoted Co-founder Alec Stapp.

  • “‘This legislation will help our nation become more resilient to the emerging biological threat landscape, which due to the proliferation of dual-use life science technologies, includes engineered and accidental biothreats, as well as naturally occurring bioincidents,’ said Alec Stapp, Co-founder of the Institute for Progress.”

• Alec also joined the Reason podcast to discuss how to prevent the next global catastrophe.

📰 Media

• Barron’s interviewed Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld on immigration, the CHIPS Act, and how to maintain American technological competitiveness. 

  • “If we stay complacent, we run the serious risk of deterring a lot of the talent that makes the U.S. the world leader in science and innovation. It will also cripple the possibility of being a chip manufacturing leader. Our science and technology leadership against China will suffer, and by extension, our security will suffer.”

• In Britain’s City A.M., Adam Hawksbee mentioned IFP:

  • “Think tanks such as the Institute for Progress inform debates in Washington DC on reforming planning and streamlining science funding.”

• The Federation of American Scientists shouted out Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter’s work in a piece asking for creative ideas to boost housing supply: 

  • “Brian Potter of the Institute for Progress writes about the overlooked roles of modular housing, the rise and fall of the mail order home, and building components.” 

• Aidan was quoted extensively in Crain’s New York Business on how litigation under NEPA is stopping congestion pricing from taking effect in New York City. 

  • “Aidan Mackenzie, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, a Washington-based, non-partisan think tank, said lawsuits as a result of NEPA have become a ‘shadow over the whole process.’ In fact, the Department of Justice said that NEPA is the most frequently litigated environmental statute… Mackenzie said he is skeptical of New Jersey’s claim that it wants a more exhaustive environmental review. ‘The review for congestion pricing is already considerably longer than the average,’ he said, noting that it exceeds what’s required of the more exhaustive review the state is seeking. ‘So, are they really saying that they would have been fine with it if it was 5,000 pages or 6,000 pages? I really doubt it.’”

• Aidan was also quoted in a National Journal article on a potential permitting carveout for semiconductor fabs:

  • “Especially when the process is new or the industry is new, there’s a learning curve that both the industry and government go through,’ said Aidan Mackenzie, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, which bills itself as a nonpartisan advocacy organization focused on accelerating science, technology, and industry while ‘safeguarding humanity’s future.’ ‘There’s also interagency disagreement over who has jurisdiction,’ Mackenzie said.

🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• The Story of Titanium

• The Rise and Fall of the Mail-Order Home

• We Need More Research on How CO2 Affects Cognition

🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang

• The Political Fragility of Metascience

Tweet for the Road

Hope summer has been going well for you so far — it sure has been smoky here in Washington, DC (thanks, Canada!).

A couple quick announcements:

• Are you an academic potentially interested in spending time in DC working on policy, but aren’t sure where you might best try to contribute? We’re launching a new pilot program with our friends at the Federation of American Scientists called “Sabbaticals in Service” aimed at fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise between academic researchers — with a focus on the economic and social sciences — and federal agencies. Get in touch!

• Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang started a newsletter focusing on the theory, policy, and strategy of science governance. It’s called Macroscience and you can subscribe here!

And now for your regular IFP updates:

✍️ Published Work

• Biosecurity Fellow Juan Cambeiro and Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter wrote a white paper on the next great public health challenge: indoor air quality

  • “Today, we’re experiencing another public health crisis largely caused by our built environment — more specifically, the air within that environment. Poorly ventilated spaces and low quality indoor air are largely behind the spread of indoor infections, and cause high concentrations of pollutants such as CO2 which have a variety of negative health effects. In the same way that stricter building codes and other built environment changes ended large urban fires, targeted changes in indoor air requirements could prevent future pandemics, reduce seasonal infections, and improve public health.”

  • Juan and Brian also had an associated op-ed in STAT News

• IFP led a coalition of 33 organizations and individuals specializing in healthcare, labor, innovation, and immigration that sent a letter to Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su calling on the agency to update the Schedule A list of occupations experiencing labor shortages in accordance with the latest economic data

  • Immigration Fellow Lindsay Milliken wrote an associated op-ed in The Salt Lake Tribune with Josh Smith from the Center for Growth and Opportunity

• IFP submitted two sets of public comments to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its request for information on assessing ethical, legal, and societal implications of emerging technologies

  • Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang and Co-founder Caleb Watney submitted comments on how DARPA can proactively shape emerging technologies

  • Biosecurity Fellows Juan Cambeiro and Arielle D’Souza submitted comments on how DARPA can better anticipate downside risk

🎤 Interviews & Events

• Co-founder Alec Stapp appeared on PBS NewsHour to talk about the lessons we can learn from the rapid completion of the construction project to reopen the I-95 highway in Pennsylvania following the collapse of an overpass

• Alec also joined Adam Ozimek, Matt Clancy, and Arpit Gupta on Econ Twitter Watercooler to talk about industrial policy

• Tim participated in an event hosted by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University discussing the importance of compute for the future of AI

• IFP partnered with the Economic Innovation Group on an event called Immigration Policy Is Innovation Policy, along with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Center for American Entrepreneurship, Foundation for American Innovation, Niskanen Center, Federation of American Scientists, Foundation for American Innovation, One America Works, and the Immigrant Learning Center

📰 Media

• In a book review for The Atlantic, Nick Bagley included Co-founder Alec Stapp in a group of like-minded people working to increase state capacity:

  • “In other words, Pahlka’s book isn’t just about tech. It’s about the American administrative state, and it’s a call for paring back the rigid rules that make it so hard to govern, and for rebuilding government’s ability to do its job effectively. In this, Pahlka joins ranks with the likes of Brink Lindsey, Misha Chellam, Alec Stapp, and Ezra Klein, who are all beating a similar drum about the need to improve the government’s ability to meet our collective aspirations.”

• The New York Times cited Brian’s work in this article about why the grid isn’t ready for the energy transition:

  • “There is no single entity in charge of organizing the grid, the way the federal government oversaw the development of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and ‘60s. The electric system was cobbled together over a century by thousands of independent utilities building smaller-scale grids to carry power from large coal, nuclear or gas plants to nearby customers.”

• Alec spoke with Reason magazine and The Dispatch about the changes to permitting in the debt ceiling deal:

  • “‘What you see is just the lowest-hanging fruit; it’s the least controversial stuff,’ Alec Stapp, co-CEO of the Institute for Progress, tells The Dispatch.”

  • “‘The permitting changes in the debt ceiling deal are a very small step in the right direction—emphasis on 'small,'’ Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, which advocates for policies that accelerate technological and industrial progress, tells Reason. The NEPA tweaks included in the Fiscal Responsibility Act will ‘slightly improve the process,’ says Stapp, ‘but the biggest problem—judicial review—was left untouched.’”

• U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) introduced the Disease X Act of 2023 to develop the necessary medical countermeasures (MCMs) to combat future pandemics:

  • “The Disease X Act of 2023 has been supported by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Biotechnology Innovation Organization, Infectious Diseases Society of America, Dr. Caroline Schuerger, Research Fellow, Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Dr. Steph Batalis, Research Fellow, Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Ginkgo Bioworks, Institute for Progress (IFP), Big Cities Health Coalition, FluGen Inc., US Biologic, Inc., Vir Biotechnology, The Gerontological Society of America, Helix, New Orleans BioInnovation Center, American Society for Microbiology, The Medical Countermeasures Coalition, 1Day Sooner, and Dr. Gregory D. Koblentz, Director, Biodefense Graduate Program, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University.”

🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• The Grid, Part I: The Birth of the Grid

  • “Electricity’s transition from a luxury good to the foundation of modern life happened quickly. By 1930, electricity was available in nearly 70% of US homes, and supplied almost 80% of industrial mechanical power. By 1950, the US was tied together by an enormous network of high-voltage transmission lines. How did electrical power become ubiquitous? How was the system for distributing it, which makes modern civilization possible, built? Let’s take a look.”

• The Grid, Part II: The Golden Age of the Power Industry

  • “By 1930, the US was using 114 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, generated by more than 4000 power plants. Most electricity was generated by coal (56%) and hydroelectric (34%) plants, with the remainder generated by natural gas and fuel oil.[0] 68% of homes overall, and 84% of homes in urban areas, had electrical service. Electricity had, in the words of Franklin Roosevelt, become ‘no longer a luxury,’ but ‘a definite necessity’”

• The Grid, Part III: The Dream of Deregulation

  • “The next major blow to monopoly utilities was a seemingly innocuous provision in the sprawling 1978 National Energy Act… Amidst its many different pieces of legislation was one that focused on utility regulation, called the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA). Most of PURPA’s provisions concerned utility rate structures, but Section 210 addressed ‘nontraditional’ energy technologies such as small dams, wind, and solar… Section 210 received relatively little attention during the passage of the National Energy Act. It was added largely for the benefit of one constituent of a single senator. But it ultimately became the most significant part of the National Energy Act.”

• The Grid, Part IV: The Hard and Soft Paths of Energy Strategy

  • “Modern civilization would be impossible to operate without cheap, widely available electric power. The grid makes modern society possible. But today, the grid faces several challenges that threaten its ability to distribute electric power. They are increasing use of variable sources of electricity, decreasing grid reliability, increasing delay in building electrical infrastructure, and increasing demand for electricity. Addressing these challenges will require massively rebuilding our electrical infrastructure. How we choose to do this will shape the future of the grid.”

🔭 Macroscience by IFP Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang

• On Macroscience

  • “Science policy exists in an exciting pre-Keynesian, pre-Friedman state. We’re not just figuring out what the most efficient levers might be, but also working out the framework that guides when and how these levers should be deployed. There’s a lot of work to be done here. After naming Endless Frontier, you’ll find that people run out of other recommendations in the macro-scientific genre very, very quickly. That’s wild when you consider the massive changes that have come to pass since Bush wrote the report in 1944.”

• The Seductions of Big Science

  • “There’s a reason why Oppenheimer will focus on the Manhattan Project, and not the bopping quantum physics scene in Göttingen that gave a young Robert Oppenheimer his start. There’s a reason why our depictions of spaceflight focus on the Apollo Program, and not the innovations of the International Latex Corporation that made walking on the moon possible. Big Science is seductive.”

• Long Science

  • “Famously, there’s the Framingham Heart Study, a longitudinal study ongoing since 1948 that has yielded major insights on cardiovascular health. But there’s also things like the Park Grass Experiment, an effort looking at fertilizer and hay yields ongoing since 1856 that has produced advances in our thinking about biodiversity and natural selection. These two contrasting characteristics of Long Science — its relative rarity and its demonstrated value — suggest a question. Simply put, are we producing enough Long Science?”

• Antitrust in the Marketplace of Ideas

  • “Should science policy shoulder the responsibility of ensuring the dynamism of scientific fields? And, if so, should it proactively attempt to break the ossified intellectual monopolies that can form within fields and threaten the rate of progress? Obviously, the government cannot literally accelerate science ‘one funeral at a time.’ But one might imagine a set of policies that could help check the power of established scientific stars in an effort to drive dynamism in a field.”

👋 Tweet for the Road

Hope you’ve all been enjoying the end of spring — it’s certainly been a wild time here in Washington, DC with the debt ceiling debacle. Two important takeaways relevant to IFP’s work:

Good news: Project Next Gen survived the debt ceiling clawbacks! (See our previous Washington Post op-ed on the program.)

Bad news: Permitting reform did not make it in the final deal (no, administrative tweaks to NEPA and yet another study on transmission do not count!).

Co-founder Alec Stapp will be talking about industrial policy in a Twitter Spaces event at noon today with Adam Ozimek, Arpit Gupta, and Matt Clancy — check it out here!

And now for the regular IFP updates:

Published Work

• Through a partnership with Brookings and the Good Science Project, IFP supported “Building a Better NIH,” a series of short papers outlining the growth potential for our nation's premier health R&D funder:

  • “The NIH is arguably the most important institution shaping the rate and direction of scientific research, in an area – health – that has enormous implications for human well-being. Even very small improvements in the productivity of how NIH funding is spent could translate into massive improvements in social welfare. These short proposals are meant to open a conversation about practical, tractable reforms that could be considered in the coming years.”

• Along with Amy Nice and Divyansh Kaushik, Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld outlined the argument for waiving in-person interviews for low-risk visa applicants, even after COVID-19:

  • “Interview waivers have positively contributed to effective visa processing. Recent data show a decline in global wait times for various applicant types… Moreover, interview waivers have had a minimal impact on overstay rates… Waivers are not granted at the expense of national security or public safety. Robust screening and vetting protocols persist even when interviews are waived.”

• Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D’Souza proposed nine legislative ideas to improve our biosecurity response:

  • “These recommendations focus on broadening the scope of key agencies and initiatives, such as the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), as well as increasing transparency in the decision-making processes of the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise.”

Share Institute for Progress

Interviews & Events

• Co-founder Caleb Watney and Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams were interviewed by Cardiff Garcia on the New Bazaar podcast to discuss the economics of innovation and how to design public institutions

Media

The Washington Post covered the “Building a Better NIH” series, which IFP cosponsored:

• “The ‘Building a Better NIH’ project was first conceived a year ago, after longtime NIH director Francis Collins retired and President Biden pushed for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a new agency inside NIH… leaders at the Institute for Progress and the Good Science Project worried about what they saw as a fundamental slowdown in NIH’s work.”

And Healthcare Finance News quoted Heidi on the series:

• "‘Even small improvements in the productivity of how NIH funding is spent could translate into massive improvements in social welfare. These short proposals are meant to open a conversation about practical, tractable reforms that could be considered in the coming years,’ said contributor Heidi Williams of Stanford University and the Institute for Progress.” 

Quartz quoted Senior Fellow Nikki Teran on the White House’s pandemic preparedness plan:

• “The White House’s proposed budget for 2023 allocated $40 billion to the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) over five years to invest in pandemic preparedness, including with the goal of developing a vaccine within 100 days of the identification of a new biological threat—something the vaccine prototypes would be key to implementing. ‘That budget [...] would do a lot towards preventing pandemics. It could do a lot towards the creation of prototype vaccines and better [personal protective equipment],’ Nikki Teran, a biosecurity policy researcher at the Institute for Progress, a scientific advancement think tank, told Quartz.”

Heatmap referenced IFP’s work on NEPA in an explainer on the permitting reform debate:

• “Some environmentalists say that NEPA is an important tool to waylay fossil-fuel development. (It’s how activists delayed the Dakota Access Pipeline for a year or so.) But others say that NEPA is now mostly slowing down the green transition, and that it has given ‘corporate interests and rich NIMBYs’ a veto over rapid climate action.”

Axios cited IFP research highlighting the need for more high-skilled immigrants in the U.S. to compete with China:

• “A report last year from the Institute for Progress found 82% of ‘companies in the defense industrial base report that it is difficult to find qualified STEM workers’ and 50% of workers who hold advanced STEM degrees and work in the defense industrial base were born abroad.”

Axios also wrote about the importance of high-skilled immigrants for the success of the regional innovation hubs that were passed by Congress in the CHIPS and Science Act, citing IFP research:

• “Even if Congress does not pass immigration reforms this year, critical agency-level actions can be taken, the Institute for Progress says. For example, USCIS could ensure the regional innovation hubs authorized under the CHIPS and Science Act can access cap-exempt H-1Bs.

Construction Physics by IFP Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

Book Review: Healthy Buildings

• “The case for increased focus on building health, especially air quality, seems very strong to me. And I agree that creating better standards is an important step. But I’m less optimistic than Allen and Macomber that we can expect voluntary standards to do much work here. I suspect improving building health will require the long, slow work of getting building jurisdictions to require or incentivize it.”

The Birth of the Grid

• “Electricity’s transition from a luxury good to the foundation of modern life happened quickly. By 1930, electricity was available in nearly 70% of US homes, and supplied almost 80% of industrial mechanical power. By 1950, the US was tied together by an enormous network of high-voltage transmission lines. How did electrical power become ubiquitous? How was the system for distributing it, which makes modern civilization possible, built? Let’s take a look.”

Tweet for the Road

Our big announcement this month is that Tim Hwang has joined the team as a Senior Technology Fellow. Tim will be working on metascience, comparative studies in emerging technologies, and grand strategy in science policy. We’re excited to have him on board!

Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams is working on a new research project related to Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) at universities — if you have any ideas, send them her way!

✍️ Published Work

• Co-founder Alec Stapp and Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D'Souza wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post calling for the Biden administration to follow the Operation Warp Speed model for its new Project Next Gen

  • “Project Next Gen should take the opportunity to build on the infrastructure that was developed during the covid pandemic and keep it warm for when the next crisis hits. The Operation Warp Speed model can keep the program from falling prey to everything-bagel liberalism. If Next Gen is to create the vaccines and treatments needed for the next pandemic, the Biden administration will need to focus exclusively on its mission.”

• Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld and Immigration Fellow Lindsay Milliken wrote about harnessing global talent for regional innovation

  • “These regional innovation hubs need more than big budgets to deliver on their mission. They will struggle if they are unable to attract new talent. Targeted action to make immigration regulations easier for these hubs will enable them to attract the talent they need for success.”

• Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter explained why it costs so much to build nuclear power plants

  • “U.S. nuclear power has been hampered by steady and dramatic increases in nuclear power plant construction costs, frequently over the life of a single project. In the 1980s, several nuclear power plants in Washington were canceled after estimated construction costs increased from $4.1 billion to over $24 billion, resulting in a $2 billion bond default from the utility provider. Two reactors being built in Georgia (the only current nuclear reactors under construction in the U.S.) are projected to cost twice their initial estimates, and two South Carolina reactors were canceled after costs rose from $9.8 billion to $25 billion.”

• Endless Frontier Fellow Aidan Mackenzie wrote about how obstructionists used environmental review laws to block the Cape Wind project

  • “Between 2001 and 2017, opponents sued Cape Wind more than 32 times, suing everything from NEPA review to state review to jurisdiction challenges to endangered species cases. Cape Wind won 31/32 cases but it didn’t matter.”

🎤 Interviews & Events

• IFP co-organized the first ever Econ Twitter IRL event with EIG — and it was a big hit! Here’s coverage in Politico:

• Co-founder Caleb Watney was interviewed by Reihan Salam about the role of the U.S. as the world’s talent cluster

• Heidi will be speaking on a panel about regional innovation systems at the NBER Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy Conference in Washington, D.C. on May 18th

📰 Media

• Reason magazine cited Alec’s article in The Atlantic about the policy implications of taking climate change seriously as an emergency

  • “‘Windmills off Cape Cod, a geothermal facility in Nevada, and what could have been the largest solar farm in America have all been blocked by an endless series of environmental reviews and lawsuits,’ Alec Stapp, a co-founder of the Institute for Progress, which advocates for policies that accelerate technological and industrial progress, wrote last year in The Atlantic. ‘U.S. climate spending could exceed more than half a trillion dollars by the end of this decade—but without permitting reform, those investments won't translate into much physical infrastructure.’”

🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• How did solar power get cheap? Part I

  • “Solar PV’s low cost is the result of it steadily falling in price over many decades. In 1957 solar PV electricity cost roughly $300,000 per megawatt-hour in 2019 dollars. By 2019, in the sunniest locations that had fallen to roughly $20 per megawatt-hour, 15,000 times less. And it's still getting cheaper. In 2021, the DOE set a goal to reduce the cost of solar PV by another 50% by 2030.”

• How did solar power get cheap? Part II

  • “Getting solar PV competitive with grid-scale electricity took many decades, and required hundreds of billions of dollars of both public and private investment that no one firm, no one country could fund alone. Solar PV shows the power of learning curve effects, but it's also an illustration of how difficult it can be to disrupt a mature, entrenched technology.”

• Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant geothermal power plant?

  • “Trying to build an enormous geothermal power plant and associated transmission lines(!) in one of the most beloved National Parks(!!), which there’s specifically a law against (!!!), and which could potentially trigger a civilization-destroying volcanic eruption (!!!!) is like the final boss of the permitting reform movement.”

👋 Tweet for the Road

Hope you are enjoying the beginning of spring wherever you are — we’re loving the cherry blossoms here in Washington, DC.

First, an announcement: With the support of the Agency Fund, Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams is helping to launch a new one-year dissertation fellowship hosted by the NBER. If you or someone you know might be interested, be sure to apply by April 27!

Heidi L. Williams @heidilwilliams_

Can we improve how we identify and develop mathematical talent among youth? With generous support from @AgencyFund, we’re excited to launch a new one-year dissertation fellowship for up to four PhD students in economics or economics-adjacent fields on this topic.

3:19 PM ∙ Mar 20, 2023

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Now, here are your regularly scheduled IFP updates:

✍️ Published Work

• Endless Frontier Fellow Aidan Mackenzie published a long Twitter thread about congestion pricing in NYC, which was then cited in multiple outlets:

  • Jonathan Chait in an article for New York magazine

  • Matt Yglesias in a post for Slow Boring

  • Eli Dourado in a research report for the Center for Growth and Opportunity

  • Noah Smith in a post for Noahpinion

Aidan Mackenzie @AidanRMackenzie

Congestion pricing in NYC is the perfect case study of what’s wrong with NEPA. This is the 4,007-page environmental assessment that took 3 years to produce even though the state legislature approved congestion pricing in 2019. Thread (1/13)

10:01 PM ∙ Mar 20, 2023

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• Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter submitted a response to the DOE’s request for information on advanced market commitments, arguing that smart DOE investment can transform the field of long-duration energy storage

  • “As Operation Warp Speed demonstrated, demand commitment mechanisms can be transformative when applied to a clear, well-scoped, commercializable goal. Today, the same demand commitments can jumpstart a robust market for long-duration energy storage, which is essential to a clean energy transition.”

Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu

"Between 2001 and 2021, only $1.8 billion was privately invested in Long Duration Energy Storage startups. By comparison, more than $33 billion was invested in blockchain and crypto startups in 2021 alone."

12:44 AM ∙ Mar 10, 2023

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• In a guest post, Gavin Leech and Misha Yagudin explained the current value and limits of forecasting, and how it can be useful to policymakers

  • “Existing research suggests that combining sources in decision-making can improve outcomes, and that forecasting can be an effective tool for improving government decision-making, even if it turns out to be only somewhat more accurate than experts.”

Institute for Progress @IFP

How should policymakers think about integrating forecasters, prediction markets, and expert judgment into decision-making? @g_leech_ and @mishayagudin lay out a framework:

progress.instituteCan Policymakers Trust Forecasters? - Institute for ProgressExperts, modelers, and forecasters try to predict events, but which of them are most reliable?

7:17 PM ∙ Mar 7, 2023

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🎤 Interviews & Events

• The dream finally becomes reality: An Econ Twitter IRL conference at Adam Ozimek’s bowling alley in Lancaster, PA (co-hosted by IFP and EIG)

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Folks, it’s finally happening… Econ Twitter IRL conference at @ModeledBehavior’s bowling alley in Pennsylvania (co-hosted by @IFP & @InnovateEconomy)

5:52 PM ∙ Mar 30, 2023

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• Co-founder Caleb Watney and Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams spoke at the Experimentation in Federal Funding conference at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Michael F. Chiang, MD @NEIDirector

Fascinating panel at @theNASEM about stimulating innovation in US Federal Agencies: Erwin Gianchandani (@NSF) Adam Russell (formerly @ARPA_H, now @UofMaryland) Jon Lorsch (@NIGMS) @heidilwilliams_ (@Stanford)

12:30 PM ∙ Mar 16, 2023

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• Paul, Caleb, and Heidi launched a re-granting program on Experiment.com to seed research projects

Heidi L. Williams @heidilwilliams_

Do you have an idea of how to accelerate scientific progress on socially important problems? If so — and if seed funding for a research project would help — please apply to a new re-granting program @PaulFNiehaus, @calebwatney, and I are co-leading.

4:19 PM ∙ Mar 9, 2023

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📰 Media

• Nikkei Asia mentioned IFP research in a story about the State Department’s decision to resume some domestic visa renewals

  • “The department had determined it was easier to collect biometric information at U.S. embassies and consulates, said the Institute for Progress, a Washington-based think tank. But a report by the institute says that domestic capacity for biometric collection has increased, and it calls for domestic reissuance, not only for petition-based visas like H and L but also for others including F (student) and J (exchange visitor) visas.”

• In her syndicated column, Veronique de Rugy highlighted research from Co-founder Alec Stapp and Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld

  • “As Alec Stapp and Jeremy Neufeld explained a few years ago: ‘Despite making up just 14% of the population, immigrants are responsible for 30% of U.S. patents and 38% of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science. A team of Stanford economists recently estimated that nearly three quarters of all U.S. innovation since 1976 can be attributed to high-skilled immigration.’”

• Alec was also referenced by The Hill in a piece on the national security threat of TikTok

  • “As Alec Stapp noted, during the Cold War, it would have been unthinkable to let the Soviet Union own CBS, NBC, or ABC.”

• Noah Smith cites Alec’s tweet about the Canadian immigration system in a post about building cutting-edge chip fabs in North America

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Canada let in a million immigrants last year. The equivalent for the US would be 9 million. Public opinion of immigration is very positive & broadly supported. How? Canada is selective about who it admits, with eligibility criteria that value higher education & skilled work.

3:49 PM ∙ Mar 25, 2023

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🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• How much safer has construction gotten?

• When did New York start building slowly?

• Which city builds skyscrapers the fastest?

• Could ChatGPT become an architect?

Caleb Watney @calebwatney

Construction used to be really, really dangerous

2:52 AM ∙ Mar 10, 2023

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👋 Tweet for the Road

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Offshore wind energy might be the starkest example of how broken our permitting process has become. The United States has 42 megawatts of offshore wind capacity in operation. There is currently more than 18,000 megawatts (!) of potential capacity stuck waiting for permits...

9:11 PM ∙ Mar 27, 2023

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We hope you’re enjoying this wintry season as much as we are at IFP. A brief note: we rolled out a new microsite to visualize America’s massive visa backlog. Check it out here: visalimbo.org. 

Without further ado, on to the updates:

✍️ Published Work

• Biosecurity Fellow Juan Cambeiro assessed the chances that the H5N1 virus could be worse than COVID, and called for increased controls on mink farms to prevent future pandemics

  • “A reasonable forecast that H5N1 causes a pandemic as bad as or worse than COVID beginning in the next year is ~4%, which means the expected cost in terms of potential harms to the U.S. is at least $640 billion”

• Biosecurity Fellow Adin Richards’s white paper on AgARDA highlights how the new program could accelerate American agricultural innovation

  • “U.S. farm output and productivity growth is slowing. From the 1960s through the early 1980s, U.S. agricultural output grew at an average annual rate of 2.45%. This fell to 1.35% for the 1980s and 1990s, and has averaged just 0.69% since 2000.”

• Bridget Williams and Rowan Kane identified policy tools to reduce the risk of engineered viruses as synthetic biology becomes cheaper

  • “The U.S. is a global leader in synthetic biology, accounting for roughly 40% of the global market. This puts the U.S. in a powerful position to set industry standards, setting the bar for typical practice, such that companies failing to meet standards can be found liable for negligence.”

• Endless Frontier Fellow Arielle D’Souza argued that cutting the Chemical Biological Defense Program (CBDP) would be penny-wise and pound-foolish

  • “Congress’ latest spending bill calls for a $126 million reduction in CBDP appropriations, despite DoD requesting an increase in multi-year funding to expand and modernize its biodefense capabilities”

• Arielle also explained how to reuse the Operation Warp Speed model for other government programs

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Operation Warp Speed was arguably the most successful government program in decades. Maybe worth building on?

9:13 PM ∙ Mar 2, 2023

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🎤 Interviews & Events

• Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams joined a panel at the American Enterprise Institute discussing metascience as a policy solution to flagging productivity growth

  

  santi ruiz @rSanti97

  great event with @tylercowen, @JimPethokoukis, Heidi, and Anthony Mills at AEI on this yesterday

  

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📰 Media

• Jeremy’s work was referenced by Bloomberg Law in two pieces about the problem with renewing visas abroad:

  • “Renewing visas in the US would offer more certainty that workers could leave the country without significant interruptions to employment that have disrupted deadlines and work duties at some companies. The option also saves workers financial burdens and puts the US on par with competitors for foreign talent like Canada and the United Kingdom, the Institute for Progress wrote last year.”

  • “‘The State Department has made concrete progress in reducing interview wait times, but ‘we’re still not approaching where we were before Covid,’ said Jeremy Neufeld, senior immigration fellow at the Institute for Progress. Adopting objective target times for completing visa interviews—as the Obama administration did in a 2012 executive order—could create the urgency needed to push wait times down, he said.”

• National Defense Magazine also quoted Jeremy in a piece highlighting how immigration reforms can help counter China:

  • “‘We see that there’s a huge labor crunch,’ said Jeremy Neufeld… ‘Something like 80 percent of firms within the defense industrial base are reporting having a hard time filling job vacancies as it is.’ And the shortage is more pronounced for sectors like semiconductors where much of the expertise is outside the United States, he added.”

• Canadian television channel CTV picked up Juan’s report on H5N1:

  • “Current known human infections have only been the result of direct contact with infected birds, according to a report by the D.C.-based think tank Institute for Progress.”

• Quartz interviewed co-founder Alec Stapp on the risks of President Biden’s “Buy American” mandate:

  • “The president’s strategy, however, is divorced from economic reality, according to Alec Stapp… ‘The economics are very clear that when you force infrastructure developers to use only American-made products, their costs are significantly higher,’ Stapp said. ‘It can vary by project, but they can often be multiples more expensive.’”

Lincoln Network 🚀🤖🏛 @JoinLincoln

🚀 Check out the latest episode of The Dynamist with @SayreEvan featuring @AlecStapp, co-founder and co-CEO of @IFP! 🎧 Give "The Geopolitics of our Energy Future" a listen today. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/epi…

podcasts.apple.com‎The Dynamist: Episode 8: Alec Stapp - The Geopolitics of our Energy Future on Apple Podcasts‎Show The Dynamist, Ep Episode 8: Alec Stapp - The Geopolitics of our Energy Future - Feb 28, 2023

6:06 PM ∙ Feb 28, 2023

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• Heidi spoke with The New York Times about the economics of drug trials:

  • “Heidi Williams… said there was a huge need for change in the industry. Yet, she said, there’s also a long history of failed technology companies that promise to make money by cutting costs from the health care system. ‘The problems are often more complicated than we realize, and the easy way to save money didn’t really work,’ Ms. Williams said.”

• Heidi was also interviewed by Nature about “golden tickets” for NSF grant reviewers:

  • “Heidi Williams, an economist at Stanford University in California who specializes in science policy, says that blinding proposals could exacerbate disparities in science. She notes, for instance, that experienced academics might write better grant proposals than do early-career colleagues, and that blinding the reviewing process means researchers from marginalized groups can’t be given extra support.”

🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• The Rise of Steel - Part I

• The Rise of Steel - Part II

• Roman vs Modern Concrete

• Goolsbee and Syverson on Construction Productivity

• Weekend roundup - Icon, Diamond Age, Cuby, Gropyus

• Does Construction Ever Get Cheaper?

• On Klein on Construction

• The Blast Furnace - 800 Years of Technology Improvement

• Construction Productivity - Structural Steel

👋 Tweet for the Road

Caleb Watney @calebwatney

How it started // How it's going 😎

12:56 PM ∙ Feb 10, 2023

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Hello,

The Institute for Progress (IFP) is celebrating our one-year anniversary!

When we launched IFP, we said that “progress is a policy choice.” We wanted to accelerate the pace of scientific, technological, and industrial progress by identifying key policy areas that are important, tractable, and neglected.

Our mission led us to focus on three initial policy verticals: metascience, high-skilled immigration, and biosecurity. These issues are each tremendously important for the long-term future, and vastly underrated as a share of the policy discourse in DC. We’ve made significant progress in each of these areas over the last year (more details in the highlights section below!).

IFP’s accomplishments over the last year are thanks to an amazing group of team members and affiliated scholars. We are grateful and humbled that they chose to take a chance on a new organization by sharing their time, talent, and ideas with us:

Team

• Juan Cambeiro, Biosecurity Fellow

• Arielle D'Souza, Endless Frontier Fellow

• Aidan Mackenzie, Endless Frontier Fellow

• Lindsay Milliken, Immigration Fellow

• Jeremy Neufeld, Senior Immigration Fellow

• Adin Richards, Biosecurity Fellow

• Santi Ruiz, Senior Editor

• Kristen Treanor, Executive Assistant

• Heidi Williams, Director of Science Policy

Senior Fellows

• Pierre Azoulay, MIT

• Matt Clancy, Open Philanthropy

• Ina Ganguli, UMass Amherst

• Ben Jones, Northwestern University

• Todd Moss, Energy for Growth Hub

• Kyle Myers, Harvard Business School

• Paul Niehaus, UC San Diego

• Nikki Teran, Open Philanthropy

Board Members

• Dan Correa, Federation of American Scientists

• Zach Graves, Lincoln Network

• Tamara Winter, Stripe Press

For 2023, we’re excited to announce a fourth policy vertical: infrastructure. With the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act, more than $1.5 trillion of public investment will be spent on climate, energy, transportation, manufacturing, and other critical areas of American infrastructure. The purpose of our research and advocacy will be to unblock bottlenecks to building in the world of atoms, ensuring that public money translates into real physical infrastructure that benefits Americans.

As part of this work, we’re bringing Brian Potter on board in a full-time capacity as a Senior Infrastructure Fellow. Brian will work on policy research projects, provide his expertise to policymakers in DC, and continue delighting readers with his Construction Physics newsletter.

In each of our policy verticals, we’re focused on nonpartisan opportunities to unblock American progress. Our work on metascience has shown how the federal government can help jumpstart the pace of progress by iteratively improving the way it funds and structures science. On immigration, we’ve pushed for streamlining high-skilled immigration pathways through both the legislative and executive branches, which is essential for maintaining American technological leadership. And our biosecurity team has pushed policymakers and public health officials to invest in innovative technologies that could prevent future pandemics and protect our country from bioweapons. 

This year, we’re excited to ramp up our work. We’re deeply grateful for your continued support.

Yours,

Caleb and Alec

✍️ Research Highlights

• Caleb and Heidi wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post on how policymakers can improve the incentives for biomedical innovation following reforms to prescription drug pricing

• Alec wrote an article for The Atlantic on the implications for policymakers of taking seriously the idea that climate change is an emergency

  • Alec, Brian, and Arnab Datta wrote a related permitting reform research report

    • As part of this report, we also drafted legislative text to aid policymakers

• Jeremy advocated in The Wall Street Journal for changes to the H1-B visa allocation method

• In American Affairs, Caleb outlined the tools on hand to make the federal government more entrepreneurial and dynamic: “But Seriously, How Do We Make an Entrepreneurial State?”

• Jeremy and Alec wrote a piece for Noah Smith’s newsletter outlining the case for high-skilled immigration reform

• Nikki wrote an article explaining the vital role BARDA has played in accelerating next-gen technologies to fight pandemics, and why the agency deserves more funding

• Jeremy produced several reports highlighting the importance of STEM immigration for our defense industrial base and for critical technologies like semiconductor manufacturing

  • This research was cited by a group of 49 former high-level national security officials in a letter to the conference committee for the CHIPS and Science Act

• We also made a splash in media outlets — IFP’s work was featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Vox, Bloomberg, The Economist, Foreign Policy, and many other publications
  

📈 Project Highlights

• With 1Day Sooner and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), we co-hosted a conference on lessons from Operation Warp Speed featuring many key leaders that helped make OWS a success, including Alex Azar, Moncef Slaoui, Paul A. Ostrowski, Peter Marks, Paul Mango, and Robert Kadlec

  • Arielle also wrote a piece following the event breaking down the OWS model and how it could be applied to future policy efforts

• We launched our Visa Limbo project, a website dedicated to continuously tracking the U.S. visa delays around the world and spotlighting potential solutions

• We launched the Metascience Working Group with FAS and the J-PAL Science for Progress Initiative. This group will provide a new forum for surfacing ideas and insights that could inform the design of science funding programs

  • Heidi and Paul wrote a related piece in Works in Progress about the ways that science can improve as a field by embracing experimentation

• We hosted an online PhD-level course with more than 80 participants on the Economics of Ideas, Science, and Innovation, which was led by our senior fellows: Pierre Azoulay, Matt Clancy, Ina Ganguli, Ben Jones, Kyle Myers, and Heidi Williams

• PS: Special shoutout to our friends at the web design firm And—Now who have helped us craft the IFP aesthetic by designing our primary website and the microsites seen above

👋 Tweet for the Road

Tamara Winter @_TamaraWinter

I am so proud of everything @calebwatney, @AlecStapp, and the entire brilliant @IFP team have accomplished in just one year! Now for year two: permitting reform, anyone?

4:46 PM ∙ Feb 10, 2023

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Happy New Year to you — we hope you’re as excited about 2023 as we are at IFP. A brief announcement: Lindsay Milliken has joined our immigration team! Lindsay has done a lot of great work to highlight underrated high-skilled immigration policy mechanisms like the Schedule A list at the Department of Labor. Watch this space 👀 

✨ As we come up on our own one-year anniversary (!), the IFP team has been hard at work — here’s what we’ve been up to over the last month:

✍️ Published Work

• Co-founder Alec Stapp and Biosecurity Fellow Juan Cambeiro wrote a response to the EPA’s request for information on indoor air quality, calling for more research into far-UVC technology 

• Biosecurity Fellow Adin Richards wrote a white paper that shows how incentivizing farmers to hold food reserves would increase global food security

  • In a related op-ed, Adin highlighted the risks we face from ceding control of global food reserves to China 

• For Works in Progress, Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams joined Senior Fellow Paul Niehaus to write about the lessons that science could learn from the field of international development — specifically, how and why to embrace experimentation: “Developing the science of science”

• Heidi also coauthored an NBER working paper titled “Representation and Extrapolation: Evidence from Clinical Trials,” on how diversifying clinical trials could build trust in new treatments among black patients and doctors

• Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld coauthored a piece with Divyansh Kaushik arguing for allowing immigrants to renew their visas in the US

• Jeremy and Senior Fellow Todd Moss explained how America’s dysfunctional visa system threatened a White House Summit

🎤 Interviews & Events

• Heidi joined a panel hosted by The Atlantic to discuss what an “Operation Warp Speed” for cancer trials could look like

• Alec appeared on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Free the Economy podcast to discuss environmental policy, housing, and the “abundance agenda”

📰 Media

• The Atlantic quoted Caleb and Heidi in a piece investigating why the age of American progress ended:

  • “The single most important thing that Operation Warp Speed did was to provide a whole-of-government urgency” to the goal of rapid deployment, Caleb Watney, a co-founder of the Institute for Progress, told me. “Getting everything right meant you needed to make a million correct decisions in the right order.”

  • According to Heidi Williams, the director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, from the time the War on Cancer was announced, in 1971, until 2015, only six drugs were approved to prevent any cancer. This reflects an enormous gap in clinical trials: From 1973 to 2011, nearly 30,000 trials were run for drugs that treated recurrent or metastatic cancer, compared with fewer than 600 for cancer prevention. How could this be?

• The Washington Post quoted Jeremy and Todd in a column about the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit:

  • “The wait time for a visitor visa appointment in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, is now 666 days; waits of at least three months are now common at US consulates across the continent,” said a CGD post by Todd Moss and Jeremy Neufeld. The problem is so bad that “the administration had to create a special visa track for participants in the White House’s own summit from civil society and the business community.”

🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Fellow Brian Potter

• Building Fast and Slow Part III: Design of the World Trade Center

• Building Fast and Slow Part IV: Construction of the World Trade Center

👋 Tweet for the Road

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

rip my mentions

9:38 PM ∙ Dec 16, 2022

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Hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. A few team announcements: Todd Moss joined IFP as a nonresident Senior Fellow; he’ll be working on U.S. visa reform. Santi Ruiz came on board as Senior Editor (and he’s writing this newsletter to you now!). And Senior Innovation Economist Matt Clancy is headed to Open Philanthropy as a Research Fellow (though he’ll still be affiliated with IFP as a Senior Fellow).

🦃 Here are some tasty morsels from the IFP team: 

✍️ Published Work

• Biosecurity Fellow Adin Richards wrote a policy brief on Unlocking American Agricultural Innovation

• Adin also wrote a white paper explaining how inefficient subsidies for inefficient fuels hurt Americans, titled How Biofuel Mandates Raise Food and Energy Prices 

• Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld co-authored a research paper on Global Skill Partnerships, bilateral migration agreements that train workers in needed skills within a country of origin prior to migration

• Co-founder Caleb Watney wrote an essay in American Affairs asking the real questions: But Seriously, How Do We Make an Entrepreneurial State?

• A new working paper from Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams and coauthors tries to decipher the complicated patchwork of patents and regulatory exclusivities needed to understand biomedical innovation

• Jeremy’s letter to the editor was also published in the Wall Street Journal, asking “Why Are H-1B Visas Apportioned by Lottery?”

  • “Awarding visas more selectively will improve the caliber of workers in the program, even if caps aren’t raised… Replacing the lottery with a points system or salary-based ranking should unite H-1B skeptics and advocates.”

🎤 Interviews & Events

• Caleb and Heidi spoke on a panel hosted by the USPTO and Santa Clara University School of Law about policy pilots; here’s Heidi’s roundup

• Co-founder Alec Stapp joined MarketWatch’s “Best New Ideas In Money” podcast to explain how high-skilled immigration can boost American innovation

  • “What we're really seeing now is an increasing war for talent globally, where countries are trying new, intentional programs that make it very easy for talented people to move there. And I think, in the United States, we have yet to see a comparable effort.”

📰 Media

• Heidi was quoted, and Senior Fellow Pierre Azoulay’s work was cited, in the Wall Street Journal, discussing the “Stagnant Scientific Productivity Holding Back Growth”

  • “Heidi Williams, an economist at Stanford University and director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, said grants typically commit a scholar to complete a specific project, even if during the research the project proves less promising than expected. Better, she said, to abandon that project and let the researcher redeploy their capital and labor to a problem closer to the frontier of science. This would likely result in more failed projects but, hopefully, more breakthroughs. ‘Science is about taking risk, and that means many projects aren’t going to work. We should build a system for funding science that explicitly acknowledges and supports that.’”

• The Journal also quoted Todd at length in a piece on visa delays

  • “The average wait time for a tourist visa appointment—the most commonly sought—is about seven weeks. But demand varies greatly by location, with some of the longest wait times in countries such as India, Mexico and Brazil where demand is highest, according to data compiled by Todd Moss, a former State Department official who is now a fellow at the Institute for Progress and founder of Visa Limbo, a website that tracks the longest wait times. Wait times in Indian cities including Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata all exceed two years, according to Mr. Moss… Mr. Moss said the issue of wait times is especially problematic compared with European nations and China, which are all processing visas at a faster clip. ‘If people have to wait months to get a visa to visit for business, tourism, or to see their families, we are not serious,’ he said. ‘The U.S. cannot possibly compete with China or the Europeans if we cannot issue visas efficiently.’”

• Senior Fellow Brian Potter received a shoutout in Morning Brew for his history of the World Trade Center’s development

🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Fellow Brian Potter

• An Overview of Concrete Forming Technology

• Comparing process improvement in manufacturing and construction: Duco vs Drywall

• Building Fast and Slow: The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center (Part I)

• Building Fast and Slow Part II - The World Trade Center

👋 Tweet for the Road

Caleb Watney @calebwatney

A chart to keep in mind this week as your relatives bring up their political views ☕️

10:06 PM ∙ Nov 22, 2022

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Hope you had a fun Halloween weekend. Two announcements up front: Kyle Myers, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, is joining the IFP team as a senior fellow! We look forward to working with him on metascience policy projects in the future.

Speaking of which… today we launched the Metascience Working Group with our friends at FAS and in collaboration with the new J-PAL Science for Progress Initiative (co-chaired by IFP fellows Paul Niehaus and Heidi Williams). We’re working to have this group be a new forum for surfacing ideas and insights that could inform the design of science funding programs.

🎃 Here are some other treats from the IFP team: 

✍️ Published Work

• Doug Elmendorf, a former CBO director and current dean at Harvard Kennedy School, wrote an essay about how to translate research findings into policy

  • Heidi Williams also wrote a related Twitter thread about how research can better serve public policy by interfacing with organizations like CBO

• Austin Vernon wrote a piece for us arguing that some land use estimates for decarbonization are wildly overblown

  • “Groups like Rewiring America are working backwards from goals of near 100% wind and solar, rather than investigating the full spectrum of clean energy solutions. When looking at our wide array of clean technologies, there’s tremendous cause for optimism. We can reach net zero emissions without devoting hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land to energy farms.”

• Arielle D'Souza wrote a call to action for the Department of Defense to invest in biosurveillance

  • “Our recommendations focus on the need to invest in core infrastructure and layered capabilities that will enable the DoD to rapidly detect, identify, attribute, and characterize any pathogen, regardless of adversarial engineering efforts or non-deliberate outbreaks of novel pathogens.”

• Jeremy Neufeld published a paper with colleagues from the Center for Global Development and the Niskanen Center about how the executive branch can implement a Global Skills Partnership with partner countries

🎤 Interviews & Events

• IFP is partnering with the USPTO and Santa Clara University School of Law on the Innovator Diversity Pilots Conference on November 18th 

  • Caleb and Heidi will be speaking on a panel about policy pilots

  • You can register to attend in person or online here

• Alec participated in a panel discussion about permitting reform hosted by Humanity Forward

• Brian was interviewed by Dwarkesh Patel for the Lunar Society podcast

• Alec participated in a panel about policy issues related to technology at an event hosted by Prime Movers Lab in Scottsdale, Arizona

📰 Media

• Heidi and Matt were quoted in an Economist article about how we can escape scientific stagnation

  • “Despite the uncertainty about exactly how best to fund scientific research, economists are confident of two things. The first is that a one-size-fits-all approach is not the right answer, says Heidi Williams of Stanford University. darpa models, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s curiosity-driven method, and even handing out grants by lottery, as the New Zealand Health Research Council has tried, all have their uses. Evaluation of them can then build knowledge of what works, says Matt Clancy, an economist who curates a continuously updated online literature survey on innovation, itself an experiment in how to improve science.”

• Caleb was quoted in an Economist article about the race between China and the West to lead the world in science and technology

  • “America may also be more daring in its investments. The Institute for Progress (IFP), an American think-tank, is helping government agencies distribute grants more effectively, says Caleb Watney, a co-founder. Erwin Gianchandani of the NSF cites “golden tickets” as an example. Rather than the standard consensus-based process to allocate funding, a single reviewer can champion a project.”

• Jeremy was quoted in an article in Roll Call about the amendments expanding visas for advanced STEM talent being left out of the NDAA:

  • “‘I think lawmakers are going to find themselves regretting letting this opportunity pass by when the new chips investments run into the labor crunch on the ground,’ Neufeld said.”

• IFP’s work on next generation COVID vaccines was mentioned in this Future Perfect article from Vox about Josh Morrison

  • “But Morrison and 1Day Sooner are just getting started. They are working with partners at the Institute for Progress and Schmidt Futures on a project called ‘Operation Warp Speed 2.0 to accelerate the development of the next generation of Covid vaccines, including universal vaccines that could cover all variants, as well as intranasal options that could lead to better protection from airborne pathogens that enter the body through the nose and throat.”

☀️ New Things Under the Sun by IFP Senior Innovation Economist Matt Clancy

• Remote Breakthroughs

• Are Technologies Inevitable?

🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Fellow Brian Potter

• Debunking the "housing variety as a barrier to mass production" hypothesis

• Why did we wait so long for wind power? Part III - offshore wind

👋 Tweet for the Road

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Insane that we don’t let international students stay in the US after they graduate with advanced STEM degrees

10:58 PM ∙ Oct 27, 2022

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Hope you are enjoying the beginning of fall. Here’s what the IFP team has been up to recently: 

✍️ Published Work

• Alec wrote an article for The Atlantic arguing that climate relief can’t wait for utopia — which means climate activists should take ideas like nuclear, direct air carbon capture, geothermal, and permitting reform seriously

  • “Yet we cannot succeed in the fight against global warming without giving many alternatives to the status quo an opportunity to evolve and prove themselves. In reality, the false solution to climate change isn’t geoengineering or nuclear energy—it’s the belief that we can decarbonize the economy only by upending our economic system, categorically rejecting certain technologies, and spurning private investment.”

• Alec and Brian published a new report with Arnab Datta from Employ America about what’s gone wrong with permitting and how to fix it

  • Draft legislative text for our policy recommendations

• We joined a coalition letter with a number of other science and immigration groups calling for improvements to the State Department’s visa processing procedures to aid international students coming to the U.S.

🎤 Interviews & Events

• Alec participated in an expert roundtable with Jason Crawford, Brad DeLong, Hannah Ritchie, Saloni Dattani, and others for the inaugural special issue from Big Think on progress

• IFP co-hosted a screening with Lincoln Network of the new Stewart Brand documentary from Stripe Press called “We Are As Gods”

📰 Media

• Ezra Klein spoke with Heidi for his recent op-ed in The New York Times about biomedical innovation

  • “Democrats should braid policies to make drugs cheaper with policies to make drug innovation easier and, in some cases, more profitable. I spent some time this week talking to Heidi Williams, an economist at Stanford who studies drug development, and the point she made is so obvious it’s a wonder we haven’t done more about it. We spend a lot on the beginning of drug development — basic science and research — and even more on the products that ultimately get developed. But we neglect the middle: All the unglamorous, difficult infrastructure needed to turn a promising molecule into a miraculous treatment.”

• Reihan Salam cited our work on high-skilled immigration reform in a recent piece for Foreign Policy

  • “Even if one stipulates that the descendants of all immigrants will fare equally well in the long run, a claim that goes beyond the historical evidence Abramitzky and Boustan carefully present, a more selective approach could yield large dividends in the interim. As the immigration advocates Alec Stapp and Jeremy Neufeld of the Institute for Progress recently put it, ‘for a given level of immigration, scientists, engineers, inventors, and entrepreneurs deliver the largest benefits.’”

• Suraj Patel cited our report on permitting reform in a piece for Time

  • “The Institute for Progress has outlined a list of policy suggestions to prevent NEPA from being used to harm the environment including giving clean energy the same regulatory treatment that fossil fuels already receive, establishing limits on judicial review arising from NEPA, establishing ‘energy security corridors’ to incentivize state and local governments to streamline their own permitting and review processes.”

• Jeremy’s research on the importance of STEM immigration to the U.S. defense industrial base was cited in a new video from Kite & Key Media

• Joel Dodge cited our work on permitting reform in an article for Washington Monthly making the case for liberals to support the deal

  • “The coal state senator may be more amenable to proposals from the Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank, which would put clean energy projects on an equal regulatory footing with fossil fuel projects (which receive numerous exemptions from environmental review law).”

• Corbin Barthold referenced our idea for a science funding lottery in a piece for City Journal

  • “Clever people are thinking hard about how to combat sludge. Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, suggests that we try to reduce paperwork in the field of scientific research by handing out grants (in part) by lottery.”

• James Coleman mentioned our permitting work in an op-ed for The Hill

  • “As the Institute for Progress explains, ‘The time limit that would likely have a major impact is restricting the ability of the courts to issue injunctions against projects that have undergone extensive environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. This change would provide developers the certainty they need to invest in large-scale … solar, wind, transmission and other clean energy infrastructure.’”

• James Broughel quoted Alec in a piece for Forbes about permitting reform

  • “As Alec Stapp of the Institute for Progress recently stated on Twitter, ‘My worry is that policymakers will say this bill ‘fixed permitting,’ and then we don't get any more reform for years.’”

☀️ New Things Under the Sun by IFP Senior Innovation Economist Matt Clancy

• September 2022 Updates

🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Fellow Brian Potter

• Why did we wait so long for wind power? Part I

• Why did we wait so long for wind power? Part II

👀 Progress Is Possible in DC (what we’re watching)

• In exchange for his vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, Senator Manchin secured a commitment from President Biden, Majority Leader Schumer, and Speaker Pelosi for a vote on permitting reform this year

  • Due to Republican opposition, permitting reform did not have the 60 votes necessary in the Senate to be added to the Continuing Resolution (which needed to pass by September 30th to avoid a government shutdown)

  • However, permitting reform could still be added to either the National Defense Authorization Act or the omnibus appropriations bill, both of which are expected to pass during the lame duck period following the midterms

  • The current bill text is a step in the right direction, but could be made considerably better

    • Republican senators would be smart to ask for stronger reforms to judicial review, such as a time limit on judicial injunctions

    • Progressives could use this opportunity to push for more categorical exclusions from NEPA review for clean energy projects such as solar, wind, and geothermal

• Senator Durbin and Senator Rounds introduced a bipartisan amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would create a green card cap exemption for STEM PhD and master’s graduates from U.S. universities

  • This is a continuation of the effort over the summer to include a similar amendment in the CHIPS and Science Act

  • Previous IFP research emphasizes the importance of international talent for national competitiveness:

    • 82% of companies in the defense industrial base report that it is difficult to find qualified STEM workers

    • 50% of the advanced STEM degree holders working in the defense industrial base are foreign-born

👋 Tweet for the Road

Jeremy Neufeld @JeremyLNeufeld

"Our findings show that only 10 to 20% of foreign graduates work in the US even in the short run, likely due to visa and policy restrictions. This significantly dampens the local returns to human capital investments that US universities generate" I would simply let them stay

9:38 PM ∙ Sep 12, 2022

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Hope you all have been enjoying the last few weeks of summer. Here’s what the IFP team has been up to recently: 

✍️ Published Work

• Caleb and Heidi wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that proposed three ideas for boosting biomedical innovation in the wake of Medicare prescription drug price changes 

• Alec and Jeremy wrote an article for Noah Smith’s newsletter making the case for high-skilled immigration reform (and offered politically tractable ideas for where to start)

• Adin wrote a comprehensive analysis of how to maintain food supplies in future pandemics

• Heidi shared the presentations from the NBER Innovation Research Boot Camp for PhD students that she co-hosted with Kevin Bryan and Ben Jones

🎤 Interviews & Events

• Matt was interviewed by James Pethokoukis in his Faster, Please newsletter

• Caleb went on the Narratives podcast

• Alec went on the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward Thinking podcast

📰 Media

• Jeremy’s work on the semiconductor workforce was quoted in Reason

  • “Solving those delays is all the more critical given the clear present need for foreign workers. ‘Even with significant recruitment from other industries and from academia, thousands of new jobs will remain vacant unless the industry is empowered to recruit top talent from abroad,’ notes Jeremy Neufeld of the Institute for Progress.”

• Jeremy spoke to National Journal about the politics behind immigration getting left out of the CHIPS and Science Act

• Jeremy also spoke to Voice of America

☀️ New Things Under the Sun by IFP Senior Innovation Economist Matt Clancy

• Innovation at the Office

• What if we could automate invention?

🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Fellow Brian Potter

• How NEPA works

• Why are there so few economies of scale in construction? Part I

• Where do economies of scale come from? Part II

• Why aren't there economies of scale in building size? Part III

👀 Progress Is Possible in DC (what we’re watching)

• The Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) was reclassified from a staff division to an operating division, which means it has equal status to the other operating divisions of HHS such as CDC and FDA

• After a mixed COVID-19 response from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced a reorganization aimed at making the agency less academic and more operational in addressing future public health crises

  • Walensky: “To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications.”

👋 Tweet for the Road

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

This really is insane when you think about it:

4:45 PM ∙ Aug 4, 2022

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Hope everyone is coping with the global heat wave — things have definitely been hot in DC recently (literally and politically!).

But first, an update on the IFP team: We added four new senior fellows to our metascience team!

• Pierre Azoulay from MIT Sloan

• Ina Ganguli from UMass Amherst

• Ben Jones from Northwestern Kellogg

• Paul Niehaus from UCSD

Paul has been collaborating closely with Heidi Williams on a J-PAL Science for Progress initiative that is closely linked with IFP’s metascience agenda. Pierre, Ina, and Ben will be jointly teaching a new online PhD course hosted by IFP on the economics of ideas, science, and innovation alongside Heidi and Matt Clancy. Current or recent students who have completed at least one year of an economics PhD program are eligible to apply. Applications are due by September 6th — apply here!

On to the rest of the update…

🎤 Interviews & Events

• Heidi co-hosted the conference on Innovation at the NBER Summer Institute with Ben Jones and Adam Jaffe. You can watch the full conference here.

  • Heidi also co-organized the Innovation Research Boot Camp for PhD students at the Summer Institute along with Ben Jones and Kevin Bryan

  • Caleb spoke at the same NBER conference on the challenges and opportunities of translating innovation research into public policy

• Jeremy appeared on NPR’s All Sides with Ann Fisher to talk about the need for international talent in the semiconductor industry

📰 Media

• Matt Yglesias gave IFP a shoutout in a reader mailbag for his Slow Boring newsletter:

  • “Thomas L. Hutcheson: Your opinion on Progress Studies? I’m for it. If you have no idea what this means, check out the Institute for Progress, a cool new think tank dedicated to finding ways to accelerate science and technological progress. Personally, I think there’s a real opportunity in this polarized world for the creation of a bunch of old-fashioned, non-partisan, narrow-pressure groups oriented around growth and progress themes. The idea would be to stay aloof from both of the two big partisan/ideological coalitions, but just enthusiastically support whatever grab-bag of candidates was willing to back core elements of the growth agenda.”

• Jeremy spoke with Politico about the connection between immigration and semiconductor manufacturing:

  • “With a short window to attract global chip companies already starting to close, a growing chorus is warning Congress they’re running out of time. ‘These semiconductor investments won’t pay off if Congress doesn’t fix the talent bottleneck,’ said Jeremy Neufeld, a senior immigration fellow at the Institute for Progress think tank.”

• Brian spoke with The Atlantic about the housing crisis:

  • “’I think the simplest, high-level way of explaining the lack of productivity [is] it’s hard to make money trying new ideas in construction, and strategies that improve productivity in other industries don’t really seem to work in construction very well,’ Brian Potter, whose Construction Physics newsletter analyzes the building industry, told me… I asked Potter whether videos of super-fast apartment-construction projects in China suggested that other countries might be cracking the code of housing innovation... ‘Just because it’s fast doesn’t mean it’s productive,’ he said. ‘These things basically work by just throwing a huge amount of resources and labor at the problem. If you watch the buildings going up, they’re using, like, three to four cranes at once just to keep things moving.’”

• Jeremy spoke with Vox about H-1B visa backlog:

  • “Historically, immigrants have played a vital role in American innovation. As Jeremy Neufeld, an immigration policy fellow with the Institute for Progress, a new innovation-focused think tank, remarked to me, ‘It’s always been the case that immigrants have been a secret ingredient in US dynamism.’ … As Neufeld points out, the Covid-19 pandemic might have gone much worse if immigration had always been as restrictive as it is now. A number of co-founders and critical researchers with Moderna are immigrants, as is Katalin Karikó, a pioneer of mRNA research — who, if she had tried to immigrate after the 1990 H-1B reforms to the skilled guest worker program, might not have been able to come to the US at all… Can an incremental approach work? Neufeld believes that changes to the H-1B system will be more likely to pass in isolation.”

• Nikki spoke with The Atlantic about what our lackluster public health response to monkeypox means for future pandemics:

  • “Nikki Teran, a geneticist and senior biosecurity fellow at the Institute for Progress, explained to me that our lackluster response to monkeypox outbreaks is largely because of administrative failures. ‘We have treatments and vaccines, but they haven’t been able to be mobilized in an effective way,’ she explained… Just last month Bill Gates told Time that we got ‘lucky’ with COVID-19. He wasn’t downplaying the horror of the disease. Instead, he was pointing out just how much deadlier it could have been. Even now, this monkeypox outbreak looks to be less deadly than worst-case scenarios. But eventually, as Teran warns, ‘we’re going to run out of luck.’”

• Jeremy spoke with Science|Business about how international talent plays into the US and Europe’s strategies to onshore chip production:

  • “What’s more, ‘the EU faces an even bigger uphill challenge than the US,’ said Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Washington DC-based Institute for Progress (IFP), a think tank hoping to speed up scientific and technology advancement. ‘Chip manufacturing tends to be a winner-take-all industry and the EU is behind the US, let alone Asia,’ he said. The semiconductor workforce in the EU is roughly 200,000, smaller than the US’s 300,000. The EU also lacks the US’s leading chip design industry, which can cross-fertilise manufacturing, Neufeld pointed out… ‘Investing in domestic education and upskilling initiatives is definitely necessary for the long-term health of the workforce but it's a long-term strategy that will not yield dividends within the quick timeline that Congress wants new semiconductor plants to be up and running,’ said the IFP’s Neufeld.”

☀️ New Things Under the Sun by IFP Senior Innovation Economist Matt Clancy

• July 2022 Updates

• Do Academic Citations Measure the Impact of New Ideas?

🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Fellow Brian Potter

• The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home - Part I

• The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home - Part II

• How building codes work in the US

👀 Progress Is Possible in DC (what we’re watching)

• The Chips and Science Act (formerly the Bipartisan Innovation Act formerly the Make It in America Act formerly USICA and America COMPETES née Endless Frontier Act) was passed by the Senate and then the House

  • A key part of the Congressional mandate given to the new TIP directorate at NSF is to experiment with diverse funding models for science

• Manchin and Schumer announced a deal on reconciliation, now branded as the Inflation Reduction Act

  • As part of this deal, Manchin has also secured a commitment from Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi to advance permitting reform in a separate bill this fall

👋 Tweet for the Road

Nikki Teran @DrNikkiTeran

World Health Organization (WHO) @WHO

🚨 BREAKING: "For all of these reasons, I have decided that the global #monkeypox outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern."-@DrTedros https://t.co/qvmYX1ZBAL

1:44 AM ∙ Jul 26, 2022

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