👋 Welcome

• Ryan Redmer joins the immigration team after five years at Microsoft, where he liaised with the federal government and helped employees navigate the changing immigration landscape.

• Sebastian Quaade and Adam Kroetsch join the biotechnology team.

  • Sebastian was most recently at the University of Chicago’s Market Shaping Accelerator, where he supported projects on climate and pandemic-preparedness innovation.

  • Adam spent a decade at the FDA and has held roles at the Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy and MITRE. He also writes a newsletter on clinical trial abundance.

• Joseph Fridman joins the editorial team, which he will support while based in Brussels. Joseph previously led communications at Convergent Research and Ginkgo Bioworks, and regularly supports experts working to communicate complex ideas to the public.

📣 Announcements

• The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law. The bipartisan package includes reforms intended to expand supply and lower barriers to building, from federal environmental review and local planning grants to modular and manufactured housing. The final law also preserves an exception for build-to-rent properties in its restriction on institutional purchases of single-family homes. IFP’s infrastructure team analyzed the bill as it moved through Congress, wrote an analysis of impacts and solutions to the build-to-rent provision, and successfully argued for a more pro-supply package. The work now moves to implement this landmark law at federal agencies and state and local governments.

• APE Explorer: Historic preservation reviews disproportionately burden clean energy and transmission. IFP analyzed 96 federal energy project reviews to see how Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act affects different kinds of infrastructure. We found that clean energy and transmission projects had review areas about ten times larger than fossil fuel projects and were more than eight times as likely to receive an “adverse effect” finding, triggering additional process, delay, and mitigation. The explorer lets readers compare the projects and download the underlying data. The visual impacts of new energy projects are typically minor, as seen in this image of a distant wind farm:

📰 Media

• Volts featured Will Poff-Webster in an episode on transit abundance, discussing why the United States pays roughly three times the international average to build transit, and how reforms to federal funding, planning, procurement, and project delivery could bring costs down.

• The Atlantic spoke with Will Poff-Webster about proposals to pay existing residents when their communities allow more housing. Will emphasized how local opposition can be rooted in status quo bias.

• MTS hosted four recent appearances by IFP experts who helped monitor the situation:

  • Olivia Scharfman explained her taxonomy of AI “doomers” and “optimists.”

  • Jonah Weinbaum discussed CAISI’s role in federal AI policy and the difficulty of attracting technical talent to government.

  • Will Poff-Webster described America’s shortage of smaller, cheaper homes and the zoning rules that constrain supply.

  • Dan Turner-Evans made the case for federal science agencies to experiment with more ways of funding research.

• unSILOed featured Brian Potter in a conversation with Greg LaBlanc about why construction productivity has lagged manufacturing and agriculture, and how scale, fixed costs, tacit knowledge, and barriers to automation shape the industry. He also spoke with Wealthfront’s Vested Interest about superwood, enhanced geothermal, grid-scale batteries, and manufactured homes.

• Cato featured Ben Schifman in a panel discussion with Jennifer Huddleston and Travis Fisher on why data-center growth need not raise household electricity rates — and how faster grid expansion could turn large new loads into an investment opportunity.

• Fortune quoted Alec Stapp praising the White House’s science funding experiments while arguing that the report missed America’s biggest advantage: attracting and retaining global scientific talent.

• The Hoover Institution published Amy Nice’s “Breaking the ‘Front Door’ of the International STEM Talent Pipeline Will Erode America’s Competitive Edge,” which warns that restrictions on international students would weaken the US STEM workforce and economic growth.

  • Amy Nice, Jeremy Neufeld, and Michael Clemens also published “Class Dismissed” with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, estimating that a sustained one-third decline in foreign STEM graduates would shrink the high-skill STEM workforce by 6.2 percent overall and 11.5 percent at the PhD level.

• Axios cited Jonah Weinbaum and Arthur Tellis’s estimate that CAISI needs $84 million annually to carry out the administration’s AI-readiness mandate.

• The Next Platform highlighted Dan Turner-Evans’s case for narrowing the Genesis Mission to a handful of clear, demonstrable goals.

✍️ Policy Work

• Picking the Right Challenges for Genesis Mission. Dan Turner-Evans makes the case that the Department of Energy should narrow Genesis Mission’s 26 challenge areas, focusing on concrete outcomes, and clarify whether its priority is a general AI-for-science platform or a smaller set of high-leverage mission problems. He argues that a more focused program would be easier to fund, evaluate, and explain.

• Science Agencies Need Metascience Units. Matthew Esche, Andrew Gerard, and Jenn Gustetic propose that nimble teams inside federal science agencies should run experiments and analyze internal data to help advance scientific progress. Housed in agency leadership offices, these units could test improvements to program design and help programs scale the approaches that prove fruitful.

🏛️ Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

• The James C. Scott Memorial Episode. Santi is joined by Dan Wang to discuss the life and work of James C. Scott. They talk about how Scott’s fieldwork shaped his account of state capacity and peasant life, how geographical features and practices of everyday resistance constrain authority, and why Scott’s ideas about legibility remain ever-useful in the age of large language models.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• How Predictable Are Laws? Brian uses an AI model to compare the expected and actual effects of 239 federal laws passed over nearly five decades, finding that most laws had roughly the effects intended. About 11 percent diverged substantially, often because courts, agencies, later Congresses, or the wider world behaved in ways that the original lawmakers did not anticipate.

• The Fall and Rise of Screwworm. Brian traces how the United States eradicated the vicious screwworm by growing and air-dropping hundreds and hundreds of millions of sterile male flies, eventually pushing its defensive barrier south to a narrow strip of land in Panama. With the parasite now resurgent in Texas and New Mexico, Brian argues that the program may have become a victim of its own success.

• Can We Lower Construction Costs with Cheaper Labor or Materials? Construction’s on-site nature makes cheaper labor difficult to access, while many common building systems are already close to the frontier of material efficiency. Brian shows that some materials may still have room for lower prices, but permitting barriers, tariffs, and risk aversion make those savings difficult to capture.

• Why Is Everyone Trying to Build a Solid-State Battery? Brian teaches us the mechanism, pros, and cons of lithium-ion batteries, and explains how future solid-state batteries could outperform conventional lithium-ion batteries. Today, the new technology is still immature and commercial viability remains uncertain.

🏭 Factory Settings by Mike Schmidt and Sara Meyers

• How CHIPS Adopted Risk Practices from Banking. Andrew Kuritzkes, Chief Risk Officer of the CHIPS Program Office, explains how they built an independent risk function modeled on private-sector finance. Future government investment programs should have sophisticated internal risk analysis that balances total risk against strategic returns, but should not try to eliminate risk so thoroughly that programs cannot achieve their goals.

• Govern Your Data Before You Have Any. Sara Meyers recounts how CHIPS pre-designed a data-governance regime, using a sensitivity-tagged inventory, least-privilege access, automated controls, and explicit staff accountability. The system helped prevent serious technical or accidental breaches. Sara concludes by arguing that future programs should build flexible workflows early, pairing architecture with culture, since rules alone cannot prevent deliberate leaks.

🔬 Macroscience by Andrew Gerard

• Five Reasons to Study the Economics of Innovation. Matt Clancy launches IFP’s free, 11-lecture Economics of Ideas, Science, and Innovation video course. In the first lecture, “Why should we study the economics of ideas?”, Benjamin Jones explains what makes ideas distinctive economic goods — and how spillovers and market failures create a case for public support of innovation.

• Chad Jones on Idea-Based Models of Economic Growth. In the second Economics of Ideas lecture, Chad Jones explains how innovation has powered long-run economic growth — and how AI might reshape it. His “weak links” model suggests AI could eventually bring profound abundance, but economy-wide growth effects may take decades to materialize.

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📣 Announcements

Last month, we launched a few major projects:

• The Atlas of Innovation, a tool to help funders navigate the world of innovation funding mechanisms. As funders answer questions about their innovation goal, the Atlas guides them to one of 13 funding approaches in the innovation library, explaining when the approach works well and how it can fail.

• The Transit Abundance Playbook, a collection of 15 concrete ideas to build transit faster and cheaper, including better upfront planning, leaner designs, itemized and value-based procurement, single accountable project decision-makers, and faster permitting for voter-approved projects.

• IFP and FAI co-organized an open letter urging Congress to require screening of commercial DNA orders for bioweapons. The letter was signed by Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, and many others, and received coverage from the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Fortune. Alongside the letter, we also published a report from Sentinel Bio: How to Secure the DNA Supply Chain.

👋 Welcome

• Liam Epstein joins our Emerging Tech team as an Associate Fellow to work on AI policy and technical state capacity. Liam previously worked at CNAS as a Research Associate.

• We have two new hires on the Operations team: Zigmund Forrest joins us as an Operations Associate, and Eitan Casaverde joins us as an Operations Coordinator.

📰 Media

• Slow Boring featured Arnab Datta and Will Poff-Webster’s How to Fix Transit Construction in America, the introduction to the Transit Abundance Playbook. Will also appeared on the Talking Headways podcast.

• Bloomberg quoted Saif Khan on two rules relating to export controls on AI chips in the context of NVIDIA sales of Blackwell chips, a topic covered by this IFP report from October 2025.

• The Washington Post cited Santi Ruiz’s Statecraft podcast with Randy Clarke, head of the D.C. Metro, in a piece on free buses in Kansas City.

• Marketplace featured Brian Potter in a radio piece on the US shipbuilding revival’s reliance on Finnish icebreakers, a topic he’s previously covered on Construction Physics.

• Bloomberg Law quoted Amy Nice on the USCIS’s inability to add green-card criteria without formal rulemaking.

• IEEE Spectrum quoted Jenn Gustetic on the National Science Foundation’s X-Labs solicitation.

• E&E News quoted Ben Schifman on the recent debate around overhauling the National Historic Preservation Act.

• Florida Trend quoted Connor O’Brien throughout H-1B Limbo, a piece on Florida’s pause on university H-1B sponsorship.

• Science|Business’s David Matthews interviewed Matthew Esche for a piece on the Atlas of Innovation in the context of European science funding.

📋 Policy work

• Reforming Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. Ben Schifman and Aidan Mackenzie show how historic preservation, originally a modest procedural check, swelled into a substantial brake on energy and other infrastructure. They propose right-sizing it by limiting review, capping visual-impact studies (so one transmission line doesn’t trigger thousand-square-mile analyses), and setting statutory deadlines for each step, in line with recent NEPA reforms.

• A Speed-for-Security Bargain for AI Data Centers. Ben Schifman argues that keeping the next generation of AI R&D onshore depends on grid interconnection that is both fast and secure. In this report, he lays out how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can speed interconnection while hardening the grid against the risks that come with it.

• Every public comment on DOL’s prevailing wage rule. Our High-Skilled Immigration team built a microsite to display public comments to the Department of Labor’s prevailing wage rule.

✍️ Statecraft

• The Strongman Presidency. Santi talks with Johns Hopkins University’s William Howell and Stanford’s Terry Moe about their 2025 book on the rise of executive power, and how a federal workforce that “were mostly mailmen” became a battleground for presidential control.

• Merit vs. Tenure: Reforming Federal Firing. Santi speaks with Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and Scott’s Senior Advisor, Noah Peters. Together, they dig into why the rules for how and whether federal employees can be fired have become “so incredibly unadministerable.”

🏗️ Construction Physics

• Converting Coal Plants to Natural Gas. Brian explains how coal plants are converted to be able to process natural gas. He traces how ~140 US coal plants were converted to burn natural gas since 2008 and explains why the wave is largely over, now that the best candidates are converted and grid batteries undercut gas peakers.

• How Long Does It Take to Plan a Bridge? Brian looks into the history of bridge building and repair, analyzing 67 major bridges built since 1900. He finds construction times roughly doubled (from 3.1 years on average in 1940–59 to 6.5 by the 1980s–90s) while planning timelines held steady at about a decade, and that the construction efforts moving fastest today are bridge replacements.

• US Subways Build Too Many Cross Passages. In this piece from the Transit Abundance Playbook, Brian shows how a fire-safety rule (NFPA 130’s demand for a connecting passage every 800 feet) that is roughly twice as strict as Europe’s equivalent standard adds millions per passage to subway costs.

• Biological Evolution and Information Acquisition. Brian looks at different forms of biological reproduction from an information-theoretic perspective. Through simulations, he shows how sexual reproduction speeds evolution the way modular engineering speeds innovation, by letting many good ideas be tested for advancement at once, instead of trapping them in a single lineage.

🏭 Factory Settings

• What Is Economic Resilience? In this cross-post with ChinaTalk, Mike Schmidt and Nikita Lalwani map three kinds of threats (demand shocks, geopolitical coercion, random supply disruptions) against three sources of resilience (stockpiles, domestic capacity, surge ability). They make the counterintuitive case for the benefit of partial progress, showing that even maintaining a quarter of domestic production for a critical input can capture far more than a quarter of the strategic benefit because an adversary’s leverage collapses as their dominance erodes.

🔬 Macroscience

• The Six Camps of Metascience. Caleb Watney and Jenn Gustetic offer a field guide to metascience for policymakers, organizing the current field into six camps, each of which diagnoses a different failure and proposes its own improvement program: research integrity, open science, metrics of science, innovation economics, R&D management, and institutional entrepreneurs. They make the case that most durable reform efforts borrow from several camps at once.

• Making Our Own Luck. Kris Willis describes a method for predicting scientific breakthroughs years ahead by reading publication patterns in PubMed and proposes testing this method directly by funding half of 30 predicted fields for a decade (~$300M/year) and measuring their progress against unfunded controls.

👋 Tweet for the Road

One big announcement to flag upfront: we’re hiring a Member of Technical Staff. We’re looking for a full-stack software engineer to give our 35-person team the leverage of a think tank 10 times its size. The role reports to Tim Fist and Olivia Jimenez, is based in DC (remote considered), and applications close May 31. The salary range for this role is $165,000 to $245,000 and we’ll pay a $5,000 referral reward for anyone you send our way who gets hired. Apply here.

💜 Welcome

• Jenn Gustetic joined as Director of Metascience and R&D Policy. She brings 20+ years of experience leading R&D portfolios and innovation programs (most recently at NASA) to IFP’s work on how the US science and technology enterprise produces breakthroughs and delivers a return on research funding.

• Leah Libresco Sargeant joined as Editorial Director. She comes from the Niskanen Center, where she was a senior policy analyst, and brings a writing and editing career spanning FiveThirtyEight, her Other Feminisms Substack, and her 2025 book The Dignity of Dependence.

• Olivia Scharfman joined as a Biotechnology Fellow, where she’ll work across biosecurity and biotech policy. Previously, she co-founded LincSwitch Therapeutics and was a Principal at The SALT Fund investing in biology and deep tech. She has a degree in Molecular Biophysics from Yale.

📣 Announcements

• The Deliverome Project. Becca J. Carlson and Bobby Hollingsworth launched a new Focused Research Organization, Deliverome Bio, in The Launch Sequence this week. Deliverome Bio is a coordinated effort to increase the number of actionable targets for precision medicine delivery tenfold within five years, by developing and publishing the missing datasets required to evaluate which surface proteins are suitable as delivery targets. We are very excited for their launch, which is being supported by seed funding from Radial at the Astera Institute, as well as support from Biognosys, Evosep, and Anthropic.

• The Launch Sequence is open for proposals. Our rolling solicitation invites researchers and builders working across science, security, and society to help us find, scope, and build the most important projects to prepare the world for advanced AI.

• Progress Conference applications close on May 31. It sold out last year, so don’t wait to apply!

📰 Media

• Fox News broke the story of the new OPT Fair Tax Act from Rep. Glenn Grothman and Sen. Tom Cotton, which would end the OPT payroll-tax exemption. The article cites IFP’s estimate that doing so would raise $27–36 billion over a decade.

  • Jeremy Neufeld was also quoted in the bill’s announcement, saying the Act “stands to raise $32 billion while bringing fairness to the OPT program.”

• Reason quoted Will Poff-Webster on the House’s move to strip the build-to-rent disposition requirement from the housing bill, which he said turns the package “into something that is unambiguously good for housing supply.”

✍️ Policy Reports

• What Will It Cost for the US to Be Ready for the Next Big AI Breakthrough? Jonah Weinbaum and Arthur Tellis estimate that the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) needs at least $84 million a year, an increase from its roughly $15 million budget today, to deliver on its readiness mandate from the AI Action Plan. For the cost of one F-35, America can secure the capacity to anticipate and respond to frontier AI developments, a gap exposed when the capabilities of Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5 caught federal agencies flat-footed against the potential of AI-enabled cyberattacks.

• A Pro-Supply To-Do List for Congress’s Housing Bill. Rohan Aras, Will Poff-Webster, Andrew Justus, and Reed Schwartz lay out how the final housing package can maximize homebuilding by amending Section 901, and combining the strongest supply provisions from both the House and Senate bills, rather than settling for the lowest common denominator.

• A comment to the Department of Labor on H-1B prevailing wages. Connor O’Brien and Jeremy Neufeld submitted a response to the Department of Labor’s notice of proposed rulemaking on prevailing wages for employment-based visas. They argue the Department should adopt an “Experience Benchmarking” alternative, which would set wage floors based on each foreign worker’s actual education and experience rather than employer-defined job classifications. IFP estimates that DOL’s primary proposal would let roughly one in six H-1B visas go to workers paid less than comparable Americans.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• Where Are the Economies of Scale in Homebuilding? Homebuilding is a surprisingly fragmented industry. Brian asks why even the largest US homebuilders show almost no cost advantage over much smaller competitors, even in factory-built manufactured housing. He finds the answer in homebuilding’s ratio of finished cost to raw-material cost (around 2 to 1), which leaves little room for scale to whittle down.

• How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions? Brian builds an AI simulation to estimate how much earlier 190 major inventions could each have plausibly appeared in history. The answer is mostly “not very long” — though a handful, like the safety pin, could have shown up millennia sooner.

• The Rise of Build-to-Rent Housing. Brian traces the rapid growth of build-to-rent single-family homes, homes built by developers or acquired from homebuilders for tenancy by renters, which represented less than 2% of new housing starts in the 1990s to more than 7% today. He then analyzes the evidence for BTR’s effect on the housing market and home prices.

🏭 Factory Settings by Mike Schmidt, Todd Fisher, and Sara Meyers

• A Cheat Sheet for Attracting Private Sector Talent to Government. Arrington Luck surveys and interviews former CHIPS Program Office staff to find out how the program lured financial and technical talent out of the private sector into government service. The answer? Communicating the chance for outsized impact, embracing time-bound “stints” rather than forever jobs, landing credible anchor hires early, recruiting through non-traditional channels, and selling the mission.

🔬 Macroscience by Andrew Gerard

• Metascience Is Ignoring the National Labs. Jordi Cabana argues that the metascience movement’s enthusiasm for new institutions overlooks America’s existing National Labs, like the ones funded at $30-billion-a-year in the DOE’s budget. He calls them “the original FROs” and makes the case for National Lab reform, rather than just building new models around them.

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📣 Announcements

• Hewson Duffy joined as an Editorial Fellow. Previously, Hewson was a summer fellow at the Centre for the Governance of AI, studied Computer Science and History at Harvard, and was a Magazine Chair at The Crimson.

📰 Media

• CNN quoted Will Poff-Webster on the Senate housing bill’s restrictions on institutional investors in single-family rentals, arguing the provision scapegoats investors at the expense of middle-income renters who can’t afford to buy.

• Bloomberg Law quoted Connor O’Brien on the DOL’s proposed H-1B wage overhaul, arguing the current wage tier framework fails to compare foreign and American workers with similar qualifications.

• The Hoover Institution featured Amy Nice on two underutilized visa pathways for recruiting top international STEM talent: the J-1 researcher visa and the O-1A extraordinary ability visa.

• ICEF Monitor cited a NAFSA/IFP survey finding that 54% of current international students would not have chosen the U.S. without the OPT program.

• Tim Hwang and Ben Murphy spoke at Harvard Law School on a panel exploring historical analogues for how institutions should adapt to rapid technological change.

• The Niskanen Center published an article by Reed Schwartz on Hawaii’s experiment with split-rate land value taxes and how to protect future land value tax shifts from backlash.

✍️ Policy reports

• How Section 901 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Reduces Housing Supply. Will Poff-Webster and Reed Schwartz examine how Section 901 of the bipartisan housing package, which restricts large institutional investors from buying single-family homes and imposes a seven-year disposition requirement on build-to-rent construction, could affect new housing supply.

🏛️ Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

• What Trump Can Learn From Nixon. Santi reviews Richard P. Nathan’s The Plot That Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency and examines how presidents from FDR to Nixon to Trump have tried to wrangle the federal bureaucracy.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• How an Oil Refinery Works. Brian walks through the core processes refineries use to convert crude oil into useful products, with Chevron’s Richmond facility as a case study, and zooms out to show the massive scale of global refining.

• Construction Costs Rarely Fall. Brian assembles construction cost indexes stretching all the way back to 1870. Across all that time, all around the world, construction costs tend to rise at or above the level of inflation.

• Helium Is Hard to Replace. Brian explores the helium supply chain after its disruption by the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Due to its unique chemical properties, helium is difficult to substitute for in uses like welding, MRI machines, and semiconductor manufacturing.

• Information and Technological Evolution. Brian replicates some experiments from a 2006 paper by economist Brian Arthur, using simulations to evolve complex Boolean logic circuits from simple building blocks, helping us think through how innovators can invent new technologies from the immense and complex search space of possible tech.

🏭 Factory Settings by Mike Schmidt, Todd Fisher, and Sara Meyers

• How Uncertainty Could Kill US Industrial Policy. Arnab Datta examines how unstable legal authority and annual appropriations cycles affect government-backed industrial deals, drawing on the CHIPS Secure Enclave reallocation and the MP Materials rare earths package as case studies.

• How to Hire from Wall Street Without Compromising Your Government Program. Sara Meyers describes the ethics architecture CHIPS built to manage conflict-of-interest risks while recruiting senior private-sector talent, such as pre-employment portfolio vetting and broader divestiture requirements.

• An Inside View of the Davis-Bacon Act. Mike Schmidt examines how applying the 1931 prevailing wage law to CHIPS shaped negotiations and implementation across major fab projects, covering challenges like retroactive pay, wage classification, and program-level cost dynamics.

🔬 Macroscience by Andrew Gerard

• Americans Want More Science Funding. Andrew Gerard and McKenzie Leier review new survey evidence on how Americans feel about federal R&D spending, and examine whether agencies are on track to spend the funds Congress appropriated for fiscal year 2026.

• Enabling the CHIPS R&D Agenda. Donna Dubinsky walks through how the National Semiconductor Technology Center was structured to fill gaps in shared research facilities, pre-competitive research, workforce development, and high-risk semiconductor investment, and what its termination means for future R&D programs.

👋 Tweet for the Road

• Financial Times, Politico, and NBC News quoted Alec Stapp, Saif Khan, and Tim Fist discussing the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, arguing the move will discourage AI companies from working with the federal government.

• In City Journal, Jeremy Neufeld and Connor O’Brien write about the new DOL proposed rule for H-1B prevailing wages, arguing the administration should adopt “Experience Benchmarking” to end the practice of employers using foreign workers to undercut American labor.

• Reuters quoted Saif Khan on proposed new AI chip export rules, saying it “could help the US government address chip diversion to China.”

• USA Today cited Jeremy Neufeld’s estimates of birth tourism and birthright citizenship ahead of a major Supreme Court case.

• The Hoover Institution published a piece by Amy Nice examining whether H-1B workers actually displace American workers. IFP’s immigration research is also cited in a separate Hoover analysis of H-1B wage gaps.

• Chemistry World quoted Connor O’Brien on the impact of Florida and Texas H-1B hiring bans on university science departments.

• The Joint Economic Committee invited Jeremy Neufeld to testify on labor inflows, competitiveness, and supporting an aging population.

• American Compass cited Jeremy Neufeld and Santi Ruiz in a policy brief on fixing the H-1B visa program, drawing on IFP’s analysis of how the current fee and lottery system fail to prioritize the highest-skilled workers.

• ICEF Monitor cited research by Jeremy Neufeld and Amy Nice on the 36% drop in US student visa issuances and the long-term consequences for the STEM workforce if OPT restrictions move forward.

📅 Events

• On April 6 from 5:30–8pm, IFP and Roots for Progress Institute are co-hosting a happy hour. Register here.

✍️ Policy reports

• A Prescription for Fixing the Prevailing Wage System Connor O’Brien, Jeremy Neufeld, and Amy Nice analyze DOL’s proposed overhaul of prevailing wages for H-1B and employment-based green card programs. They argue that, more often than not, DOL’s preferred “Blind Benchmarking” proposal would fail to compare foreign worker pay to what similarly qualified Americans earn. They make the case for DOL’s alternative method, “Experience Benchmarking,” which has 100% accuracy.

• When Do More AI Chips for China Mean Fewer for the United States? Georgia Adamson and Tim Fist demonstrate how NVIDIA H200 production for China would divert chips from US customers. Because H200s and Blackwells compete for the same memory and packaging capacity, production for China would come at the direct expense of US buyers and allies in the current 100% supply-constrained environment.

• Fast and Secure Grid Interconnection for American AI Leadership Ben Schifman responds to FERC’s proposed rules for how large loads like AI data centers connect to the grid, arguing FERC should standardize the process and unlock dormant capacity, but condition expedited access on robust security standards.

• America’s AI Exports Program Georgia Adamson, Tim Fist, and Sam Winter-Levy offer recommendations for the Trump administration’s AI Exports Program. They propose prioritizing US-operated cloud services, tailoring export packages to different market sizes, and focusing on emerging markets where American presence is contested.

🏛️ Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

• How the National Security Strategy Gets Made. Nadia Schadlow, former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy and lead architect of the 2017 National Security Strategy, discusses the coalition-building behind these documents, the competing power nodes across agencies, and why time is an underappreciated element of strategy.

• Ten Thoughts on Government Data. Violet Buxton-Walsh reflects on lessons from building IFP’s OPT Observatory with DHS data: government datasets are collected for narrow administrative purposes, leading to gaps and idiosyncrasies that require unusual combinations of legal, policy, and technical expertise to navigate.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home examines why factory-built housing has consistently failed to deliver dramatic cost reductions. Despite nearly a century of attempts, savings tend to land in the 10–20% range at best. The answer: prefabricators often end up emphasizing speed or quality rather than cost.

• A History of Operation Breakthrough tells the story of HUD’s ambitious 1969 program to industrialize American homebuilding. Modeled after Apollo, Breakthrough funded 22 prefabricated building systems across nine sites. Then conventional homebuilders doubled output on their own, and most Breakthrough systems were soon out of production.

• The Age of the Amplifier traces how AT&T’s quest to boost telephone signals produced a string of transformative inventions: the vacuum tube, the negative feedback amplifier, the transistor, and the laser. Each was built to solve a narrow telephony problem but eventually reshaped entire industries.

🏭 Factory Settings by Mike Schmidt, Todd Fisher, and Sara Meyers

• Did the CHIPS Act Trigger the Manufacturing Construction Boom? Skanda Amarnath examines whether the historic surge in manufacturing construction was driven by CHIPS or already underway. A regional analysis suggests it was policy-driven and sector-specific: four census divisions account for 88% of the national increase since 2019, concentrated where CHIPS-funded semiconductor projects are located.

• What Does World War II Teach Us About Industrial Policy Today? Mike Schmidt revisits Destructive Creation to argue that supply-side public investment has always been America’s playbook for industrial mobilization, but shows that today’s more complex, globalized threat environment demands new demand-side thinking alongside it.

• A Rare Ode to Redundant Meetings. Sara Meyers explains how the CHIPS Program Office managed dozens of deals in parallel by building overlapping “throughput meetings,” each scoped to a specific slice of the pipeline. The redundancy sounds inefficient, but the pipeline was moving too fast for any single meeting to carry the current state of reality, making these meetings instrumental in closing deals.

🔬 Macroscience by Andrew Gerard

• How Close Are We to Connecting Our Brains to the Matrix? Dan Turner-Evans surveys the state of the art in whole-brain emulation, pushing back on recent hype. The field has made extraordinary advances in mapping cell types and neural connectivity, but meaningful whole-brain emulation will require patient, sustained effort, rather than a single breakthrough.

• Virtue Metascience. Tim Hwang and Ian Banks argue that metascience should care not just about whether science produces useful outcomes, but whether it cultivates a virtuous scientific practice. The distinction parallels consequentialist versus virtue ethics and offers another measure by which to prioritize reforms.

👋 Tweet for the Road

• Brielle Hill joined us as our Director of Operations. Previously, Brielle was the Chief of Staff for the Economic Security and Technology Department at CSIS and Associate Director for the Wadhwani AI Center.

📰 Media

• The New York Times quotes Tim Fist on the shortcomings of China’s chip industry:

  • “Chinese companies will most likely make just 2% as many AI chips as foreign firms do this year.”

• The Washington Post mentions IFP’s work on building energy capacity fast to power AI development.

• The Wall Street Journal cites Connor O’Brien’s research showing that computer scientists earn “63% more than the typical young graduate, up from 47% in 2009.”

• Bloomberg Law quotes Connor on how Texas and Florida’s new H1-B restrictions could leave their states with fewer doctors.

• Business Insider cites Connor's analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey in a discussion of whether the age of first-time homebuyers is actually going up.

• Poynter cites our analysis showing how exporting H200s without restrictions could shrink America’s compute advantage.

• Reason quotes Will Poff-Webster’s support of Congress’s proposed updates to the PRO Housing program.

✍️ Policy Reports

• How to Create Real Permitting Certainty. Aidan Mackenzie explains how the bipartisan FREEDOM Act can break the cycle of executive abuse in federal permitting by setting universal timelines, preventing revocation of approved permits, and backing these protections with enforceable legal remedies.

• Breaking the NEPA Litigation Doom Loop. Ben Schifman examines how NEPA traps infrastructure projects in cycles of review, litigation, and re-review lasting years — even though agencies prevail in ~80% of cases. He then presents several options for reform, from barring courts from halting projects to more targeted fixes.

• Beyond AlphaFold. Dan Turner-Evans shares a framework for how science funders can unlock more AlphaFold-like breakthroughs with targeted investments in datasets, domain expertise, and compute.

🏛️ Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

• How to Rewire City Hall. Santi interviews James Anderson of Bloomberg Philanthropies about how his team helped more than 900 cities build problem-solving capacity. They discuss why local governments are stuck in a Fordist model and what it takes to help mayors govern differently.

• What’s Wrong with Nonprofits? Santi and Greg Berman, author of The Nonprofit Crisis, discuss why public trust in nonprofits has eroded, how the federal and local governments depend on NGOs for service delivery, and what nonprofit leaders can do to refocus on mission.

• How a Congressional Office Actually Works. Santi interviews Baillee Brown, former chief of staff to Congressman Scott Peters, about the inner workings of a House office, from how schedulers control members’ time to how legislative assistants juggle eight issue areas at once.

• When FAFSA Broke, They Called This Guy. Santi interviews Jeremy Singer, president of the College Board, about his six months salvaging the botched 2023 FAFSA redesign at the Department of Education and how the fix made 1.7 million more students eligible for maximum Pell Grants.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• Trends in US Construction Productivity. Brian examines decades of data showing that US construction productivity has been essentially flat since the 1960s, even as productivity in the rest of the economy tripled. He then walks through why different metrics all point to the same trend.

• Is the Future “AWS for Everything”? Brian explores whether capital-intensive industries could follow the cloud computing model: large-scale operations producing a wide range of outputs in low volumes, and where the model is most likely to work.

🏭 Factory Settings by Mike Schmidt, Todd Fisher, and Sara Meyers

• How the US Won Back Chip Manufacturing. In a crosspost with ChinaTalk, Mike Schmidt and Todd Fisher discuss how the CHIPS program catalyzed the biggest semiconductor buildout in memory and when similar interventions might be warranted.

• A User’s Guide to Government Equity Investing. Arnab Datta proposes a four-part test for evaluating government equity stakes in private companies, arguing that equity is a useful industrial policy tool but needs guardrails to avoid politicized mismanagement.

• Getting What You Want from Industrial Policy. Todd Fisher explains how the CHIPS team used tailored milestones to ensure accountability: they unlocked funding only when companies hit specific operational targets, turning federal grants into something closer to private equity.

🔬 Macroscience by Andrew Gerard

• Do Not Surrender to the Tech Tree. Tao Burga defends technological determinism — the idea that the tech tree’s structure largely determines which technologies emerge — but argues that deliberate action can still shape when and how they develop, even as AI narrows the window for steering outcomes.

👋 Tweet for the Road

• The Launch Sequence is now open for new pitches:

  • With more than $25 billion flowing into AI resilience and AI-for-science from funders like the OpenAI Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we’re building a collection of concrete projects to accelerate science, strengthen security, and adapt institutions for advanced AI. Submit a short pitch, and we’ll help develop your idea, connect you with funders, and get it built. We’re offering a $10,000 honorarium for published proposals.

• Reed Schwartz joined us as an Associate Infrastructure Fellow. Reed previously worked at the Niskanen Center on housing and transportation policy.

• Gaurav Sett joined us as a Non-Resident Fellow. Gaurav is a PhD student in Policy Analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy researching AI and national security.

📰 Media

• The Financial Times and Foreign Affairs cited our H200 exports analysis. From Foreign Affairs:

  • “According to analysis by the Institute for Progress, if the United States exported no advanced chips to China, its compute capacity in 2026 would be more than ten times that of China’s. With aggressive H200 exports, however, the U.S. advantage could dwindle to the single digits — or, under some scenarios, disappear.”

• The Center for Security and Emerging Technology published a report on the automation of AI R&D co-authored by Saif Khan: “When AI Builds AI.”

• The White House Council on Economic Advisers cited IFP’s research in its report “Artificial Intelligence and the Great Divergence.”

• Connor O’Brien wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle discussing Governor Abbott’s new policy for H-1Bs in Texas.

📅 Events

• We hosted a Metascience Working Group meeting featuring former OSTP Director Kelvin Droegemeier, National Academies Senior Program Officer Alex Helman, and NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Jon Lorsch.

• On February 11th, we’re co-hosting an FDA Transparency Happy Hour with 1Day Sooner and FAI. Join us for drinks and remarks on using AI for redaction and release of FDA records, the Common Technical Documents fund, and legislative opportunities to promote FDA transparency in 2026. RSVP here.

✍️ Policy Reports

• Protect Human Subjects, Not Bureaucracy. Ruxandra Teslo and Matthew Esche examine how Institutional Review Boards prioritize procedural compliance and slow down research. They propose encouraging federally funded investigators to choose among accredited IRBs, introducing competition and accountability into the system.

• The Cost of the OPT FICA Exemption. Jeremy Neufeld and Violet Buxton-Walsh analyze a tax exemption that allows many employers to hire international students on Optional Practical Training while avoiding Social Security and Medicare contributions. They find that closing this exemption would raise $27–36 billion over 10 years.

• Proxy Praxis: Why Validating an Endpoint Took 12 Years. Ruxandra Teslo examines why it took 12 years to validate bone mineral density as a surrogate endpoint for osteoporosis trials, despite the biomarker being in clinical use since the 1980s.

🏛️ Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

• One Year of Trump’s Economic Statecraft. Santi interviews Biden officials Daleep Singh and Peter Harrell, as well as IFP’s Arnab Datta, about the Venezuelan oil seizure, the China trade deals, the MP Materials rare earths investment, and economic statecraft lessons from the administration’s past year.

• What’s Wrong with NIH Grants? Santi interviews Mike Lauer, the former NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research. They discuss how the grant system went from funding 60% of applications in the 1950s to just 10% today, why scientists spend 45% of their time on paperwork instead of research, and how block grants could fund more breakthrough science.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• Do Commodities Get Cheaper Over Time? Brian looks at 124 commodities and found that prices have historically fallen — until 2000. The key pattern: the more production resembles manufacturing, the more prices fall.

• On Technologies vs. Commodities. Brian examines the popular claim that renewables will keep getting cheaper while fossil fuels won’t. He finds the distinction is real but overstated: both can see falling prices from tech improvements, and both can face resource constraints.

• The Surprisingly Long Life of the Vacuum Tube. Brian traces how vacuum tubes birthed a surprisingly sprawling technological ecosystem: from triodes enabling transcontinental telephone lines to magnetrons in microwave ovens and klystrons in cancer treatment machines.

• How Did TVs Get So Cheap? Brian investigates why a 50-inch TV that cost $1,100 in 2001 now costs under $200. The main driver is that the giant glass sheets used in LCD manufacturing have grown nearly 100x larger over the past few decades, dramatically reducing equipment costs per unit of display area.

🏭 Factory Settings by Mike Schmidt, Todd Fisher, and Sara Meyers

• The Paperwork Reduction Act Doesn’t Reduce Paperwork. In a crosspost with Jen Pahlka’s Eating Policy, Sara Meyers details the irony of PRA compliance. To create a voluntary 5-minute meeting request form, CHIPS had to produce a 20-page screenshot document, a 7-page supporting statement, and three notices.

• Consultants: Tool, Not Crutch. Sara Meyers explains how CPO used more than 100 consultants effectively. A key lesson: specialized work (financial modeling, environmental review) outsources well; general program management does not.

• How to Rebuild American Industry. In this crosspost from American Compass’s Commonplace, Mike Schmidt joins Oren Cass to discuss what it took to stand up the CHIPS program: negotiating with chipmakers, combining grants and tax credits, and what “everything bagel” critics missed.

• Eight Legal Challenges CHIPS Navigated. Mike Schmidt describes how legal negotiations over clawbacks, indemnification, and change-of-control rights became the central challenge of closing CHIPS deals, often escalating to CEOs and boards.

🔬 Macroscience by Andrew Gerard

• NSF Tech Labs FAQs. Andrew breaks down Tech Labs, which will invest up to $1 billion over five years to fund independent research organizations with $10–50 million annually. Like IFP’s X-Labs framework, Tech Labs moves from incremental grants toward flexible, milestone-based funding.

• Five Prescriptions for Simplifying Science Policy. Andrew reviews the National Academies’ 53 recommendations for cutting science red tape and identifies the five most tractable reforms that don’t require new funding or congressional action.

👋 Tweet for the Road

There were two major announcements in the world of science policy recently, pointing in a bold new direction for the NSF and NIH:

• The National Science Foundation announced Tech Labs, a new initiative that will invest up to $1 billion over five years in large-scale, long-term funding to scientific teams working outside traditional university structures. It’s one of the most significant experiments in federal research funding in decades.

• Reps. Josh Harder (D-CA) and Jay Obernolte (R-CA) introduced bipartisan legislation to bring a similar model to NIH. The “Launching X-Labs for Breakthrough Science Act“ would establish a new funding track for independent research organizations, building on our X-Labs framework.

The basic insight behind both efforts is that a healthy research funding portfolio requires a diverse set of funding mechanisms. Small project-based grants to university scientists are like bonds: relatively low-risk, steady, and important for stability. But you wouldn’t want 2/3rds of your portfolio in bonds. Yet that’s roughly where we stand with grants to scientists across NSF and NIH today.

Meanwhile, the science that shapes the frontier, from particle physics to protein design, increasingly requires massive datasets, large interdisciplinary teams, and sustained institutional support. That’s a poor fit for a funding system built around small, short-term grants to individual scientists. Tech Labs and the X-Labs bill are attempts to rebalance the portfolio. We can maintain support for traditional grants while experimenting with higher-risk, higher-reward institutional bets.

There’s a larger community of scientists and reformers who have been pushing for these kinds of reforms for years, so it’s exciting to see real momentum building — from both parties, and across both major science agencies. IFP has formally endorsed the Harder-Obernolte bill as an important step toward ensuring the US remains the global leader in scientific discovery.

If you want to dive deeper, I wrote about the case for these reforms recently in the Wall Street Journal. Full text below.

Caleb

Science Funding Goes Beyond the Universities

Caleb Watney, Wall Street Journal

The National Science Foundation announces Friday that it is launching one of the most significant experiments in science funding in decades. A new initiative called Tech Labs will invest up to $1 billion over the next five years in large-scale long-term funding to teams of scientists working outside traditional university structures, a major departure from how the agency has funded research over the past 75 years.

The timing couldn’t be better. The way our science agencies fund research in the U.S. no longer matches the way many breakthroughs actually happen.

For most of the postwar era, federally funded science has been built around a simple model. Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 essay, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” sketched a vision of government-backed research led by university-based scientists pursuing their own ideas. The system that emerged—small, project-based federal grants mostly to individual scientists—worked brilliantly for decades. It gave researchers autonomy, kept politics at arm’s length, and helped make American science the envy of the world.

But the frontier has moved. In 1945 world-class scientific research could be done with a few graduate students and modest equipment. But the science that shapes our world, from particle physics to protein design to advanced materials, increasingly requires massive data sets, large integrated teams and sustained institutional support.

Take the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle that helps explain why anything has mass—and thus why atoms, molecules and matter itself can exist. Making this discovery required a multibillion-dollar particle accelerator, thousands of scientists across dozens of countries, and papers with multipage author lists.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2, which cracked the 50-year-old protein-folding problem and earned researchers the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, emerged from a team with access to massive computational resources and sustained institutional support.

The Janelia Research Campus in collaboration with other institutions mapped the complete wiring diagram of the fruit-fly brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, through years of coordinated microscopy and analysis that no single lab could attempt alone.

Yet our federal science funding system is still largely organized around small grants to university scientists. At the NSF, around two-thirds of research dollars flow through small awards to individual university investigators. At the National Institutes of Health, the share is often more than 80%. The average NSF grant is roughly $246,000 a year for three years, often requiring investigators to predict in advance exactly what research they’ll pursue and to spend a significant amount of time navigating administrative hurdles. Scientists consistently report spending close to half their research hours on compliance and grant management.

The system still produces good science, but it has weak points. The current structure is built for discrete projects rather than missions. When research requires long-term continuity, interdisciplinary collaboration or substantial shared infrastructure, it’s often difficult for it to fit into this structure. Many advances we now celebrate succeeded despite the funding model, not because of it.

Philanthropy has stepped into this gap. Focused research organizations, a model backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, build time-limited teams around ambitious technical problems and tie funding to specific milestones that researchers must meet. The Allen Institute for Brain Science, launched with $100 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built the first comprehensive gene-expression map of the mouse brain through industrial-scale data collection that would have been impossible under fragmented academic grants. The Arc Institute offers scientists eight-year appointments backed by permanent technical staff with expertise in topics such as machine learning and genome engineering, the kind of sustained expertise that often evaporates when a three-year grant ends. These institutions bet on teams, not projects.

But philanthropy alone can’t reshape American science. The federal government spends close to $200 billion on research and development, orders of magnitude more than even the largest foundations. If we want to change how science gets done at scale, federal funding has to evolve.

While final details are still being worked out, Tech Labs represents NSF’s attempt to do exactly that. Rather than funding isolated projects, the agency would provide flexible, multiyear institutional grants in the range of $10 million to $50 million a year to coordinated research organizations that operate outside the constraints of university bureaucracy. These could include university-adjacent entities such as the Arc Institute or fully independent teams with focused missions. The program would bring the lessons of philanthropic science into a part of the federal portfolio that hasn’t seriously tried them.

This is a good political moment to launch this initiative. Republicans have expressed interest in diversifying federal research away from universities. Democrats want to see the legacy of the Chips and Science Act come to fruition and to get dollars out the door. By funding independent research organizations, Tech Labs sidesteps some of the thorniest debates about indirect costs and institutional overhead. Reps. Josh Harder (D., Calif.) and Jay Obernolte (R., Calif.) introduced bipartisan legislation on Wednesday that calls for applying a similar model of team-based funding to the National Institutes of Health.

None of this is an argument against traditional grants. Small project-based awards to individuals at universities remain important, especially for training the next generation of scientists and supporting curiosity-driven research. But a healthy funding portfolio needs more than one instrument. To borrow an analogy from finance, incremental project-based grants are like bonds: relatively low-risk, steady, important for stability. But you wouldn’t want 70% of your portfolio in bonds.

Tech Labs is a chance to rebalance. If it succeeds, it could begin to shift how America funds science. If it fails, we’ll learn something and use what we learn to change course. Either way, we’ll have taken the first serious step in decades toward experimenting with how America funds science. After all, isn’t science supposed to be about experiments?

• We’re hiring for our editorial team. If you’re an eagle-eyed editor with a passion for counterfactual policy impact, apply here. The deadline is January 19th, with a minimum salary of $110,000 (and potential for more based on experience). DC or NYC preferred, but open to remote candidates. Remember: We are offering a $3,000 bounty to whoever refers our hire.

• The deadline to apply for our PhD-level course on the Economics of Science, Ideas, and Innovation is today. Apply here.

• Will Poff-Webster joined as Director of Infrastructure Policy. Will previously worked on the Hill in Senator Schatz’s office on infrastructure and technology issues.

• Olivia Jimenez joined as Communications Manager. Olivia previously worked on talent sourcing and special projects for the AI Security Institute in the UK.

• Arthur Tellis joined as Senior Technology Fellow. Arthur previously worked on the Senate Armed Services Committee and at the Pentagon on cost assessment and program evaluation.

• Arnab Datta has been promoted to Director of Policy Implementation, taking on a larger role working across our policy teams.

✍️ Published Work

• Should the US Sell Hopper Chips to China? Saif Khan, Tao Burga, Tim Fist, and Georgia Adamson analyze the implications of exporting NVIDIA’s H200 chips to China. The H200 is nearly 6x as powerful as the H20, which already requires an export license. They find that unrestricted H200 exports would shrink America’s AI compute advantage from 21-49x down to 6.7-1.2x.

• How to Accelerate the American Scientific Enterprise. In response to OSTP’s request for information, Andrew Gerard, Matthew Esche, Dan Turner-Evans, and Connor O’Brien submitted five recommendations for accelerating American science. They argue for reducing visa delays for STEM researchers, empowering program officers like DARPA does, and creating agency-based metascience units.

• Proxy Praxis: How Surrogate Endpoints Can Speed Drug Development. Ruxandra Teslo launches a new series examining how surrogate endpoints (measurable biological signals that predict clinical benefit) can dramatically reduce the time and cost of clinical trials. She explores why the system is backwards: new, better endpoints face steep barriers while old, weak ones persist due to precedent.

📰 Media

• IFP’s H200 export analysis was widely cited in news coverage of President Trump’s decision to allow chip sales to China: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Reuters, Politico, The Atlantic, CNBC, and The Economist.

• STAT News mentioned our work on clinical trial abundance:

  • “The Institute for Progress, for example, has been championing what it calls ‘clinical trial abundance’ — a pragmatic reform agenda to make trials cheaper, faster, and more numerous. Their case for abundance lays out a vision where the U.S. embraces iteration rather than fearing it, returning clinical research to something closer to the scientific method: run, learn, adjust, repeat.”

• The Washington Post cited our work on H-1B reform:

  • “The Economic Innovation Group and the Institute for Progress, both pro-innovation, pro-growth policy research organizations, have proposed replacing the lottery with a straightforward compensation-based ranking for applicant selection.”

• And Bloomberg Law quoted Jeremy Neufeld:

  • “Jeremy Neufeld, director of immigration policy at the Institute for Progress, said the rule will disrupt employers’ recruitment pipeline at top US universities since those graduates will now have a decreased chance in the lottery. Those students typically get paid more than other H-1B applicants but are registered at a lower wage level, he noted.”

🏛️ Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

• 99.8% of Federal Employees Get Good Performance Reviews. Why? Santi interviews Trump’s head of talent about the federal workforce. The conversation covers the 300,000+ people leaving government through the Deferred Resignation Program and Reductions in Force, and the problems with using headcount alone as a metric.

• Did the CHIPS “Everything Bagel”...Work? Santi talks with members of the original CHIPS leadership team about how they got all the deals done, and whether the much-discussed “everything bagel” requirements actually slowed things down. The takeaway: “Nobody on the team thought we were going to get all these deals done.”

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• Stagnant Construction Productivity Is a Worldwide Problem. Brian looks at construction productivity trends across countries using EU KLEMS data and finds that stagnant productivity isn’t just a US problem. Even sustained, large-scale building programs like China’s or Sweden’s factory-based construction haven’t changed this.

• How Bell Labs Won Its First Nobel Prize. Brian tells the story of physicist Clinton Davisson, who won the 1937 Nobel Prize for demonstrating electron diffraction while working at AT&T, before Bell Labs formally existed. He explores what this early research tells us about the culture that made Bell Labs so successful.

• How Accurate Are Learning Curves? A new paper analyzes 87 technologies and finds that learning rates in the first half of each curve don’t correlate well with those in the second half. The core insight (that costs fall with cumulative production) still holds, but the specific rates are far less predictable than commonly assumed.

• Should US Homebuilders Emulate Sweden? Brian examines the common argument that US housing should adopt Sweden’s 85% prefab rate. Despite impressive factories, Swedish construction costs have risen at about the same rate as US prices since 1995, and the average Swedish home costs over 70% more per square foot.

🏭 Factory Settings by Mike Schmidt, Todd Fisher, and Sara Meyers

• The CHIPS Investment Process: Move Fast and Break Nothing. Sara O’Rourke, former COO of the CHIPS Investment Office, explains how the team redesigned the typical government grant process to emulate private equity. The new approach included optional pre-applications with formal feedback, letting CHIPS push companies toward more ambitious projects. By the end, they had allocated $34 billion across 20+ projects.

• An Inside View of NEPA in Practice. Mike Schmidt details how the National Environmental Policy Act created significant risks of delay and litigation for CHIPS. Environmental assessments typically take 9-12 months, while full impact statements average 4.4 years. Congress ultimately passed the Building Chips in America Act in October 2024 to exempt most projects.

• How CHIPS Executed on an Ambitious but Vague Mandate. Todd Fisher explains how the team translated the CHIPS Act’s broad mandate into an executable strategy. Four early decisions shaped success: using rolling applications, proactively allocating capital across industry segments, establishing a 5-15% funding range anchored in IRR analysis, and adding upside-sharing provisions to close information asymmetries with companies.

🔬 Macroscience by Andrew Gerard

• To Get More Effective Drugs, We Need More Human Trials. Ruxandra Teslo and Jack Scannell argue that debates about pharmaceutical productivity focus too much on basic science and FDA approval while ignoring clinical development. They make the case for “Clinical Trial Abundance,” noting that Australia completes Phase I trials 40-50% faster than the US.

• How Bad Is It When the Government Cancels Active Research Grants? Andrew Gerard examines the consequences of the Trump administration terminating thousands of in-progress university grants. He outlines the risks (reduced research quality, harm to the PhD pipeline, weakened university finances) and proposes resilience measures including Congressional fixes like automatic payouts for terminated grants.

👋 Tweet for the Road

• We launched Factory Settings, a newsletter focused on lessons learned from the CHIPS Program Office, which was tasked with deploying $39 billion in public money to reshore semiconductor manufacturing. Subscribe for weekly insights on industrial policy and state capacity from the original CHIPS leadership team: Mike Schmidt, Todd Fisher, and Sara Meyers.

• We also relaunched the Macroscience newsletter, now helmed by Andrew Gerard. Read the launch essay from Andrew about his vision for a community metascience blog. And read the first piece in the new era from Tim Hwang about doing metascience in dangerous times.

• Connor O’Brien joined IFP as a Fellow on our High-Skilled Immigration team. Connor most recently worked on immigration and industrial policy at the Economic Innovation Group. And here’s the whole IFP squad at our recent team retreat on the Eastern Shore of Maryland!

📰 Media

• IFP experts and research on AI chip export controls have been cited recently in The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and The Information. Saif Khan and Georgia Adamson also went on CSIS’s AI Policy Podcast to discuss export controls on China.

• IFP’s work on high-skilled immigration has been cited recently in Bloomberg Law, City Journal, and multiple Nature articles.

• Andrew Gerard participated in a discussion published by Issues in Science and Technology on why taxpayers should care about scientific cooperation. You can read Andrew’s contribution here.

✍️ Published Work

• Lab-Directed R&D at the National Labs. Dan Turner-Evans and Charles Yang examine DOE’s Lab-Directed Research and Development model, which gives national labs flexible funding for high-risk, early-stage research. LDRD funded early CRISPR work that contributed to a Nobel Prize and now backs emerging technologies like AI-driven autonomous laboratories. The report argues this decentralized approach could be expanded to universities and other agencies.

🏭 Factory Settings by Mike Schmidt, Todd Fisher, and Sara Meyers

• Introducing Factory Settings. The inaugural CHIPS leadership team explains why they’re launching this project. The $39 billion program catalyzed a 20x increase in semiconductor construction spending and awarded $34 billion across 20 deals. They argue that successful government execution should be the norm, not the exception.

• No (Process) Risk, No Reward. Mike Schmidt explores how CHIPS navigated process risk versus execution risk, abandoning the traditional “grant conclave” model for continuous engagement with applicants, while running an open process that created a “Hunger Games” dynamic, pushing companies to put their best offers forward.

• Hiring: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t. Sara Meyers explains how the CHIPS team hired staff in 67 days on average versus the 100+ day government norm, using special hiring authorities, strategic placement within NIST, and a centralized hiring tracker.

• Industrial Policy: When Is Business the Government’s Business? Todd Fisher lays out a framework for when industrial policy is justified: when an industry is strategically critical, compromised by dangerous concentration, calcified in ways markets won’t self-correct, and correctable by bounded intervention. Leading-edge logic semiconductors, with >90% produced by TSMC in Taiwan, hit all four criteria.

We are grateful to the Recoding America Fund for providing the financial support to make this project possible.

🏛️ Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

• How to Run New York City. Maria Torres-Springer, who spent 20 years in NYC government and most recently served as first deputy mayor, discusses the coalitions behind City of Yes, why NYCHA apartment turnovers take over a year, and how different mayors governed differently.

• How Diplomacy Works in Africa. Judd Devermont, former NSC Senior Director for African Affairs, talks about the importance of senior-level engagement with foreign leaders, what went wrong with Niger in 2024, and how Ukraine and Gaza consumed Biden administration bandwidth.

• Should the Feds Bail Out Chicago? David Schleicher of Yale Law School talks about America’s municipal pension crisis. Chicago now spends 40% of its budget on debt and pensions, with some funds only 18% funded. Schleicher explains the legal constraints on reform and what the feds should do when cities come asking for bailouts.

• How to Save Science Funding. Pierre Azoulay (MIT) and Dan Gross (Duke) talk about their research on indirect cost recovery. Their study found that universities receive much less overhead than negotiated rates suggest, and institutions hit hardest by proposed cuts are those whose research most often leads to new drugs and breakthroughs.

• Statecraft Gift Guide 2025. Santi’s annual recommendations for the policy wonk in your life, featuring books from Statecraft guests plus gift ideas from the IFP team.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• Strap Rail. Brian explores strap rail, a forgotten 1840s technology that attached thin iron plates to wooden timbers instead of using solid iron rails. It cut costs dramatically but came with rapid decay and dangerous “snakeheads.” A case study in how local constraints shape technological development.

• What Is a Production Process? Brian breaks down the fundamentals of manufacturing using light bulb production as a case study, from hand-blown bulbs at 150 per hour to the Corning ribbon machine producing 120,000 per hour by the 1980s.

• How ASML Got EUV. Brian explains how EUV lithography was developed through decades of US research at DARPA, Bell Labs, and the National Labs, but ultimately commercialized by a single Dutch firm. A case study in the gap between R&D and commercialization success.

• How a Government Think Tank Trained the First Generation of US Software Developers. Brian tells the story of the System Development Corporation, which by 1959 employed roughly half of the US programming workforce. With 20% annual attrition, SDC alumni seeded the entire field of electronic data processing.

📅 Events

• We hosted a launch party for Factory Settings, including a live interview with Senator Todd Young and Mike Schmidt.

• Tim Fist spoke on a panel at Progress Conference on “AI in the Machinery of Government. You can watch the video here.

• We published The Launch Sequence — our collection of ambitious ideas in AI-for-science and AI-for-security — in physical form and hosted a book party with many of the project contributors.

• We also hosted another edition of our Moonshots happy hour series with our friends at the Foundation for American Innovation.

👋 Tweet for the Road

• We’re hiring a Director of Operations to improve and oversee the internal systems that power IFP’s work — from finance and compliance to HR and organizational planning. This role will be the senior-most operations role in the organization and includes managing the operations team and ensuring the organization’s day-to-day operations are seamless, compliant, and scalable.

• Our high-skilled immigration team is hiring for Fellows and Senior Fellows with experience in policy design and analysis, federal engagement, and public communication. Come help us rethink how the US recruits global talent.

Remember: referrals can earn you a $3,000 bounty if we hire someone based on your recommendation, so share with your friends! Now on to the regular updates.

✍️ Published Work

• OPT Observatory. Immigration Fellow Violet Buxton-Walsh built a new microsite with never-before-seen data that IFP obtained from ICE via a FOIA request. This microsite is the most in-depth public resource on how the US retains international students after they graduate.

• Should the US Sell Blackwell Chips to China? Georgia Adamson, Saif Khan, Tao Burga, and Tim Fist published the first in-depth analysis of the B30A, NVIDIA’s “China-version” of their Blackwell chip lineup. Contrary to claims that this is a “downgraded” chip, the B30A is nearly equivalent to the best chips on the market because, at around 50% performance for 50% of the cost, you can just buy 2x as many and network them together.

• How to Implement an Operation Warp Speed for Rare Earths. China issued dramatic global export controls on rare earths (which have since been paused following trade negotiations). On October 23rd, Treasury Secretary Bessent called for an Operation Warp Speed for rare earths. Our team pulled together a plan in partnership with Employ America for how to achieve that goal on a rapid timescale.

• How Much Should We Spend on Scientific Replication? HHS Secretary Kennedy has proposed directing 20% of the NIH’s budget to replication. That would be orders of magnitude more than we’ve ever allocated to biomedical replication. How much should we actually spend? And how do we ensure the money is well spent? In a new analysis for IFP, Jordan Dworkin investigates the ROI of replication and finds the optimal level is much lower: 1.4%

• Aligning High-Skilled Immigration Policy with National Strategy. Director of Immigration Policy Jeremy Neufeld wrote a report with the Aspen Institute outlining the shortcomings of the current high-skill immigration system. He proposes a points-based green-card system that awards visas based on characteristics associated with success and recommends more proactive talent recruitment.

• Brain Freeze: How International Student Exclusion Will Shape the STEM Workforce and Economic Growth in the United States. Jeremy and Distinguished Immigration Counsel Amy Nice wrote a paper with the economist Michael Clemens about how foreign students play a key role as the main pathway for high-skill STEM talent entering the U.S. workforce. Proposed policy changes could significantly reduce the number of foreign STEM graduates from U.S. universities, leading to a 6–11% drop in high-skill STEM workers. This decline could cause annual GDP losses ranging from $72 billion to $481 billion within ten years, depending on the severity of the restrictions.

• Two new episodes of the Right of Way podcast from Infrastructure Fellow Pavan Venkatakrishnan and Thomas Hochman:

  • Episode 3.5: Special Shutdown Edition

    • An interview with Josh Siegel, an energy and climate reporter at Politico, about how the shutdown will affect permitting reform discussions, what makes this round of negotiations different from past efforts, and the state of play in Congress, from the House to the Senate, from NEPA to transmission, and beyond.

  • Episode 4: The End-Users

    • An interview with Cy McNeill, the Director of Federal Affairs for the Data Center Coalition, and Chris Phalen, the VP for Domestic Policy at the National Association of Manufacturers and former Senior Policy Advisor to Senator Kyrsten Sinema, on how permitting is constraining manufacturing and data center deployment, end-users’ permitting wishlists, and how political dynamics have shifted on both sides of the aisle

🏛️ Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

• Why We Don’t Build Apartments for Families. Santi interviews Bobby Fijan, a co-founder of the American Housing Corporation, a startup building housing for families in cities. A burning question motivates his work: How do you make cities places where families can live and thrive?

• Is the Senate Fixing Housing Policy? Santi interviews Will Poff-Webster, Brian Potter, and Alex Armlovich about the ROAD to Housing Act, which passed the Senate recently as a rider on the annual defense bill. It’s a package of 27 pieces of legislation to boost housing supply, improve affordability, reduce regulatory roadblocks, and reduce homelessness.

• A Statecraft Fall Roundup. Santi announces the launch of the Recoding America Fund, reflects on his experience at the Progress Conference in Berkeley, and publishes a new interview from that event with Michael Kratsios, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• Why Are So Many Pedestrians Killed by Cars in the US? Brian investigates the mysterious rise in pedestrian deaths in the US. More than 7,300 pedestrians were killed in motor vehicle accidents in the US in 2023, around 18% of all motor vehicle deaths that year. Until around 2009, pedestrian deaths in the US had been falling, declining from 7,516 deaths in 1975 to just 4,109 in 2009.

• More on US Pedestrian Deaths. After reader feedback from his first piece on pedestrian deaths, Brian looks into a few more theories (spoiler: he finds them mostly wanting).

• How the UK Lost Its Shipbuilding Industry. The UK fell from producing 57% of world tonnage in 1947 to just 17% a decade later. By the 1970s, their output was below 5% of the world total, and by the 1990s it was less than 1%. In 2023, the UK produced no commercial ships at all. Brian explains how it happened.

📰 Media

• Our analysis of the effects of exporting NVIDIA Blackwell chips (B30As) to China garnered a lot of media attention:

  • Bloomberg included a summary of our paper in their Economics Daily newsletter:

    • “Days earlier, the Institute for Progress, a think tank focused on innovation policy, wrote a lengthy paper on the chip’s capabilities and the implications of allowing its sale to China. Since this is an economics rather than technology newsletter, you’ll need to read the paper if you’re interested in the chip’s specs. Suffice it to say, it’s much better than anything China can make right now.”

  • Reuters quoted Tim and cited our analysis in their coverage of the US-China trade talks:

    • “‘If any meaningful quantities are allowed, it’s a huge change,’ said Fist, director of emerging technology policy at the Institute for Progress, a Washington-based think tank. ‘It’s functionally ending the export control regime that we have today.’”

  • CNBC mentioned our work in their news coverage:

    • “A report released earlier this week from the Institute for Progress, a U.S. think tank, argued that allowing B30A exports to China would dramatically shrink America’s current AI compute advantage over China.”

  • NBC News covered our report:

    • “Allowing China to buy Nvidia’s latest-generation chips, even a modified version, could drastically reduce the United States’ AI advantage, analysts say, as the American artificial intelligence government lobbies the U.S. government to expand its export control permits to also include the upcoming B30A chip. ‘Minimizing the export of powerful AI chips to China is the best way to maximize the United States’ AI compute advantage in the short term,’ said analysts at the Institute for Progress, a Washington-based think tank.”

• Bloomberg quoted Technology Fellow Georgia Adamson on the role of Middle Eastern oil companies in AI investments:

  • “The Humain deal gives Aramco a more direct role. Down the road, oil companies expect to be beneficiaries of the technological advances they are financing in the first place, according to Georgia Adamson, technology fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Progress. ‘Adnoc and Aramco are among the most important players in realizing the Gulf’s AI ambitions — from financing state-controlled AI investment vehicles to serving as key AI adopters,’ she said. ‘The immense capital that Adnoc and Aramco have at their disposal gives the UAE and Saudi Arabia permission to take hugely risky bets on AI, and the financial padding if these investments fall through.’”

• The Economist interviewed Jeremy about the new H-1B rules proposed by the Trump administration:

  • “Around 130,000 H1-B visas are granted each year, two-thirds as part of a lottery available to all employers and the remaining third through a route for universities and research bodies. The $100,000 fee would not apply to people already in the country, muting its effect, notes Jeremy Neufeld of the Institute for Progress, a think-tank. But the impact on the research route would be brutal: university post-doctorates rarely command the sort of salaries that could justify a $100,000 visa, even if their work carries big economic benefits.”

• Brian went on Odd Lots with Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway to talk about construction productivity and promote his new book, The Origins of Efficiency.

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• Published analysis showing how the H-1B “wage level” reform would backfire and actually lead to more visas for large outsourcing firms.

• Wrote an op-ed for City Journal with Senior Editor Santi Ruiz explaining why the proposed changes will be counterproductive to the administration’s own goals.

• Appeared on Hard Fork, an NYT tech podcast co-hosted by Casey Newton and Kevin Roose.

• Published commentary in The Wall Street Journal.

• Was quoted in news coverage from The New York Times.

Distinguished Immigration Counsel Amy Nice also had commentary published by The Washington Post, where she pointed out the overlooked negative effects of the $100,000 proposed fee on international students, scholars, and researchers.

And one announcement before the rest of our updates: Zach Liscow, a professor at Yale Law School and the country’s leading scholar on the law and economics of infrastructure costs, has joined IFP as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow.

✍️ Published Work

• High-quality data is a major bottleneck to AI progress. While recent LLMs were trained on hundreds of terabytes of data, the world has digitized 180 zettabytes, or about a billion times more. The problem is access. In a new essay for our series The Launch Sequence, Andrew Trask and Lacey Strahm lay out a possible solution with Attribution-Based Control (ABC).

• In a new episode of the Right of Way podcast, Infrastructure Fellow Pavan Venkatakrishnan and co-host Thomas Hochman sit down with Daniel Palken, a recent staffer on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, to discuss how transmission fits into the broader power system, the “3 Ps” that make transmission buildout difficult, and why past efforts at reform came up short.

• Non-Resident Senior Fellows Matt Clancy and Pierre Azoulay have a new paper in Nature with Danielle Li and Bhaven Sampat analyzing grants that would have been at risk of being cut in an alternative history with a 40% smaller NIH budget. They found some striking results:

  • 51% of 21st-century drugs have a patent that cites one or more articles funded by an at-risk grant

  • 12% of drugs have more than a quarter of their patent-to-paper citations going to at-risk research

  • 35% of drugs that acknowledge NIH support reference a grant that would have been at-risk

• IFP signed a bipartisan coalition letter to OSTP Director Michael Kratsios supporting American scientific competitiveness.

🏛️ Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

• Leninist Technocracy with Grand Opera Characteristics. Santi interviews Dan Wang, author of the new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. Dan spent the better part of the last decade in China and published a yearly letter summarizing his thoughts, explorations, and eating.

• How to Write the AI Action Plan. Santi interviews Dean Ball, who was, until recently, a Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Dean was the organizing author of the Administration’s AI Action Plan, which garnered near-universal praise.

• What Is America’s Infrastructure Cost Problem? Santi interviews Zach Liscow, a professor of law at Yale Law School and the country’s leading scholar on the law and economics of infrastructure costs. From 2022 to 2023, Zach was the Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget.

• How to Bring Down Healthcare Costs. Santi interviews Anup Malani, a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, currently on leave, serving as the first Chief Economist at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, where he oversees economic analysis for an agency in charge of $2 trillion in annual healthcare spending — 23% of the entire federal budget.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• Ford and the Birth of the Model T. In an excerpt from his new book, The Origins of Efficiency, Brian explains how the Model T changed the world, both by making the car a ubiquitous feature of American life and by showing what could be achieved with large-volume production and a cascading chain of improvements.

• I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption. Brian catches an error in an earlier piece about data centers and water usage, and in the process of correcting it, learns more about the weird way water usage is measured for hydropower (hint: it includes evaporation from reservoirs).

• An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project. Watch Oppenheimer if you want the popular history of the Manhattan Project. Read Construction Physics if you want the engineering history.

• What’s Happening to Wholesale Electricity Prices? For the five years prior to 2020, electricity prices in the US were essentially flat; since 2020, average electricity prices in the US have increased by around 35%. Brian investigates why.

• How Common Is Accidental Invention? Brian looks into the history of “accidental invention” and discovers an interesting pattern: Evidently, the nature of chemical phenomena — which are comparatively difficult to predict, but comparatively easy to create and manipulate — both makes accidental invention more likely, and multiple invention somewhat less likely.

📅 Events

• We hosted two book events in the penthouse of our DC office: One for Brian Potter’s The Origins of Efficiency and one for Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.

• We also co-hosted the second annual Abundance Conference in DC, which featured bipartisan speakers and covered everything from housing to energy to healthcare policy.

• We are co-hosting the Progress Conference from October 16-19 in Berkeley, CA. Tickets are sold out, and we look forward to seeing many of you there.

📰 Media

• Rogé Karma quotes Tim Fist in a piece for The Atlantic about the likelihood we’re in an AI bubble.

  • “Programming is something that AI systems tend to do extremely well,” Tim Fist, the director of Emerging Technology Policy at the Institute for Progress, told me. “So if it turns out they aren’t even making developers more productive, that could really change the picture of how AI might impact economic growth in general.”

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AI advances over the next few years could catalyze a new golden age of discovery and abundance. The private market will deliver amazing consumer products, but it’s up to US policymakers to make sure public goods don’t get neglected.

Check out all the essays in the series below, and then read on for the rest of our regular updates.

1. Preparing for Launch by Tim Fist, Tao Burga, and Tim Hwang: An introduction to the series on why shaping AI progress matters, and how to go about it.

2. The Replication Engine by Abel Brodeur and Bruno Barbarioli: How to build automated replication infrastructure for better, faster science.

3. Mapping the Brain for Alignment by Adam Marblestone and Andrew Payne: How to map the mammalian brain’s connectome to solve fundamental problems in neuroscience, psychology, and AI robustness.

4. Teaching AI How Science Actually Works by Ben Reinhardt: How block-grant labs can generate the real-world data AI needs to do science.

5. Benchmarking for Breakthroughs by Séb Krier and Zhengdong Wang: How to incentivize AI for national priorities through a strategic challenge and evaluations program.

6. A Million-Peptide Database to Defeat Antibiotic Resistance by Maxwell Tabarrok: How to build a large peptides database to train the AlphaFold for new antibiotics.

7. Biotech’s Lost Archive by Ruxandra Teslo: How to fuel AI by unlocking the FDA’s knowledge of biotech failures.

8. Using X-Labs to Unleash AI-Driven Scientific Breakthroughs by Caleb Watney: How to adapt our science funding mechanisms to the unique infrastructure needs of large-scale AI projects.

9. Scaling Materials Discovery with Self-Driving Labs by Charles Yang: How to close the gap between AI-guided material design and real-world validation.

10. Faster AI Diffusion Through Hardware-Based Verification by Nora Ammann and David “davidad” Dalrymple: How to use privacy-preserving verification in the AI hardware stack to build trust and limit misuse.

11. The Great Refactor by Herbie Bradley and Girish Sastry: How to secure critical open-source code against memory safety exploits by automating code hardening at scale.

12. Operation Patchlight by Miles Brundage: How to leverage advanced AI to give defenders an asymmetric advantage in cybersecurity.

13. Scaling Pathogen Detection with Metagenomics by Simon Grimm: How to generate the data necessary to reliably detect new pathogen outbreaks with AI.

14. Preventing AI Sleeper Agents by Evan Miyazono: How to ensure American AI models are robust and reliable via a DOD-led red- and blue-teaming effort.

15. A Sprint Toward Security Level 5 by Sella Nevo: How to protect American AI from nation-state level threats.

16. The Infinity Project by Patrick Shafto: How to use AI and mathematics to prove and improve science and security.

We’re also incubating The Great Refactor as a focused research project at IFP (and will eventually spin it out). Check out the project website here.

🏛️ Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

• How to Fix Foreign Aid. Santi interviews Dean Karlan, who spent two and a half years at the helm of the first-ever Office of the Chief Economist at USAID. In that role, he tried to help USAID get better value from its foreign aid spending, shifting $1.7 billion of spending towards programs with stronger evidence of effectiveness.

• How to Be a Good Intelligence Analyst. Santi interviews anthropologist and intelligence community veteran Dr. Rob Johnston. He’s the author of the cult classic Analytic Culture in the US Intelligence Community, a book so influential that it's required reading at DARPA.

• Order of Operations in a Regime Change. In a change of pace, Santi reviews Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok. The big thesis of the book is that the collapse of the USSR wasn’t inevitable — had Gorbachev made better decisions, he could have liberalized while keeping the Union together. Santi sees parallels for would-be reformers today.

• Four Ways to Fix Government HR. Santi interviews Judge Glock, Director of Research at the Manhattan Institute, about civil service reform and how to build a better talent pool in the federal government.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Brian Potter

• Where Are Vacation Homes Located in the US? Second homes cause a lot of consternation in the housing crisis debate. But how many actually are there in the US? And where are they? Brian found a comprehensive dataset to answer those questions and more.

• Group Technology, the Forgotten Cousin of Lean Manufacturing. One lesser-known industrial improvement system that appeared and then receded in the second half of the 20th century is Group Technology. It’s interesting to try to understand what made it seem compelling, and why it ultimately lost favor.

• My Book "The Origins of Efficiency" is Now Available for Preorder. Brian wrote a book! The Origins of Efficiency is now (officially) available for preorder, and will be released on September 23rd.

• How Does the US Use Water? Last year, Brian wrote a “cheat sheet” for building better intuitions about energy systems. Now he’s done it again, but this time for water systems. Everything you need to know (and a lot you probably don’t).

⚡ Right of Way by Pavan Venkatakrishnan and Thomas Hochman

• We launched a new podcast with our friends at FAI! It’s called Right of Way, and it’s hosted by Pavan Venkatakrishnan and Thomas Hochman. Check out the first two episodes below:

  • Ep. 1: Energy Policy Whiplash. Pavan and Thomas sit down with Liam Donovan and Yogin Kothari to talk about the aftermath of the One Big Beautiful Bill, foreign entity of concern requirements, the breakdown in advocacy and political miscalculations, and the path forward for permitting reform.

  • Ep. 2: The Permitting Picture. Pavan and Thomas talk with Richard Meyer and Peter Stahley about how NEPA works (or doesn’t) and how reform efforts have shaped outcomes, the role of the Clean Water Act in stalling major projects, and the politics and political tradeoffs in permitting reform.

📅 Events

• We’re excited to co-host the Abundance 2025 conference in DC, which is now only a week away. Demand was off the charts, and tickets are sold out. We look forward to seeing many of you there!

• Arnab Datta will be participating in an R Street Institute event on the future of permitting reform on September 9th. Sign up to watch here.

📰 Media

• David Wallace-Wells mentioned our Launch Sequence series in a piece for The New York Times speculating on the future path of AI development.

  • “In a bundle of proposals for science and security it called “The Launch Sequence,” the think tank Institute for Progress recently outlined areas of potential rapid progress: improving surveillance systems for outbreaks of new pandemic pathogens, sifting through the Food and Drug Administration’s archive to highlight promising new pathways for research, using AlphaFold to develop new antibiotics for an antibiotic-resistant world and solving or at least addressing the scientific world’s replication crisis by stress-testing published claims with machine modeling.”

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• Distinguished Technology Fellow Saif Khan. Saif was previously Director for Technology and National Security at the White House National Security Council and Counselor for Critical and Emerging Technologies to the Secretary of Commerce. He also currently serves as a Bipartisan Senior Advisor to the House Select Committee on the CCP.

• Senior Technology Fellow Ben Schifman: Ben was a trial attorney with DOJ for 11 years working on environmental and natural resources litigation, and an attorney-advisor at the Department of the Interior for three years.

• Technology Fellow Jonah Weinbaum: Jonah is also an Emergent Ventures Fellow and studied mathematics, physics, and cognitive science at the University of Michigan.

• Associate Technology Fellow Alexandra Bates: Alexandra recently completed a degree in mathematics from Columbia University.

We’re really excited to have them on board! As you may have noticed, our Emerging Technology team, led by Tim Fist, has been growing a lot in recent months (and will continue to grow in the future). With the recent release of the White House’s AI Action Plan, it’s clearer than ever that we’re in a pivotal moment for AI policy in DC. Our Emerging Technology team is focused on developing concrete policy ideas to accelerate and shape the development of advanced AI. Our current plans span four areas:

1. Reducing bottlenecks to developing, deploying, and diffusing AI in America.

2. Accelerating AI-enabled R&D in key areas like science and societal resilience.

3. Building technical government capacity to measure and respond to fast AI progress.

4. Ensuring that America wins the global AI competition.

Now on to the regular update.

✍️ Written Work

• We have two major upcoming projects:

  • The Launch Sequence: AI advances over the next few years could catalyze a new golden age of discovery and abundance. The Launch Sequence is a collection of essays, written by expert authors, describing concrete but ambitious projects that use AI to accelerate scientific breakthroughs, and to accelerate the development of defensive technologies to increase societal resilience in the face of intelligence too cheap to meter.

    • We'll publish The Launch Sequence on the IFP website and as a physical book. Sign up here to be notified when it’s published.

  • The Transit Policy Playbook: With the must-pass surface transportation funding bill coming up next year, we’re soliciting ideas to improve federal transit policy to compile into a playbook for Congress. If selected, we’ll work with you to shape your idea into a concrete, actionable policy reform. Authors will also receive a $2,000 honorarium. Submit your idea here.

🏛️ Statecraft by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• How to Save DC’s Metro. Santi interviews Randy Clarke, the head of DC’s Metro. Under Clarke’s leadership, WMATA has had an unexpected resurgence, bouncing back from the pandemic stronger than any other metro system in the country.

• What Can We Learn From Estonia? Santi interviews Joel Burke, author of the new book Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution, about what the rest of the world can learn from the leader in digital government. 

• How UK Biobank Was Built. Santi interviews Sir Rory Collins. Sir Rory has spent a full 20 years building and leading one of the most important scientific resources in the world: UK Biobank.

• More (Brief) Thoughts on DOGE. Santi reflects on what’s happened in the months since he published his first essay on DOGE.

• How Cheaply Could We Build High-Speed Rail? The Transit Costs Project at NYU recently published a report claiming we could build high-speed rail in the Northeast Corridor for $17 billion. Amtrak says it would cost almost an order of magnitude more than that. Santi interviews Alon Levy, the lead author of the report, to explain the difference.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• How Common Is Multiple Invention? Are different inventions guaranteed to occur at a certain point in time, if the precursor ingredients have reached maturity? Or is it possible that viable ideas can go unexploited for a long time until the right inventor comes along? Brian looks at the case of multiple invention for hints.

• How Batteries Are Making the Electrical Grid More Reliable. There is a battery revolution going on and most people aren’t aware of it. Brian examines the myriad use cases for batteries on the grid, and explains why their growth won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

• Why Are Homes in Western States So Expensive? It’s not a surprise that housing is expensive in places like Manhattan or San Francisco, given land constraints. But why is housing also becoming more expensive in Western states, where available land shouldn’t be as much of a problem? Brian searches for an answer.

• Should the Federal Government Sell Land? Senator Mike Lee recently made waves with a proposal to sell federal land. Brian takes a look at the data to see where this land is located and what it might be useful for.

• How China Became the World’s Biggest Shipbuilder. According to the US Navy, China’s shipbuilding capacity is over 200 times that of the US. In 2023, China delivered 972 commercial ships; the US delivered 7. Brian reviews the history to see how China accomplished this feat. 

🏛️ Events

• In celebration of launching our Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook, IFP co-hosted an event June 17 on Capitol Hill featuring Senator Todd Young.

• Saif Khan spoke at a CSET event on the trends and challenges in chipmaking equipment.

• Amy Nice participated in an event co-hosted by FAS and the House R&D Caucus about stemming American brain drain on July 22.

• IFP is co-hosting the Abundance 2025 conference in Washington, DC on September 4 and 5 — register now.

📰 Media

• Pavan Venkatakrishnan was quoted in multiple outlets about the energy tax credits in the reconciliation bill:

  • The New York Times: “Clean firm sources of power are now bipartisan. Republicans had a sledgehammer available to them and decided not to use it on a couple key technologies.”

  • Heatmap: “I’m sure Secretary Wright’s strong support for firm technologies over the past few months played a role in Chairman Crapo’s approach to energy tax credit reform.”

  • E&E News: “Changes to the investment and production tax credits would drive reliability by supporting the deployment of baseload technologies like nuclear, geothermal, hydropower and long-duration energy storage.”

• Alec Stapp was interviewed on the Founders in Arms podcast.

• Brian Potter was interviewed on the Maritime Nation podcast.

• IFP helped organize a coalition letter in support of the tax credits for clean baseload energy, including nuclear, geothermal, hydropower, and energy storage.

  • Politico covered the letter here.

• Aidan Mackenzie and Nick Bagley were both cited in a DC Circuit Court opinion regarding NEPA.

• Will Rinehart from AEI gave our AI Action Plan Database a shoutout:

  • “While this flood hasn’t yet materialized, AI tools are already being deployed to analyze public comments more efficiently and identify key themes within large comment volumes. The Institute for Progress database analyzing comments for the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan demonstrates the analytical power these tools can bring to regulatory processes.”

• The House China Select Committee on the CCP cited our work in a letter to Commerce Secretary Lutnick regarding H20 export controls.

🔗 Links from Friends of IFP

• Open Philanthropy is hiring up to four new team members for their Abundance and Growth Fund, led by Matt Clancy. They’re seeking 1-2 generalists plus 1-3 specialists with expertise in housing policy, energy, infrastructure, state capacity, healthcare, economic dynamism, high-skilled immigration, or building abundance/progress studies communities. Apply by July 27 for full consideration. Know someone who might be a good fit? Earn $5k if your referral results in a hire.

• Asterisk magazine is launching a writing fellowship aimed at improving the state of public discourse around AI. They’re looking for 15 people with subject matter knowledge, nuanced opinions — and a niggling sensation that they should really, really start a blog. You can apply here. The fellowship lasts for six weeks, from August 24-October 6. 

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✍️ Written Work

• We published the Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook along with the Foundation for American Innovation, American Compass, and the New American Industrial Alliance Foundation. Here are the five pieces from our team:

  • Launching X-Labs for Transformative Science Funding by Caleb Watney

  • Reforming Naval Shipbuilding by Brian Potter and Austin Vernon

  • Launching Project Paperclip 2.0 to Recruit Top Scientists by Jeremy Neufeld

  • Conditional Export Controls on AI Chips by Tao Burga

  • Establishing Special Compute Zones by Tim Fist

• Pavan Venkatakrishnan wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post about how the reconciliation bill would affect nuclear energy with FAI’s Thomas Hochman.

• Our emerging tech team used AI tools to build an interactive database of every substantive submission to the White House’s request for information on its AI Action Plan.

  • They also analyzed and summarized the responses here.

• We also submitted a response to the White House’s request for input on its AI R&D strategy.

• Sam Marullo wrote a retrospective for Foreign Affairs on what policymakers can learn from the implementation of the CHIPS and Science Act.

• Violet Buxton-Walsh wrote about how visa wait times have changed over the last three years.

🏛️ Statecraft by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• How to run a $5 trillion payment system. Santi interviewed David Lebryk, who was the highest-ranking civil servant in the Treasury Department and one of the most senior civil servants in the entire federal government, before being pushed out by DOGE.

• How to salvage a transit project. Santi interviewed Stephanie Pollack, the Deputy Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration for the first half of the Biden admin. Before that, she served as Secretary of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (DOT).

• How the Federal Transit Administration works. Santi interviewed Peter Rogoff, who spent 22 years as a staffer on the most powerful Senate committee, the Appropriations Committee (on the Democratic side). Rogoff was also the head of the Federal Transit Administration for five years.

• How the '90s version of DOGE worked. Santi interviewed John Kamensky, who served for eight years as Vice President Al Gore's deputy for the Reinventing Government project, a predecessor to DOGE.

• How to run the Treasury Department. Santi and guest host Kyla Scanlon, the author of In This Economy?, interviewed Wally Adeyemo, the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury during the Biden admin.

🏗️ Construction Physics by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• How the US scaled shipbuilding during WWII. The US currently builds around five oceangoing commercial ships per year. During WWII, we built more than 800 ships per year. Brian reviewed the history to figure out how we did it.

• Robot dexterity still seems hard. How far along are we in commercializing humanoid robots? And is that even the form factor that will make the most sense for commercially useful robots? Brian surveyed the industry and found some surprising answers.

• Improving naval ship acquisition. Brian and Austin expanded on their reform proposal for naval shipbuilding from the Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook.

• How Japan birthed the modern shipbuilding industry. Brian closes out his series on shipbuilding by looking at how Japan catalyzed its own shipbuilding industry.

• Can we afford large-scale solar PV? Brian looks at how feasible it will be to scale solar and storage in the US.

📰 Media Mentions

• Axios cited analysis from Aidan Mackenzie on the recent Supreme Court ruling on NEPA.

• Politico quoted Jeremy Neufeld about the recent policy changes affecting Chinese students in the US.

• Reuters quoted Tim Fist about a new bill to fight AI chip smuggling using location verification.

• Heatmap quoted Pavan Venkatakrishnan on how the reconciliation bill would affect energy innovation.

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• We’re hiring Fellows and Senior Fellows for our metascience team. We will pay a bounty of $3,000 for a referral that leads to a successful hire. Apply here.

• We’re thrilled to be cohosting the Progress Conference again this year. The event will take place in Berkeley, CA from October 16th to 19th. Speakers from IFP include Caleb Watney, Alec Stapp, Tim Fist, Santi Ruiz, and Chris Elmendorf. Apply to attend here.

• We’re also excited to be cohosting the Abundance Conference in Washington, DC on September 4th and 5th. Registration isn’t open yet, but you can sign up for event updates here.

1. IFP testified before Congress on global AI competition

• Director of Emerging Technology Policy Tim Fist testified before Congress on DeepSeek and how to keep the US in the lead on AI, with a special focus on energy, R&D, and talent. Tim’s testimony highlighted three critical concerns: security risks from Chinese open-source AI, America's need for better technical intelligence capabilities, and the continued importance of export controls.

• He then outlined an R&D agenda focused on boosting American open-source AI through federal prize competitions, launching a "Human Genome Project" for AI interpretability, securing AI chips and data centers, and implementing "pre-deployment hardening" for critical infrastructure.

• Tim also went on the Complex Systems podcast with Patrick McKenzie to talk about AI and energy issues.

2. NVIDIA can no longer sell H20 chips to China

• Tao Burga, Arushi Gupta, and Tim Fist wrote a piece making the case that NVIDIA’s sales of H20 AI chips to China likely violated US export controls, and called on the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) to block the sales by notifying the company.

• Shortly after our piece was published, NVIDIA disclosed that the US government had informed the company that the export of H20 chips violates supercomputer end-use restrictions, as we claimed. Reuters referenced our research in their coverage and Tim went on the TBPN livestream to talk about the news.

• But more work still needs to be done:

  • BIS should update export controls to cover inference chips.

  • The White House should empower a technical team — ideally within the AI Safety Institute (AISI) at NIST — to forecast AI threats and proactively shape control policy.

  • BIS should track chips once exported to high-risk locations by incentivizing industry adoption of chip geolocation features.

3. Most of America’s top AI companies were founded by immigrants

• High-skilled immigration has long been a key driver of US technological leadership. This is especially true today — with immigrant entrepreneurs powering American AI dominance. New analysis from Director of Immigration Policy Jeremy Neufeld and Immigration Fellow Lindsay Milliken shows that 60% of the top US-based AI companies have at least one immigrant founder.

• The analysis draws from the new 2025 Forbes “AI 50” list of top startups developing promising AI applications. 42 of the 2025 list were US-based companies, of which 25 were founded or cofounded by immigrants.

• Axios covered the release of our report here.

4. How FORGE kickstarted next-gen geothermal energy

• In a new white paper for IFP, Tom Ough tells the story of the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE), a $218 million field laboratory started in 2014 to conduct hands-on research into “enhanced geothermal systems,” or EGS, a promising form of geothermal power.

• FORGE has demonstrated the effectiveness of government-backed field research in unlocking new energy technologies. Its success suggests that similar de-risking models could be applied to other sectors facing market failures.

5. Statecraft by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• How to fix crime in New York City. Santi interviewed Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, about his new book, an oral history that attempts to understand and describe exactly how the city’s leaders managed to drive down crime so successfully in the early 1990s.

• How to fund new energy tech. Santi interviewed Narayan Subramanian, a Department of Energy and National Security Council official in the Biden administration, about how a big influx of money can best be used to support innovative energy projects.

• How to fix risk assessment in child welfare. Santi interviewed Alex Jucta, the head of analytics and technology at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, where his team’s mission is to build the country’s leading R&D lab for local government.

6. Construction Physics by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• Who wins Nobel Prizes? Brian looks at two datasets related to Nobel Prizes in physics, medicine, and chemistry — one for biographical facts about winners and one about their prize-winning work — to spot patterns and emerging trends.

• Understanding US power outages. Brian analyzes a comprehensive dataset on power outages at the country and utility level going back to 2017 to better understand grid resiliency.

• 50 things Brian has learned writing Construction Physics. After 600,000 words and 4.5 years writing his newsletter, Brian does a retrospective sharing his biggest takeaways and the most interesting facts he’s learned.

7. Links from friends of IFP

• The Foundation for American Innovation led a coalition letter calling on DOE to preserve the Loan Programs Office (LPO).

• A bipartisan group of senators introduced the Fix Our Forests Act, which would streamline environmental review for wildfire mitigation projects.

• Sam Hammond wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on why US policymakers should focus on export promotion, rather than import substitution via tariffs.

• Non-Resident Senior Fellow Nick Bagley and David Schleicher have a new working paper on state capacity issues at the state level.

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1. What “government efficiency” should mean for science

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Co-founder Caleb Watney argued for a better approach to science funding amid DOGE's cost-cutting:

• Our scientific system misses out on valuable research: Despite eventually winning a Nobel Prize and enabling COVID-19 vaccines, Katalin Karikó's pioneering mRNA research was repeatedly denied grants and delayed by a decade due to risk-averse funding systems.

• DOGE's current approach could make things worse: While our system needs reforms, the administration's 15% cap on indirect costs for NIH grants could lead to $4 billion in annual biomedical funding cuts, forcing universities to lay off researchers and close labs.

• "Efficiency" should be about ROI: Instead of equating efficiency to cost-cutting, we should maximize returns on scientific investment. We can do this by paring back regulations and supporting high-risk, high-reward research.

• We need new ways to fund science: Cutting-edge science is increasingly performed by organizations beyond traditional academia. The NIH should develop new funding mechanisms to support large-scale scientific infrastructure.

Read the full piece here.

2. What is DOGE's real goal?

Senior Editor Santi Ruiz went on The Ezra Klein Show to discuss his “50 Thoughts on DOGE” essay. Here’s a taste of some of those thoughts:

• Twitter is an adversarial information environment: Elon Musk is an unreliable narrator, and the feedback loops he’s constructed on Twitter have shaped DOGE in unexpected ways.

• DOGE's focus has shifted: Although it was initially pitched as an agency for targeting overregulation, DOGE now emphasizes headcount reduction and dollar savings at the risk of reducing government effectiveness.

• Staff cuts target the wrong people: Due to civil service rules, DOGE is primarily firing probationary employees — often younger, techier workers who could improve the way government functions.

• Multiple agendas are at work: Some DOGE initiatives would have happened without it, as they align with longstanding conservative goals to reduce specific agencies or reassert presidential control over spending.

Read all 50 thoughts here. Watch Ezra Klein’s interview with Santi here.

3. An action plan for American leadership in AI

IFP submitted recommendations to the Office of Science and Technology Policy for its AI Action Plan RFI. US policymakers should:

• Establish Special Compute Zones: Designate regions where AI clusters of at least 5 GW can be built rapidly through coordinated federal and private action, while streamlining permitting and enhancing security requirements.

• Support American open-source AI: Launch prize competitions to incentivize the development of reliable open-source AI models, and provide free hosting of American open-source models for small developers via the National AI Research Resource.

• Fund ambitious research moonshots: Invest in a "grand challenge" for AI interpretability, tamper-resistant hardware security, and AI-driven formally verified software to overcome key reliability and security challenges.

• Build state capacity for model evaluation: Reform the AI Safety Institute to focus on national security risks and directly report to key national security decision-makers about the capabilities of both US and adversary AI models.

• Improve export controls and enforcement capacity: Use export controls as market-shaping incentives to develop more secure AI chips, restrict access to high-performance inference chips, and modernize BIS.

Read the rest of the plan here. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton also discussed our submission on their Hard Fork podcast — listen here.

4. How to strengthen America's AI workforce

In another submission to OSTP’s AI Action Plan RFI, our Director of Immigration Policy Jeremy Neufeld worked with Matthias Oschinski, Jacob Feldgoise, and Sophie Alcorn to pull together 11 recommendations to recruit the world's top AI talent. The US government should:

• Launch Project Paperclip 2.0: Initiate a targeted talent recruitment program to attract top AI talent for national defense purposes, similar to past recruitment programs.

• Add premium processing for entrepreneurs: Add premium processing to the International Entrepreneur Rule program to support AI startup founders and reduce processing times.

• Cut red tape: Update the Schedule A shortage occupation list to include AI fields, implement special handling for advanced STEM talent, allow domestic visa renewal, and deploy AI for visa processing.

• Support AI talent: Clarify dual intent for O-1A visas, recapture unused green cards, authorize work for O-3 spouses, launch a targeted talent recruitment program, and provide export control clarity for immigrant inventors.

Read the full report here. Jeremy also spoke about the role of high-skilled immigrants across the defense sector on the Emerging Tech Horizons podcast.

5. Understanding solar energy from first principles

Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter explained the dramatic rise of solar power and evaluated its long-term potential:

• Solar is growing at unprecedented speed: Solar capacity has expanded faster than any energy source in history, growing from 100 to 1,000 terawatt-hours in just 8 years. It now represents about 50% of planned new electrical generation capacity in the US.

• Costs have fallen dramatically: Since its invention in the 1950s, solar PV costs have decreased by a factor of nearly 10,000. In the last decade alone, cell costs dropped by more than 50%, making solar one of the cheapest electricity generation methods.

• Intermittency remains the key challenge: Unlike fuel-based power sources, solar can't generate electricity on demand. Day-night cycles, seasonal changes, and weather conditions significantly impact solar output.

• Overbuilding can address intermittency: Meeting high percentages of electricity demand requires "overbuilding" — installing excess panel capacity and storage to compensate for periods without sunlight, which becomes economically viable if costs continue to fall.

Read the full analysis here.

6. How to build compute in America

Director of Infrastructure Policy Arnab Datta and Director of Emerging Technology Policy Tim Fist discussed how to build out AI infrastructure in America on the Lawfare and ChinaTalk podcasts:

• Multiple energy sources will be needed: We recommend an "all-of-the-above" approach including natural gas in the short term, solar with battery storage where feasible, and next-generation geothermal and small modular nuclear reactors as they become available.

• Government must reduce uncertainty: The greatest obstacle to financing next-generation energy projects isn't quantifiable risk, but true Knightian uncertainty — unpredictable technical, supply chain, and regulatory variables that defy probabilistic modeling and pricing by conventional financiers.

• Security requirements should accompany federal assistance: As AI companies build powerful systems that could reshape global power dynamics, the government should require robust security measures at data centers to protect against theft of model weights and sabotage.

• Geothermal emerges as a breakthrough energy source: Next-generation geothermal energy could unlock vast resources by applying fracking techniques to create artificial reservoirs in the Earth's crust, providing abundant, reliable, and clean power for AI data centers.

Listen to ChinaTalk here and Lawfare here.

7. A solution to the housing shortage

Non-Resident Senior Fellow Christopher Elmendorf and Alex Armlovich wrote a piece for City Journal on their proposal to reform the low-income housing tax credit to boost housing supply:

• Focus on cities, not suburbs: Rather than attempting politically difficult suburban zoning reform, Congress should target big, expensive cities where voters already support more housing development but local interest groups block progress.

• Reallocate housing tax credits: The $15 billion federal affordable housing tax credit program should be withheld from major cities unless they adopt key pro-housing reforms, redirecting those funds to other areas within the same state.

• Required reforms for cities: To remain eligible for tax credits, cities would need to allow apartment buildings along major corridors and in commercial areas, cap development fees at $10,000 per unit, waive price controls that make projects infeasible, and approve projects “ministerially.”

Read the full op-ed here.

8. How to run a private military company

Santi interviewed John Lechner about his new book Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare on the Wagner Group:

• Wagner evolved over time: Beginning with Russian involvement in Ukraine in 2014, Wagner Group expanded from military operations to diplomacy, mining, brewing, and other enterprises in regions like Syria, Libya, and Central African Republic.

• PMC models vary significantly: Unlike Western contractors like Blackwater that primarily secured facilities or personnel, Wagner often engaged in direct offensive military operations and expanded into diplomatic and economic activities.

• Wagner wasn’t just an arm of the Russian state: Wagner functioned both as a tool of the Russian government and as entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin's personal business venture, with varying degrees of state oversight in different regions.

Read or listen to the full interview here.

9. Why it’s so hard to build a jet engine

Brian explained why commercial jet engines represent one of civilization's toughest technical challenges:

• Performance and economy are tightly linked: Jet engines must be fuel-efficient, require minimal maintenance, operate at extreme temperatures, and remain lightweight — all while lasting thousands of flight hours.

• Only a few organizations can succeed: Just three companies (GE, Pratt & Whitney, and Rolls-Royce) manufacture large commercial jet engines, and developing a new engine costs billions of dollars.

• Technical boundaries must be pushed: Each new engine project requires companies to further optimize compression ratios, materials, and operating temperatures in key technologies. The RB211 engine drove Rolls-Royce into bankruptcy before becoming successful.

Read the full piece here.

10. Will Boom successfully build a supersonic airliner?

Brian also examined Boom Supersonic's recent milestone of breaking the sound barrier with its XB-1 test aircraft and evaluated the company's chances of successfully building a commercial supersonic airliner:

• Technical hurdles are enormous: Building commercial aircraft and jet engines are already among the most difficult engineering challenges. Boom is attempting both simultaneously, with the added complexity of supersonic flight.

• XB-1 success is just the beginning: While impressive, Boom's supersonic test flight doesn't address the harder challenge of building an economical, reliable airliner that meets performance targets.

• Engine development is a major risk: After established manufacturers declined partnerships, Boom is designing its engine in-house — a highly unusual and risky approach for an aircraft manufacturer.

• The business case remains uncertain: Even if technical challenges are overcome, the market for supersonic travel must be large enough to justify development costs of approximately $10 billion or more.

Read the complete assessment here.

11. Links from friends of IFP

• Max Tabarrok offers one clear metascience reform: Rely less on external academic reviews for grants and more on (faster) internal reviews.

• Dwarkesh Patel wrote a book for Stripe Press about the scaling era in AI.

• Matt Clancy takes a step back and reviews his own life as a way to think about the value of technological progress.

• Open Philanthropy is launching the Abundance and Growth Fund, and is seeking a Senior Program Officer to lead its strategy and grantmaking, with at least $120 million committed over the next three years. They’re looking for an experienced leader to fund high-impact opportunities and cultivate a thriving ecosystem of researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and funders. Learn more and apply here by March 31st. Refer a strong candidate here and get a $5k reward if Open Phil hires them.

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• Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan and current title holder for “Most Frequent Statecraft Guest.”

• Miles Brundage, an independent AI policy researcher, most recently at OpenAI working on AGI readiness.

IFP Research

🗽 STEM Immigration and the US Defense Workforce

A new report from Distinguished Immigration Counsel Amy Nice, published by the University of Chicago and the National Bureau of Economic Research, examines the critical role of foreign-born STEM professionals in US national security.

• Foreign-born STEM talent is essential to defense innovation. The Defense Department and US national labs are working with the private sector on AI and other critical technologies for national security. Immigrants comprise 37% of the advanced STEM workforce in Department of Defense-funded projects.

• The US faces growing competition for global STEM expertise. China is projected to produce nearly double the number of STEM PhDs as the US by 2025.

• Policy changes are underway but remain insufficient. The Biden administration updated visa guidance for STEM graduates, but legislative action is needed to address wait times and uncertainty about adjudications.

Read the full report here.

Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

⚖️ The Rise of Judicial Injunctions

Legal expert and new Non-Resident Senior Fellow Nicholas Bagley joined Statecraft to explain why courts are increasingly halting executive actions. While judicial review has long been a check on executive power, the rise of nationwide injunctions has dramatically expanded the judiciary’s role in shaping policy.

• Nationwide injunctions are a recent trend. Previously, rulings applied only to the parties to a case, but now courts frequently halt policies nationwide.

• Congressional dysfunction has fueled judicial intervention. Gridlock has led presidents to expand executive authority, prompting courts to push back.

• Partisan views on judicial power have flipped. Conservatives now seek to limit injunctions, while progressives view them as essential checks on Trump’s policies.

• Supreme Court intervention is likely. Expect early rulings through its "shadow docket" as legal battles escalate.

Read the transcript or listen to the podcast here.

📝 How to Run a White House Office

Tom Kalil, former Deputy Director for Policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), spoke with Santi about some key lessons from his time in government. Kalil identified three important maxims for navigating policy and bureaucracy.

• People never follow up. Meetings don’t ensure progress — persistent follow-up does. Always clarify next steps, create an open channel for updates, and proactively check in.

• Talk to who owns the paper. Policy moves through formal documents. Identifying who drafts key memos, budgets, or executive orders is critical for driving action.

• Make it easy for people to say yes. Reduce friction in decision-making. Draft emails, suggest key personnel, or offer ready-made solutions to get buy-in from agencies and leaders.

Read the whole conversation here.

🔥 The Wildfire Crisis in California

Matt Weiner, CEO of Megafire Action, joined Statecraft to break down why California’s wildfires are growing worse despite decades of policy focus. While climate change plays a role, bureaucratic obstacles, outdated regulations, and flawed land management strategies are making the problem harder to solve.

• Fire suppression without land management has created a crisis. Decades of fire exclusion have left landscapes overloaded with dry, flammable material, making catastrophic fires more frequent and intense.

• Regulatory barriers slow wildfire mitigation. Permitting laws like NEPA delay controlled burns and mechanical thinning for years — often until it’s too late. The Clean Air Act paradoxically penalizes controlled burns while exempting wildfire smoke.

• Bureaucratic fragmentation hinders response. Multiple agencies with conflicting priorities manage fire at the federal, state, and local levels, but no single entity oversees risk reduction holistically.

• California’s insurance market is in crisis. Strict rate regulations have driven private insurers out, leaving the state-backed FAIR plan on the hook for billions in wildfire damages.

Read or listen to the full conversation here.

Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

⚡ Inside the Interconnection Queue

Brian got access to a comprehensive dataset about the interconnection queue — the massive backlog of energy projects waiting for grid approval. The queue contains more than 11,000 projects totaling nearly twice the country’s current generation capacity. Delays in this process are a major obstacle to expanding US energy infrastructure.

• Renewables dominate planned projects. Solar, wind, and battery storage make up 90% of proposed capacity, with solar leading in 36 states.

• Grid congestion is slowing approvals. Project wait times now average nearly five years, delaying infrastructure expansion.

• Most projects won’t be built. Historically, 72% of queued projects are withdrawn due to high and uncertain grid upgrade costs.

Read more here.

🏗️ The Impact of Tariffs on US Construction

The Trump administration’s new tariffs on Canadian, Mexican, and Chinese imports — ranging from 10% to 25% — have sparked widespread debate over their economic impact. Brian dove into the trade data from the US Census Bureau to figure out where construction imports come from and how tariffs may affect building costs.

• Construction-related imports are massive. In 2022, the US imported $469 billion in construction-related goods, accounting for nearly 15% of total US imports.

• Metals dominate, but other materials are critical too. Steel and non-ferrous metals lead at $163 billion, followed by interior fit-out materials ($129 billion), building components ($84 billion), and tools and machinery ($46 billion).

• Tariffs hit key trading partners differently.

  • China supplies mostly finished goods — appliances, lighting, and power tools — rather than raw materials.

  • Canada is a major supplier of bulk materials, accounting for 50% of US wood imports and 20% of metal imports.

  • Mexico provides a mix of materials, machinery, and manufactured goods, benefiting from proximity and lower labor costs.

Read the full analysis here.

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🔗 Links from IFP

1. The US needs “Special Compute Zones” to rapidly and securely build AI clusters: We published the final piece in our “Compute in America” series. Director of Infrastructure Policy Arnab Datta and Director of Emerging Technology Policy Tim Fist explain specific executive actions the Trump administration could take to accelerate the AI buildout in exchange for higher security commitments.

   • “We propose that the federal government establish ‘Special Compute Zones’ — regions of the United States where AI clusters at least 5 gigawatts in size can be rapidly built through coordinated federal action, eventually totaling tens to hundreds of gigawatts across the country. Special Compute Zones would rely on strategic partnerships with top AI labs and computing firms. The government should help finance next-generation power plants and expedite permitting processes. In return, the government should require commitments from top AI and computing firms to invest in security and protect strategically important AI technology from the United States’ adversaries.”

2. NEPA needs new agency guidance following Trump’s EO: Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie and FAI Director of Infrastructure Thomas Hochman proposed some recommendations for the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to consider following an executive order that rescinded previously binding CEQ regulations on NEPA implementation.

   • “We offer three reforms to pare NEPA back to fulfill its true statutory goals. First, to narrow the set of actions that trigger NEPA, CEQ should redefine ‘major federal action’ to ensure that projects with low levels of federal involvement do not trigger NEPA. Second, to expand the set of actions that are eligible for a CatEx, CEQ should set a clear and broad standard for actions that ‘normally [do] not have a significant effect on the human environment.’ Third, to narrow the set of actions that require an EIS, CEQ should set a high standard for what constitutes a ‘reasonably foreseeable’ significant effect. In each case, CEQ should be careful to reduce the litigation attack surface for agencies, advising agencies to consider issues like indirect effects under minimal scrutiny.”

3. Judicial review should be the top permitting reform priority: Arnab Datta and James Coleman wrote an article for City Journal making the case for bipartisan permitting reform to focus on solving the "litigation doom loop” that often ensnares energy infrastructure projects.

   • “What’s needed is a solution that ends the courts’ discretion to hold up a project indefinitely but allows for strictly time-limited review. We propose that courts receive a maximum of four years to block a project, beginning when environmental review starts. If a NEPA review is genuinely rushed, the courts can halt the project for the rest of the four years to ensure sufficient review time. But after four years, the project could go forward even if a court believes the agency’s review is inadequate. The court could still require the agency to do more review, but it could no longer delay the project.”

4. Why the two parties operate differently: Senior Editor Santi Ruiz interviewed Jo Freeman, a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s, a civil rights campaigner, and later a political scientist.

   • “I've been thinking about the political cultures of the two parties for a very long time. I've been to every Democratic convention since ‘64 and every Republican convention since ‘76. I've been particularly focused on what women were doing within the two parties, although I'll admit that in ‘64 they weren't really doing very much. In ‘76, they both were doing a lot, but they were doing it differently. Because I saw feminists do things differently in the different parties, I began to ask myself, ‘Why?’”

5. How to budget for the SEC: And in the second installment of his two-part interview with his dad, Santi asks about his experience as the Executive Director of the SEC during the financial crisis.

   • “There is this highly instructive story that makes the rounds in budget circles in Washington about a former head of the Army Corps of Engineers who was asked that question in his Senate appropriations hearing on the Hill. This head of the Army Corps of Engineers took the opportunity to say, ‘No, I think we're being underfunded in the President's request. I really don't think we're equipped to carry out our mission and we need more.’ He was on the street looking for work practically the next day.”

6. Why is homeowners insurance getting so expensive? In the wake of the Palisades Fire, Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter did a deep dive on homeowners insurance.

   • “To sum up, homeowners insurance costs have risen steadily and substantially since the 1970s. Construction cost inflation and increasing home size can probably only explain a small portion of the increase. Insurers’ profits don’t seem to be a driver, and neither does state-level population shifts: the cost increases are across the board, in essentially every state… Looking at data from types of claims filed, the increasing frequency and severity of wind and hail damage is responsible for around half the increase in insurance losses over the past two decades, despite the fact that loss ratios in most wind and hurricane-prone states seem to be down. Fire risk is a relatively small portion of the increase. And another major source of increase isn’t anything related to climate at all, but due to the increasing frequency and severity of water damage.”

7. Red tape is holding back clean energy deployment: Co-founder Alec Stapp was interviewed by Freethink about the regulatory barriers to building more solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear power in the US.

8. Most people are wrong about what DeepSeek means for US-China competition on AI: Tim Fist went on The Dynamist podcast alongside FAI Chief Economist Sam Hammond to talk about what the new model from China’s leading AI lab should tell us about the efficacy of US export controls and whether China has caught up to the US.

🤝 Links from friends of IFP

9. Supersonic flight hit a new milestone — but we still need policy change: In honor of Boom’s supersonic flight achievement, re-read the classic white paper from Eli Dourado and Sam Hammond on what policy changes still need to happen to Make America Boom Again.

10. Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment: Andy Masley debunks some common myths surrounding water usage and power consumption for AI applications.

    • “One of the most important shifts in talking about climate has been the collective realization that individual actions like recycling pale in comparison to the urgent need to transition the energy sector to renewables. The current AI debate feels like we’ve forgotten that lesson. After years of progress in addressing systemic issues over personal lifestyle changes, it’s as if everyone suddenly started obsessing over whether the digital clocks in our bedrooms use too much energy and began condemning them as a major problem.”

11. Do prediction technologies help novices or experts more? Matt Clancy looks at the research literature to figure out who will benefit most from using AI tools.

    • “The impact of future AI on scientists and inventors will depend on your assumptions about what future AI will do well and how much that overlaps with existing expertise. My own view is that the current AI paradigm is going to keep getting better at identifying useful patterns in data, whether the protein data bank or the corpus of scientific journal articles. So to the extent an expert’s work is primarily based on mining patterns from data, AI is potentially going to erode their advantages over novices.”

12. Speculative Technologies announces the 2025 class of Brains Fellows: Brains provides training, mentorship, and connections to help scientists and technologists design and execute on coordinated research programs (like a DARPA program manager would).

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We’re also experimenting with a new format for our newsletter, including links to interesting work from other friends in the progress studies community. Let us know what you think!

🔗 Links from IFP

1. How to almost double the economic value of the H1-B program without even issuing more visas: What if instead of awarding H1-Bs using a lottery, we awarded them based on compensation (or almost anything other than chance)? 

   • Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld FOIA'd the US government to obtain the data necessary to simulate different H-1B reform proposals and found the compensation-based approach would raise the value of the program by 88%.

   • See also his op-ed in the WSJ.

2. Congress could leverage the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) to incentivize big cities to adopt pro-housing policies: Non-Resident Senior Fellow Chris Elmendorf published a white paper with Sam Jacobson and the Niskanen Center’s Alex Armlovich showing how this could work.

   • “To retain LIHTC eligibility, big cities would have to accept limits on fees and price controls on new multifamily housing; review housing development proposals ‘ministerially,’ that is, just for compliance with objective standards; and allow reasonably dense housing to be built on commercial corridors.”

3. Federal data collection is underrated by everyone, including DOGE: Metascience Fellow Matt Esche and Senior Editor Santi Ruiz wrote a piece for Commonplace — a new publication from American Compass — with some pointers for better data collection.

   • “A focus on federal data collection can solve a few problems simultaneously. Paradoxically, it can reduce the administrative burden on citizens of providing the government with information on taxes or permits (by allowing cross-referencing and user research). Much of sociology and economics relies on the federal government as the only actor with the bird’s-eye view to collect relevant data. And most importantly, it can make the federal government much more responsive to the needs of its citizens.”

4. Why did skyscrapers become glass boxes? Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter answers the question on everyone’s mind in this week’s Construction Physics:

   • “Skyscrapers are designed by architects, but it’s the developer who conceives of the project, arranges the funding, hires the design team, and ultimately decides what the building will be. To me, the question isn’t ‘Why did architects embrace modernism?’ It’s ‘Why did real estate developers embrace modernism?’ Ultimately, it was economics (or at least perceived economics) that drove developers to embrace this style. Glass curtain wall buildings were cheaper to erect than their masonry predecessors, and they allowed developers to squeeze more rentable space from the same building footprint. Ornate, detailed exteriors were increasingly seen as something tenants didn’t particularly care about, making it harder to justify spending money on them. And once this style had taken hold, rational risk aversion encouraged developers and builders to keep using it.”

5. How to win an election against the communists: In a special edition of Statecraft, Santi interviews his dad — a seasoned policy and political hand with hemisphere-spanning experiences. He did everything from advising anti-communist political candidates in Nicaragua to working with a member of the US House on the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission.

   • “We start hearing that Jimmy Carter is doing a bit of shuttle diplomacy. He's over in the other bunker with Daniel Ortega, who was president of Nicaragua at the time — and he’s president again today, sadly. This is how circular things are in Latin America and in Nicaragua, specifically. Through that shuttle diplomacy, Carter got Violeta Chamorro to agree to let the Sandinistas keep control of the military and the intelligence apparatus, in exchange for them willingly giving up and transferring power to her. That was the deal Carter cut. It gave all of us a bad taste in our mouth. And to this day, I think it was a stain on his record.”

6. Where should permitting reform go from here? (And what did the Trump executive order on CEQ regulations just do?): Alec Stapp and Brian Potter discussed these questions and more on a panel about infrastructure permitting at AEI this week. You can view a recording of the event here.

🤝 Links from friends of IFP

7. The Economic Innovation Group (EIG) released a big new report on high-skilled immigration.

   • “High-skilled immigration is America’s not-so-secret weapon. Done right, high-skilled immigration policy can accelerate economic growth and innovation, cement American leadership in technologies critical to national security, and even reduce the nation’s fiscal deficit. Unfortunately, today’s high-skilled immigration system is not set up to advance these goals. But there is a better way.”

8. Nicholas Bagley, Zachary Liscow, and the Niskanen Center are hosting a “Law of Abundance” conference.

   • You can submit paper abstracts here.

9. Dean Ball and Tim Lee launched a new interview podcast called AI Summer.

   • Early guests include Jon Askonas, Nathan Lambert, Ajeya Cotra, and Sam Hammond.

10. Jacob Trefethen has five ideas for reforming science funding:

    • “1) Fund high-ambition proposals that have little or no preliminary data. 2) Less unpaid peer review, more accountable Program Officers. 3) Split off ARPA-H, protect its money, insulate from NIH processes. 4) Slash grant reporting requirements. 5) Fund Assistant Professors as Pls more + career track for talented non-Pl.”

11. Thomas Hochman also has some free ideas for budding policy wonks.

    • “The policy world has a strange way of misallocating attention. Major, systemic problems languish in obscurity for years; relatively minor issues attract armies of experts and millions in funding. As an economist friend once told me, there’s no efficient market for wonkery. This mismatch creates opportunity. There are whole areas of research out there just waiting for their champion.”

12. Jason Crawford wrote about how sci-fi can have drama without dystopia or doomerism.

    • “The opposite of dystopia isn’t utopia — which doesn’t exist. It’s ‘protopia’: a world that is always getting better, but is never perfect. Such a world always has new problems to solve, including some problems created by the old solutions. There is plenty of conflict and intrigue in such a world, and plenty of room for heroes and villains.”

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