IFP — Giving Tuesday and November 2024 Update
We hope you all had a restful Thanksgiving break. We’re especially thankful this year for all the support that makes the work of IFP possible.
As a non-profit organization, we rely on philanthropic donations from individuals and foundations to do our work (and we don’t accept money from corporations or foreign governments). This fundraising strategy enables our team to stay laser-focused on IFP’s mission and to take advantage of policy windows as soon as they open.
We couldn’t be more excited about the breadth of projects we’ve launched in just three short years — everything from Hill advocacy on permitting reform, analysis on underutilized visa pathways for top international talent, wonky interviews with policymakers through Statecraft, partnerships with federal agencies on science funding experimentation, and much more. And it still feels like we’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible in the coming years.
For Giving Tuesday, if you’re interested in helping us expand our work, you can visit our donation page here, or you can find us on Benevity.
Thank you all for reading our work and for being part of this burgeoning community. Here’s what we’ve been up to this month:
✍️ Published Work
The New Atlantis published “The Builder Issue,” and it featured three IFP writers:
Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie analyzed why rebuilds after disasters move faster than normal infrastructure projects, and what that can tell us about the political economy of building.
In the “What We Should Build” section, Senior Editor Santi Ruiz profiled the Ocean Cleanup organization and its trash-removing nets.
In the same section, Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter called for “chains of geothermal power stations to keep the Yellowstone supervolcano from destroying modern civilization (and get a lot of clean power too).”
In “The Triple Rapid Framework for Pandemic Diagnostics,” Fellow Janika Schmitt and Non-Resident Senior Fellow Jake Swett laid out a model for containing future outbreaks at their source: rapid reconfiguration, rapid deployment, and rapid results.
Janika and Jake fleshed out the Triple Rapid framework in STAT News.
Janika, Biotechnology Fellow Willy Chertman, and Co-founder Alec Stapp highlighted five key moves the new administration could make to improve the nation's biosecurity in the Trump era.
Keeping the theme, Santi laid out “the five things President Trump should do on day one” in The Free Press, calling for a state capacity focus in the new administration.
🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang
In September, Macroscience kicked off “Metascience 101”: a nine-episode crash course in the debates, issues, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement. You can access the full series here. We closed out the series this month with a final episode:
Episode Nine: “How to Get Involved”
Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams talks with Non-Resident Senior Fellows Paul Niehaus and Matt Clancy about the academic, non-profit, and private sector paths to research, the importance of your surroundings, and how you can find good use-inspired questions.
🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz
Santi interviewed Anduril Co-founder Trae Stephens and former US Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios on “How to Rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy.”
“When I was in government, we fought these massive ‘Huawei wars’... We were in this unfortunate position where some of our strongest allies had this nefarious technology baked into their infrastructure. We were literally begging them to rip it out. With artificial intelligence, we have a huge opportunity to not make that mistake again.”
Santi talked to Chris Anderson, who helped prototype and deploy the first kamikaze drone used by the US Army.
“Keep in mind, these things were not yet on the battlefield. We had to walk the dog with these folks and explain the logic. We would show them a video of how this was employed: that you can bring this thing almost to the target, and if you get close and say, ‘Oh, that guy's holding a shovel, not a weapon,’ you can wave off and either go blow it up in the air or go find another target.”
And he talked to Dr. Eric Van Gieson about building a flying Ebola hospital, CDC reform, diplomacy in Africa, and seeing gain-of-function research proposals while at DARPA.
“There's an example of where we were waiting to go in to meet with an African delegation. Our team was prepared to speak in French — we had translators. We got half an hour with the delegation from their Ministry of Health. We walked out, and the Chinese delegation came in, but they went to the effort of not only knowing French, but also knowing a local language that none of us had ever heard, and they spoke in that language to their hosts. We were ushered out. The Chinese stayed for three hours.”
🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter
Brian drew some historical parallels between the 19th-century US and China today:
“In both the US and China, the transition to manufacturing powerhouse came through operating at previously unimaginable levels of scale… The US developed a host of mass-production and continuous-process manufacturing methods that could produce a constant stream of output in enormous quantities, a transformation sometimes known as the second industrial revolution.”
Does all semiconductor manufacturing really depend on a quartz mine in North Carolina? The short answer: not exactly.
“Spruce Pine is indeed a key choke point in the modern semiconductor manufacturing landscape, but it’s not quite an irreplaceable, load-bearing column supporting all of the modern economy. It’s closer to occupying a relatively unique niche in a price-performance landscape: there are alternatives, but they’re all some combination of not as good, not as cheap, and not yet developed.”
Brian investigated the underrated influence of Bell Labs on the American R&D ecosystem:
“Bell Labs’ achievements, particularly the invention of the transistor in 1947, seem to have prompted the decisions of many companies to start their own R&D labs… There seem to have been several modes of influence. For one, the transistor itself ushered in a new world of semiconductor devices… Anyone who wanted to compete in the new market by developing their own semiconductor-based products would need to acquire the relevant scientific expertise… The transistor also demonstrated that ‘basic’ research could result in enormously successful, world-changing products… Finally, Bell Labs was incredibly prestigious, and companies wanted to burnish their reputations by having their own scientific research establishments.”
Brian did an in-depth comparison of American road quality to international parallels, and found our roads hold up pretty well, with some exceptions:
“US interstates seem high quality, and as good as comparable roads in Europe. Non-interstates are of lower quality, particularly within major urban areas, but a lack of data makes it hard to do much international comparison. The limited data we have suggests that US roads are perhaps not a huge outlier in quality… Overall, my main takeaway is that roads in major US cities are often shockingly bad, particularly in California, and that much more data is needed on road quality in other countries.”
And he investigated the long, winding road taken by the lithium-ion battery toward mass adoption:
“It’s perhaps more appropriate to think of the lithium-ion battery not as a single invention, but as a slow, steady accumulation of many inventions that were needed to both make a battery practical and to unlock its full potential.”
📰 Media
IFP’s research series Compute in America was cited in Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View newsletter on AI, and by Heatmap in a piece on the power demands of new data centers:
“Thanks to 10-year delays in permitting for new transmission lines and connecting generation capacity to the grid, the most viable near-term option is behind-the-meter,” Tim Fist and Arnab Datta wrote in a report for the Institute for Progress, a technology and science policy think tank. In other words, one way to get around grid interconnection and intermittency issues is to have your own power plant.”
Heatmap also quoted Aidan Mackenzie on the political promise of geothermal energy:
“The 118th Congress… is quietly working on bills to ease the development path for the one form of clean, firm power that Republicans and Democrats can peaceably unite around: geothermal. Geothermal has something to offer for everyone in Washington. ‘It’s a source of clean energy, which makes it appealing to Democrats,’ Aidan Mackenzie, a fellow at the science and technology policy group the Institute for Progress, told me. It can also generate electricity 24 hours a day with no greenhouse gas emissions, thus potentially making it a key part of the decarbonized grid of the future. For Republicans, it does all this while also employing the people, skills, and sometimes the actual gear of the oil and gas industry to drill deep into pockets of trapped heat, which are often in states Republicans control. For this reason, it ‘fits very well with “drill baby drill” Republican ethos,’ Mackenzie added.”
A Foreign Policy op-ed called on Congress to adopt an IFP proposal that would place a time limit on injunctive relief for NEPA lawsuits.
City Journal interviewed Jeremy on immigration changes that can make it easier to build chips in America.
“As Institute for Progress senior immigration fellow Jeremy Neufeld explained to me, ‘There is a lot of untapped potential in some of the existing pathways.’”
👋 Tweet for the Road
