IFP — January 2025 Update

Happy New Year! First up — the IFP team is getting bigger. We added three amazing folks recently:

• Abigail Africa is an Assistant Editor working on Statecraft, IFP research products, and other editorial and design projects.

• Pavan Venkatakrishnan is an Infrastructure Fellow focused on energy, tax, and regulatory policy — he’ll be on the Hill a lot this year.

• Tao Burga is a Non-Resident Fellow working with our emerging tech policy team.

We’re also excited to announce a forthcoming joint project with the Foundation for American Innovation and American Compass: The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook.

Here’s what else we’ve been up to recently: 

✍️ Published Work

• Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal about H-1B reform, arguing we should ditch the lottery and instead allocate H-1Bs using an age-adjusted wage ranking.

  • “Awarding visas by chance means that while the program can bring in world-class talent, including Mr. Musk, it also brings in thousands of middling workers. They compete with citizens for jobs and contribute less meaningfully to productivity and innovation. As constructed, the lottery doesn’t serve American interests and needs to be replaced.”

• Director of Infrastructure Policy Arnab Datta wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about the path forward for climate advocates.

  • “Both the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act were passed by a fractious Congress because of an important shift: Policymakers moved away from treating climate change as a moral crusade against fossil fuel villains to treating it as a problem of technological innovation and industrial strategy… [They] must continue this strategy rather than revert to the old playbook of regulations, lawsuits and industry vilification.”

• In partnership with Renaissance Philanthropy, Biotechnology Fellow Willy Chertman and Ruxandra Tesloianu launched the Clinical Trial Abundance project, starting with nine specific and actionable policy memos from academic experts and industry veterans.

  • Their overview of the project was published by Slow Boring.

    • The New York Times called it “an invigorating manifesto for drug development reform.”

• Willy also published an innovation agenda for addiction with CASPR Co-founder Nicholas Reville.

  • “Despite the enormous medical, economic, and societal cost of addiction, the field of addiction medicine has been largely abandoned by the pharmaceutical industry and underfunded by the US government. Between 2000 and 2023, the FDA approved 222 distinct products for cancer, 57 for heart disease, and dozens for psychiatric illnesses. But it approved just 6 for substance use disorders. Of those 6, 3 were different delivery methods for buprenorphine.”

• In partnership with the National Defense Industrial Association’s (NDIA) Emerging Technologies Institute (ETI), we released a new paper with nine recommendations for how foreign-born talent can be leveraged in the Department of Defense and defense industrial base’s STEM workforce.

• Senior Technology Fellow Tim Fist co-authored an op-ed in Breaking Defense with former NIST Director Walter G. Copan about the need for a non-profit foundation to support NIST’s mission.

  • “Because the US approach is industry-led by design, NIST cannot directly support US experts to counter China’s efforts [to manipulate international standards]. A NIST foundation could fill this gap by supporting US experts (especially from small and medium-sized enterprises) to participate in international standard-setting, ensuring a level playing field for American enterprises.”

• Non-Resident Fellow Hamidah Oderinwale wrote about maximizing the scientific ROI from international PhDs.

  • “As of 2022, US institutions graduate almost 15,000 international STEM PhDs yearly. However, those graduates are locked out of critical US scientific institutions through immigration requirements tied to fellowship and grant programs. At the NIH, from 2012 to 2021, 91% of scientific grants for postdocs were awarded through programs restricted to citizens and permanent residents.”

• We published a report from Max Langenkamp on securing benchtop DNA synthesizers to mitigate their risks while protecting potential the benefits from innovation.

🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• Santi spoke with Nicholas Bagley, Kathy Stack, and Jenny Mattingley about how bureaucracy is breaking government.

  • “If you work at OMB and you see these paperwork requests, part of your day job is helping agencies make those better. And so if you're asked, ‘Does the Paperwork Reduction Act do good?’ From your perspective, you've helped people make their requests better. It looks like the PRA is working. What you never see is all the time and effort that's wasted getting your approval, and all the costs it imposes on actually getting user feedback. So some of the staunchest adherents to some of the stupidest procedural rules are the very agencies that are implementing them.”

• And he finally landed his white whale interviewee: Edward Luttwak, author of 20-odd books on grand strategy, military affairs, and security. A Romanian Jew, Luttwak served in the Mossad before moving to the United States, where he staffed Reagan’s transition team and consulted for the Pentagon (and still does).

  • “Ironically, when Hassan landed after the attempt to have his plane shot down, he proved exactly that. He immediately went and got a few people, rounded up the pilots, and then came to town and did everything that Oufkir had wanted the heir of the throne to do. But he, of course, entered Oufkir's office and shot him. Oufkir bled to death, and he did so over a copy of my book.”

• Then Santi brought back Nicholas Bagley for a conversation with James Coleman and Adam White about two recent court cases that have the potential to end environmental review as we know it.

  • “This might get too far into the trivia, but Judge Randolph, who wrote the D.C. Circuit decision blowing this whole thing up, has a very long memory. As the D.C. Circuit case says, this all started with an executive order from President Carter in 1977, after a Supreme Court case the year before where the Justice Department told the Supreme Court that the CEQ only proposes guidelines, it doesn't have rulemaking authority. Judge Randolph would remember that, because he was in the Solicitor General's Office when that case was argued. More specifically, Judge Randolph was the Deputy Solicitor General who argued that case and told the Supreme Court in 1976, “CEQ only does guidelines, it doesn't do rules.”

• Statecraft talked to Jennifer Pahlka and Andrew Greenway about their new paper on state capacity called “The How We Need Now: A Capacity Agenda for 2025 and Beyond.”

  • “It is just really hard to put solar on your house. It's really hard to build new transmission lines. It's really hard to build housing. There are digital ways of working that I think help fix this — I don't necessarily mean to say there are great digital tools we can bring to the table, though that's also true. But when Andrew talks about a digital way of working, it's one that doesn't accept that all the steps in the process that exist today should just be digitized. We don't need a lot of those steps in the process!”

• Santi went on the American Compass podcast last month to talk about government efficiency, state capacity, and what Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is likely to tackle.

  • “I think there's a deeper question that I'm sure they're thinking about: not just how do you reduce headcount right now, but how do you fix the hiring and firing process in general? The federal government fires people at a rate four times lower than the private sector for a variety of procedural reasons. Federal bureaucrats can all appeal their own firings internally. There's no ‘for performance’ requirement.”

🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• Brian went deep on one specific innovation — polycrystalline diamond drill bits — to see what learning by doing looks like up close.

  • “When a technology is first being developed, its behavior and performance won’t be understood particularly well. There won’t be an obvious ‘theory’ of the technology or any sort of body of knowledge surrounding it — how manipulating various aspects of it changes its performance, how different parameters relate to each other, what governs the ultimate ceiling on it, and so on. As more experience is accumulated with a technology, beyond simply learning what works and what doesn’t, practitioners will gradually develop more sophisticated models of how it works, and use those models to push performance even further.”

• He also pulled together an energy cheat sheet for aspiring wonks everywhere.

  • “We built our energy infrastructure primarily around hydrocarbons, a technology with a particular set of capabilities and constraints. Hydrocarbons are very energy-dense, easy to move around, and easy to store, which to some extent makes up for the fact that it’s hard to convert them into other types of energy without incurring large losses. The technology we’ll replace it with will likely not share those particular capabilities: electricity can be converted to different forms of energy with fewer losses, but it's not as easy to store and move around as hydrocarbons are. Decarbonizing doesn’t just mean building lots of solar power and wind — it probably means completely rethinking how our energy infrastructure works.”

• Somehow the two-volume autobiography of TSMC founder Morris Chang had yet to be translated into English. So Brian went ahead and did it (reminder: you can just do things.)

  • “If you were making a list of the most important companies in the world, you’d find Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, somewhere very close to the top. It’s one of a tiny handful of companies, along with Intel and Samsung, that can make the most advanced microchips, and it has a commanding lead in that market. TSMC makes the microprocessors and 5G chips for Apple’s iPhones and Macbooks. It makes chips for both Intel and AMD. And it makes the chips for NVIDIA, Meta, and Amazon that are powering the AI boom. TSMC is so important that it’s sometimes called Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” the idea being that fear of damaging TSMC might dissuade China from trying to invade Taiwan.”

🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang

• Back in July, Tim announced an open RFP for short papers on “negative macroscience,” diagnosing places where the infrastructure for science has broken down, and how we might do better. The first piece in the series is from Non-Resident Fellow Maxwell Tabarrok on peptides and antibiotic resistance.

  • “If nothing is done, antibiotic resistance promises a return to the historical norm of frequent death from infectious disease. As humans use more antibiotics, we are inadvertently running the world's largest selective breeding program for bacteria which can survive our onslaught of drugs. Already by the late 1960s, 80% of cases of Staphylococcus aureus, a common and notorious bacterial infection agent, were resistant to penicillin. Since then, we have discovered many more powerful antibiotic drugs, but our use of the drugs is growing rapidly, while our discovery rate is stagnating at best. As a result, antibiotic resistance is spreading. Today, certain forms of Staphylococcus aureus, like MRSA, are resistant to even our most powerful antibiotics, and the disease results in 20 thousand deaths every year in the US. The most promising solution to antibiotic resistance comes from dragon blood.”

📰 Events & Media

• Co-founder Alec Stapp gave a presentation on exponential growth and linear governance at the Progress 2024 conference in Berkeley, CA.

• Co-founder Caleb Watney was quoted in an Axios story about potential reforms at NIH under Jay Bhattacharya.

  • "‘Getting science right is arguably the single-most important thing we can do in society,’ says Caleb Watney, co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress.”

• John Bailey referenced IFP’s work on H-1B reform in an op-ed for The Hill.

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