IFP Update: April 2026
We're excited to once again be co-hosting the Progress Conference with the Roots of Progress Institute, October 8–11 in Berkeley, CA. The event will sell out, so be sure to apply by the May 31 deadline if you want to attend.
📣 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
