IFP Update: May 2026
It was a packed month at IFP! We helped launch a new Focused Research Organization to accelerate the development of new medicines, published a to-do list for a great Congressional housing bill, and put a price tag on national AI readiness.
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.
👋 Tweet for the Road
