IFP Update: September 2025
Happy October! Last month was a busy one for all of our policy teams, but especially for our high-skilled immigration team with all the H-1B news. Director of Immigration Policy Jeremy Neufeld:
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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