Institute for Progress — December 2022 Update
Hello!
Happy New Year to you — we hope you’re as excited about 2023 as we are at IFP. A brief announcement: Lindsay Milliken has joined our immigration team! Lindsay has done a lot of great work to highlight underrated high-skilled immigration policy mechanisms like the Schedule A list at the Department of Labor. Watch this space 👀
✨ As we come up on our own one-year anniversary (!), the IFP team has been hard at work — here’s what we’ve been up to over the last month:
✍️ Published Work
Co-founder Alec Stapp and Biosecurity Fellow Juan Cambeiro wrote a response to the EPA’s request for information on indoor air quality, calling for more research into far-UVC technology
Biosecurity Fellow Adin Richards wrote a white paper that shows how incentivizing farmers to hold food reserves would increase global food security
In a related op-ed, Adin highlighted the risks we face from ceding control of global food reserves to China
For Works in Progress, Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams joined Senior Fellow Paul Niehaus to write about the lessons that science could learn from the field of international development — specifically, how and why to embrace experimentation: “Developing the science of science”
Heidi also coauthored an NBER working paper titled “Representation and Extrapolation: Evidence from Clinical Trials,” on how diversifying clinical trials could build trust in new treatments among black patients and doctors
Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld coauthored a piece with Divyansh Kaushik arguing for allowing immigrants to renew their visas in the US
Jeremy and Senior Fellow Todd Moss explained how America’s dysfunctional visa system threatened a White House Summit
🎤 Interviews & Events
Heidi joined a panel hosted by The Atlantic to discuss what an “Operation Warp Speed” for cancer trials could look like
Alec appeared on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Free the Economy podcast to discuss environmental policy, housing, and the “abundance agenda”
📰 Media
The Atlantic quoted Caleb and Heidi in a piece investigating why the age of American progress ended:
“The single most important thing that Operation Warp Speed did was to provide a whole-of-government urgency” to the goal of rapid deployment, Caleb Watney, a co-founder of the Institute for Progress, told me. “Getting everything right meant you needed to make a million correct decisions in the right order.”
According to Heidi Williams, the director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, from the time the War on Cancer was announced, in 1971, until 2015, only six drugs were approved to prevent any cancer. This reflects an enormous gap in clinical trials: From 1973 to 2011, nearly 30,000 trials were run for drugs that treated recurrent or metastatic cancer, compared with fewer than 600 for cancer prevention. How could this be?
The Washington Post quoted Jeremy and Todd in a column about the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit:
“The wait time for a visitor visa appointment in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, is now 666 days; waits of at least three months are now common at US consulates across the continent,” said a CGD post by Todd Moss and Jeremy Neufeld. The problem is so bad that “the administration had to create a special visa track for participants in the White House’s own summit from civil society and the business community.”
🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Fellow Brian Potter
Building Fast and Slow Part III: Design of the World Trade Center
Building Fast and Slow Part IV: Construction of the World Trade Center
👋 Tweet for the Road
