Institute for Progress (IFP) — April 2024 Update
Come work for IFP! We’re hiring for some exciting jobs, including two Biotechnology Fellow roles and a Data Fellow position. Today is the last day to apply!
Here’s what we’ve been working on this month:
✍️ Written Work
In Slow Boring, Director of Infrastructure Policy Arnab Datta coauthored a piece on the “litigation doom loop” that new energy projects face, and outlined a way to defeat it.
“We’re proposing a time limit on injunctions. Under our proposal, after four years of litigation and review, courts could no longer prevent a project from beginning construction. This solution would pair nicely with the two-year deadlines imposed on agencies to finish review in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. If the courts believe more environmental review is necessary, they could order the government to perform it, but they could no longer paralyze new energy infrastructure construction.”
For IFP, Jordan Schneider and Arrian Ebrahimi outlined a roadmap the new National Semiconductor Technology Center can take to support ambitious moonshots in critical technologies.
“The chip industry was born in America, and a sufficiently ambitious NSTC can ensure the next generation of computing technology is continued here. If the NSTC’s ambitious research and investment agendas complement those of private industry, the once-in-a-generation consortium can make a strong argument to Congress for continued funding, becoming an institution with staying power.”
Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter explained how the costs of building transmission lines are allocated, and why it matters.
We joined more than 80 organizations, companies, and universities to urge the full funding of the National Institute of Standards and Technology budget for AI-related work in the upcoming fiscal year.
Biotechnology Fellow Arielle D’Souza and Fellow Janika Schmitt created a comprehensive map of the entities that monitor biological threats across the U.S. federal government.
In Issues in Science and Technology, Co-founder Caleb Watney responded to Adam Russell’s disquisition on the ARPA model and its strengths.
“As a society and a political system, we need to develop a better set of antibodies to the opportunism that leaps on each failure and thereby smothers success. We need the political will to fail.”
🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter
🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz
📰 Media
British outlet CityAM flagged how “The Statecraft project at the Institute for Progress shares stories of how policymakers do seemingly impossible things, from preventing the annual waste of 17,500 donated organs to running a CIA base in Afghanistan.”
Reason Magazine featured IFP and the broader “progress studies movement.”
“The Institute for Progress (IFP), co-founded by Caleb Watney and Alec Stapp, focuses on finding public policy ideas that can boost innovation sooner rather than later. ‘Because of the unique position of the United States, we have a moral call to really take the lead and embrace our role as the world's R&D lab,’ argues Watney. The U.S., he notes, has particular advantages when it comes to scientific and technological progress: the concentration of the world's top universities, the fact that the world's top scientific minds want to immigrate here, a huge and dynamic economy that enables the rapid iteration and prototyping of new technologies.”
Heatmap quoted Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie on (great) new categorical exclusions to some geothermal activity on public lands
“‘I think this is a very good step in the right direction,’ Aidan Mackenzie, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me. On top of saving companies time, it also saves the government time. Creating a new categorical exclusion ‘requires notice and comment, which is more challenging for an agency,’ Mackenzie said. ‘Adopting an existing categorical exclusion is a much easier process.’”
Aidan also talked to Freethink about the problems with permitting for geothermal energy
“‘The policy problem is that geothermal companies are forced to conduct environmental assessments — the mid-tier of NEPA reviews, which can be hundreds of pages and take years — before they can drill and test whether geothermal resources are good enough to produce electricity,’ Aidan Mackenzie, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told Freethink. ‘If companies fail to find the resource,’ he continued, ‘they may have to repeat the review. And then after they confirm a resource, companies are obliged to conduct another, even more burdensome environmental impact statement review to construct the production wells and transmission lines.’”
And Co-founder Alec Stapp was quoted by EnergyCentral on the new categorical exclusions:
“Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a Washington-based policy think tank, said on Twitter, ‘If you care about clean energy abundance, this is a massive win.’”
Arnab Datta was interviewed by AEI scholar James Pethokoukis on geothermal energy, along with Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter, for Pethokoukis’s newsletter, Faster Please!
Our research on the roadblocks to building transmission lines was cited by POWER Magazine.
And Brian got a shoutout on The American Compass Podcast, while the IFP team got a shoutout from Zvi Moskovitz on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.
The Brookings Institution praised a proposal from IFP to modernize the Schedule A list at the Department of Labor.
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