Institute for Progress (IFP) — January 2024 Update
Is it too late to say Happy New Year? Probably. Regardless, we hope you’re having a good start to 2024. A few announcements we’re really excited to share:
Jassi Pannu joined our team as a Senior Biotechnology Fellow with a focus on policies and technologies that improve health and prevent disease. Jassi is a licensed physician and completed her M.D. and medical residency at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Arnab Datta also joined the team as Director of Infrastructure Policy to lead our work on energy, transportation, and housing. Arnab previously worked for Senator Bennet and is also a senior counsel with Employ America.
And we welcomed Patrick Collard as a Non-Resident Fellow, focusing on metascience and high-skilled immigration research topics.
Here’s what we’ve been tackling this month:
✍️ Written Work
Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D’Souza and Co-founder Alec Stapp led a coalition letter to Congress, calling for specific reforms to the Federal Select Agent Program that would improve effective oversight of US laboratories that work with biological select agents and toxins.
“Together, these provisions establish a pathway to regulate synthetic, chimeric, and modified select agents, and create an anonymous and voluntary no-fault reporting system. They comprehensively modernize FSAP, ensuring emerging biosecurity and biosafety risks are mitigated.”
Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld and Immigration Fellow Lindsay Milliken released an interactive tool that lets you “Create Your Own Data-Driven Update to Schedule A,” the Department of Labor list that enables immigrants in key fields to more quickly enter the country.
Lindsay wrote a Boston Herald op-ed with Aidan Enright, on how Schedule A reforms can kickstart economic growth.
“The Biden administration should prioritize not only enhancing Schedule A but modernizing it to ensure that we take advantage of its benefits for years to come.”
Senior Editor Santi Ruiz reviewed a new book on “conservative futurism” for The Dispatch.
“Belief in the power of markets, therefore, may be a necessary piece of a forward-looking conservative movement. But it surely can’t be the only piece. If futurists want to build that movement, they’ll have to justify their vision of human flourishing to a skeptical audience.”
Senior Fellow Chris Snyder has a new working paper with co-authors that estimates the social value of a universal COVID vaccine.
“We estimate the incremental value to the U.S. population of a universal COVID-19 vaccine to be $1.5–$2.6 trillion greater than variant-specific boosters (depending on how the arrival rate of variants is modeled). This social value eclipses the cost of an advance market commitment to incentivize the universal vaccine by several orders of magnitude.”
🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter
🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz
🎤 Interviews & Events
Lindsay did the rounds, joining The Sophie Alcorn Podcast and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s This Week in Immigration to discuss Schedule A reform.
📰 Media
Reason quoted Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter on the sale of US Steel:
"Arguably, US Steel has been a disappointment since the day it was formed," writes Brian Potter, a senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, in his Construction Physics Substack newsletter. "The company's large size made it unwieldy to manage, and it was late to every major advance in steelmaking technology of the last 100 years, from continuous rolling to the basic oxygen furnace to the minimill…As far as I can tell, no major steelmaking technology over the last century came out of US Steel."
The Dispatch also recommended Brian’s excellent history of US Steel, as did Economic Innovation Group Fellow Conor O’Brien.
TechCrunch highlighted IFP’s new Schedule A report.
AEI scholar James Pethokoukis discussed our series on the future of geothermal energy in his newsletter, Faster Please!