Institute for Progress (IFP) — July 2024 Update

Some big announcements this month: 

• We’re excited to announce that Claire Larkin has joined IFP as our new Chief of Staff! Claire's skills and experience will provide a major boost to our capacity across the board and help IFP continue to scale our policy impact.

• And we’re thrilled to have Chris Elmendorf, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis, joining the team as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow.

  • We look forward to working with Chris on infrastructure policy issues and leveraging his expertise on housing and administrative law.

• We enthusiastically endorse the EPIC Act in the Senate, which would authorize the creation of a non-profit NIST Foundation to support the important work of the agency. You can read more about the case for a NIST foundation in our report here. 

• And in the Macroscience newsletter, Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang and Senior Editor Santi Ruiz wrote an “RFP on Negative Metascience.” Macroscience will pay up to $5,000 for case studies of scientific failure. Email Tim if you are interested!

Here’s what we’ve been up in July:

✍️ Written Work

• Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie explains how NEPA will tax clean energy.

  • “To understand how NEPA affects clean energy, we must first uncover NEPA’s so-called ‘dark matter’ effects — the law’s downstream costs that distort markets, create uncertainty for developers, and undermine state capacity. By investigating these costs, this paper adds important missing context to the limited data on NEPA. A holistic evaluation of the available data supports a concrete conclusion: As we transition our energy system, NEPA is likely to create larger drags on clean energy than on fossil fuels.”

• Distinguished Immigration Counsel Amy Nice and several coauthors explained how the National Interest Waiver streamlines the green card process for STEM talent.

  • “Early figures suggest the number of NIW petitions has more than doubled since the guidance, shifting the share of petitions filed for advanced STEM degree holders toward NIW.” 

• Amy also released a working paper outlining the state of American defense, science, and engineering workforce needs. 

  • “Unfortunately, economists and economic research have been less attentive to the types of policy changes related to high-skilled immigration that have been pursued in recent years by the U.S. via executive branch and legislative policy decisions.” 

• Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter investigated a crucial question: Will we ever get fusion power?

  • “The next generation of low-carbon electricity generation will inevitably make use of technology that doesn’t yet exist, be that even cheaper, more efficient solar panels, better batteries, improved fission reactors, or advanced geothermal. All of these technologies are somewhat speculative, and may not pan out — solar and battery prices may plateau, advanced geothermal may prove unworkable, etc. In the face of this risk, fusion is a reasonable bet to add to the mix.”

🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• Matthew Meselson came back on Statecraft as our first ever two-time guest, to explain how he realized the Russians had leaked anthrax from a lab.

  • “Our paper is a classic in epidemiology, quite aside from the subject. I guess I'm bragging, but what could be more clear-cut?”

• Award-winning historian John Milton Cooper Jr. unpacked how Woodrow Wilson’s White House was able to keep the president’s incapacity a secret for more than a year.

  • “For quite a while, the only people who saw him were his medical attendants, Mrs. Wilson, and the immediate family, his daughters. It was a very, very small circle. As Edith says, when serious matters came, demanding the president's attention, she would often put them aside, and she said, ‘I didn't want to upset him.’ An awful lot of stuff just wasn’t getting through.”

• Skanda Amarnath and Arnab Datta explained how they convinced the federal government to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a novel way:

  • “Our tone was a little harsh, but it also made a very clear point. The more we went to the media to say, ‘This is something we could do in the here and now,’ the more we could show this was legal and feasible, that it could fit the political constraints the administration was facing, and the economic constraints American producers were facing: the more pressure it put on those who consume the media within the administration.”

• And Sandeep Patel explained how BARDA DRIVe manages to act like a venture capital investor within the federal government: 

  • “We got the authority in 2017, and in 2018 a team was set up to do market research, basically talk to every public and private investor, figure out all the models that existed, what didn't work, what worked. It was a massive amount of scouting, because this was not expertise that anyone in HHS had.”

🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• Brian investigated the rise and fall of the Bell Telephone Company, better known to most as AT&T:

  • “Tracing the causes behind many cases of progress is difficult, but with telephones in the U.S., we can trace it to the relentless efforts of one single company.”

• He followed it up with a deep dive into the incredible R&D success of AT&T’s research arm, Bell Labs:

  • “For decades, Bell Labs was considered not only the best industrial research lab in the world, but arguably the best research lab in the world, period. One Bell Lab alumnus described it as ‘a parallel organization to almost all the academic institutions put together.’”

• And he outlined why “Levittowns” were so successful after WWII, and why they still eventually failed. 

  • “Levitt’s model of large-scale, efficient homebuilding using mass production-style methods worked for a brief window in the 1950s, but by the end of the 1960s a changing housing market and increasingly strict land use controls meant that such methods were no longer feasible.”

📰 Media

• RealClearPolicy cited IFP’s work on judicial reform for permitting. 

  • “...Meaningful litigation reform legislation needs to come from Congress. Congress should focus on changes already vetted by centrist organizations such as the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Institute for Progress that can garner widespread political support.”

• IFP was cited several times by Kelvin Yu and Anson Yu (unrelated) at American Compass.

• In his great Not Boring newsletter, Packy McCormick called Statecraft “one of the most fascinating newsletters on the internet.” Thank you, Packy.

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