Arrington Luck

"Program leaders’ decision to go on the Odd Lots podcast was referenced by several colleagues, with non-traditional recruiting pathways serving as critical for getting team members"

This has gotta be one of the best endorsements for the podcast ever. Tell your CEO to go on Odd Lots

@AaronBergman18 A famous example of someone taking their talent somewhere unexpected, in his case South Beach

@ArringtonLuck LeBron?

CHIPS needed a team that could sit across the table from large, well-capitalized semiconductor firms and negotiate deals that both protected the taxpayer and delivered on national security objectives. A lot of the program success was built on the backs of government operators and national security professionals. Equally important, however, were the private sector hires that the program brought onboard. This week in Factory Settings, I took a look at how the program was able to effectively recruit private sector talent. A few of the most salient points: - Program leaders’ decision to go on the Odd Lots podcast was referenced by several colleagues, with non-traditional recruiting pathways serving as critical for getting team members - CHIPS gave significant empowerment to junior colleagues, allowing them deal reps well above their private sector counterparts - The program had a tangible, positive impact on the career trajectories of the private sector talent that came through the program Private sector talent isn't everything, and traditional government competencies are equally critical. Nevertheless, future industrial policy efforts would do well to make a concerted effort to get ex-financiers, operations professionals, and technologists working towards program success. Read here: factorysettings.org/p/a-cheat-shee…

The podcasting to policy pipeline

Americans support science spending - this isn’t new. But how much do they want to spend on it? A new study suggests that when Americans know what the government spends on science, 80% want increased spending, and the median respondent wants to double spending. So why did the Trump Admin try to cut nondefense science funding by 21%? And why is science spending so slow right now? Give the people what they want: fund American science. Macroscience piece with @McKenzieLeier here: macroscience.org/p/americans-wa…

The CHIPS and Science Act instructed the Dept. of Commerce to start a National Semiconductor Technology Center. Its responsibilities: conduct research and prototype advanced semiconductor tech, grow the semiconductor workforce, and establish an investment fund. In designing NSTC, Commerce had to decide on an institutional structure. They decided on an independent non-profit that would contract with the government - but it turns out there were a lot of potential options! See Macroscience/Factory Settings cross post (!) on the rise and fall of NSTC here: macroscience.org/p/enabling-the…

The Davis-Bacon Act requires "prevailing wage" on federally funded construction. It's been on the books since 1931. Applying it to the CHIPS Act created a bunch of problems... 1. One company learned mid-negotiation that it might need to locate 20,000 construction workers who'd already cycled off the job & pay them hundreds of millions in retroactive backpay — for work done years before CHIPS funding was awarded. 2. Another company making chips critical to the auto industry & defense industrial base couldn't reconcile prevailing wage with its profit-sharing pay structure or the requirement to track every employee's hours by trade classification. Their deal died after Davis-Bacon challenges consumed 6 months of negotiations. 3. For leading-edge fabs costing $20-25 billion to build, the Davis-Bacon premium ran into the hundreds of millions. But because CHIPS grants only covered ~10% of project costs, a 1% increase in construction costs meant a 10% increase in program costs, and fewer total projects funded. 4. To be clear, no single compliance requirement broke the CHIPS program. But the accumulation — Davis-Bacon, NEPA, procurement rules, the Paperwork Reduction Act — made execution far harder than it needed to be. New at Factory Settings, by Mike Schmidt, former director of the CHIPS Program Office: factorysettings.org/p/an-inside-vi…

IFP is hiring an Editorial Director (the role I'm leaving). Teddy Roosevelt said, "The best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." That's been my experience with this team. I couldn't recommend it more highly. ifp.org/opportunity/ed…

Competing with China doesn't mean becoming China. We have our own tradition of industrial policy, it worked because government & industry fought each other constantly. That tension was a feature, not a bug. See Mike Schmidt's latest for Factory Settings on lessons from WW2.

How similar are Trump and Biden, really, in their approaches to economic statecraft? Of course, Liberation Day is the kind of move on tariffs the last administration never considered, as is the ongoing attempt to seize Venezuelan oil production, to name two examples. But when you compare both administrations to the American consensus of the ‘90s, you start to see a different picture. They each approach economic statecraft differently, yes. But both have actively experimented with a set of tools that were basically absent from the toolkit of the post-Cold War era. I didn’t expect that to be the takeaway from my mega-episode with Daleep Singh, @ArnabDatta321, and @petereharrell. Daleep and Peter were senior officials on Biden’s National Security Council; Arnab is a colleague at @IFP, and an influential thinker on energy/industrial strategy. When I put this episode on the calendar, my hope was to get three of the smartest, most thoughtful liberals I could find on the topic of economic statecraft, and have them run a full assessment of the last year: tariffs and the trade war, export controls on chips to China, taking equity stakes in domestic companies, the works. I expected them to critique how the Trump admin has executed its tariff strategy and its trade deals, which they did. But I was surprised by the degree to which all of them were open to the admin's use of novel or forgotten tools — equity stakes, offtake agreements, concessional lending capital — even if they critiqued the execution. Daleep argues that future administrations should build more robust state capacity, in something like a "Department of Economic Security," to have the measurement and prediction ability to use these tools more strategically. Some of the other surprising takeaways for me: - “China’s had a really good trade war,” says Daleep. - Compared to 2000, there are ten times more sanctioned individuals and entities in the world. Hyper-targeted sanctions, used this often, are a 21st-century practice. - China has storage capacity for 2 billion barrels of oil. It has already stored over 1.4 billion barrels and will add millions more in the next couple years. - The federal government has now taken equity or equity-like stakes in more than 15 companies over seven months. - We now have by far the world's highest steel and aluminum prices. - $100+ billion in capex would be needed to rehabilitate Venezuelan oil fields, and their pipelines currently leak oil every single day. Full episode here, give it a listen/read: statecraft.pub/p/one-year-of-…

-When should the government hire contractors? -What functions do they perform well? -How does FAR make contracting hard? Check out the latest from Factory Settings piece from Sara Meyers to learn more. factorysettings.org/p/consultants-…

NSF is launching one of the most ambitious experiments in federal science funding in 75 years. The program is called Tech Labs, and the goal is to invest ~$1 billion to seed new institutions of science and technology for the 21st century. Instead of funding projects, the NSF will fund teams. I’m in the @WSJ today with a piece on why this matters (gift link): wsj.com/opinion/scienc… Here’s the basic case: 1) Most federal science funding takes the form of small, incremental, project-based grants to individual scientists at universities. 2) The typical NSF grant is ~$250k/year to a professor with a couple of grad students and modest equipment over a few years. This is a perfectly reasonable way to fund some science, but it's not the only way. 3) A healthy portfolio needs more than one instrument. Project-based grants are like bonds: low-risk, steady, safe. But no one trying to maximize long-run returns would put 70% of their portfolio in bonds. 4) Yet that's basically what our civilian science funding portfolio looks like. Around 3/4ths of NSF and NIH grant funding is project-based. 5) Tech Labs is NSF's attempt to diversify that portfolio. The Tech Labs program is aiming for: - $10-50 million/year awards per team - 5+ year commitments - Measuring impact through advancement up the Tech Readiness Level scale rather than papers published - Up to ~$1 billion for the program - Supporting research orgs outside traditional university structures 6) Scientific production looks very different than it did when the NSF launched 75 years ago. The lone genius at the chalkboard can only do so much. Frontier science + tech today is increasingly team-based, interdisciplinary, and infrastructure-intensive. 7) The team behind AlphaFold just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It came from DeepMind, an AI lab with sustained institutional funding and full-time research teams. It would be near-impossible to fund this kind of work on a 3-year academic grant. 8) Same pattern at the @arcinstitute (8-year appointments, cross-cutting technical support teams) and @HHMIJanelia (massive infrastructure investments to map the complete fly brain). Ambitious science increasingly needs core institutional support, not a series of project grants stapled together. 9) Similarly, Focused Research Organizations (@Convergent_FROs) have showcased a new model supporting teams with concrete missions and predefined milestones to unlock new funding. 10) There’s a whole ecosystem of philanthropically-supported centers doing amazing research, like the Institute for Protein Design, the Allen Institute, the Flatiron Institute, the Whitehead Institute, the Wyss Institute, the Broad — the list goes on. 11) But philanthropy can’t reshape American science alone. The federal government spends close to $200 billion each year on research and development, an order of magnitude more than even the largest foundations. 12) If we want to change how science gets done at scale, federal funding has to evolve. And the NSF and NIH don’t have dedicated funding mechanisms to support or seed these sorts of organizations. 13) Earlier this year, I started working on a related framework called “X-Labs” that built on all this exciting institutional experimentation that’s been happening within the private and philanthropic sectors. It’s time for the federal government to step into the arena: rebuilding.tech/posts/launchin… 14) Traditional university grants are still important for training the next generation of scientists and for certain kinds of curiosity-driven work. But after 75 years of putting nearly everything into one model, we should try something different. 15) And key program details are still being developed! You can reply to the Request for Information with suggestions or feedback on how to design this program here: nsf.gov/news/nsf-annou… 16) Science is supposed to be about experimentation. Science funding should be too.

When is business the government's business? In his inaugural piece for Factory Settings, Todd Fisher sets out to answer this question. He offers a compelling four-part test.

American science is increasingly cautious and bureaucratic. Our institutions feel rickety. At the same time, political and technological change is accelerating. The government is canceling research grants, AI is taking off. Can our scientific institutions keep up? Should they be redesigned? Rebuilt? To answer those questions and more, we’re relaunching Macroscience. macroscience.org Fortunately, we know more than ever about the structure of science. Building from metascience evidence, scientists and policy entrepreneurs are experimenting with new models for funding and doing science. In the political and technological tumult, ideas are ready to be tested, opportunities are waiting to be seized. Driven by writers who challenge assumptions and start friendly arguments, Macroscience will explore ideas for how to improve science and policy. Macroscience will provide, I hope, an optimistic but plausible vision for the future of scientific progress.

@zdch @IFP Far too kind!

How did I not realize @ArringtonLuck was at IFP? Speaking of “salience of CHIPS mechanics” discourse. Total badass. @IFP is like Elesh Norn from Magic where it just expands to include literally everyone you’re at all interested in hearing talk about any given issue.

In recent decades, only a handful of government interventions have been widely regarded as successes. Operation Warp Speed is one of them. So is the CHIPS Act, the $39 billion program that catalyzed a massive investment boom in manufacturing semiconductors on American soil. What can we learn about industrial policy and state capacity from this program? In Factory Settings (factorysettings.org), a new series from IFP, the inaugural CHIPS leadership team will explain what went right and what needs fixing. The team chose the name Factory Settings because so much of what CHIPS experienced came down to the defaults — the inherited ways the government is wired to operate. Those defaults often make it harder, not easier, to deliver. Every law, every regulation, every process, every oversight mechanism was built for a reason, but together they’ve created a system that wasn’t built for the challenge of 21st-century governance. It’s time to update the government’s factory settings.

1/ Trump is meeting Xi this week for China trade talks. Congress is worried Trump may offer downgraded Blackwell AI chips as a concession. If this happens, it could effectively mean the end of US chip restrictions. Thread with highlights from our new 7,000-word report.

1/ OPT OBSERVATORY I’ve spent the past year creating *the most in-depth public resource* on how the US retains international students after they graduate. Today, @IFP is releasing never-before-seen data we obtained from ICE via FOIA. Check it out: optobservatory.org