Washington, D.C. · building things on purpose
YesPress · Profile in Progress
Alec Stapp
He counts progress in veto points removed - and there are a lot of veto points.
Co-founder & Co-CEO, Institute for Progress
Washington, D.C. · building things on purpose
He counts progress in veto points removed - and there are a lot of veto points.
In April 2024, the Bureau of Land Management quietly handed geothermal energy exploration a categorical exclusion from environmental review under NEPA. Most people scrolled past it. Alec Stapp called it a massive win and meant it. To him, a paperwork carve-out for drilling test wells is not a footnote - it is the whole ballgame. Cheap clean energy already exists. The thing standing between it and the grid is process.
That instinct - to find the boring bottleneck and name it loudly - is the engine behind the Institute for Progress, the nonpartisan Washington think tank Stapp launched in 2022 with Caleb Watney. The pitch is deceptively simple: the United States is not short on good ideas. It is short on the ability to act on them. Somewhere along the way the country accumulated a thicket of approvals, reviews, and sign-offs, and learning to cut through it became its own kind of expertise.
Stapp's diagnosis is blunt. "Our governing institutions don't work as well as they used to," he says. The fix is not a slogan. It is the slow work of rewriting the rules that decide how fast America funds science, admits talented immigrants, and braces for the next pandemic.
"The number of veto points individuals have to navigate to create new things or change existing systems has been massively increased." - Alec Stapp
IFP picked areas where a small, well-aimed push can move a lot of weight. Each looks like a separate policy silo. Stapp treats them as one problem wearing four hats.
The work that made him a household name in wonk circles. Solar and batteries are cheap; environmental review and procedural statutes drag the buildout to a crawl. He hunts for the categorical exclusions and approval shortcuts that let clean energy actually get built.
The science of doing science better. How grants get awarded, who gets funded, and why more shots on goal matter. The premise: small changes to how research dollars flow can compound into outsized discovery.
Stapp argues that letting more talented people into the country is among the highest-leverage moves available to American innovation - and that the system makes it needlessly hard.
Preparing for the next pandemic before it arrives. Building slack and resilience into a system optimized, dangerously, for just-in-time efficiency.
Before there was a think tank with his name on the masthead, there was a circuit. Stapp moved through the institutions where Washington's technology debates actually happen: a graduate research fellowship at the Mercatus Center, a technology policy fellowship at the Niskanen Center, a research fellow seat at the International Center for Law and Economics, and then director of technology policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.
It reads like a tour of the ideological spectrum because it is one. Stapp built a reputation as a nonpartisan - someone more interested in whether a rule works than in who proposed it. His writing on antitrust, data privacy, and emerging tech showed up in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and Politico, and got him cited in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the New York Times.
Then in 2022 he and Watney did the thing think tankers rarely do: they left to start their own. The early backers were a who's-who of progress thinking, including Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison. The bet was that progress studies, until then mostly a blog-and-Twitter phenomenon, deserved a real shop in D.C. that could put it in front of the people who write the rules.
The economics matter for understanding the choice. Stapp came up through George Mason, where the curriculum leans hard on public choice and the study of how institutions and incentives shape outcomes. That lineage is all over his work. He tends to look past the personalities in any debate and toward the structure underneath: who has the power to block, who bears the cost, where the incentives point. It is a frame that makes regulatory plumbing feel less like drudgery and more like the place where the real decisions get made.
"If we were trying to make money, there are far more lucrative fields than think tank work." - Alec Stapp, on motivation
Spend any time reading Stapp and a tension shows up: he is relentlessly hopeful about technology, and relentlessly specific about the obstacles. He does not do vibes-based futurism. When he talks about industrial policy, he wants it "grounded in a discussion of specific market failures, public goods, and externalities." When he talks about resilience, he means it literally: "Building resiliency into our economic system requires intentionally creating more slack in certain areas of our economy."
His faith in diffusion is genuine. "Over the medium and long run," he argues, "the benefits of new tech are almost always broadly shared instead of hoarded." That is the optimism. The specificity is what makes it credible - and what makes a tweet about a NEPA categorical exclusion go further than a manifesto.
It also reframes the housing debate, a recurring theme in his thinking. Americans pour a dangerous share of their net worth into a single asset on a single street, and when that street stops building, the bet gets riskier. His instinct is to widen the aperture: "We need to promote a system that can diversify away some of that risk, ideally through investments in the broader national economy." The throughline from permitting to portfolios is the same conviction - a country that builds more is a country where more people get to share in the upside.
"We want to make sure that our interventions are grounded in a discussion of specific market failures, public goods, and externalities."
"Building resiliency into our economic system requires intentionally creating more slack in certain areas of our economy."
There is a craft to what Stapp does, and it is mostly translation. Permitting law, grant mechanics, visa categories - these are subjects engineered to repel attention. The expertise lives in dense statutes and the people who read them do not usually post. Stapp's contribution is to drag the consequential detail into the open and explain, in a sentence, why it matters. A geothermal carve-out becomes a story about whether the country can build its way to cheaper power.
That is partly why IFP looks different from the older D.C. model. The classic think tank publishes a report and hopes a staffer reads it. Stapp's generation treats the argument and its distribution as the same job. His pieces in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and Politico, and his citations in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the New York Times, are not trophies on a wall - they are the mechanism. An idea that nobody hears is, for his purposes, an idea that did not happen.
The co-CEO structure fits the same logic. Splitting the top job with Caleb Watney is a wager that two people focused outward beat one person trying to do everything. It lets the institute punch above its size on several fronts at once - infrastructure one week, immigration the next - without the founder bottleneck that quietly throttles a lot of young organizations. For someone whose whole project is about removing bottlenecks, it would be strange to build one into his own org chart.
Catch him mid-stride and the picture is consistent: an optimist who refuses to wave his hands. He believes the future can be richer, healthier, and faster - and he believes the only honest way to get there is to read the rule, find the clause that says no, and go change it. Most people want the destination. Stapp is unusually willing to do the unglamorous work of clearing the road.