institute-for-progress
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Alec Stapp
Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress (IFP), a nonpartisan Washington, D.C. think tank he launched in 2022 with Caleb Watney to turn progress studies into concrete policy. He works at the intersection of metascience, high-skilled immigration, biosecurity, and infrastructure permitting, arguing that America's biggest obstacle to progress is not a shortage of ideas but a surplus of veto points. A George Mason economist by training, he became one of the most-followed voices of the abundance movement, translating dense regulatory questions into widely shared arguments for building more.
Caleb Watney
Caleb Watney is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress (IFP), a nonpartisan Washington, D.C. think tank that turns ideas from progress studies into policy. He runs IFP's work on metascience, high-skilled immigration, and emerging technology, hunting for the policy levers that could rebuild American state capacity and speed up the rate of scientific breakthroughs. Before IFP he led innovation policy at the Progressive Policy Institute and was a tech-policy fellow at R Street and a graduate research fellow at Mercatus.
Brian Potter
Brian Potter is a structural engineer turned writer who publishes Construction Physics, a Substack newsletter with 72,000+ subscribers covering industrial technology, manufacturing productivity, and why buildings still cost so much to build. A Senior Infrastructure Fellow at the Institute for Progress, he spent 15 years in construction - including a front-row seat to the $2B collapse of Katerra - before channeling his frustration into some of the most rigorously researched long-form writing on industrial systems published anywhere. His first book, The Origins of Efficiency, was published by Stripe Press in October 2025.