Dear friend of FAI:

I’d like to share with you some of our recent activities, including new analysis from the Research team, project updates from Labs, and other developments across the Foundation for American Innovation.

As the year draws to a close, we hope you will consider FAI in your year-end giving. All donations are 100% tax deductible. You can give at thefai.org/donate.

And if you’re still looking for a few last-minute Christmas present ideas, just consult FAI’s handy tech right gift guide!

Policy/Research

Our policy team had a busy quarter, working to strengthen national security, improve American governance, and keep America at the forefront of technological dynamism.

The team keeps growing, and we’re excited about several new hires. Senior Fellow James Wallner is an expert on the separation of powers, Congress, political parties, and the federal policy process and will be supporting our governance research. Kevin Hawickhorst, our Policy Manager, State Capacity, will help build out our work on state capacity and government efficiency. And Tryn Haney, our Program Associate, will be helping with our research, events, and operations.

We also welcomed James Poulos and Keegan McBride as Non-Resident Senior Fellows, and Patrick Blumenthal as a Non-Resident Fellow. James is the founder of RETURN, acquired by Blaze Media, where he is editor-at-large; editorial director of Frontier; and host of Zero Hour. Keegan is a lecturer in AI, government, and policy at the Oxford Internet Institute and an Adjunct Senior Fellow in National Security and Technology at the Center for a New American Security. Patrick is an investor and operator running an early-stage DeepTech fund, and he previously worked at Village Global.

Senior Economist Sam Hammond, Senior Fellow Tim Hwang, and I have joined Virginia’s new AI Task Force, which will advise Gov. Youngkin on AI policy and regulation. The announcement of the Task Force’s members received a write-up in StateScoop.

We’re also excited about our team’s success outside FAI. Senior Fellow Jon Askonas was recently awarded Redeemer University’s Emerging Public Intellectual Award, which rewards scholars “working in the Christian academy who excel in both academic and public spheres.” Meanwhile, Head of Policy Dan Lips was promoted to Senior Fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

Reports and Testimonies

Together with the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, we published Congress after Chevron: Legislative Responses to Changing Deference Doctrines, a symposium featuring new papers that address the challenges and opportunities Congress faces after the overturning of Chevron deference. The symposium featured papers by Michael A. Fragoso, Jonathan Wolfson and Tanner Jones, Neil Chilson, Paul J. Ray, John D. Rackey and Lauren C. Bell, and Kacper Surdy.

In theWall Street Journal, Jon made the case for a "Space Coast Compact" to free SpaceX from onerous federal regulations. The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Environmental Policy Act have contributed to years of delay in the aerospace industry, hobbling SpaceX and other firms. With his co-author Jonathan Berry, managing partner of firm Boyden Gray PLLC, Jon argues that interstate compacts could offer a solution, cutting red tape and accelerating frontier technology development.

Dan, Sam, and Director of Infrastructure Thomas Hochman released a paper, “An Efficiency Agenda for the Executive Branch,” identifying ways that the White House and executive agencies can use executive authority to achieve substantial efficiencies and cost savings across the federal government. They cover four areas: implementing nonpartisan watchdog recommendations to prevent federal misspending and fraud; leveraging AI to streamline operations and reduce bureaucracy; eliminating federal regulations; and presenting legislation to Congress to achieve taxpayer savings, improve government performance, and end or reform unauthorized federal programs. The report was cited by Politico, the American Conservative, and other publications.

Thomas published “The State Permitting Playbook,” which provides state legislators with a comprehensive understanding of the key environmental permitting issues affecting economic development and highlights potential areas for reform. The playbook analyzes the challenges posed by 32 states’ implementation of four major environmental laws and offers individual recommendations for how states can reform their permitting policies. We created an accompanying State Permitting Scorecard, which assigns a letter grade to states based on their performance across various environmental laws.

Together with Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, we published “Shaping the Future of Social Media with Middleware,” a paper co-edited by Director of Policy and Outreach Luke Hogg and Georgetown University’s Renée DiResta. The paper is the product of a symposium jointly held by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Stanford Cyber Policy Center earlier in 2024, and considers how middleware—third-party software intermediaries between users and platforms—offers a solution to counter the concentrated power of social media platforms. The paper received a write-up in Politico.

Dan and Director of Research Robert Bellafiore published a paper, “Strengthening the Federal Education R&D Enterprise: Recommendations for 2025 and Beyond,” which provides a comprehensive agenda to strengthen America’s education R&D system. They argue that an effective education R&D enterprise must account for the ongoing decentralization in education and ensure that parents and teachers have access to the information they need to make the best decisions for their children.

Thomas contributed an essay to the fall issue of the New Atlantis, on whether there is a political constituency for the “abundance agenda.” As he argues, “An increasing number of Republicans and Democrats may agree that we should build more things in America, but scratch beneath the surface and the same old political divisions appear. … This partisan approach is a significant challenge to implementing a truly cohesive abundance agenda, and should temper our expectations of what the agenda can achieve.”

Dan and Robert published another paper, “Securing the Southern Border: The Role of Technology and Additional Staffing,” arguing that Congress and the White House could significantly improve border security in the face of political constraints by leveraging technology and increasing staffing. Ongoing technical innovations, such as advancements in AI, cargo scanning, and counter-drone technology, have the potential to be force multipliers for law enforcement.

Thomas and Sam wrote a pair of memos on how permitting reform can support infrastructure for AI infrastructure. Thomas’s memo on “Federal, State, and Local Regulatory Barriers to Data Center Energy Infrastructure” considers how regulation at every level of government interacts across jurisdictions to affect behind-the-meter gas deployment for AI infrastructure. Sam’s memo on “Unlocking Federal Lands for AI Compute Infrastructure” outlines the key considerations for leveraging federal lands to develop AI-centric computing hubs.

Non-Resident Senior Fellow Reynold Schweickhardt testified before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Subcommittee on Technology Modernization, for a hearing on “Modernizing VA: Lessons Learned in the 118th Congress.” He argued that fulfilling the mission of the Department of Veterans Affairs is inextricably linked with the department’s ability to manage and modernize its IT systems, and offered recommendations to address the many delays and cost overruns in modernization projects.

On his Substack, State Capacitance, Kevin wrote about bureaucratic autonomy, the reorganization of the Department of Agriculture, and other governance topics. And Non-Resident Senior Fellow Dean Ball wrote about AI governance, progress studies, and Republicans’ AI policy on his Substack, Hyperdimensional.

Commentary and Impact

Policies that our scholars have advocated for saw progress this quarter.

• Dan has offered many recommendations for how a government efficiency commission could accomplish its mission. In a recent press release, the House Budget Committee highlighted Dan’s work, noting how his recommendations could help the Committee as it works to “improve government efficiency and ensure the proper stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
• We were among the first to sound the warning about the growth in purchases of U.S. farmland near military bases by Chinese government-affiliated companies. We’ve been pleased to see this topic gain wider attention among the public, including during the election cycle: as the Wall Street Journal reported, “Opposition to Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland in the name of economic and national security” featured in more than $8 million worth of advertisements in the 2024 election cycle alone, from both Democrats and Republicans.”
• The National Defense Authorization Act includes the Countering CCP Drones Act vote. This bill would prohibit new models of drones produced by the Chinese drone company DJI from receiving authorization from the Federal Communications Commission to operate on U.S. communications infrastructure. We’ve previously warned about the dangers posed by Chinese drones, especially from DJI.
• The Removing Our Unsecure Technologies to Ensure Reliability and Security (ROUTERS) Act has been included in the continuing resolution being considered in the House this week. The legislation would require a report from the Department of Commerce on potential risks posed by consumer internet routers, modems, and other technologies produced by companies based in or controlled by foreign adversary nations. In May, Media Fellow Evan Swarztrauber and I led a coalition letter to House Speaker Johnson and Minority Leader Jeffries, calling for Congress to take up the ROUTERS Act. As we explained, the legislation would help Congress understand our technological vulnerabilities in products produced in nations such as China and Russia.
• Thomas has called for the expansion of categorical exclusions—a tool for excluding infrastructure projects from onerous regulatory assessments—for geothermal energy. The Bureau of Land Management recently proposed a new categorical exclusion to expand geothermal energy on public lands.

Our commentary included the following:

• Josh Levine, “Don’t Let Copyright Kill American AI,” in The Republic
• Robert Bellafiore, “From Laboratory to Hegemony?” in The Republic
• Dean Ball, “America is Sleepwalking Into a Permanent DEI Bureaucracy That Regulates AI,” in Pirate Wires
• Richard Reisman, “Three Pillars of Human Discourse (and How Social Media Middleware Can Support All Three),” in Tech Policy Press
• Josh Levine, “To Support AI, Defend the Open Internet and Fair Use,” in Tech Policy Press
• Richard Reisman, “New Perspectives on AI Agentiality and Democracy: "Whom Does It Serve?" in Tech Policy Press
• Dan Lips, “What a Trump-Musk Government Efficiency Department Should Do in its First 100 Days,” in The Hill
• Sam Hammond, “Why Kamala Harris Couldn’t Convince an Anti-Establishment America,” in The Guardian
• Dean Ball, “4 Ways to Advance Transparency in Frontier AI Development,” in TIME
• Robert Bellafiore, “Solidarity about Nothing,” in First Things
• Luke Hogg and Josh Levine, “A Tailored Solution to the SHEIN-Temu Revelations,” in the National Interest
• Josh Levine, “The CCP’s Two-Track Approach to AI Training,” in the National Interest
• Farrell Gregory, “The BRICS Summit, De-Dollarization, and the Global Realignment,” in the National Interest
• James Poulos, “How Trump’s 'Golden Age' Rhetoric Could Redefine America,” in Return
• Thomas Hochman, “The Energy Permitting Reform Act Doesn’t Go Far Enough,” in RealClearPolicy
• Dan Lips, “The U.S. Should Secure Federally Funded Research,” in the National Security Institute’s The SCIF
• Dean Ball, “The United States Must Win The Global Open Source AI Race,” in Just Security
• Dan Lips, “Reestablishing Congressional Oversight of Federal Regulations,” in the Federalist Society blog
• Farrell Gregory, “To Solve Its Mineral Security Paradox, America May Need Price Floors,” for the Oxford Diplomatic Society
• Farrell Gregory, “China in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: A New Dynamic in Critical Mineral Procurement,” for the Strategic Studies Institute
• Roslyn Layton, “Americans Need to Understand Crypto Better,” in NWI
• Jimmy Soni, “The 2024 Election Is Over—Good Riddance. Let’s Move beyond Politics,” in The Hill
• Sam Hammond, “China's Military Is Using Meta's AI. So What?”
• Kevin Hawickhorst, “Presidential Reform Commissions: Be Gore, Not Grace”
• Kevin Hawickhorst, “Five Underrated Appointments for the Upcoming Administration”
• Dan Lips, “How Congress Can Help the Department of Government Efficiency”
• Roslyn Layton, “DOT: A Job for DOGE”

Highlights among our media hits included the following:

• Dan spoke to the New York Times about how the Department of Government Efficiency can benefit from the efficiency work done by the Government Accountability Office and others.
• Kevin spoke to the Washington Postabout the long history of government efficiency commissions preceding DOGE.
• Sam spoke toFOX LiveNOW about the incoming Trump administration’s approach to AI.
• Josh and Luke spoke to the Washington Timesabout trade loopholes that allow toxic goods made in China to enter the U.S. market.
• Evan spoke to the Washington Postabout how Elon Musk’s Starlink might fare under the Trump administration.
• Dan was interviewed by the Federal News Network about how the Chinese military benefits from federally funded research.
• Thomas spoke to NPR’s Boston outpost, WBUR, about permitting reform in Massachusetts.
• Jon joined podcasts hosted by Brian Chau andAaron Renn to discuss the philosophy behind ongoing tech debates.

Labs

Big changes have been happening in the Labs department this quarter.

As Schoolahoop, our platform for school choice, transitions to a new team beyond FAI, Joey Livingston, our lead engineer, has stepped up to be FAI’s new Chief Technology Officer. He’s been reorganizing and streamlining the department in preparation for a new era, and we’re excited about what’s coming next for Labs. Here are some top developments:

• Section 117 Dashboard: In 2022, we developed a platform to track universities and colleges’ receipt of foreign payments, which is required by Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965. This quarter, we imported the most current data to this project and identified bottleneck areas in the architecture that needed refactoring. Especially with these updates, we hope that the dashboard can enable better analysis of the foreign money flowing through U.S. higher education, give Congress an example of how the Department of Education should improve its data tracking, and help protect our schools from malign foreign influence.
• State Permitting Scorecard: As noted above, we’ve created a State Permitting Scorecard, which grades states on their performance across various environmental laws. We’re confident that this scorecard, which visualizes the data across a state map provides a detailed breakdown of each state’s score, can be a major resource for permitting reform efforts across the country.

Events

This quarter, we hosted events across the country with some of our favorite organizations and thinkers.

In DC, we held a salon dinner on pathways for fiscal reform and improving government efficiency in the next administration, featuring David M. Walker, former Comptroller General of the United States.

We partnered with the Center for Renewing America for a debate on the constitutionality of digital age verification, moderated by Senior Fellow Evan Swarztrauber. Adam Candeub of Michigan State University Law faced off against Robert Corn-Revere of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to ask, when do measures to protect minors create an undue burden on adult First Amendment rights? You can listen to a recording of the debate on our podcast, The Dynamist.

In Austin, we partnered with the Texas Public Policy Foundation for a discussion about responsible AI policy, featuring the Hon. Giovanni Capriglione, Director of Policy and Outreach Luke Hogg, and TPPF’s Hon. Zach Whiting and David Dunmoyer. The panel explored what AI can bring to the Texas economy, how it can be used to shrink government, and how responsible AI can be a net benefit for Texas.

In San Francisco, we hosted a salon dinner on copyright and AI, convening technologists and legal experts to discuss the geopolitical implications of America’s copyright regime for AI.

We also co-hosted the Abundance 2024 conference in DC with the Inclusive Abundance Institute, Breakthrough Institute, Federation of American Scientists, Institute for Progress, and Niskanen Center. Many members of the FAI team spoke, including Sam on AI, Chief of Staff Max Bodach on FAI’s role in the abundance movement, Media Fellow Marshall Kosloff on building a coalition for abundance, and Thomas on permitting reform.

Other highlights among the events our scholars spoke at included the following:

• As part of a conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute on “What Comes Next in the Information Wars?” Jon participated in a panel discussion on whether we need new conceptual frameworks for understanding information in a post-truth age.
• I spoke at a webinar about congressional dysfunction and restoration hosted by the Society for the Rule of Law.
• Senior Fellow Evan Swarztrauber joined a panel on abundance issues in Virginia and the 2024 election at the Center for New Liberalism’s event on Advancing Abundance in Virginia.
• Kevin spoke on a panel hosted by the Policy Entrepreneur Network about DOGE and its precedents in the history of presidential reform commissions.
• Thomas gave a presentation to American Moment’s fellows about permitting barriers to economic development.
• Jon gave a presentation at the Institute on Religion and Democracy about the rise of the tech right and what it means for American politics.

Podcasts

On The Dynamist, Evan brought on some of today’s most important thinkers and doers to discuss the future of technology, governance, and innovation. Recent episodes have featured ​​FTC Commissioner (recently nominated to chair) Andrew Ferguson, American Compass’s Chris Griswold, and Politico’s Derek Robertson. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal highlighted Ferguson’s Dynamist appearance in their coverage of his recent tapping by Donald Trump to lead the FTC.

Several recent nominees to the incoming Trump administration have been featured on The Dynamist. For a better sense of how the White House will approach tech, check out our episodes with Mark Meador, Michael Kratsios, and Brendan Carr (a repeat guest).

Marshall and Saagar Enjeti have continued hosting The Realignment, which is sponsored by FAI. They’ve had conversations in recent months with figures such as Representative Ro Khanna, the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam, and the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts. The Realignment has also featured a number of leaders in the incoming Trump administration. Give a listen to the episodes featuring Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, Senator Marco Rubio, AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks (another repeat guest), and Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Jacob Helberg.

Book Recommendations

The FAI team has been getting into some great books in recent months. Here are a few that members of the FAI team recommend:

• The Strategy of Conflict, by Thomas C. Schelling
• On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, by Robert K. Merton
• Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe, by Rachel Chrastil
• Law, Legislation, and Liberty, by Friedrich Hayek
• The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, by Norman Cohn
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, by David Foster Wallace
• Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
• The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
• Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, by René Girard
• Holy the Firm, by Annie Dillard

You can also see a longer list of our recommendations on our Bookshop page.

Coming Soon

We have many projects in the works and are excited about the next few months. We’ll be publishing reports on AI and copyright, defense tech, education policy, and more, and we have several events planned across the country.

Thank you for following our work. We appreciate your continued interest in FAI and welcome any questions or feedback.

Sincerely,

Zach Graves
Executive Director
Foundation for American Innovation