Institute for Progress co-founder on R&D reform, replication crisis, and poaching China's top scientists

Summary

Santi Ruiz, co-founder of the Institute for Progress (IFP), joined to walk through the techno-industrialist policy playbook — a joint effort by IFP and several partner think tanks, with physical copies being hand-delivered to every congressional office the same day.

R&D reform

The playbook divides into three broad areas: national security (defense acquisition, hypersonic testing), industrial power (critical minerals, small manufacturers), and frontier science and technology — IFP's primary contribution. The through-line in the science section is extracting more value from existing federal R&D spend, whether or not NIH's budget gets cut by 30%.

One concrete proposal Ruiz highlights is from his colleague Caleb Watney: using existing agency authority at NIH, NSF, and the Department of Energy to create new grant structures that can fund institutions beyond universities and national labs. No new legislation required — the agencies could act today. The pitch is that some of the best frontier research, particularly hardware-intensive or high-capex work, is already happening outside traditional academic settings, at places like the Arc Institute.

More broadly, Ruiz points to a structural shift toward focused research organizations (FROs) — nonprofits spun up for five years to crack a single basic research problem, moving faster than academia and without the constraints of tenure or institutional inertia. The model: affiliate with a Stanford for the graduate pipeline, but build the institution around the problem rather than around the institution itself.

Replication crisis

Ruiz is measured on this. He thinks the replication problem is substantially worse in the social sciences than in hard tech, where results tend to be binary and easier to verify. His preferred fix isn't a sweeping federal mandate — it's faster turnaround cycles, loosening federal regulations that gate scientific access, and creating stronger incentives to kill bad research early. Bad science will always exist; the variable is how quickly the ecosystem flushes it out.

Sustaining policy across administrations

The democratic accountability problem — four-year cycles, veto points, NEPA permits that take four-and-a-half years — is the hardest structural challenge. Ruiz's answer is partly about shortening implementation timelines so reforms survive a change in administration, and partly about building a genuinely democratic public case rather than relying on a Sputnik-style shock event. Short of a Taiwan invasion, he says, there is no single moment that wakes up the American public. The playbook focuses on technocratic, largely bipartisan items — critical minerals, small business manufacturing support — where political agreement already exists but specific action plans are missing.

Manufacturing and automation

Ruiz is direct that manufacturing job counts will not return to historical peaks even with aggressive reindustrialization. Competing with China requires leaning heavily on automation. That said, he argues reindustrialization plus automation still generates substantial employment — just not at World War II mobilization scale. American Compass, the third think tank partner on the playbook, owns the workforce retraining section, and Ruiz notes the record on retraining programs is genuinely mixed — acknowledging failures rather than treating reskilling as a clean solution.

China comparison

On what the U.S. can learn from China's industrial policy, Ruiz pushes back on the "China is just a copycat" framing as cope. BYD, drones, and critical mineral dominance are real advantages built over decades of compounding five-year plans. The core lesson isn't the five-year plan format itself — it's the seriousness with which Chinese leadership, from Xi Jinping down to internal think tanks, treats industrial and technological power as the foundation of geopolitical standing. Tariffs, Ruiz argues, are a stick but not a strategy.