Statecraft

• A Statecraft Fall Roundup

  This episode was originally recorded on October 18th at the Progress Conference in Berkeley. Because of the federal shutdown, Director Kratsios called in virtually.Michael Kratsios is Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the president’s top science and technology advisor. In the first Trump administration, Kratsios was US Chief Technology Officer, and later acting Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, where he championed emerging tech like AI, quantum, and autonomous systems in defense.Given constraints in the topics Kratsios could speak on, my questions focused on understanding the administration’s AI and science policy. We talked about the recent AI Action Plan: what AI can do for America and the world, and how the administration plans to ensure US leadership. We discuss the administration’s vision for gold standard science, and whether the structures we use to fund science need to change. We also touched on how the second Trump administration differs from the first, and Kratsios’s take on AI safety.Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood and Katerina Barton for their light edits for length and clarity in the transcript and audio, respectively, and for a tight turnaround. The White House has not yet cleared the full video for publication, but we’ll share it here if it is cleared.The full transcript for this conversation and many others is available at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

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• Is the Senate Fixing Housing Policy?

  Today we’re talking about housing. The ROAD to Housing Act passed the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee 24-0 in late July. Last week — despite the shutdown — it cleared the Senate. It’s a package of 27 pieces of legislation to boost housing supply, improve affordability, reduce regulatory roadblocks, and reduce homelessness.When you zoom out a bit, what’s happened here is pretty surprising. The chair of the committee, Republican Tim Scott, and the Ranking Member, Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, co-sponsored the bill. The bill is the committee’s first bipartisan housing markup in over a decade. Passing through committee unanimously doesn’t happen often for serious bills of this sort. I wanted to understand how this bill happened, and came to have a serious shot at passing. And I also wanted to get a better sense of what’s actually in the bill, and why it matters for housing. If you’re like me, most of the debates you hear about housing policy focus on zoning, which is a local issue — very little federal say. So what are all these pieces of legislation? Do they matter?Joining me is an unorthodox trio:* Will Poff-Webster was legislative counsel for Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii. He’s our inside guy today: he worked on the bill within the Senate. And today, he covers housing policy here at IFP.* Alex Armlovich is Senior Housing Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center. He has been working on housing issues for a long time, and his fingerprints are on parts of this bill package. He’s my advocate from the outside.* Brian Potter is Senior Infrastructure Fellow at IFP and author of Construction Physics, which I very much enjoy editing. If I can make one newsletter recommendation to you besides Statecraft, it’s Construction Physics. He has a background in private-sector home building. And has written about several of the proposals in this package.Table of contents:* What’s the federal role in housing policy?* What’s in the bill?* Regulatory reform* Technical assistance plus incentives* Funding and financing reform* A brief sidebar on manufactured home chassis* Will the bill matter?* How did the bill happen, politically speaking?* The policy wonk success storyThank you to Harry Fletcher-Wood and Katerina Barton for their judicious transcript and audio edits.For the full transcript of this conversation, go to www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

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• Why We Don't Build Apartments for Families

  Today, we’re joined by Bobby Fijan. He’s a co-founder of the American Housing Corporation, a startup building housing for families in cities. A burning question motivates his work: How do you make cities places where families can live and thrive? He has a new report out with the Institute of Family Studies looking at what families really want from their apartments.This is a pretty self-indulgent episode for me. I live in Brooklyn with my wife and two-year-old, and we’re expecting our second kid. We want to stay in the city — it’s where our life and community are, and where we’ve put down roots. But the classic route for people like us is to move out to the suburbs once the family grows. I hoped talking to Bobby would help me avoid that fate.Bobby argues that the best ideas for family-friendly housing aren’t new. Pre-war apartments in American cities look a lot like what he’s advocating for. We’ve done this before, and we could do it again.We discuss:* How the financial crisis fuelled a boom in studio apartments* Why did apartments get so much smaller after 2008?* Why are most two-bedroom apartments designed for roommates?* What do families actually want in a floor plan, and why don’t developers build it?* Whether upzoning can helpThanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood and Katerina Barton for their judicious transcript and audio edits.The full transcript to this conversation and many others is available at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

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• How to Bring Down Healthcare Costs

  Today, I’m joined by Anup Malani. He’s a professor of law at the University of Chicago, currently on leave, serving as the first Chief Economist at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. This means he oversees economic analysis for the agency managing $2 trillion in annual healthcare spending — 23% of the entire federal budget. CMS runs Medicare for 70 million elderly Americans, Medicaid for low-income families, and the health insurance exchanges where millions buy coverage.Malani answers a lot of questions I have about American healthcare policy:* The US spends 20% of GDP on healthcare. Why is our life expectancy so bad?* How do you crack down on Medicare fraud without hurting patients who need care?* What incentives do private insurers like UnitedHealth have to make patients look sicker than they are?* What do academic economists get wrong about policy?The full transcript for this conversation is at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

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• What Is America’s Infrastructure Cost Problem?

  This episode was originally recorded on September 4th at the Abundance Conference in DC."Zach Liscow, my guest today, is a professor of law at Yale Law School. In 2022-2023, he was the Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget. He's also now my colleague at IFP, as a non-resident senior fellow.I have a bit of a problem today, which is that while Zach may not be a national household name, he might as well be in this audience. As most of you are aware, Zach has worked on many interesting economic topics, but especially on infrastructure costs: why it costs so much to build in the US, what the inputs are, and cross-cutting comparisons.The challenge for me today as an interviewer is that, in part because of Zach’s work, everyone here now knows that infrastructure in the US costs a huge amount to build. I recently reviewed some submissions for a project on transit at IFP, and every other submission referenced the fact that the cost per mile to build a subway in New York is something like eight times more than the equivalent project in Paris.These stylized facts are now embedded in our discourse. And my problem is that this makes it a little hard to figure out how to have a conversation that isn't just all of us nodding in agreement. I'm going to try to tackle that problem, but I just want to lay my cards on the table. This is my fear, and we’ll try to avoid it."The full transcript for this conversation and many others is at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

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