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1/ OPT OBSERVATORY
I’ve spent the past year creating *the most in-depth public resource* on how the US retains international students after they graduate.
Today, @IFP is releasing never-before-seen data we obtained from ICE via FOIA.
Check it out: optobservatory.org
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NEWS: 19 FORMER ECONOMIC AND NATIONAL SECURITY LEADERS ENDORSE THE BIPARTISAN PERMITTING REFORM BILL
Today, a group of former Cabinet members and White House principals across seven Democratic and Republican administrations sent a letter calling on Congress to pass BAAJA. Here are the signatories:
Janet YELLEN, Michael R. POMPEO, Steven T. MNUCHIN, Leon E. PANETTA, Timothy F. GEITHNER, Henry M. PAULSON, Jr., Robert E. RUBIN, Stephen MIRAN, Jared BERNSTEIN, Tyler GOODSPEED, Jason FURMAN, Glenn HUBBARD, Laura D’Andrea TYSON, Michael J. BOSKIN, Jeffrey ZIENTS, Jake SULLIVAN, Brian DEESE, Larry KUDLOW, Allan B. HUBBARD
Key highlights from the letter:
1. “We are not building infrastructure fast enough to remain globally competitive… The median time for a new power plant to move from an interconnection request to commercial operation has more than doubled, from less than two years for projects built between 2000 and 2007 to more than four years for projects built between 2018 and 2024.
2. China has built more high-voltage transmission in the last fifteen years than the U.S. has built in all of its history... In 2024, China accounted for 31.5% of global knowledge- and technology-intensive manufacturing value added, compared with 20.7% for the United States.
3. Federally funded or permitted projects require NEPA review, but private projects often do not, creating a threat of failure precisely where the government is trying to be proactive, strategic, and engaged.
4. A project that spends years awaiting approval must continue carrying development and financing costs while remaining exposed to rising input costs. The IEA reports that prices for utility-scale transformers increased 26% in 2024, while lead times for some transformers have stretched as long as six years.
5. Mining projects also face tremendous uncertainty: a 2026 study by researchers at the Colorado School of Mines found that permitting for modern mining projects takes an average of 5.5 years, rising to 8.9 years for contested projects. The U.S. currently has the second-longest mine development timeline in the world.
6. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is the most significant bipartisan legislative effort that Congress has undertaken in decades to tackle these challenges.
7. BAAJA addresses key constraints stifling American industry by requiring interregional transmission planning, strengthening the federal backstop for nationally significant transmission lines, and creating a faster, more predictable process for connecting new generation to the grid.
8. BAAJA also makes permits more durable by imposing tighter timelines for litigation and limiting frivolous lawsuits that can halt projects indefinitely, while preserving community input and judicial review of substantive agency decisions.”
The letter was organized by @arnabdatta321 on behalf of @IFP and covered exclusively by the WSJ this morning.
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The size of the US lead over China in AI is a policy choice.
Currently that lead is about 6.5 months.
Using existing authorities, the US government could make different policy choices on export controls & anti-distillation measures to ***double*** our lead to 13 months.
Big new IFP report from @GeorgiaCAdamson, @KonstantinPilz, and me on the US-China AI competition.
We spent the last 6 months digging into how Chinese AI companies’ access to compute and distillation of American models translate into the current US-China capabilities gap.
The result is a 23k-word research report, including an interactive analytical model that visualizes changes in the US AI lead under different policy interventions.
Our findings:
1. The US AI lead over China is currently only around 6 months.
2. The US could roughly double this lead, to over a year, using authorities already available to the federal government.
3. On chips: China’s access to AI chips will roughly double over the next year, with chips housed in data centers overseas accounting for roughly half of China’s 2027 compute.
4. On distillation: the current ~16x US training compute advantage would normally yield a 13-month lead. But we estimate adversarial distillation halves this to around 6.5 months.
5. Increasing the lead would have some obvious benefits:
- Give the US broadly a greater cyberdefensive advantage against Chinese threat actors.
- Give US AI companies breathing room to spend more R&D resources on making their systems safer and more secure, without fear of being overtaken by less safety-conscious Chinese competitors.
6. Provide the US government more leverage in negotiations with China about the future of AI.
7. The two most important interventions are:
- For BIS: Create a new end-use control to restrict China’s remote access to training clusters abroad — China’s largest and fastest-growing source of frontier-scale compute.
- For DOJ/FTC: Create a narrow safe harbor to allow US companies to coordinate on countering Chinese adversarial distillation.
8. Both interventions (and all the others we discuss in the report) are things the federal government could do today.
9. To estimate the effects of each policy intervention, we model the US lead as a function of its compute advantage over China and China’s ability to adversarially distill the capabilities of the US frontier.
10. The model makes many simplifying assumptions, but provides a useful way to assess and rank the impact of different policy interventions at a high level.
Read the full report here: ifp.org/how-to-increase-amer…
Violet retweeted
Big new IFP report from @GeorgiaCAdamson, @KonstantinPilz, and me on the US-China AI competition.
We spent the last 6 months digging into how Chinese AI companies’ access to compute and distillation of American models translate into the current US-China capabilities gap.
The result is a 23k-word research report, including an interactive analytical model that visualizes changes in the US AI lead under different policy interventions.
Our findings:
1. The US AI lead over China is currently only around 6 months.
2. The US could roughly double this lead, to over a year, using authorities already available to the federal government.
3. On chips: China’s access to AI chips will roughly double over the next year, with chips housed in data centers overseas accounting for roughly half of China’s 2027 compute.
4. On distillation: the current ~16x US training compute advantage would normally yield a 13-month lead. But we estimate adversarial distillation halves this to around 6.5 months.
5. Increasing the lead would have some obvious benefits:
- Give the US broadly a greater cyberdefensive advantage against Chinese threat actors.
- Give US AI companies breathing room to spend more R&D resources on making their systems safer and more secure, without fear of being overtaken by less safety-conscious Chinese competitors.
6. Provide the US government more leverage in negotiations with China about the future of AI.
7. The two most important interventions are:
- For BIS: Create a new end-use control to restrict China’s remote access to training clusters abroad — China’s largest and fastest-growing source of frontier-scale compute.
- For DOJ/FTC: Create a narrow safe harbor to allow US companies to coordinate on countering Chinese adversarial distillation.
8. Both interventions (and all the others we discuss in the report) are things the federal government could do today.
9. To estimate the effects of each policy intervention, we model the US lead as a function of its compute advantage over China and China’s ability to adversarially distill the capabilities of the US frontier.
10. The model makes many simplifying assumptions, but provides a useful way to assess and rank the impact of different policy interventions at a high level.
Read the full report here: ifp.org/how-to-increase-amer…
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DHS is proposing $100,000 in total fees for Optional Practical Training (OPT) and STEM OPT.
We have a new resource out today on the legality of this proposal and its likely effects on the OPT program and American economy.
ifp.org/100k-opt-fee/
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Between this and the repeal of the 60-say grace period, admin policy is giving employers more leverage over their employees on temporary visas.
Bad for the wages and working conditions of Americans and visa holders alike.
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$239,000 is the value that DOL defaults to when OEWS doesn't have a large enough sample to estimate PWs for a particular combination of occupation and area. It's pretty common in medicine.
DOL explains this every year in its technical documentation:
dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/E…
Billings Clinic is paying $625,000 a year for an H-1B anesthesiologist. The prevailing wage for that role in Montana is $239,000. That is 2.6x the government standard.
Red flags are all over this filing. The documents list two worksite locations, but only one is disclosed. The point of contact isn't a CMO or a department chair; it’s a "Physician Recruitment Manager."
Meanwhile, Gov. Gianforte was in India signing bioscience and university partnership MOUs.
Billings Clinic needs to answer a few simple questions:
What was the actual recruitment process?
How many Montanans or US citizens applied?
Why couldn't a $625,000 salary attract a single American doctor?
The H-1B system is for genuine shortages. Claiming "we couldn't find anyone" while offering nearly triple the prevailing wage is a joke. Show the recruitment records or stop pretending this is a shortage.
Source: Department of Labor / LCS Case I-200-26141-938834
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Part of the problem with PERM is the notion that there is a job opening isn’t true. Companies by definition are sponsoring people they already employ. It’s bizarre to have this labor market test at the very end of the immigration journey.
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We wrote the Transit Abundance Playbook because transit costs 3x more to build in the US than in peer countries.
The Playbook lays out 15 concrete policy ideas to stop paying more for less.
Since June, it's had an incredible reception from advocates, legislators, and agencies, and Congress's Build America Caucus just included many of these ideas in their agenda.
We've now added new artwork with beautiful collages by @em_steinhobel. Check the Playbook out at ifp.org/cheaper-transit.
More coming soon on how to build more for less, including what the new federal permitting deal means for transit.
🚨HUGE NEWS:
The Build America Caucus is launching an ambitious, bipartisan agenda focused on improving Americans’ lives by making it easier to build the things we need.
It just went live on our website for you to read. Here’s why you should: 🧵
buildamericacaucus-harder.ho…
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First solo winner of the physics prize since 1992.
He came from CERN on a temporary visa in 1971 for what was supposed to be a six-month visit to Wisconsin and never left.
Hard to imagine he'd be in the US at all if the restrictionists had their preferred policies.
BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physics to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.”
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DHS’s proposed OPT fee rule is out. DHS says the fee is meant “to ensure employers, students, and institutions are engaging in appropriate activities” consistent with F-1 status.
Its solution? Make schools pay $70,000 for each student’s initial OPT and another $30,000 for a subsequent OPT period.
And the idea that this will generate billions in revenue is fantasy.
DHS also goes out of its way to address alternatives and reliance interests, seemingly building an administrative record to defend the rule in court. But no amount of regulatory box-checking can disguise the broader policy goal: if the administration cannot easily eliminate a lawful immigration program outright, make it prohibitively expensive to use.
Up to $100,000 in OPT fees is elimination by another name. public-inspection.federalreg…
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DHS's goofy assumption that a $100k fee on STEM OPT won't reduce STEM OPT participation is necessary for them to argue their plan won't be detrimental to the US economy.
Once you account for the fact this will shrink the skilled STEM workforce, this kind of change will conservatively cost the US $240-481 billion a year, or about $1,000 per household.
From @m_clem, @AmyMNice, and my work for @theNASEM:
nap.nationalacademies.org/re…
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The effect this rule is already having on US higher ed should scare us all.
Even though it is just a proposal & it could get shot down, this impacts schools' ability to recruit talent starting TODAY.
There's billions in revenue & hundreds of thousands of jobs on the line.
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The New York TImes: What’s one issue in politics that you’ve changed your mind about?
Zohran Mamdani: The role of the private market in housing construction.
Private developers are essentially bragging about still being able to do market-rate development in districts represented by democratic socialists therealdeal.com/new-york/202…
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The entire justification rests on lump of labor fallacy that fewer people is better for wages, which is it not.
No consideration given to how more high skilled workers raise wages of low skilled ones by raising demand.
And no mention of decreased tax revenue from fewer workers.
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New OPT rule:
$70,000 for OPT
$30,000 for STEP OPT
It assumes demand drops by 44%, which is an arbitrary and incredibly optimistic scenario. There is no indication that universities will pay this, demand will drop 99%.
This is bad for innovation, and will cost taxpayers.
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This morning, DHS released a new proposal for large new fees on Optional Practical Training (OPT), to be paid by schools:
$70,000 for one year of OPT, plus another $30,000 for the STEM extension.
DHS assumes that for STEM grads, there will be ZERO change in participation.
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$700/year property tax directly adjacent to $25k and $50k/year in San Francisco:
IFP @reedschwartzsf explains how 2 neighbors in San Francisco can own similar homes yet pay $200 vs $20,000 a year in property taxes under Prop 13:
"I think it is very plausible you could find a home paying $200 a year and a home paying $20,000 a year right next to each other."
"The way Prop 13 works is the value that the government assesses your house at is capped at the purchase price plus 1% per year, starting in 1975."
"If you bought in 1975, we had enormous inflation after that, and land prices have gone way up. If you bought for $10,000 and you're paying 1% in property taxes, it's just significantly less than if you bought for $2 million. Very plausible in San Francisco today."
@IFP
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Sometimes I hear people say we don't need OPT because we have the O-1.
But that's not how America recruits superstar talent in real life.
A new report from @CSETGeorgetown looks at how our STEM prize winners (Nobel, Lasker, ACM AM Turing, MIT Innovators Under 35) come to America and the student pipeline is key.
Two thirds first came to the United States as students!
All these people could get an O-1 today, but would they be here if they had to get one right when they graduated?
New from @athinnyun, Kelly Beavan, and Zachary Arnold: cset.georgetown.edu/publicat…
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Buy the shirt for a very reasonable price:
etsy.com/listing/4583435871/…
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A new report from @CSETGeorgetown highlights why the Trump administration's National Security Science and Technology Strategy is exactly *right* that a top priority for the US must be "attracting and retaining top-tier global talent in critical national security science and technology fields."
Yet this administration is meanwhile doing all it can to discourage, dilute, and deter the ability of international students, scholars, and researchers to come to or remain in the US - by trying to eliminate through proposed regulations: duration of status to allow completion of degrees and programs (rule finalized but currently enjoined), access to Optional Practical Training after graduation (new ~100k fees to be proposed), access to H-1B sponsorship (new ~100k fees proposed).
These sorts of restrictions lead to significant, negative economic impacts to America and Americans, as analyzed by @m_clem @JeremyLNeufeld and me in a working paper on the "front door" international STEM talent pipeline.
See cset.georgetown.edu/publicat… (CSET report) and whitehouse.gov/wp-content/up… (WH S&T strategy report) and nap.nationalacademies.org/re… (working paper)
