Institute for Progress

The Institute for Progress (IFP) was announced on January 20, 2022 by Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney as "a new think tank in Washington, D.C.," with the mission "to accelerate scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity's future." Their founding essay stated: "There's a framework we like to borrow from the effective altruism community that says, to do the most good in the world, prioritize issues that are important, neglected, and tractable." It named three initial areas: metascience, immigration and biosecurity.¹ Watney's IFP biography dates the founding to 2021.² The organization's first federal tax return, for calendar 2021, reported 1.9 million dollars in contributions; the Internal Revenue Service recognized its tax exemption in May 2022.³ Its office is at 1255 Union Street NE in Washington.⁴

By 2026 IFP described five "policy verticals": metascience, high-skilled immigration, biotechnology, infrastructure and emerging technology. It stated that it provides "technical assistance to federal agencies" and "educational briefings on Capitol Hill," and that it is "laser-focused on counterfactual policy impact."⁴ A search of the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act database returned no filings for the organization; all eleven results for the client name "Institute for Progress" concern unrelated Turkish and Syrian clients.⁵

Funding

In October 2021 Open Philanthropy, later rebranded as Coefficient Giving,⁶ granted 1.6 million dollars over a year and a half to "the Institute for Progress, a new think tank, to conduct research and advocacy on policies relevant to a number of our grantmaking areas, including immigration policy and scientific research"; the grant investigator was Jacob Trefethen, and the grant page noted that "Institute for Progress staff also reviewed this page prior to publication."⁷ A later Open Philanthropy page, archived in August 2023, listed the same grant at 2,215,000 dollars. In March 2023 Open Philanthropy recommended "two grants totaling $9,000,000 over three years" for general support, within its innovation policy focus area.⁸

IFP lists its funders as "foundations like the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Arnold Ventures, Astera Foundation, Coefficient Giving, Heising-Simons Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation." It states that it does not accept donations from corporations or foreign governments and that "the majority of our support is unrestricted."⁴

IFP's Form 990 returns report the following:³

In 2024 the highest-paid person was Amy Nice, "Distinguished Immigration Counsel," at 250,000 dollars; other paid staff that year included Jeremy Neufeld, Tim Fist, director of emerging technology policy, Santiago Ruiz and Brian Potter.³

People

The returns list Dan Correa, Zachary Graves and Tamara Winter as unpaid directors from the first year.³ In 2026 IFP's external board comprised Correa of the Federation of American Scientists, Graves of the Foundation for American Innovation, Winter of Stripe Press, and Watney, by then at Coefficient Giving.⁴ Watney served as co-chief executive until 2026, when Coefficient Giving hired him as its first managing director of public policy, overseeing its U.S. AI policy grantmaking and its Abundance and Growth Fund; Coefficient wrote that it "was an early supporter of IFP." The fund's program director, Matt Clancy, was a former IFP colleague of Watney's,⁹ and in 2026 IFP listed Clancy, with the affiliation "Coefficient Giving," among its non-resident senior fellows, together with Santi Ruiz of Anthropic, Miles Brundage and the economist Pierre Azoulay. Its staff included Heidi Williams as distinguished metascience fellow and Saif Khan as distinguished technology fellow.⁴

In September 2026 Effort, a publication founded by Brian Chau, stated that "EA fellowships have placed over 50 staffers in Congress and the administrative branch," citing as its sources "Horizon, IFP and FAI biographies and government records."⁶