Derek Thompson

And to the question of what do we want to do quickly?

I mean, the bipartisan infrastructure law was in many ways a very abundancy law.

They wanted to spend money to improve American infrastructure.

And in particular, I think if you look at the delays happening right now with transmission lines and transformers, we need to find some way either through regulation or through legislation.

or through personnel to build this stuff much faster because you cannot electrify a grid if there's like interconnection cues and transformer delays of months and years.

So that's one thing I think you'd really, really want to use a kind of maybe progressive doge to do.

The other that I think is so important is right now the delay in the drug development pipeline

at the level of the FDA and clinical trials is absolutely horrendous.

And there's a group of people, including Roxandra Teslow, that are looking at what would clinical trial abundance mean?

How could you use a combination of artificial intelligence and innovative public policy

to renovate the way that we test drugs to get the same safety benefits out of it, but going at something like warp speed.

Because despite what the anti-vaxxers say, the COVID vaccines were really remarkably safe given the health benefits that they gave the American and global population.

But Ezra, you talked about this a lot when we were traveling the country.

I'm wondering how your thinking has evolved here and what you think a good doge would look like in 2029.

You're saying all left of center here.

I'm saying all left of center.

I think the NIH is a really interesting flashpoint for the perspective that you're advancing.

Consider like three approaches to the NIH, a sort of pro-establishment liberal approach, an anti-establishment MAGA approach, which we'll call just current policy in 2026, and an anti-establishment abundance liberal approach.

The establishment approach would be to say the NIH is

spends $40 billion a year, is the jewel of global biomedical research.