‘Moonshot’ Infrastructure Program Aims to Fund Transformative Ideas

A new federal program titled the Advanced Research Project Agency for Infrastructure (ARPA-I) is taking aim at ‘moonshot’ projects that require massive research and development funding to develop, writes Andrew J. Hawkins in The Verge.

Some of the last century’s most important inventions, like the internet, GPS, and autonomous vehicles, grew out of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg hopes ARPA-I could do similar things for innovation in the infrastructure sector.

ARPA-I was authorized as part of the Biden administration’s signature $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which passed in 2021. In essence, the goal of the new agency is to futureproof the nation’s infrastructure against climate change, massive technology disruption, energy transition, or any other imminent challenge we have yet to conceive of.

The administration is calling on Congress to appropriate $19 million in additional funds to the program in 2024. “Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said that ARPA-I will bring together ‘talented individuals’ as program managers whose job it is to understand the scope of the challenge” and address three key tasks: “set a very big bold, barely feasible goal;” “build a plan that might actually be able to show that that goal is possible;” and “execute like mad.”