ARPA-I: Improving How the Nation Moves
We’re constantly keeping our eyes peeled for the best opportunities to create positive impact at FAS – moments when “policy windows” open up.
We pride ourselves on being able to identify these moments – when the right bipartisan support exists politically and the appropriate talent and capacity is in place in a particular agency to execute on an idea.
The truth is that these open policy windows are still hard to predict with confidence; and it can be even harder to know exactly when good policy proposals will start to bear fruit.
Case in point: FAS’s push for the establishment of an “Advanced Research Projects Agency for Infrastructure,” or ARPA-I. It’s a story that starts more than five years ago.
Back in 2020 FAS hosted a Day One workshop with former leaders from the Department of Transportation.
In this virtual gathering the idea was hatched: create an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Infrastructure modeled on other ARPAs like the storied DARPA at the Department of Defense and ARPA-E at the Department of Energy.
ARPA-I would be aimed at improving the country’s transportation systems.
The concept moved from idea, to expert engagement, to an agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation authorized in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).
The mission: accelerate the development of transformative transportation technologies that decrease costs, increase safety, enhance resilience, and make America more globally competitive.
In May 2025 ARPA-I announced its first two projects, officially bringing this multi-year work to life:
X-BRIDGE (eXceptional Bridges through Innovative Design and Groundbreaking Engineering)
a program to develop half-cost, double-life modular bridges
INSIGHTS (Infrastructure Systems Insights through Geospatial Sensing)
a program using airborne LiDAR, synthetic aperture radar, and AI-powered spatial analytics to generate high-resolution, real-time digital twins of multimodal infrastructure systems.
By June, the House Science Committee reached out to FAS asking for legislative recommendations for ARPA-I reauthorization and appropriations. The invite was a validation of FAS as a crucial partner, ready to take action as the policy window opened.
“The announcement of X-BRIDGE and INSIGHTS, followed by the committee’s invitation, brought about a surge of excitement here at FAS,” says Andy Gordon, who led the project. “We had been working on this diligently for years with input from scientific and technical experts around the country.”
Andy Gordon
In August, FAS launched legislative recommendations aimed at advancing ARPA-I, and continued to explore additional concepts with interested funders eager to chip in on the massive effort to modernize transportation infrastructure around the country.
Excitement grew with the prospect of bipartisan collaboration bringing new ideas to fruition on the legislative side – X-BRIDGE and INSIGHTS, ideally, will be just the first of many ARPA-I research projects.
Despite broad uncertainty at the Federal level following an extended government shutdown, there are reasons to remain optimistic for ARPA-I’s future: a vast network of expert stakeholders now bought into the fledgling agency’s research agenda, committed champions within the Department of Transportation, and a team inside FAS that remains poised to help deliver meaningful results.