While much of the world is focused on Donald Trump’s selling out of Ukraine and aggressive threats toward America’s peaceful neighbors Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland, if you’re in U.S. military intelligence, you’re more likely to be tracking with concern a specific Chinese threat to a piece of geography that is not in the headlines. The DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile represented a major upgrade of President Xi Jinping’s war-fighting toolbox when it entered service in 2016. The missile (of which about 250 have been built) is precise enough to target aircraft carriers, and it can be equipped with nuclear as well as conventional warheads. But perhaps the most striking thing about the DF-26 is its 2,500-mile range. That’s not enough to reach the continental United States, but it certainly suffices to target America’s westernmost territory in the Pacific. That’s why the DF-26 is sometimes called “the Guam killer.”

Americans rarely spare a thought for Guam, which bills itself as the place where “America’s day begins.” Most voters in this country don’t know that the island is part of the United States, or that its 150,000 native inhabitants are U.S. citizens in every way except their right to vote in presidential elections. Even fewer would be able to find it on a map. But such ignorance doesn’t apply to our armed forces, who know the island by another nickname: “the tip of the spear.” 

Defense planners are acutely aware that any potential conflict with China will immediately involve Guam. When the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) war-gamed a Chinese invasion of Taiwan two years ago, the simulated Chinese side attacked the island’s Andersen Air Force Base “in every iteration.” The war game planners knew what they were doing. Five years ago, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force put out a video showing one of its bombers carrying out a simulated attack on Guam. The message is clear.

Geography, politics, and strategy conspire to make Guam a tempting target. As the American territory nearest to China, the island is a vital strategic strongpoint. U.S. forces in Japan, South Korea, or the Philippines might be closer to Taiwan in the event of war, but Guam has one big advantage over them: Washington wouldn’t have to ask for another country’s permission if it wanted to send its forces there into a conflict—something that becomes especially important in a fight over Taiwan, in which every second counts. Security experts in Washington are fretting over the possibility that a war with China could come as soon as 2027; at least one Navy admiral has raised the possibility that it could happen earlier. Is the American military prepared to defend Guam and its 170,000 residents, 20,000 of whom are members of the U.S. armed forces and their dependents? And if it can’t defend Guam, can it come to the aid of Taiwan if the island nation is attacked by China? There are reasons to doubt it.

“Without holding Guam, defending Taiwan would be difficult,” Brent Eastwood recently wrote in The National Interest. Over the past few years that realization seems to have percolated through to the U.S. defense establishment, which has been trying to fortify the island accordingly. There are now some 9,700 uniformed personnel on Guam, up from 2,500 around the turn of the century. The U.S. Navy currently homeports five Los Angeles–class submarines there, and has the capacity to host a number of additional vessels, up to and including aircraft carriers, as circumstances demand. Andersen Air Force Base, on the north end of the island, is the only place in the Western Pacific that can service strategic bombers; up to 150 aircraft can park at the site, which has the largest fuel storage capacity (66 million gallons) of any base in the Air Force. The Air Force doesn’t station any airplanes there permanently, though, as things stand now.

The Chinese know all of this—and probably a great deal more. It is an open secret that the island has become a major focus of Beijing’s intelligence-gathering efforts. According to reports, the Chinese spy balloon that caused such a ruckus as it floated over the continental U.S. two years ago was supposed to be conducting surveillance over Guam before it went rogue. Also in 2023, the U.S. uncovered a huge Chinese cybercampaign that attempted to install malware in the civilian power and communications systems on the island. James Moylan, Guam’s delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, told Politico the attacks were “clear signs that China wants to gain an edge over the U.S., starting with Guam.”

In December, seven Chinese citizens were arrested after trying to illegally enter the island during a sensitive missile defense test. The Guam Customs and Quarantine Agency said that four of the spies were found “in the vicinity of a military installation,” and noted that since 2022 it had responded to “a total of 152 individuals from the PRC who were determined to be in violation of Guam entry law.” 

Back when I paid my first visit to Guam in 2007, military planners were just beginning to wake up to the implications of China’s rising power. In particular, there was a great deal of excited talk about boosting Guamanian defense capacity by bringing in 8,000 Marines from the Japanese island of Okinawa. The Marine presence on Okinawa has long been a bone in the throat of the civilian population there, who are tired of the noise and mess generated by the base—not to mention several high-profile cases of rape committed by U.S. military personnel. Japanese officials accordingly welcomed the news that a sizable number of Marines might be leaving the island. Washington and Tokyo first agreed on the transfer in 2006, then revised the terms of the deal in 2012.

Guam is still waiting. Last year, a first contingent of Marines finally made the move—but there were only 100 of them. They were billed as “logistics” specialists who are supposed to pave the way for the rest. The Marine Corps plans to make the island home to a permanent force of 1,300 Marines, with another 3,700 rotating in and out. But the Department of Defense is still working out where to put the thousands who are yet to show up. In 2023, the Marine Corps activated a new base, Camp Blaz, to house the new arrivals. 

Obstacles abound. Housing, schools, and other support facilities still need to be built. Guam’s infrastructure, including communications, water, and power systems, is notoriously deficient. If the Army decides to move forces to a permanent base on the island, which looks likely, that could squeeze the space available for the Marines. One-quarter of the island is owned by the Defense Department—but the island is only 30 miles long, so space is at a premium. Both Apra Harbor, used by the Navy for its ships, and Andersen Air Force Base have infrastructure improvements underway, which merely underlines the extent to which the needs of the island have been neglected in the past. 

The military is also trying to make up for lost time by addressing a more fundamental strategic issue: Guam is vulnerable. It’s a vitally important but small chunk of real estate, crammed with juicy assets, in the middle of a vast ocean. Intermediate-range ballistic missiles aren’t the only attack option for Beijing. The island’s defenses might also have to contend with ship- or submarine-launched cruise missiles, and potentially even hypersonic glide vehicles the Chinese currently have under development. Guam is also under threat from North Korea, which has produced missiles capable of reaching the island.

The strengthening of Guam’s defenses began under the Obama administration. In 2013, even before China had missiles that could reach the island, the Defense Department brought in a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system (one of seven deployed by the Army around the world), which is designed to protect against ballistic missile attacks at ranges of up to 125 miles. 

Preparations largely stalled during Donald Trump’s first term. Retired General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s first chief of staff during those years, later recalled how the two of them once discussed scenarios for a possible North Korean attack. When he tried to explain that a possible North Korean raid might take lives across the Pacific, given that Guam was within missile range, Trump responded: “Guam isn’t America.” Trump’s obliviousness seems especially odd considering his oft-proclaimed affection for the expansionist polices of William McKinley—who happens to be the very president who added Guam to the U.S. empire in 1898, after the Spanish-American War.

Under Joe Biden, the bolstering of Guam ramped up considerably. That includes more than $100 million for civilian roads, clean water, and broadband access from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act as well as an expanded effort to protect the island from Chinese missile attack that is set to cost $10 billion over the next decade. In December, the Missile Defense Agency conducted its first successful intercept of a ballistic missile in an exercise using a land-based version of the Navy’s state-of-the-art Aegis missile defense technology. The Army has its own Patriot battery on the island, to be supplemented by more in the event of a crisis. The aim of all this is to create a layered defense that would target incoming missiles at a variety of ranges and altitudes. Yet even this might not suffice to cope with a full-scale surprise attack involving hundreds of missiles, decoys, and electronic countermeasures.

Any U.S. strategic bombers and other military aircraft on Guam could also be vulnerable. For that reason, the Air Force under Biden developed a new operational concept it calls Agile Combat Employment. The idea is to create a constellation of possible landing sites for U.S. planes across the Western Pacific in the event of war. The strategy would rely on civilian airports as well as long-dormant airstrips from an earlier era of American Pacific conflict. Crews are currently reviving a World War II–era airfield on Tinian Island in the Northern Marianas, which is also a U.S. territory. The Air Force has even suggested a $400 million runway extension on the island of Yap, 530 miles from Guam and part of the Federated States of Micronesia. Marine engineers are also rebuilding a runway on Peleliu, part of another independent island chain, Palau, and the site of a vicious battle between Japanese forces and Marines in 1944. Yet there is a huge amount of work yet to be done, and critics of the plan wonder how the Air Force will maintain and supply its aircraft once they’re dispersed over such a large area.

The planning for upgrading Guam’s civilian and defense capacity and bolstering the American presence in other parts of the Western Pacific sounds impressive. But much of it remains exactly that—planning, and therefore subject to the budget whims of the Trump administration. Guam government officials are already bracing for the possible denial of federal dollars for infrastructure and other projects already promised and planned for. The future of the U.S. military buildup on the island is also unclear; the new defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his team have not weighed in one way or another.

But perhaps the greatest unknown is what effect Trump’s overall geostrategy, or at least rhetoric, might have on Guam’s safety, which hinges on China’s appetite for a military move on Taiwan. In a bid to deter Beijing, Biden broke with the “strategic ambiguity” of past presidents by saying that the U.S. would defend Taiwan against an attack by China. In contrast to this solidarity, Trump has repeatedly accused Taiwan of stealing American trade secrets and declared that the island should pay more for its own defense. While praising Xi Jinping personally, Trump has also goaded China with new tariffs on steel and aluminum. And with his threat to cut off military aid to Ukraine and to take Greenland and the Panama Canal by force, he has signaled to the world, and to China, that the United States no longer worries overly much about the sanctity of borders or protecting the weak against the aggression of the strong. It would not be unreasonable for China to interpret all this as evidence that now would be an excellent time to complete its long-planned “unification” with Taiwan—even if that means a surprise attack on an under-prepared American island in the South Pacific.  

The post Will Guam Be America’s Next Pearl Harbor? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

While campaigning in the late summer of 2024, Donald Trump wooed voters with this declaration: “When I win, I will immediately bring [food] prices down, starting on Day One.” But even before Day One arrived, he was already backpedaling, declaring, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”

Indeed, it is. In the best of circumstances, presidents don’t have the power to unilaterally reduce prices. Yet Trump is adopting policies that are overtly inflationary. Aggressive import tariffs, for example, will drive up prices for food and other essential commodities. And the U.S. agriculture and construction sectors are particularly dependent on the immigrant workers Trump promises to deport. All of this will increase working Americans’ already high cost of living.

Still, if Trump were serious about fulfilling his campaign pledge, there is a policy tool he could use to help drive down the prices that most hurt working-class Americans. Namely, he could actively enforce the U.S. antitrust laws. 

To understand the opportunity before him, consider that market power is a major factor in driving high prices for goods and services that matter the most to working American families.

In the markets where consumers spend most of their budgets, for example, single companies or tight cliques of just a few firms command outsized market shares and so are able to impose anticompetitively high prices, lower quality, and slow down innovation. For example, four or fewer firms have 70 percent market share or more in sectors ranging from warehouse clubs and supercenters to passenger car rental, passenger airline service, kidney dialysis centers, and breakfast cereals. Tight cabals of large food manufacturers control markets ranging from sugar to baby formula. 

Similarly, major consumer-facing markets are also marked by business practices designed to stifle competition from start-ups and smaller players. These include small medical device innovators,  independent grocers and pharmacies, and generic pharmaceuticals. Concentrated markets like automobile parts and financial services strengthen incentives for firms to collude to fix prices, rather than compete hard on the merits, also driving up prices to consumers.

Yet another problem is the market power “bottleneck” in consumer-facing supply chains. Take beef packing, where four firms control more than 80 percent of U.S. capacity, or pharmacy benefit managers, where four firms control 70 percent of the national market. Everyone pays the hefty toll to get through these bottlenecks—consumers, through higher prices for essential products; and producers, through lower prices paid for their commodities. 

Consider also that these market power bottlenecks are inherently destabilizing, as firms propose mergers expressly to gain bargaining power over even more powerful suppliers and customers. This downward spiral of consolidation has left little of the redundancy in supply chains that is necessary to survive disruption. Just look at the beef packers, who went dark during the COVID-19 pandemic while beef prices spiked. Or consider what happened to the supply of IV fluids after a major hurricane in Florida took out a facility owned by a firm that controls 60 percent of the market.

The U.S. antitrust laws are among the most potent tools the government has to promote fair competition and thereby protect consumers from monopoly prices. For example, Barack Obama’s Department of Justice scored a double header in the 2010s in blocking two mergers between major health insurers, Anthem with Cigna and Aetna with Humana. Those deals would have raised insurance premiums for tens of millions of consumers. Likewise, in the 2010s, the Federal Trade Commission enjoined the merger of the broadline food distributors Sysco and U.S. Foods. 

The Biden administration’s antitrust chiefs, while concentrating on actions against large digital platforms that did not directly affect consumer prices, also stepped on the gas to block harmful mergers that hit consumers directly in their pocketbooks, with a palpable impact on their cost of living. 

For example, the Biden enforcers blocked the merger of the grocery giants Kroger and Albertson, the combination of which would almost certainly have driven up the costs of food. In enjoining the merger of JetBlue and Spirit, the Biden enforcers preserved choice and low fares for budget air travelers. To keep rental housing prices down, the Justice Department took action against RealPage, a digital platform for matching up tenants with housing providers that allegedly fixes prices at anticompetitively high levels. The department also brought suit against Live Nation Entertainment—which had been formed in 2010 by the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster—for monopolizing the market for tickets to live events.

If, as Trump claims, he is a tribune for the nation’s working class, he not only will employ the authority granted to the Justice Department and the FTC to defend consumer interests but also will explain why market power is at the core of the economic problems facing working-class and other Americans. His antitrust enforcers  will use the full force of the antitrust laws to police anticompetitive agreements and practices that squeeze out smaller players in the food, housing, transportation, health care, insurance, and retirement markets. The federal government’s ability to enjoin mergers that would substantially eliminate competition and drive up prices for consumers is the first line of defense against the emergence of anticompetitive threats like monopolies and oligopolies. 

Will Trump do this? We don’t know yet, but we do know what to watch for. For example, if the administration fails to act against harmful mergers and business practices that hurt consumers or uses antitrust to target companies or issues that are the source of grievances and disputes, it will be clear that Trump’s campaign rhetoric was a bill of goods. Democrats should make sure the public pays attention to how antitrust unfolds, or not, under the current administration. 

If Democrats expect to reap electoral advantage in 2028, they also must themselves fully embrace the importance of antitrust policy and explain how it directly impacts kitchen table issues, particularly those affecting working Americans, who make up the plurality of voters. In an era where the markets that working families most depend on lack competition and fail to deliver fairly priced goods and services, antitrust enforcement is an essential, all-American position. Whichever party grabs it is likely to prevail.  

The post What Happens to Antitrust Under Trump? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In March 2019, I arrived in Tulsa for the first of what would become a long series of visits. A local philanthropic foundation, the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), had invited me to see their urban revitalization program, which they hoped would bring people and investment back to the post-industrial city reeling from the decline of its energy industry. Having studied and worked in economic development for four decades as an academic and consultant, I expected to be shown the standard playbook for community leaders who want to encourage growth. I would be walked through an incubator that lured tech companies to Tulsa. I would be ushered through new arts centers and parks. I would hear about the foundation’s successful remote worker program and about investment in local industry. All of these programs serve a traditional model that seeks to build by attracting new money and people from outside. 

As it happens, the Kaiser Foundation is doing all of those things. But I was wrong about our first tour stops, and about the foundation’s vision as well—wrong in a way that would forever change my understanding of the field that I have devoted my professional life to. 

I was greeted by Brandon Oldham, a dynamic young program officer at GKFF and a native Tulsan who was the first in his family to attend college. To my surprise, our first destination wasn’t the foundation’s offices or the site of one of its economic development initiatives, but the historic Greenwood neighborhood, once known as “Black Wall Street” because of its extraordinary number of Black-owned businesses. Then we visited one of the foundation’s early childhood development centers, where we were joined by GKFF’s executive director, Ken Levit, and others. As they told me, early childhood development was GKFF’s original mission. The more recent, more conventional economic initiatives—the ones I had expected to see? Those came later and evolved from that guiding star.

Although I did not realize it at the time, I was seeing the glimmerings of a new model for economic development in the American city. This new approach overcomes the long-running divide between “economic development,” which focuses on things like business recruitment, talent attraction, and job generation, and “community development,” which emphasizes equity and helping the least advantaged. GKFF has joined these seemingly incompatible goals by building a more balanced knowledge economy that also bolsters the fabric of the community. 

When the nickel did drop, I saw that they were responding to the same paradoxical development I’d first noticed a decade or so ago—that the unbridled pursuit of innovation and economic growth for their own sake was undermining communities and stoking the flames of social division. In my 2017 book, The New Urban Crisis, I wrote about the trend of deepening economic inequality and unaffordable housing that was doing damage to superstar cities like New York and leading tech hubs like the San Francisco Bay Area, and that would later spread to Sunbelt boomtowns like Miami and Austin. GKFF was trying to build a more inclusive economy that could spare Tulsa from this fate.

While observing and advising GKFF over the next six years, I would develop a profound appreciation for its approach to what I have come to call “community-enhancing economic development.” It will take more time to refine this new paradigm, but the Kaiser Foundation has begun to move the economic needle, improving Tulsa’s track record in attracting talent, adding population, growing jobs, and reducing economic divides. Other communities can learn from this pioneering model and adapt it to their own conditions. This will be especially important as the Trump administration reins in spending across the board, including in the area of economic development. 

Tulsa came into existence in the 1820s when the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek, and Cherokee peoples were forced out of Georgia and Alabama and into the Oklahoma Indian Territory. The trading post and cattle town didn’t attract much white settlement until the 1880s, when the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway arrived. When the first major oil drilling operation began in Oklahoma Territory in 1901, Tulsa’s population had reached about 1,000. Six years later, when the territory became a state, it had swelled to 7,000; by 1912, when the city began calling itself “the Oil Capital of the World,” it had more than doubled, to 18,000. Aviation emerged as another leading industry in the teens, when airplane manufacturers and early airlines opened facilities in the city. By the early 1920s, Tulsa was a bona fide boomtown, with a population of more than 70,000, a downtown filled with corporate headquarters, and leafy residential neighborhoods.

Among them was Greenwood. In 1921, after a Black man was falsely accused of molesting a white woman, vigilantes descended on the neighborhood and set it on fire. When the smoke cleared, two days later, as many as 300 African Americans had been murdered, 6,000 had been rounded up by the police and National Guard and thrown into internment camps, and nearly 10,000 were homeless. Witnesses reported seeing dynamite dropped onto rooftops from civilian airplanes, giving Tulsa the dubious distinction of being the first American city to be bombed from the air.

By the turn of the 21st century, the volatility of the oil industry had taken a toll; Tulsa’s boom times were distant memories. A 2002 story in The Washington Post, “Tulsa’s Desperate Times, Measures,” painted a bleak portrait: 

Tulsa has weathered at least 4,000 layoffs—many in high-paying corporate executive jobs, with no imminent prospect of new development. High-end houses sit empty as the residential real estate market stagnates. The restaurant business is flat, and hotel occupancy is down about 13 percent. More than 150 city positions have been eliminated, and city employees have been forced to accept seven furlough days a year to save money.

Significantly, the article also noted that “Tulsa’s struggle brings with it a unique story: that of a small city with a rich, century-old history of oil, wealth and philanthropy that rivals some of the nation’s largest urban centers.” It is thanks to that legacy that two decades later the city is enjoying an astonishing turnaround. In late 2023, one publication hailed Tulsa as a “City for Creators, Dreamers and Doers,” calling it “a place where it seems they’ve thought of everything—and have the resources to make plans and ideas into reality.” This past fall, The New York Times heralded the unique success of Tulsa’s remote work program, which has settled 3,400 young professionals in the city, according to GKFF. The foundation’s efforts, economists say, are contributing to a turnaround in population and jobs and an overall “brain gain,” reversing a generation of stagnation. 

While the GKFF has been the animating force in Tulsa’s economic transformation, the path it charted wasn’t obvious at the start. The foundation’s original mission stems from George Kaiser’s passionate commitment to early childhood development as a way to create economic opportunity for less advantaged people and neighborhoods. Born in Tulsa in 1942 to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, he attended public schools and eventually earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from Harvard. He went to work at the Kaiser Francis Oil Company, which his father and his uncle had built, assuming its leadership in 1969 when his father suffered a heart attack. In 1991, he bought the Bank of Oklahoma out of receivership from the FDIC and grew his net worth to $16 billion as of 2025. In 2010, he signed on to Bill Gates’s and Warren Buffett’s “billionaires’ giving pledge,” promising to give away half of his wealth through GKFF.

In an essay he wrote for the occasion, he explained the ethos behind his philanthropic work. “I recognized early on that my good fortune was not due to superior personal character or initiative so much as it was to dumb luck. I was blessed to be born in an advanced society with caring parents,” he wrote. “As I looked around at those who did not have these advantages, it became clear to me that I had a moral obligation to direct my resources to help repair that inequity.” Kaiser followed up on that concept with a host of initiatives intended to reverse the generational cycle of poverty. Those included prenatal and family health care, early learning and development for at-risk children, teen pregnancy prevention, parenting and skill development, job and income assistance for families with young children, and alternatives to incarceration for mothers convicted of nonviolent crimes. 

To realize this vision, in 2006 GKFF opened the first of its 16 state-of-the art early childhood education centers in Tulsa’s least advantaged neighborhoods, where they continue to serve more than 2,000 kids. Kaiser insisted that the foundation benchmark its programs against other cities’ initiatives, both to evaluate their effectiveness and to ensure that they stay focused on the city’s most pressing problems. Two issues emerged as especially significant contributors to childhood poverty in Tulsa: its high rates of teen pregnancy and female incarceration. The foundation developed clinics, recruited doctors, and helped establish the School of Community Medicine at the University of Oklahoma–Tulsa. 

For most economic development agencies and initiatives, recruiting businesses, generating jobs, and attracting talent are the sole objectives. But for GKFF, they were seen as mechanisms for extending opportunity to those without it. The foundation’s unique model of community enhancing economic development evolved out of its original social purpose. In fact, it was built into the foundation’s enabling documents. In a critical move that ensured that its work would be tied to serve the community over the long haul, Kaiser placed his philanthropy under the umbrella of the already existing, though considerably less well endowed, Tulsa Community Foundation. 

In its early years, GKFF avoided getting too involved in the nuts and bolts of economic development, seeing that as the responsibility of the public sector. But it came to recognize that the social problems it was trying to address were also rooted in economic development and thus required building a more vibrant economy that could broaden the scope of economic opportunity. The foundation began to expand into economic development, housing, community building, and the arts, music, and culture.

Slowly, a vision developed. At first, according to Jeff Stava, COO of the Tulsa Community Foundation, the philanthropists viewed their efforts at economic development as tangential to GKFF’s mission to provide equal opportunity for young children. “Complementary, but secondary,” he told me. But as they began to see how their supposedly primary work of child care intersected with these new programs, they realized that everything fulfilled one goal. “What all the foundation’s initiatives ultimately reflect is a fundamental belief that the most efficient use of resources is not to alleviate the symptoms of poverty but to address its root causes,” Stava explained. That’s the nub of community-enhancing economic development, which works to combat poverty by building a more inclusive economy that extends economic opportunity to disadvantaged people and neighborhoods. 

As GKFF branched into a wider program of economic development, it employed traditional tactics meant to attract businesses and skilled workers, while leavening them with efforts to bring the disadvantaged into the new economy. The foundation launched an incubator and co-working space in a rehabbed warehouse in the city’s Arts District. It created Tulsa Innovation Labs to build and support the city’s high-tech ecosystem. It retained McKinsey & Company to identify Tulsa’s leading industry clusters. Led by a former Tulsan who grew up with GKFF’s Levit, the study, “Tulsa’s Tech Niche,” documented the region’s strengths in the fields of advanced energy technology, cybersecurity, drone operations and testing, virtual health, and data analytics. 

Most of the cities that have boomed as tech hubs in recent decades—such as Austin, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Denver-Boulder, and Seattle—are state capitals, homes to major research universities, or both. Tulsa doesn’t fit that model. So the foundation has buttressed the small but industrious research university it does have, the University of Tulsa, supporting high-tech initiatives like the school’s successful cybersecurity program. The foundation also worked with New York University to create NYU-Tulsa, alongside its affiliates in London, Paris, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, and Buenos Aires.

Reflecting its commitment to the less advantaged, GKFF realized that the innovation economy is not just about techies, entrepreneurs, and knowledge workers—it offers career pathways for less skilled workers, as well. It invested in new STEM programs at local colleges and a seamless four-year degree program that students at Tulsa Community College could immediately enroll in. It created the Atlas School to train Tulsans in coding and software development, and recruited as its CEO Libby Ediger, a native Oklahoman who had cofounded a successful start-up in Washington, D.C. 

Much of the foundation’s efforts in workforce training remains aspirational, however. By 2030, it hopes to draw 20,000 tech jobs to Tulsa, with a third going to people from disadvantaged backgrounds. In its five years in existence, the Atlas School has trained about 100 coders—a meaningful contribution, but like many of these programs, one with a long way to go. 

Well before all of this, GKFF was already formulating an endeavor that would have even more impact but, like much of the foundation’s work, started off not as an economic development project but as a mechanism for social uplift.

Looking to bolster Tulsa’s poorest-performing schools, in 2009 the foundation invited Teach for America to place  idealistic college graduates in the city as teachers. At first, corps members looking for placements routinely put Tulsa at the bottom of their wish lists. But, as Justin Harlan, who worked for Teach for America, told me, “When they came here, Tulsa had the highest retention of any region in the country. People have an idea of what Tulsa is like in their heads, but when they show up and see it for themselves, it’s different. We realized that if we could just get people to come here, they would be very likely to stay.” 

From that insight, the foundation in 2018 launched Tulsa Remote, which Harlan directs. The program recruits educated workers to move to Tulsa for at least a year with a package of benefits including $10,000 stipends, resettlement assistance, and memberships in local co-working spaces. While other cities would start similar efforts during the pandemic, Tulsa’s pioneering program stood out for the generosity of its offerings and the selectivity of its admissions criteria. Specifically, it favors individuals who express interest in building community and provides opportunities for them to do so. GKFF employs several dedicated “integration specialists” who focus on getting the “remoters” involved in the city—joining boards, volunteering, attending Tulsa Remote events, and befriending locals with similar backgrounds and values. 

Tulsa Remote has garnered praise from economic development specialists and attention from the national press—“Researchers found that when remote workers were paid to move to Tulsa, Okla., everyone came out ahead,” The New York Times reported last fall. A 2021 evaluation by the Economic Innovation Group found that the program had attracted more than 3,000 remote workers to Tulsa, three-quarters of whom stayed on after their initial term was up. The number who stayed is now closer to 3,400, according to Harlan. Nearly 90 percent of Tulsa’s remoters had college degrees, compared to 32 percent of Tulsa residents, and their average income was more than $100,000. 

This influx of talent has had positive spillover effects for the city, according to the report, which estimated that one local job was created for every two remote jobs brought to Tulsa, and that the program’s overall economic impact would grow to roughly $500 million by 2025. And while the money is certainly a lure, what distinguishes the program and drives its success are its efforts to embed its participants in Tulsa’s community. “The success of Tulsa Remote to date,” the report’s authors concluded, “is closely tied to both program design—emphasizing pro-social behavior in the application process with community support services upon arrival—and strong support from local institutions.” 

While the foundation’s initiatives have been a crucial spur, the city’s affordable real estate prices also play an important role in its ability to attract talent. Young families who are priced out of housing markets in other parts of the country can more easily afford to buy homes in Tulsa’s historic neighborhoods. Aspiring small business owners can take advantage of the city’s underused stock of buildings to house their new restaurants, cafés, music venues, galleries, maker spaces, and boutiques—amenities that lure still more talent. High-tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists launch start-ups in the city’s abandoned industrial spaces, and civic entrepreneurs use them to house their social ventures. Those housing dynamics place many other heartland cities in a good position to replicate Tulsa’s strategy, and they are real-world demonstrations of Jane Jacobs’s famous maxim: “New ideas must use old buildings.” 

The foundation also sought to leverage the city’s rich musical legacy to increase its attractiveness to talent and business. Tulsa was the home of Bob Will’s Western Swing and Leon Russell’s Tulsa Sound and more. When Levit found out that Woody Guthrie’s archive was locked away in an attorney’s office in New York City, he sensed it could serve as a crucial touchstone for the city.

The foundation acquired Guthrie’s archive; in 2013, it opened the Woody Guthrie Cultural Center to anchor its burgeoning Arts District, a revitalized neighborhood of industrial warehouses just north of Tulsa’s business center. GKFF also acquired Bob Dylan’s archive for the new Bob Dylan Center and, just last year, launched a songwriter fellowship with Universal Music Group to build the next generation of musical talent. 

Likewise, the foundation’s largest capital investment, a 65-acre, $465 million waterfront park, seeks to build community through beautiful and accessible public spaces. Hence its name, “the Gathering Place.” The executive director, Julio Badin, told me, “One of my favorite things I see when I walk through the park is Tulsans pointing out its features to their out-of-town family and friends. They can’t wait to show them what their city—what they have here.”

Whether the aim is to attract major high-tech employers to Tulsa’s downtown or generate greater economic opportunity in East Tulsa, Kendall Whittier, and North Tulsa, the foundation’s efforts are meant to build on what makes the city unique—its irreducible Tulsa-ness. That means pursuing economic development strategies that are deeply rooted in the community and reflect its values.

In 2021, Ashli Sims, a broadcast reporter, was offered the opportunity to join a GKFF-funded initiative to spur entrepreneurship for underrepresented founders called Build in Tulsa. “What struck a chord,” she told me, “was this idea of resurrecting, highlighting, and amplifying the spirit of Black Wall Street, the spirit of Black excellence, and the spirit of entrepreneurship that Black Wall Street represented. This idea that we were going to tap into not only the history of that but be part of the future of it.” 

Sims told me the story of Arbit, an app for people who buy and sell designer sneakers. It was developed by Venita Cooper, the owner of the Silhouette Sneaker Shop in the Greenwood neighborhood. The secondary market for designer sneakers has tremendous price volatility. Sims introduced Cooper to Brian Brackeen, a local venture capitalist, who suggested that Cooper create an app that could predict prices. He encouraged her to attend a local start-up boot camp and join Act Tulsa, an accelerator for minority ventures. By the time she finished the six-month program, she had hired a cofounder; just a few months later, she received a million dollars in venture capital, split between Lightship and Atento Capital. 

In the summer of 2024, Tulsa won a $50 million grant from the federal government’s competitive Tech Hub program to make the region a world-class center for autonomous transportation—one of just 12 communities out of the more than 350 that applied. Economic development experts like me would have thought something like this was impossible for a city without a major research university. Instead of trying to create the next Silicon Valley from scratch, the proposal drew on the region’s rich legacies in aerospace, energy technology, and advanced manufacturing and applied it to autonomous systems like self-driving cars and unmanned aircraft, transforming and bolstering already-existing industries’ competitiveness. 

The grant process was led by a Kansas City native, Jennifer Hankins, who in 2020 joined Tulsa Innovation Labs, the GKFF-supported initiative responsible for building the region’s innovation economy, and became its director in 2023. Hankins also spearheaded Tulsa’s successful bid for a federal Build Back Better grant in 2022, which focused on increasing the region’s capabilities in advanced mobility. Hankins sees those two projects as critical “building blocks” for Tulsa’s emerging innovation economy. 

Still, for Hankins, innovation is not an end in itself. Having seen the damage that the untrammeled pursuit of high-tech growth has done to places like San Francisco and Austin, she is charting a different track. “We’re trying to flip the script and use technology and innovation as a path to building a stronger community with wider economic opportunity,” she says. One of the programs Tulsa Innovation Labs supports is the new Greenwood AI/AS Center of Excellence (G-ACE), located on the former site of the historic Moton Hospital in the Greenwood district, which will offer companies, start-ups, individuals, and public-sector agencies access to leading AI technologies and expert support. 

The foundation’s efforts are beginning to generate real gains as the metro area has begun to attract people and talent. Tulsa accounted for the largest share of Oklahoma’s recent population growth, with most new residents coming from California and Texas. The state has turned more than a decade of brain drain into a brain gain, adding over 10,000 college graduates in 2021 and 2022. Tulsa placed among U.S. News and World Report’s top 25 best and most affordable places to live in 2024–25. The Milken Institute’s 2025 Best Performing Cities report named it the large metro that experienced the biggest gain in annual job growth. And the Brookings 2024 Metro Monitor analysis ranked it eighth out of more than 350 metros for closing its Black-white employment gap, and fifth for improving the employment gap between its most successful and least successful neighborhoods.

Despite such improvement, Tulsa’s economy continues to face headwinds. It still has not fully recovered from the decline of oil and gas and the ravages of deindustrialization; it lags on its share of college graduates and on knowledge and professional employment; and it continues to suffer from economic and racial division. Still, what it has accomplished in the face of great adversity is a story other cities can learn from.

Tulsa highlights the central role that “anchor institutions”—not just well-endowed foundations but also universities and medical centers—have come to play in urban economic development. The combination of deindustrialization, globalization, and corporate consolidation all but eradicated the ranks of locally headquartered businesses in many if not most of America’s smaller cities and metros. At the same time, the continuing loss of businesses and populations has meant less capacity for municipal governments. 

I witnessed this shift firsthand in Pittsburgh when I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon in the 1990s. The decline of the steel and aluminum industries left a huge economic gap in the city, and I became involved in efforts to use its research capabilities to develop new industries like robotics, computer science, and software development. Most second- and third-tier cities are more like Tulsa and less like Pittsburgh, in that they lack a leading research university to build from. But as Tulsa has shown, it’s possible to leverage branch campuses, local businesses, and nonprofits to build a local innovation economy. 

Even more importantly, Tulsa shows how economic development can be done in more inclusive, community-enhancing ways. During my time in Pittsburgh, I got to know Timothy McNulty. There is little in the world of local economic development that McNulty hasn’t seen or done. He has worked in innovation and economic development at Carnegie Mellon for more than two decades, and before that spearheaded economic development for two Pennsylvania governors and served as head of the Council of Great Lakes Governors. But when he joined me on a recent trip to Tulsa, he was as wide-eyed as I’ve ever seen him. “What they have done is amazing,” he said. “A step beyond what we were able to do in Pittsburgh. They are reinventing economic development.”

The key to this reinvention, McNulty believes, is that GKFF has rewired its work in a more fundamental way, rather than “bolting on” a more superficial commitment to community building. Other foundations, for instance, might hire an “inclusion representative” to monitor whether their initiatives are benefiting disadvantaged people; here, the economic initiatives are designed from the beginning to complement that mission. One example is how the Kaiser Foundation has made sure to align new manufacturing locations with its existing child care sites. Another is the way Tulsa Remote pushes these new, more educated residents to participate fully in the community—which has contributed to its nationally recognized success. GKFF’s approach has a “long way to go,” McNulty told me. “But it did strike me as fundamentally different in structure and focus.” 

Tulsa’s lessons take on special salience today given Trump’s second term in office. Even though they were forged in the Biden era, federal technology and economic development initiatives like the “tech hubs” program created under the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 enjoyed considerable bipartisan support. While administration officials have signaled their intent to scale back what they see as more progressive or left-leaning social objectives, these programs might well survive in modified form and continue to support the creation of innovation-based industry clusters, especially in lagging cities and regions. 

Another major lesson comes from GKFF’s ability to find common ground with conservative lawmakers on kitchen-table economics. Tulsa is located in a red state—a very red state. The foundation worked closely with former Republican Mayor G. T. Bynum and his team, some of whom have gone on to other foundation-supported roles in the city. The foundation also has been able to gain the cooperation of the state’s Republican governor and legislature on its economic development initiatives. For instance, it was able to convince the state to rebate a portion of the state income taxes paid by Tulsa Remote participants. Within three to four years, GKFF will recoup all of its $10,000 stipends, allowing the program to expand and recruit still more remote workers. Remoters and others who have moved to Tulsa often say the opportunity to mix with people with different political perspectives is among the things they most appreciate about the city.

Still, for the next few years, localities can expect little additional investment from Washington. Cities must be prepared to shoulder more of the cost of economic development initiatives. Unfortunately, many if not most of America’s smaller cities and metro areas don’t have foundations as well endowed as GKFF to underwrite their economic revitalization efforts; they will have to marshal resources from their own local institutions. More than that, the mayors, councils, businesspeople, and philanthropists leading local development need a new paradigm—a vision for growth that exists to serve the people, rather than for its own sake. Though they have much work to do, Tulsa and GKFF have cracked open a window to what that might look like. It’s a mode of development that weds innovation and the attraction of talent to the building of a stronger, more inclusive community. And it comes from the knowledge that if local leaders keep practicing the dominant form of economic development, they will very likely make inequality worse.

That’s a lesson our entire nation needs to learn.  

The post What America Can Learn From Tulsa appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Like many incoming freshmen, Audrey arrived at Middlebury College without a clear plan for her future. “I knew pretty much nothing about finance,” she admitted. “I watched Succession.” But she was certain about one thing: securing a successful, well-paying career during college was nonnegotiable. After attending a high school with an “extreme amount of wealth” and now navigating a similarly privileged environment at Middlebury as a student on financial aid, she felt constantly reminded, “Shit, I need to make money.” 

Although she had previously explored opportunities in public law—volunteering at a free legal center where she simplified legal documents to make them accessible for young people and interning at a court—at college it was hard to resist the pull of the finance recruiting machine. Jokingly dubbed the “Middlebury Mafia,” the school’s finance network is vast and the on-campus recruiting is intensive: newsletters, information sessions, networking breakfasts, and even curated trips to New York City, where students meet Middlebury finance alumni and get a taste of their world (parties included). “I signed up for all the career center materials, but finance was the only thing I saw,” Audrey told me. 

As we sat at the campus café—the go-to spot for finance “coffee chats,” a thinly veiled audition where younger students feign interest in older ones, hoping for a future referral—Audrey explained that she had barely settled into Middlebury before feeling pressured to pick a path. Banks push for the earliest access to top talent, creating “an expectation that you go into your first semester and know exactly what you want to do.” And finance tells a compelling story: land an internship, perform well, and you’re set with a high-paying job and unmatched exit opportunities. So, with all her friends also getting involved, she decided to give it a shot, joining a student-run investment club, where she learned how to analyze a discounted cash flow and structure a leveraged buyout. Fast-forward a year, and Audrey’s now in the thick of recruiting season, hoping to land a coveted “bulge bracket” investment banking internship. (Because she doesn’t want to burn bridges with the big banks, she asked me not to use her real name.)

We at the Monthly have long raised alarms about the college-to-finance pipeline. Ezra Klein reported on the problem in 2012, and Amy Binder, the Johns Hopkins sociologist who has pioneered the study of career “funneling” into finance, warned in our pages in 2014 that corporate recruiters were making off with Harvard’s talent. Yet read those articles today and they feel almost quaint. Roughly one-fifth of students at highly selective universities now go into finance. The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2023 that the industry is beginning to recruit summer interns 18 months before they’re expected to start, in the first semester of sophomore year. Meanwhile Goldman Sachs announced that applications for its internships have increased sixfold over the past decade, with the bank only accepting .80 percent of those applicants—and a mere .33 percent of full-time job candidates. Students today are expected to join finance-related extracurriculars, build networks of hundreds of people, learn financial modeling, practice case studies, and prep for a series of technical and behavioral interviews. “It takes up more time than school,” Audrey confided. “It feels like if I’m doing schoolwork then I’m wasting time which should be recruiting focused.”

Some of this modern frenzy can be traced to student demand. The skyrocketing cost of elite college has forced many students to meticulously calculate the financial returns of their degrees. Housing prices in major cities are near all-time highs, pushing those who dream of living in glamorized metropolises toward the high-paying careers that make it possible. Finance, perceived as the most desirable and stable sector among 18-to-25-year-olds, has naturally become a focal point for competition. Beyond material pressures, there’s a deeper generational shift in how young people value money. The annual American Freshman Survey shows that a significant surge in students aspiring to become “very well off financially” occurred between the 1970s and ’80s. That trend has culminated, according to another survey, with Gen Z claiming they need nearly $600,000 to feel “successful”—about half a million more than older generations.

And yet, according to Binder, who has studied the finance pipeline at Harvard, the dominance of finance recruitment at elite universities isn’t just driven by economic or cultural factors. Instead, she identifies a phenomenon she calls “career funneling” as the real driving force. According to Binder, “student career aspirations are not simply the result of individual preferences but are heavily influenced by organizations and the actors inhabiting them.” Binder argues that finance firms leverage their clout with elite universities to create high-stakes “status tournaments,” where students—most of whom already spent their high school years fiercely competing to earn a spot at an elite university—come to see finance as the inevitable next rung on the overachievement ladder they’ve been climbing since childhood. Career funneling has long been a feature of elite universities, though the favored industries change over time. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, the most sought-after careers on elite campuses were at the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency—non-remunerative fields that complicate the functionalist narrative between top wages and job seekers. To Binder, the real allure isn’t the work or even the lucrative salaries but the “halo effect” of having beaten out the competition, a continuation of the hypercompetitive ethos that defines elite institutions. Audrey agreed: “I’m a competitive person. This kind of seemed like the next big competition.” 

The effect of this recruiting system is to channel students into a field for which they have little genuine interest or aptitude. A 2008 survey by The Harvard Crimson revealed that half of the university’s students planning to go into finance or management consulting—an industry with a nearly parallel trajectory—would choose a different career if financial concerns weren’t a factor. 

While it may be hard to muster sympathy for these students—after all, a privileged yet unfulfilling life is hardly the worst fate—the broader societal implications are far more concerning. Leave aside the fact that the modern finance industry is a force that exacerbates inequality, stifles corporate innovation, and inflates systemic risk. The bottom line is that it is also among the best paths to accumulate wealth, and today entry to this exceedingly remunerative career is largely saved for students who already come from the wealthiest backgrounds. Brilliant and equally qualified students at less selective colleges are not cut in on the riches. That in itself is an outrage. 

But the loss to society is greater still. When a disproportionate share of the wealthiest and most academically credentialed graduates flock to finance, other vital professions are left starved of the talent and prestige they desperately need. For instance, at Harvard, more students in 2020 entered finance than academia, the health industry, public service, or government combined—some of which face looming worker shortages.

Thanks to the financial recruiting funnel, a whole generation of America’s most competitive and expensively educated students are missing out on a vast range of personally fulfilling, societally useful, and reasonably remunerative jobs. Instead of becoming junior analysts at Goldman Sachs, students could be getting in on the ground floor of microchip companies that are building new plants under the 2022 CHIPS Act. They could address the climate crisis by working on the cutting edge of battery storage, geothermal, and distributed energy—or by becoming federal energy regulators and helping to pave the way for electric transmission lines for solar and wind. They could protect the environment at the Nature Conservancy or defend women’s rights at EMILYs List. They could join start-up firms trying to commercialize lab-grown meat. They could do their bit to help solve the housing crisis by finding employment at real estate firms that are turning empty downtown office buildings into residences and constructing apartments on commercial strips in the suburbs. They could seek jobs at one of the many for-profit and nonprofit health care organizations trying to transform primary care for the better. They could go to work for blue-state attorneys general who are bringing lawsuits against the Trump administration’s unconstitutional actions. 

Instead, they are being herded like sheep into jobs that are likely to put money in their pockets but suck their souls dry.

Historically, those seeking to get rich didn’t gravitate toward finance. For many young people today, this seems surprising—the modern finance industry exudes an almost mythic inevitability, the sense that an industry centered around money would naturally generate vast wealth. But for much of American history, finance was a stable but ordinary middle-class profession, with finance workers only slightly better educated and paid than their peers. However, starting in the 1970s, fundamental changes in the economy—spiraling inequality, legal innovations granting financial firms greater control over corporate management, and lax government policy—paved the way for the industry’s meteoric rise. Today, finance is synonymous with the economic elite, producing 20 percent of all billionaires and employing 40 percent of Americans with assets exceeding $30 million.

As compensation on Wall Street exploded, the industry reorganized its internal corporate structure to better attract top students from brand-name universities. Kevin Roose, in his book Young Money, explains how banks ended their traditional recruitment practices in favor of a “two-and-out” program in which college seniors are hired for two-year stints as analysts before moving on, usually to find work at a hedge fund or private equity firm. The model proved enormously successful, attracting a wave of young talent eager to collect a hefty check and another résumé-boosting gold star, even if they didn’t aspire to lifelong careers in banking. 

At Harvard, for instance, the percentage of men entering finance and consulting doubled between 1970 and 1990, peaking in 2007, when 58 percent of men pursued careers in those two fields. Today, as Matt Kuchar, Middlebury’s finance career adviser, told me, many students view finance like “grad school—you’re deferring any big career decisions until two years after graduation. And for a lot of students, that’s very comfortable.”

While students eventually adopt this mind-set, few enter college with it already in place. For example, Binder’s “career funneling” study found that only two out of 56 interviewees had even a basic understanding of finance, let alone plans to enter the field after college—and both of these students came from families with Wall Street connections. To bridge this gap, the industry employs a recruitment strategy described by Roose as “reminiscent of very polite stalking … These firms behave less like faceless corporate entities than like insecure middle schoolers.” While Roose focuses on the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business—arguably the premier recruiting hub for financial firms—finance holds an outsized role across most elite institutions. At Middlebury, for example, finance and consulting compose nearly 20 percent of all events sponsored by the career center and 49 percent of information sessions. And formal events only scratch the surface. Walk through the library on any given afternoon and you’ll spot clusters of students in ill-fitting suits, hunched over laptops, anxiously preparing for coffee chats with finance alumni—hoping to make an internship-granting impression. With the industry seemingly omnipresent, students have (probably correctly) internalized the importance of constant contact. As Audrey put it, “If you don’t have a network, you’re not going to get a job. If you don’t have people within the bank advocating for you, there’s not even a point in submitting the application.” A recent email from Middlebury’s career center highlights the demands of finance recruiting, reminding interested students that “hopefully you’re well into your conversations with alumni and networking contacts at these firms” and shared feedback from alumni coffee chats, noting that “across the board, our alumni have reported that most Midd students have work to do.” Still, the email reassured them that more can still be done, as “it’s [only] preseason.”

The industry also understands the importance of capturing students’ attention early, bombarding them with advertising and manufacturing a sense of urgency that overshadows alternative career paths. A typical career center email invites “first-years or sophomores interested in learning more about careers in finance” to “join Midd Alumni for an Investment Banking 101 presentation and networking session.” When I spoke with Kuchar, he explained that the accelerated timeline “is probably the biggest challenge that our students have, and it’s the area where this industry is most susceptible to critique. It is insanely early to be recruiting people in January of their sophomore years.” In addition to a crowding-out effect, this practice also fails to ensure that Wall Street draws from a truly richer talent pool. Students from lower-income backgrounds are particularly disadvantaged, as they often lack early exposure to the industry and may only learn about the process when it’s already too late to catch up. This dynamic may help explain a finding from Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-affiliated research group, which shows that among Ivy League students, the higher their parents’ income, the more likely they are to enter finance, consulting, or tech—and the less likely they are to pursue nonprofit or public-sector work.

Another clever approach financial firms have taken is to restructure recruitment to resemble the college admissions process. Like applying to top universities, students vie for positions at a handful of elite firms through a highly competitive and formalized application process, complete with rigorous interviews, networking requirements, and carefully timed recruitment seasons that dominate the academic calendar. This sense of structure particularly appeals to a type of student who has spent their whole life anxiously striving toward the next goal without always knowing why. For many, college—especially at an elite institution—is the final destination, the achievement that promises a secure future. Yet as Binder observed in her interviews, this confidence often gives way to an “almost existential angst” when students face the uncertainty of life after graduation. It’s a striking irony that despite Wall Street’s reputation for risk-taking, its ranks have swelled most by appealing to students who are often the most risk averse and career confused. 

Hovering over much of this is the fact that, at many universities—though not Middlebury—the recruiting process operates on a pay-to-play model, where access is determined by financial contributions from employers. In a separate study from her career funneling research, Binder documented the rise of “corporate partnership programs,” which grant companies direct access to students for an annual fee. Looking at members of the Association of American Universities—a group of elite schools with members like Duke, Yale, and MIT—she found that roughly 55 percent of schools had such programs. She writes that CPPs subvert the traditional career center missions of providing counseling and job search skills to students and instead “attempt to directly deliver students to a small portfolio of companies willing to pay rents to the career center.” Even schools without formal partnerships offer perks like “platinum partnerships,” which grant firms access to interview rooms, premium slots at career firms, sponsored recruitment campaigns, and other special privileges. Some schools simply charge employers directly. Harvard’s career services offices, for instance, charge $800 for for-profit employers to participate in career fairs, $50 for each 60-day job posting on its “Crimson Careers” platform, $100 for each on-campus job posting, $150 per interview room, $300 for conference room usage, and an additional $300 fee minimum for use before or after scheduled interviews. The result, Binder writes, is that “a very small group of extremely well-resourced companies … gain outsized influence on the cognitive landscape of elite college students.”

Some young people are beginning to push back against the status quo. Ryan Cieslikowski, a former Stanford student with a background in community organizing, is one such example. As a freshman, he was “sold by this vision of taking a bunch of bright students from diverse backgrounds and trying to make the world a better place,” only to find it “naive” once on campus. He wrote an award-winning master’s thesis on career funneling and then cofounded Class Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to combating career funneling and legacy admissions.

Cieslikowski believes that the first step is addressing who steps onto elite college campuses in the first place. At the 91 most competitive colleges, 72 percent of students come from the top quarter of the income distribution and only 3 percent come from the bottom quarter. Regrettably, 38 of the most elite colleges have more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent. As Cieslikowski put it, “When you have a campus that is so saturated with wealth, certain types of jobs become the culture, the expectation. It’s what you’ve grown up with, and it’s what the natural next step is,” a view reinforced by Opportunity Insights’ findings. Reform is unlikely to come from within, which is why the Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits proposes stripping universities of their tax-exempt status until they ensure that at least half of their students come from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution.

When it comes to the recruiting process, universities should reconsider their stance on institutional neutrality. Unsurprisingly, they reject the idea that they funnel students into certain industries, instead placing the onus on the students: “There’s a herding effect where students vote with their feet,” Kuchar explained. “We can run seven sessions a week for Teach for America, but we might have seven people show up. When it’s Morgan Stanley, 120 show up.” Despite this reality, most colleges maintain that they should neither favor nor oppose the vast majority of industries, because as Kuchar explained, “all industries come fraught with ethical concerns,” and reasonable people will disagree about which professions are good or bad. The prevailing belief is that universities should focus on providing students with a strong moral foundation, enabling them to act ethically regardless of their chosen career path—a principle reminiscent of the educational mantra to teach students how to think, not what to think. Consequently, universities avoid challenging the practices or narratives of certain industries. Kuchar, for instance, voiced concern that such efforts could lead to a restrictive environment where students would feel dissuaded from joining an industry that “needs people who can look at complex, ethically charged situations and build consensus.” 

Neutrality, at least as universities define it, is a flawed concept—and one they don’t even consistently uphold. In reality, their actions often resemble promotion rather than impartiality. Take Middlebury, for example, which offers students free access to a third-party informational packet that frames the “worst-case scenario” of working in finance as: “you get a bit run-down, you learn a handful of transferable skills, and maybe you get paid a little bit along the way. Regardless, this industry will open doors others can’t, so doing it for a small amount of time is better than nothing.” Of course, a genuine “worst-case scenario” resembles something more like the tragic death of Leo Lukenas III, a Green Beret turned Bank of America associate who passed away at just 35 after working more than 100 hours a week for nearly a month. Meanwhile, another packet provided by Middlebury encourages students to “show that you understand and accept (relish, even) the physical and mental demands this job entails.” 

More broadly, universities must confront the reality that their campuses have become the crucible where students with little initial interest or knowledge of finance transform into a student body where, in some cases, as many as 70 percent of seniors apply for jobs in Wall Street or consulting firms. Even if universities are truly neutral parties, the dynamics of an unfettered talent recruitment market on college campuses—where industries with significant resource disparities compete—have led to a clear market failure. Middlebury already tacitly acknowledges this reality through practices such as refraining from allocating funds to promote finance-related programming or using some of the career center’s budget to bring alumni from lesser-known industries to campus. But these measures, while helpful, are insufficient.

An easy next step would be for universities to warn students of concerns surrounding funneling. Cieslikowski suggests that if universities were up-front with students early on—saying, “This is how career culture plays out here; prepare to be funneled”—it would empower them to navigate the process more intentionally. Beyond transparency, universities with pay-to-play recruiting models and corporate partnerships should abolish these practices entirely. Career centers should not function as auction houses, selling access to students to the highest bidder. Or, schools that continue generating revenue from recruiting visits should replace special perks with taxes on overrepresented industries, redirecting those funds to support access for less affluent sectors that cannot afford extravagant recruiting efforts. 

The success of Teach for America highlights how campus prestige and access can trump compensation for elite college graduates. In 2010, universities like Yale, Dartmouth, and Duke all reported that TFA hires more seniors than any other employer, although that number has shrunk substantially since TFA came under criticism over its high turnover rate. Creating a better-functioning talent recruitment market requires not only boosting the campus presence of less visible industries but also curbing the dominance of the most visible ones. Universities have the power to collectively prohibit the industry from recruiting freshmen and sophomores and to limit on-campus visits to no more than once or twice a year. Exposing students so early and incessantly in their college careers serves no meaningful purpose and only limits their ability to explore and develop other interests.

Beyond that, universities have been negligent in instantiating any career training into the curriculum itself. Twelve years ago, Ezra Klein wrote in the Monthly, “Universities have been looking at the problem backward … My hunch is that we have underemphasized the need to learn skills, rather than simply learn, while in college.” Seemingly little has changed today. Universities should make career planning a formal part of the curriculum, a required course equivalent with classes like English or math. While career preparation shouldn’t overshadow the broader intellectual mission of higher education, ignoring it entirely pushes students straight into Wall Street’s hands. Something as simple as a mandatory career exploration track—introducing students to a wide variety of fields, providing opportunities to shadow professionals, and featuring guest speakers—could prove helpful. Perhaps the Ivy League could take a lesson from their under-appreciated counterparts—the regional public universities. These institutions take a proactive approach to career development, like Grand Valley State University’s Laker Accelerated Talent Link—a program that provides students with $15,000 in scholarship money, a career-focused curriculum, and a paid internship with a local company. Rather than outsourcing career development to the whims of the market, programs like these offer a structured, community-oriented alternative. 

Even if universities can’t formalize career planning, universities should work to destigmatize it by fostering a culture where thinking about one’s future is seen as both healthy and expected. The pervasive attitude among students—and sometimes even professors—that pro-active career planning equates to “selling out” discourages meaningful exploration of professional goals. By promoting the idea that preparing for the future is a natural and valuable part of personal growth, schools can encourage students to pursue a range of opportunities, decoupling career planning from defaulting to finance. 

Part of the university’s culture should also involve fostering more nuanced discussions about the ethical implications of various career paths. One example is Cambridge, where the career center pushes back against the finance industry’s dominance. It sends emails telling students, “If you don’t want to become a banker, you’re not a failure,” and even hosts an event titled “But I Don’t Want to Work in the City” (referring to London’s financial district). When I asked Audrey if people ever discussed the ethical implications of a career in finance while recruiting, she laughed and said, “Nobody ever talks about the moral side of it. Nobody talks about that.” In research for Cieslikowski’s thesis, he discovered that while students acknowledged that many others are sellouts, they rationalize their own decisions by drawing personal “moral boundaries” that differentiate them from “actual” sellouts. For example, they might argue that their decision to work in finance is unique because they intend to leave after a few years, donate a portion of their earnings to charity, or use the skills they gain to eventually transition into a socially impactful career. University career centers are little help, focusing mostly on individual decisions in a way that similarly allows students to avoid weighing the wider societal consequences of their choices. Without these open and honest conversations, students either avoid critical reflection altogether or construct romanticized narratives about the nature and impact of the industries they aspire to join.

Of course, most measures would work best if implemented collectively. A lone school going rogue risks alienating these powerful industries, which can simply shift their recruitment efforts to more compliant institutions. Fortunately, there are signs of a growing movement. Class Action recently held its inaugural conference at Brown University, a three-day event in which attendees and organizers from eighteen different institutions—most of which heavily feed into Wall Street pipelines—met to discuss strategy and build connections. While activists have led the charge to end legacy admissions—ranging from student governments passing anti-legacy resolutions to lobbying and testifying for legislative bans, culminating in California’s successful prohibition last year—there is also growing momentum to push back against the dominance of corporate career funneling. For instance, Mason Quintero, another Class Action board member, played a key role in a 2022 Amherst initiative that secured a $400,000 annual investment for alternative career programming. This funding enabled Amherst’s first Social Impact Career Fair and broadened the Trek Program, which provides students with multiday trips to gain behind-the-scenes insights into specific industries. Thanks to these efforts, the program now features compelling alternatives to the traditional Wall Street and Silicon Valley tracks, including a sustainability-focused trip to Boston and a “government and nonprofits” trip to Washington, D.C. 

Cieslikowski hopes to build on that success, by “bringing the Amherst model to other schools.” Currently, Class Action is working with the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute—an academic forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy—on developing a white paper analyzing career funneling and outlining concrete reforms. “Universities profess neutrality, but if they just conceive of their purpose as being an intermediatory in the supply and demand of careers, that’s not a conception of neutrality that’s helpful for students,” Cieslikowski argues. “Because then you’re going to wind up with a narrow band of wealthy and resourced firms recruiting all your students.” Instead, he wants universities to recommit to their mission statements—helping students define their own paths and preparing the next generation of leaders. 

Of course, it’s pretty difficult to monetize learning to live more freely and fully as yourself. At a time when 58 percent of college students cite work outcomes as their primary motivation for attending college, many argue that elite education’s value proposition should shift away from humanistic ideals toward a more pragmatic approach. Phrases like “acquire human capital,” “preserve optionality,” and “optimize for future earnings” dominate campus discourse. Or, as Audrey put it more bluntly, “If people want to make money, people want to make money, and I don’t think that’s so bad.” It’s understandable that students may internalize that message, but universities shouldn’t. In a society where nearly everything is up for sale, elite universities should stand apart—one of the few institutions that don’t have to operate like profit-maximizing firms kneeling before the logic of the market. Education should cultivate curiosity, critical thinking, and public service, not simply serve as pipelines to the highest-paying jobs. In order to do that, one thing is clear: It’s time to end Wall Street’s hostile takeover.

The post The Corporate Raid on Campus appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Kathleen deLaski started her career as a TV correspondent, covering the White House and foreign affairs for ABC News. Then she worked at AOL, as chief Pentagon spokesperson, as a Sallie Mae executive, and as the founder of the influential Education Design Lab. Now she’s out with a new book, Who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Won’t Matter (Harvard Education Press, February 2025). 

DeLaski told me recently that she used to be on the “college for all” bandwagon. But she’s become persuaded that college isn’t right for everyone, that we need a much more expansive definition of college, and that we urgently need more and better alternatives for the “new majority learners” who haven’t been well-served by traditional higher education. The excerpts from our conversation below have been edited for length and clarity. 

Ben Wildavsky: How did you go from being a pretty high-profile broadcast journalist to being a tech executive to becoming a higher ed policy wonk – what’s the through line? 

Kathleen deLaski: I had a very fortunate, elite college experience. And, you know, I didn’t even realize I had been that lucky until I started meeting people on the other side of the divide. I took the job at Sallie Mae because they were starting a foundation, which could be whatever I wanted. So we set up a foundation that looked at “How do we help more people access higher education? And how do we help them leverage the federal entitlements that many families don’t know about?” Then I worked for a time in the charter school movement, and that helped me understand the issues around zip code-is-destiny, right? That just struck me as hugely unfair. I was swept up and moved by the college-for-all or college-is-possible movement in the 2000s. 

It wasn’t until we started seeing two things that got me into what I would call the higher-ed entrepreneurial space. One of those was that for many of the lower-income folks getting into college, their journeys were difficult, and the statistics that we started to see were really not good. Forty to 50 percent of students from families that didn’t have a college-going culture were choosing to leave college. Many of us began to say, “Okay, how can we make higher ed not just accessible but more applicable and help people be more successful once they get into a college environment?” But increasingly over the 2010s, many of us also wanted to see how college could be a “product fit” for people who don’t want a four-year degree—they either can’t afford the time or money, or they have careers they want to get to, but they need training. Why can’t college be more customized to fit the needs of different populations, careers, and pocketbooks? 

I should say I am pro-college and pro-university. Any 18-year-old who comes to me and says, ‘Should I go to college? Do we even need it anymore? I would say, “Absolutely, unless you’re financially constrained to the point of being anxiety-ridden by debt, or you just can’t sit in a classroom for four years, give it a try. You can always leave.” 

BW: The title of your book suggests a pretty deep skepticism. What’s your diagnosis of what’s wrong with college today? 

Kd: It doesn’t serve the needs of many. There’s a reason only 38 percent of American adults have a degree. I felt compelled to write the book because we’re sending these competing messages to families–one of which is that college is too expensive, and the other is that you need a college degree to get a good job.  

BW: You say colleges are failing “new majority learners.” Who are they, and why is college not working out for them? 

Kd: These are the majority of American adults for whom college was not originally designed. Today, if you are a low-income person, if you have to work while going to college, if you are a single mom, neurodivergent, a returning veteran, older than everybody else—these are the types of people for whom college was not designed. And that’s why we see so many not choosing to go. And so many who do try, washing out for whatever reason. 

BW: One solution you propose is the “flexible step ladder approach to education.”  

Kd: It’s the notion that learners can come in and out of college and build their earnings power as they go. Community colleges are starting to use “micro pathways”: let’s say six months of a training period that might be credit-bearing, where employers in the region say, “If you teach these things, we’ll hire some of these people.” What’s nice about the micro pathways is that they get stacked like Legos into a degree path. One I profile is a young woman doing an EMT program full time. She gets a job as an EMT, and then she can return and get other certifications, but she can do it part-time alongside her job. 

In the more elite higher ed world, Northeastern University has the co-op model, where you come, take classes, go off to your job, and then come back. You do two of these co-ops, and after graduation, their job placement rates are in the 90th percentile by the end. I would call that a stepladder approach. 

BW: You were the founder of the Education Design Lab. How did design thinking come into play as you were trying to frame a reform agenda around college or not going to college? 

Kd: The first way was to create the personas, which is the term we use in design thinking, where you look at a problem through the eyes of the end user. How might we imagine the school-to-work pipeline? The end users are mostly learners, but you could also say employers to some extent because they’re the other half of the transaction at the end of college. The second thing that design thinking looks at is “extreme users,” or outliers. What are the workarounds that are working for them? So, I looked at what early-adopter employers are doing. What are early adopter colleges doing? Which high schools on the front lines are forward-looking? And what are families doing? I tell stories through 150 interviews, people showing us what the future could look like by mid-century. 

BW: You note that for 25 years, you’ve advocated a “fix and disrupt” approach to higher education. But in the book, you also write, “Can the four-year degree be saved? Not for most learners.” Do you now see “disrupt” as being the main strategy? 

Kd: The most important thing that needs to happen is to elevate these other kinds of pathways: apprenticeships, industrial certifications, short-term certification programs, and programs like Year Up that help lower-income people do in a year what everyone is sent to college to do. But the reason that can be a “fix or disrupt” strategy is because why can’t colleges embrace those models and develop them themselves? And you’re starting to see that happen. Year Up is working with community colleges now. Apprenticeship degrees are becoming a thing in fields like teaching and nursing. Think of all the colleges starting to bake in industry apprenticeships and colleges that are saying, “Let’s have a three-year degree.” Is that fix or disrupt? I think it’s kind of both. 

BW: We now have a record number of Americans with college degrees. About 38 percent have bachelor’s degrees, and another 10 percent have community college associate degrees. Lumina released some statistics recently showing that more than 50 percent of Americans have degrees or credentials of value. The earnings gap between individuals with only a high school diploma and those with college degrees is still at an all-time high. Doesn’t the evidence suggest we should keep trying to improve college access and completion? Aren’t you giving up on something that’s a proven strategy for success? 

Kd: Why is it giving up to say that we should expand the definition of college and provide the same funding structures? Why can you go off to college as an 18-year-old, maybe not knowing what you’re going to study, and be funded by the federal government, and yet if you’re a single mom and you want to do a short-term program, you’re on your own to pay for it? That’s the problem: We’re holding up college as the construct to the detriment of all others. 

The research only applies to the people who finish their degrees—and a lot of people do not. The data is also retrospective. We’re in a period of great change with the success of people with degrees. With the rise of AI and the short half-life of skills, employers want you to have skills you’re not necessarily taught in college. All those things lead me to question the ROI data going forward. 

College has to be a better value proposition. When you talk to millennials who came into the job market in the 2010s, they’re bitter about the jobs they could get and their student loans. It cries out for more disruption and less incremental change when you look at the value proposition that college is offering. 

BW: Many employers say they want to move to skills-based hiring. But, as you say in the book, that isn’t what’s happening. What will make skills and alternative credentials more valuable than degrees in the real world? 

Kd: You see it happening where employers are more desperate. Demand drives change. You saw people hired with certifications and from boot camp in the late teens and early 2020s in tech, for example. In fields where there aren’t enough people with college degrees, you’ll see the early adopters begin to get to scale. 

We’ve pushed up the numbers in college graduation a bit, but we’re also losing people at the front end, choosing not to enroll or enrolling in shorter-term programs. I want us to be realistic and practical about not shutting people out of the system. 

The post Who Needs College Anymore? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump’s victory last November and his shock and-awe first two months have left his opponents stunned, disoriented, and struggling to regain their bearings. For Democratic politicians, donors, pundits, and activists as well as center-right Never Trumpers, the most immediate task has been to slow down the assault on the country’s democratic institutions led by the oligarch Elon Musk. But the opposition is also engaged in a vigorous internal debate about what the Biden administration and the Democratic Party did wrong and what a new, more electorally successful agenda might look like. While many potential contenders are vying to define that agenda, one early favorite is a group of thinkers known as “abundance liberals” (or sometimes “supply-side progressives”).

If you are a regular reader or listener of the columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein of The New York Times, or the Substack blogger Matt Yglesias, or Jerusalem Demsas and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, you are probably at least somewhat familiar with this perspective. Its central premise is that excessive red tape—from federal environmental statutes to local zoning rules to government agency procedures—is driving up the costs and slowing down the building of things the country desperately needs, from new housing to clean energy infrastructure.

While abundance liberals don’t all agree on everything, they are united by an overarching aim of a world of plenty: clean air, clean water, cheap renewable energy, affordable housing, high-speed rail, and an efficient, modernized electrical transmission grid. To bring us all that, they would unleash the full potential of nuclear and geothermal power, of liquified natural gas to complement renewables, of desalination, AI, and other technologies of the future that they believe can lift billions out of poverty and greatly improve living standards at home and abroad, all without devastating the planet.

They also converge around a critique of well-intended regulation. Klein and Thompson in their new book, Abundance, the author Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, and The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum in Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, focus on rules and bureaucratic process as obstacles to progress, especially in major metropolitan hubs like New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. They lament the way that industrial policy is bogged down by what Klein calls “everything bagel” liberalism—well-meaning but costly and time-consuming requirements, such as mandating DEI hiring policies, union labor, and child care centers in subsidies for green energy or new microchip factories. In support of their arguments, these writers frequently cite the work of likeminded researchers at center-left and center-right think tanks such as the Niskanen Center, the Breakthrough Institute, the Foundation for American Innovation, and the Mercatus Center—organizations with generally anti-regulatory outlooks and connections to Silicon Valley and energy interests.

Thompson describes the “Abundance Agenda” as a synthesis of ideological strengths: the left’s concern for human welfare, the libertarian instinct to cut through stifling regulations, and the right’s fixation on national greatness—but applied to the things that actually make a nation great: clean and safe cities, world-class public services, and widespread prosperity. As Klein writes, the abundance agenda would encourage the progressive movement to “[take] innovation as seriously as it takes affordability.”

These thinkers aren’t quite techno-libertarians à la Musk, but they inject a sense of optimism and vision in our politics. They reject the prevailing fatalism on both the left and the right—that progress is an illusion and decline is inevitable. Abundance as they describe it is also morally robust. Scarcity breeds reactionary politics. Authoritarianism and blood-and-soil nationalism feed on the belief that resources are finite and must be hoarded.

There’s a lot to like about these writers (many of whom have written for—or, in the case of Klein, started their careers at—the Washington Monthly). Their insurgency against the status quo represents what the Democratic Party is desperately trying to find. They articulate an optimistic vision of the future that goes beyond just resisting Trumpism, they’re skilled on social media, and they’re funny. Their message is tapping into potentially powerful political energy, especially among Millennial and Gen Z voters facing astronomical housing costs and existential climate anxiety. The abundance liberals deserve real credit for bringing early attention to the housing crisis, and their call to roll back residential zoning restrictions has been taken up by the grassroots YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) movement and endorsed during the 2024 campaign by Kamala Harris and Barack Obama.

At the moment, the abundance liberals seem like the closest thing we have to the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s: a group of centrist thinkers plotting a revival of liberalism by way of pragmatism and policy innovation. Like the New Democrats of that era, they show an admirable willingness to challenge their own side. They regularly call out progressives who have become reflexively opposed to growth, whether it’s liberal think tanks rejecting any permitting reform deal that compromises with natural gas, or affluent liberals in Berkeley coming up with environmental excuses to oppose new housing. The Johns Hopkins political scientist Steven Teles argues that the DLC analogy doesn’t sufficiently capture the depth and importance of the abundance movement, of which he is a leading light. He likens its thinkers to the Progressive Era intellectuals who made the case for the creation of the modern administrative state—but with the aim of reforming that state.

As skilled as they are, however, at making the case for rapid growth of supply in key sectors like transportation, housing, and energy, abundance liberals can be awfully sketchy about what policy solutions they favor. Of the few they do clearly advocate, some, like permitting reform, are wildly insufficient to the immense tasks at hand. Others, such as overturning residential neighborhood zoning rules, are less likely to produce new housing than to spark a political firestorm that could set back liberalism for years. Worst of all, while devoting so much attention to progressive contradictions, abundance liberals are almost completely silent on the alliance between corporate behemoths and antigovernment politicians that is the biggest threat to the world of plenty they envision, not to mention the republic.

If there’s one issue that animates abundance liberals above all, it is the crushing cost of housing. To be precise, they are animated by the crushing cost of housing in a handful of major affluent cities where they and most people they know live—New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and so on. These writers understand that there are plenty of affordable homes in, say, Cleveland and St. Louis. But such places are not as “productive” as San Francisco or New York, Klein and Thompson write (see Zephyr Teachout’s review of Abundance). In their view, the failure to build enough housing in these coastal cities so middle- and working-class people from all over the country can afford to move there is the great tragedy of our times.

The core driver of this tragedy, abundance liberals argue, is restrictive zoning. Local laws that ban apartment buildings and mandate single-family homes have long constrained housing supply, especially affordable multifamily units. But over the past two decades, middle-class and affluent homeowners in desirable areas have weaponized these restrictions to block new construction, driving home prices ever higher. This in turn has led young, educated progressives in booming coastal cities who are priced out of the housing market to join the YIMBY movement, which abundance liberals champion. And that movement has one main demand: eliminate restrictive zoning laws and let property owners build what they want on their land. 

State and local leaders in high-cost regions have begun taking up this libertarian cause. In 2019, Minneapolis became the first major U.S. city to end single-family exclusive zoning. The same year, Oregon became the first state in the nation to legalize duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes—commonly known as “middle housing”—statewide. California in 2021 enacted a series of reforms, including laws that allow homeowners to split single-family lots and build multiple units, eliminate parking requirements near transit, and limit localities’ ability to block new housing development.

The movement to lift zoning restrictions is still new, but enough time has elapsed to begin to see how well it’s working, and the answer is … a little. Since Minneapolis pioneered the elimination of single-family zoning in 2019, 72 new duplexes and 37 triplexes (for a whopping total of 255 individual units) have been built. Los Angeles saw only 211 applications for multifamily construction in the year after the law getting rid of single-family zoning went into effect. A comprehensive study from the Urban Institute of land-use reforms across 1,136 cities from 2000 to 2019 found that they increased housing supply by only 0.8 percent within three to nine years of passage. 

Why has broad zoning reform yielded such modest results, at least so far? The answer is that supply-side liberals didn’t fully consider the demand side of their policy. “The demand for two-flats and four-flats in car-dependent residential neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes just isn’t that high,” says Chris Leinberger, a development consultant and professor emeritus of real estate at George Washington University. The urban policy expert Alan Ehrenhalt agrees. “The problem here is that developers won’t be flocking to build cheap housing on these properties,” he wrote in Governing magazine. 

Back in the 1970s, neoconservative scholars used the droll term “well intentioned” to describe liberal social policy experiments that didn’t work and created popular backlash that hurt the cause of liberalism generally. The term could apply to the crusade to eliminate zoning restrictions in residential neighborhoods. Not only has it failed so far to produce new housing at anywhere near the rate its advocates argue is necessary, but it tends to infuriate existing homeowners, especially affluent ones who have political connections and money for lawyers. If abundance liberals succeed, as they seem to be, in convincing senior Democratic leaders to push for broad zoning reforms, they could be unwittingly walking the party into a trap. In 2020, Trump accused Democrats of plotting to “destroy the suburbs” because of an Obama-Biden administration regulation meant to nudge municipalities toward residential zoning reform through tighter reporting requirements for HUD grants. 

If Democrats are going to take on the politically fraught issue of housing affordability—and they must—they should do so with policies that are less likely to spark a voter backlash and more likely to solve the problem. Fortunately, there is such a policy: building dense residential communities on underutilized commercial land near transportation. Prime examples of this strategy are the mini downtowns in the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia, that arose around Metro stations in the 1990s and similar ones going up along Rockville Pike in suburban Maryland. These “walkable communities,” Leinberger presciently observed in the Washington Monthly in 2010, work because they give people what they most want and can’t find in today’s market: housing with easy access to commuter rail or regular bus lines as well as restaurants, retail outlets, grocery stores, and other amenities. Real estate developers can make a lot of money building such projects, as long as municipalities let them.

Minneapolis has done just that. While its residential neighborhood zoning reforms haven’t produced much housing, a few years ago the city also lifted a cap on the height of residential buildings that can be constructed on commercially zoned land near some transit corridors from six stories to 30. Since then, it has seen an explosion of apartment building construction in these areas. The new condos and apartments are market rate, not subsidized “affordable” ones, yet so many have been built—more than 20,000 units in just a few years—that it’s had a measurable effect on housing affordability. According to research by the Pew Charitable Trusts, rent grew 13 percentage points less in Minneapolis than in Minnesota as a whole, and homelessness, which grew by 14 percent statewide, dropped by 12 percent in Minneapolis. Similar zoning reforms in other cities, such as New Rochelle, New York, targeted at increasing the supply of large apartment buildings around transit hubs have had similar success in holding down rent increases, according to Pew research. 

Of course, not everyone wants to live in high-rise buildings, and there’s still a need to build more single-family homes. There, a major problem is consolidation in the home construction industry. Since the 2007 financial crisis, the number of homebuilders has plummeted by 65 percent, according to a Johns Hopkins University study. Two companies, D.R. Horton and Lennar, account for nearly as much new construction as the next eight largest builders combined. The Hopkins study authors estimate that when a local market loses competition in the homebuilding market, housing production drops by 15 percent in value, 16 percent in total square footage, and 11 percent in number of units. Prices go up, too. 

Abundance liberals have little to say about homebuilder consolidation—or about the broader problem of growing corporate monopolization, as we’ll see.

Abundance liberals argue—rightly—that the United States must dramatically expand its energy generation and transmission capacity to combat climate change and to power emerging technologies that demand immense electricity. At the heart of this challenge lies the complex task of building the high-voltage power lines that transport electricity from where it’s generated, often in sparsely populated regions of the country, to where it’s needed, predominantly in metro areas often hundreds of miles away. Without robust transmission infrastructure, renewable energy remains stranded, unable to reach the communities and industries that need it most. This problem has become particularly acute as renewable energy development accelerates, with many solar and wind projects facing yearslong delays in connecting to the grid due to insufficient transmission capacity. 

The main bottlenecks in this mounting crisis, abundance liberals argue, are federal environmental statutes, and one above all: NEPA, short for the National Environmental Policy Act. Signed into law in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to assess environmental impacts before approving major building projects. As Marc Dunkelman explains in Why Nothing Works, courts over the years interpreted NEPA as allowing individuals and groups outside of government to use the law to file suits to slow down or block large-scale building projects, something the lawmakers who crafted the statute never intended (see Alan Ehrenhalt’s review of Why Nothing Works). As a result, NEPA has become increasingly burdensome, particularly for large-scale transmission projects that must generate voluminous environmental-impact statements, which take an average of 4.3 years to complete, according to analysis from the Niskanen Center. 

Environmental groups have been especially vigorous in using NEPA lawsuits to halt building projects, and the law’s strongest defenders are on the left. That a foundational progressive law is being used to slow deployment of the renewable energy needed to save the planet from climate change is a central plank in the abundance liberal argument that progressivism has become the chief enemy of progress. 

Abundance liberals are right that NEPA needs to be reformed. What they don’t say is that progressives aren’t primarily responsible for blocking that reform. In 2022, the Senate took up a permitting reform bill authored by centrist Democrat Joe Manchin that would have greatly restricted the ability to bring NEPA lawsuits. The measure would also have strengthened the authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to preempt state and local opposition to the building of electric transmission lines that cross jurisdictions—another key item on the abundance liberal wish list. A strong majority of Democrats voted for the legislation. An equally strong majority of Republicans opposed it. After the bill died, Manchin, normally the scourge of the progressives, left no doubt which side killed it: “Once again, Mitch McConnell and Republican leadership have put their own political agenda above the needs of the American people.” Now that Trump is back in office, he is streamlining fossil fuel permits while punishing solar and wind—all without receiving any pushback from his own party. 

But here’s the crucial point: Even if we eventually succeed in streamlining permitting through NEPA reform and expanded FERC authority, we still won’t be able to deploy renewable energy on the scale abundance liberals believe—rightly—is needed. That’s because of an even bigger bottleneck: corporate power.

America’s electric grid is under the control of regional transmission organizations (RTOs) that are in turn dominated by incumbent electric utilities. These utilities are regulated corporate monopolies that earn guaranteed returns on capital investments and fuel costs. They make money building and operating fossil fuel plants that require continuous fuel purchases. Renewable energy, with its high up-front costs but minimal operating expenses, offers fewer opportunities for ongoing profit under this model. Combined with the quarterly profit pressures of investor-owned utilities, this creates a systematic bias against the long-term infrastructure investments needed for renewable integration. 

These utilities and RTOs employ a range of tactics to protect their monopoly positions and fossil fuel investments, as detailed by the Roosevelt Institute and by Sandeep Vaheesan in his book Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (see Shelley Welton’s review of Democracy in Power). One is slow-walking grid connections for new solar and wind projects, creating byzantine interconnection processes that can take years to navigate. Another is requiring expensive technical studies and grid upgrades to be paid for by renewable developers, while similar costs for fossil fuel plants are typically spread across all ratepayers. In many regions, the interconnection queue—the line of projects waiting to connect to the grid—has become so backlogged that some developers must wait a decade just to plug into the system. PJM, one of the country’s largest RTOs, has said most projects entering their interconnection queue are unlikely to come online before 2030. Utilities also frequently underestimate future renewable energy growth in their transmission planning, leading to chronic underinvestment in grid capacity. When they do build transmission, they often design it around their own generation projects rather than enabling open access for independent developers. This strategic planning creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: by not building adequate transmission, they ensure that renewable energy remains constrained by infrastructure limitations. 

When all else fails, utilities use their political clout to lobby the regulatory boards that oversee them and the state legislatures that oversee the regulatory boards. That’s what Mississippi’s utility, Entergy, has done—so far successfully—to block a 320-mile transmission line that Pattern Energy, a private renewables developer, has been trying for a decade to build to link Texas’s renewables-rich grid to the Southeast.

This effective veto power utilities and their RTOs have over the electric grid is an immense obstacle to the transmission and distribution of renewable energy. It’s also one abundance liberals almost never talk about.

For abundance liberals, the inability of the U.S. to build infrastructure quickly and cost-effectively is a defining failure of government. And there is no better illustration of that failure, they say, than California’s ill-fated high-speed rail project. When the state’s voters first approved a $10 billion bond issue for the endeavor in 2008, it was projected to be completed by 2020 at a cost of $33 billion. Its price tag has since ballooned to $128 billion, and the initial segment—which won’t even connect Los Angeles and San Francisco—isn’t expected to be completed until sometime between 2030 and 2033. As Klein and Thompson point out, “In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.” Abundance liberals blame America’s local “vetocracy,” where lawsuits, environmental reviews, and endless bureaucratic hurdles stall major projects, making it nearly impossible to build at scale. 

Yet California’s high-speed rail is a uniquely Californian debacle—no other state has attempted such an ambitious project—and its failure was also foreseeable. More than a decade ago, Phillip Longman, a Washington Monthly senior editor, warned that a national high-speed rail system of the kind progressives like Klein and Thompson pine for isn’t just difficult to build for the reasons they bemoan—right-of-way disputes, litigation, environmental regulations—but also because, unlike in Europe and Asia, government in the United States has no expertise in constructing and owning long-distance rail lines, a task it has historically left to the private sector. Moreover, the United States has no great need to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on a high-speed rail system that would mostly serve affluent travelers shuttling between metro areas. For a fraction of the cost and time, the federal government could develop a robust medium-speed passenger rail network using existing privately owned tracks that would also provide connectivity to the cities and towns in between big metro areas—if only Washington required monopoly freight rail companies to make those tracks available. 

Abundance liberals are on firmer ground when critiquing the soaring costs and slow delivery of more conventional projects for which state and local governments have traditionally been responsible, such as mass transit. Because so many abundance liberals live in the D.C. area, one of their go-to examples of botched transit projects is the Purple Line, a vital but much delayed 16.2-mile light rail meant to connect working-class and affluent Maryland suburbs and those communities to D.C.’s Metro system. In an interview with Klein, Jerusalem Demsas blamed the delays on “wealthy homeowners in Chevy Chase, Maryland,” bringing nuisance environmental lawsuits. In a Vox piece, Matthew Yglesias similarly focused on local opposition.

In 2022, the Washington Monthly published an in-depth investigation of the Purple Line. That investigation, by Eric Cortellessa, determined that a NEPA-based lawsuit brought by those wealthy landowners was responsible for a year and a half of the delay since the project’s funding was secured in 2015. What caused the remaining slippage? Governor Larry Hogan’s administration added almost two years by changing the project’s already completed specifications. A right-of-way dispute with the monopoly freight rail company CSX caused a five-month delay costing $187.7 million. New state environmental regulations required design changes that added 976 days and another $519 million. But the biggest blow came from the Hogan administration’s botched management of the contractors, which added $1.4 billion and five more years to the project. It is currently scheduled to open in 2027.

The Purple Line is a fair representation of transportation projects generally. Permitting delays based on federal laws like NEPA sometimes drive up costs. But they are typically only one of many factors.

Indeed, permitting delays play virtually no role at all in some of government’s most common, and commonly mismanaged, construction projects. Consider road resurfacing, a task that seldom requires complex permitting because no new land is being taken. A 2023 Yale Law and Economics study of highway resurfacing projects in all 50 states found that two variables overwhelmingly explain cost overruns. The first is bureaucratic “capacity”—that is, the number, skill level, and experience of employees at state departments of transportation—which has generally declined in recent years. This drop has led state DOTs to rely on outside consultants to plan and oversee the resurfacing projects. The second variable is a fall in the number of contractors available to bid on the projects. This is due largely to industry consolidation, which has shrunk the number of construction firms in 70 percent of U.S. states. The Yale researchers found that outsourcing infrastructure planning increased costs by 20 percent per mile, while each additional bidder on a project corresponded to an 8.3 percent reduction in cost. 

This combination of capacity-starved bureaucracies and lack of contractor competition goes a long way toward explaining skyrocketing costs in another vast area of public life: national defense. The F-35 joint strike fighter is more than a decade behind schedule and $183 billion over original cost estimates, according to the GAO—a figure greater than the entire projected cost of California’s high-speed rail project. The Zumwalt-class destroyer, billed as the future of naval warfare, ran into so many design flaws that the Navy canceled it last fall after delivering only three of a planned 32 ships at a cost of $24.5 billion. These and other examples of weapons procurement catastrophes have occurred with such mind-numbing regularity over so many years that the public hardly notices anymore. 

Their root causes also go back decades. As the former congressional military budget staffer Mike Lofgren reported in these pages last summer, beginning with Ronald Reagan and accelerating with the administration of Bill Clinton, the defense industry massively consolidated: 51 major aerospace and defense contractors became five during the 1990s. Meanwhile, private industry successfully lobbied to take over more engineering and design work that had traditionally been done in house by the military services and the Defense Department. The Navy, for instance, reduced its naval architecture and engineering staff by 75 percent, from roughly 1,200 to 300. With fewer experienced civil servants managing the contracts, and fewer contractors available to bid on them, each with more market power, costs have naturally soared.

Other factors contribute to the problem, including the military’s penchant for stuffing weapons systems with fragile, unproven, and unnecessary high-tech tools (“everything bagel” policymaking was invented in the Pentagon, not the Biden administration). What doesn’t explain the exploding prices and slow delivery of weapons systems? Permitting. Perhaps not coincidentally, abundance liberals have had little to say about the subject. 

If all you have is a hammer,” the psychologist Abraham Maslow famously observed, “everything looks like a nail.” For abundance liberals, the nails are government-created bottlenecks. Remove them (via the claw end of the hammer, to extend the metaphor) and a world of plenty will flow. 

In health care, they argue, the key bottleneck is doctors. The United States produces too few of them because of a cap on the number of medical residencies and the federal funds to pay for them—artificial constraints orchestrated by the powerful medical profession to protect doctors’ high incomes. Increase the supply of doctors, the theory goes, and the price of health care will fall. “Fixing this problem is eminently within the powers of the federal government,” Klein and Thompson write in their book.

It is true that the medical profession behaves like a cartel. It’s also true that increasing the number of certain kinds of doctors—especially primary care physicians, with their focus on prevention and disease management—might bring down health care costs under normal market conditions. 

The problem is that health care is not a normal market. Among its many oddities is that few people can do meaningful comparison shopping to judge the value of different doctors, hospitals, or procedures. That’s why in health care increased supply and competition often leads not to lower prices and greater efficiency, but to increases in unnecessary surgery and testing. A well-established finding, for example, is that the number of heart operations performed in a community correlates with how many cardiologists are in local practice, not with how many people need a stent or a bypass. It is the same with MRI machines and many other expensive medical technologies: the more they are available, the more they are used, which drives up health care spending, often with little if any measurable clinical benefit. 

An even bigger problem abundance liberals haven’t grappled with is industry consolidation. Hospitals have merged into giant systems that now control more than half the beds in the vast majority of metro areas. They have also purchased freestanding physician practices, diagnostic labs, and other parts of the health care delivery system. This has given the hospitals so much market clout that they can dictate prices to the insurance companies—and in many markets the hospital groups have acquired the insurance companies, too, and vice versa. Similarly, the overwhelming cause of high drug prices is not insufficient numbers of pill factories, but monopolies up and down the supply chain charging monopoly pricing. Those price hikes lead to higher insurance coverage costs for employers, which are then passed on to employees in the form of lower wages and higher copays and deductibles. With the commercial health care market this locked up, even a sizable increase in the supply of doctors will have little effect on costs. 

Government-run insurance programs like Medicare have done a better job of controlling costs. These programs, however, suffer from fraud and unintentional overpayments costing taxpayers more than $100 billion a year. Here, the problem is, once again, bureaucratic capacity. Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) account for roughly 23 percent of all federal spending, but the agency that oversees that spending, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), employs just 0.3 percent of all federal employees. As the public administration scholar Don Kettl recently noted in the Monthly, “CMS isn’t a large bureaucracy—it’s a small bureaucracy charged with overseeing a mammoth contractor system.”

The heart of the government capacity problem is that for half a century, politicians in both parties, bowing to or playing up the anti-bureaucrat attitudes of voters, have kept government agencies on a starvation diet even as they’ve asked them to deliver more and more services. Consider this: The federal government today has roughly the same number of civilian employees as it had during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, even though federal spending has quintupled in inflation-adjusted dollars. 

Washington has coped with this soaring workload by relying more and more on contractors (many of them behemoths like Deloitte and Booz Allen Hamilton) for administrative tasks once done by civil servants, including managing the work of other contractors. It has also routed its spending through state governments whose bureaucracies are similarly stripped of talent. As with road resurfacing and weapons procurement, this dynamic has led to poor government performance and higher cost to taxpayers. 

Supply-side liberals don’t deny the importance of government capacity in achieving greater abundance. Klein and Thompson describe the problem in vivid detail, and the Niskanen Center has produced impressive studies on the subject. Much of that work, however, is deregulatory in nature, focusing on the need to eliminate unnecessary procedures that get in the way of civil servants doing their jobs. For instance, Jennifer Pahlka, a Niskanen senior fellow and Barack Obama’s former deputy chief technology officer, has pointed out that government agencies can’t even update their websites without first going through time-consuming rounds of public comments thanks to the requirements of a statute, the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act, that was passed before the internet existed. 

Cutting such procedural red tape, as Pahlka and others suggest, is a crucial part of any strategy to rebuild government capacity. But that alone won’t come close to matching the scale of the problem. To align its mission with its internal resources, the political scientist John Dilulio, a former adviser to George W. Bush, has argued that the federal government needs to hire an additional million civilian employees. 

Abundance liberals haven’t endorsed actions quite that dramatic, but they at least acknowledge that their agenda depends on a buildup of government capacity. The same can’t be said for the fight against corporate monopoly, a subject about which they are surprisingly silent. 

That may be because they see monopolies as drivers of innovation. In their book, Klein and Thompson write with awe about how Bell Labs, in its mid-20th-century heyday as the development arm of the telephone giant AT&T, came up with the electronic transistor and other technologies that would define the future. 

As a state-sanctioned monopoly, AT&T could invest in every facet of telecommunications science without concern for short-term profits, which gave its scientists and engineers the freedom to pursue ambitious projects over decades. This long-term security was essential for many of Bell Labs’s most important technological advances, such as fiber optics and electronic switching, which took decades to develop.

What the authors don’t say is that AT&T wasn’t interested in exploring the potential of the transistor its own scientists invented out of fear that it would compete with its existing vacuum tube business. As Barry Lynn of the Open Markets Institute has written, only after the Federal Trade Commission brought an antitrust suit against AT&T for hoarding valuable technology did the company agree to license its patent for the transistor and other technologies to outside companies like Motorola and a start-up called Texas Instruments. It was the government’s suit against AT&T, said Intel founder Gordon Moore, that “started the growth of Silicon Valley.”

Today’s tech giants engage in similar patterns of innovation hoarding, but through different mechanisms. Companies like Meta and Google routinely acquire potential competitors and promising technologies, often letting them wither—essentially a version of the National Enquirer’s “catch-and-kill” tactic. This concentration of technological capacity creates new bottlenecks in precisely the sectors—from artificial intelligence to clean energy—that abundance liberals hope will drive future prosperity. 

By now, it may have occurred to the alert reader that with a leading member of the tech oligarchy having seized control of the federal bureaucracy and actively decimating its capacity in constitution-defying ways, now might be a good time for abundance liberals to expand their thinking about what the real roadblocks are to a more plentiful America. 

The Trump-Musk attack on the federal bureaucracy might be the start of a new authoritarian era. The more likely outcome, however, is epic government performance failures—a gutted CDC unable to respond to a bird flu epidemic, for instance, or Social Security payments that don’t get delivered, or even worse. Such disasters could shift public opinion in favor of shoring up the federal government and taking on unaccountable corporate power. 

If that happens, the anti-MAGA opposition will need a bigger agenda than the one abundance liberals currently offer. Decluttering bureaucratic procedures won’t be enough to strengthen government capacity. We’ll need to hire far more bureaucrats, offer higher pay to recruit those with the needed skills and experience, and beef up antitrust enforcement agencies like the FTC. Permitting reform won’t be enough to give us a modern electric grid. We’ll need a new government agency that can construct and manage new renewable power generation and transmission lines when utilities refuse, as the Tennessee Valley Authority did in the 1930s. Training more doctors won’t be enough to meaningfully bring down health care costs. We’ll need the federal government to break up provider monopolies and impose a “Medicare prices for all” regime on commercial health care, as Phillip Longman has advocated. 

Klein opened one of his podcasts earlier this year with a smart observation. Presidencies in their second terms, he noted, are usually “intellectually exhausted,” and Trump’s might have been, too, had he won in 2020. Instead, he and his movement had four years out of power, during which “the ferment driving MAGA’s ideas deepened quite a bit.” In 2024, Trump ran on those ideas and won. Now he’s acting on them, good and hard. 

For better or worse, Democrats have been given a similar time-out. They need to treat it as an opportunity to do what MAGA did: develop and coalesce around a set of ideas (but not crackpot ones) that can command a majority of voters. 

For that, they will need a lot more than what’s currently in the abundance liberal playbook. In an era when tech oligarchs openly work to hollow out the administrative state and monopolists actively suppress innovation, we need our smartest and most influential liberal thinkers to confront power rather than just process. After all, Progressive Era intellectuals didn’t just advocate modernizing government bureaucracies but also taking on corporate monopolies. And the Democrats who found success in 2024 weren’t technocrats promising AI-driven innovation and efficiency, but populists like Pat Ryan in New York who raged against corporate profiteering. 

Getting rid of the stupid rules that slow progress and add unnecessary costs is an excellent idea. But it’s not remotely capable, by itself, of unleashing the prosperity and plenty that abundance liberals promise. And overpromising and underdelivering is a mistake Democrats cannot afford to make again. The road to abundance will be paved by a government that knows how to pave roads—and one strong enough to stand up to the corporate interests who prefer that those roads remain unbuilt.  

The post The Meager Agenda of Abundance Liberals appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One evening in October 1962, Nikita Khrushchev attended a performance of Boris Godunov starring the American opera star Jerome Hines. Khrushchev led a standing ovation and congratulated Hines backstage. This might not sound like much, but it was in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

The idea of normal, even friendly contact between Americans and the Russian premier during the single most perilous moment of the Cold War is just one of the many up-close surprises in Marvin Kalb’s new book, A Different Russia. 

In this closely observed memoir—the third in a series of Moscow recollections—94-year-old Kalb, clear as a bell in his 17th book, shows why he was in the top rank of 20th-century diplomatic correspondents, first for CBS News and later for NBC News, where he hosted Meet the Press before becoming the founding director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics. 

Kalb began with The Year I Was Peter the Great—1956: Khrushchev, Stalin’s Ghost and a Young American in Russia, a delightful depiction of meeting not just Khrushchev (who, noticing Kalb’s six-foot-three frame, gave him that nickname; the tsar was six eight) but also Marshall Zhukov, who led the Soviet Union to victory over the Nazis in World War II. (My late father, a decorated combat aviator in the war, told me Zhukov, who met few Westerners, was much more central to the victory of the Allies than Dwight Eisenhower). Kalb followed up with Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War, about his early years as CBS’s very young man in Moscow. A Different Russia is the product of Kalb’s astonishing memory and the foresight of his impressive wife, Mady, in saving his old TV and radio scripts and freelance Sunday New York Times pieces. It chronicles a good chunk of what are called “the crisis years” of the Cold War. 

This is the period—1961–62—when the Soviet Union sent the first man (the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin) into orbit; Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy quarreled in Vienna; and Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, then dispatched nuclear missiles to Cuba before “caving” (that was the word Kalb used on CBS, which Kennedy tried to squelch) by withdrawing them. In between, Kalb covered Moscow visits from Benny Goodman and a boring Elizabeth Taylor, found himself detained (sort of) in Mongolia, and arranged for the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. By this time, Edward R. Murrow, who had first hired Kalb, was working for JFK and tried to hire his protégé to come work for the government, as Kalb’s distinguished brother, Bernard, would later do under Ronald Reagan. Marvin declined. Instead, he prospered in the company, on air and off, of Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, Daniel Schorr, John Chancellor, James Reston, A. M. Rosenthal, and other giants of journalism now remembered only by the long-in-the-tooth.

The view from Moscow was quite different than the one from Washington. Khrushchev comes across as a flawed but surprisingly sympathetic figure—a Russian leader who anticipated Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and who weeps upon learning of JFK’s assassination. But first, at the Vienna summit in June 1961, he took the measure of the new young president—less than six months in office—and found him wanting. 

Kalb’s sources told him that Khrushchev in Vienna said Kennedy was “pleasant”—an insult—“very immature, not well-prepared and not that smart.” One of Khrushchev’s interpreters revealed to Kalb shortly afterward that when Kennedy got up from his chair as the premier reentered the room, in what he viewed as a sign of respect, Khrushchev saw it differently: “Imagine a millionaire, a friend of Wall Street, leaps to his feet when Nikita Sergeyevich walks into a room … He’s weak.”

JFK, for good reason, wanted to discuss the risks of accidental nuclear war. Many years later, scholars learned that Khrushchev, losing his temper, yelled, “Miscalculation! Miscalculation! Miscalculation! All I ever hear … is that damned word, miscalculation! You ought to take that word and bury it in cold storage and never use it again. I’m sick of it.” He continued, “If the U.S. wants war, so be it.” This from a leader best known for his belief in “peaceful coexistence.” Kennedy let a minute pass and replied, “Then it’s going to be a cold winter.”

Kalb presents Khrushchev as a warm and often accessible presence for the foreign press—even as the premier raged about the massive migration flow from East Germany to West Berlin. Kennedy had never warned Khrushchev against doing something about it, so when the Berlin Wall went up in 1962, the Americans could only issue a loud protest. This led to what Dan Schorr memorably called a “stable crisis.” Kalb argues that after Khrushchev’s gambit paid off, he was “infused with a new cockiness, acting as if he owned the world.” By that time, Kalb (at only 31) had already written a book about the Sino-Soviet split, a conflict the Soviet leader now exacerbated as he took steps to replicate Mao’s cult of personality within his own sphere of influence. 

Kalb’s descriptions of his schedule and the internal politics of CBS News are excessively detailed, but I liked learning about the logistical difficulty of going live and how—thanks to Soviet restrictions—he often had to operate his own camera.

Starting in the late 1940s, the assumption within the governments and on the streets of both countries was that a new world war would center on Berlin. In the Soviet press—which Kalb, fluent in Russian, always read carefully—there was more talk in the fall of 1962 of Yemen than Cuba, which was seen in Moscow as too far away to care much about. Misjudging Kennedy as weak, Khrushchev placed missiles there; when JFK responded strongly, the Russian leader was taken by surprise. He tried to turn down the temperature by greeting American visitors effusively in the early days of the crisis and by responding positively to the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s proposal for a summit, which Kennedy ignored.

Kalb was a CBS News colleague and close friend of Blair Clark, who had roomed with JFK at Harvard. Wary of surveillance, the CBS code words on the phone for fleeing Moscow for Finland were “shopping spree.” When Clark told him during a radio hookup in the middle of the missile crisis that this would be “a perfect time for a shopping spree,” it chilled Kalb, who interpreted the line as Kennedy saying that war was a real possibility. But he and Mady chose to stay put. Days later, Khrushchev turned his ships around when faced with a naval blockade, and the crisis ended. 

If JFK had instead followed the advice of the Joint Chiefs and senior senators and attacked Cuba with air strikes, Khrushchev might have made a dangerous countermove in Berlin. Only later did we learn that Fidel Castro, whom Khrushchev viewed as a hothead, wanted the Soviets to launch a tactical nuke at the United States. In the late 1990s, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara put his thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart and told me: “We came thisclose to nuclear war.”

Kalb believes that Khrushchev and Kennedy both wanted peace when they signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and looked forward to nearly six more years of working together if Kennedy won a second term. Instead, JFK was assassinated that fall, and within a year, the Politburo and Khrushchev’s “friend” and deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, forced him out, largely over the poor Soviet economy. 

At the end of this intimate book, I felt as if I was on a first-name basis with these figures of history. I even felt a tad sorry for Nikita, which is just what Marvin intended.

The post How Khrushchev Underestimated Kennedy appeared first on Washington Monthly.

America is in a funk. People are unhappy with every major institution of government, from Congress to the Supreme Court to newspapers to the Democratic Party, and they lack confidence in the future. The rent is too damn high and wages too low, the health care system is broken, fires and floods are wrecking our communities, and we can’t even build a decent high-speed rail to rival 1990s Europe. 

To be a vital economy, we know we should be building new and better things—more housing, better transit systems, and solar everywhere the sun shines and wind farms everywhere the wind blows. We should be innovating to build technologies never dreamed of. We should be tearing down bloated power structures, tapping into the profound innovative capacities of Americans to build, create, and flourish.

In certain corners of the Twitterati, Substack, and elite magazines, the notion of “abundance” has started to circulate as a possible response to this modern malaise. The “abundance movement,” with roots in “Yes in My Backyard” (YIMBY) advocates and environmental permitting reform advocates, positions itself as an answer to the funk—and as the core future agenda of the Democratic Party. 

In Abundance, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and the Atlantic writer Derek Thompson seek to stake out what this movement should be. They argue that America’s inability to build is the result of deliberate policy decisions, bureaucratic inertia, and progressive ideological commitments that have prioritized redistribution over production. They advocate for a version of supply-side progressivism, in which the government plays a proactive role in expanding the supply of essential goods and services, rather than simply subsidizing demand or withdrawing from economic support. 

The book opens with a utopian vision of the year 2050, in which clean energy, vertical farming, and AI-assisted productivity have transformed daily life. This future is not a work of science fiction, the authors argue, but rather a political and economic possibility—one that will only be realized if policymakers reorient themselves around abundance. Klein and Thompson contrast this optimistic vision with the failures of the early 21st century, where the U.S. struggled with a housing crisis, a broken health care system, and political gridlock that prevented meaningful action on climate change and infrastructure. They argue that while America once prided itself on ambitious, large-scale projects—such as the postwar housing boom and the construction of the interstate highway system—it has now become a country that knows what it needs to build, but fails to build it.

The foundational premise of Abundance is the assertion that there is a widespread ideology of scarcity, a quasi-theological belief that America lacks the resources, technology, or capacity to solve its most pressing crises—whether in housing, energy, or health care. Both Republicans and Democrats are allegedly in the grip of this ideology, which has led them to abandon the future, although in different ways. The authors argue that while conservatives have long championed deregulation and tax cuts under the banner of supply-side economics, they have largely abandoned the idea of government playing a role in actually building the things society needs. Meanwhile, liberals have focused too much on subsidizing demand—providing assistance for housing, health care, and education—without ensuring that the supply of these essential goods grows to meet the rising need. This has led to high costs, limited access, and worsening economic inequality, despite enormous government spending.

Their key example of the left’s version of this failure is the housing crisis in America’s wealthiest, predominantly Democratic, cities. The authors argue that restrictive zoning laws, environmental regulations, and local opposition have made it nearly impossible to build affordable housing in places like San Francisco and New York. The result? Burdensome rent, unaffordable homes, and urban life that is grim, costly, and lacking in economic opportunity. As they put it, cities “are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class.” They argue that this pattern is repeated in health care, infrastructure, and energy—areas where well-intended regulations have inadvertently stifled the very innovations needed to make essential goods and services more abundant.

One of the most damning real-world examples they use is the California high-speed rail debacle, a project that was meant to revolutionize transportation but has instead become a symbol of bureaucratic dysfunction. The project has been stalled for decades due to legal challenges, environmental reviews, and political infighting, resulting in billions of dollars spent with little progress. This failure exemplifies for them how excessive regulation and a political tendency to search for “no” can cripple ambitious public projects.

Instead, they argue, we should look to supply-side success stories and work to replicate them. Over the past decade, the cost of solar energy has dropped by nearly 90 percent; they claim that this is due to public investment, technological advances, and economies of scale. Significant and fast change is possible if policymakers commit to scaling up solutions rather than merely tinkering around the edges.

It can be jarring to read about zoning while Elon Musk chainsaws through the government, plundering public money for his own benefit, but Klein and Thompson argue that there is a direct connection: a failure to build represents a political stagnation that has led to political crises. Without cheap housing and energy, affordable health care, and basic infrastructure, public trust erodes and populist movements thrive. A government incapable of solving material problems creates a vacuum that demagogues fill. The authors imagine an abundance movement that will “marginalize the most dangerous political movements” by “prov[ing] the success of your own.” (A minor question I had throughout is whether their theory means that abundance cannot be a popular public movement until it succeeds, or whether they also believe that abundance could be an organizing principle for a grassroots bottom-up movement before any reforms have been implemented.)

The authors have special disdain for progressive governance in California, which they claim should be a model of liberal success but instead struggles with housing shortages, homelessness, and infrastructure failures. They argue that while liberal politicians have embraced redistribution, they have been reluctant to embrace the production-oriented policies needed to make essentials like housing and transportation more affordable. As they bluntly state, “Democrats learned to look for opportunities to subsidize. They lost the knack for making it easier to build.”

In the final chapters, Abundance lays out a vision for a new political economy—one focused on building, investing, and expanding the supply of essential goods and services. The authors argue that policy-makers must embrace a proactive role in technological and industrial policy, ensuring that breakthroughs in clean energy, biotechnology, and infrastructure are not just invented but also widely deployed. As they might put it, a society that innovates but does not deploy, that invents but does not build, is a society that chooses stagnation.

I frequently disagree with Ezra Klein, but I almost always find him compelling, thoughtful, and worth engaging. Derek Thompson has a knack for elegantly identifying some of the great spiritual challenges of our time. So I opened Abundance with a fair amount of excitement. Like or hate it, I’d finally understand what this abundance thing is all about, and get to wrestle with a big political vision. As I closed it, however, I was still left wrestling, but not with big ideas—with far more mundane questions about scope and meaning. 

The book toggles between very specific examples and a very broad spiritual stance, with a lot less meat in the mid-zone. That means the vision they lay out could either fit a broad deregulatory agenda, like that of the “shock doctors” of the 1990s, or an FDR vision of rural electrification: both were driven by a hunt for vitality. While the authors insist that the book’s examples of high-speed rail, expensive cities, and blocked wind projects are intended to stand for something other than significant reform in those areas, the signified “something else” never quite comes into view. 

For instance, in a chapter on green energy, they explain how more than 60 federal laws, including the National Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, and many others, are regularly used to slow or halt green energy wind projects. They support NEPA reform, and a proposal that would fast-track green energy projects so as not to pit green against green, but are very clear that law is not enough, we need “a change in the political culture.” What do they think that “change” would be? Liberalism “needs to see the problems in what it has been taught to see as the solution … it is not always clear how to strike the right balance. But a balance that doesn’t allow us to meet our climate goals has to be the wrong one.” A version of this vague conclusory exhortation is far too common throughout the book.

As a result, it would be very easy to take their critique as a muffled call for deregulation writ large; if they are not careful, the ambiguity could be used by big financial interests to make abundance a bible for a Ronald Reagan–style deregulatory juggernaut. 

The zoning reform example ends up revealing that the authors are burdened by the very scarcity mind-set they diagnose. They seek to dismantle the zoning rules and some of the procedural hurdles that require local input in residential building. Let’s assume that reforming rules on setbacks, parking, single-family zoning, and local input would achieve what they desire (the evidence is not straightforward; cities that have these reforms have lower costs, but they are rising at the same rate as in other cities). It would still seem relatively small-bore as a novel solution: Half of the 10 biggest cities in America—many in Texas—already have a zoning and procedural regime fairly close to what Klein and Thompson want. Are they simply arguing that Dems embracing Texas zoning approaches would transform national politics? That can’t be it. 

Or is it? It emerges that the examples they give from New York and San Francisco are not examples at all. Instead, they and a few other coastal cities are the whole object of reform. These cities seem to bear almost magical capacities for the authors, who cite research that purportedly shows that they are more productive than other places. But rather than ask what policies have drained wealth away from such once-vibrant centers of innovation as St. Louis or Cincinnati, they presume that if only more people moved to New York or San Francisco the nation’s productivity would soar, and that the only big obstacle to this happening is exclusionary zoning and burdensome building permit requirements. 

Doctor, heal thyself! They seem to be blinded by their own scarcity mind-set. When it comes to the resources of humans and places, they imagine that only a few places can be the engines of the country. I live in New York City now, and I love New York City, but the “fiery creation of the new” does not only happen here or in one of a few supercities. Frozen food, the radio, the airplane, were all created far from any major urban hub. As for for productivity and contributions to GDP, places like Rockford, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Des Moines, Iowa; and Cleveland, Ohio, were all among the 25 richest metro areas as recently as the mid-1960s. 

It cannot be that people need to move to a handful of elite coastal cities to produce abundance. The growth of regional inequality of opportunity that the authors’ own scarcity mind-set represents is a real problem, and has little to do with land use regulation and everything to do with the deregulatory push from the 1970s to the 2020s and the resulting concentration of power and shift of resources from the real economy to the financial sector. 

The 40-year stagnation of wages, and the drop in small and medium-sized businesses, is a supply-side story that they simply don’t engage—one that, as the former chair of the FTC Lina Khan and many others have recognized, is a direct result of monopolization and financialization. 

If they took their own “stop the scarcity mind-set” medicine, they’d realize that the industrial policy of the 1980s to 2020, not zoning, was what caused the scarcity of opportunity throughout the country—and we can change that policy. During the most productive and innovative era in American history, places like Corning, New York, known as a glassware technology powerhouse, and St. Louis, which once had 22 Fortune 500 companies and a thriving “creative class,” were the centers of the dynamism. If we just got out of the modern coastal-scarcity mind-set and took on the real bureaucratic behemoths of today—the private equity cartels and the monstrous platform monopolies like Google and Meta—we would unlock far more innovation and creativity and vitality. 

There’s some language that casually evokes economies of scale hinting at a Chicago School efficiency and consumer welfare framework of economic productivity, but also some praise of Bidenomics, which directly confronted and rejected the efficiency paradigm. For instance, they trace America’s decline in semiconductor manufacturing and argue that ceding ground to Taiwan and South Korea was not due to inevitable economic forces but rather a failure to have a long-term industrial policy. They highlight Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act as a belated attempt to reverse this trend, and argue persuasively that interventions must be sustained and expanded if the U.S. is to reclaim its leadership in critical industries.

Which is to say, I still can’t tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small-bore and correct (we need zoning reform) or nontrivial and deeply regressive (we need deregulation) or whether there is room within abundance for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American potential. 

It happens that I have a personal affinity for the language of abundance. My very first speech in my very first campaign for public office was about abundance and scarcity, and how we needed to reject Andrew Cuomo’s scarcity mind-set, which was holding back New York’s economy. 

My view then, and now, is that to transform a bloated corporate feudal system into a dynamic one, we need to break up feudal power, unlock the brilliance that accompanies human freedom, and allow small and medium-sized businesses to prosper. We have to stop thinking of economic development as giving out big grants to big donors. Instead, we need to start thinking about it as building platforms for entrepreneurs and new ideas to flourish. 

This position has a long lineage and is currently at the center of major public debates on industrial policy. After finishing Abundance, however, I’m unclear about where the authors stand on those debates. I know what they think about permitting reform, NEPA, and the NIH, and I know they think we need to be more solution oriented. But I don’t know what their agenda requires outside of that.

The post An Abundance of Ambiguity appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Before Alex Karp cofounded Palantir Technologies, the shadowy data analysis firm and defense contractor of which he is now the CEO, he wanted to be an academic social theorist. Upon graduating from Stanford Law School—where he befriended his eventual Palantir cofounder, Peter Thiel—Karp enrolled in a PhD program at Goethe University Frankfurt. There, under the tutelage of a specialist in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, he immersed himself in the thought of the Frankfurt School, the collective of Marxian theorists and cultural critics who inspired student protest movements in the 1960s.

It is unclear what led Karp to abandon his high-minded pursuits and build a company whose software has been used by ICE to track down suspected illegal immigrants for deportation, by the U.S. military to target drone strikes, and possibly by the Israel Defense Forces to develop “kill lists,” among other ethically fraught pursuits at the frontier of intelligence and warfare. What is certain is that today, Karp has ascended to a position on the world stage that his former student cohort could never imagine. Since Palantir went public in 2020, the company’s market cap has soared from $16 billion to a recent high of more than $280 billion, briefly surpassing stalwarts like Toyota and making Karp a billionaire many times over (after a nearly 500 percent surge in the company’s stock price last year, The Economist named Karp its top-performing CEO of 2024). And despite Karp’s liberal commitments—he has supported Democrats most of his life, and has referred to himself as a socialist and even a neo-Marxist—Palantir now wields tremendous influence in Trumpworld, largely through Thiel, who has backed Trump since 2016 and is J. D. Vance’s former employer. “Palantirians,” including one of Karp’s closest advisers, are installed in senior roles across the new administration.

At the height of his power, Karp is using his platform to publish a scathing critique of the academic community he once aspired to join. The Technological Republic, cowritten with Karp’s Palantir deputy Nicholas Zamiska, argues that it is academics and other liberal elites, not Karp, who have betrayed their shared values. By abandoning the pursuit of truth in favor of problematizing the pro-West worldview, they have discouraged generations of America’s best and brightest from contributing to the national defense, and diverted precious technical talent to trivial endeavors such as “building algorithms that optimize the placement of ads on social media platforms.” This, in turn, has weakened the liberal world order in the face of rising authoritarian threat, particularly from China.

Why would a man in Karp’s position write an alienating, combative political treatise? On the surface, the book calls on academics to do what Karp believes he has done himself, and embrace a more forceful and pragmatic role in defending democracy—in their case, by strengthening, rather than tearing down, young Americans’ sense of patriotic duty. But the argument Karp delivers is unlikely to convince them. So unlikely, in fact, that it raises the question of who Karp is truly speaking to.

The Technological Republic begins with an assessment of Silicon Valley that channels Karp’s leftist academic roots. The tech industry of the internet era, he says, allocates an incredible amount of financial and human capital to endeavors that contribute little to, and often detract from, the collective welfare.

For Karp, the tech industry’s finest moments came during World War II and the Cold War, when STEM talent partnered with the government—and especially the military—to pursue “grand, collectivist” projects. Government initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program produced world-changing breakthroughs. In the private sector, companies like Fairchild Semiconductor turned government-funded research, and military procurement work, into the bedrock innovations of the modern internet.

Karp views the modern tech industry, and especially Big Tech, as having abandoned this spirit of ambition and public purpose. The platform empires are built not on breakthrough innovations that lifted up the broader economy, but rather on the “aggressive disruption of incumbents and the construction of new monopolies.” They have not sought to solve humanity’s great challenges, but rather to address the “inconveniences of daily life for those with disposable income,” such as getting a taxi or ordering takeout. The Technological Republic drips with disdain for a generation of companies that, while draping themselves in the rhetoric of changing the world, have been content to “sat[e] the often capricious and passing needs of late capitalism’s hordes.” As China channels its resources toward strategic technologies—Karp is particularly concerned about China’s advances toward intelligent drone swarms, which he believes represent the future of warfare—this “complacency” is no longer acceptable.

How did we get here? The contrast Karp draws between the mid-20th-century and the modern-day tech world provides an opportunity to reflect on structural economic changes that might have contributed to the slowdown he sees in innovation and ambition. Has the rise of the venture capital model, or more recently the dominance of a few incumbent players, encouraged founders to think small? Karp suggests that America has “ceded too much control to the whims of the market,” and gestures vaguely at the need for a “Manhattan Project” for battlefield AI, as well as increased allocations to AI in the defense budget (surprise, surprise). But he declines to elaborate on these proposals. The Technological Republic is not fundamentally interested in questions of political economy—it is interested in culture.

What set apart the technologists of the World War II and Cold War eras, Karp claims, was their mentality. These were not “technical minds chasing trivial consumer products,” but builders who “aspired to see the most powerful technology of the age deployed to address challenges of industrial and national significance.” The core premise of The Technological Republic is that this collectivist ethos was made possible by a strong sense of national identity rooted in “shared culture”—the mythologies, religious beliefs, and common experiences, such as mandatory military service, that forged bonds between citizens and constituted their understanding of what it meant to be part of the American project. But over the latter half of the 20th century, America’s national identity faded. Improbably, Karp blames this entirely on efforts by the academic left to promote tolerance and inclusivity in higher education.

Karp’s narrative of decline begins with efforts to reform Eurocentric university core curricula. Starting in the 1950s and accelerating in the countercultural moment of the late 1960s, rising generations of historians made the obvious point that required general education courses on Western civilization—which for decades had taught students that America was the inheritor of a civilizational legacy linking the ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome, and early modern Europe, progressing all the while toward liberty and reason—excluded the histories of civilizations elsewhere in the world, and warped students’ understanding of what “civilization” meant. Universities assented, refashioning “Western Civ” into world history courses or, more often, abandoning it altogether. Later, in the 1980s and ’90s (although Karp fuses these distinct episodes into one), the humanities faced a similar reckoning in what became known as the “Canon Wars.” Dead White Men were asked to share space with a more diverse cast of authors.

Meanwhile, a more combative strain of intellectual reform sought to directly “deconstruct” the edifice of Western identity and knowledge. Karp picks on two prominent postcolonial scholars here: Kwame Anthony Appiah, who attacked the coherence of Western civilization as a march from Athenian democracy to the Age of Enlightenment; and Edward Said, whose 1978 tract, Orientalism, produced the revolutionary—and, Karp admits, “brilliant”—insight that productions of history and anthropology reflect power dynamics between speaker and subject. Said’s influence was particularly profound, Karp writes, generating “a new industry in American higher education, built around dismantling colonial understandings of the world,” which “remade” academia as a whole.

To his credit, Karp’s criticism of these academic challenges to the West—the instincts of postwar intellectuals toward diversification and deconstruction—is somewhat more nuanced than the familiar complaints of aggrieved campus conservatives. Unlike his Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, whose 1996 screed, The Diversity Myth, lambasts multiculturalism as “anti-Western zealotry” in disguise, Karp acknowledges that the intellectual projects of Appiah and Said had merit. “The dismantling of an entire system of privilege was rightly begun,” Karp writes. His gripe is that the generation of academics the reformers, and especially Said, inspired “failed to resurrect anything substantial, a coherent collective identity or set of communal values, in its place.”

In the hands of more radical thinkers, Karp argues, Said’s insight that subjectivity is inherent in the production of knowledge about other cultures was twisted into a belief that accurate descriptive knowledge of other cultures was not possible at all—and therefore that comparative value judgments about different cultures was an inherently problematic, and futile, endeavor. How could Americans claim that their art, ethics, or social organization was superior to the art, ethics, or social organization of another society, from behind their American eyes? Borrowing a term popularized by the traditionalist historians of the Canon Wars era, Karp claims that cultural “relativism” became dogma in academia by the end of the 20th century, and from there permeated political institutions, journalism, Hollywood, and other bastions of the liberal elite. It became, Karp writes, “the dominant form of elite establishment thinking.”

As academia, and the broader liberal establishment, pulled away from comparing cultures, Karp argues, it ceased making normative claims about what America’s shared culture should be. It became uninterested in, or perhaps afraid of, articulating a positive vision of America’s national identity. Certain segments became outright hostile to the idea of having one at all. Karp catches two high-profile academics in the act: the sociologist Richard Sennett, who pondered, in The New York Times, whether there might be “ways of acting together without invoking the evil of a shared national identity,” and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who castigated Americans’ unique “patriotic pride” as “morally dangerous,” and instead called for “primary allegiance” to “the community of human beings in the entire world.”

The result, according to Karp, was that the generation of Americans raised in this intellectual environment developed no concept of being part of a worthy national endeavor—and retreated into the pursuit of riches instead. Whereas mid-20th-century technologists’ sense of patriotic duty was fortified by their education, the education of Uber and Instagram founders had systematically stamped theirs out. Into the resulting void, Karp writes, “the market rushed in with fervor.” This generation “knew what it opposed—what it stood against and could not condone—but not what it was for.”

Ironically, The Technological Republic falls into this trap itself. Karp concludes the book with what is essentially a call for academics and the liberal elite broadly to reject cancel culture and orthodoxy—one that resembles Thiel-style cultural warfare more than it resembles an original, or constructive, critique. In one eyebrow-raising passage, Karp appears to sympathize with a 1998 speech by a German writer that railed against what Karp describes as “the yoke of an enforced remembrance” of the Holocaust. This speech was also the subject of Karp’s doctoral dissertation, although he did not condone it then.

But Karp, like the academics he criticizes, fails to articulate a positive vision of what a new American identity should be. Nor does he grapple with recent liberal attempts to do so—contrary to Karp’s claim that such projects have been thought-policed out of existence—such as Jill Lepore’s This America, and Colin Woodard’s voluminous work in the Washington Monthly and elsewhere. If there is a path forward suggested by The Technological Republic, it is that by embracing “intellectual confrontation,” the liberal establishment can allow a new national identity to spontaneously emerge through debate.

Considered in isolation, Karp’s key observations are likely to resonate with his supposed target audience of academics and liberal thought leaders. Readers with ties to elite educational institutions would likely agree that their peers are more motivated by money than any sense of duty to the collective, especially when one considers the staggering percentages of graduates who flock to the finance and consulting industries. (Karp himself notes this phenomenon in one passage, though his focus is on the tech world; for a deeper dive, see Zach Marcus, “The Corporate Raid on Campus.”) And it’s difficult to argue with his claims that America’s national identity has been eroded, or that higher education has become more interested in questioning, rather than strengthening, a pro-West perspective.

But The Technological Republic fails to convince that these phenomena are interconnected. Do many of America’s best and brightest today work for Facebook and McKinsey because they lack patriotism? Was one semester of “Western Civ” so pivotal in the career trajectories of the engineers who put a man on the moon? If so, Karp provides no evidence. And he strenuously avoids grappling with other historical events and cultural currents that likely contributed to the elite’s abandonment of public service careers—does it have more to do with their belief that America is bad, or that “greed is good”? As far as there is a disinclination toward military work specifically, the impact on public opinion of America’s disastrous military campaigns in Southeast Asia and the Middle East goes unmentioned.

Perhaps, after two decades at the helm of an infamously cult-like company where he is “accustomed to being received as an oracle,” according to a recent profile, Karp’s powers of persuasion have dulled. Or perhaps he was simply limited by the scope of the book. The main text of The Technological Republic clocks in at 218 breezy pages, 56 of which are dedicated to a non sequitur on Palantir’s corporate culture. But for a man of Karp’s intellectual mettle—which does shine through in the book, in his command of intellectual history—these explanations are doubtful. One can’t help but feel that he has not made an earnest attempt at persuasion.

Which brings us to the question of Karp’s true purpose in writing the book. There are moments when he seems to be making a friendly appeal for liberals to get their act together; the clearest example is his warning, borrowed from the political philosopher Michael Sandel, that “fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.” But the carelessness with which he argues his central points, and his neglect of a thoughtful solution, do not ultimately leave the impression that The Technological Republic is rooting for the liberal establishment to recover. What we are left with is a vicious critique of that establishment, delivered through gleeful transgressions of its boundaries on acceptable topics of discussion. In short: red meat for the right.

Viewed this way, the book forms a pattern with other publicity stunts Karp has performed in the wake of last November’s vibe-shifting election. After Palantir reported blowout earnings in February, Karp went viral and successfully triggered the libs by proclaiming on the (video-streamed) investor call his commitment to “scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box the morning The Technological Republic hit shelves, Karp called Elon Musk “obviously the most important builder in the world.” He applauded Musk’s controversial DOGE initiative, which he claimed “90 percent of Americans” support, for targeting “the fraud, waste, and abuse we know is there.” Musk tweeted the clip.

The moral case for Palantir that Karp has made throughout his career—that the company is a project to promote democracy, and strengthening Western militaries is its means to this end—has always been somewhat simplistic. But Karp seemed to genuinely believe in this calculation, and his conduct could be seen as consistent with it. He made a point of refusing to work in autocratic countries, and of meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine to offer Palantir’s support in its war against Russia. 

But as Karp attempts to curry favor with an administration that is not only disassembling the world order Karp cherishes but actively undermining America’s standing as a beacon of liberal democracy at home, the coherence of Palantir’s political project has begun to unravel. In his TV interview, and in his book, Karp no longer comes across as a man with firm commitments.

“I’ve been a Democrat most of my life,” Karp said on CNBC. “I still—I kind of view myself as outside it.”

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It is not just deep state conspiracy theorists or the president’s henchmen who dislike government these days. Even on the left, there is mounting frustration with the ways in which bureaucracy proves an impediment to building things the country very much needs, like clean energy infrastructure and housing. Environmental review processes, administrative requirements for public participation, protracted and nitpicky judicial review, labor and domestic content requirements, and zoning and siting restrictions all slow down and sometimes outright destroy worthwhile projects. (See Alan Ehrenhalt’s review of Why Nothing Works, and Zephyr Teachout’s review of Abundance.)

The exigency of the climate crisis lends these complaints some force, at least when they align with empirics rather than serve as convenient scapegoats. Responding to climate change will require building a lot of things, quickly. We need massive quantities of wind and solar, long-distance transmission lines, battery storage facilities, and more. But what if we were to reconceptualize government not simply as an impediment to these ventures but as a potential powerhouse itself? (Pun intended.) 

Enter Sandeep Vaheesan’s lively new book, Democracy in Power, which paints a striking portrait of how federal, state, and local governments collaboratively built much of the U.S. electricity system over the first half of the twentieth century. Vaheesan then uses this history to spin off a future in which the government’s role in public power is revivified to construct a decarbonized and democratized energy system. 

The story begins in 1920s rural America—a cold, dark, and grueling place without the electricity by then common in urban areas. Vaheesan presents this rural darkness as “a puzzle,” given the state of the technology—although not so puzzling when reconceived through classic corporate logic. Rural customers were poor and far apart. Investor-owned utilities refused to build expensive systems to connect these households, who likely would consume too little electricity to make it worth the corporations’ while.

An alternative solution percolated its way into mainstream politics over the next decade: Perhaps government should build and own this system instead. Drawing on many successful examples of municipally owned utilities, public power champions like Senator George Norris of Nebraska pushed for Congress to adopt a broad agenda of giant publicly owned electricity systems throughout the country, which would serve the populations private utilities refused to connect.

Vaheesan recounts with vivid and amusing details the public-private battle that ensued. In short, private utilities dug their own graves. By the 1920s, most states had established public utilities commissions to regulate electric utilities’ rates and practices, in exchange for granting these companies monopoly service territories. But although utilities originally supported such regulation (in part to stave off bids for public takeovers), they quickly looked for ways to thwart it. 

Utilities’ central strategy in this regard was the holding company, an opaque device that Vaheesan manages to explain clearly and accessibly. Holding companies amalgamated smaller utilities into giant corporate structures that evaded state regulation, over-leveraged their assets, and obscured the financial fragility of the utility industry. When the industry wobbled, holding companies collapsed, taking with them the life savings of many Americans who had bet on utilities as a secure investment. One key New Deal response to this crisis was legislation that brought these companies under federal regulation and limited their scope and size. 

The holding company scandal had a collateral consequence: It increased politicians’ and the public’s appetite for publicly owned power as an antidote to private excesses. Although the utility industry was able to stave off public power in the 1920s through intensive lobbying and public relations efforts, by the early 1930s public power supporters were ascendant. Most notably, incoming President Franklin D. Roosevelt championed the ability of public power to discipline its private counterparts and pushed Congress to act. 

What resulted was a series of bills that finally brought power to rural America through government ownership. Vaheesan’s account of how this legislation and its programs unfolded is gripping and can scarcely be summarized in a paragraph. But to try: Congress authorized the federal government to construct and operate large hydropower operations across the country, and (in some cases, as with the Tennessee Valley Authority) to build the transmission lines to spread this power across rural regions. At the same time, it created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to aid rural communities in organizing themselves into rural electric cooperatives and municipal utilities. These locally or publicly owned systems received federal loans for construction and preference in the distribution of federally owned power, which helped make electricity affordable. Adjacent federal programs worked to grow rural electricity demand so systems would pay for themselves through rates. 

Together, these efforts formed a harmonic program of federal, regional, and local public initiatives that quickly electrified rural America—a program that corporate America had labeled impossible. Indeed, although private utilities had not wanted to serve these areas, they contested government efforts to electrify them every step of the way. In some places, they went so far as to build “spite lines,” which connected the wealthiest and most densely concentrated residents of potential cooperative territories but left all others in the dark, thereby rendering the economics of cooperative ownership ever more difficult. To no avail: The REA actively worked to counter these efforts through its loan authority, and it innovated to cut the cost of constructing distribution systems in half. Ultimately, after “the successes of the REA showed that rural electrification was feasible and even profitable,” Vaheesan writes, private utilities finally joined in these efforts that transformed life in rural America. 

The subtitle of Democracy in Power—A History of Electrification in the United States—promises too little: Although it is an excellent history, most of the book focuses on the present (Part II) and the potential future (Part III). 

Part II provides a snapshot of the electric industry today. As Vaheesan reports, some publicly owned utilities and cooperatives are flourishing, while others are floundering. The most democratic and innovative among them are working to increase engagement and turnout in board elections and to bring emerging clean energy offerings to their members. But others scarcely have any democratic impulses left—as with one cooperative that has failed to hold a board election for more than 60 years. Vaheesan explains this divergence in cooperative performance as partly due to failures of the REA to “codify democratic governance,” instead leaving cooperatives free to adopt divergent democratic practices and norms. 

Investor-owned utilities have a similarly mixed track record, much of which comes down to what their regulators demand of them. For example, Vaheesan observes that California utilities are leaders on renewable energy but—unfortunately and tragically—laggards on wildfire management. Why? Because regulators have put in place requirements for renewable energy purchases but have not carefully monitored utility practices with respect to wildfire prevention. Too often, Vaheesan suggests, regulation fails to live up to its potential to elevate the interests of the public over the interests of shareholders. The introduction of more competition into the sector has done little to ameliorate these dynamics, as electricity markets create new opportunities for market power and gaming that prove difficult to check. 

In sum, Part II offers a fair account of imperfect alternatives in modern power provisioning. No model of ownership clearly outperforms the others. Publicly owned utilities, regulated utilities, and deregulated utilities all have failed in transitioning to clean energy at the rate necessary to avert climate disaster and reduce attendant local air pollution. In fact, as Vaheesan astutely observes, carbon-intensive segments of the industry, which cut “across ownership types,” are actively working to resist the transition to clean energy. 

The question then is how to address this sclerosis—the pressing subject of Part III. Here Vaheesan’s tone pivots from that of historian-reporter to audacious policy advocate. To democratize the power sector, Vaheesan urges Congress to take two major steps. First, it should pass legislation to make it easier for localities to take over their power systems from private utilities. (Although this is presently legal in many places, it is politically and economically hard to achieve.) In essence, this step replicates the REA, although Vaheesan argues for one key difference. In place of loans, federal grants would cover the costs of these purchases, on two important conditions: a commitment to principles and practices of democratic governance; and adherence to a decarbonization mandate that accords with the imperatives of climate science. Second, Vaheesan calls for the establishment of “regional power authorities to generate and transmit low-cost, zero-carbon electricity”—21st-century equivalents of the Tennessee Valley Authority, updated for our times and needs. He also suggests that Congress should simultaneously pass a requirement on all investor-owned utilities to fully decarbonize, so this part of the sector does not fall behind. 

I am sympathetic to Vaheesan’s prescriptions, which is why I wish he had spent more time building his democratic case. If we’re inhabiting a policy world where Congress is ready to put in place a full decarbonization mandate on private utilities, what more do we need? Vaheesan insists that democracy in the power sector is “intrinsically valuable” and that a “democratic power system” should be the ultimate goal. But he doesn’t fully justify the widespread local takeovers he supports. Unlike Vaheesan, I am far from convinced that many cooperatives—even under more principled democratic governance—would yield ideal answers on questions such as infrastructure siting, given classic environmental justice concerns, well-known pathologies of local opposition to renewables, and enduring struggles in other areas of local decision-making such as zoning and affordable housing. Moreover, widely and deeply splintered ownership of the utility system has its own pitfalls under climate change, because more coordination across systems will be essential to a deeply decarbonized grid. How to balance the need for integrated systems, expertise, and collaboration with the allure of democratization is a difficult question that deserves confronting head-on. 

For similar reasons, what I find most attractive about Vaheesan’s proposal is the idea of new federal power authorities. As he notes, renewable energy has distinctly different economics than fossil fuels: Although it is capital intensive to construct, it has low operating and maintenance costs and zero fuel costs over time. As leading energy scholars have observed, that makes it a difficult fit with the current design of electricity markets, pegged as they are to the marginal costs of generation. Private developers who count on such markets as a core revenue stream to finance their projects struggle to build new renewable energy profitably, even as its costs have plummeted. At the same time, investor-owned utilities have an abysmal track record at planning and building the high-voltage transmission lines needed to affordably and reliably decarbonize the U.S. grid. Federal efforts in this space could optimize generation and transmission investments without the need for profits at levels that excite Wall Street investors, thus delivering the clean energy transition as affordably and quickly as possible and avoiding Vaheesan’s feared “zero-carbon oligarchy.” 

None of these proposals is remotely plausible at the moment, and Vaheesan is quick to acknowledge as much. But again he draws a historical analogy, noting that “public power wins that appeared impossible in the 1920s seemed to be inevitable in the mid-1930s.” Of course, the United States experienced the most severe economic shock in its history between those dates, a fate none would wish on us again. More bleakly, the more appropriate analogy for current U.S. politics might be Weimar Germany rather than our Roaring Twenties. 

Nevertheless, there is political resonance and relevance in Vaheesan’s case for public power that, if anything, he undersells. As he aptly notes, FDR celebrated public power as a “birch rod,” a disciplining force on private utilities. There need not be new federal legislation for them to play precisely this role now—and it may be more necessary than ever. Utilities across the country have a new strategy for delay: an insistence that we must not rush the energy transition, lest we compromise the reliability of our electricity system. One hundred percent carbon-free energy simply can’t be done, they say—at least not on the timescales demanded by science and morality—even as system modelers routinely show that it can be. 

That sounds an awful lot like what utilities said about rural electrification. As Vaheesan compellingly shows, it took new public entities and public programs to prove them wrong and force them to get on board. During this period when the energy transition is at risk of stalling, that is exactly what forward-looking states and localities should be doing: proving through public models that affordable, reliable, and clean energy is possible, and thus charting a course for system change that redounds to the benefit of all Americans while contributing to the ever-more-elusive goal of planetary stability.

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