It feels like a century ago that Donald Trump stood on the west front of the U.S. Capitol and was sworn in for a second time, promising to seize the Panama Canal, slap tariffs on the world, dispatch troops to the southern border, and let Elon Musk chop down the federal government. But while the past 11 months have often been exhausting and dispiriting, they’ve also been invigorating for us at the Washington Monthly as we generate new ideas to take on MAGA, never flinch from criticizing liberals and Democrats, and offer reporting and analysis that explains what’s really going on. 

We’re not calling these 11 pieces our best (although they are among them), nor are they among our most widely read (though many are), but they are representative of the continued breadth and inventiveness of this magazine in its 56^th year. 

Of course, it takes readers like you to keep our work going, so we hope, in an age of corporate and consolidating media, you’ll support our non-profit, independent voice. Meanwhile, if you’ve read these before, see how they held up, and if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. We’re proud of them. 

The post 11 of Our Most Memorable Pieces from 2025  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It feels like a century ago that Donald Trump stood on the west front of the U.S. Capitol and was sworn in for a second time, promising to seize the Panama Canal, slap tariffs on the world, dispatch troops to the southern border, and let Elon Musk chop down the federal government. But while the past 11 months have often been exhausting and dispiriting, they’ve also been invigorating for us at the Washington Monthly as we generate new ideas to take on MAGA, never flinch from criticizing liberals and Democrats, and offer reporting and analysis that explains what’s really going on. 

We’re not calling these 11 pieces our best (although they are among them), nor are they among our most widely read (though many are), but they are representative of the continued breadth and inventiveness of this magazine in its 56^th year. 

Of course, it takes readers like you to keep our work going, so we hope, in an age of corporate and consolidating media, you’ll support our non-profit, independent voice. Meanwhile, if you’ve read these before, see how they held up, and if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. We’re proud of them. 

The post 11 of Our Most Memorable Pieces from 2025  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The headline of Ezra Klein’s buzzy New York Times column—“Stop Acting Like This Is Normal”—is correct, because “Democrats cannot pretend this is a normal Republican administration.” The narrow prescription Klein offers congressional Democrats is correct: “Should Senate Democrats partner with Senate Republicans to fund this government? I don’t see how they can.” 

But with the September 30 deadline for passing spending bills necessary to keep the federal government open, Klein takes his strategic advice for Democrats one step too far. He wants Democrats to force a government shutdown and take the credit for it. 

The case for a shutdown is this: A shutdown is an attentional event. It’s an effort to turn the diffuse crisis of Trump’s corrupting of the government into an acute crisis that the media, that the public, will actually pay attention to. Right now, Democrats have no power, so no one cares what they have to say. A shutdown would make people listen. 

This is the assumption that every shutdown agitator has made and learned the hard way is completely wrong. I summed up the legacy of shutdown failures two years ago for the Washington Monthly: 

The late 1995 to early 1996 Republican-led shutdown couldn’t force President Bill Clinton to swallow deep budget cuts. The 2013 Republican-led shutdown couldn’t force President Barack Obama to defund his signature health care program. The 2018 Democratic-led shutdown couldn’t force President Donald Trump to accept legislation protecting “Dreamers” from deportation. The late 2018/early 2019 Trump–led shutdown couldn’t force congressional Democrats to fund his border wall. 

These failures taught us that shutdowns make people forget what you have to say. Public attention shifts to how shutdowns hurt average Americans and how one political party is willing to harm constituents to play political games. Once public opinion quickly turns, the shutdown agitators invariably realize the shutdown failed to provide negotiating leverage and eventually cave. 

Klein counsels that a shutdown could only work if Democrats “pick a small set of policies and stick to that. They would have to choose those policies wisely. They would have to hold the line even when it got tough.” At this point, the argument is already collapsing on itself. Klein previously warned that “Donald Trump is corrupting the government” and “This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop.” But how does sticking to a “small set of policies” prevent funding Trump’s widespread corruption?  

Some Senate Democrats reportedly want to strike a deal to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsides that are scheduled to expire. Josh Marshall argued, and David Dayen echoed, the point that such a deal would give Trump the chance to take credit for supporting health care ahead of the midterms. That would potentially help Republicans retain power, power which they could then use to break the deal.  

And why would Democrats have to “hold the line even when it got tough?” Things getting tough means people getting hurt and Democrats losing public opinion. Losing public opinion means losing leverage. Without leverage, what comes next is caving.   

Moreover, a hobbled federal government that deprives people of needed services will not bother Trump and his Republicans in the slightest. Another fallacy in the Klein argument is that with Elon Musk gone from the administration, Trump no longer wants to wreck the civil service: 

… the scale of DOGE’s assault on the government has shrunk. Trump and Elon Musk went through a messy and public breakup. But the real reason it didn’t continue, I suspect, is that it’s Trump appointees running these agencies now. They don’t want their own agencies wrecked. They don’t want to be blamed for the failures that might result. They need staff. 

Uh, take a quick look at what’s happening lately to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, and the State Department. Wrecking agencies is what Trump likes to do, as is blaming others for the consequences of his transgressions, so he would leap at the chance to pin a shutdown and its impacts on Democrats.  

A government shutdown simply would not stop anything Trump is doing. The authoritarian would exempt whatever he considers “essential” from shutdown—such as National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement policing sweeps.  

The choice Democrats face is not limited to abetting Republican authoritarianism and embracing a government shutdown. Democrats have a third option: End all negotiations with Republicans and tell them it’s their responsibility to keep the government open. 

Normally, both parties would accept a degree of shared responsibility in our constitutional system to ensure the basic functionality of governance. But, as Klein notes, these are not normal times. The Trump administration has said openly, “the appropriations process has to be less bipartisan,” and has already reneged on bipartisan spending agreements with recissions. As I argued back in July, this gives Democrats every reason to say: You want a partisan appropriations process? You got it. 

Walking away from the table—walking away from a negotiating partner who is demonstrably negotiating in bad faith—is not the same as wielding a government shutdown as a hostage.  

Because Democrats could credibly say: We don’t want a government shutdown. We would work with Republicans on a bipartisan agreement if they included language to ensure the deal would stick, with no opportunity for partisan recissions. If they don’t want to do that, there’s nothing to discuss. But we’re not forcing Republicans to shut down the government. They have majority power. They have a proven willingness to revisit norms and rules. If they think bipartisan spending bills are terrible, they can junk the filibuster and pass them themselves. It’s their responsibility. If they want Democratic help, fine. If not, best of luck.  

Will a Democratic washing of the hands stop authoritarian abuses of executive power? No. But a congressional minority is not in a position to do that. It’s not reasonable to put that burden on Democrats. Republicans, who do have considerable congressional power, are the ones who should be pressured to check Trump.  

What Democrats can do is point out the failings of the Republicans in charge and offer an alternative agenda so they can gain congressional power in 2026 and then have more ability to constrain Trump. Owning a shutdown is unnecessarily taking a looming failure away from Republicans, and there’s no need for Democrats to make such an unforced error. 

The post Ezra Klein (Almost) Gets It Right  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In late March, the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein went on the Weekly Show with Jon Stewart podcast to talk about his new book, Abundance, which Klein had co-authored with journalist Derek Thompson, then of The Atlantic. The book’s thesis is that over the years Democrats, often bowing to left-wing interest groups, have encouraged various forms of red tape—from federal environmental statutes to local zoning rules to minority contractor set-asides—that have gummed up the workings of government to the point that it is no longer possible to build things the country desperately needs, like new housing and clean energy infrastructure, in a timely and cost-effective manner. To illustrate his point, he regaled Stewart with a tragicomic tale of the government failure to expand rural broadband access.  

In late 2021, Klein explained, Congress passed and Joe Biden signed a major infrastructure law that contained $42 billion to subsidize the construction of broadband networks in rural areas that lack access to high-speed internet service. But more than three years later, not a single home had been connected by the so-called Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. Indeed, he noted, not a dime of that $42 billion had even been spent.  

The reason, Klein went on, has to do with a “baroque” 14-stage implementation process for how BEAD funds can be distributed from the federal government to state governments, and ultimately to internet providers. To give Stewart a full appreciation for the bureaucratic nightmare this entails, he listed the steps one by one. States submit a “Letter of Intent,” a request for planning grants, a “5-year Action Plan,” an “Initial Proposal,” and a “Final Proposal,” with long federal review and approval periods in between. (This elicited an anguished “Oh my god!” from Stewart.) The federal government publishes a map of where broadband needs to be built, states challenge the map for accuracy, the feds review and approve the challenge results. (“My hair was dark when we started this process!” Stewart exclaimed.) Notice and comment periods are sprinkled in throughout. No state, Klein explained, had made it past the “Final Proposal” stage. Stewart sat in apparently stunned silence, later quipping that BEAD is not a broadband program at all, but rather an “overcomplicated Rube Goldberg machine that keeps people from getting broadband.” To Stewart’s pleas for an explanation of how this defective process came about, Klein responded simply, “This is the Biden administration’s process for its own bill—they wanted this to happen.” 

Clips of the conversation went viral—boosted by Elon Musk, who was angling for the Trump administration to call BEAD a failure and reroute the funds to his Starlink satellite internet service. And as the broader “abundance liberalism” movement has continued to gain traction among prominent Democratic politicians and donors, Klein’s narrative of the BEAD program has become a favorite anecdote of its leading evangelists. Jonathan Chait, Dylan Matthews, Josh Barro, and Matt Yglesias have all cited BEAD as an example of liberal governance failure. 

The accuracy of the story, however, has come under question. In April, Bharat Ramamurti, a former member of the Biden administration’s National Economic Council who worked on telecommunications policy, alleged that the BEAD implementation process was not a Biden or even a Democratic prerogative, but the result of a compromise with Senate Republicans during negotiations over the infrastructure law. According to Ramamurti, these Republicans had “insisted” on a cautious implementation design in part to monitor spending for waste, and in part “at the behest of large incumbent internet providers,” who wanted more opportunities to shape the program to protect their interests.  

In a subsequent New York Times column, Klein admitted that he had gotten some of the facts wrong—that “portions of [BEAD’s] 14-stage process were insisted upon by congressional Republicans.” But rather than concede the broader argument, he doubled down, saying that after further talks with “various people who’d been part of the broadband program,” he discovered that “much of the process was worse than I’d known.” One official, he wrote, told him that “he’d wasted 40 to 50 percent of his time on internal government requirements he judged irrelevant to the project,” though Klein didn’t name the official or the specific requirements the official was referencing. Similarly, Klein’s coauthor, Derek Thompson, acknowledged in an interview with the journalist Mehdi Hasan that Klein initially “got some things wrong” about BEAD, but insisted that “rules we’ve put in our own way” (he didn’t specify which) had derailed the program. 

So, what’s the real story here? Was it liberal proceduralism or corporate power that incapacitated Biden’s rural broadband effort? Getting the answer right is vital for two reasons. First, the economic and political stakes of the rural broadband problem are serious. High-speed broadband is to the 21st century what electricity became in the 20th—a service so essential that lacking it means not fully participating in modern life. Yet more than 40 million Americans today live in small towns and rural communities that lack access to internet service at the speeds that are required to pursue an education, hold down a job, or run a business that can compete with firms in the big cities. This broadband “digital divide” is a major driver of regional inequality. A study by the Center on Rural Innovation found that rural counties with greater broadband utilization, typically due to faster and better broadband service, have 213 percent higher rates of business start-ups and 18 percent higher per capita income growth than comparable rural counties with lower broadband usage. And according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 58 percent of rural residents believe that access to high-speed internet is a problem in their area, compared to only 13 percent of urban dwellers and 9 percent of suburbanites who think the same is true in their communities. Rural residents have valid reasons, in other words, for believing that the economy is rigged against them.  

Second, figuring out what precisely screwed up the BEAD program can help adjudicate a crucial debate taking place among Democrats about how best to make the party more politically competitive. Abundance liberals say the answer is for Democrats to embrace an agenda of targeted deregulation—one that would free both government agencies and private companies from picayune procedural constraints that get in the way of building needed physical infrastructure and developing promising new technologies that can solve abiding human problems. Others, including the editors of this magazine, argue that abundance liberals, in their laudable eagerness to diagnose the deficiencies of government, fail to recognize that corporate behemoths are frequently the hidden saboteurs, and that their outsized economic and political power is a direct result of past deregulatory efforts.  

To resolve this question, we spoke with nearly two dozen government officials and outside experts who were involved in the design and implementation of the BEAD program, pored over hundreds of pages of program documentation, and researched rural broadband policies of previous administrations going back to the 1990s. What we found is that while abundance liberals are certainly right that some infrastructure projects have been slowed or stalled by regulations and public engagement processes put in place by Democrats to placate progressive interest groups, that is simply not the case with Biden’s rural broadband initiative. Rather, the complexity and delays of the BEAD program and the broader failure of Washington over many years to solve the digital divide is overwhelmingly the result of telecom monopolies whose economic and political power previous administrations unleashed. And this misjudgment by abundance liberals is not a one-off mistake, but part of a pattern. 

Understanding BEAD requires a bit of background on the government’s decades-long effort to spur broadband deployment. 

When we talk about internet access, we are actually talking about two distinct, layered services. The first is data transmission, or the carriage of data from point A to point B across network infrastructure. The second is data processing, or the transformation of data from digital computer language into a more easily transmitted format at point A, and back into digital computer language at point B, using equipment like modems that sit on top of the transmission infrastructure. 

To create a competitive market for data processing, the Federal Communications Commission in the early days of the internet regulated basic transmission services—which at the time could only be provided by telephone wires—under “common carrier” rules. In practice, this meant that telephone carriers had to allow a third-party data processor (an “internet service provider,” or ISP) like AOL to connect modems and other hardware to their telephone wires. The telephone carrier then had to transmit data processed by AOL modems on the same terms as it transmitted data from modems belonging to its own ISP business, if it had one. This regulatory regime was widely considered a success: by the late 1990s, there were more than 7,000 ISPs in North America. 

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is mostly remembered as ushering in sweeping deregulation and monopolization across the telecom and media industries. But as the Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford writes in her 2013 history of American internet policy, Captive Audience, the act actually represented continuity with the FCC’s regulations. Indeed, the legislation empowered the FCC to subject two-way “telecommunications service” providers not only to open-access requirements, but also to a broader suite of common carrier regulations. 

But this approach seemed oppressive and old-fashioned to George W. Bush’s first FCC chairman, Michael Powell, a tech enthusiast who believed fundamentally that “broadband should exist in a minimally regulated space.” By the early 2000s, new innovations had enabled cable television networks to transmit internet data, breaking the monopoly previously held by telephone wires. Other technologies, such as satellite, broadband over power lines, wireless (data transmitted via cell towers to either a fixed antenna or a mobile device), and fiber-to-the-premise (extending the fiber-optic “backbone” of transmission networks all the way to end users) were promising to join the fray. Powell feared that common carrier regulation would stifle investment in these emerging technologies. Alternatively, Crawford writes, he believed that a hands-off approach would allow them to flourish, ultimately creating a world where competition between vertically integrated transmission and internet service providers would protect consumers in the way ISP competition on top of individual transmission networks once had. “The great regulatory difficulty over the past one hundred years is, we have always had just one wire to the home,” said Powell at a 2004 conference. “We have a historic opportunity here not to repeat that world … The future is exciting, innovative, and bright.” 

To unlock this vision, Powell declined to regulate internet networks as common carriers and waged a legal battle to liberate them from the act’s “telecommunications service” classification that made such regulation possible. When a court ruled in 2003 that cable was a telecommunications service, Powell enlisted the Department of Justice to appeal; the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in Powell’s favor in a technical decision related to the FCC’s authority. With this ruling in hand, Powell was free to do as he pleased. As he campaigned for reelection in 2004, George W. Bush pledged that with Powell “clearing the underbrush of regulation”—and additional supply-side reforms Bush enacted that year, such as easing permitting requirements for providers to access federal rights-of-way—the market would deliver “universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007.” 

Of course, this vision didn’t come to pass. Powell’s deregulation effectively gave the telecoms permission to deny competing firms access to their lines, leading thousands of ISP start-ups to go out of business, as the Washington Monthly reported at the time. Moreover, in urban and suburban areas, the “intermodal” competition Powell had banked on failed to arrive. The technology behind broadband over power lines never panned out. Satellite and wireless service reached the market but proved to be poor substitutes for a wired connection (IT geeks took to calling satellite “fraudband”). Telephone carriers experimented with rolling out fiber-to-the-premise networks in affluent areas, but Wall Street insisted that they focus their investment on cornering the growing, less capital-intensive cellular service market. By the end of Bush’s second term, most consumers were left with only two choices for genuine broadband internet: their local telephone carrier or their local cable company. Under this duopoly market structure, as Nicholas Thompson reported in these pages in 2009, Americans paid far more, for worse service, than citizens of other developed nations, where forms of common carrier regulation had almost universally been adopted. 

For rural Americans, the situation was even worse. Deregulation and permitting reform were not enough to lure cable internet providers to remote, sparsely populated areas. This left telephone carriers, which had preexisting rural infrastructure thanks to long-standing universal phone service obligations, firmly entrenched as the dominant transmission providers in these areas (satellite “fraudband” and fixed wireless service had some presence). Meanwhile, lax antitrust enforcement was allowing these carriers to “cluster” their regional monopolies into increasingly large, and politically powerful, entities. By 2005, the “Baby Bell” offspring of the 1984 AT&T breakup had already reconsolidated into two behemoths: a reborn AT&T, and Verizon. CenturyLink and Frontier Communications also grew to control significant chunks of rural territory, sometimes by buying lines from AT&T and Verizon. Just like that, the Bush administration had handed a handful of carriers lucrative, unregulated monopoly fiefdoms over rural internet service provision—and the political clout to protect them. 

Before the Bush presidency was even over, it had become clear that a new approach to broadband policy was needed. In 2006, former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta and the Free Press founder Robert McChesney pointed out in the Monthly that a better model would be to follow what Franklin D. Roosevelt had done to bring electricity to rural America. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Rural Electrification Agency had provided low-cost loans and other support for municipalities and farmer cooperatives to set up public power utilities. Unburdened by short-term profit imperatives, public power initiatives proved a resounding success, while the threat of competition often spurred investment from private utilities. The federal government could replicate this playbook with broadband, Podesta and McChesney argued—if it first preempted a growing number of state “anti-muni” laws, passed at the behest of incumbent providers, that banned municipal networks.  

As a presidential candidate, and early in his first term, Barack Obama seemed to agree with this logic. A spokesperson for his 2008 campaign told PBS that “if private entities are not going to deliver wireless internet or broadband to an area, municipal governments should be allowed to,” suggesting Obama would preempt anti-muni laws. In his first month in office, he signed into law a major post-financial crisis stimulus that contained more than $7 billion in broadband grants and loans, much of which would go toward municipalities and cooperatives. This investment, the president declared, would allow “a small business in a rural town” to “connect and compete with their counterparts anywhere in the world.” 

Unfortunately, Obama’s promises held up little better than those of Bush. The stimulus grants were undermined by the administration’s desire for immediate results: the Commerce and Agriculture Departments, the agencies tasked with implementing the grants, insisted on funding “shovel-ready” projects, leading to rushed, ill-conceived proposals. Defaults and other misfires ensued, providing years’ worth of ammunition for industry-aligned advocates and academics to discredit the New Deal model for broadband. Meanwhile, Obama didn’t follow through with preempting state anti-muni laws, allowing them to proliferate across the country.  

The Obama administration was handed a separate opportunity to get broadband policy right. In the stimulus bill, Congress mandated that the FCC transform a long-standing program it administered to subsidize rural telephone service, the Universal Service Fund, into the new broadband-focused Connect America Fund. This could have gone a long way toward closing the digital divide by redirecting several billion dollars of federal spending every year into broadband upgrades. The question was, how would the money be spent?  

Other nations that had made significant public investments in broadband prioritized fiber-optic networks. The upfront cost of laying fiber is relatively high, but the networks are “future proof” in the sense that once the high-bandwidth wire is in the ground, it can be scaled up to provide ever-faster speeds by cheaply switching out electronic components (cable broadband is also future proof, although to a lesser extent). In other words, a one-time investment in fiber can yield true broadband internet service for decades, whereas other technologies are expensive to upgrade or, in the case of satellite, need to be replaced altogether after a few years. 

But in the development of the plan, two factors discouraged the FCC from prioritizing fiber. The first was lobbying from incumbent providers. Telephone companies were well positioned to deploy fiber in rural areas, but they preferred to squeeze all the juice they could out of their legacy telephone wire networks rather than cannibalizing these sunk-cost investments. Satellite and fixed wireless providers, meanwhile, wanted a slice of the subsidy pie—and did not want the government to fund fiber competitors to their low-quality offerings. 

The second factor was a flawed, consultant-produced cost model commissioned by the FCC, which greatly overestimated the price tag of laying fiber in rural America. Jonathan Chambers, who would help implement the Connect America Fund as the FCC’s chief of policy analysis from 2012 to 2016, told us that the model projected the costs of building “greenfield” networks from scratch, rather than the more common “brownfield” approach of leveraging preexisting poles, ducts, or other infrastructure. “They calculated a cost of like, $150 to $180 billion,” Chambers said. “They said, ‘Well, my God, we don’t have that kind of budget.’” 

Thus, Julius Genachowski, Obama’s first FCC chair, had a conundrum. Subsidizing satellite, fixed wireless, and telephone wire was clearly not a long-term solution to the digital divide. But Genachowski was a business-friendly moderate who had already been engaged in another battle with industry over an Obama campaign pledge to prevent internet providers from privileging their own content applications. With incumbents opposing a fiber-first approach—and a study suggesting that it would take decades to implement—Genachowski took a technologically neutral approach to the new Connect America Fund, pledging support over the following decade for any networks capable of providing download speeds of at least 4 megabits per second (Mpbs). This speed threshold could be met with modest upgrades to telephone networks, and by satellite and fixed wireless service. 

Four Mpbs service allows a user to browse the web, send emails, and stream standard definition video. These were the essential needs as of 2010, but far short of where the internet was heading—the plan itself set a target for most Americans to receive service at 100 Mpbs download speeds by 2020. When consumer advocates and members of Congress raised these concerns, Genachowski responded that 4 Mpbs was just an initial speed threshold, and could be scaled up as the FCC implemented the subsidies over time.  

Nevertheless, the direction had been set: Through the Connect America Fund, rural Americans would receive second-class service from incumbent providers. Between 2012 and 2015, the FCC offered the 10 largest telephone companies more than $10 billion to upgrade their networks. Between 2016 and 2019, the FCC gave $15 billion to smaller, rural-only telephone carriers to do the same. In 2018, the FCC held a $1.5 billion auction for alternative providers to bid on locations that the large telephone companies had declined to serve, allowing fixed wireless and satellite providers to get a piece of the action. 

By the close of the 2010s, most of the networks supported by the Connect America Fund were already obsolete. As Donald Trump’s FCC crafted the $20 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund in 2020, its signature program under the Connect America Fund umbrella, it found it had to re-subsidize many of the same locations subsidized just a few years prior. “It was scandalous, what the commission did,” Jonathan Chambers would tell Broadband Breakfast of the Obama-era implementation of the fund. “It was graft.” 

The Trump FCC’s iteration of the Connect America Fund would be an improvement in one critical respect. Rather than offer money to incumbents and auction off what they declined, it ran an auction from the start. The third-largest winner in the auction was a consortium of over 90 rural electric cooperatives led by Chambers himself, who had cofounded a company that helps cooperative energy utilities leverage their infrastructure to deploy fiber broadband. The consortium secured more than $1 billion by bidding as much as 50 percent below the FCC’s asking price on more than 600,000 locations, validating Chambers’s hypothesis that its cost model had been way off the mark. 

But at the same time, the Trump FCC repeated many mistakes of the past. While the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund primarily financed fiber, it also put billions toward short-term fixed wireless and satellite deployments—including a new satellite entrant whose infrastructure came with better service quality but equally short life spans: Elon Musk’s Starlink. And as with Obama’s original stimulus grants, haste to deployment undermined many of the projects that received funding. Hoping to get money out the door amid Trump’s reelection campaign, the FCC awarded the subsidies without asking for much proof that bidders had the financial means or technological capability to follow through on their commitments. The result was widespread defaults that continue to roll in to this day. 

In total, the federal government spent $50 billion on rural broadband over the 2010s—more than enough money to lay fiber to every rural home and business in the nation, according to Chambers’s estimate. And yet by 2020, as many as 42 million Americans still lacked broadband. 

The rural broadband programs of the 2010s were products of what the telecommunications scholar Christopher Ali has called “the politics of good enough.” Politicians and regulators wanted to do something about the digital divide. But their deference to industry, and desire for immediate results, prevented them from approaching the problem rationally. 

The COVID-19 pandemic looked like it might finally upend this political calculus. “We reached a pressure point where we couldn’t play games anymore,” Harold Feld, a longtime public interest advocate at Public Knowledge, told us. Suddenly, members of Congress were overwhelmed by “their constituents calling them up and saying, ‘My kid is doing homework in a parking lot.’” The door was open for a real solution. 

In March 2021, when Joe Biden unveiled his vision for one of the first major legislative pushes of his young presidency—a massive infrastructure package that would ultimately become the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA—it contained a remarkably ambitious broadband plan. It was a plan that finally seemed to grasp the urgency of closing the digital divide, and the correct historical precedent for doing so. “With the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, the federal government made a historic investment in bringing electricity to nearly every home and farm in America, and millions of families and our economy reaped the benefits,” read an announcement from the White House. “Broadband internet is the new electricity.” 

Biden’s plan called for a $100 billion investment focused on “future proof” technology. It promised to promote competition, including by “lifting barriers that prevent municipally-owned or affiliated providers and rural electric co-ops from competing on an even playing field with private providers”—a clear reference to preempting state anti-muni laws—and “prioritiz[ing] support” for these networks. Finally, the plan promised to “reduce the cost of broadband internet service” while noting that “providing subsidies to cover the cost of overpriced internet service is not the right long-term solution,” hinting at a move toward rate regulation. “When I say ‘affordable,’ I mean it,” Biden declared in a speech in Pittsburgh the day the plan was released. Through these measures, Biden vowed to bring broadband to “every single American” at long last.  

For incumbent providers, Biden’s plan was nothing short of an existential threat. Big telecom stocks tumbled on the announcement. Providers and trade associations released a flurry of statements urging the new president to be reasonable. “A fiber first policy might inadvertently grow a rural mobility digital divide,” warned one. A “misguided” push to fund municipal networks would prevent continued private investment from “get[ting] the job done,” warned others. Michael Powell himself, the architect of internet deregulation under Bush and now the president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, cautioned against “discarding decades of successful policy.”  

Congress took up the task of converting Biden’s plan into legislation in the early summer of 2021. The broadband portion of the IIJA was hammered out by a bipartisan working group of senators from heavily rural states, with Susan Collins of Maine and Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire serving as lead Republican and Democratic negotiators. Behind the scenes, an epic lobbying campaign was underway. 

Across a long summer of negotiations, the key provisions of Biden’s plan were pared back one by one. The $100 billion figure dropped to match a Republican counteroffer of $65 billion, with only $42 billion allocated to the new subsidy program, now known as the BEAD program (the rest would support preexisting initiatives). Forty-two billion dollars was still a historic investment, sufficient to connect all unserved areas of the country. But it would leave almost nothing left over to fund the deployment of new networks in “underserved” areas with existing but inadequate service. This aligned with incumbents’ goal of avoiding competition to their existing infrastructure. Meanwhile, Biden’s mandate to fund future proof networks was cast aside when Congress set a speed threshold allowing fixed wireless networks, and Elon Musk’s Starlink, to qualify for subsidies. The proposals to preempt anti-muni laws, and to give municipalities priority in applying for subsidies, disappeared altogether. When the dust settled on negotiations in August, one disappointed consumer advocate called the BEAD program a “Shadow of Its Former Self.”  

A different Senate compromise was ultimately responsible for slowing the pace of BEAD’s implementation. In early stages of negotiations, the White House had proposed to run a centralized, nationwide subsidy program out of the federal government, according to several former Biden administration officials and congressional staffers with knowledge of negotiations. This proposal—and the other key elements of Biden’s original plan—was modeled on legislation first introduced by Representative James Clyburn in 2020, which would have tapped the Commerce Department to award funds to providers. But Senate negotiators instead opted for a federalist design. The final text of the infrastructure law ordered the Commerce Department—specifically, a bureau within the department called the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA—to award grants to states, which would then design their own subsidy programs within guidelines set forth by the NTIA, and ultimately allocate the funds out of newly created “broadband offices.” 

With those provisions, the Senate overrode Biden’s streamlined vision, and created a whole new layer of bureaucracy: Rather than directly awarding subsidies to providers, the NTIA would have to manage 56 separate broadband programs (one in each state, plus several territories). Government sources told us that the initial impetus for implementing BEAD through the states came from Republicans and rural-state Democrats. It was a good outcome for providers, which maintained extensive lobbying operations in statehouses. It also provided a way for Republicans to defeat a White House proposal to force subsidized networks to provide a basic internet plan for low-income consumers costing $30 a month. This proposal was a top priority for the White House; one former senior White House official said that “at one point, we had [it] signed off and in text by Susan Collins, because we made the case over and over again.” But with the states in play, Collins was able to force a compromise. The final text of the infrastructure law allowed states to propose their own definitions of a “low-cost service option,” while explicitly prohibiting the NTIA from “regulation of rates.” 

Consumer groups also supported state involvement in BEAD, not wanting to repeat the hastily deployed, default-prone programs of the Obama and Trump years. “I mean, who wants to repeat that nonsense when you’re talking about $42 billion?” said Gigi Sohn, a cofounder of Public Knowledge and former Biden FCC nominee. 

The upshot, however, was that BEAD would be a much slower program to implement. No one was happier about this than telecom lobbyists, who were cheerfully gearing up for the coming state-by-state battle for funding. “In general,” reported the IT trade publication Light Reading, “the message from top telecom trade associations to their members is: Don’t worry. We’ve got this.” 

Right up front, BEAD’s federalist design added an extra step to the implementation process: the divvying up of a $42.5 billion pie between the states. A key piece of context about BEAD—one that has been missing from the discourse surrounding the program—is that this one step would account for nearly half of the total time between the enactment of the infrastructure law and the end of Biden’s term.  

To allocate funds fairly, the federal government needed to know how many underserved locations each state needed to connect. The problem was that no accurate and comprehensive data set existed. Thanks to more than a decade of industry lobbying, the FCC’s map of broadband availability counted coverage at the level of census blocks, based entirely on provider self-reported data—allowing incumbents to keep subsidized competitors at arm’s length. In early 2020, Congress finally intervened, enacting legislation to force the FCC to create a granular, address-level map, and implement a system for the public to challenge provider coverage claims. But Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sat on his hands for the remainder of his term, claiming that the FCC could not start work on the map until Congress appropriated funds explicitly for that purpose. (The funds were appropriated in December, but Pai was by then looking ahead to a private-sector career—first in private equity and later as the president of a major wireless provider trade association.) By the time the infrastructure bill was being negotiated, the Biden FCC had just begun work on the new map, and staff predicted that it would not be ready until “probably next year.” 

If speed to deployment had been the top priority, Congress could have allowed the NTIA to make initial allocations based on a rough approximation of each state’s needs. Instead, the law was written to explicitly require the NTIA to wait for the new map. 

As with the decision to run BEAD through the states in the first place, the political dynamics behind this move were mixed, people with knowledge of the negotiations told us. All senators wanted to ensure that their own state received its fair share of what remained, even after all the watering-down in the Senate, a “once-in-a-generation” federal investment. But Republicans also worried about the possibility of any state receiving a disproportionately large budget. Their motivation for cutting BEAD down to $42.5 billion in the first place had been to allow the program to cover unserved locations, while minimizing leftover funds that might be used for competitive deployments. But if certain states received too much money, the calculation would be thrown off, opening the door for providers’ worst nightmare: the “overbuilding” of incumbent networks. Thus, basing the state-by-state allocation on the new map “became table stakes for Republican members,” a former senior Commerce Department official with knowledge of infrastructure law negotiations told us. “You’ve got to use the maps, you’ve got to serve all the unserved locations before you do anything else.” 

From November 2021 through September 2022, the new map was caught up in a series of legal challenges filed by a losing bidder for the contract to build the map’s underlying “fabric” of broadband-serviceable locations. When the “pre-product,” yet-to-be-challenged version of the map finally arrived in November 2022, it was riddled with errors. In many states, the pre-product map overstated broadband coverage—an expected outcome, since at this stage it was still based on provider-reported data. In other states, the map fabric mistakenly included so many sheds, barns, and other uninhabited structures that on balance it erred in the opposite direction, overstating the number of locations that needed to be served. Seeing the extent of the mess, senators of both parties called for the NTIA to push back its “aggressive” June 2023 allocation deadline, to allow for an extended challenge period. Future Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune even cosponsored legislation to codify the extension, in hopes that funding would go “to areas that are truly unserved.” The NTIA declined to extend the deadline, and allocated the funds in late June. 

By then, a large chunk of the 14-step process Ezra Klein would later describe to Jon Stewart was already complete. States had applied for and received planning grants from the NTIA, used the planning grants to create new broadband offices, and taken care of preliminary planning tasks. The NTIA had released its guidelines to structure state program proposals. From the day allocations were made, the NTIA gave state offices exactly six months—until late December 2023—to submit initial proposals for their programs, and one year after that to finalize them with the NTIA. By November 2024 at the latest, states would be able to start getting money out the door. 

If you put abundance-aligned punditry on BEAD under a microscope, you’ll find that it shifts between multiple narratives to explain the slowness of the program. Ezra Klein has emphasized the Democratic fetish for pointless process. But others in his orbit peg the delays on a separate preoccupation of abundance liberals that Klein has dubbed “everything-bagel liberalism”: the Democratic penchant for loading up infrastructure projects with burdensome requirements related to labor, climate, and social justice goals. “One thing the abundance movement asks Democrats to do is to scrape the toppings off the ‘everything bagel,’” wrote Josh Barro in June. “Don’t assign climate goals to your rural broadband project, et cetera.” In May, Matt Yglesias published a guest essay by a former Biden political operative, who repeated the abundance conventional wisdom that “in an attempt to satisfy a narrow ideological faction,” the Biden administration had saddled BEAD with “rigid, impractical rules, sacrificing effective governance for ideological purity.”  

A close look at how the NTIA’s everything-bagel-y state requirements played out in the real world reveals that they were not major time sinks. While states had to document steps taken to ensure that minority- and women-owned businesses would be “recruited, used, and retained when possible,” complying with this was as simple as advertising that BEAD was happening through identity-based nonprofit organizations (the “Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce,” the “Women’s Business Center of Utah”). While states had to ensure that subsidized providers “use strong labor standards and protections,” the minimum requirement here was simply asking subsidy applicants to submit a written plan for ensuring compliance with labor and employment laws. In awarding grants, states had the option to prioritize applications from providers who committed to additional labor and wage provisions, but there was no federal requirement to do so. Finally, a requirement that states conduct “an assessment of climate threats” served to ensure that states prioritized funding technologies resilient against local weather patterns—it did not have anything to do with fighting climate change. “Resilience is important, right?” said Veneeth Iyengar, executive director of Louisiana’s ConnectLA broadband office. “Hurricane season is coming soon, and over 90 percent of our infrastructure is gonna be buried.” 

In reporting this story, the Monthly spoke with five leaders of state broadband offices, as well as outside experts who consulted on state proposals. While they expressed various frustrations with the NTIA’s management style—confusing or delayed guidance on technical requirements was a big one—all dismissed the idea that liberal requirements were a significant drag on completing their proposals. They emphasized that most of their time was spent figuring out how to divide unserved areas into parcels (“project areas”) that would make sense to providers as network building blocks, and how to design a scoring rubric for applications that would result in commitments to serve each parcel at a competitive price—in other words, the essential business of parlaying their budgets into universal broadband coverage. “If you want to know the biggest lift of designing the proposal, it was trying to figure out how to do the project areas,” said Eric Frederick, Michigan’s chief connectivity officer. Frederick explained that his office developed a “hexagonal grid system” rather than relying on oddly shaped census blocks, allowing providers to propose more efficient network designs. Compared to this technical challenge, writing a few paragraphs on how his office had advertised BEAD to diverse populations “was not a lift for us.” 

Sascha Meinrath, a Penn State telecommunications professor who consulted on several state proposals, concurred. “Doing an entire regional network, you know, diagramming and all that, is easily 90 percent of the time,” Meinrath said. “Having done many of these successfully, I can tell you that if that’s the case [that a state is struggling to comply with the everything-bagel requirements], they’re definitely doing it wrong.” 

Nor was compliance with everything-bagel requirements a barrier to states receiving final NTIA approval on their program designs. If any particular requirement stood out as a limiting factor here, it was the requirement for states to define a low-cost plan that subsidized networks would have to offer to poor consumers. (Lest this be dismissed as a nonessential social justice priority, it’s worth noting that affordability is a key driver of the digital divide. There are more Americans who forgo broadband because they cannot afford it than there are Americans who do not have any access at all.) 

Recall that during infrastructure law negotiations, a compromise between the White House and Senate Republicans had given states flexibility over what counted as “low cost.” Several states took this flexibility to an extreme, proposing in their initial program designs to leave the definition of low cost entirely up to providers. When the NTIA ordered these states to define low cost as an exact price or formula, several states—including South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia—held firm, accusing the NTIA of illegal rate regulation.  

After a prolonged back-and-forth negotiation, another compromise was reached, with the NTIA allowing states to define the low-cost option within a range of acceptable minimum prices. But in the case of Virginia, the standoff lasted over a year, and inspired a Politico feature later cited by Vox as evidence of a generalized problem with BEAD bureaucracy, rather than a fight centered on affordability. Texas, which fought the NTIA over its low-cost proposal as well as requirements that implicitly restricted states’ ability to subsidize wireless providers, was the very last state to receive NTIA approval, right up against the November 2024 deadline. By that point, eight states were already in the process of committing funds to broadband projects; Louisiana had finished. 

For all the messiness of its implementation design, in early 2025 the BEAD program was shaping up to be a success. Three states had finished running their processes for awarding grants, and the results were promising: Provider participation had been robust, and in each state, more than 80 percent of awards were going toward fiber projects. Unserved areas, as determined by genuinely accurate maps, would finally receive future proof networks. 

Then, immediately following Donald Trump’s inauguration, the president signed an executive order that froze BEAD funds. The administration’s cynical rationale echoed the criticisms the abundance camp has made in earnest: “woke mandates” and “government red tape,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained, had caused “delays and waste.” To rectify this, the Administration was delaying BEAD intentionally while it “revamp[ed]” the program. 

In June, the NTIA released updated program guidelines that shifted subsidies to Musk’s Starlink satellite service by forcing states to award grants to the lowest-cost providers that meet a minimal set of requirements. The change sets BEAD back to where it was in mid-2023. All states will need to submit, and have approved, updated program proposals; states that have already awarded subsidies to providers must rescind them. Analysts now predict that money won’t get out the door until 2026.  

While Starlink satellites have some advantages (if your fiber power goes out in an emergency you can still get a satellite signal as long as you have a home generator), they have greater disadvantages (slow signal during peak traffic, latency issues). Even worse, while fiber can last for decades with minimal upkeep, satellites need to be replaced every five to seven years, thus requiring billions of dollars more in ongoing federal subsidies. The new pro-Starlink guidelines give Trump leverage over Musk in their on-again, off-again feud. If the bulk of BEAD funds ultimately go through to Musk’s company, a program that was meant to close the digital divide for good will become just the latest in a series of shortsighted, wasteful investments.  

The digital divide should have been closed long ago. Indeed, it would never have opened in the first place had Washington dealt with broadband the way other rich democracies did, or the way FDR handled electricity back in the 1930s: essentially, by treating broadband as a public good. Instead, the advent of broadband coincided with a bipartisan swing toward deregulatory policymaking. Deregulation, in turn, empowered monopolies to capture the new broadband industry and use their economic and political clout to beat back nearly every attempt at sensible reform. That, not some liberal fetish with procedures and everything-bagel requirements, is why implementation of the BEAD program took so long and why, over decades, we’ve made so little progress in shrinking the digital divide despite the billions of taxpayer dollars we’ve thrown at the problem. 

Abundance liberals aren’t wrong that excessive rules and regulations pushed by progressive interest groups can, in some cases, slow down or increase the cost of building housing, infrastructure, and the like. But as we have seen, the BEAD program is not one of those cases. The slow and convoluted nature of BEAD is better understood as an example of what the Johns Hopkins University political scientist Steve Teles has called American “kludgeocracy.” A “kludge” is computer coding jargon meaning a “a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” U.S. policymakers, Teles argues, increasingly create kludgy government because of the tension between liberals who want to use federal power to address national problems and conservatives who want to siphon federal largess through private corporations and the states. The result is unnecessarily complicated federal programs that don’t work, that citizens can’t understand, and that “redistribute resources upward to the wealthy and the organized at the expense of the poorer and less organized.” 

It would be one thing if BEAD were the only Biden program abundance liberals have misunderstood and mischaracterized. But it’s not. For instance, they accused the administration of unwisely burdening its flagship legislation to reshore semiconductor manufacturing, the CHIPS Act, with everything-bagel requirements such as onsite daycare and training pathways for the disadvantaged. But as Joel Dodge reported in the Washington Monthly, those rules didn’t seem to have bothered the chip manufacturing firms, whose applications for funding outstripped the program’s budget by nearly two to one. Moreover, executives at the companies have said the legislation’s training and other requirements match their own strategies for opening up pipelines for hard-to-find talent. 

Time after time, Klein and other abundance thinkers blame liberal proceduralism for policy disasters that, on further inspection, turn out to be partly or entirely the result of corporate power. The United States lacks high-quality nationwide passenger rail service not just because of the soaring expense and snail-like pace of California’s high speed rail project—a special obsession of abundance pundits. The bigger reason is that hedge fund–controlled freight rail monopolies own nearly all existing U.S. rail infrastructure and refuse to give Amtrak trains reasonable right of way—and politicians in Washington are too afraid to take those corporations on. America lacks sufficient electricity transmission lines to carry renewable energy from rural areas where it’s produced to metro areas where it’s needed not just because of federal environmental laws, as abundance liberals argue. It’s also because investor-owned utilities use their control over the grid to block those new lines to protect the profits from their own fossil fuel–driven generation facilities. American health care is increasingly expensive not because of bottlenecks in the supply of doctors, as abundance liberals insist, but because the whole health care sector, from hospitals to pharmaceuticals to insurance, is now controlled by private monopolies.  

The story Ezra Klein told Jon Stewart, of the Biden administration deliberately bogging down its own broadband program in needless complexity, went viral in part because it fits an increasingly popular abundance liberal vision of what’s wrong with liberal governance and what Democrats need to do to win back power. The story told here, of how telecom monopolies are behind the failure of government to solve the digital divide, suggests a different strategy for Democrats, and has the advantage of being true. 

The post The Broadband Story Abundance Liberals Like Ezra Klein Got Wrong appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In a 2023 New York Times column, Ezra Klein coined the term “everything-bagel liberalism” to describe the phenomenon of projects that liberals favor getting weighed down by seemingly ancillary requirements liberals impose on them. He noted, for instance, that in California, strict labor and environmental standards embedded in various pieces of legislation passed by the Democratic legislature over the years have made it too costly and time-consuming to build subsidized housing for the homeless. 

This same problem, he warned, would imperil one of the centerpieces of the Biden administration’s economic policy: the CHIPS and Science Act. Klein praised the aims of this flagship legislation to reshore semiconductor manufacturing with a $39 billion fund to attract companies to the United States. But in the administration’s implementation of the bill, he discovered a plethora of conditions the government would have to use to evaluate prospective grantees that worried him—ranging from applicants’ commitments to workforce development for racial minorities and women, to environmentally friendly operations, to community investments in transit, housing, and child care, and more. Klein warned that this litany of priorities that were not directly related to the main task at hand—bringing semiconductor manufacturing to the U.S.—risked overwhelming the core enterprise. “The government is adding subsidies with one hand,” he wrote, “and layering on requirements with the other.” An industrial policy mission as complex as bringing back semiconductor manufacturing calls for “an intensity of focus that liberalism often lacks,” he concluded.

Klein resumed his critique of the Biden administration’s industrial policy approach in his book Abundance, coauthored with The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and released in March—and the two were hardly alone. When the administration first issued the CHIPS Act funding guidelines, Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post wrote that the requirements were the latest example of how “virtually every ambitious program gets saddled with too many other unrelated objectives to do any of them well.” Matthew Yglesias wrote in his Slow Boring newsletter that if promoting semiconductor manufacturing is an important national goal, then the administration should “act like it’s important and say that other causes need to fall by the wayside.” The blogger Noah Smith likewise bemoaned liberals’ “laundry list” habit of “inserting every goal into every project.” Senator Ted Cruz and a dozen of his Republican colleagues got in on the action too, blasting the administration in a letter for including “application requirements that are ancillary to accomplishing Congress’s stated goals or otherwise squander taxpayer dollars on social policy objectives.”

The argument that liberals inadvertently produce scarcity by entangling their own projects in a web of competing priorities is a central tenet of what’s become known as “abundance liberalism”—an emerging policy movement, of which Klein and Thompson are among its most prominent proponents. And in certain contexts, they are right. For instance, I’ve argued in these pages in favor of permitting reform to accelerate the building of clean-energy infrastructure, and elsewhere have endorsed using the Defense Production Act to bypass procedural barriers for important green projects.

But just as too many conditions can doom a project in some contexts, so can too few conditions spell doom in others. Indeed, despite all of the op-ed page consternation, the CHIPS Act’s everything-bagel conditions turned out to be a nothingburger. When stacked up against high-profile economic development failures of the recent past, the CHIPS Act shows that a little bit of everything-bagel liberalism is actually quite useful to crafting effective and politically sustainable industrial policy. When government is handing out vast sums of taxpayer dollars to private industry, the best and only way to achieve public ends is to put the right conditions on the money.

It’ll be years, of course, before we can know for certain whether Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act achieves its goal of rebuilding an internationally competitive advanced microprocessor fabrication industry on U.S. soil—and whether it can withstand Donald Trump’s vendetta against the “horrible” law enacted by his predecessor. But by many measures, the CHIPS Act is already achieving its aim of creating a domestic alternative to the existing geopolitically fraught Taiwanese-dominated semiconductor supply chain. The act’s semiconductor grants program wound up “vastly oversubscribed,” according to Biden’s commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo. The Department of Commerce received some 600 statements of interest from companies seeking to build semiconductor fabrication facilities (known colloquially as “fabs”) in the United States, collectively requesting $70 billion in funding—nearly double the amount available under the law. To take one prominent example, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) received a grant to create a new plant in Phoenix, which is now up and running and achieving chip production yields that outpace the company’s Taiwan plants—a key mark of success. In March, the company announced plans to more than double its investment in Arizona.

The administration’s supposed gauntlet of conditions held back very few suitors. In fact, many of the “extraneous” conditions were directly tied to significant industry needs. 

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson singled out the Biden administration’s funding preference for CHIPs Act applicants who “create equitable work force pathways for economically disadvantaged individuals,” including “building new pipelines for workers.” However, workforce development is a critical concern for semiconductor reshoring: The meager existing domestic chip industry in the U.S. means that the country has few skilled workers available to staff new fabs, posing a stark bottleneck for new investment. Indeed, in 2023, TSMC’s new fab in Phoenix was forced to delay production in part because of the shortage of skilled workers. 

Nonetheless, Klein and Thompson (along with many other critics) expressed particular dismay over the administration’s consideration of whether a CHIPS Act applicant would arrange for either onsite or local child care for its workers. Yet the industry itself seemed entirely nonplussed by this requirement. In an interview with Oren Cass of American Compass, Scott Gatzemeier, an executive at the semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technologies, explained, “What keeps me up at night [is] getting the workforce for these fabs and building the workforce for the future,” noting that his firm was actively exploring “nontraditional pathways [to] reach out and get more people coming in … At Micron, we’re building a daycare right across the street from our [Idaho] headquarters.” He added, “We’ve already purchased the land [at our coming] New York site to do that [too].” Semiconductor firms are providing perks like child care because it’s a smart strategic choice to attract and retain the skilled workers they need to succeed.

Klein and Thompson’s list of apparently dispensable funding preferences also included the administration’s encouragement of a “climate and environmental responsibility plan.” However, environmental impacts are hardly an abstract concern for chipmaking: Semiconductor manufacturing is a famously water-intensive process, with the typical fab consuming volumes of water each day equivalent to roughly 30,000 households’ usage. When Micron was deciding where to open its next production site, it ultimately chose Clay, New York, over Austin, Texas, in part because of central New York’s superior access to a reliable water supply. Indeed, as Micron explained in a 2024 financial filing, its “manufacturing and other operations in locations subject to natural occurrences and possible climate changes” could “result in increased costs, or disruptions to our manufacturing operations.” If anything, legitimate environmental concerns weren’t emphasized enough in the CHIPS application process, with TSMC opting to locate in notoriously water-constrained Arizona.

Abundance also made at least one notable omission from its list of Biden administration conditions for semiconductor firms. According to a 2023 New York Times report, Raimondo informed governors that the administration would favor applications from firms that had received state and local assurances “to have permitting sped through” normal review processes to expedite the construction of new fabs. That abundance-friendly funding criterion was reported by none other than Ezra Klein.

All of which makes the CHIPS Act an awkward poster child for everything-bagel liberalism run amok. Indeed, in fretting about condition overload, Klein and Thompson might well have their worries backward. To understand the value of industrial and economic policy with conditions, consider what such a policy without conditions looks like: the brief saga of Amazon in New York City.

In 2017, Amazon announced a nationwide competition to determine where it would build its second headquarters (“HQ2”). The competition prompted a stampede of nearly 240 cities applying to host the e-commerce giant, jockeying in a race to the bottom to offer the company billions in tax breaks and other public incentives. New Jersey and Maryland each reportedly offered a record $7 billion in incentives to the company. Within a year, Amazon announced that it would split the new headquarters into two locations: New York City and Arlington, Virginia. In New York, Amazon was set to receive $3 billion in state and city incentives for up to 8 million square feet of office space on the East River waterfront in Long Island City, Queens, replete with a private helipad for CEO Jeff Bezos.

Amazon’s new headquarters would have displaced a planned mixed-use neighborhood—including new apartments with affordable units—and a school lunch distribution center. For its part, the company pledged a handful of community benefits, including office space for tech start-ups, internships and résumé workshops, a new community school, and green space.

After negotiating the deal in secret, New York’s political leaders—Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Mayor Bill de Blasio—and Amazon appeared to expect a celebratory reception. But the surprise deal quickly provoked public outrage. Residents objected to the eye-popping tax breaks offered to one of the world’s richest companies, and the lack of transparency surrounding the deal—something Amazon had insisted on by making public negotiators sign nondisclosure agreements. Elected officials condemned the deal as diverting taxpayer funds to corporate welfare while pressing city issues like affordable housing and deteriorating public transit went unaddressed (and could be worsened by Amazon’s arrival). Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.” State Senator Michael Gianaris added, “If Amazon wants to come here, they should be talking about subsidizing Long Island City, not squeezing subsidies out of New York state or New York City.” Others saw behavior like Amazon’s anti-union history and its successful effort to kill a Seattle tax that would have funded affordable housing for homeless people as troubling red flags for the city’s future with the company.

By February 2019, the deal was dead. Amazon announced that it was pulling out of New York, and Virginia would be the sole location for HQ2. (Amazon was reportedly “upset at even [the] moderate level of resistance” it faced in New York.) The company made its decision shortly after the New York State Senate selected Gianaris, a vocal Amazon opponent, to sit on a state public authority board with the power to veto the deal absent unanimous approval. 

Some abundance-oriented commentators have pointed to this breaking point as an example of how vetocracy can stifle economic development. In Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—And How to Bring It Back, Marc Dunkelman concludes, “Whether or not Amazon’s proposal was worthwhile, no single state senator should have the authority to scuttle a deal of this magnitude on his own … In a nation desperate to build, progressivism’s imbalance had left the government unable to deliver.”

That may be so. But New York lawmakers took a different lesson from the HQ2 debacle. In 2021, state legislators set out to craft new economic development legislation to draw semiconductor manufacturers to New York—a state-level set of incentives separate from those being developed under the federal CHIPS Act around the same time. And lawmakers had the Amazon fracas front of mind: state Assemblyman Al Stirpe, one of the legislative sponsors of the New York bill, wanted to ensure that any financial incentives for chipmakers came with attached requirements to benefit the community at large. “There is a concern about the Amazon blowup from a year and a half ago in New York City,” Stirpe told reporters. “You want to make sure people who feel that way about incentives for corporations know that we’re very concerned about inclusivity and this project will benefit everybody.” 

In August 2022, New York enacted the Green CHIPS Act, which created a $10 billion fund to provide subsidies to chipmakers that moved to the state. To be eligible for funding, firms had to create at least 500 new jobs, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, provide workforce development opportunities for low-income New Yorkers, and pay prevailing wages for plant construction. “We thought if we were going to give a business an incentive, which is what they want, let’s get something that we want in terms of a sustainable project,” Stirpe said.

The Green CHIPS Act took the anti-Amazon approach. Successful economic development projects required socially beneficial terms and conditions in exchange for public subsidies to corporations. And where HQ2 liberalism failed, everything-bagel liberalism succeeded. In October 2022, on the heels of both the federal and state CHIPS laws, Micron announced its new $100 billion investment in central New York, a project that promises to transform the region.

The juxtaposition of these two approaches—no strings attached for Amazon on the one hand, and some strings attached for semiconductors on the other—is telling. When the government undertakes industrial policy, attaching smart conditions is an important, even essential, predicate for success for several reasons.

First, conditions can help secure industrial policy’s democratic legitimacy. New York’s Amazon deal met resistance because of the top-secret negotiations and because the HQ2 search process smacked of unseemly corporate power: a mega-company dictating development terms to the public, instead of the other way around. Conditions that alter firm behavior and ensure that a project advances important social purposes signal that the public is driving industrial policy, rather than letting the state acquiesce to corporate capture. 

Second, the federal government can set high national standards by employing conditional industrial policy. The design of the HQ2 competition played states and cities off of each other to up the subsidy ante for Amazon’s benefit. Because states are in competition with one another for any company’s business, big corporations can drive a bidding war. That’s less true at the national level. While the federal government has to worry about firms moving abroad, it’s still much easier for companies to move across state lines than national ones. That gives the federal government more bargaining power to add conditions consistent with community and coalitional values on subsidies to corporations. While New York was able to put a small number of conditions on its CHIPS bill, the federal government was able to demand far more from firms benefiting from its largesse.

Third, conditions can protect the government’s investment. Many of the CHIPS Act conditions simply reflected the government doing due diligence on potential grantees, ensuring that they were properly prepared to plan for workforce development, environmental sustainability, and other foreseeable issues that could otherwise squander federal funding. Conditions can also include corporate guardrails to make sure that federal subsidies are not siphoned off by shareholders, as the economists Lenore Palladino and Isabel Estevez have explained. Those guardrails can take the form of restrictions on share buybacks and shareholder payments, protections for workers, and public equity stakes. Protective conditions increase the government’s confidence that the investment will achieve its aims, thereby decreasing the risk that the investment fails and becomes right-wing fodder as another liberal wasteful boondoggle.

Other investment protections can seek to maximize the benefit of public subsidies for the American economy. For example, the clean vehicle tax credit under the Inflation Reduction Act included domestic content conditions requiring eligible automakers to substantially source key EV components from the United States or its free trade partners. This leveraged an industrial policy subsidy to spur additional domestic economic activity—in this instance, EV battery production and critical mineral development. In doing so, it also advanced national security priorities by creating a firewall to limit federal funds from indirectly subsidizing foreign supply chains in China.

And fourth, conditions distinguish industrial policy from mere corporate welfare by securing a direct public return on investment. Echoing criticisms of HQ2, in 2022 Senator Bernie Sanders condemned the not-yet-passed CHIPS Act as “corporate welfare,” saying that “taxpayer handout[s]” would go to “five companies [that] made $70 billion in profits last year.” While he supported industrial policy, Sanders said, “industrial policy to me means cooperation between the government and the private sector. Cooperation. It does not mean the government providing massive amounts of corporate welfare to profitable corporations without getting anything in return.” He demanded that CHIPS Act subsidies be limited to only those companies that “agree to issue warrants or equity stakes to the Federal Government. If private companies are going to benefit from generous taxpayer subsidies, the financial gains made by these companies must be shared with the American people, not just wealthy shareholders.” While stopping short of taking an equity stake in semiconductor firms, the Biden administration did impose an “upside sharing” requirement such that companies receiving funding under the CHIPS Act must share any profits achieved above a certain threshold with the federal government. 

Industrial policy that benefits private companies for a public purpose ought to yield direct public returns. As the economists Mariana Mazzucato and Dani Rodrik put it, “conditions create a healthy tension between public and private so that subsidies are part of a ‘deal’ rather than a blanket handout.” For instance, when the Mexican government sought to curb grocery inflation, it granted industry concessions by waiving import tariffs, freezing transportation fees, and relieving regulatory burdens—but on the condition that firms agree to consumer-facing price caps on food and essentials. Likewise, when the United States sought to expand health coverage through the Affordable Care Act, it subsidized the insurance industry—but insisted that insurers cover a stronger set of essential health benefits, offer plans to everyone regardless of preexisting conditions, and spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on actual care, among other requirements. Indeed, industrial policy with conditions bears some resemblance to utility regulation: Private firms that benefit from government protection or investment must in turn comply with special rules and requirements for the benefit of the public.

Klein and Thompson have a point that liberals need to pay as much attention to supply as they do to demand. But their prescriptions often only get us part of the way to actual abundance. With housing, exclusionary zoning and NIMBYism do constrain supply (including for public housing) in many high-growth areas. But those obstacles don’t explain why home construction never fully recovered from the 2008 housing crash. With clean energy, old green laws are slowing new green projects. But so are financing challenges, input bottlenecks, fickle market-sensitive private developers, and oppositional investor-owned utilities. Or take semiconductors: Regulatory and permitting processes do slow the build-out of new domestic fabs. But as TSMC showed, so do workforce constraints.

Abundance can be hampered by more than just government red tape. And securing abundance will require a pragmatic blend of catalyzed private power (whether through subsidization or regulatory reform) and directive public power (to ensure that the private sector doesn’t subvert or bungle public aims, or siphon off public dollars). 

“Everything-bagel liberalism”—industrial policy with conditions—provides that blend. The government provides the direction, but the private sector generates the output.

Policy makers must find a sweet spot where a project pencils out financially for the firm while the attached conditions hold water democratically for the public. No-strings-attached public money to corporations is generally not democratically viable or desirable. Yet a tangle of attached strings risks strangling a project for a firm. 

The question is not whether to do conditional industrial policy, but how much to do. How many conditions should be attached? And which ones? Maybe there’s a role for a new industrial policy agency that can get a stronger grasp of industry dynamics in order to better understand which conditions are valuable and which might be detrimental. The most obvious conditions to include are those that simply adopt an industry’s own best practices—like in the semiconductor context, proactive workforce development and environmental sustainability. And there’s also a strong democratic case for protective conditions that get something back for the public—like a share of profits, or a commitment to R&D investment—even though they might raise hackles from a firm’s shareholders.

The aim, according to Mazzucato and Rodrik, is to “maximize the public value of public investments.” Positive-sum industrial policy enhances the collective good, alleviating scarcity and want. The road to abundance is lined with everything bagels.

The post In Defense of Everything-Bagel Liberalism 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.

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.

The “Abundance” movement is catching fire among Democrats as an economic paradigm shift that could unleash prosperity and revive the Democratic Party’s brand. Its major focus is regulatory reforms to free up bottlenecks in the construction of new housing, infrastructure, and sources of energy. But is it enough? Washington Monthly Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris and Editor Nate Weisberg think not. On the latest episode of the Washington Monthly podcast, they share their critique with contributing editor Anne Kim.

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Below is a transcript lightly edited for readability:

Anne Kim: Hi Nate, hey Paul — great to have you both here.

Paul Glastris: Great to be here.

Nate Weisberg: Thanks for having us.

Anne Kim: You two have written quite a barn burner for the latest issue of the Washington Monthly. Your target is so-called “abundance liberalism” — a white-hot theory in Democratic circles championed by folks like The New York Times’ Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, who recently published a book called Abundance. For listeners who might not be following the latest intellectual trends on the progressive left, can you explain what abundance liberalism is?

Nate Weisberg: Sure. Klein and Thompson’s Abundance is just one of many recent works trying to diagnose why government struggles to deliver on big goals — in areas like housing, energy, and transportation. The core argument is that well-meaning regulations, whether federal or local, have unintentionally gotten in the way of building more housing, healthcare, clean energy, and so on. The problems vary by sector, but the through line is a critique of bureaucratic bottlenecks.

Anne Kim: Why has this critique gained traction now? Regulatory reform has been a focus of New Democrats for decades — think Clinton’s “reinventing government” push, or Obama’s OIRA under Cass Sunstein. What’s different now? Is it the packaging, the messengers, or something else?

Paul Glastris: Well, I’m not sure the broader left is actually that into it. This is more of an elite conversation—think tankers, donors, a few Democratic politicians looking for something fresh. There’s a sense that the party has a brand problem, and abundance liberalism seems to offer a policy-forward way to rebrand. But most voters have never heard of it. If you’re a loyal New York Times reader or follow Matt Yglesias on Substack, maybe you’re familiar. But it’s still pretty niche.

That said, the core idea is straightforward: government red tape is blocking progress on big goals—housing affordability, climate action, infrastructure. And they’re not wrong that bureaucracy and outdated rules can be a problem. But our argument is: even if you implemented every reform they propose, it wouldn’t come close to solving the problems they want to fix. There’s a lot more standing in the way—especially in the private sector—that they mostly ignore.

Anne Kim: You do credit them in your piece for being pragmatic and willing to challenge their own side. You write that they’re “centrist thinkers plotting a revival of liberalism through pragmatism and policy innovation,” which sounds pretty appealing. But you also argue that their theory of change is incomplete. What are they leaving out?

Nate Weisberg: One big omission is their framing of progressives as the main obstacle to clean energy. Yes, there are environmental laws that have slowed down projects, and some groups on the left oppose permitting reform if it means compromising on natural gas drilling. But the bigger idea that progressives are primarily to blame for blocking our green energy transition is ridiculous when you step back and think about it. Who’s really blocking our green energy transition? It’s the entire Republican Party, which is fundamentally opposed to a green economy. Trump is already punishing clean energy permits—and his party backs him all the way.

Paul Glastris: Exactly. Sure, some environmental rules need reform. And to their credit, most Democrats supported a permitting reform bill a few years ago. Republicans, by and large, didn’t. But more importantly, the biggest barriers to building, say, transmission lines aren’t activists or environmental reviews—they’re monopoly utilities and regional grid operators who don’t want competition from renewables. Their business model depends on burning fossil fuels and charging for it. That’s a huge structural problem—and you hear nothing about it from the abundance crowd.

Anne Kim: But you do share some goals with them, right? Both of you want the private sector to thrive. That pro-growth mindset isn’t something we always associate with the progressive left.

Paul Glastris: Definitely. We give them credit for rejecting the scarcity mindset that can dominate left-wing thinking. They’re optimistic about technology—desalination, lab-grown meat, renewable energy—and they’re right that abundance is possible. But our argument is: you don’t get there just by tweaking a few permitting rules. If we don’t address monopoly power and the ways private actors block progress, we’re not going to see the transformation they envision.

Anne Kim: I want to bring up Elon Musk and DOGE. Musk is the ultimate techno-libertarian—his project seems aimed at bulldozing government entirely. Do you think what he’s doing undermines the abundance liberal project? Is this what deregulation run amok looks like?

Nate Weisberg: It’s a good comparison point, but Klein and Thompson aren’t Musk-style libertarians at all. They actually believe in a strong, competent government. They want more capacity, not less—better state transportation departments, faster permitting turnarounds. But you’re right: their arguments about deregulation don’t really offer us much for responding to someone like Musk, who’s actively working to dismantle government capacity.

Paul Glastris: Yeah, a fair reading of the abundance literature shows they’re not anti-government. In fact, some of their best work is about improving public institutions. And they’d probably argue that government dysfunction helped create a vacuum that Musk is now exploiting. They’re not wrong. But here’s the issue: Musk isn’t just any private actor. He’s an oligarch. And when you have billionaires owning the platforms, shaping the media, and cozying up to authoritarian figures, it’s dangerous. If your policy agenda ignores this consolidation of power, you’re not engaging with the real stakes.

Nate Weisberg: And they really do ignore it. Whether it’s energy, housing, or transit, they just sort of skip over the role of monopoly actors. We’ve read all their stuff—and the silence on corporate concentration is striking. I think part of the reason is that they’re trying to build a big-tent coalition in the think tank world. There’s something in abundance liberalism for everyone: libertarians who like deregulation, centrists who want housing reform, even climate activists. But that means leaving out the neo-Brandeisians—folks like us at the Washington Monthly—who focus on market power and economic concentration.

Anne Kim: Let’s talk about housing. One of abundance liberalism’s big ideas is that local zoning laws—especially in blue cities like San Francisco and New York—are making housing unaffordable for the middle and working class. What’s your take on that?

Paul Glastris: It’s true that exclusionary zoning has made it hard to build. And the YIMBY movement—Yes In My Backyard—has been pushing to allow things like duplexes, fourplexes, accessory dwelling units. In some places, like Minneapolis and parts of California and Oregon, reforms have passed. But the data so far shows that these changes haven’t produced much housing. Why? Because there’s not a lot of demand for dense apartments in car-centric suburban neighborhoods.

What these reforms have created is backlash—people worried about property values. If the Democratic Party centers its economic message around abolishing single-family zoning, we’re going to be in the wilderness for decades.

Nate Weisberg: And the frustrating part is there are zoning reforms that work. Targeted upzoning around transit corridors—places with bus lines or metro stops—has led to real results: lower rents, less homelessness, more walkable urban communities.

Paul Glastris: And we’ve been calling for that kind of reform at the Washington Monthly for 15 years. So the abundance liberals are right to push for change—but their specific solutions range from vague to politically toxic.

Anne Kim: Paul, you worked as a speechwriter in the Clinton White House. Clinton was a master of political messaging. Do you think “abundance” is the right word for what Democrats should be trying to sell?

Paul Glastris: I’m not a messaging guru, but I do think the instinct is right. We need a story about growth and progress—something that offers hope without being naïve. But permitting reform and zoning tweaks? That’s not a compelling agenda. What we really need is a story about how monopolies are crushing competition and holding back entrepreneurs. We need policies that create more millionaires and fewer billionaires. That’s classic American stuff—spreading opportunity, promoting competition—and we’ve moved away from it.

Anne Kim: Paul, you and your colleagues wrote a series of essays at the start of the year outlining ideas that could form the backbone of a new progressive agenda. Could you walk us through a few of those—just to give listeners a sense of the kind of vision you’d like to see emerge over the next few years?

Paul Glastris: Sure. One straightforward idea is what we call “Medicare prices for all.” The basic premise is: require hospitals, doctors, and insurers to charge roughly what Medicare pays for any given procedure, office visit, or prescription. Right now, there’s no competitive market in healthcare. You’ve got these massive hospital systems that own the insurance companies, the labs, the doctor’s offices—they can charge whatever they want.

That system is broken. By bringing prices in line with Medicare, we could put thousands of dollars back into the pockets of average Americans. The savings would trickle down to workers, since employers could lower their healthcare contributions and redirect that money toward wages. It’s a win-win.

Another big idea: focus on the self-employed. Gig workers, contractors, Uber drivers—tens of millions of people. Somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of the workforce. It’s the fastest-growing segment, and it’s incredibly diverse—heavily women, heavily people of color. Yet neither party is speaking directly to them. They don’t get benefits, they’re taxed unfairly, and they’re often exploited by tech platforms. There’s a wide-open policy lane here, and whoever gets there first—Democrats or anti-Trump Republicans—has a huge opportunity.

Permitting reform? Sure, add it to the list. But it’s just one piece of a much larger puzzle.

Anne Kim: Yeah, that’s such an important point—especially about the shift away from the old employer-based benefits model, which really grew out of World War II. The tax system sort of locked it in with employer deductions, but the economy has changed. Work has changed. People don’t stay at one company for life anymore. But our regulatory structure hasn’t caught up at all.

Paul Glastris: Exactly. And to be honest, labor unions—which are an essential part of the Democratic coalition—haven’t quite adapted either. They’d often prefer that gig workers become traditional employees so they can be unionized. But many of these workers like their independence. They want flexibility, but they still need support—portable benefits, protections against exploitation, and a fair tax structure. There’s an entire agenda here, just waiting for someone to own it.

Nate Weisberg: And to make it worse, these workers pay more in taxes. Gig workers are hit with both the employer and employee sides of FICA payroll taxes—for Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, everything. That’s a huge burden. It’s a structural unfairness that hits precisely the group most in need of help. Fixing that would make a real difference and there’s a real opportunity there.

Paul Glastris: Democrats do have some wins to point to here, as well. Obamacare gave a lot of people in the gig economy access to health insurance they wouldn’t have had otherwise. But they need to build on that. There’s a story to tell—but also a lot of work to do.

Nate Weisberg: And again, abundance can be a useful frame. We agree with the aspiration: let’s have plenty of housing, energy, opportunity. But the question isn’t whether we want abundance. Of course we do. The question is: how do we get there?

Anne Kim: Right—nobody’s campaigning on scarcity. So what else would you like to see coming out of the center-left or the Democratic Party in the next few years? What’s the opportunity?

Paul Glastris: That’s a big question. We touch on it in the piece, but here’s how I see it: right now, we have a federal government that’s essentially attacking itself. It’s like an autoimmune disease. The capacity of agencies to do their jobs is being hollowed out—and a member of the tech oligarchy has been given free rein to slash and burn however he wants.

That’s not going to end well. One path is a slide toward illiberal democracy or soft authoritarianism. But the more immediate risk is catastrophic failure—millions of people not getting Social Security checks, a bird flu outbreak overwhelming a gutted CDC. We’ve got a piece in the next issue arguing that Guam could be the next Pearl Harbor if China decides to make a move on Taiwan.

Nate Weisberg: If Xi is listening to our President it wouldn’t be unreasonable for him to conclude that now is a perfect time to invade.

Paul Glastris: Exactly. We could see things happen in the next few years that really shatter the widespread assumption that we can just ignore government and trust the private sector. That crisis—if it comes—will be a chance for Democrats to step in and say, “Here’s the plan to rebuild.” And we’ve written that plan: invest in government capacity, hire competent public servants, and stop outsourcing everything to massive, unaccountable consulting firms.

Right now, a huge share of federal work is done by contractors—Musk is just the most visible example. But there are thousands more: big consulting firms billing billions, often with very little oversight. The civil service has been hollowed out. We no longer have the people, the skills, or the authority to manage these contractors effectively. That’s the root of a lot of what the abundance liberals blame on “process.” But it’s not process. It’s personnel.

We need to bring skilled people into government, give them real authority, and reduce our dependency on outside firms. And honestly, that’s a message that might start to resonate with voters—especially as things continue to break.

Anne Kim: Let’s just hope we don’t have to hit rock bottom before the rebuilding begins. Nate, Paul—thank you both so much for joining me.

Nate Weisberg: Thanks for having us.

Paul Glastris: This was great. Really smart questions—appreciate it.

Anne Kim: Take care.

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The post Ep. 13: The Hot (or Not) New Theory of “Abundance Liberalism” | w/ Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg appeared first on Washington Monthly.

If a conservative is a liberal who got mugged, what’s a liberal who got their Johnson & Johnson vaccine appointment canceled?

Two hours before my appointment for the J&J vaccine at my local New England Walmart, the store pharmacy called to say that my appointment was canceled. I’m hardly alone. The Food & Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control recommended pausing the use of J&J vaccines which have become the Instant Pot of innoculations since they are paragons of convenience, requiring only one dose. Almost 7 million Americans have gotten one of these just-once jabs. But after six cases of severe blood clots were identified in people (all women under 50) who received the J&J vaccine, leading to one death, public health officials formally urged a pause.

As a good liberal who appreciates the generally thankless work performed by government workers, my disappearing vaccine triggered a clash of emotions. I had selfish rage at having immunity delayed when it was tantalizingly close. I also had altruistic sympathy for the public health officials doing their best to balance risk amidst crises.

With bureaucratic decision-making comes second-guessing, and in the social media age, it is turbocharged. Twitter raged. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver. “6 cases out of 7 million people. What a disaster,” Silver opined. “This is going to get people killed. And it’s going to create more vaccine hesitancy. These people don’t understand cost-benefit analysis. They keep making mistakes by orders of magnitude.”

The New York Times’ Ezra Klein piled on: “If you’re going to pause J&J, go to first doses first of Pfizer and Moderna. Or since the clots were all in women, use J&J for men and Pfizer/Moderna for women. Do something to show you are as fearful of [the variant] B117 as adverse vaccine events.”

Such critiques resonate with my selfish rage side, which must be driven by some latent libertarian DNA in my Y-chromosomes. Why should the government be able to stop me from getting my J&J? (Never mind the fact that the government made the vaccine possible in the first place.)

But if our impatience ruled the day, who knows what junk would have ended up in our veins? Whatever vaccine hesitancy might be instigated by the J&J pause must pale in comparison to the communication nightmare we would suffer if we didn’t have rigorous public health officials willing to resist public pressures and exercise caution.

As is often the case, the single data point generating outrage—only “6 cases out of 7 million people”—doesn’t tell the whole story. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb (who now serves on the board of Pfizer) explained on CNBC Tuesday morning that public health officials are likely concerned “that they’re only seeing the severe [blood clot] cases, and they’re missing some of the more mild cases and by taking this action that’s going to elicit more reporting.” Remember, J&J vaccines weren’t available until six weeks ago, and the blood clots didn’t materialize until one to two weeks after the women received their shot. Scientists need more data to be able to determine if there is a connection between the vaccine and the clotting, and by calling attention to the issues, they will be getting more data.

A full suspension may not have been needed to identify more blood clot cases. But there was a related concern: how to treat these particular blood clot cases.

Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, told the press Tuesday that “if one administers the standard treatments, that we as doctors have learned to give for blood clots, one can actually cause tremendous harm, or the outcome can be fatal.” At the same briefing, the CDC’s deputy director Dr. Anne Schuchat said a pause in administering J&J vaccines was necessary, “so that there was time for the health care community to learn what they needed to learn about how to diagnose, treat and report.” If there is a connection between the J&J vaccine and the blood clots, then continued vaccination would not only create more clots, doctors would not have enough information to know how to save patients with clots from dying.

Still, the crude cost-benefit analyses loom. Will the number of people saved by learning how to treat vaccine-related blood clots be larger than the number of people who contract Covid-19 because they grew suspicious of all vaccines or had their vaccination delayed?

Vaccine distribution point man, Jeff Zients, reassured the White House press corps that there was now plenty of vaccines around, so there shouldn’t be too much inconvenience, especially since J&J only comprises about 5 percent of the shots given. Sure enough, later on Tuesday afternoon, I was able to schedule both doses of the Pfizer vaccine—one this week and one three weeks from now. Not bad!

However, the CDC considers one “fully vaccinated” two weeks after their final dose. So I will be fully vaccinated on May 21. I had received my J&J vaccine as initially scheduled, that day would have been April 27. How many people in a similar position as me will contract coronavirus between the time they would have been fully vaccinated via the one-shot J&J and the time they are now scheduled to receive their second dose of Pfizer or Moderna? I don’t know the answer, but I do know it’s not as simple as “follow the science.”

Government officials make choices where, no matter which course of action they take, some people die. And it can seem like the right course is to follow the logic of John Stuart Mill, or Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as he sacrifices himself: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

Yet there is room for Captain James T. Kirk’s reasoning in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: “The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.” Kirk was speaking of the importance of friendship. But the Biden administration likely is also looking beyond the raw body count in considering an additional ethical factor: in each vaccine scenario, who would be directly responsible for the deaths?

If people died of blood clots because the federal government encouraged the use of a vaccine with a known clotting risk, then the federal government would have been directly responsible. But if I get Covid-19 before May 21, it will be because I will have engaged in some form of risky activity in defiance of other government instructions regarding social distancing, mask wearing or hand sanitizing.

Nevertheless, if anyone who had been scheduled for the J&J vaccine dies, then the Biden administration will get horsewhipped, as it would if more vaccinated people die from blood clots. There is no risk-free political path.

That is why simplistic analyses of Biden’s overall governing strategy fail to capture the complexities of…governing.

In January, Klein wrote in The New York Times: “Great presidencies — and new political eras — are born of crises … A successful mass immunization campaign will save lives, supercharge the economy and allow us to hug our families and see our friends again. Few presidents, outside the worst of wartime, have entered office with as much opportunity to better people’s lives immediately through competent governance. Biden’s team understands that.”

But in a column last week, before the J&J pause, Klein fretted, “Are people dying because our coronavirus response is far too conservative?” (in the cautious sense, not the ideological sense.) He went to question Biden’s capacity for boldness: “…he’s said, repeatedly, that he doesn’t want to get ahead of the science. Unfortunately, science can’t tell you what it does not yet know, and the virus spreads faster than our knowledge. It’s the job of politicians to weigh the information we have and the possible benefits of experimentation, against society’s broader goals.”

In the case of the blood clot issue, the FDA and the CDC concluded they needed to know more before they could encourage more J&J jabs. Klein, in his Twitter thread, weighed the information differently. But there is no definitive right or wrong answer, and some faction of people will be displeased—and some people will become sick and die—whichever course is taken.

This is why a strategy to “better people’s lives immediately through competent governance” is hardly a foolproof political strategy, because competence, while obviously desirable, does not prevent grappling with governmental Sophie’s Choices and does not immunize governments from criticism when inherently imperfect and unsatisfying decisions have to be made.

The Trumpian disdain for expertise has its obvious flaws, but the one advantage is it keeps people’s expectations low. When you run on competence, people want governmental perfection, which is utopian and unattainable, or mere excellence, which is also tough.

So I’m going to shelve my initial anger, mask up, and wait another month. I’ll remind myself liberal government can inspire and deliver, yet at times it will inevitably disappoint. Pols aren’t perfect. Neither is Fauci. Still, let me kvetch. To paraphrase “Hamilton,” I can’t believe they’re giving away my shot.

The post My Johnson & Johnson Vaccination Was Canceled. How Mad Should I Be? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Late last week, Vice President Kamala Harris declared the hemorrhaging of women from the workforce as a result of the pandemic a “national emergency.” “In one year,” she said,  “the pandemic has put decades of the progress we have collectively made for women workers at risk.”

Of course, millions of women might say it’s been a national emergency all along. What else would you call balancing the demands of raising children, tending to elderly parents, and holding a job, let alone nurturing a career? Women routinely sacrifice wages and job opportunities due to family responsibilities. For instance, women are ten times more likely than men to take off work when a child is sick, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and a majority (60%) don’t get paid when they do. Only 17% of workers male or female had access to paid family leave in 2018, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though women feel the lack of that benefit most acutely. Pre-pandemic, six in ten working moms told the Pew Research Center that juggling work and family is “difficult.” The pandemic has since proved to be the breaking point, prompting 2.5 million women to drop out of the workforce altogether.

Unfortunately, many conservatives don’t seem to be feeling the urgency of the crisis.

The economic relief package proposed by President Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats would offer some much-needed relief to struggling families. It includes paid family leave and, most notably, a revolutionary expansion of the child tax credit to $3600 per child, delivered as a monthly “child allowance” so families need not wait until tax time for benefits. While a few conservatives have embraced these ideas – Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), for example, introduced his own child allowance plan — others have opposed them. Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), for instance, derided the child allowance as “welfare assistance” that would “undercut[…] the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.” The American Enterprise Institute’s Scott Winship recently told the New York Times’ Ezra Klein that “he just doesn’t believe it’s the government’s role to subsidize parenting.”

But government already provides plenty of subsidies to parents – so long as they’re middle or even upper class. The Child and Dependent Care Credit, for example, offers families up to $3,000 in benefits to cover child care costs (including nannies and housekeepers). According to the Tax Policy Center, the bulk of the benefits flow to families in the top two income quintiles, while those in the bottom fifth don’t benefit at all.

There are other perks to affluence: Middle-income and wealthy families disproportionately benefit from tax breaks for education expenses, including tax-preferred education savings accounts, 529 accounts, and education tax credits. The federal deduction for state and local property taxes and the home mortgage interest deduction also arguably support middle-class families with children by subsidizing the cost of buying houses in neighborhoods with better schools. Biden’s proposed child allowance makes explicit what’s long been implicit and extends those benefits to low-income families as well as the middle class.

As for the argument that the benefit would discourage work, it’s hard to see how a few hundred dollars – given the expense of raising a child – would induce a parent to quit a job and sit on the couch. The better way to think of a child allowance is as a wage subsidy for parents without livable earnings.

Conservative objections to the child allowance ultimately boil down to this: A refusal to acknowledge that the work of raising a child – especially a poor child – is real work that is worthy of recompense. While Sens. Lee and Rubio fret that a bigger child credit would discourage paid work, they refuse to see that it compensates mothers for the unpaid child care they already provide. Caregiving – already devalued as “women’s work” – becomes cause for punishment when it’s poor women who are performing it on behalf of poor children.

Conservatives have been heartless in their insistence on “work requirements” – which they see as mandatory not only for cash assistance programs such as welfare, which has some logic, but for food stamps and Medicaid, which is not only burdensome but laughably impractical. Work, then eat!

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the loudest opponents of the child allowance in Congress are (wait for it) white men, albeit Romney, with his five children and 25 grandchildren, is driving much of the discussion.

Still, the sad truth is that many men’s current lived experiences end up calcified in policy. Men still don’t do much of the caregiving work in the United States. To no one’s surprise, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) finds that women in the U.S. spend an average of four hours a day on unpaid labor around the home – about twice that of men. And because women perform so much of this work, economic statistics ignore this enormous contribution. The value of all this unpaid care, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, was as high as $3.2 trillion – or 20 percent of GDP – in 2012.

Fathers rarely make the sacrifices that women do. Women are often penalized with lower wages and less work outside the home once they have children, while men who become dads often enjoy a “fatherhood premium” on their wages of between 6% and 13%.

Allowing conservatives to cloak their objections in the language of “work” is an insult to all parents and to mothers in particular.  The irony is, of course, that men would benefit from a child allowance just like women and children would. You can’t help but wonder:  Had the child allowance been framed as a “fatherhood credit” to recognize men’s household contributions and encourage “responsible fatherhood,” would we be seeing the same objections and having the same debate?

The post The Phony Conservative Attacks on Child Credits appeared first on Washington Monthly.