The biggest question facing democracies worldwide today is what has led voters to support authoritarian politicians and parties. Is it economic anxiety? Cultural factors, such as trans rights, immigration, or race? Failing institutions, including traditional political parties? Or the behavior of aggressively anti-democratic politicians themselves? Obviously, all these elements matter to some extent. But which, if any, is the driving force? Without an answer, it is hard for liberal parties and politicians to know precisely what to prioritize in their fight to defend democracy and the rules-based international order.  

In a recent book, The Backsliders, Susan Stokes, the University of Chicago political scientist, provides an answer. She and her colleagues analyzed the growth of illiberalism in 22 countries from the end of the 20th century through to 2020, ranging from Hungary, Serbia, and Poland to the Philippines, Turkey, and the United States. They tested against a range of possible drivers of democratic erosion. Ultimately, Stokes finds that economic inequality within a country is the key variable. “The statistical association between inequality and erosion was very robust,” Stokes writes. “Try as we might, we had difficulty getting rid of the statistical result.” 

Now, maybe you don’t trust the regression analyses of some academic you’ve never heard of to guide electoral strategy. But over the last year plus, we’ve had a real-world test of that hypothesis. In 2024, as inflation eroded the living standards of middle- and working-class families worldwide, every incumbent party in every developed country that held elections lost vote share, marking the first time this had ever happened.  

In the United States, Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris, promising to overthrow the old order with far-reaching policies—including steep tariffs and a crackdown on illegal immigration—billed as solutions to declining wages and manufacturing jobs. Just as he did in his successful 2016 presidential campaign, Trump won the sympathies of vast numbers of voters in the bottom 60 percent of the income bracket who for decades have seen their living standards stagnate or decline, even as the balance sheets and lifestyles of the top 20 percent have soared. Many of these vulnerable voters think God sent Trump to save them, and they would walk over a cliff for him, believing they are flying until the moment they hit the ground. Millions of others, however, don’t much like Trump, are fully aware that he is a crook and a wannabe dictator, but voted for him anyway, hoping he would shake things up and provide some economic relief. 

This first year of Trump 2.0 is not yet over, but there is already mounting evidence of buyer’s remorse. The president’s job approval ratings have been underwater since March. By even greater margins, voters now hate his tariffs, military deployments to blue cities, cuts to federal medical research, and, most of all, his handling of the economy.  

Sure enough, on Tuesday, November 4, Democratic Party candidates running against Trump’s policies and actions, and laser-focused on affordability, swept off-year elections across the country, in both blue and red states.  

The most celebrated of those outcomes, especially in the international press, was Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City. An immigrant Muslim who proudly identifies as a democratic socialist, Mamdani ran on a bold platform to make the city more affordable, featuring free buses, publicly run grocery stores, and lower fees for small businesses. His victory has been widely interpreted as an indication that the Democratic Party is shifting, or at least should shift, strongly to the left.  

That is a misreading of the election results.  

More telling were the elections for the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. In both cases, the winners were women with strong national security backgrounds—Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA analyst in Virginia, and Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot in New Jersey. Both candidates are widely seen as and identify as political moderates. Both won by double-digit margins far beyond what most polls had anticipated.  

States, of course, have more politically diverse voter bases than cities, which tend to be far more liberal. But even at the city level, Mamdani’s victory seems more of an outlier than a trend. Consider Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd was killed in 2020 and where “defund the police” became a national rallying cry for young progressives. Voters in Minneapolis are at least as left-leaning as those in New York City. Yet this month, another Muslim socialist candidate, Omar Fateh, lost to the mainstream liberal incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey. Frey won a third term on a record of reducing crime by putting more police on the streets and orchestrating a home-building renaissance that has kept a check on rent in that city. 

This month’s elections, in other words, were more a victory for the moderate wing of the Democratic Party than for the left. But it is crucial to understand the policies these moderate Democrats are advancing. Yes, as a rule, they oppose defunding the police, loosening borders, and elevating identity politics and climate change above all other concerns. At the same time, however, they cut a different path on economic issues. Unlike centrist Democrats of the recent past, who openly sided with and represented the interests of large corporations and Wall Street financiers, today’s Democratic moderates are quick to side with hard-pressed citizens against corporations using excessive market power to exploit them.  

In her campaign, New Jersey Governor-Elect Sherrill promised to freeze electricity rates, which have skyrocketed; challenge grid operators controlled by investor-owned monopoly utilities; prosecute price gouging by food companies; and take on private equity firms that buy up housing and jack up rents. Virginia Governor-Elect Spanberger vowed to lower energy costs by making data centers “pay their own way” and to target pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen who inflate prescription drug costs. 

Washington Monthly editor Nate Weisberg has given Democrats like these a label: “populist moderates”. They are in many ways invading Trump’s populist territory while framing him as an ally of the mega-rich whose policies are devastating average people. Sherrill, for instance, lashed out at Trump’s tariffs, especially on Canada, as “massive tax hikes on New Jersey families” and at his tax cuts for “billionaires like Elon Musk” coming at the expense of working families. 

This populist-moderate movement in the Democratic Party is just emerging. But I think it is the future.  

That doesn’t mean that the upwelling of support, especially among young people, for democratic socialists like New York City Mayor-Elect Mamdani, isn’t also real. It is. Mamdani is a gifted politician who communicated an ambitious affordability policy agenda that resonated with a majority of New York voters. He and like-minded democratic socialists will be formidable competitors for attention and votes within the party. If the U.S. had a parliamentary system, politicians like Mamdani, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would form their own party.  

But at present, there is an overlap between these two factions around populist economics. Each side will need the other to build a broad and durable majority that will put America on the path of democracy, the rule of law, and responsible leadership in international affairs.  

Alas, we have a long way to go between now and then. Barring unforeseen circumstances, Donald Trump will be in the White House until 2029. What can America’s traditional allies in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere expect from Trump in the next three years? And what hope should they have that American rivals will check his worst instincts and behaviors? Of course, no one knows the answer, but here are some facts to consider. 

For at least the next year, and possibly the next three, the place where the most effective challenge to Trump will happen will not be Washington, but states controlled by Democrats. We are already seeing that happen—for instance, with blue states matching red ones in congressional redistricting. States in our system exercise significant sovereign power. Political leaders in Canada and Europe would be wise to find creative ways to short-circuit Washington and partner directly with states in international fora that Trump has abandoned or denigrated. For instance, as my Washington Monthly colleague Markos Kounalakis has written, why not bring California into the G7 and other international bodies? 

Our democratic allies in other countries should also pay attention to which independent organizations in America have resisted the Trump administration’s aggressions and which have caved. The latter category includes large corporations, especially those that require something—such as merger permission or tariff relief—from the federal government. The higher education sector, by contrast, has been far more steadfast overall. In the face of massive cuts to federal research dollars and threats of further reductions to come, a few universities, such as Columbia, initially bowed to the administration’s demands that they adopt conservative priorities in hiring and curricula. But the vast majority have refused, and some, like Harvard and UCLA, have sued and won court rulings that the administration’s tactics are unconstitutional.  

Why have universities acted resolutely and corporations like quislings? The answer is that university leaders are under immense pressure from powerful constituencies — students, faculty, university senates, and alumni — to stand their ground. In contrast, corporate leaders answer to institutional shareholders who demand the opposite. Elected officials in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere are torn between the competing demands of their voters for defiance, their corporations for compromise, and their own fears of losing the American security umbrella. Their strategies for dealing with Trump have consequently been muddled. At some point, they are going to have to choose. 

If left to his own devices, we can expect Trump to continue using tariffs as an all-purpose Veg-O-Matic, the tool he thinks can solve all problems. Fortunately for our trading partners, the Supreme Court may ultimately do what submissive Republicans in Congress have failed to do: insist that only Congress, not the president, has the constitutional power to levy tariffs.  

On Ukraine, there is no reason to expect Trump to change course. He will always side with Vladimir Putin. Ignore his words, look at his deeds. His supposedly tough new sanctions on Russian oil have had little discernible effect so far, and he is already exempting countries like Hungary from them. Despite “plans” to allow NATO countries to buy and ship U.S. weapons to Ukraine, so far not one American bullet has flowed to Ukraine that wasn’t already approved by the Biden administration. 

On his new policy of sinking alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, understand it for what it is: Performative machismo meant to cover his steady, unwise, and cowardly disengagement from our allies across the Atlantic and the Pacific. 

Should Democrats retake the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections (a high likelihood) or even the Senate (a low probability), they can throw sand in Trump’s gears. But on foreign policy matters like these, U.S. presidents traditionally have wide latitude. U.S. policy will change only when a different president sits in the Oval Office, one who believes in the small-d democratic tradition, in the vital importance of allies, and in a rule-of-law-based international order.  

But that will only happen if a broad majority of American voters can be convinced to support it. The only path to that majority, in my opinion, is for the Democratic Party to pursue policies that markedly improve the economic circumstances of the least-affluent 60 percent of the American public. Such policies will need to be far more thoroughgoing than the moderate wing of the Democratic Party has hitherto been comfortable with, and far more intelligent and pragmatic than the left wing of the party has hitherto chosen to support. But if both sides can come together around such a policy vision, and bring some disillusioned Republicans along with them, I think we have a good chance of getting out of this mess. 

This essay is adapted from a speech Glastris gave at the Transatlantic Legislators’ Liberty Dialog in Toronto, Canada, on November 14, 2025. 

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If you think that elections are won by vibes, not vision, the latest issue of the Washington Monthly, out today, is not for you. If you’re of the opinion that resisting the Trump administration’s growing authoritarianism should be the overwhelming focus of liberals’ attention and that policy debates are a sideshow at best, this issue of the magazine will try your patience. If you’re sure that Trump will not allow fair elections in the future, this issue of our publication will seem naive. If you’ve concluded that rural and working-class voters are so lost in the fever swamps of conspiracy and resentment that there is nothing the Democratic Party can reasonably do to win them back, this issue will frustrate you. If you believe that Democrats already have the right policy ideas and just need stronger messaging, or a better messenger, then I can suggest some other media outlets that will better suit your inclinations.

The Washington Monthly was founded on the belief that good policy makes good politics—not in every case or every election, but generally and over the long term. We also believe that the flip side is true: Parties that pursue policies that screw average Americans eventually pay a price. Three days after last November’s election, when many of my liberal friends were still so shell-shocked they could barely get out of bed, I wrote that Donald Trump and his MAGA colleagues would make moves that would “horrify the same public that elected them,” and that “the role of this magazine is to get the American people ready with ideas they can use when the opportunity arises.” 

Weeks later we published an entire print issue devoted to “Ten Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself.” These included having government set prices in the highly consolidated commercial health care market to control soaring costs; providing the growing ranks of the self-employed with portable benefits and relief from monopoly predation; creating a new deal between Washington and universities to make tuition free for moderate-income students; and making ICE raids unnecessary by combining tough restraints on companies that hire undocumented migrants with generous opportunities for those migrants to become legal. 

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In subsequent weeks and months, in print and online, we proposed bringing back “regulated competition” in the airline industry to spur innovation and lower costs to travelers in “flyover” parts of the country. We called for stronger antitrust enforcement to combat corporate “greedflation” in consumer-facing industries from food to financial services. And we took the measure, respectfully but critically, of the new policy ideas being promoted by our friends in the “abundance liberal” movement to address the housing and climate crises by cutting red tape and regulations. 

This latest issue adds more new weapons to our arsenal. Phillip Longman and Gillen Tener Martin offer a creative plan to save Social Security—the solvency of which has been made worse by Trump’s tax and immigration policies—that avoids raising taxes on average Americans, boosts benefits to retirees who need it, and promotes a healthier and more productive America. Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that by exacerbating the suffering of rural Americans with tariffs and health care cuts, Trump is creating the same conditions that allowed FDR and Barack Obama to win substantial numbers of rural votes. Zach Marcus makes the case that instead of fighting MAGA in today’s poisonous digital political ecosystem, Democrats should challenge that environment as the root cause of our dysfunctional politics, and vow to be the party that cleans it up. And a group of writers lays out a post-Trump industrial policy for America that incorporates positive aspects of the administration’s approach while rejecting what’s insane. 

This first year of Trump 2.0 is not yet over, but there is already mounting evidence that the public is indeed horrified by most of what the president is doing. His job approval ratings have been steadily underwater since March, and by even greater margins voters hate his tariffs, military deployments to blue cities, cuts to federal medical research, and overall handling of the economy. Meanwhile other recent surveys show strong and broad voter support for policies that take on corporate pricing power of the kind the Monthly has been proposing—with one finding that voters prefer cracking down on corporate price gouging over abundance liberal policy prescriptions by a two-to-one margin. 

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Of course, polls also show that the Democratic Party brand is at least as toxic as the GOP’s. The reason isn’t “messaging” but policy: For decades both parties have presided over a government that consigned the least-affluent 60 percent of Americans to grinding downward mobility. Trump is president because he promised to help those folks by overthrowing the old order with far-reaching, if ill-advised, policies. If (when) he fails, Democrats can win, and possibly win big, but only if they adopt new, equally far-reaching, but smarter policies truly geared toward uplifting that neglected 60 percent. 

If you agree—that Democrats need smart new ideas to win, and they can find them at the Washington Monthly—there’s something you can do to help: Donate to our Fall fundraising drive, which we’re kicking off today. Do it now. Give whatever you can—$25, $50, $100, $1,000. 

Because we’re a nonprofit, we can’t do our work without your support. It also means that your donation is tax-deductible. As a token of our gratitude, if you give $50 or more, we’ll send you a one-year subscription to the print edition of the  Monthly. 

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Last week, U.S. Special Operations forces launched deadly strikes against two vessels in the Eastern Pacific off the coast of Colombia. The attacks, against what the Trump administration claimed were narcotics traffickers, represent an expansion of an aggressive new campaign the administration began in early September that had been limited to boats in the Caribbean near Venezuela.  

Efforts led by Senate Democrats to block the administration’s unauthorized military actions have themselves been blocked by Republican lawmakers. A broad range of experts in military use of force, including former George W. Bush justice official John “torture memos” Yoo, have said the strikes are illegal because the military is barred from targeting civilians not engaged in hostilities toward the United States, even if they are criminals. Previous administrations had dealt with drug trafficking vessels by boarding them, arresting their crews, and confiscating their contraband—actions that are permitted under international law.  

What exactly is the Trump administration’s goal with this deadly new policy? What are the risks and the chances of success? To learn more, I spoke with a source who has had a decades-long career in the U.S. defense and the intelligence community, serving both in and out of government. The source requested anonymity to speak freely. The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.  

What do you think of these latest strikes in the Eastern Pacific? 

This is a significant escalation of this whole campaign of theirs. It’s unclear why they’re doing it. When it was limited to the Caribbean, I thought it was a pretext for military action against Venezuela. It wasn’t clear to me why they were doing that either, by the way. Maduro didn’t seem to bother Trump during his first administration. Why’s he bothering him in the second one? Payback for all the migrants? I don’t know. But at least we have a history of starting wars on pretexts that didn’t hold water. So, this would be in that tradition. 

But now, going after shipping in the Eastern Pacific, where Venezuela doesn’t have a coastline, but Colombia does, it’s clearly not just a Venezuela thing.  

On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the redeployment of a Navy aircraft carrier battle group from the Mediterranean to waters off the coast of Latin America to aid in this drug interdiction effort. What does that tell you? 

At a strategic level, it looks like Hegseth is beginning implementation of the new national defense strategy, which has not been publicly released, but its contents and thrust are starting to leak to the defense press. It basically codifies our policy of appeasing Russia and telling the Europeans you’re on your own—which I think everyone has seen for a while. Most people just attributed it to Trump’s unrequited love affair with Putin. But apparently, what is new in this strategy is that we’re now abandoning all our Asian allies as well. Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, Australia—sounds like you guys are now on your own, and we’re going to retrench from the Pacific. The fig leaf, at least that I’ve heard, is, well, we’ll still be focused on countering China, but on their presence in Latin America. But the Chinese presence in Latin America is through trade, commerce, foreign aid, and diplomacy. It really has nothing to do with the military. China does not pose any military threat to the continental United States or to any nation in this hemisphere. So that’s a very thin fig leaf that you’re using to cover up your military retreat from both your allies in the East and your allies in the West. 

Well, the threat Hegseth identifies in Latin America is what he calls “narco-terrorism.” 

Calling these guys narco-terrorists is clearly perverting the definitions of terrorism and narco-trafficking to get around legal restrictions. These traffickers are criminals. They’re not terrorists. They’re not trying to overthrow the United States government. They have no ideology or religious purpose. They’re not enemy combatants. They’re not enemy soldiers. They’re not enemies of anything. They’re common criminals.  

The official reason given by the president and the defense secretary is to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. 

Yes, I understand that. But there are big holes in their story. Trump claimed the boats we sunk off the Venezuelan coast were carrying fentanyl to the United States. But the fentanyl we get doesn’t come by ship or from Venezuela, but by land from Mexico, from precursors made in China. And the drugs that do get trafficked along the Venezuelan coast are mostly headed to Europe.  

We do get a lot of cocaine from Colombia, and some of that comes by boat, right?  

Yes, but if they’re genuinely thinking they’re going to impact the flow of cocaine in the United States by doing this, they are sadly mistaken. 

Why is that? 

Because we have decades of history telling us this, the Defense Department has been in the anti-narcotics business since Congress directed it to be the lead agency in the 1989 Defense Authorization Act. At the time, the Pentagon had many good reasons for not wanting to do that job. But it now has 35 years of experience in drug interdiction and 35 years of data on drug trafficking. The U.S. Southern Command conducts its Caribbean counternarcotics operations out of the Joint Interagency Task Force—South (JIATF-S) in Key West, Florida. Years of data on the routes and conveyances that drug traffickers use—by airplane, by go-fast boat, by fishing boat, by land, and by smuggling in commercial maritime shipping containers. There are thousands and thousands of records of radar tracks and other interdiction events. And what we know from our history is that traffickers are very smart and patient. If you deny them or raise the costs of smuggling drugs in a certain way, they’ll back off that for a while and do other things.  

They have a hierarchy of preferences for how they move drugs. We know that because when they first started transporting cocaine into the United States, there were no defenses whatsoever, and so what they did was fly it from northern Colombia right into Dade County, Florida. It makes sense because with general aviation aircraft, they always have the drugs in their possession. They’re not relinquishing control of them. And these flights take only a few hours, so your risk of interdiction is low. So that’s their preferred mode, and everything after that is just a cascade of less optimal conveyances they will use if denied ones that are preferable.  

If you look at the history of Colombian cocaine trafficking, you can literally watch it ebb and flow for three decades based on what we’re doing. When we pushed them out of general aviation into South Florida, they started flying into the Bahamas and other Caribbean nations. When we pushed them out of the air there, they started flying, working their way up into Mexico, and then using maritime. Maritime takes longer, so they prefer not to do it. As for smuggling in commercial maritime containers, it can take days, and it’s stuck in the port of Miami, the port of Baltimore, or God knows where. So, they really don’t like using that way, but they can.  

They went to Mexico as one of their last resorts because they basically split their drug loads in half with the Mexican drug trafficking organizations. Once it gets into Mexico, you have all your underground tunnels.  

It’s an endless game of cat and mouse. It’s been going on for years. Anyone with any history of how the counterdrug interdiction works will tell you this is how it goes. And obviously, we’re still flooded with cocaine, and now we’re flooded with fentanyl. So, by definition, it hasn’t worked. And we have thrown the kitchen sink at it over the years, with extensive use of Air Force AWACs aircraft, Navy P-3s upgraded with high-tech surveillance sensors, an armada of surface vessels, Over-the-Horizon radars which can monitor the entire Caribbean and portions of South America, all of it. DOD has probably spent between $20-$30 billion on this effort. And for what? Ever hear of a shortage of cocaine in one of America’s cities or towns? Unlikely.  

But can’t the Trump administration say we’ve operated with one hand tied behind our backs for all these years by observing international law, and it hasn’t worked, so now we’re going to try this more aggressive approach? 

Sure, they can say that. But you need to weigh the chances of success against the risks. I think the chances of success are basically zero, for the reasons I’ve said. The traffickers use all the conveyances—by air, sea, land—all the time, and they just flex and move based upon what we’re doing. If you blow a few boats out of the water, they will back off that tactic and do something else for a while. They track our assets very, very carefully.  

For instance, across the Southwest border and in places on the East Coast and in the Caribbean, we have a whole string of ground-based aerostats. These are like big, tethered blimps that float a few thousand feet in the air. They typically have radars or other sensors on them. They are costly as hell, and the traffickers simply monitor when they are up or down—and they are down a lot for maintenance, bad weather, and so on. When they see our aerostats are down or when they see our ships are out of the area, they’ll just go back to what they were doing.  

So, you’re justifying this whole operation by stopping the wrong drug coming from the wrong place, using methods that are outside international law, and that years of history will tell you are destined not to work. So why don’t you look back at some of that history before you blast boats out of the water? 

Won’t bringing in this aircraft carrier group help? 

It’s precisely the wrong instrument to use for these kinds of counterdrug purposes. It’s enormously expensive. You’ve already demonstrated you have plenty of capability to identify and strike these boats. Most likely, they’re using MQ-9 Reaper drones to take them out. That’s a far cheaper way to do things than a carrier battle group intended to fight wars and deter strategic enemies. It’s like grabbing for a sledgehammer when you just need a screwdriver 

Is it possible that these are the first steps of a major new military operation the Trump administration has in mind to go directly after the drug lords, regardless of what the governments of these countries say? 

We’ve had U.S. military participation in counterdrug operations on a cooperative basis with countries in Central and South America literally for decades. You’ve had Marines in Peru doing riverine operations. You’ve had special forces in Colombia and Bolivia on training missions. The Air Force has had ground-based radars in Colombia and Peru. Our Navy has extensive exchanges with its counterparts. So, there’s nothing new about the U.S. military participating and helping host nations counter drug activities. Its utility over time was obviously very limited, or we wouldn’t be where we are today. But it was always with the cooperation of these countries.  

So, if we’re going to embark on something without their cooperation and not at their invitation, then obviously, one could consider that an act of war and an invasion. And it’s hard for me to imagine you’ll be much more effective when you’re going in there over the opposition of the government than you were when you were there at their invitation.  

Short of U.S. troops getting killed in an anti-drug quagmire in Latin America, which is obviously speculative, what are the risks of the policy we’re already seeing? 

A couple of things. Of course, if you keep attacking boats, you will eventually hit the wrong vessel; it is just a question of time. You will get bad intel, or someone will make a mistake in targeting, etc. These are human acts, and humans make mistakes. That is a certainty. 

But that’s actually not the thing I’m most concerned about. What most concerns me is the complete disregard for law and international law and the total erosion and corruption of these terms, the terrorists and the narco-traffickers. Those things are really important because terms and the legal status associated with them establish how business is done throughout the world. And if we can just disregard it any time we want, then so can everybody else.  

That’s why the Pentagon really does not like the idea of shooting down civilian aircraft, because the joint staff would say, Who do you think has the most civilian aircraft in the world? We do. The United States does. So, we are the most at risk when we move to a system where we say we can ignore all international bans, international laws, and international definitions of who is a terrorist and who is an enemy combatant, because it invites everybody else to do that. Hey, I don’t like that person. I just whacked them. Yeah, that was a narco-terrorist. Wow, really?  

Lastly, with the news reporting that the administration has now conducted more than ten of these strikes, I have another worry, and that is this: the Full Motion Video (FMV) clips of these attacks can be exhilarating and addictive (no pun intended). Each strike compels the next. Pretty soon, the hunt is on; we turn on the TV to see if there were any new strikes today. The strikes become an end in themselves. Over time, we lose sight of the fact that these strikes are illegal and are destined to fail to impact illegal drug flow. The only ones being diminished are ourselves.  

The post Sinking Boats Off Venezuela, Colombia. What Could Go Wrong? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Early Wednesday morning, approximately a dozen Russian drones entered the airspace over eastern Poland. Most or all were shot down by Polish and Dutch fighter jets with assistance from German and Italian air defense systems. “It was the first time in the history of NATO that alliance fighters had engaged enemy targets in allied airspace,” reported The New York Times.

The Russians have so far given inconsistent answers to questions about the incursion—saying alternatively that it was an accident and that there is no proof it happened. Donald Trump responded, somewhat inscrutably, on social media “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!” 

Why would Russia have made such a provocative move? What might it mean for Western security? I had a phone conversation about this with a source who has had a decades-long career in the U.S. military and the intelligence community, serving both in and out of government. The source requested anonymity to speak freely. The following Q&A has been edited for clarity. 

What was your immediate reaction to this news?

It’s initial reporting. More information will certainly come out over time. But two things caught my attention. First, the dozen or so drones were launched amidst 450 others that were attacking Ukraine, which is a relatively limited number. Second, this isn’t the first time it’s happened. A few crossed into Poland last week. 

Is there a chance we’ve been doing the same to Russia?

I don’t think so. We typically will approach a country’s airspace and then fly parallel along it but not enter it. Also, we typically fly aircraft loaded with SIGNIT (signal intelligence) and other electronic collectors.  We can collect a lot without violating airspace. In a war time scenario like you see with Russia and Ukraine, we are typically even more restrained, we don’t want to trigger a direct confrontation.

Why do you think Russia is doing this?

This is just classic Russian behavior.  A little probing, looking for a reaction.  It’s part of their campaign to see how far they could push the Poles. Can they violate their airspace with impunity? Or are the Poles going to do something, and if so, what? It’s an opportunity for the Russians to gather intel. Which forces reacted? How quickly? From which air bases? What kind of radars light up? It’s useful information to have in case someday you have a future attack. 

What do you make of how the Poles reacted?

They reacted appropriately. The involvement of the Dutch Air Force was key. It immediately signals back to the Russia “we’re not taking this, it’s serious business, it’s a NATO violation.” The Russians were trying to figure out, would this prompt a NATO response, just a Polish response, or no response at all? They just found out they got a full NATO response—which, in that time frame, with things happening so fast, is impressive. 

What do you make of the U.S. response so far?

A typical C minus out of Donald Trump. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s ambivalent about NATO. He doesn’t have a functioning State Department, NSC, or anything else to advise him. So, he’s shooting from the hip and failing to strongly condemn Russia’s actions. Any previous U.S. president would have said that this was unacceptable aggression, and we stand by Poland. We obviously didn’t get that out of Trump. The Europeans are showing they’re serious about defending NATO. And in the United States, you have the waffler-in-chief. This is all helpful to the Russians.

What do you think comes next?

The ball is in Russia’s court. They got a serious message in response to their incursion. I personally would expect them to lay off for a while, and maybe in a month or six weeks, do it again.

I don’t think they want to go to a war with Poland. They’re not even winning the war they started in Ukraine. In fact, the Ukrainians are getting increasingly proficient at degrading Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure, which basically underwrites the whole Russian economy.  

What Russia is doing is throwing their weight around and seeing what’s going to happen, looking for fissures and cracks, seeing how NATO reacts—and again, kudos to the Poles and the Dutch and in a very strong NATO response. But Moscow got out of the TACO what you’d expect they’d get out of the TACO. 

The danger is that they are really escalating this. For all these decades of the Cold War, both sides were always somewhat restrained with each other. The fear was that things could spiral out of control, and you can have an accident that leads to basically unintended consequences. So, Poland and other Europeans are now telling the Russians, if you do this, you’re going to get a strong response, and you saw it. And is that really what you want to be doing? 

Is it possible that we’ll look back on this and see that Putin made a tactical error here, that the effect of this probe was to put more of a fear of God into the population of Europe and make it easier for its leaders to increase their defense spending?

The European public is already afraid, but this just reinforces it. The Europeans collectively totally have Putin’s number, unlike our president. They are already throwing money at their defense as fast as they can. This is just one more “I told you so,” or one more piece of evidence for EU leaders who are calling for a stronger response to Russia. So, in that sense, that was not a good move by Russia. You helped steel the resolve of the Europeans. 

The post Putin Goes There appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Berea College’s no-tuition model, minimal student debt, and commitment to opportunity have propelled the small Kentucky school to the top of the Washington Monthly’s 2025 College Guide and Rankings.

Unlike other rankings that emphasize “prestige” and selectivity, the Monthly measures what really counts—commitments to public service, research, and social mobility. Founded by an abolitionist minister as the first interracial, coeducational college in the South, tiny Berea college now serves about 1,550 students. Ninety-nine percent are low- and moderate-income Pell Grant recipients, who pay no tuition and graduate nearly debt-free. Most remain in the region, strengthening its economy and future.

Editor in Chief Paul Glastris spoke with Berea President Cheryl Nixon about the college’s philosophy, approach and formula for student success. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Paul Glastris: Dr. Nixon, congratulations! How does it feel to the ranked the number one college in America?

Cheryl Nixon: Of course it’s thrilling. We are just absolutely over the moon, and I think you know what I’m going to say. It’s because this ranking is trying to come up with a different way to assess the value of higher ed. We’re just so proud that Berea can be number one in this way of putting a different lens on what makes higher ed work and what makes higher ed important.

Paul Glastris: Tell us more about Berea and its history.

Cheryl Nixon: We’re in Berea, Kentucky, and Berea, the college, was founded before the city. We’re a small college, only about 1,550 students, but that allows us to do a very unique model. We were the first interracial co-educational college in the South founded by an abolitionist minister, so we sort of had a radical founding. 

One of the things we’ve done to carry through on that idea of a radical mission is to say that education is about opportunity, especially for people that might feel that educational doors are closed to them. Over time, that mission has become more and more focused on educational access for students that don’t have economic means. Our mission is to accept students who have great academic possibility and promise. They bring their gifts to us. They bring their talents to us. We want to give them a gift in return, which is trying to fund as much of their education as possible. 

Right now, our entering class is 99 percent Pell eligible.  That means that typically the family income is going to be $40,000 to $50,000 a year or less. And starting in 1892—over a hundred years ago, we moved to a no-tuition model as a  “work college,” which means that students work on campus to help defray their costs. We now receive federal funding as a federal work college, and all of our students have a job on campus for all four years.

Paul Glastris: Is that the same as work study? Most students know about work study, but work college is different.

Cheryl Nixon: It’s a version of work study, but it is a very different version in that every student on campus is required to work for 10 hours a week at least. What they get is a scholarship that goes directly against their tuition costs rather than getting a paycheck that would come to them that they would then have to budget toward college costs. 

This is a way for students to have a guaranteed job all four years, and it gives them a substantial scholarship of around $10,000 a year. 

We are also very proud that we have lots of jobs on campus that allow students to explore different talents and interests. For example, Berea has a farm and a forest, so if you’re an agricultural major, you might decide to go work on the farm. You might be required to do that to align with a class. Or you might be a computer science major who’s always loved the forest and the idea of being out in nature. So you might do that as a job as a break from your academic classes. However, another student might want to do our forestry minor, and so they’re working in the forest as part of their academic program. 

We also have a great craft program that’s nationally known, and some of our craft work is in the Smithsonian. Some of our students work in our craft department. 

So we have a wide range of jobs that are a bit out of the box, alongside things like tutoring, service work in the community with things like our food bank, or as teaching assistants on campus. We also have students who work in our IT department who repair broken computers or create new software designs. And those students are definitely on their way to a good job when they graduate.

Paul Glastris: Tell us a little bit about the demographics of your students. Are they mostly from the area, from Kentucky, or from around the country?

Cheryl Nixon: Our mission is serving our region. We do take students from across the country and internationally, but primarily from Kentucky and Appalachia—65 percent of our students are from that region. Outreach into small rural communities is part of our mission.

Moreover, 72 percent of our alumni stay in the region. We feel that a part of our mission is to be that engine of opportunity in terms of service to the community, in terms of mobility, in terms of the types of jobs that are needed in our region. We really take that seriously. We draw from our region and return students to it.

Paul Glastris: I’d also love for you to tell us more about your academic rigor. I’ve got to tell you, students online say Berea is really academically very tough. 

Cheryl Nixon: It is. We want to have students that want that academic challenge and to feel that they can get the highest quality possible education without having to worry about cost. 

So nursing, for example, is very rigorous, but that’s exactly the type of career that’s needed in rural Appalachia. We need nurses. 

Our top two majors are computer science and business. We need people who are going to be the smartest entrepreneurial or managerial thinkers that can go out and help our region.

We also want our students to go to graduate school. We need doctors. We definitely want our students to see that if that is their path, they’re very well prepared to go in that direction too.

Paul Glastris: Maybe it’s the rigor that explains some of your numbers, but the average earnings of a Berea student nine years after they start college is $5,000 greater than you would predict by the demographics of those students. In other words, similar students going to similar schools make $5,000 less than Berea students nine years out. How do you explain that? And it’s Kentucky, right? It’s not like you’re in Silicon Valley and the average salary is high. 

Cheryl Nixon: I think there’s several reasons, one of which is that we are proving that the liberal arts is a route towards high-paying jobs. Why? Because we’re a small campus where students get to know their faculty. They’re in small classes, so it is rigorous. They have to engage in depth, they have to be quick on their feet. They have to know how to work as teams. They have to know how to pivot and be flexible in solutioning. Also, they’re going to be in small laboratories where they’re getting hands-on experience, say, in the latest medical technologies. And they will have a faculty member by their side training them. So those are some of the things I think most colleges would say a liberal arts education does well—a small college experience and making sure that the students have that mentorship of a faculty member. 

We feel that our students are getting a very rigorous, well-rounded education. We combine that with the work college model and that is where they will learn skills that are the essential backbones of what you need in the real world, whether it’s time management, problem solving, oral communication, doing presentations, and even things like being able to take direction from a supervisor. Our students have four years of practicing that. 

Paul Glastris: Let me quote a couple more figures from the rankings that I just think our audience ought to know about. The net price of a year at Berea is $3,395—about a quarter what the average price net price of a public university is in this country—and you have, I believe, the lowest debt level of graduates of any college in the country. How do you do it?  

Cheryl Nixon: The average debt that we’re seeing for our students right now is around $2,500.

Every year we’re chipping away at this because we feel this is our mission: to prove there are ways to show a different economic model for higher ed. And right now, 

80 percent of our entering first-year class is paying zero for their education. And that means zero tuition. None of our students pay tuition, but that also is zero for housing, food, and fees. So again, we are trying to get students to get as close to zero as possible. And if they do have to take out a loan, we are trying to get that as low as possible.

And I will be honest, the biggest issue is that we have to work within federal financial aid, and we have to follow rules that FAFSA sets in place. So we can’t over-award. In other words, we cannot give students more funding than their FAFSA dictates. So that’s why some students might have a small amount of debt. 

The next groundbreaking thing we hope to do is to offer students a summer job or a summer payment possibility that is equivalent to whatever their FAFSA or their term bill is saying they have to pay. So if they’re being told you have to pay $2,000 because you have that family ability, we’ll give you a summer job that could pay that $2,000.

How do we to this? I like to think of it as a three-legged stool. Number one is the work college model. Secondly, we do have federal funding in the form of Pell Grants, and students are often getting a state scholarship. But third, the biggest contribution to their education is that we do have a large endowment. A hundred years ago, when we went tuition free, it was just a stroke of genius that we started to ask for small donations – not from one big donor but many small donations. 

So we have a large endowment—about $1.5-$1.6 billion—and all of the returns from that endowment are used 100 percet to fund our students’ education. 

Paul Glastris: Now  that we’ve convinced students that they should apply, how do they maximize their chance of getting into Berea?

Cheryl Nixon: They can just look on our website, find our admissions connection, and ask for more information. We ask students right away to make sure that they meet our financial criteria because we want students that need economic support. Students have to meet a financial need criteria. We’re not asking you for tuition.

Paul Glastris: You know, every other college in the country does the opposite, right? 

Cheryl Nixon: Right, but we’re trying not to accept you if you have too much money. I know it sounds like a crazy model, but clearly it’s taken us over 100 years to build this model up. But of course, we’re very proud of it. So we do check your financial background. And we do check that you want to be at a smaller campus where you will be challenged. You’ll be asked to think deep thoughts. You’ll be asked to do hands-on projects, do some undergraduate research, do that internship. 

Paul Glastris: Tell us a little bit about yourself, Dr. Nixon. You did go to a very elite school—you got your Phd, I believe, at Harvard. But you’ve spent most of your career not in the areas of higher education that cater to the classic elite student from an upper middle class family. Tell us about your path to Berea.

Cheryl Nixon: I started my academic career as an English professor. And you wouldn’t know it today, but I was one of those shy kids that loved to read under the covers and found my calling in books. I worked at institutions where I was working with first-year students and trying to get them to have that love of literature and reading also.

I spent most of my career at University of Massachusetts Boston, and UMass-Boston has the mission of trying to serve the citizens of Boston. It’s a commuter campus and has that principled idea of access to education. I started teaching literature classes there and realized my passion became trying to make sure that students were successful in reading and writing, especially when English was not their first language. 

That pivoted me to become increasingly passionate about how can we make sure that we open the doors of opportunity for students to get a college degree.

After working at UMass-Boston, I worked at a small liberal arts college in Colorado—Fort Lewis College—which is a non-tribal Native American serving institution, wanting to work again with a population that often had some barriers to educational opportunity. 

Whether it’s recent immigrants to the United States, Native Americans, or here in Appalachia, rural students, the through-line has been students that maybe haven’t had economic ability to pay and for whom that shouldn’t be a barrier. I’m a big believer in the old fashioned thing called the “American dream” and that education is the route to get there.

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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.

Yesterday, CNN broke the news of a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) preliminary report showing that the Iranian nuclear programs at underground facilities targeted by U.S. airstrikes over the weekend were not “completely and fully obliterated,” as President Donald Trump claimed, but instead were likely set back a matter of months. To get a better sense of that report and what it means, I spoke with a source who has had a decades-long career in the U.S. military and the intelligence community, serving both in and out of government. The source requested anonymity to speak freely. The following is an edited version of our conversation:

Are you surprised that this DIA report was leaked?

Not at all. The results would be of high interest. Hundreds of folks at least would be on the distribution list or have access to the report.

How reliable is this report? 

Time will tell. But the DIA is the key intelligence agency that does these kinds of after-action damage assessments. That’s their traditional role and they’re very good at it. Their assessments are typically based on a combination of imagery, signals intelligence largely provided by the NSA, and human intelligence that comes from the CIA, the Israelis, and other sources. The DIA would have pulled these strings together to come up with their assessment of the damage. These nuclear sites have been the focus of the United States and Israel for decades and we’ve built up considerable sources over the years. The Israelis have clearly penetrated Iran at the highest levels. So presumably, in addition to what we can see from satellites, we are hearing chatter from within the Iranian national security bureaucracies. We will see. This is only a preliminary report, but it is not encouraging.

Are you surprised at what seems to be the limited degree of damage to these facilities? 

No, the United States military has been toiling for several decades to develop weapons capable of destroying underground facilities.  These complexes are called “Hard and Deeply Buried Targets” (HDBT).  These efforts started all the way back in the Clinton administration when the Secretary of Defense was looking at options for taking out Libya’s underground chemical weapons complex at Tarhuna. At the time, none of the options on the table were palatable, so the quest began to develop air delivered munitions that could take out these targets. It proved far more difficult than anyone would have imagined. The government established a test facility, a mock underground chemical and nuclear production facility, out in the western US and bombed it literally for years. Every imaginable type of bomb or combination of bombs were used, rarely did it cause any more than superficial damage to the facility. So, this latest weapon, long in development but never deployed, has demonstrated once again that if an adversary simply digs deeply enough, the laws of physics are on their side. So, these results were disappointing, but by no means surprising, following a long history of failure against this type of target. That’s a major reason why previous administrations have been resistant to using them.  

If this initial report proves true, what are the consequences? 

Terrible. As long as we didn’t use them, Iran didn’t know for sure how damaging they could be. That gave us leverage with them. Now the situation is reversed. We’ve revealed or confirmed that our most fearsome weapon, or the most fearsome we’re willing to use—we could drop nukes or send in the 82^nd Airborne, but that’s not going to happen—can collapse the entrances of tunnels but not destroy facilities buried deeply in a mountain. Going into any negotiations with them, they know our limits. That doesn’t mean Iran is in a strong position. Israel has decimated its military, and its economy is in ruins because of sanctions. In any negotiations with Trump, it’s the sanctions they want lifted. But now they’re in a much better position to get what they want than they were before this bombing run, especially considering other intel suggesting that the regime removed some or all its highly enriched uranium and centrifuges out these facilities before the attack. 

And not just Iran. Every other adversarial regime now knows these weapons are essentially duds. That weakens our leverage considerably with all of them. I am sure Kim Jung Un is happy in North Korea today.

What do you make of the fact that Trump is continuing to insist that the facilities were totally destroyed? 

I’d say that’s not going to fly. If I’m the Iranians, I’m going to clear the rubble from the entrances of those facilities and then invite CNN and Al Jazeera to bring their cameras into the tunnels and show that they’re still there, still functional. 

The post Will Trump’s Bombing Raid on Iran Prove Not Just a Bust, But a Disaster? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Democrats are putting a lot of their political chips on the message that Donald Trump’s radical tariff regime will raise consumer prices, tank the economy, and alienate voters. So far, that’s looking like a pretty good wager. But it’s also a risky one. If Trump continues to ease and modify his tariff policies, it’s possible that the economy won’t fall into recession and inflation won’t be at intolerable levels by the time the 2026 midterms roll around. It’s even conceivable that by November 2028, enough manufacturing will have been reshored (whether because of tariffs or not) that Trump and his designated successor—presuming there is one—will be able to declare victory.

Even if that scenario seems unlikely, there is an aspect to Trump’s tariff pitch that Democrats ignore at their peril: It addresses a deep yearning among middle- and working-class Americans, especially those living outside large metro areas. For decades, these folks have watched their communities fall further and further into economic and civic decline, even as big coastal cities have boomed. It’s hard to exaggerate their fury at this inequity, their desperation to reverse it, and their gratitude to Trump for, in their eyes, at least trying to do something about it. These are precisely the voters the Democratic Party keeps losing and most needs to win back. And right now, Democrats don’t have a convincing alternative economic vision to Trump’s.

Arguably, they did. It was called Bidenomics. It consisted of massive fiscal stimulus, aggressive antitrust enforcement, and an industrial policy of targeted tariffs and federal support for key industries such as alternative energy and microchips, much of it going to red states and districts. I could make the case—and have in these pages—that this agenda was quite successful (the reshoring Trump promises was already happening under Biden). But in 2024, enough voters disagreed that we now have President Trump. Part of the reason was that voters felt more punished by inflation than helped by the policies. Part of it was that Biden was too old to run, much less to articulate his economic agenda. But it was also because Bidenomics was a half-thought-through hodgepodge of policies and programs that, while connected, lacked a unifying theory—or at any rate one that even the most eloquent younger members of his administration, like Jake Sullivan and Pete Buttigieg, could explain in under half an hour.

The advantage of Trump’s agenda is its simplicity: A single policy—high tariffs—will solve all our problems. Tariffs will punish the countries that stole our jobs, bring those jobs back to America, and raise enough revenue to pay for massive tax cuts. The disadvantage of Trump’s agenda is that it is simplistic, as even his own base understands. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans believe that Trump’s tariffs will raise prices for consumer goods, according to an April Gallup poll, and 25 percent oppose them.

What Democrats need is a vision for reviving the American dream that is more convincing than Trump’s, but more robust and understandable than Biden’s. In this issue of the Washington Monthly, senior editor Phillip Longman offers one: regulated competition. The term was coined by the political scientist and economic historian Gerald Berk to describe the sophisticated set of federal market rules that steered the course of the nation’s economy from the late 19th century to the 1970s, before it was dismantled in the era of deregulation. These rules set the terms of competition in much of the economy, from banking to transportation to energy. “Working with industry,” writes Longman, “federal lawmakers and regulators hashed out rules that determined who could enter and exit different key sectors, what terms of service they could impose, and with whom they could merge.”

To modern ears trained in the language of libertarianism, this sounds benighted. But it was precisely the system that built the United States into a capitalist superpower while delivering broad-based prosperity. It did so, Longman explains, by catalyzing a virtuous cycle of innovation:

Firms in key industry sectors like transportation and electricity were guaranteed modest but predictable profits that allowed them to attract more capital, and to take greater risks, than they otherwise could. In exchange, companies were obliged to serve all market segments, rather than cherry-pick the most profitable. This enabled smaller cities, towns, and rural areas to compete on a more equal footing with large cities on the coasts, thus spreading economic development and wealth creation more equitably across the country while also serving as a check on the growth of financiers and oligarchy. 

With the Trump administration and the Supreme Court decimating regulatory agencies, and “abundance liberals” blaming excessive red tape for many of the nation’s ills, the idea that Democrats should rally around an agenda of economic reregulation might sound crazy. Yet a decade ago, almost no one (aside from Washington Monthly writers) was talking about reviving antitrust enforcement. Now it has a foothold in both parties. And tariffs were considered retrograde. Now they’re the pillar of American economic policy. As Barry Lynn explains elsewhere in this issue, Democrats stand to reap a political windfall if they can learn to connect policies like these to language that speaks to the American working class’s hunger for economic liberty. There’s no reason why regulated competition (or whatever the political messaging pros decide to call it) can’t go from the forgotten secret of America’s past economic success to the blueprint for its future prosperity.  

—Paul Glastris, Editor-in-Chief

Inside the issue:

The post Rules to Win By appeared first on Washington Monthly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One day in early 2004, I called my senior editor at the Washington Monthly, Josh Marshall, with a proposition: Would he be interested in moving his blog, Talkingpointsmemo.com (TPM), which he was then writing on the side, to the Washington Monthly, and work on it full time? Josh thought for a moment and answered that he would rather keep the blog independent in the hope of making something of it, but that if I wanted a blogger for our website, I should check out the site Calpundit, written by a guy named Kevin Drum.  

That turned out to be about the best advice Josh ever gave me—or himself. Josh went on to build TPM into a powerhouse political commentary and investigative site. (His coverage of Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal bureaucracy has few rivals.) Kevin Drum, who joined this magazine in April 2004 and wrote our “Political Animal” blog for the next four years, would revolutionize the Washington Monthly and, to some extent, political blogging itself. 

Yesterday, we got the news from his wife, Marian, that Kevin passed away on March 7 after a long battle with cancer at the age of 66. So, I wanted to share a few thoughts about my old friend and colleague.  

In many tributes to him over the past 24 hours, Kevin has been called an “OG” (original gangster) blogger, meaning he was among the genre’s pioneers. That’s true, but it doesn’t quite capture the qualities that made him unique.  

One was his amateur Renaissance Man mind. From its earliest days, the political blogosphere was diverse. Ideological bloggers were attacking each other in the high plane of ideas, hack bloggers poring over polling data and election news trying to find and formulate winning messages, and academics—mostly economists but also political and social scientists—adding their wonky knowledge and expertise to the national discussion. Kevin didn’t quite fit into any of these categories. Yet he was fluent enough in all of them that he could comment on just about anything anyone else was writing that caught his attention in ways that would catch other people’s attention. With his wide range of interests, Kevin helped turn the blogosphere’s often-disparate discussions into a larger, more integrated, and engaging conversation. And he did this without a hint of pretense or pedantry.  

Some writers are different in person than they are on the page. That was not true of Kevin. If you followed his blogging, you pretty much knew the man. He was what I would describe as deeply normal. 

Born and raised in Southern California but with family roots in Missouri, Kevin had a Midwesterner’s plainness of manner and Show-Me State unwillingness to accept things at face value. As a young man, he was smart, gaining admission to Cal Tech, but after two years, he transferred to Cal State Long Beach, where he majored in journalism. Like many people who graduated in the recession of 1981, he had trouble landing work in his chosen field, so he took a job at RadioShack. He became store manager and then was hired to write user manuals for a local tech company. For the next two decades, he rose through the ranks of the software industry on the marketing side and lived a comfortable life with his wife and their cat, Inkblot, in Orange County, which was then predominantly Republican. 

Yet Kevin retained his journalistic urges, and in 2001, he started blogging in his spare time. Over the next few years, he built a sizeable following, partly by introducing “Friday Cat Blogging”—essentially, photos of Inkblot doing typical cat things (hunting bugs in the backyard) that presaged the coming explosion of pet-centric internet content.  

When he came to the Monthly in 2004, Kevin brought his audience with him and grew it on the strength of his work ethic. Every day, he would scan the papers and other blogs and write a dozen posts on whatever subjects caught his eye. Some were tightly argued mini-essays, others a few sentences with a link. Some were reactions to breaking news, others analyses of news-relevant research papers on, say, healthcare economics or the history of counterinsurgency. Kevin had a gift for pithy, accurate, and entertaining summation of complicated material, a product of a scientific mind honed by a career in technical marketing. He loved numbers and was an early adopter of chart-making software.  

Kevin identified as center-left but called himself a moderate—a word that described his politics and disposition. Much blogging back then—like social media commentary today—was driven by the writers’ emotions, suffused with hyperbole, and aimed to rile readers up. Kevin was almost exactly the opposite. Curiosity rather than outrage fueled his writing. Judiciousness and skepticism rather than self-assured know-it-all-ness characterized his prose. He had virtually no patience with the Bush administration and its combination of hubris and incompetence. But neither was he much interested in internecine battles to pull the Democrats ideologically one way or another. He understood the importance of the horse race aspects of politics, but he really cared about the nature of the underlying issues—war, inequality, crime, climate change—and sleuthing out the proper policy responses. His politics followed his policy views rather than the other way around.  

He was, in other words, a near-perfect reflection of the ethos of the Washington Monthly. He was also living proof that substantive, level-headed, non-alarmist news commentary could draw a decent audience. Readers with day jobs could keep up with the news and get a reliable spin on it by refreshing “Political Animal” several times daily. Traffic to our website soared under Kevin, who left the Monthly in 2008 to join Mother Jones, and it stayed that way under his successors Steve Benen and Ed Kilgore—who, like Kevin, went on to better-paying gigs at bigger outlets.  

Kevin’s success was also a kind of victory of democracy over snobbery. It proved that you can write incisively about national affairs without being in Washington, New York, or San Francisco. You can be an ordinary person living an everyday middle-class suburban life where you don’t rub elbows with influential journalists, academics, or financiers, yet write journalism that those sophisticates—and plenty of other ordinary Americans—read and respect. I never entirely understood why an even bigger outlet, like The New York Times, didn’t steal Kevin away from Mother Jones. “I seriously think he deserved the Pulitzer,” Keith Humphreys, the Stanford psychologist and blogger, emailed me yesterday about our mutual friend, “but he didn’t get it because he wrote for the ‘wrong outlets.’” 

In 2014, Kevin was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. He wrote about his disease and treatment, his remissions and relapses, with the same dispassionate precision he brought to every other subject. Though we no longer talked multiple times a week like when Kevin was at the Monthly, we kept in touch. I followed his writing at Mother Jones and then at his personal site, Jabberwocking, which he started in 2021 when the chemo and other treatments became too much for him. He continued to update his blog until a few days before he died. 

In 2022, he emailed saying he would be in Washington, and I invited him to come by the office and join a crew of current and former editors for lunch. He seemed okay, a little weak, but talkative and full of well-considered opinions as always. It was a chance for the younger editors to meet a legend and for me to reconnect—for the last time, it turned out—with a dear colleague. You would think knowing about his disease and its progression would lessen the shock and sadness—and it does to some extent, but less than I would have guessed. Then again, not many of us leave this life with an audience of devoted followers and a sure place in the history of our profession. Kevin did, and that makes me smile. 

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