Will Anyone Vote for Abundance?

Ever since Derek Thompson introduced the term “abundance agenda” in his 2022 Atlantic article “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems,” the idea has spun out into a network of new think tanks, conferences, and newsletters — and of social circles that often begin online. At a recent abundance-themed happy hour, I found myself in a room with a hundred people whose names I recognized from Twitter. But the idea has also captured the interest of a number of elite tastemakers, from New York Times columnist Ezra Klein to Silicon Valley giant Patrick Collison. Abundance seems to have gained traction.

The abundance agenda first emerged as a response to Covid-related supply-chain failures. Many commentators remarked on the prolonged shortage of Covid tests well over a year into the pandemic: How was it that the United States still had people standing in lines for rapid tests costing $15 or more, while Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom were selling them at corner stores for less than a dollar a pop, or handing them out for free? In a country as wealthy as ours, many reasoned, this sort of scarcity must be a policy choice.

By 2022, examples of scarcity were everywhere. Housing, nuclear plants, semiconductor manufacturing — all of these were areas where the United States had once succeeded but now struggled. Advocates of the abundance agenda attributed this decline to two main factors: a regulatory state that had become increasingly sclerotic, and decades of underinvestment in domestic industry. These issues, they argued, had made it very difficult to make and build things in America. And in Thompson’s view, just as our problems did not stem from any particular political party, solving scarcity would require sourcing ideas from across the political spectrum:

This agenda would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great — such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth.

This is the abundance agenda.

Thompson’s is a vision of a common political cause. Despite our different priorities, progressives, conservatives, and libertarians can all surely agree that scarcity is a problem worth solving.

But as the last few years have shown, a common cause is not the same as a coalition. An increasing number of Republicans and Democrats may agree that we should build more things in America, but scratch beneath the surface and the same old political divisions appear, as each side interprets and pursues abundance through the lens of existing ideological priorities. While the agenda emphasizes deregulation and government spending as key strategies for beating scarcity, proponents on the left have embraced spending without deregulation, and proponents on the right have embraced deregulation without spending. This partisan approach is a significant challenge to implementing a truly cohesive abundance agenda, and should temper our expectations of what the agenda can achieve.

Many Democrats want to cut certain regulations — but, more often than not, only when those regulations are clearly hurting their ideological priorities. California governor Gavin Newsom has complained that his state’s restrictive regulations were leading President Biden’s infrastructure spending to go to red states where “they don’t give a damn about these issues,” meaning climate and the environment. This view of regulatory reform is at odds with that of Republicans, who tend to oppose regulations as a matter of free-market principle. And it has led Democrats to take a piecemeal approach to regulatory reform; call it deregulatory favoritism, whereby Democrats target specific carve-outs for their preferred industries rather than comprehensive changes to a regulation itself.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), for example, has long posed challenges for economic development because of its requirement that projects involving the federal government undergo an environmental review process, which often takes years to complete. These requirements have caused Republicans to push for NEPA reform since at least the early 2000s, when House Resources Committee chairman Richard Pombo organized a task force to recommend changes to the law. In general, Republicans want to take a hammer to NEPA’s more burdensome requirements, and favor sweeping proposals that would limit the number of lawsuits that can be filed on NEPA grounds and that narrow the scope of impacts that must be considered in NEPA analysis.

Many Democrats now say they want NEPA reform, too — but they want it primarily because NEPA creates problems for clean energy development, locking up wind, solar, and geothermal energy in years of regulatory delay. The result has been that instead of targeting broad reforms, Democrats have typically focused their efforts on skirting NEPA requirements for clean energy through exemptions and agency rulemaking.

One of the proposals that has gained popularity among Democrats, for example, is the issuance of categorical exclusions for clean energy projects, which would allow clean energy developers to bypass the extensive environmental impact assessments, public comment periods, and detailed agency reviews typically required under NEPA. President Biden’s Department of Energy has expanded categorical exclusions for solar energy projects. The Department of Transportation has used a new provision passed in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 to adopt categorical exclusions for electric vehicle charging.

Exclusions like these can significantly reduce the time and resources needed to approve these specific kinds of projects, but they do nothing to change the way that NEPA works for projects in general. Furthermore, the Democratic approach to NEPA ends up hurting the political viability of more-comprehensive permitting reform, as it pushes Republican members of Congress, many of whom have historically supported the idea of categorical exclusions, to resist them. NEPA’s role in blocking clean energy has become a bargaining chip: Republicans know that if they give it away through categorical exclusions, they will never get the broader reforms they are hoping for. In this way, Democrats’ deregulatory favoritism often backfires.

Meanwhile, Republicans’ obsession with deregulation has led them to adopt a monocausal view of scarcity. Take nuclear power. There is a great deal of bipartisan support in Congress for building more nuclear reactors. However, Republicans in Congress believe that the main problem facing the U.S. nuclear industry is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. To be sure, the NRC has a long history of obstructing nuclear power, typified by former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who, after leaving the agency, called for a global ban on nuclear power. But despite the NRC’s problems, regulatory reform alone will never be enough to bring about an American nuclear renaissance. Nuclear’s upfront capital costs are enormous — not just in the United States, but everywhere in the world. As a result, there has never been a nuclear reactor built without government funds. The hard reality of nuclear is that it is a big-government energy source.

Actually getting more nuclear reactors built, then, will require Republicans to endorse enormous government spending. The most recent reactors to come online in the United States, Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Waynesboro, Georgia, required over $12 billion in federal loan guarantees and cost a total of nearly $35 billion. Any bill aiming to kickstart a more substantial American nuclear scale-up would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars. But Republicans in Congress remain widely opposed to increased government spending. In fact, they’ve written this opposition into the rules of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in a clause known as CUTGO (“cut as you go”), which requires that any increase in mandatory spending — which would include certain infrastructure funding — be offset by cuts in other mandatory spending within the same bill. This thinking has filtered into the Trump administration, too: Trump energy appointee Bernard McNamee has called for the elimination of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which served as the primary federal funding mechanism for advanced nuclear projects like Vogtle. So while Republicans are major proponents of nuclear energy in principle, it’s very unlikely that the current slate of Republicans will get on board with the level of federal involvement required to significantly expand nuclear power generation.

These problems extend to almost every advanced technology industry that abundance thinkers favor, from biotechnology to space travel. Democrats’ deregulatory favoritism means they are reactive; rather than preemptively reducing the regulatory burden for all new technologies, Democrats have to identify and build up the political support for regulatory carve-outs one technology at a time — a process that, as NEPA and clean energy have shown, can take decades. Meanwhile, Republicans often use the existence of regulatory barriers to argue that advanced technologies would flourish if only the free market were allowed to take root. Tim Cavanaugh, a senior editor at the Mackinac Center, a free-market think tank, has argued that the way to revive the American nuclear industry is to “end all energy subsidies.” Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy suggested last year that the solution is to “shut down the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

Yet so often, abundance requires both deregulation and a period of government spending. Many advanced technologies in the United States were developed with government support. The American aviation industry achieved its early commercial success thanks to government-sponsored research and development and airmail contracts. The American car industry was boosted by the creation of the interstate highway system and wartime contracts that vastly increased car companies’ manufacturing capabilities. And government involvement was vital to the growth of these industries despite the fact that they commercialized in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, long before laws such as NEPA, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act were passed. Creating a system that favors abundance, then, will require major concessions from Democrats and Republicans alike.

None of this is to say that abundance efforts are doomed politically. But it does mean that, in practice, issues like NEPA reform look very different to different groups, and so legislation that focuses exclusively on abundance-friendly policies is unlikely to be introduced, much less passed, under the current paradigm.

What we’ll get instead are policies like the recently introduced Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, introduced by Senators John Barrasso and Joe Manchin in July. The bill perfectly encapsulates the messy reality of bipartisan dealmaking. While it does include some promising NEPA reforms, these are narrowly tailored and come packaged with a host of other provisions to satisfy various constituencies. Republicans would secure expanded oil and gas leasing on federal lands and offshore areas, along with streamlined coal leasing. Democrats would obtain provisions to accelerate renewable energy development, including specific goals for offshore wind production and improved electric transmission planning. The long-awaited permitting bill is largely not about permitting.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing. The Energy Permitting Reform Act is still a good bill that would dramatically improve the status quo for energy development in the United States. The important thing for abundance agenda hopefuls to understand is that this new bill represents the realistic blueprint for working towards abundance. If you want a bipartisan permitting reform package to pass, you need to load it up with concessions to partisan interests.

Rather than demanding a clean break from partisan politics in favor of a distinctly new agenda, the path to abundance will require the same political maneuvering that major policy shifts always do: negotiation, compromise, and a willingness to accept incremental progress. The abundance agenda has the right priorities. It just misunderstands what it will take to achieve them.