Three hard-left, Mamdani-backed candidates swept through New York City congressional Democratic primaries last night. Down-ballot, the DSA cleaned up as well.

Predictably, the moderate wing of the Democratic Party is thoroughly spooked. Vicente Gonzalez, a Congressman from a Texas swing district, responded to the results by saying, “Nationally it’s a huge concern, how they push policies within the Democratic caucus that we’re going to have to defend. A lot of these policies I don’t agree with and would be very difficult for me to sell to people in South Texas.”

There’s no denying that Darializa Avila Chevalier’s views on crime and immigration would play poorly in Gonzalez’s moderate, Hispanic-majority district. And we shouldn’t over-index on the magnitude of last night’s result; the DSA is still only gaining power in the deep blue urban centers.

That being said, the same centrist Democrats who demand the party make room for politicians with more conservative views on immigration and public safety also need to get along with people like Brad Lander and Claire Valdez. That means understanding why they have been successful: They are riding a wave of deep-seated anti-incumbent sentiment and representing a part of the base that has become more progressive and accepting of socialism over the past decade.

It’s still an open question how a Democratic presidential candidate can square the fact that primary voters are substantially more progressive than the sort of voters that decide presidential elections. But in the immediate term, as the party gears up to take back Congress this November, they can’t write off the political forces that are electing these hard-left candidates to office. This means understanding that beating Trump and forming a true supermajority will involve governing alongside leftist allies who represent the views of their constituents just as much as the members of Congress who represent swing districts.

It’s essential to note that this is a two-way street. If hard-left candidates want to run on the party line and caucus with Democrats, they need to provide assurances that they’re not aiming for a hostile takeover of the party and avoid goofy legislative stunts that put frontliners at risk. They should know that they’re welcome in the big tent, but just like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they still need to vote for the sort of compromise legislation that actually makes it through Congress and improves people’s lives.

Brad Lander struck exactly the right tone in an interview this morning.

“We need to build bridges between more progressive candidates and moderate candidates. Two years ago, I knocked doors for Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen. I joked that I did it in like a disguise mustache so I wouldn’t hurt their chances.”

And he continued with a fair warning to the moderates who defy primary voters at their own peril. “But I think part of the reason Dan Goldman didn’t win last night is he couldn’t endorse Mamdani when he was the Democratic nominee for mayor.”

A supermajority-focused Democratic party will need to welcome left-wing representation from the big blue dots, while also remaining dialed in on winning the districts and states that will give the party a durable governing majority. That’s a big bull to wrangle, and a job that won’t get done without taking lessons from Democrats all over America.

The left flank may have won in New York, but they have also suffered primary defeats in districts like Utah-01. Moderates like Josh Turek and Roy Cooper1 are putting red seats firmly in the flip column. Basically, there is no magic bullet that makes Democrats successful. As with most things in electoral politics, it depends on where you’re running.

This is where Searchlight’s founding principle of heterodoxy comes in. No one faction, policy, or person can save the Democrats. That remains true whether you’re talking about campaigning or governing. You wouldn’t run a Democratic Socialist in the Rio Grande Valley any more than you’d run a Blue Dog in Brooklyn. Even if Democrats are in the majority, compromise is the only way to effect change in a Congress that represents our vast and ideologically diverse country. Expanding the social safety net and taxing the rich will require buy-in from all sides.

I’m well aware how lofty that goal may seem in the thick of a contentious primary season. But I actually think Democrats’ willingness to openly disagree with each other is the party’s superpower. As Will Rogers said, “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a Democrat. Democrats never agree on anything; that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.”

So far, artificial intelligence seems to be having limited effects on the labor market. Despite the occasional viral headline announcing AI-driven job cuts, we are not seeing a big increase in unemployment or layoffs. While there are some weak signals in the market (notably the decrease in hires), there’s little support showing this is due to companies no longer demanding labor.

At the same time, we should recognize that this might not always be the case. It’s possible that a few years from now we will see dramatic shocks to the labor market. Policymakers should be preparing for these shocks now, so that appropriate policies to respond are already in place.

One of the most popular policies for mitigating the employment effects of AI also appears to be the simplest – we could just have the government create more jobs by directly hiring people. Polling by Blue Rose Research shows that 54% of Americans would support the government creating jobs directly, sometimes referred to as a “Job Guarantee.” Conversely, only 17% are in favor of direct income support without an attached job.

The US government previously used public employment programs similar to a Job Guarantee to help solve mass unemployment during the Great Depression. Agencies like the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps loom large in American history and serve as a reminder that a robust government can materially improve people’s lives with a paycheck and the dignity of work.

However, I want to be clear-eyed here and note that the existing literature shows we should be skeptical of a Job Guarantee working at scale today. While there are certainly great positive economic effects of high employment levels, I worry that we sometimes lose track of why jobs are good for people. A job doesn’t provide purpose, meaning, or skills in a vacuum. It provides those qualities in the context of that specific job being something employers demand.

A job created solely for the purpose of employing someone will not necessarily provide skills that will be useful elsewhere in the labor market. Moreover, employment will only feel valuable to people if they believe that their job is providing a valuable service. While there are cases where public works demand public employment, “make-work” jobs will not have the same functionality as jobs that exist to provide a specific service.

I have some ideas for how policymakers can think creatively about how to deal with a future of possible AI-induced unemployment. But as an economist who studies unemployment and job training programs for a living, I want to first start with a technical look at existing labor market interventions and an awareness of how effective these programs truly are.

Subscribe now

Let’s begin our preparation for the potential AI jobs apocalypse by looking at the Congressional Budget Office’s 1976 typology for labor market interventions. It’s important to first understand how a federal jobs guarantee compares to other government programs.

• Skill development programs try to enhance the skills of employees through a combination of classes or on-the-job training.

• Work experience programs try to give an introduction to the workforce for people without previous employment, such as younger workers. Unlike on-the-job training, the goal is not to develop skills for a specific job, but to give job seekers experience working in general.

• Employability development programs help people search for appropriate jobs. This includes job search assistance, resume help, and creating job boards to help workers and firms find each other.

• Public sector employment programs hire the unemployed directly. These programs create new jobs expressly for the purpose of decreasing the number of people who are unemployed. These programs are typically aimed at adults with previous work experience.

So how well do these programs work compared to other labor market interventions? To examine this, we can look at a meta-analysis across over 200 evaluations of workforce programs.1 The results show that evaluations of “skill development” and “work experience” programs tend to find weak results in the short run and strong results in the long run.2 “Employability development” programs, such as job search assistance, find strong results in the short run, and weaker long run results.

But “Public sector employment” – the programs a “Job Guarantee” would scale up – consistently find weaker results than the other three frameworks, in the short, medium, and long run.

Why is public sector employment ineffective? In part, because it crowds out other activities that the worker could be doing. A person who loses their job and receives unemployment insurance can spend their time looking for suitable jobs, developing skills to match what employers are looking for, and applying for positions. A person working in a public sector employment program has less time to do these things. Moreover, because the job was created for the purpose of providing employment, it might not provide the worker with skills that other employers will demand.

This doesn’t suggest that a Job Guarantee can’t be part of the package of programs intended to help workers with AI shocks. Perhaps a more expansive Job Guarantee will have fundamentally different effects than narrow public sector employment programs. Alternatively, maybe policymakers simply need more experience designing these programs and working to make them better. Proposals to pilot a Jobs Guarantee in a specific area, such as Senator Cory Booker and Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman’s Federal Jobs Guarantee Development Act, could help work out any bugs.

But we should also be focusing on scaling up effective programs and making them work even better. For example, a randomized trial of Year Up (a program that combines training and job placement) found that it increased wages by over $8,000 a year up to 7 years after the program ended. Scaling this program, or reworking it to focus on AI-related job destruction, could substantially help people adjust to any shocks. There are also useful tax reforms that could be enacted. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program is effectively a work subsidy – increasing the take-home pay of workers and making them cheaper for employers – and has substantially increased employment. Scaling the EITC up, such as Marco Rubio’s 2014 proposal to transform the EITC into a wage subsidy, could build on this success and keep people employed. Reforms that allow for more predictable unemployment taxes can also encourage greater hiring rates.3

Novel programs – including Job Guarantees – that are designed around the unique challenges of AI can supplement existing programs. But the core of our AI labor policy has to be programs and incentives that have been demonstrated to work. Policymakers across the political spectrum are right to be concerned about the prospect of future AI job displacement. It’s time they acted on that concern, and the public’s growing angst, to start developing solutions for it.

Subscribe now

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral tenure has started on a good note. His generational political talents on the campaign trail have translated into genuinely strong mayoral leadership. He has smartly touted good governance policies like fixing potholes and forged a working relationship with the governor to secure funding for universal 2-K. Mamdani has also achieved buy-in from more moderate skeptics by releasing a smart housing policy and supporting a plan to increase headcount at the NYPD. The mayor is clearly aware that the best form of politics, even in deep blue cities, involves taking on a heterodox set of issues.

Mamdani also hasn’t had to deal with some of the problems that can bedevil big-city mayors. There’s no ‘migrant crisis’, major crime is falling from pandemic-era highs (although less than in other major cities), and the vibe in the city is, well, immaculate. Between the Knicks’ championship and the World Cup, New York City is ready to party. And there’s no one better to oversee that party than their young, hyper-charismatic mayor.

The urban Left that backed Mamdani from the beginning is set to take a victory lap. Before they begin, they should ask themselves this question: What if the fundamentals in New York City weren’t as strong? What if Mamdani governed under the weight of the Biden-era migrant crisis? It might be politically convenient to memory-hole the event that sunk mayoral approval ratings, cut city budgets, and helped hand Trump the White House. But as the Democratic Party looks to define its immigration agenda, it is something that can’t be forgotten.

There is a consensus among many national Democrats that the next administration needs to reform the immigration system and secure the border. Progressives have signaled their interest in achieving these policy goals too. But to ensure that another politically destabilizing crisis doesn’t happen again, the left-wing of the party needs to reflect on a still unresolved tension.

There is a conflict between the border policy advocated by Left groups at the federal level and the conditions that allow for Left mayors to thrive at the local level.

Trump’s interior enforcement strategy has been cruel, lawless, and unpopular (although not as much as one would hope). For that matter, the decision from governors like Greg Abbott to bus migrants across state lines for political purposes was also wrong. But Mamdani has doubtlessly benefited from the fact that migrant encounters at the southern border are at their lowest level in fifty years.

There’s a path forward here that doesn’t involve Trump’s inhumane immigration policy. That path also means the left needs to confront the excesses of their immigration activist groups, too, and implement the sort of policies that will prevent another migrant crisis.

Who the migrant crisis hurt the most

Last year, I reported on Brandon Johnson’s failed mayorship in Chicago. I wanted to figure out why the once insurgent left-wing mayor had seen his approval rating fall to 14 percent. After speaking with several city aldermen and policy experts in the city, I found that the migrant crisis was the most significant factor.

One of the most interesting stories I heard was that some of the low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods that voted for Johnson were also some of the most impacted by the migrant crisis. That’s because many of the migrant settlements popped up in their communities, and when they saw the City Council allocate large sums of money towards these newcomers, they were understandably upset. Progressive City Alderman Desmon Yancy expressed this exact sentiment when the Council passed a $70 million migrant aid bill: “When Black residents see the large financial investment being made to help support the migrants, they rightfully question when it will happen for them.”

Johnson certainly could have handled the crisis better. But other big-city mayors faced the same trade-off between increasing or even maintaining funding for city services and redirecting taxpayer dollars towards migrant settlement. In Denver, the city was forced to spend $180 million supporting tens of thousands of newcomers. For that to be fiscally sustainable, Mayor Mike Johnston reduced recreation center hours and enforced alternating weekly closures at DMV offices.

The progressive mayor repeatedly begged the Biden administration to deal with the border because the crisis made the job of governing Denver significantly harder.

New York City is the most glaring example. During the city’s migrant crisis, Mayor Adams cut billions in funding for everything from summer camp programs and libraries to trash pickup.

As one might expect, low-income New Yorkers were the ones who bore the brunt of these budget cuts. When the city reduced hours and cut Fridays for “Summer Rising” — a summer program focused on reducing learning loss and providing free meals to students, 30,000 low-income families suffered. When there is less funding to empty trash cans, neighborhoods like the South Bronx get dirtier, and richer neighborhoods can pay to stay clean.

This isn’t to say these mayors shouldn’t have redirected money to migrants. It was a genuine humanitarian crisis, and these people needed shelter, food, and healthcare. The problem is that when a city like New York is forced to pay 3 billion dollars a year on migrants, it creates an inherently zero-sum situation where the city is unable to maintain services for its citizens. Nobody should be surprised when the citizens who rely on city services get upset.

The month after the 2024 election, I chatted with a progressive city councilwoman from Queens about the borough’s rightward shift to Trump. I expressed shock, and she wasn’t surprised at all. Over the past two years, her office had fielded countless calls about migrant issues, and she expected Trump’s border message to resonate in her district.

Tax and spend progressivism needs an orderly border

It’s important to remember that the mayors who dealt with the migrant crises entered office with plans to increase funding for city services. Just like Mayor Mamdani, they see the government as the primary mechanism to redistribute wealth and create a more egalitarian society.

At the federal level, progressive immigration groups that advocated against the Biden administration’s (fatefully, late) decision to restrict asylum claims are guided by a similar moral impulse. They see the plight of the migrants, even those fleeing for strictly economic reasons, as something that must be rectified by the United States, a much wealthier country.

The problem, of course, is that these immigrant groups are not accountable to the voting public. And as much as some on the left want to exclusively blame increased migrant flows on issues like American imperialism, that’s not going to solve the sort of border crisis that happened under the Biden administration. That’s not going to satisfy the working mom in Queens who can’t drop her kid off at a city-funded summer camp because it’s closed on Fridays.

There are real political ramifications to this. It wasn’t just New York City where the migrant crisis moved voters towards Trump; a study from the USC Price School of Public Policy found that counties that received migrant buses from Texas saw Trump’s vote share increase by three points compared to the 2020 election. Trump nearly swept every Texas border county in the 2024 election, doubling his previous electoral performance. These counties are overwhelmingly Latino.

I don’t want to overstate the role immigration played in swaying voters; cost-of-living was still the primary factor. It’s also worth noting that the mayors who presided over the migrant crisis, including Mayor Brandon Johnson, saw their approval ratings rebound somewhat after the issue abated.

But there is still an important and unresolved tension between progressive immigration policy and progressive economic policy. The Left used to be more cognizant of this. Remember when Bernie Sanders railed against open borders? If the Left wants to become a more formidable electoral force and show they can actually govern, they’re going to need to return to the era when they embraced more heterodoxy on immigration.

Subscribe now

Fixing asylum is a policy necessity and a political winner

President Biden did not campaign on a plan to massively increase migrants into the country. Nor did his administration develop a plan to allow substantially more migrants. It was the result of the administration moving to the left on asylum policy, regional push factors, and a functionally broken immigration system that hasn’t been properly updated in decades.

That means the next Democratic administration needs to enter office with a plan to prevent another migrant crisis from happening. Sitting back and hoping one doesn’t materialize is a strategy that invites political doom.

When most people think about Democrats’ plans to fix immigration, they think about Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Blas Nuñez-Neto, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former Biden administration Assistant Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, makes an important point:

None of the major comprehensive immigration reform efforts over the past 30 years would have directly addressed the asylum system—which means that, even if they had been enacted, surges at the southern border almost certainly would have continued.

More than a pathway to citizenship or enhanced border security, fixing the asylum system is the primary way to rebuild the public’s trust on immigration. I’d encourage anyone reading to check out Nuñez-Neto’s full immigration plan, which he released for Searchlight, but I want to briefly highlight the reforms on asylum.

• People who cross illegally between ports of entry should generally not be eligible for asylum, unless there is an extraordinarily compelling reason—such as their life being in imminent danger.

• Create an orderly process that starts abroad for individuals who are fleeing persecution or torture to claim asylum safely at a port of entry.

• Increase the screening standard used during credible fear interviews at the border to ensure economic migrants are identified early in the process.

• Repurpose existing federal funding to create asylum processing facilities where everybody encountered at the border goes through this expedited process and is not just released into the country.

Some of these policies are contentious in certain more left-leaning parts of the party. But I’d like them to really reflect on that tension I began my piece with. A mayor like Zohran Mamdani can not increase funding on city services or govern with durable political support if he’s dealing with a migrant crisis. For that matter, no progressive Democratic president could govern popularly while allowing such chaos to reign at the border.

Every wing of the Democratic Party needs to remember the political catastrophe that doomed the Biden administration and start discussing actual solutions to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Subscribe now

Two years ago, I attended a conference with Democratic staffers, Biden Administration officials, and friendly new media figures. The purpose was to celebrate the Biden Administration’s policy success, then a smaller portion of the conference was left to interrogate why their agenda had failed to resonate with voters. I hoped for some careful introspection, but left more pessimistic about the party’s prospects for the coming November.

One panel summed up the whole, frustrating endeavor. It was titled, “Naming Villains.” The conceit was that the Biden Administration’s agenda had failed to gain political traction because they had not vocally identified the right political enemies. Voters weren’t mad because of inflation and the border crisis. They had merely “misplaced” their blame away from the corporations, the self-enriching billionaires, and neoliberalism — the ultimate boogeyman at the conference.

Never mind the fact that the Biden Administration did regularly blame corporate greed for inflation or that many of the administration’s staffers came from the left-wing of the party; the whole premise just felt wrong-headed and, frankly, insulting to voters who had legitimate grievances with the past several years of governance. Those voters had lived through the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and felt the sticker shock of rising prices; they turned on the news and saw reports of a ‘migrant surge’ at the border one day or a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan the next.

We all know what happened in 2024. The party lost the White House and handed the Republicans unified control of the federal government.

There is an impulse inside every faction of the Democratic Party to only name villains that flatter previous ideological biases. But it’s important to remember that the villain changes depending on the policy in question. Should you name them to voters, you need to propose the right solution to fight them.

Think about some of the most important issues in society today: housing affordability, the clean energy buildout, and the rising cost of healthcare. There just isn’t a singular ideological lens inside the Democratic Party that can solve each of these issues. Deregulation can help reduce the cost of building more housing. There are monopolies in the healthcare industry that must be broken up. At the same time, there are regulations that need to be removed to increase the supply of healthcare providers!

This idea is really what drew me to the Searchlight Institute. The guiding philosophy is “heterodoxy,” and it allows us to release research that both flatters or offends all sorts of ideological biases across the political spectrum.

Look at some of the reports we released last month. One proposal aims to “reign in the power of health care monopolies” by giving the FTC the authority to investigate the consolidation of hospital systems using broader standards of community benefit. Research shows that hospitals with local monopolies charge consumers more for services than hospitals in more competitive markets. It’s a problem that needs to be solved.

That doesn’t mean we’re tied to every other issue that falls under the umbrella of left-wing economic thought. Take data centers, for example. Jane Flegal, a Senior Searchlight Fellow and former White House Senior Director for Industrial Emissions, recently released a report that explicitly rejects calls for a data center moratorium. Instead, she says policymakers should leverage hyperscalers’ energy demand to force them to help pay for a massive expansion of the grid and boost our transmission capacity.

Make no mistake, it is progressive to advocate for adding significantly more infrastructure to the grid. If we want to create more advanced manufacturing jobs, increase electric vehicle adoption, and lower utility rates for consumers, we need to enhance grid capacity.

The good thing about data centers, as Jane Flegal put it in a recent Searchlight interview, is they’re “really invested in an electricity system that can actually serve their demand, and if we can use their political power to counter the sort of historical opposition from utilities and states, it might be a real opportunity to do something big.”

This is a perfect example of why holding tight to any political dogma prevents you from solving the right problems. If you exclusively see any large tech company as a nefarious force that needs to be stopped, then you are effectively robbing our energy system of an enormous investment opportunity.

Of course, that doesn’t mean hyperscalers should not face more regulatory action in other areas of the economy. It’s just important to be rigorous in your policy analysis and not automatically default to any particular ideological bias.

The 2026 midterms are just around the corner. The presidential primaries will be here before we know it. Candidates from all sorts of ideological factions are hitting the campaign trail and espousing their favored solutions to a voter base that is understandably nihilistic about our nation’s politics. Be on the lookout for candidates who reject simplistic political solutions. Be wary of the political organizations and think tanks that always propose a hammer for every nail that pops up in the world.

Building a durable governing coalition is hard. Using that governing coalition to actually solve policy problems is even harder. That’s why philosophies like “big tent” and “heterodoxy” are so important. Fundamentally, it’s a humble approach to politics. It recognizes that every solution doesn’t need to flatter a singular ideological bias, nor does it always need to name a particular enemy.

Subscribe now

So what should states do about it? One camp of thought says “just say no!” and implement a moratorium on data center construction. Jane Flegal, a Senior Fellow at Searchlight and former Senior Director for Industrial Emissions in the Biden Administration, has published two recent reports that point policymakers to a more positive-sum outcome.

Subscribe now

First, the American Grid Infrastructure Fund — a dedicated federal funding vehicle to finance and coordinate grid investment at scale. The second proposes criteria to ensure the hyperscalers are good “grid citizens” that are held accountable for the energy they use.

I recently sat down with Jane to talk about her reports. We dive into the details of her proposals, identify how policymakers can build a political coalition to support them, and discuss why it’s so important that we capitalize on this historic moment to modernize and decarbonize our grid.

I really want to emphasize that last point. If we continue to let data centers build without concrete strings attached, we’re locking in more fossil fuel infrastructure and inevitably creating more public opposition. But if we just close our eyes, plug our ears, and tell the data centers to go away, we will lose out on an unprecedented investment opportunity.

And our grid needs this investment. Most of our grid hasn’t been updated for over half a century. A cleaner and more prosperous future requires a substantially larger grid and much greater transmission capacity. We need to seize the moment and think much bigger.

Below is a transcript of the conversation that has been lightly edited for clarity.

Danielle Deiseroth: Hi, my name is Danielle Deiseroth. I’m the chief of staff here at the Searchlight Institute, and today I’m joined by our senior fellow, Jane Flegal, to talk about climate, energy, data centers, and all of her recent work.

Just to start off, I would love to hear you talk a little bit about your recent paper that you wrote for Searchlight about state tax abatement and how state legislators can leverage this moment to really take advantage of this opportunity to build more grid infrastructure.

Jane Flegal: So, taking a step back, I feel like everyone who works on climate and clean energy right now is talking almost exclusively about the data center build out, which is sort of funny because none of us even considered that this would be a thing we’d be talking about even a few years ago. So it is remarkable how quickly the terrain changes. I think for me, I have felt from the kind of early days of this massive projected build out a couple of things. One, as someone who spent my whole career focused on climate change, and I know you know this, the projections for how much electricity generation and infrastructure we have to build in the US and globally, so that we can electrify other sectors of the economy, like transportation and industry, is really kind of an unfathomable scale.

It’s one thing to look at these models and say we have to 5x the grid by 2050 or whatever. But in truth, I think very few of us really seriously grappled with how significant that the challenge of infrastructure investment was going to be. Costa Samaras actually has a really good piece about the need to think about decarbonization as mega project for the Roosevelt Institute, which I’d recommend. But in any case, that was one thing, as we saw all this surging demand for data centers. I was kind of like, okay, on the one hand, this feels sort of scary. On the other hand, our own projections for climate infrastructure build out were at this scale, just not at this pace.

So, perhaps there’s an opportunity here. The second thing was more political, which is to say, for a long time, particularly on transmission and the grid, it’s been very difficult to build a political coalition capable of getting the kind of large scale planning and permitting and financing for the electricity grid that we need, in part, because there’s been pretty concentrated political opposition to a larger role in grid planning and permitting from some states and some utilities.

So one of the things that I thought was interesting about the moment of data center demand was now we may have a slightly different political coalition capable of advocating for grid policy at scale. The data centers are obviously really invested in an electricity system that can actually serve their demand, and if we can use their political power to counter the sort of historical opposition from utilities and states it might be a real opportunity to do something big. That was my overarching frame, rather than just saying yes or no to the data centers, which is a fight I don’t want to get into. I think the question is how do you leverage the build out that is already happening to try to get the investments in clean energy infrastructure that we know that we’re going to need.

I’ve written a little bit about more federal interventions, but so much of the action on electricity governance happens in states. These governors specifically have really been grappling with some tough political tensions around data centers. On the one hand, there is often an imperative, or a perceived imperative, to draw these investments to the states the governors are in charge of, for reasons of economic growth, not for jobs necessarily, but for tax revenue, for sure. There’s countervailing pressure now, because there’s so much opposition to data centers, kind of across the board. For a long time, there have been these tax abatements for data centers to attract data center developers to any given state. Now, we’re in this moment where I think historically the governors were kind of in a race to the bottom around who can give the most generous tax benefits. So that the data centers come there. I do think that is starting to shift, just because public opposition to the data centers has become so fierce.

So I think a lot of these governors, you see Spanberger grappling with this, you see others grappling with this, are in a situation where their legislatures are kind of like either ban data centers altogether or get rid of the tax breaks altogether. On the other hand, there are people, particularly in rural communities, who are often quite supportive of the data centers, so it’s kind of this weird political situation. An idea that I had was that rather than kind of yes no tax abatements, could you think about helping governors solve this political problem while driving investment in the grid by saying data centers are welcome in our states and can get X tax benefit if and only if they agree to abide by a certain set of conditions that I talk about as being kind of good grid citizens.

I think the reason that matters is that I feel like the public does not have a good understanding, for good and fair reasons, of what the agreement is between data centers and utilities and governments about who’s getting and who’s giving what. It all feels very opaque and kind of buried in these rate cases at utilities. So I think if you have legislatures or governors kind of articulating this is what the deal is. If you come here, for instance, you have to be able to flex your demand for electricity at given times, or you have to contribute to a fund to reduce the financing costs of transmission infrastructure, or you have to pay for the costs that your new demand causes on the grid. Just kind of clarifying what that contract looks like at a political level, rather than letting it get negotiated bilaterally, felt like it might be useful. So that’s the idea behind it. I do think there are definitely challenges. This issue around the race to the bottom is a real thing, and so I think the state conditionality frameworks works best if you could get kind of an interstate compact, where several states, where there’s a lot of data center development, agree to this. But I don’t think that’s impossible, given how much controversy there is about this stuff now.

Danielle: I would love to talk a little bit about what’s at stake, because what you said earlier, instead of saying yes or no, there’s so many data centers that are already under construction right now or are in the pipeline, and because of the patchwork of states legislating on data centers in different ways, there’s real variability in whether clean energy gets built or perhaps behind the meter gas gets built to power these data centers instead. So, do you want to say a little bit more about what could happen if we do this well? What’s at risk?

Jane: There is this, why does this matter piece to it. My bias coming into this was because I am interested in advancing electrification for climate. For me, the obvious ask of these companies was to invest in and build a public grid that benefits everyone. Help us do the clean energy and grid expansion that the world needs for economic growth and climate. Which is a different question than just how do you meet this very near term demand from data centers, right?

f you’re just asking the latter, you can roll up a bunch of diesel gen sets to some poor neighborhood and power your data center, which I think would be a very suboptimal outcome, not just because discretely you’re losing the potential upside of having the hyper scalers actually help us address the grid problems that got us to this point in the first place. But also, there are very serious pollution impacts associated with some of the behind the meter gas stuff, particularly because of the technologies that are being used at the moment.

I do think there’s some misunderstanding about how bad the behind the meter gas strategy is. Some people would argue that my view of this is a little rosy eyed or naive, but I think the truth is that we as a country should never be in a situation ever again where our electricity system is so sclerotic and broken, that we can’t meet demand to cleanly power growth. We should all be kind of embarrassed about that, and that is the case right now. The problem is we have demand and we don’t have enough supply and infrastructure to meet that demand, so I view to a large extent the build out of the behind the meter gas as a symptom of our decadal failure to invest in the grid.

This is what happens, and I think it is also true that some behind the meter generation is inevitable. Both because it takes way, way too long to plan, build, and interconnect demand and generation, and all of these companies are motivated by speed to power, meaning they want to get electricity as fast as possible. And right now we have a system that takes seven plus years to connect to the grid, so that’s not going to be workable for these companies. There’s kind of the speed to power argument for behind the meter thing, and then I think there are some other arguments that given the scale of the demand, they were probably always going to have some form of backup power. So there would be a rationale for some behind the meter stuff. Even if they were all fully grid connected, and what we’re seeing now is a hybrid: partial behind the meter, but not fully isolated from the grid. A plan to connect in the future, which I think is interesting.

I think the climate community is quite freaked out about the build out of gas to meet this moment, and and I understand that anxiety. I will say that my view on this is that the way to deal with this is to build so much cheap clean energy over the next few years that these gas plants run at very low capacity factor, so that they exist and they’re helping us manage peak demand, but they’re not running all the time, and dumping Co2 in the atmosphere. But that requires us to fix our permitting system, so we can actually build all this clean energy.

Danielle: That requires us to pass permitting reform once and for all. I know you talked about this at the federal level as well, and some of your other work for Searchlight, and that is a core component that predicates everything else that you would propose. So I would love to hear a little bit more about some of the other federal solutions that go along with permitting reform.

Jane: I’m glad people are finally talking about permitting reform, and on the other hand, there are other tools as well. We do absolutely need to pass permitting reform, and I think a piece of a permitting deal is reforming the Federal Power Act, which governs how we plan inter regional transmission. But there’s lots of other things. So you know one thing that I kind of think is worth drawing out here is that, your polling points this out, everyone’s obsessed with affordability right now. I don’t want to become post affordability, because I understand that these are real concerns that people have. On the other hand, I think we need to be candid about the challenges of cramming all of our domestic energy policy through an affordability frame, especially if affordability is measured in capping or reducing rates in the next two years.

The truth is, there’s a very limited tool set to do that. But there are things that we can do. What are the things we can do that meet the dual imperatives of fixing the structural issues with our energy system and enhancing supply and creating a situation where we have enough energy to power growth, while also containing costs as much as we can. Not just contain the cost, but have a conversation about who should pay those costs, because so much of our current system for building out the electricity grid is very much dependent on placing those costs on the back of ratepayers, which is a really regressive way to fund nationally important infrastructure. Because as you know, we all get charged the same electricity rate, which is independent of our income, so it’s just not a progressive way to fund shared infrastructure. It’s also like not how we do it with highways or lots of other nationally important shared infrastructure.

That’s one thing about affordability. But the other thing I’ll say is that there are tools that can help reduce the costs of building new infrastructure today. What I don’t think we should do is say we are not going to build new infrastructure, because if we defer the investment that we need, we will end up in this exact same situation over and over and over again. That’s one thing that worries me a bit about rate freezes, or whatever. This will defer investment that we need to have, unless you figure out a way for it not to. But I think some of those ideas are a little overly cute.

Anyway, some of the federal tools. One is using federal financing for large clean energy generation and grid projects of various kinds, and the Trump Administration is doing some amount of this, and it’s certainly a set of tools that we used aggressively in the Biden administration.

Things like using the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, which is now called Energy Dominance Fund — same set of tools basically, it’s to reduce the cost of capital to build these projects that we know we need to build. The other is that parts of the Inflation Reduction Act were retained, including clean energy tax credits for some of the clean firm technologies we need. And by clean firm, I mean clean energy technologies that can be dispatched or used whenever they’re needed, irrespective of the weather. So that’s things like nuclear or geothermal or maybe gas with CCS, and I think part of what this moment is revealing is that despite my absolute optimism about solar, wind, and batteries. There are parts of decarbonizing our system that are going to require clean firm power, that’s what’s going to compete with gas. So again, if we end up with new gas plants because of behind the meter generation or on grid generation for data centers, the solution is to out compete those technologies. We really need investments in clean firms, and those federal tax credits exist, as does some demonstration funding.

So, those are just a couple of things that I think are really important. Maybe the last thing is that I mentioned Federal Power Act reform, but I think there probably is space and a need to have a much more ambitious conversation about what the federal government should be doing on the grid. We have this very fragmented jurisdictional patchwork of states and regional transmission offices and organizations, and then the federal government. I think if you look at the system we have today for building out the poles and wires that give us the foundation of the American economy, we would be like, why would anyone design it this way? This is crazy. So, I think, in part, because of the data center conversation, I think there’s the political space to ask some really fundamental questions about what should the federal role be in building a grid for growth that is funded progressively.

Danielle: So what I’m hearing from you is that it’s sort of a perfect storm, right? You have incentives for the data centers to be built quickly. You have very rapidly rising public opposition to these data centers. You have governors who have political problems dealing with all of this. And you have a federal government that has not only affordability concerns, but also national security. This is like the window to really get all these disparate parties in the room to come to some sort of positive outcome for everyone.

Jane: Totally. The Trump administration announced the rate payer protection pledge. It’s just totally toothless, and in a way, they were sort of on the right track of, we need a better contract between the public and these data center companies and utilities as it relates to meeting these challenges. So I think we need more big ideas, and there is a tendency on grid and electricity system issues to get so complicated and it’s so technical. Someone said, I think it was Robinson Meyer, like these people have their own language.

It makes it hard for policymakers, because when I would go around and ask people what should we do about this, I think there’s a reluctance to float big ideas, in part, because no one wants to be seen as dumb. I, on the other hand, I’m very happy to put myself out there. But we can’t let the complexity of this hamstring our ability to do the right things, so we’re going to have to. It’s a perfect storm in a lot of ways, there’s a lot of potential downside risk, but I do think there’s a lot of potential upside if we can figure out how to navigate it right.

Danielle: The one thing that I’ve seen in polling here and from other pollsters too is that transmission is also sort of this Goldilocks, like when you ask people in a poll, what do you think about clean energy, what do you think about fossil fuels, you see a lot of partisan divides in the way that you might expect, and maybe it’s because people aren’t really sure about transmission in the same way. But all that’s to say, there is, at least in polling, bipartisan support for building out transmission. So you really could see bipartisanship with this.

Jane: It’s like a totally technology agnostic vehicle to move electricity around. It doesn’t discriminate based on whether you’re moving electricity from a nuclear plant or a coal plant. We should all be invested in having a grid that works. It’s kind of crazy. I do worry a lot about the risk of it getting caught up in the political culture wars, but I’m very happy that for now that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I think the downside is I don’t think the NIMBYism that you would encounter around all kinds of built infrastructure you definitely see with actual transmission infrastructure. So whereas for me it’s like upside, we want public investment for the grid. On the other hand, it’s sort of like taking a data center and coupling it with a giant transmission line might be like better for society as a whole, but it could really inflame local opposition, you know? I’m not sure it helps with local opposition. So, that I think is a real challenge. It’s part of the reason I think we need more centralized and effective permitting reform, because I don’t know how we’re gonna bottom up our way through building the stuff we need.

Danielle: And it’s about, I think, communicating fairness. You talked about this. Who is the person who is paying for this, and how can we clearly communicate the benefits of what working families can see from all of this build out? Maybe do some education about transmission and our aging grid, and the broader imperatives about affordability and economic development too. It’s just, it does seem like there’s a lot of potential education that could be happening here too.

Jane: Totally, and I should say, the Trump administration has taken a bunch of actions that have made all of this much, much worse. So in some cases it’s like, okay, they’re doing pretty muscular industrial policy on big nuclear projects. That’s cool, and like the ratepayer protection pledge is at least kind of scratching at something that is real. But, the vast majority of the actions, whether it’s weaponizing the permitting regime to go after our cheapest forms of energy to deploy today, or you know, doing everything you can to make it impossible for companies to utilize the tax credits for clean energy, the tariffs — all of these things are definitely making what would already be an affordability crisis for electricity much worse, not better.

Danielle: They say energy dominance, but their actions are not necessarily speaking to that.

Jane: I think this is another potential political opportunity for Democrats, because I think, whether it’s fair or not, for a long time I think the Democratic Party has been viewed as not particularly in favor of something we would call energy dominance. Rather much more concerned with the pollution effects of energy and reducing demand for energy and advancing efficiency and picking only a few technologies that we like, like solar and wind, but doing everything we can to obstruct gas.

Now, it is the Republicans who are picking and choosing what they like and don’t like in the energy system, often in really kind of economically irrational ways, and so Democrats now have a real opportunity to juxtapose our agenda with Republicans. We are the party of energy dominance. We are the party that actually wants to build everything as fast as we can and isn’t going to discriminate based on technology choice.

That would obviously be a pretty significant pivot from where the party has been in the past, but I do think, in that frame, clean energy is really positioned to win, and that just wasn’t the case, even like four years ago. The cost declines in clean energy technologies have just been really incredible. Again, it’s horrible what is happening, and I think there is a potential for political upside.

Danielle: Hypothetically, if Democrats would win back Congress and the presidency in 2028 and they walk into the Department of Energy on day one, they’re going to have some really tough opposition from within their own party to say we got to swing the pendulum completely back, and take advantage of the precedent that the Trump administration has set to pick winners and losers. Democrats are going to have to really shift their positioning.

Jane: You see it even in the permitting fight today. People are mad, and I understand why they’re mad. But, at some point we have to kind of pick our heads up and say, okay, if Democrats win in 2028, I would assume that they would want to hit the ground running. And that means doing permitting reform before then. Also some of the pieces of a permitting bill that are being discussed right now are about permitting certainty and constraining the discretion of the executive branch. Which is the only way to stop what’s currently happening.

So, even though we’re mad and there’s kind of a don’t negotiate with your enemies vibe right now, I think that’s really short sighted, because A.) permitting reform is the only actual solution to that problem. And B.) I think Democrats really need to have permitting reform in place if and when they take power and want to advance their agenda. So, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. So much about climate and energy discourse and policy and macroeconomics have changed, and economics have changed in the last few years. It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens next.

Danielle: In large part, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. You worked in the Biden White House, and were instrumental in helping to pass that legislation, and I am really just such a fan of how you describe your theory of change behind the IRA. I’m an eternal optimist, especially when it comes to climate change. I firmly believe we are going to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. We know what we need to do, and the green spiral that — capital has invested in these technologies because of the IRA technologies getting better and cheaper. I sort of look at that as like a bulwark against even what the administration is doing, and Democrats need to remember what we did and what we set off and not forget that if they win again in 2028.

Jane: Yeah, I think that’s right. And Nina Kelsey is the academic who first wrote about the green spiral. I am very inspired by it, and I think there is often a lot of confusion about what the theory of change underpinning the Inflation Reduction Act was and wasn’t, and confusion about whether it was a failure. I think there was some confusion about whether what we were trying to do was deliver kind of charismatic projects to local communities to build broad-based political support for Democrats. Like was it an electoral strategy based on charismatic projects, or was it really the more green spiral approach?

The only way you’re going to get the changes you need is to drag a part of capital with you. By investing in these clean energy industries and making them not just marginal, but powerful, serious actors, you would help shift the political economy of climate action and create a loop where there’s an incentive for vested interests to want more ambitious climate over time.

That feels like a slightly different theory than what most people, I think, would describe the Green New Deal theory as. They are related to one another. But, they’re different in important ways.

When Democrats lost the election, I’m not an optimist, so I was like, everything that we just worked for is going to be gone. As a result, I was sort of positively surprised when much of the Inflation Reduction Act stayed in place, actually. Especially because Trump was like “repeal the green new scam.” I mean, that’s what he called for, and Republicans protected pieces of that bill. I think that the explanation for that is some combination of a small set of stakeholders really building important relationships with those offices over time, and that work is really underfunded in philanthropy in my view, but that’s one piece of it. The other one is we had industry interests and sort of moneyed interests advocating to keep these things in place. I think what I underestimated was just how much cultural polarization there would be on like solar and wind, in particular. There’s sort of like irrational disdain for those technologies.

Danielle: Trump thinks windmills kill birds, and hates them.

Jane: They hate them. I had underrated the effectiveness of that fierce cultural opposition to technology. There’s probably more that we can learn there about why we don’t want to repeat these things.

The reason the green spiral is important in my view is that climate is not like almost any other public policy problem where it’s like okay we know we need to pass X healthcare policy, and we’re gonna pass it next year, and then we have fixed the health care system. Climate change is a multi decadal problem that we’re gonna have to manage for a very long time, both in terms of emissions reductions — even if the IRA had been maintained in full it would not have gotten the world to net zero emissions, it wouldn’t really have even come close. We’re going to have to keep coming back and coming back, both on emissions reductions, but also on adaptation and resilience, as we experience impacts of climate change. So, this idea that you actually do need a durable politics for climate action, I think, is in some ways quite unique to climate, actually, and more important than it may even be in other areas. I’m optimistic that we can metabolize that and continue to make progress in that way.

Danielle: There’s analogs to the data center grid policy, as well. You have capital, you have legislators. There could be this opportunity to forge a durable coalition to result in positive outcomes for everybody. But, there’s been a lot of talk about quiet climate policy and climate hushing, and whether this more sort of behind the scenes coalition building can result in more durable policy if we’re not going out in front of voters and just saying climate, climate, climate all the time when it is polarizing to a lot of voters out there.

As someone who was very close to the messaging development around the IRA, I think that was the lesson that I took away from it all, is that I did underestimate the cultural backlash.

Jane: Yeah, the climate hushing thing. One thing about my theory of change that transcends a bunch of this stuff is that I really believe in policy sequencing. I do not think that anyone would argue that it is good electoral advice to Democrats or Republicans today to make climate action the tip of the spear in your election. Everyone knows that is true, like anyone who’s saying that it’s not true is lying.

On the other hand, I’m not convinced that you can never talk about climate. It really is quite context dependent, and also I don’t think it means that that will be the case forever. That’s part of the kind of green spiral theory — not only are you building these concentrated economic interests who stand to benefit from more aggressive climate action over time, but you’re also investing in technologies to bring them down the cost curve, making it cheaper to take climate action for everyone. The notion is, if you can reduce the marginal unit of political will that is required to overcome cost barriers for climate action, you will be in a much better space politically, because you’re not asking people to make sacrifices in the name of a global invisible gas.

Even though I know it has horrible consequences for humans and ecosystems all over the planet, it is just hard because it’s a global invisible gas, and a lot of the worst impacts are feared in the future. So, we should be honest that climate hushing may be a near-term tactical requirement, and I think that in some ways it is, and we are not going to get the entire global economy to net zero by never talking about climate change. Over time our analysis of this stuff needs to evolve, but I think in this moment, yeah, it’s just there’s a lot of progress that we can still make without leading with climate,

Danielle: Shifting gears a little bit, you keep saying the term net zero, and there has been a lot of discussion about climate targets. A lot of the Green New Deal discussion was really set off by the IPCC report, which was now like quite a few years ago. But setting global climate targets and certain metrics and barriers that we need to hit by a certain timeline to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. So, what do you think about those types of measurements and metrics? Do you think that that’s still the right way to be viewing emissions reductions in 2026?

Jane: Yeah, this is such an interesting question. I do think some of the targets and timelines have been very bad for climate action and climate politics. First of all, there’s this kind of false scientism that they imply, which just isn’t true, like it is not true that if we don’t get to net zero by 2030 we will, the world will fall off a cliff, like that’s not going to happen.

And so, as a scientific matter, some of the targets and timelines were just not correct, and so that in and of itself is kind of a problem. It freaked everyone out, and was not scientifically credible. It certainly is true that every 10th of a degree of temperature warming matters, and so we should avoid as much of it as possible, but it’s not a cliff from which we fall, so that’s kind of one thing. The other thing is that emissions, climate change is a global problem, and we tend to set these targets at sub-global levels, like at the state level. Like a city or an individual company makes a net zero commitment, and it’s just like that. I think this is not the right way to think about the problem.

Just take the United States, for example. Even though the bulk of emissions growth over the next few decades is projected to come from non-OECD economies, the whole world does have to get to net zero scientifically at some point. Like, that is true. And so, eventually we are going to have to get very close to zero or net negative. I think the notion is if the US is going to expect that, you know, the world decarbonizes, and especially rapidly developing economies, it would behoove us to demonstrate that a rich developed economy can actually do this without major sacrifice. That I think is the rationale for the for the weird jurisdictional targets, and they do give you something to aim for, I guess.

I worked on industrial emissions in the White House, and not a lot of people were paying attention to industrial emissions, and the fact that we had to sort of like reverse engineer our policies such that we could hit like the nationally determined commitment for our UN climate ambition did kind of create the space for me to be like you’re never going to hit this target unless you focus on industry. So in a way that was positive, but it focuses you on very near term actions without thinking about whether they’re durable.

So for instance, if California has a net zero by 2030 target or something, you can, if you’re in office, say we’re going to ban all internal combustion vehicles tomorrow, and that will take care of a huge chunk of the emissions. Your emissions accounting does not account for the fact that next year you could get voted out of office, and all of that work gets undone, and because greenhouse gas emissions are a cumulative problem, you have potentially made the problem worse, not better. So, like the near-term emissions focus has some real downsides, I think. The question is, what can you measure that would be a way for sort of understanding whether we’re making progress or not toward decarbonization? And there aren’t yet, that I’ve uncovered, perfect answers to that question. But I do think starting to think more in terms of measurement of investment additionality. So if you’re a governor in a state, how much new transmission infrastructure have you, like, would this have been there before, exactly? Like, how many gigawatts of new clean power have you brought online through your policies? How many electric vehicle charging stations deploy? Whatever it is, just kind of near-term metrics that are upstream of the emissions impact.

The other thing that I mentioned, that it has, that you have this near-term focus on emissions, but if you think about climate change as a global problem, one of the most valuable things the United States can do, especially given where emissions growth is projected to happen, is to invest in and bring the cost down of other clean energy technologies. If you’re sitting behind a desk and you have an emissions accounting rubric in front of you, investing in innovation and geothermal, it’s very hard to estimate what the emissions reduction of investing in a new technology is today, and and it could end up being one of the most important tools for decarbonizing Africa, and you have totally failed to capture that in your near-term emissions accounting analysis. So, I think on net it’s a mixed bag, but I tend to think that it can often foreclose more than it enables, and that we should probably rethink some of these targets.

Danielle: Jane, with that, we will wrap. Thank you so much for sharing all of your expertise, and I’m excited to hear you speak more about emissions targets, and how we can reframe our thinking around that.

Gordon Wood died at 92 this weekend, less than a month short of the nation’s 250^th anniversary. Among the nation’s most preeminent historians—perhaps the most respected expert on the country’s birth—he deserves to be remembered not least for what his scholarship tells us about the present day.

Gordon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution detailed in ways that are too often lost in the contemporary debate why exactly our society should be considered “exceptional”—not, to note, that it’s explicitly better than others, or that its history is unblemished, but rather that’s it is different. We are a people without a single origin story. We’re not predominately from the same stock, we don’t worship using the same liturgy, and our ancestors did not speak a single language.

Rather, the governing institutions we will celebrate next month reflect a distinct element in our common heritage: We chose to live, or now choose to live, with one another absent the categorical bonds that define other societies. Who could have predicted that a society loosed from what might otherwise tether us together would, two and a half centuries later, claim a mantle as the oldest democracy on the globe?

In one of our most memorable conversations, Gordon mentioned something I’ll never forget. He noted that historians frequently highlight how John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, sometimes friends and frequent rivals, happened to die on the same day—July 4, 1826, the nation’s 50^th anniversary. That coincidence has become a part of our national lore, evidence perhaps that the hand of God played a role in arranging the date.

What few knew—what Gordon revealed to me—was that both men, icons of the Founding Generation, both took their last breath feeling despondent about the fate of the nation. They were convinced that the American experiment was coming to naught—that the balance they had each worked to achieve between effective government and popular sovereignty was doomed. And of course, the cynicism was well placed: The nation would break apart just a few decades later in a war that would famously be described, amid the carnage, as a “new birth of freedom.”

Perhaps the most dispiriting element of Gordon’s untimely passing is that, ironically or not, we’re in a moment of similar despondency, particularly among those of us who are MAGA detractors. The eminent professor leaves us at a moment when many just presume that the American experiment is caught in a potentially permanent doom loop—that we need to “save our democracy,” even if many worry it’s beyond redemption. And perhaps it is.

But there are two things about that. First, as Gordon revealed to me all those years ago, this isn’t the first time we’ve been so cynical—and those of us worried about the future today can hardly claim to understand this moment as well as Adams and Jefferson would have claimed to understand theirs. For all we may seem to be on the precipice of disaster, America has survived seeming catastrophe before. That is perhaps the (accidental) genius of our society and government.

Second, a point which Gordon both embodied and illustrated last year while being honored with a lifetime achievement award at the American Enterprise Institute gala in Washington, our nation remains full of heterodox thinkers who are perpetually challenging orthodoxy and proposing new approaches to seemingly intractable problems.

Speaking before the denizens of America’s conservative movement at a time when a Republican administration had embraced out-and-out xenophobia, Gordon took the opportunity to extoll the virtues of immigration. However one parses the various streams of the conservative movement, there were more than a handful of Trump supporters in that room, and Gordon nevertheless received a standing ovation. That took what many of us might label “chutzpah.” And it may well have changed some very influential minds.

I’m as sad to realize today that I won’t have another conversation with Gordon as I was thrilled when, more than a decade ago, he responded to my email out of the blue asking whether I could pick his brain over lunch here in Providence.

He was a generous man, an iconic scholar, an important voice, and a reminder both in word and deed of what makes America great: a working-class kid who went on to shed light on our common story that might otherwise have been lost in the shadows of history.

His books, lectures, and articles were about things that happened a long time ago, but his wisdom speaks to our present moment. Upon his death and the nation’s 250^th anniversary, we should be careful to appreciate what he taught us.

Across the political spectrum, new media, creators, and influencers often lean hardest toward the extremes on either end. And that’s no surprise: Your feed is heavily biased toward showing you the very-online, very-loud, very-intense voices of our politics. There is a significant financial and attention incentive for the largest of these personalities, too.

Two things can be true at once. Your algorithmically-pruned feed is not real life — our politics plays out much differently than what you’re seeing in your online bubble — and these influencers and online personalities do in fact matter. But the question of “How much?” remains.

New polling from Searchlight shows a significant gap in the name recognition of personalities on the left versus their counterparts on the right.

That won’t be breaking news to anyone paying attention — it’s conventional wisdom at this point that the right is eating the left’s lunch when it comes to new media. But before liberal readers start bellyaching they should take heart from the fact that right-wing figures tend to be quite unpopular. In fact, Tucker Carlson was the most disliked person that we polled (maybe there is hope after all). And Ben Shapiro, the most popular conservative tested, is seeing his viewership numbers fall off a cliff.

Subscribe now

It’s worth taking a minute to zoom in on Hasan Piker. Before you groan from exhaustion on the topic it’s important to note that he’s making a real effort to assert himself as a gatekeeper for the left — and even though he’s not a kingmaker (by his own admission), he has seen some success as an endorser in Democratic primaries.

Share

For all the attention that Hasan has received from beltway media and the chattering class, he’s just about as unknown to the general public as Asmongold, an avatar of the ‘incel’ right. Believe it or not, Hasan is actually less-liked than his fellow streamer, although that unfavorability is driven mainly by Republicans.

So, how do we actually measure ‘influence?’ That’s proving to be a difficult proposition. Folks like Hasan do undeniably play an important role in our politics by driving conversation via their loud and engaged audience. Any major political campaign takes creators and new media seriously; many of them now hire digital partnerships and new media staff. Influencers get credentials to campaign events or an escort on Capitol Hill. They are briefed on policy. Candidates and elected officials meet with and make content with them — often developing a personal relationship.

But, as with most things related to politics, there’s a TON of grey here. Influencers have pretty small audiences as well as their own baggage, and each individual candidate has unique potential benefits and pitfalls from engaging with new media. That being said, influencers have carved out important niches for themselves. They’re tenacious, and they’ve become a true force for holding candidates accountable or otherwise pushing for them to mutually agree on policies and positions. They’re here to stay.

Social media is bad for us and Americans know it. But it’s an addiction that Americans can’t, and don’t want to, quit.

Even if they haven’t read the scientific papers (who has the attention span to do that anymore, anyway?), people know innately they weren’t meant to spend their lives online. When asked about whether they believe that the overall impact of social media on society will be positive or negative, voters say negative. Voters aren’t necessarily concerned about phones as a technology (they give cell phones a net +61 rating), but they understand that there is something uniquely dark about social media.

Subscribe now

Dim views of social media’s impact on society do not affect the amount of time that voters tend to spend scrolling. A plurality of voters overall (34%) report spending multiple hours a day scrolling on social media and another 22% say they spend about an hour each day on the activity. Importantly, we specified time on social media rather than time on their phones in general so voters are likely spending more time on their phones in general every day doing non-social media tasks and activities.

Voters aged 35-49 (50%), voters under 35 (41%), and women (39%) are the most likely to say that they spend multiple hours a day scrolling on social media. These demographic groups have very negative attitudes towards social media’s impact on society (net -11, net -12, and net -9, respectively), yet they still spend a significant portion of each day on the platforms.

Interestingly, negative perceptions of social media and high social media use do not lead voters to wish they spent less time scrolling. A plurality of voters across demographic lines agree that they are comfortable with their phone usage. A majority (57%) of voters aged 35-49 answer that they are content with their screen time, despite half of this demographic spending multiple hours a day on social media. A similar pattern occurs among women, 64% of whom report satisfaction with their scrolling behavior despite high levels of social media use.

Share

While voters are much more likely to say they wish they spent less time on their phones rather than more, the broad complacency with their digital and technological habits is a cause for alarm.

Attitudes towards social media usage are eerily similar to attitudes held by smokers in the 1970s as the tide turned on cigarette use. A report conducted in 1978 by the Roper Organization on behalf of the Tobacco Institute found that Americans overwhelmingly believed smoking was dangerous but only 29% of smokers answered that they would ‘very much like to quit.’

A large majority (61%) of Americans said that any amount of smoking was harmful to someone’s health and nearly another third (31%) said heavy smoking had negative impacts. Yet, even as 92% of Americans agreed that cigarettes caused health issues, smokers did not feel a sense of urgency in quitting their cigarette habits. Nearly a third (31%) showed no interest in quitting and another third (32%) answered that they would “sort of like to quit.” In fact, the report for the Tobacco Institute makes clear that the industry should not yet panic because “while the overwhelming majority of the public has been convinced by the anti-smoking forces that smoking is dangerous to the smoker’s health, this has not persuaded very many smokers to give up smoking.”

Now, with nearly fifty years of hindsight, the general public can agree that smoking has harmed millions of Americans and continues to kill more than 480,000 Americans every year. The government has taken countless steps to address cigarette use, including spending hundreds of millions of dollars on education and prevention. But public health professionals are still playing catch-up: In 2022, the CDC spent nearly $250 million on national ad campaigns and tobacco prevention grants; the tobacco industry spent $8 billion on advertising and promoting their products.

Hindsight is 20/20. Lawmakers should heed the lessons from widespread cigarette addictions in the 20th century and get ahead of what may already be a full-blown crisis.

You can view the full toplines from this poll here. You can view the crosstabs here.

Subscribe now

Over the course of the Biden Administration, Blas played a pivotal role in ensuring that Democrats took border security seriously — especially as a surge of illegal immigration began to overwhelm the U.S.-Mexico border in the early part of Biden’s presidency. The Washington Post went on to call him “The quiet technocrat who steered Biden’s effort to tighten the border.”

Now a senior fellow at Searchlight, Blas leads our immigration and border security policy. He recently published his latest Substack piece ‘Border Security is National Security,’ as well as ‘NO MORE BACK DOORS,’ a comprehensive plan to reshape federal immigration law and enforcement.

I sat down with Blas to discuss Searchlight’s 11-point plan to regain the public’s trust on the issues of immigration and border security. We also spoke about the need for more Democrats to take Independent and swing voters seriously when they say border security remains a top priority of theirs.

Part of that need centers on the question of immigration enforcement in our nation’s interior. Calls to ‘abolish ICE’ have taken hold in the wake of chaos and violence in Minnesota — including the killing of two Americans, Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

Blas made clear that ICE’s abuses and cruelty must be reined in, reiterating the points he had first raised in a memo shared with Democrats in Congress earlier in January. (First reported by of .)

The Bulwark

Dems Are Begging Their Own to Drop ‘Abolish ICE’

DEMOCRATS RISK FALLING into a “trap” of Donald Trump’s making if they revive calls for the abolition of ICE, warns an upstart Democratic think tank in a new memo that reads, in part, as an emotional plea to others in the party…

Read more

5 months ago · 402 likes · 501 comments · Lauren Egan

To many Americans, I can imagine there must be an overall perception that our nation’s federal immigration strategy has — in recent years — oscillated between ‘chaos’ on one end and cruelty on the other. “People don’t like to see chaos,” Blas said.

Blas himself is an immigrant. Born in Argentina, he came to the United States when he was ten years old following the nation’s democratic transition after the Dirty War. (My father is an immigrant, too. He was raised in the south of Lebanon and later in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War.)

We ended our conversation with optimism that leaders in Washington can, with the right focus and motivation, improve our broken immigration system — and that America today remains just as much a home for immigrants as it did before.

A country’s ability to secure its border must be a primary component of its national security strategy and its foreign policy. This fact seems obvious: keeping dangerous people and products from entering the country is a prerequisite to ensuring that the American public is safe. In fact, recent polling by the Searchlight Institute confirms that for many voters — including critical swing voters — border security is national security, and immigration is not solely an economic or cultural issue. But for too long, Democrats have sidestepped — and often actively ignored — border security when they advance their vision for national security.

In Searchlight’s polling, securing the border was seen as a “very important policy goal” for half of voters, including 77% of Republicans and 47% of Independents, but only 19% of Democrats. In fact, Republicans see border security and the prevention of illegal immigration as a key element of a national security policy — more important than maintaining a strong military and stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Drug trafficking was also seen as a key national security threat that deserves a strong policy response. More than half (54%) of voters, including 77% of Republicans and 44% of Independents, say it is usually or always appropriate to use military force to intercept drug traffickers. This enthusiasm among Republicans is likely related to Trump’s use of military force against boats in the Caribbean and Pacific.

Subscribe now

The donkey in the room

It is clear from our poll that Democrats, unlike other voters, do not prioritize border security in national security or foreign policy. This kind of myopic thinking about the border is also present in America’s national security apparatus, which has historically overlooked the importance of the border by focusing almost exclusively on great power competition. You can see this clearly in how our government is structured.

In the executive branch, the Department of Defense devotes a small fraction of its resources to the Western Hemisphere even as its combatant commands deploy incredible firepower, bases, and resources in other parts of the world. And DOD has historically resisted devoting substantial resources to combatting drug or human smuggling in our hemisphere — activities that can help contribute to the security of our border — preferring instead to focus on building warfighting capacity.

The State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs has also historically been viewed as a place where young diplomats cut their teeth before moving up and out to more important postings in Europe and Asia. Before President Trump’s ill-advised moves to neuter our global soft power by slashing foreign assistance, USAID spent only 10% of its budget in the Western Hemisphere.

Meanwhile, the State Department has historically been more focused on helping Europe solve its refugee crisis than helping the U.S. solve ours: its Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration spent more than four times as much money in the Middle East and Africa on migration than it did in the Western Hemisphere. This lack of vision isn’t just confined to the Executive Branch. The Congressional oversight and appropriations committees that authorize and fund the Departments of Defense and State have also resisted treating border security-related issues within our hemisphere as a key part of their jurisdiction.

This structural bias against prioritizing border security in our national security governance and foreign policy has had real consequences. One of the most pernicious effects has been the State Department’s lack of focus on immigration and border issues as it engages foreign governments. For example, during the Biden Administration, Panama’s decision to swiftly bus migrants who exited the Darien jungle after the brutal week-long hike from Colombia to Costa Rica turned the previously impenetrable jungle into a highway that hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants took to come north. At the same time, Venezuela refused to accept returns of their nationals for most of the Administration.

Allowing two foreign governments to effectively dictate our border policy led to a crisis on our border that continues to reverberate in our politics to this day. Our inability to wield the full power of the U.S. government to strong-arm those governments to change their policies reflects a lack of conviction within the Democratic establishment and the State Department that the security of our border needed to be a real focus of our foreign policy.

So while I disagree with most of President Trump’s callous and wantonly cruel immigration policies, I cannot help but note with some chagrin that his team has successfully made border and immigration issues central to their national security and foreign policy strategy — with real results. The State Department has concluded a series of landmark agreements with foreign governments to accept the return of third country nationals and beef up their enforcement of transit routes, which have contributed to record lows in illegal border crossings.

Subscribe now

To be clear, some of these agreements — such as the decision to deport immigrants to jails in El Salvador or to war-torn countries in Africa — are clearly beyond the pale. But the swiftness with which the State Department was able to negotiate these agreements shows what is possible when leadership truly prioritizes the security of our border as it engages with foreign governments. The next Democratic administration should not lose focus on these issues and instead channel this energy to make smarter, safer, and more durable partnerships with our international counterparts on migration and border issues.

Likewise, the Department of Defense has taken extraordinary — and I would argue illegal — actions to target and assassinate purported drug smugglers in the Caribbean and Pacific oceans. These actions reflect a muscular role for DOD in helping to secure the border in this Administration, but they are also counterproductive. Killing alleged smugglers means that we cannot elicit information through interrogations and analysis of their devices that can be used to identify — and go after — the broader criminal networks that they are working for. We should encourage DOD to play a more active role in targeting drug smuggling in our hemisphere, but ensure that they are doing it smartly and legally.

Democrats need to stop paying lip service to the border

Democrats need to recalibrate their thinking on national security and convince voters that they are serious about securing the border. According to our poll, border security ranks 2nd among 14 possible national security policy priorities for Republicans, 4th among swing voters, and last for Democrats.

Likewise, voters spontaneously bring up immigration issues when asked open-ended questions. Voters have favorable impressions on Republicans’ strength on immigration and border issues, and list these same matters as their top concerns about Democrats. This simply must change if Democrats are to regain the broader public’s trust on this issue.

Democrats should do three things to change this narrative. First, they need to get over their allergy to talking about the need to secure the border as a key national security priority. Democrats simply cannot be credible with voters on national security issues if they believe we will return to the border crisis of the Biden years.

Second, border and immigration policy has to be a central plank of any credible foreign policy. We need countries to help us interdict drug smuggling, police transit routes, accept the return of migrants, and create more lawful pathways for migrants.

Third, border and immigration policies must be comprehensive and include commonsense measures that ensure the border remains secure, while providing orderly legal ways for people to come to the United States, help grow our economy, and make our cities and towns more prosperous. Until and unless Democrats get serious about securing the border, voters will continue to trust Republicans more on these critical issues.

Share

Need to argue for onshoring semiconductor manufacturing? China. What about next-gen energy technology? Also China. How about naval construction or AI or cars? Once again, China. You need to sell the American people on your governing priorities? Just point to what our rival across the Pacific is doing. Right?

Maybe it’s just carryover from Cold War-era politics, but for whatever reason, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle love to say “China Bad” whenever they need to make the case for a piece of legislation. Just take your pick from a potpourri of committee hearings if you’re looking for evidence.

That strife-based salesmanship tends to work on other members of Congress. Competition with China has proven to be a powerful propellant for bipartisan cooperation on the Hill. But it’s not as salient to the American people as many lawmakers may think.

Searchlight just published the results of a whole slew of questions where we asked voters about how they think America should move on the world stage. As it turns out, even though a majority of voters view China as a threat, a majority also favor cooperation with China over antagonism. That sentiment is especially strong among voters under 35, which suggests that an anti-China posture will become less and less convincing to the public in the coming years.

Our polling doesn’t indicate exactly what’s driving this mindset among Americans. Some people may say it’s related to Trump’s tariffs, some might even say that the generational divide could be proof of online CCP influence operations are working (that’s for the spooks to decide).

Perhaps younger voters see issues that are important to them, like climate change, as needing an all-hands-on-deck approach. Or maybe it’s just a case of good-old American bravado: 55% of voters think that the US military is stronger than China’s, while 44% say the same thing about our economy. But whatever the cause may be, Searchlight’s findings fly in the face of longstanding conventional wisdom on the Hill.

Subscribe now

To be clear, this piece is not arguing that Congress should deprioritize outcompeting China. What lawmakers should do however, is examine their assumptions about how Americans might respond to anti-China rhetoric and try out some new arguments in favor of the critical work that’s happening in Congress to strengthen our national security and supply chains.

President Trump’s visit to China earlier this month only further cements this shift. Flanked by both his cabinet and members of the White House press corps, he and the rest of the delegation stepped onto Chinese soil with a new tone toward the nation’s leadership and its insurgent place in a multipolar world.

Consider these findings in the broader conversation regarding the new, shifting consensus among young people and their view of America’s role in the world — a consensus which seems to reject intervention, aggression, and the hawkishness that has long fueled skepticism of China in international affairs.

Put simply, younger voters today have become less interested in the United States serving as some sort of arbiter of American values abroad. The old way of doing things might not work for much longer.

Having a baby is expensive. The medical costs for pregnancy, childbirth, and post-partum care amount to $20,416, including $2,743 in out-of-pocket costs for women on employer plans. Hospital expenses could be even greater if the child requires admission to NICU. Factor in a crib, a stroller, a car seat, and other basic equipment, and parents are looking at thousands of dollars in one-time costs due before or at the moment of birth.

A new bipartisan bill would help address this problem head on. The Supporting Newborn Parents Act — sponsored by Representatives Valadao (CA-22), Suozzi (NY-3), Dingell (MI-6), and Moore (UT-1) — is legislation that would create a new $2,000 tax credit per newborn child, providing immediate relief during one of the most financially demanding periods of a family’s life.

The baby bonus

This newborn credit would complement the existing Child Tax Credit (CTC) while giving new parents additional flexibility. Families would accrue value from the newborn credit for every dollar earned above $0. The credit phases in at a 20% rate, where every additional dollar earned adds twenty cents to the credit amount received. Families would receive the full $2,000 credit if they’ve earned $10,000 or more, with the overall credit amount indexed for inflation in future years. Like the CTC, the newborn credit begins to phase out at a 5% rate beginning at $200,000 for single filers and at $400,000 for joint filers.

Parents could receive their tax credit when they file their taxes, or they could decide to receive it right after birth. At the hospital, parents could fill out a form to receive advance payment of the credit along with the standard Social Security Administration application at birth. This streamlined process ensures families don’t have to wait months to cover the immediate costs of a new child. In order to avoid improper payments when immediately claiming the credit, new parents can apply using their income level from the current or previous year.

Subscribe now

Make the most of the opportunity

In a political landscape set to be defined by, at best, a divided government over the next few years, liberals should view a newborn credit with a phase-in as a worthwhile legislative endeavor. A significantly larger and fully refundable Child Tax Credit delivered through monthly payments modeled on the 2021 American Rescue Plan is highly improbable this Congress or next. By accepting and supporting a phased-in credit focused on tackling one of the most challenging economic moments for parents, liberals can work to secure a tangible policy win now and avoid the “all-or-nothing” trap that arguably derailed previous legislative efforts.

Critically, this legislation can serve as the first step to securing a truly universal newborn credit. There will not only be a single bite at the apple. Passing the Supporting Newborn Parents Act this Congress will deliver cash assistance to millions of middle and working class parents over a short period of time — without breaking the bank — and make it fiscally easier for a future Congress to make the newborn credit fully refundable or embed it within a reformed Child Tax Credit than if lawmakers need to start from scratch. A $2,000 “baby bonus” with an earnings requirement would likely cost in the ballpark of $70 billion over ten years — shifting from that sort of phased-in version to a universal version would require a more modest increase in cost per year.

This is Searchlight’s rationale for endorsing the bill: a fully refundable credit is unlikely to pass in the near future, and parents of newborns would benefit from real progress this Congress or next. By delivering a robust newborn credit now, we can support American families in a meaningful way, build a growing constituency for this program, and then work to further expand the benefits in the future.

By championing the Supporting Newborn Parents Act, lawmakers have a rare opportunity to move past the gridlock and deliver meaningful relief to American families. Securing this ‘baby bonus’ today is a win for new parents and helps to build a more robust support system for the next generation. Liberals should feel proud to back this bill, knowing that millions of new parents and their babies would quickly benefit if passed.

Share

Josh Jacobs is a senior fellow at Searchlight focusing on Tech Viaduct, a project drafting the plans and people to modernize the federal government’s use of technology and digital services while undoing the harm of DOGE.

In Bureaucracy, his landmark 1989 book on American government agencies, political scientist James Q. Wilson examined the Navy’s personnel demonstration project at China Lake Naval Weapons Center.

China Lake, the Navy’s sprawling weapons research complex in the California desert, was exactly the kind of place where the mismatch between federal personnel rules and technical work was most visible.

The base employed thousands of civilian scientists and engineers doing cutting-edge weapons research, competing for the same talent as defense contractors and aerospace firms that could pay market rates and promote people based on technical skill rather than seniority and paperwork.

In 1980, the federal government authorized a demonstration project there: a deliberate experiment in whether relaxing the standard rules around classification, pay, and performance management would produce better outcomes. It ran for years, covered nearly eight thousand employees, and was considered to be the most significant test of new civil service rules ever conducted.

The results were striking. Pay was actually tied to performance in ways that rewarded good work and didn’t reward poor work. China Lake could offer engineers higher starting salaries and faster advancement, competing for talent it had previously lost to contractors.

Turnover declined, and it was the higher-performing employees who were least likely to leave. President Reagan proposed expanding the experiment to the entire federal workforce.

But it didn’t happen. The experiment stayed an experiment. China Lake remained a carve-out — another in a long series of government pilot programs that were grounded before take off.

Wilson used the China Lake story to illustrate something he observed repeatedly across American bureaucracy: pilot programs tend to prove their concept — only to then calcify into permanent exceptions and one-off attempts at something new. The lesson learned doesn’t flow back into the mainline system, or in this case the entire federal workforce. The exception becomes its own institution, carefully maintained and quietly celebrated, while everything outside it keeps running exactly as before.

Subscribe now

Trying ≠ changing

Anyone watching the federal digital services movement develop over the past decade should find the China Lake story familiar.

The HealthCare.gov crisis in 2013 galvanized the creation of the United States Digital Service. 18F stood up inside GSA to offer in-house digital consulting to agencies. The Presidential Innovation Fellows program brought technologists in for short tours. Dozens of agency digital services offices followed. The people who built these organizations were talented and mission-driven, and they did real, consequential work.

But look at what these efforts actually were: workarounds. Each one was predicated on the idea that normal federal hiring couldn’t attract or retain the technical talent needed to deliver modern digital services, so a special structure was built alongside the normal system to do what the normal system couldn’t. Excepted service appointments. Direct hiring authorities. Tour-of-duty contracts.

That design made sense as a rapid-response measure. When a major government system is failing publicly, you don’t have time to fix the underlying personnel architecture. You develop a workaround.

The problem is what happened next: the workarounds became a permanent fixture, the underlying ways in which the government hired and recruited talent didn’t get fixed, and these two facts became mutually reinforcing. As long as the workarounds existed, there was a release valve for the pressure that might otherwise have forced structural change in the federal workforce. As long as there was no structural change, the workarounds remained necessary. The exception had become the system.

Share

Check the schedule

This isn’t a criticism of the people who built USDS, 18F, or any of the fellowship programs. Many of them understood perfectly well that they were applying bandages, and said so. The problem is that bandages, however skillfully applied, don’t heal the underlying wound, and the federal tech community has spent more than a decade getting better at applying bandages.

But the underlying wound for government workforce development is, by most accounts, the current General Schedule system: a personnel architecture designed in 1949, built around the assumption that most government jobs are stable, classifiable, and interchangeable.

It has no real mechanism for attracting people with scarce technical skills, no way to pay them competitively once hired, and no career path that doesn’t require eventually becoming a manager. Every workaround built over the past decade has been, at its core, an attempt to get around one or more of these constraints without actually changing them.

China Lake proved in the 1980s that changing them was possible. But the lessons sat on a shelf — and eventually, even the shelf was cleaned.1

The workarounds and hacks introduced by the federal tech reform movement have now been around for twelve years and three presidents in four administrations. It’s time for a reckoning. The practices that have proven effective for bringing in useful tech talent should be expanded, made uniformly available to all agencies, and thoughtfully integrated with other parts of the federal workforce strategy. Then, the side doors should be closed.

Future work from Searchlight’s Tech Viaduct project will lay out what’s needed for real structural reform to the federal technical workforce — and the steps to get there. It’s time to make James Q. Wilson proud and turn a decade of learning via pilot projects into meaningful action across our government.

No more grounding the pilots. Clear the runway for liftoff.

When California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation last year cutting the red tape that too often thwarts infill housing construction, a certain class of progressives detected a disturbance in the Force — and this one for the good.

For decades, liberals had been focused primarily on what some call “demand-side” interventions in the housing market — programs designed to help those who can’t afford homes cover the rent or make down payments on mortgages for homes that already exist. Finally, after years of effort, a new breed had convinced the left to turn its focus to the “supply-side” of the problem — that is, the reality that there aren’t enough homes to rent or buy in the first place. And it was about time.

The shift had been born from a simple economic realization: No matter how much the government chooses to subsidize rents and mortgage payments, housing prices are inevitably going to go up in the absence of new construction.

Here, with Newsom’s bill signing, was a clear win for what New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has termed a “liberalism that builds” — a phrase he and his co-author Derek Thompson have since come to term “abundance.” Like with similar reforms passed in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, and Massachusetts, construction under Newsom’s reforms would now be “as of right” or “ministerial” for certain types of units. No one’s discretionary approval would be required before the person who owned various sorts of properties could erect certain types of homes.

Housing advocates were right to be thrilled. In many cases, excess process is a primary barrier to additional supply. Beyond construction costs and financing concerns, abundant housing is often thwarted by the laws and regulations that empower neighbors to hold up a property owner’s plans to build what their heart desires. If, for example, they want to build a six-story apartment building near a subway station or bus stop, neighbors can prevail on the local zoning board or the city council to hold the plans in abeyance. Discretion, in essence, sits with the neighborhood and not with the property owner.

The bills Gov. Newsom signed, negotiated by members of the state legislature including State Senator Scott Wiener and Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, were designed to thwart just those sorts of process-oriented impediments. To preclude neighbors and naysayers from vetoing worthwhile projects with these sorts of shenanigans. To push power down.

But successful as these reforms may prove to be, those who embrace the mantra of supply-side liberalism need to realize that the core arc of this narrative marks what may be an aberration to the generalized barrier to far-flung abundance. Far from facing circumstances where builders are beset by those wielding too many vetoes, in other venues they are held back by the reality that nobody’s in charge.

Subscribe now

No one has the discretionary authority to determine where a new housing development can be sited, or where new train tracks will run, or how clean electricity will flow through the forest. Facing this distinct sort of problem, the solution isn’t to weed out process—it’s to empower the government to point the way forward expeditiously. But, particularly for Democrats, giving public authority that sort of raw power — in other words pulling power up — is much more unnerving.

The distinction marks a significant difference — and one that many who have embraced the mantra of abundance have yet to confront. When too many people wield vetoes over an individual proposal, salvation can be gleaned from giving a property owner more discretion. You need to do little more than permit the woman who purchased that lot near the subway to build her six-apartment building and you’ve got more homes.

Setting aside the construction cost and financing concerns that Klein and Thompson have begun to highlight, transfer what might be termed “the power to choose” from the neighbors to the lot owner and, voila, housing abundance. But that option isn’t available when you want to erect new ports, train lines, electrical grids, and other infrastructure across America. To build a new train track, or site a new transmission line, someone needs to impose decisions down onto property owners who remain adamantly opposed. And that, for progressives, is inherently out of character.

The Moses problem

This is what might best be termed progressivism’s Robert Moses problem.

A half-century ago, the legendary author Robert Caro won the Pulitzer Prize for The Power Broker, a harrowing takedown of Moses, a purportedly apolitical bureaucrat who had served as the most powerful man in New York City from the 1930s through the 1960s. Moses had entered public life as a young man with what seemed like the best of intentions—a self-serious reformer determined to bring order to the chaos of machine-drenched politics such that, at long last, the good people of New York could have beautiful parks, modern housing, and rational roads and highway systems they deserved.

But over the decades that followed, as he amassed the power required to raze whole neighborhoods in the pursuit of better housing and to cut canyons across whole boroughs to make room for new arterial interstates, Moses became a political island unto himself. He lost sight of the effects his projects were having on the people whose homes were being demolished and whose communities were being destroyed to make room for what he considered to be “progress.” He came to wear so many hats and he held so much leverage over all the other players who might have stopped his bad ideas, that he could roll over any opposition. And he did. Even when a mayor, or a governor, or even a president objected to something he deemed to be in “the public interest,” he frequently got his way.

That turned out to be a problem. It would have been one thing if Moses’s judgment had proven impeccable. But as Caro made so painfully clear in The Power Broker, his imperiousness was not only cruel, it was often disastrous. Most famously, the Cross-Bronx Expressway turned what had once been a thriving hive of working-class neighborhoods north of Manhattan into an urban wasteland.

When, during a broadcast of Game 2 of the 1977 World Series, announcers Howard Cosell apocryphally responded to footage of smoke billowing out of a building near Yankee Stadium by noting that, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is burning,” he was referring to the aftereffects of Moses’s impact on New York City. The expressway had forced people to scatter. Drugs had taken hold. Properties had become derelict. Arson had become endemic. The Bronx was in shambles. Moses’s dreams had become everyone else’s nightmare.

The Power Broker was of a piece with a broader progressive awakening about the essential scourge of centralized power. Powerful men wielding broadly unchecked authority had, by the 1970s, done America all sorts of wrongs. They had led us into Vietnam, and polluted the Cuyahoga River so badly that it burst into flames. They had flooded the nation’s streets with cars that were “unsafe at any speed,” in Ralph Nader’s iconic phrase, and sprayed chemicals on crops such that women had given birth to children with horrific disfigurements. They had built dams out West designed to subsidize agribusinesses to the detriment of family farmers and the environment alike. And finally, of course, they had gotten us into the mess of Watergate.

Subscribe now

The cumulative effects on progressivism were profound. By the mid-1970s, the Democratic Party still purported to be about the same end goals — pursuing social justice and fighting economic inequality. But the movement’s zeitgeist had been turned upside-down. Once intent on centralizing authority in the hands of figures who would use big government to do big things, progressivism was now intent instead on invariably speaking truth to power. Reformers would work assiduously to ensure that public authority could never again be abused in Mosesesque ways to coerce or trample the indigent and meek. And that meant looking for new levers to check centralized authority. Environmental laws. Preservation statutes. Community consultations. In a word, process.

Today’s paralysis

It has now been 50 years, and largely without progressives noticing, the glut of procedure built up in reaction to Mosesism has itself become a problem. In many cases, that’s because the very processes progressives have championed to protect against new incarnations of Moses types have been weaponized against progressive interests. Environmental laws are among the favorite tools that those opposed to new housing use when trying to thwart proposals for new apartment buildings which, opponents speciously claim, will endanger some species, or imperil some precious natural resource. That’s exactly the problem that California’s new law is designed to address.

But that’s not the only problem that’s emerged from progressivism’s penchant for diffusing power. We’ve also made it increasingly difficult for government to make the sorts of decisions that figures like Robert Moses used to make with abandon and absent any real community consultation.

Somebody, in the end, has to decide where big housing projects, major port expansions, long railroad tracks, and interstate transmission lines are going to go. There is no way to handle that problem like California and other states are trying to handle neighborhood opposition to little housing projects. But what, we worry, would stop a newly empowered figure from pushing through another terrible project like, say, Moses’s Cross-Bronx Expressway? What would prevent the new train line from cutting right through the middle of a bucolic little suburb, or a historically minority neighborhood?

These aren’t just hypothetical problems. Americans who travel to Europe and Asia regularly come back and marvel not only at how fast the trains are, but at how embarrassing the trains are here by comparison. The Acela corridor connecting Washington, New York, and Boston should be comparable—the Northeast has the ridership and wealth to support the sort of service connecting London and Paris, or Beijing and Shanghai. Why doesn’t it?

The issue has nothing to do with the trains themselves—it’s the tracks or, more specifically, the right-of-way. For trains to be speedy, they need to travel in straight lines. The current route, cobbled together mostly in the 19^th century, is incredibly curvy. To speed up, someone would have to purchase new, straight corridors through Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Private landowners would have to give up their homes and farms. Beautiful forests and parks would be bifurcated by tracks. Habitats that are home to endangered species will be permanently altered. But on whose authority?

The same story is true when it comes to transmission lines. We can build new solar farms, or wind turbines, or geothermal facilities. But to get the electricity generated by these scattered facilities to the places that will use the electricity, we will need to build new wires, and those wires will need to traverse property where local landowners will object. Unlike with the owner of that lot who wants to build apartment buildings, there’s no way to push power down to the people who own the property, so authority will need to be vested in some more imperious figure, à la Robert Moses, or else nothing will happen. But how can reformers shape a system that allows for necessary things to be built without allowing for imperious figures to take things too far?

There’s no easy answer. The solution isn’t to let those who want to build have their way unencumbered, as was too typical before the 1970s. Utility executives shouldn’t be given unfettered power to string wires across endangered habitats. Railroads should not be able to route tracks through people’s homes without recourse. But surely someone should be empowered to balance public interests against individual rights. When three doctors with different specialties hover over a patient during an operation, one has to prevail in moments of disagreement or risk a fatality. When three military commanders have different ideas about how to pursue victory in the heat of battle, they either settle on a shared strategy or potentially yield to the enemy.

Too often, when progressives are faced with real tradeoffs in public policy, they have no real answer as to how to resolve substantive and legitimate differences. Ultimately, we need a plan for how to make a hard decision. That’s what those who support abundance need to figure out and articulate.

Share

Admittedly, this may seem like a strange moment for a progressive to speak up for additional government discretion. President Trump, after all, struggles to honor even the most basic checks and balances. But MAGA’s appeal is born from a broad-based frustration that government doesn’t work—that ordinary people are being hoodwinked by some hidden deep state, and that only a would-be authoritarian can set things straight.

In reality, if public authority were to begin delivering again, voters wouldn’t be so drawn to Trump. And that’s the political tragedy of progressivism’s unending effort to box government in: It compels people who might support the Democratic agenda to vote the other way.

You needn’t be a Trump supporter to believe that government should have the capacity to weigh competing goods and make tough calls. When a high-up counterterrorism official working in the FBI’s national headquarters wants agents in one field office to spend their hours on one investigation, but the special agent in charge of that office deems another investigation a higher priority, the FBI director makes the call. When the electric company proposes to raise rates and consumers object, a utility commission decides what’s reasonable.

Not everyone is necessarily satisfied with the outcome, but the disputes rarely wind their way into court. The abundance movement needs to articulate how government should similarly resolve questions about housing projects, rail lines, and electricity corridors. The systems need to provide everyone a voice, but not a veto.

This isn’t the first time America has been frustrated by incompetent government. The progressive movement was born at the turn of the 20^th century to address this same core frustration. In the decades since, the country has struggled repeatedly to balance the greater public interest with individual proclivities.

Here we are again. Our choice is not between Robert Moses and paralysis. But reformers need to articulate the means to a better medium. Until we do, the impulse to “speak truth to power” is liable to undermine Democratic efforts to reclaim a public mandate. Here is a case where good policy is the key to a better politics.

As Democrats celebrate what is starting to look like a victory in a mid-decade redistricting war that they did not start, a less sunny future is just over the horizon: another potential gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court seems poised to strike a pretty decisive blow against a key provision of the law. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits racial or ethnic discrimination in elections. From subsection (a) of the statute:

The section goes on to spell out what constitutes a violation:

In layman’s terms, Section 2 has both prevented discrimination and provided a pathway for racial and ethnic minorities to have a reasonable opportunity to get elected. It has inarguably changed the composition of the U.S. House of Representatives by affording people long denied it seats at the table of power. In short, it has been very effective at doing the thing its architects intended.

Which brings us to today

The facts of Louisiana are a bit complex but they go like this: After the 2020 census and subsequent decennial reapportionment, lawmakers in Louisiana enacted a new congressional district map that included only one majority minority (or “opportunity”) district. Plaintiffs in a separate case alleged that the new map was in violation of Section 2. A federal district court and circuit court affirmed this.

Subsequently, lawmakers redrew their maps again ahead of the 2024 elections and created a second opportunity district. This new map was then challenged by a dozen white Louisiana voters who alleged the new maps were a violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. This case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court in March 2025. After initial oral arguments, the Court ordered that the case be reargued with a specific focus on whether the use of race as a factor in redrawing district maps is unconstitutional. A ruling on the case is due any day now.

The ruling most voting rights activists fear is an effective neutering of Section 2 entirely. One need not wonder why that ruling would be troublesome:

If the Supreme Court severely weakens Section 2, Republican state legislators across the south would likely be able to pursue aggressive gerrymandering to gain as many as 12 seats in the House. In addition to nuking minority representation and eroding the voting potency of non-white voters, this could easily lock Democrats out of a majority in the lower chamber for a generation or more.

This is scary stuff to be sure and advocates are right to sound the alarm. But a question I keep pondering aloud is what’s the plan if the worst comes to pass? This Supreme Court warring against the Voting Rights Act is not new. Chief Justice John Roberts has been cutting away at the law with almost surgical-like precision since he was a baby lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice. It appears that, should the bottom fall out from the Voting Rights Act, the plan is just to decry an adverse decision and hope a future Democratic trifecta (if one can even be achieved) does something about this.

For the sake of multiracial democracy, liberals had better find another way.

Subscribe now

I understand how uncomfortable this moment is. Donald Trump, many Republicans, and their allies are weaponizing the statutes long used to help guarantee a pluralistic society to further their brand of grievance politics. It can be paralyzing, but I’m reminded that it was during the height of institutional segregation that leaders and advocates pressed their case to achieve the bedrock civil rights protections we know today.

I believe now is the opportune time to think proactively about how we move forward on fair and free elections—without the spectre of Trump being the main focus. Something will come after him. Liberals need to be ready.

American democracy does look differently than it did when the Voting Rights Act was passed. The racial animus that necessitated its creation is not the voting rights challenge we face today. While we must remain vigilant against all the efforts to restrict access to the ballot or fair representation, we need to update our priors. The Voting Rights Act was the first measure that meaningfully established multiracial democracy in this country, but it need not be the last.

Where do we go from here?

In short, liberals need a plan, both for if the worst comes to pass and even if it doesn’t. This Supreme Court clearly sees the Voting Rights Act as an anachronism. Even and especially if you don’t agree, it’s incumbent on those of us who believe in the sanctity of the vote to plan for the reality we inhabit and not just curse the wind.

What does this look like in practice? Other countries have managed to adopt redistricting schemes that seek to ensure communities of interest can elect representatives of their choosing while avoiding considerations that can scan as biased or even prejudicial to onlookers. There is also no shortage of fresh thinking on changing the way we elect Members of Congress to promote more demographic diversity overall—from multi-member districts to ranked choice voting and a smattering of other proposals.

The problem is solvable, but is there actually the will to do so?

Share

I suspect there’s reticence to engage fully on what a redistricting process that is more race-neutral could look like in part because of the multiracial coalition that powers Democrats’ electoral victories. The backbone of this coalition is indisputably black voters. If you’re the Democratic Party, how do you look the staunchest part of your base in the face, during the height of the second Trump troubles, and say “we need to move on from maximizing the chance of your community having representation this way?”

The sign of any healthy organization is recognizing when something you’ve been doing the same way forever is no longer working. We are quickly approaching—both by judicial erosion and natural evolution—the end of the functional utility of many statutes that pushed our country forward to this moment. It’s possible that in the not too distant future, liberals will be in a position to do long overdue renovations to our democracy’s infrastructure. Now is the time to have the hard conversations necessary to make that moment as productive and effective as possible when it arrives.

The business of democracy is not fixed, and we’d be foolish to believe that a statute enacted six decades ago would be sufficient for all purposes for all time. The people who fought and marched and died for voting rights had faith that future generations would keep up the fight—even as it moved to a new phase. Let’s prove them right.

Who is a party leader? In a presidential election year, it’s obviously the person on the top of the ticket. In a midterm year, and for a party out of power, the answer is murky. Democrats currently find themselves lost on the stormy seas of that latter case. The party should resist its natural inclination to hand-wring over what appears to be a rudderless ship, and instead look at this moment as an opportunity to chart a course to smoother waters.

The appeal of an agenda-setting leader is understandable, especially at this perilous moment for our country. But now is the time to lean in to a vigorous debate over the future of the party and create the space for a leader to emerge — not look for answers from on high. After all, it’s often said that Democrats win when they fall in love. Leave the falling in line to Republicans.

If you take that perspective, there’s some good news. Searchlight recently asked voters who the leader of the Democratic Party is, and most people said they didn’t know (or that nobody leads the party).

But beyond the fact nobody is seen as the ‘party leader,’ there are additional findings in these results that call to our attention the shifting visibility of past and present political talent: Barack Obama is viewed more as a leader than Joe Biden — while AOC is seen more as leader than Bernie Sanders. Predictably, the soon-to-be-retired Nancy Pelosi is seen as less of a leader than Hakeem Jeffries, her successor in the House Democratic Caucus.

Subscribe now

Chuck Schumer, elected by New Yorkers and chosen among a few dozen of his fellow senators to be Senate Minority Leader, retains the same place as Barack Obama — who a generation ago swept two nationwide presidential elections and earned a combined total of 135,414,00 votes.

Republicans and Independents see Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer as two of the named leaders of the Democratic Party, though Don’t know and Nobody lead all the same while zero percent answered Other.

Much can be (and has been) said about the state of the national Democratic brand. But far too many pundits and activists — centrists, moderates, liberals, progressives, and leftists alike — have cast wide-ranging assertions as to who holds the mantle of leadership. The pool of elected officials representing their party on a national level is both wide and deep.

The answer is, as is often the case, much grayer than the chattering class likes to admit. Right now, the Democrats have no leader — and that’s OK.

Share

It’s been recently reported that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — the human resources agency for the entire federal government — has begun removing degree requirements from federal technology jobs.

As a team pooling much of the expertise in government tech implementation from the last three presidential administrations, Searchlight’s Tech Viaduct has been frequently critical of the Trump Administration and DOGE’s brazen attacks on public workers and institutions. This move by OPM, however, is welcome news — and when you’re right, you’re right.

Getting the right talent into the right place at the right time is one of the hardest parts of any technology project. It’s hard even when you have an unlimited budget and a coveted brand, as I found when I helped manage hiring at Google. For the Feds, it’s worse.

The government hamstrings itself by offering little flexibility in compensation, slow and demeaning hiring processes, and a brand that has a mixed reputation in the best of times.

Hiring requirements that don’t have a direct bearing on selecting for competence make it even harder to staff critical functions that protect our country and keep it running. Four-year degree requirements for tech jobs needlessly lock out two-thirds of Americans from one of the best career opportunities on the market.

Selecting for skills is better than relying on credentials. Unfortunately, it’s also much more difficult than checking off a list of resume requirements. One-dimensional coding tests in the style of “LeetCode” won’t cut it. Actual experience programming a computer is important, but most government IT jobs require overseeing contractors and managing a large set of stakeholders with poorly defined needs.

Subscribe now

Generalized problem-solving skills and the ability to coordinate and cooperate with diverse people are more valuable than any particular technical niche. And to whatever extent AI takes over coding tasks, the interpersonal skillsets will only grow more important.

Detecting these qualities in an interview process is difficult enough, and doing it in the form of a test — as OPM now plans — is probably impossible.1 Instead, OPM should create a process where the first stages accept a wide range of skills and aptitudes. Then, the final decisions should be made with input from hiring managers and peer evaluations. In short: people that currently do the job should interview the candidates. This is a best practice currently deployed across the industry.

This system is far from perfect. Those of us that have hired hundreds of engineers would say it’s the worst system except for all the others that have been tried. There is frankly no way to predict a person’s performance, advancement, or happiness decades into the future based on one snapshot at hiring time.

That’s why the best hiring process in the world will not solve the problems caused by bad management. Retention, promotion, compensation, and accountability in the federal system all need improvement.

Share

In fact, better management will reduce the pressure on hiring to be unrealistically perfect. We have all known managers that tolerate subpar performance because they think it will be too hard to fill an open position, and Searchlight will be proposing major management reforms through its Tech Viaduct work in the coming months.

Finally, and importantly, we have to point out that Democrats were discussing degree requirements at least as far back as 2023. Once again, we knew what needed to be done and left the ball at the one-yard line, leaving an easy win to be picked up by the Trump Administration.

The next administration will have the herculean task to rebuild the mechanisms of good government, after years of mismanagement and, in some cases, outright destruction. Anyone seeking a way out of the current morass must demand that future administrations do better — even, and especially, when it’s your own team.

As they say, there are two things that are certain in life, death and taxes, but when has inevitability stopped anyone from having big feelings? We wanted to see just how big those feelings are, so we asked Americans what they really think about taxes.

We found that the idea (which is en vogue among certain Senators) that Americans see their taxes as some great burden doesn’t necessarily bear out in the data. In fact, a majority of Americans don’t think that paying less in taxes would make them feel better. They just want to know where the money is going and that corporations and wealthy Americans are paying into the system at a fair rate.

Voters agree that lower and middle income Americans are paying too much in taxes while upper-income Americans and corporations are paying too little. These opinions are stable across all the demographic groups we tested, including across partisan divides.

Subscribe now

A majority (57%) of voters think the amount they have to pay in income tax is too high, compared to just under a third (30%) who say that it is about right. Unsurprisingly, a negligible number of people say that their federal income tax rate is too low. Importantly, these opinions are stable across partisan lines. Middle-aged voters, aged 50-64, are more likely (69%) than their younger (45%) or older (57%) counterparts to say that their tax burden is too high.

When we dig deeper into why voters feel this way about their taxes, they overwhelmingly disagree with statements like “I know where my taxes go” and “I trust the government to make good spending decisions with my tax dollars.” But even as they say that “paying taxes feels like a punishment,” two-thirds (66%) of voters say that “paying taxes is part of being a good citizen.”

So the answer to everyone’s tax woes is to just slash taxes and either cut government programs or raise taxes specifically on the rich, right? Wrong.

When asked about what would make voters feel better about paying their taxes, paying less is far from the top choice. We gave voters a list of possible solutions to make them feel better about paying taxes, as well as an option to include their own answer, and asked them to select all of the options that applied. Even though they were not restricted to just one answer, just four-in-ten (41%) said paying less would make them feel better. Importantly, the only demographic group where paying less in taxes ekes out majority support is among middle-aged voters.

So what do voters want?

Voters want fairness and transparency when it comes to taxes and government spending. Majorities of voters say that “knowing everyone was paying their fair share” (58%) and “having a better sense of where my money went” (57%) would make them feel better about their taxes. These two solutions amass majority support across partisan lines, with Independents agreeing most strongly. These were also the top two most selected answers across age divides, gaining more support than cutting taxes even among middle aged voters.

Congress shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that Americans believe they shouldn’t pay taxes at all. There’s an opportunity for liberal lawmakers to make the case for a contributory society. They just have to make sure that the public knows where their taxes are going (are they paying for health care for elderly Americans or an unpopular war in Iran?) and that if they are giving the government their hard earned dollars, others are doing the same too.

At the end of March, the Trump Administration released a National AI Legislative Framework that lays out half a dozen objectives for Congress.

Notably, the framework fails to mention the word “agent.”

Any sensible legislative framework will require Congress to understand and address the expansive new capabilities agentic AI brings to the table.

As a New Yorker who can’t drive, I have no business making traffic analogies. But, for the sake of my argument, I’ll say this: attempting to regulate AI while discounting autonomous agents is like writing rules of the road for horses in a world that runs on cars.

Agentic AI, as described by this helpful backgrounder from MIT Sloan, is a “new breed of AI systems that are semi- or fully autonomous and thus able to perceive, reason, and act on their own.” Unlike AI chatbots, which require a human to prompt each new output, AI agents can complete tasks without constant back-and-forth communication. Working with other software systems, agents independently break down complex tasks into subtasks — making decisions and acting across multiple steps to achieve a given goal, often from a single human prompt.

AI agents can be useful and fun! (I have a friend, for instance, who uses one to notify her in real time when price drops occur on fashion resale sites). But they can also complete tasks that are far more serious — and sinister — than flagging vintage handbag deals: probing and exploiting software vulnerabilities; operating spearphishing campaigns that can adapt in real time according to a target’s responses; coordinating disinformation at scale; or acquiring accounts and resources while evading human oversight.

Think about it this way: Agentic AI can do anything a human can — but unlike humans, AI agents can act around the clock in thousands of parallel instances. And they aren’t constrained by fatigue, cost, or conscience.

The Trump Administration’s framework does not mandate (or preclude) any specific policy on agents. It’s a set of non-committal, vague objectives. Even organizations that have expressed approval broadly for Trump’s framework have put forward criticisms regarding its failure to include calls for transparency or safety testing requirements on frontier AI companies.

Subscribe now

Congress is also behind the ball on agentic AI. The National Institute of Standards and Technology — the executive agency lawmakers rely on as their technical authority on AI — recently issued a formal Request for Information (RFI) on the security of AI agents in January 2026. Information gathering through an RFI is the first step in an ongoing, but long process that should end, eventually, in the creation of guidelines for Congress. But this timeline assumes that lawmakers know what they’re waiting for in the first place.

The deeper problem here is conceptual. The lawmakers that still picture AI through the chatbot lens are operating under a mental model that’s already obsolete. Regulations built around that context would be fundamentally ill-equipped to handle ‘AI as an autonomous actor.’

The following sets of hypothetical regulatory questions demonstrate what this blindspot looks like in practice. The first question in each pairing raises a regulatory issue from the ‘AI as a chatbot’ perspective. The second question does so from that of the ‘AI as an agent.’

1. How do we keep minors away from harmful or inappropriate AI-generated content? → How do we identify and govern agents that can autonomously build ongoing relationships with children, learn their vulnerabilities, and act on them over time?

   
   

2. Who should be liable when chatbots deliver harmful physical and mental health advice? → Who is liable when an AI agent takes action in the world (like scheduling a procedure or ordering a medication) that causes someone harm?

   
   

3. Should we require platforms to disclose when content was AI-generated? → Should we disclose (if we can even detect) when an AI agent autonomously drafts, sends, or negotiates on someone’s behalf?

   
   

4. What types of outputs should require human review before they’re acted on? → In a reality where AI agents are executing thousands of decisions per minute, what does “human review” actually mean in practice?

   
   

5. How should we regulate AI-generated disinformation or predatory advertising? → How do we detect and regulate AI agents that can autonomously identify persuadable voters, craft hyper-individualized messages, or run deepfake campaigns at scale?

The window for getting this right is narrowing. AI agents are already transforming the world. In the meantime, Congress is still writing rules of the road for horses — while cars zoom past them at 80 miles an hour.

On Monday, OpenAI published the broad strokes of its plan to “Keep People First” as America continues our ever-quickening march towards an AI economy. The $852-billion company’s policy recommendations should obviously be taken with a grain of salt. After all, it has an existential financial interest in ensuring that our economy adopts AI at a broad scale. So it’s a safe bet to assume that OpenAI isn’t being entirely selfless in its proposals for how to best regulate the industry that’s making its shareholders fabulously wealthy.

But there’s a solid foundation of redistributive ideas in OpenAI’s (very general) framework for “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” that tracks nicely with how we at Searchlight are thinking about AI.

Lawmakers would do well to hold OpenAI to the values that it’s aligned itself with. At the end of the day, what’s the point of massive economic growth if it’s not leveraged to create wealth for everyone?

Now’s the time to go BIG

If the hype is to be believed, AI will redefine what it means to be a “worker” to a degree that we maybe haven’t seen since the advent of the assembly line. With that hypothetical but increasingly likely future would come significant upheaval to our labor market that would demand a public response on par with the New Deal.

That’s precisely why, in their new paper, Searchlight’s Will Raderman and Alex Mechanick of the Niskanen Center argue that Congress should use this moment as an opportunity to expand existing unemployment and re-employment programs that benefit all workers — not just those who can prove that their jobs were eliminated due to AI.

Searchlight’s own polling confirms that the number one anxiety Americans have about AI is its potential to replace jobs and cause unemployment, so it’s encouraging to see OpenAI align with Searchlight’s recommendations and actually take worker concerns seriously by proposing “Adaptive safety nets that work for everyone.”

It’s not all sunshine and roses though. Federal re-employment programs enacted more recently than the New Deal have come up short due to their narrowness of scope — AKA a failure to Go Big. OpenAI flirts with some of those shortcomings by proposing a “package of temporary, expanded safety nets” to provide assistance to workers affected by “industry-specific displacement” — a recommendation which harkens back to the restrictive eligibility requirements of the now-defunct Trade Adjustment Assistance program. Congress should stay far away from such limiting policy that would prevent workers from getting benefits.

Subscribe now

AI companies should pay into the system

An inevitable byproduct of AI hyperscaling is more strain on our already aging grid infrastructure. We’re starting to see the political consequences in the ubiquitous conversation around data centers.

Policymakers should see this moment not as something to run away from, but as an opportunity to seize on the data center buildout for grid modernization, as Searchlight’s senior fellow Jane Flegal recommended in her paper calling for the creation of an American Grid Infrastructure Fund. In its framework, OpenAI put itself on the record in support of such a proposal. Congress shouldn’t forget that.

What’s next?

Congress should not cede the role of managing the direction of AI’s growth to the AI companies themselves. Instead, policymakers should lean into the leverage they possess at this moment. It is presenting policymakers with a generational opportunity to go big, think creatively, challenge assumptions, and double down on America’s basic social contract. They should take it.

Share