28 blurbs
“Abundance” as a movement has a set of diagnoses of what’s wrong with US public policy, and how to fix it, but it also has a historical narrative behind it, which goes something like this: the US used to be able to build…
Compared to some of the other areas we work on , improving “state capacity” can seem a bit nebulous. The end goal of improving the productivity of government is laudable, but what, specifically, does that mean? With that…
I enjoyed reading Oliver Kim’s article on the two lives of Robert McNamara: one as US secretary of defense and chief escalator of the Vietnam War, the other as World Bank president and crusader against global poverty. He…
Aaron Shroyer and Sarah Brundage at NAAHL have the essential federal implementation guide for the ROAD Act . None of the law's ~47 housing sections are wholly self-executing: NAAHL counts 124 discrete implementation acti…
This Monday was the deadline for public comments on OMB’s proposed rewrite of the rules governing federal grantmaking. The response was immense, with more than 200k comments submitted over the past few weeks. As expected…
To add even more uncertainty to the fraught landscape of energy planning and regulation, the end of the Supreme Court opinion season last month brought a highly controversial ruling in Trump v. Slaughter , where the cour…
Economists, sociologists, demographers, and other researchers need accurate, ideally individual-level data to understand what’s going on in the world. At the same time, most people don’t want information like their addre…
Last week the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a proposed revision to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance . It runs 412 pages, and carries significant implications for federally funded science in…
One thing we’ve been tracking is the proliferation of state and local abundance agendas. In the last year, we’ve seen Abundance New York publish a detailed policy roadmap across housing, transit, energy, and governance; …
“The USPS owns over 8,500 properties and leases over 25,000 more. It also needs money.” In a new Brooking Report , Aaron Shroyer, Ben McAdams, and Glen Nuckolls argue we can kill two birds with one stone: the Postal Serv…
New York took two big steps on housing permitting this week. After weeks of late-budget deadlock, Governor Hochul’s SEQRA modernization is reportedly final with bill text coming next week. The deal reportedly exempts NYC…
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned this week, just over a year in the role. It seemed sudden from the outside, but was reportedly a long time coming internally, with months of friction with RFK Jr. Apparently, the fi…
Our existing processes for how we decide what is allowed when there is disagreement are a key reason its hard to build things in the USA today. Over the last week, Marc Dunkelman and Alex Mechanick wrote an interesting p…
Loudoun County, Virginia is notable for a few things. It’s the richest county in America by median household income , significantly richer than runners-up in Silicon Valley; it houses Dulles Airport and is thus the exurb…
Willow Latham-Proenca: Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy . I frequently argue that Francis Fukuyama is an under-acknowledged intellectual godfather to t…
Beyond the budget request, DOE has also been slow-walking grants it already committed to (a similar pause is now in place at NOAA ) as well as slowing the pace of the new solicitations and award obligations that keep app…
Research in action: Why permitting reform matters . Evan Soltas translated his recent LA permitted reform paper, that we featured a few weeks ago, into a localized estimate of the value of permitting reform in NYC. Each …
One of the big challenges in permitting reform is that it’s really hard to forecast how changing one piece of the massive US legal/regulatory permitting system will play out. At a more micro-level, it’s also a headache f…
Last week, Abundance NY put out The Abundance Agenda , a roadmap to, well, Abundance for New Yorkers. I’m a fan of just how concrete the document is, both in terms of the big picture and the small. On the big picture, th…
Meanwhile, closer to home, Governor Hochul’s EXPRESS NY initiative is accepting submissions through April 3 from anyone who can identify a state regulation or practice that adds unnecessary burden — with a focus on housi…
Federal permitting negotiations have re-started in the Senate, following the first steps of an apparent thaw in solar permitting. Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute has a timely piece in response, discussing the…
In a previous post , we noted that Congress largely preserved science budgets for FY26, rejecting large proposed cuts. Unfortunately appropriations are only step one. A few weeks ago Nature reported that OMB has been wit…
If policymakers in the US can agree on anything, it’s that they want more semiconductor plants (“fabs”) built in the US. The bipartisan CHIPS & Science Act promised hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies to…
When novel technologies get shoehorned into ill-fitting permitting systems, the results are rarely enviable. In a recent piece , Samuel Roland tours the byzantine landscape of state-level geothermal regulation. While som…
The rise and fall of DOGE was an interesting state capacity story to me on a number of dimensions: DOGE cuts threatened to undermine state capacity in a number of ways; it was pitched as a way to bring in outside tech ex…
This year’s remarkably bipartisan burst of federal housing policy legislation is back in action after the earlier breakdown of House-Senate talks: The House has put their package on the calendar this week, and the Senate…
The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 probably wins the prize for “most Kafkaesque US federal law.” Whatever else it does, the PRA dramatically increases the amount of paperwork federal workers have to do. In theory, this …
Daniel Stid, writing for his substack , points out that there is a mismatch between how much governing happens at the state level (maybe most of it?) and the level of civil infrastructure (think tanks and other policy su…