Could we use Trump's tricks to make good green policy?

0:06All right. Hello. Greetings and salutations, everyone. This is Volts for August 28, 2026. Can we use Trump's tricks to make good green policy? I'm your host, David Roberts. In 2024, an oil company called Sable bought a pipeline from Exxon that had ruptured years earlier in one of California's worst offshore oil spills. Its bet was that it could overcome or bypass California regulators and get the pipeline pumping again. It did not go well. The company was fined more than$18 million last year for doing pipeline repair work without permits. It is facing state criminal charges for environmental violations, a congressional investigation, insider trading lawsuits, and a shareholder-launched class action lawsuit.

1:06So, Sable did what any criminal does these days. It turned to Donald Trump. Last year, it asked the federal government to use the Defense Production Act to effectively force it to run the pipeline. on national security grounds. The DPA, a federal judge recently ruled, can override state law and regulation. Todd Tucker, who runs industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a DC think tank, co-wrote a brief on the episode. His conclusion was not that the DPA should be repealed. Rather, it was that a future administration should use it the same aggressive way Trump has to push geothermal and offshore wind past state permitting barriers, to allocate electricity away from data centers that aren't paying their way, and to preempt state right-to-work laws.

2:09That is the through line of a new Roosevelt collection he edited, Building Up in 2029. The 17 essays therein argue in various ways that even as the Trump administration has been tearing down climate policy, it has been opening up new tools of state economic power, equity stakes, emergency authorities, sovereign wealth funds that the next Democratic administration can use. But are dueling executive orders really, as the subtitle promises, durable? That is one of many topics I'm eager to get into with Tucker, so let's do this. All right. With no further ado, Todd Tucker, welcome back to Vaults. Thank you so much for coming.

3:02Glad to be with you again. Lots to discuss here. So I guess somebody had to take on the grim subject of how to rebuild green policy after all this. I'm glad you've waded into the breach. Maybe let's start here, though. As I said, the subtitle of this collection is about how to create durable green policy. So maybe let's start with Biden, green policy, and just discuss briefly why do you think that did not prove durable? Or did it prove durable? Or what does it teach us about durability? What do we learn from Biden's attempts, do you think? Well, I think, you know, especially after Harris losing the 2024 election, there was a tendency to go sort of into full Doomer mode and make the claim that basically all of what Biden attempted to do was misguided, did not have political benefits, and did not have staying power.

3:57And I think that a few years out, that's due for a reassessment. And I think that there's, you know, good, bad, and ugly here. I think the good is that a substantial portion of the tax credits that were passed during the Biden years did end up getting extended or rather not eliminated as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, even though that was one of the top priorities that Trump campaigned on was getting rid of what he called the Green News scam. Everything but wind and solar, basically. I mean, everything but the wind and solar tax credits. That's right. All the tax credits, except for the wind and solar tax credits.

4:34That's right. That's right. And so, you know, for some of these more mature industries like solar, there's a fade out of the tax credits. But then for other kind of more classic, what you might call infant industries like hydrogen and geothermal and other sectors, there continues to be some tax credits. So there has been more staying power than was initially thought. Some of the recent assessments also by political scientists show that, you know, especially at the UC Santa Barbara Institute, show that it was certainly not politically negative for the administration to have leaned into that. And I think there's more of a debate about how positive it was.

5:10But I think the general assessments that it was communities that saw investments did tend to like that they were getting investments. And in some cases, that also helped the pro-climate politicians that pushed them in the first place. So that's some of the good news. But I think part of why we pulled together this Build Up in 2029 collection, which included, you know, some of the folks that were policy implementers during the Biden administration at places like the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Commerce, was the sense that there were some things that certainly could be done better and certainly a lot faster.

5:43You know, we basically, during the Biden administration, it took two years, 2021 and 2022, to get the policy passed, to basically agree on what the direction we were going to be taking for as a country was going to be. And then, you know, one to two years to write the implementing legislation. You know, to write the implementing regulations and actually get the money out the door. So that is not fast enough, as it turns out, in our democracy in the 2020s. We need to be going faster so that people can see benefits even quicker. And, you know, the challenge that we're going to have in 2029, unlike in 2021, is that we now have a federal workforce that has been decimated by Elon Musk and Doge.

6:26Depending on the agency of the federal government, we've lost up to 30 % or more of the staff. So you're going to be trying to do more faster with fewer resources than you had before. And so part of what we're trying to do here is map out how do you deal with that cluster going forward? I mean, how do you move faster while also having less capacity? And so there's a bunch of different ideas we have about that. Yeah, I just want to pause to say, just for the record, the idea that You have to do fundamental changes to the economy, to the manufacturing base, to multiple agencies, to trade policy, all fast enough that it can manifest its results within four years is just an insane way to run a railroad.

7:19I know there's no way around it. That's the train we're on. That's what we have to do. But it's insane. It's an insane. You know, when you look out at China making these 50-year plans, etc., the idea that, like, you have to do this overnight is just insane. I mean, I think Biden gets a lot of crap for this, but, like, that's just an insane thing to ask. It's an insane thing to ask to do for this federal bureaucracy that we've built to move that fast. It's just crazy. One of the things you invoke in your introduction is the Jamel Bowie column in The New York Times, which says, like, they had a plan ready to go.

7:54So speaking of changing things fundamentally quickly in the form of Project 2025, which I think listeners will probably be familiar with, do you think this collection you pulled together is something like that? Or is it like a first step to that? Or is that what you had in mind on the horizon? How big of a swing do you think you're taking here? Yeah, I mean, so some of the ways that it's not alike is that the original Project 2025 was 920 pages. is ours is only 150 and change. And they had a plan for, you know, every federal agency and ours focuses, you know, on a subset that are climate related.

8:34I think that that our thinking was that while some people might just read climate is just kind of one issue that certain interest groups are interested in, you know, I think that all of the contributors to this collection, you know, 19 authors and all sort of see climate probably the way that, you know, you and a lot of your listeners do, which is that it's an all of government, all of the economic system kind of change. And so it seems appropriate to be thinking about in the same way that Project 2025 was kind of a systemic revisioning of government. I think that's what we see needs to happen.

9:07Frankly, it needed to happen in 2021, but will even more so need to be happening in 2029. So we think that it's worth thinking in terms of the need for climate policy kind of at that more systems level, power level. In Jamel Bowie's column, he talks about even the constitutional theory of it all. And sort of we think that while we certainly have policy ideas in this building up collection, we start with four chapters that are looking just squarely at the constitutional questions and sort of the governance questions. Yeah, I have some questions about all that stuff. But let's start just with the Defense Production Act as an example here.

9:45So maybe just briefly run us through the Sable case, just so we can have the context for what we're talking about here. Just briefly talk about the role of the DPA in that case. Yeah. So as you established in your introduction, this is a case that has been kicking around, you know, California courts for years now and a company, Sable. Sable is a Texas company that was involved in the offshore oil industry in California. And they had been tied up in litigation in California, you know, for about the last decade, trying to get approval to restart production out there. When Trump comes back into office, they start floating the idea of using this sort of FDR era tool, you know, Defense Production Act, which had its roots in the second War Powers Act of 1941 under the Roosevelt administration that gives government all this power to not only prioritize governmental contracts, but actually to reorient the structure of contracts, even in private markets.

10:54And so that's what Trump did here. He basically said, any companies that can help Sable produce oil in California need to prioritize contracts for Sable in order to get that going as quickly as possible. And, you know, this is something that the DPA is a tool that the Pentagon uses a lot for defense and national security purposes. But this is one of the more ambitious uses, again, sort of really going back to, you know, the mid 20th century in doing it for a non-national security purpose, really just more to benefit an individual fossil producer. It will have some impact on oil prices, which is ostensibly sort of a nexus here that merits DPA use, but not very much.

11:41I mean, it really is more of a handout to one of the president's campaign contributors. And so, you know, what the argument that we make in several Roosevelt pieces is that this precedent has now been set to use the DPA for clean as well. If it can be used for fossil for these purposes, then it can be used in an even smarter fashion for clean purposes. And, you know, I think that, for instance, some of the hiccups in the offshore wind industry sort of around 2023 would have looked very different if the federal government was stepping in to actually solve some of the supply chain and other challenges that Orsted and some of these companies had.

12:19I mean, the question I wanted to ask is that the provenance of the DPA is sort of contested. It's in court right now. Now, there's one judge said basically, yes, you can use it to override California law and regulation, but that's going to go to the Ninth Circuit. And there's some speculation in your volume and elsewhere that if that gets affirmed, if a judge says, yes, the DPA can override state law, that the Trump administration is just kind of going to go on a bender overriding all kinds of California state laws and other state laws in other states doing whatever. it wants on the basis of the DPA.

12:57And so I guess I would just sort of ask flatly, do you want the Ninth Circuit to uphold this judgment and affirm that the DPA can override state policy? Like if you had your druthers, is this an affirmative good or are you just talking about making the best out of something bad that's happened? Do you know what I mean? Like, would you actually want the DPA to be used this way and to be affirmed as capable of being used this way? It's a totally fair question, and I am of two minds of it. You know, I think on the one hand, in the very near term, it is obviously troubling the way that the Trump administration is using not only the DPA, but earlier the International Economic Emergency Powers Act to impose tariffs.

13:46You know, he's using a lot of the best of the New Deal legacy to hammer home things that are sort of narrow and short sighted and to benefit his campaign donors. You know, as someone who's worked a long time at the Roosevelt Institute, it gives me no joy at all that it's Trump rather than Biden that is using these authorities to the maximum. On the other hand, in part because of all of these problems and weaknesses in our democracy and the fact that, you know, a single senator from a single state can block all sorts of policy from going forward and that, you know, filibuster rules make it really hard to do anything other than tax credits.

14:25We have all these kind of fundamental problems in our system and tools like the DPA or the International Emergency Economic Powers Act give the executive branch a way to move forward even when Congress is being obstinate. So, you know, I think what we argue for in this volume is that if these tools are going to be on the table, we need to get rid of this asymmetry where, you know, right wing anti-climate governments use their powers to the hilt. But when progressive governments are in power, they sort of hold themselves back in the name of these outdated norms. Yeah, I guess I'm just asking, do you want this tool to be on the table?

15:02Like if you had your druthers, would you take this tool off the table or would you leave it on the table so that DIMMS can use it if you had to choose? I would leave it on the table. You know, I mean, everybody's going to have a different cost benefit of what is the damage that Trump can do in the next two years versus the good that a future administration could do by using it more aggressively. But I think we're ultimately doing ourselves no favors as a country if we're using the courts to take tools off of the table that could be used, frankly, in much more positive and useful direction by a pro-climate administration in the future.

15:35Okay. So here's the question. I was going to bring this up later, actually, but let's just talk about it now. Because if there's any, I think, sort of like fundamental objection I had, or not objection, but just sort of pushback I had to a lot of the essays in this collection, it's this idea that if Trump opens up the use of a tool, like, say, the Defense Production Act, then the tool is laying there can be used by anyone the same way, that the tools are agnostic to who's using them and for what purposes. But it just seems to me that that kind of ignores the political economy of the situation, which is if you are using, to put it in the bluntest way possible, the system is going to react differently to Republicans using this than it will to Democrats using this, right?

16:30A Republican administration is using this to bolster powerful incumbents, to bolster the status quo, to defend, do you know what I mean? To defend against what are seen as sort of wild-eyed reformers. And so that gets treated one way by the courts, by politicians, by the media, even by the public. But if Democrats pick up these tools and start using them in the name of substantial radical reform, I just think the whole system will react very differently. Like the courts will not be as friendly. The media will treat it. You know what I mean? Suddenly the media will discover how radical and crazy it is.

17:18You know what I mean? Like just The political economy is not a mirror image here. It's not the two sides doing just because the tool is the same doesn't mean the two sides will be doing the same thing or will be treated the same way or greeted the same way by the system. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, totally. I mean, we have some evidence from the transition from Trump one to Biden that some of the tools that Trump put on the table, such as targeted tariffs in individual sectors, Biden not only got rid of them, but in some cases went further, you know, really increasing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and others.

17:56And I think at the time, a lot of people said this would have been hard for Obama to do it if he was the first one doing it. But it's easier for Biden to do it, given now Trump has sort of put this on the table. And so I think as a governing matter, whatever new team comes into office in 2029 is going to look at some of the tools that Trump has used this time around and is going to face basically a fork in the road, which is that do we get rid of all this stuff on day one? Do we privatize all of these equity stakes that Trump has been taking in companies? Do we get rid of the tariffs or do we try to get something out of them for our priorities?

18:33And, you know, what we saw in the Biden administration was that they didn't get rid of them. They did try to use them for their own priorities. So, I mean, I think just as a predictive matter, I predict that the next administration will come in and find ways to use these tools to its own advantage and for purposes like climate policy. And I think that they will absolutely face a differential standard from the Roberts Court or whatever Supreme Court we have at that time. Yeah. I mean, don't you think the Supreme Court is going to suddenly discover some principles that rule out the use of these things the second a Democrat tries to use them?

19:12I mean, we're going to get into later a little like the balance of power among the court and Congress and everything else. But if I was predicting, I would predict that the Supreme Court will continue to act as partisan hacks and we'll find ways to block this stuff. I mean, maybe there's nothing you can do about that. Yeah, I mean, no, absolutely. You know, which is why first essay of all of them is looking at how we need to reform the courts. Right. I mean, that is absolutely front and center. But I think the question is, again, sort of from a early 2029 vantage point, do you choose not to govern so that the Supreme Court doesn't tamp you down?

19:45Or do you try to do both things at once, which is reform the courts, but then also sort of get started going quickly to actually show some results and frankly, invite the fight with the court because it's going to come one way or another. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's get into some of these sort of big, broad constitutional issues. And so, like, I guess another thing I'd say political economy wise is the promise of the collection of essays is this is how to create durable green policy. But just on its face, it seems like placing these immense powers in the hands of the executive branch with basically like Congress and states being shoved out of the way, tying things to the whims of the executive seems like on its face the opposite of durable.

20:31It seems like precisely the kind of thing that is going to swing wildly between administrations. So how do you see the relationship between this sort of empowerment of the executive branch and durability? It's a huge challenge. I think of it in terms of two different speeds. Basically, there's the speed that is inevitably reliant on executive branch tools that are the tools you're going to be able to use for the first year or so of the administration. And then there's the longer term project, which is how do you plug a 30 percent staffing gap at the Department of Energy? How do you ensure that the courts are reformed so that you have a fighting chance of seeing these things stick?

21:14You kind of need to do all of that. And in fact, I mean, also one of several of the recommendations we have is to get some of this stuff out of Washington over the medium term, you know, devolve more power and resources to state and local governments. You know, we have tons of local economic development agencies across the country at the city and state level that could be doing more than they're doing now. We have utilities that are really undertapped tool for governing. So it really is a kind of all of the above and moving at these different speeds. speeds. And, you know, I think ultimately it's also about some of these executive branch tools that have been abused, frankly, under the Trump administration.

21:54You need to be using them and then finding a way to sort of plug that gap going forward so that future administrations don't abuse them in some of the same ways. Yeah, well, let's talk about this. This is all about to balance the power between the executive and congressional branches. Like, I think it's pretty clear to obvious to everyone that Trump has irrigated enormous powers to himself and Congress has become, I mean, at least under Trump, Congress has basically become a rump. I don't know what they're for these days. So like Tim Meyer's essay in your collection proposes a kind of grand bargain where the president comes in, uses a bunch of these executive authorities quickly, as you say, but then makes a bargain with Congress that says, if you will write these changes into law, then you can write statutory limitations on these powers.

22:43A sort of bargain with Congress. Like, let me do this thing, but then in an ongoing way, you can limit these executive powers. This is the proposal. The minute I thought, what president is going to want to do that deal? You know what I mean? Like, can you imagine a president voluntarily, purposefully limiting their own power and limiting the power of the executive branch, I guess? Like once it's been empowered, once it has all these new powers, it seems like any new president is going to jealously guard them. Like, can you envision a president taking a deal like that, handing power voluntarily back to Congress?

23:22Yeah, it's a really daunting problem that we've had, you know, basically since the 30s in this country, systematic disempowerment of Congress and policy area after policy area and really aggrandizement of executive branch power. And so this has been a problem, whether it's on trade or national security or sort of, you know, any topic you'd want to name. This is a problem that we have that we need to fix. And it never seems like it's the right time to fix it. But if you never fix it, the problems sort of persist. And so that's where I think, you know, operating at some of these different speeds is important.

23:56We have seen in the past some instances of, you know, of sort of Congress reclaiming some of its power, but it's been far too infrequently. But, you know, I think that what we've seen, especially with some of the developments in the Supreme Court in the last few sessions, they are quite taken with these doctrines, like the major questions doctrine, like the non-delegation doctrine, that are basically saying, hey, Congress, you need to get your act together. You're a co-equal branch of government. Like you need to start giving the executive branch clearer instructions on what you intend and not just allow these vague all-purpose statutes to be construed, you know, one way by right-wing governments and another way by progressive governments.

24:39And I think Tim's, he knows what he's talking about. He was a clerk for Neil Gorsuch, the author of the major questions doctrine, you know, that Congress does actually need to rise to this occasion, staff up better and get a lot clearer, you know, not only to, frankly, obviously to survive under the Roberts court and some of the current justices we have, but to have, you know, even in future courts, I think we'll look for Congress to be more of an active player. Myer's sort of take is that court reform is kind of wish casting and it's unrealistic and the better route is just for Congress to get its mojo back and to reclaim its powers.

25:17But then you run into another problem addressed in the essay by Will Dobbs Alsop, which is that Congress, particularly the Senate, is grossly imbalanced in favor of fossil fuel states, basically, because of all the sort of the skewed representation of the populace in the Senate, I think, is an old topic. Probably most listeners are familiar with the basic idea. But Dobbs also says, if you're going to re-empower Congress, at the very least, you need filibuster reform because you're never going to get this collection of small states that benefit from fossil fuel production to go along with any kind of substantial green reform.

26:04If you're going to re-empower Congress, you need filibuster reform. What's your take on where filibuster reform should come in the priority list here? If you want Congress to start doing stuff, it seems like that has to be a piece of the puzzle. Absolutely. You know, what they call the malapportionment between states is terrible, has always been terrible, and is projected to get far worse. And can I just say, because I'm irritated by theoretical replies on social media already when we talk about this, and let's just say for the record, the founders knew that. They knew that it was unfair. They knew that it was a kludge.

26:43They knew that it was not democratic. They knew that they were just doing it to talk basically reactionary states into coming into the union. There was no high-minded principle behind this Senate malapportionment. It has always been, everyone has always known it makes no sense and it's not fair. I just wanted to put that on the record. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, if you look at the power of the residents of the smallest state, our least populous state, Wyoming, they have about 70 times as much power as someone from California. So that's bad. And then if you look at some of the ways in which climate change is going to change the patterns of demographic settlement across the country, that gap is going to get twice as bad by the year 2100.

27:29So it's a problem that's bad that's getting worse. And so you asked sort of where should filibuster reform fall in the priority list? I say it has to be, you know, day one. This needs to be something that the climate movement, even if all you care about is emissions reductions or all you care about is clean energy, this needs to be something that gets embraced very early on. In the past, I've talked about on past episodes about this everything bagel critique that Ezra Klein and others have popularized, which is that Biden was trying to do too much by glomming these labor rights standards onto semiconductor investments.

28:03Well, you know, part of the reason that you had to do that was because of the filibuster and reconciliation rules, which make it impossible to do labor law reform in a more sane way. And instead, you have to kind of do it in this very inferior way of trying to get these semiconductor venture capitalists in government to also become labor law experts. It's really tough, right? Yes. Thank you for making that point. It irritates the hell out of me when people talk about this as though that's just what Biden wanted to do. You know what I mean? That was just his preference. Everything that a presidential administration does these days has to be interpreted in the light of Congress's inability to do anything.

28:41You can't get a serious labor reform law through a Congress where the filibuster is in place. You're never going to get 60 votes for any of that stuff. So all of this is a kludge to get reformed through other means, like because we have a dysfunctional Congress, everything falls out of that. That's absolutely right. You couldn't get rid of the filibuster and pass fundamental labor law reform on the books. It was on the table. It was on the table. You know, we had a law in 2022 or whatever. Yeah. The PRO Act, right, which is something that unions have been pleading for forever. So obviously unions are going to like that.

29:19But I think also the companies that we're trying to invest in, in the clean energy sector, in the semiconductor sector, they would prefer that too. Because part of what they did not like about the Biden policy was the feeling that they were being targeted to offer better childcare, better protection for workers than what their competitors that weren't taking the subsidies were getting. So if you want to solve that problem, there's one way to do it, and it's filibuster reform. Also, speaking of fundamental constitutional reforms, I think a lot of Democrats, a lot of progressives these days would tell you all of these grand dreams of green reforms and green policy are going to come to naught under the current Supreme Court.

30:04Like the Supreme Court has made it as clear as it can make it that it is on Republicans' side and on the side of fossil fuels and against these kinds of reforms. And they will come up with ways to nix anything Democrats try to do. And thus, if you want Democrats to do anything ambitious at all, you need court reform. And there's actually, within your essays, within this collection, there's disagreement about this, about whether it's possible, whether to prioritize it, etc. I'm sort of curious, again, where you come down on that, because is that a day one thing, two? Or do you think that's just like an impossible dream?

30:51You got to work around it? What's your take on court reform in light of these green reforms you want? Well, you know, I mentioned we had some of the folks from the Biden administration participate and contribute chapters here. And I think it was interesting to talk to some of the lawyers. Their job during the Biden years was to try to Supreme Court proof all of the regulations that they were doing. And that's part of why it took forever, right? Which is that, you know, that's really hard to do under the best of circumstances. But certainly it's even worse with these kind of new anti-regulatory doctrines that are coming out of the Supreme Court.

31:25Yeah. I mean, if you can just make up a doctrine, you know what I mean? Like this is like the major changes or whatever the doctrine is. I mean, it's just like if it's too big, we'll kill it. There's no legal logic to that. There's no metrics. There's no way to measure that. There's no way you can write a law that can make its way through a Supreme Court that's willing to just make up stuff to kill stuff it doesn't like. Like, it just seems futile. Well, and I think in one way that is liberating, right, for the next administration, which is that rather than spend two years trying to second guess what John Roberts is going to do, you can just acknowledge that they're completely political actors.

32:09And, you know, you should just try to do the policy that has the best policy and political return rather than trying to Supreme Court proof it. But that obviously presents sort of a parallel problem, which is that if this is still the court that you're dealing with and we still have a system of checks and balances where people think you should basically be following court orders, what should you do? And that is where Supreme Court reform will need to come into play. And I think the idea that is easiest here is adding justices because there's nothing in the Constitution that requires that there be nine justices.

32:43We have altered the number of justices, I believe, seven times over the years. So there's nothing magic about nine justices. You could add that. But then I think people worry that's the easiest reform to do because you could just pass a law in Congress and get it through. But I think people worry that that leads to tit for tat escalation where Democrats add 10 justices and then Republicans add 20. And then, you know, before you know it, you're just kind of have 100 justices. So I think that there's some legitimate concern about that tit for tat escalation. The problem is the ideas that I think people feel like would be less escalatory and more sort of better policy options for the longer term are things like getting rid of lifetime tenure and having sort of rotation of lower court judges like onto the Supreme Court on a case by case basis.

33:34I like all of these ideas. All these ideas are great. But the problem with those is that they require a constitutional amendment. And if you think getting a law through Congress is hard, just wait trying to convince three quarters of state legislatures that disproportionately benefit from all of this counter majoritarian aspects of our government. Try to convince them to sort of do fundamental constitutional reform of the court. So, you know, I think that probably in the short term, there is no alternative to kind of that more escalatory adding of justices. But I think that over time, at some point, progressives and others are going to have to get serious about what our vision is for sort of fundamental constitutional reform as well.

34:14Yeah. As you can see, the checklist, the to-do list grows and grows. Let's talk a little bit about manufacturing, which is a huge topic in the sort of green reform world. I think the Biden administration bought the idea that we need to grow manufacturing in the U.S., grow green manufacturing in the U.S., start manufacturing some of this stuff on our own and took some steps to try to do that, although most of those steps got crushed. But Nam and Driscoll in your collection make a sort of novel argument, which I've not heard put plainly before, which I found kind of interesting, which is they say, look, the U.S.

35:00has mostly shifted to a service economy. That ship has sailed. The idea that you're going to lurch from like 7 % manufacturing back to any substantial percentage of the economy being in manufacturing is a bit of a dream. So instead, we should just accept that China's going to manufacture the stuff and make it cheap. And we should just buy the cheap stuff and use it to do what we do well, which is services stuff. And so when they talk about building a green coalition, they're talking about building trades, utilities, grid software, installation, financing, all these kind of like services related stuff.

35:43They say, China's doing us a favor. They're manufacturing a bunch of cheap green stuff. Let's just take it. Let's just accept it. Let's just import a bunch of it, install a bunch of it, and do what we do well. And then on the other hand, in a different essay, Joel Dodge argues that the U.S. government should quit trying to just persuade or lure or incent more manufacturing. It should just take charge, start owning factories, start building factories of its own, owning manufacturing facilities of its own, operating its own factories like in the sort of World War II era. So, again, there's a little bit of tension within the collection about what is the role of manufacturing and green reform and how much should we try to restore manufacturing, et cetera.

36:36I'm wondering where you come down on that set of issues. Yeah. So we did not shy away from controversy in this volume. Go after Supreme Court reform in a big way or kind of basically fix Congress, prioritize manufacturing or maybe not so much. You know, we intentionally added essays in here that are in some tension with each other, which is not unlike the original Project 2025, where you had kind of majority and minority reports on a variety of important questions. And part of the reason we did that is, again, sort of that learning from the Biden years, which is that on some of these fundamental questions, they didn't come in with agreement across agencies or across the administration about what to do.

37:17And manufacturing is a great example. Biden was sort of Mr. Hardhat, you know, Mr. Build It here in America, right? Buy American. But then his administration also did things like pause collection on tariffs on solar panels because they wanted to do deployment faster. Right. And so there's a lot of tensions between building it here at home versus making the biggest dent, the quickest you can on emissions reductions. And we think the time is now to have those debates so that on day one, there's more agreement about where to go so that you can actually start implementing instead of wasting a year or two debating.

37:53And so on this manufacturing question, that's a good example where I think that there's, you know, reasonable people can kind of come to different conclusions here. So Jonas Nam from Johns Hopkins and Daniel Driscoll from University of Virginia have an essay in here where they're basically saying, you know, the U.S. is at a fork in the road. All countries have what political scientists, economists call a growth model, which is either more consumption oriented or more production oriented. And there's kind of a path dependency there. Like once you get good at producing, you can orient a lot more of your policy around production.

38:26Conversely, in the U.S. context, which is more oriented around consumption. You know, Donald Trump has learned this the hard way, which is that if you put a bunch of tariffs on all the stuff we import, inflation is going to go through the roof and it's going to be really hard to keep those tariffs in place. Right. And it's not just going to magically produce a bunch of factories and manufacturing here. It's just going to make the consumption more expensive. That's right. And companies have been leaning with that economic reality for decades now by offshore and production. Right. So I think that, you know, what NAM and Driscoll's call for is for this just to be really, realistic about sort of which path we're going to go down.

39:01We could either go down a path that leans into sort of what they see as the U.S. comparative advantage, which is more on the consumption side and making sure that those solar panel installer jobs are good jobs, but then getting as much as we can from overseas as cheaply as possible. Or alternatively, we can try to lean against the growth model and prioritize more manufacturing. But that just to be realistic, that like that might cost more and that you have to kind of incorporate that into your budget estimates and like all of the government planning stuff that happens kind of behind closed doors.

39:33On the other side of that, we have Joel Dodge, who talks about the history in the U.S., again, under FDR, of public factories. So just using the public sector, you know, in the same way that we do now for munitions in certain instances to do that for a broader range of products. And then if you take out the need to get super profits like Wall Street Demands, then you can actually do some of this manufacturing here, even if it wouldn't be economical on a purely private run capitalist equation. So I think, you know, we want the folks to debate this now. You know, I tend to be a little bit more. Todd, you're conspicuously not telling me which way you want to go.

40:10Yes. Well, so I won't dodge that question on Joel Dodge's essay. I will not dodge the question. No, I mean, I think for me, I tend to be more in favor of building up the manufacturing sector in the U.S., But using tools like public factories, using other types of unorthodox financing mechanisms to make it more viable to produce more of that stuff at home. Because I think, if nothing else, a national security imperative in not having a single country monopolize so many of these core supply chains. Yeah, I guess the only thing I would say, maybe weighing slightly in the other direction, and this is just a pet peeve of mine, but people act like if you buy the solar panel from China, that China's claimed all the value there.

40:51But you're installing the solar panel, you're employing installers, and also, notably, you're generating cheap electricity. And cheap electricity is an economic value creator, is an economic value driver. And then you own it and you get all that cheap electricity. So the vast majority of the value of the panel is going to come from 20 to 30 years of cheap electricity. So just this idea that only the manufacturer benefits, I feel like people need to get over that. If we have cheap EVs and cheap panels and cheap inverters, we're going to be producing an enormous amount of economic value with those machines.

41:37And we're going to own that value. We're going to claim that value. Just because we didn't manufacture them doesn't mean we're like missing out on the whole thing. You know what I mean? No, I think that that's right. But I also think that these things we know from the economists that study manufacturing, that these things are ecosystems, right? So you might sort of be willing to lose the solar panels, but then that also means you're losing out potentially on stuff upstream and downstream, which are useful for other manufacturing processes. So there's a bit of a worry here that once you start giving up parts of your manufacturing ecosystem to another country, that it doesn't just stop at the solar panels.

42:12It kind of goes upstream and downstream as well. Well, I mean, we've already kind of given it up. That's kind of Nam and Driscoll's point, right? Is like most of it we've already kind of given up. You know, not giving it up is one thing, but rebuilding it is a much bigger challenge. Yeah, well, and I think if you use the kind of new type of cost benefit analysis that they're calling for in their piece, you're probably going to conclude that there's some sectors like solar that don't make sense for us to ever try to, you know, get back into in any substantial way. But then there's other more cutting edge technologies that we do want a piece of.

42:44And you just need to be orienting a lot of your policy calculations around sort of on which side of the ledger does a given industry fall. Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's move to a different topic, which is another sort of critique, I think. I think if you talk to clean energy practitioners these days, they will tell you that the binding constraint on rapid decarbonization in the U.S. is interconnection queues, transmission permitting, labor supply, all these kind of things that have to do with these sort of regulatory blockages that need to be cleared away. This is, of course, a long time. This is a hot topic these days.

43:29But the volume of essays is notably silent on this. For instance, permitting reform. And I guess I wonder why, because if you do permitting reform right, if you unblock these blockages, among other things, you're just going to build out a crapload of clean energy. And that is going to change facts on the ground, which will then change the political economy going forward. Do you know what I mean? So, like, it seems like even on a power analysis basis, that should be a piece of the puzzle. And, yes, the volume is quiet on it. I'm sort of curious why. Yeah, absolutely. You could go through the list of there's a lot of things we didn't cover.

44:11We didn't have a dedicated chapter on transportation either, which is, you know, one critique that I've heard. Yeah. So, I mean, I think part of it is that we feel maybe incorrectly, but somewhat optimistic that that is a problem that where there's some bipartisan interest in moving forward and we might actually resolve some of that sooner rather than later. So I think we felt that by 2029, we hope to have dealt with some part of that. But if not, certainly it needs to be high on the agenda. And I, you know, if I were redoing it, I would probably try to find out someone to write a chapter on that.

44:42But I think where we do come in is that some of these tools like public factories, like using a federal sovereign wealth fund to make investments, are ways, you know, like using the Defense Production Act to get to go back to where we started this conversation. If Trump can use the Defense Production Act to preempt California zoning law, then the next administration could do so to get the right of way to build out the electrical grid. Right. So our focus on that statecraft question, which is sort of, you know, what are the tools that the federal government can do affirmatively to, you know, build its own capacities here to move faster?

45:19Permitting in some ways is let's figure out how to get the government out of the way in certain respects. And we're all in favor of that, too. But I think we were trying to think sort of proactively of what are the capacities that need to get built within the federal government to actually move affirmatively in that sort of next generation of policy reform after hopefully, God willing, we've solved some of the permitting questions. Yeah, I mean, one of the arguments in here is that FERC already has the more power than it's used to override some of these things and sort of impose transmission permitting.

45:52One of the sort of critiques you make in the introduction, a lot of these arguments about clearing away government blockages and regulatory blockages are sort of these days abundance coded, associated with the abundance movement. One of the things you say in the intro is that abundance and also the sort of recent wave of affordability politics, which everybody seems to be hurting toward, are thin, thin programs with no theory of power. I'm sort of curious what you mean by that. What does it mean for a political program to have a theory of power to be thick, I guess? Yeah. So a thick ideology or a thick political program would have, you know, kind of a theory of how the economy works in some sort of broad, whether you want to call it macroeconomic sense or societal sense that, you know, has a theory of the plumbing of how the parts of the economy and parts of the government kind of fit together.

46:53typically is going to involve some theory as to the role the class and some of these classic sociological categories play in things. That would be a denser or thicker theory of change. And I think that, you know, social democracy is a good example of that. That's having a good moment these days in some of these recent elections. So that would be a thick theory. And there's nothing wrong with being, you know, thick or thin. I mean, these are just kind of different approaches that are useful in different ways. You know, I think both abundance and affordability are useful in certain specific applications and less useful in others.

47:25I think that it does make sense to have sort of part of our politics be looking at unintended consequences from some of the social democratic reforms of the past, you know, where we put in permitting rules, we put in environmental review. Over time, if you're adding to that and not subtracting to it, things are going to get pretty slow in terms of the plumbing of government. So I'm sympathetic to some of those arguments from abundance. But I don't think it, once you kind of acknowledge that, it doesn't give you a lot more to work with. Like, how do we actually build the political movements that can carry out abundance?

48:01There seems to be a lot less interest in some of that, which is why I think it's been interesting, you know, with the mayoral win of Zoran Mamdani in New York, as well as Janisilis George, now in D.C., and there's a variety of these kind of sewer socialists at the municipal level that are wholly embracing some of the ideas that the Abundance Movement talks about in terms of getting rid of red tape and sort of making government work faster. And that's in part because they sort of think that the political yield to workers' rights movements and sort of this broader coalition that they have are going to do better if you're actually showing results in a quick fashion.

48:37So the Abundance Movement has been adopted, in essence, by a lot of these sewer socialists to flesh out the program. Similarly with affordability, everybody's talking about it. Everybody wants to lower prices and keep the cost of living down. But, you know, one aspect of price on the flip side of it is the wages that workers are paid. Right. And so, you know, one very easy way to bring prices down real quick is to get rid of the minimum wage. Right. And pay people tiny amounts. I don't think that anyone thinks that that's going to be sort of better for society over the long term. So you need to be pairing some of these affordability and abundance instincts with a broader political program that focused on, you know, really meeting some of the existential challenges we have at scale.

49:19Yeah, well, relatedly, let's talk a little bit about the dynamics of public ownership. You know, the idea of the U.S. government owning or partially owning companies, I think, was universally derided as socialism until roughly five minutes ago when Donald Trump started doing it. And now all of a sudden, I guess that's on the table. So I'm sort of curious, you have this sort of like this table in the essays, which is like how much ownership and how much control that comes with the ownership, et cetera, et cetera. you know, it gets very complicated. Like public ownership is not one thing. So I'm sort of curious how you see those dynamics of public ownership, sort of, should we be taking ownership stakes in big companies?

50:17And beyond that, should we be asserting public control over some of these companies, which is kind of a different thing. Like it's one thing just to have an ownership stake. So you maybe make some money for the government if the industry does well. It's another thing to say, like, the public can start having seats on the board and having control over the decisions the company makes. Just curious, like, where you see that discussion. Yeah, so I think we wouldn't be having any of this conversation about state capitalism under the second Trump administration if it wasn't for the practices of the Chinese government over roughly the last 40 years, which is substantial amounts of public ownership, public financing, public direction, which is their ability to build up their manufacturing sector was not the free market at all.

51:07I mean, it was very much sort of a system of, and still to this day, a lot of state intervention. And so, you know, during the 2010s, the line that, you know, the Bush and Obama administrations, you know, had towed, we're going to try to change China's economic model by using rules of the World Trade Organization to get them to be more like us. And Obviously, that did not work. And so then at some point, you're left of kind of needing to figure out how you are going to be put yourself on an even playing field with China. And it's in that context that I think some of these new tools are these relatively new to the U.S.

51:40tools like public equity stakes have come into play. It's quite interesting that the conventional wisdom used to be that over time, China will come our way on economic policy because of the miracles of capitalism. They'll see that like socialism doesn't work. They'll evolve in our direction. Instead, they stuck with their guns and kind of like smoked us on grabbing the manufacturing, grabbing ownership of a lot of these next gen industries. And now here we are going their way. It's just like 10 years ago. if I told you that was going to happen, you would have laughed at my, or 20 years ago, you would have laughed at my face.

52:14As I've been writing about state capitalism, you know, a bunch of pieces over the last year, there was even some debate as to whether we should be using that phrase state capitalism, because it sounds big and scary and who knows even what it means. But I mean, you know, in the academic literature, it basically is pretty simple. It's that when the state gets more involved as either an owner or a controller of the means of production, then you've got some variety of state capitalism. And so we've seen in the last year that the Trump administration has taken on tens of billions of dollars of equity stakes and everything from long established companies like Intel in the semiconductor space to upstart rare earth companies that are, in theory, going to help reduce some of our dependence on China.

52:58If you look at these different deals, all of them are a little different from each other. And in some cases, there's a lot of ownership. Like we now own 10 percent of intel. The American public does. That's a pretty big deal. That's worth a lot of money. It's wild. I bet not one percent of the U.S. public knows that. That's right. Only to feel that right for magazines that, you know, I've called it everything from Maoist to socialist to fascist. I mean, it's every ism you can imagine has gotten thrown at this. But it's actually like despite the big number, in some ways, it's a bit of a screwed up deal.

53:30I mean, you know, the administration, as a condition of its ownership, basically signed away any the right to differ from the company management on any important topic that might come up before them. And by the way, to also basically get rid of the requirements that Biden had in place for them to reinvest in domestic manufacturing. So, you know, we've kind of gotten rid of the control that we had under Biden in exchange for more ownership. But then there's other cases that are kind of the other opposite end of the spectrum where we now have what's called a golden share in U.S. steel. And, you know, what does that mean?

54:05This is actually an innovation that Margaret Thatcher's government came up with when they were starting to privatize some of their big utilities, which is a middle ground between letting the market figure it out and having it be totally publicly run is having some kind of intermediate level of ownership or control, which, you know, in that case was called golden shares. And so Trump has done that with U.S. Steel. As a result, we now have a government representative that advises the board of U.S. Steel. We don't get any money from this. We didn't spend any money to acquire this golden share, and we're not going to get any money from the golden share.

54:39But we do have a federal veto over 10 different categories of corporate decision making, ranging from changing their name to being based in Pittsburgh to like actual investment plans for a lot of their factories. So that's a lot of control, little ownership. When you look at, especially when that deal was announced in 2025, you had a lot of folks from the Biden years going on the record saying we should have absolutely done that. You know, we needed a plan to basically get some of this Japanese investment into U.S. steel, but we didn't trust that the company was actually going to follow through with it.

55:13If you have that kind of a trust deficit, one of the best things you could do is have some type of ongoing government supervision of the company's businesses. That's what the golden share is. What would it look like to use this new openness, I guess we all have, to state capitalism for green purposes? What would public ownership, like how would that be deployed in the name of decarbonization? Well, let's stick with the example of U.S. steel. You know, as you've had on your program many times, folks talking about green steel versus dirty steel. And, you know, some of the ways in which these big companies like Cleveland Clips and U.S.

55:52Steel, their carbon emissions are so much more than you would even think as a share of the country's total. And you're only talking about like a half dozen facilities across the country. They have been at this pivot point for the last few years where they could either reline all of their facilities to, you know, use green and cleaner methods or to sort of reline them so they keep using coal and natural gas. And if we had a golden share under the Biden years, we would have been able to tell that company, no, you know, we need you to go down the decarbonization path. And by the way, we'll give you some subsidies and other support.

56:25But we're also, as a board member of this company, going to be instructing you to do that. And I think, you know, one of the benefits of that versus more arm's length regulation is that, you know, rather than having to sign an 1 ,000-page grant or loan agreement, as they often had to do during the Biden years, you can just have the government in the boardroom kind of monitoring on a day-to-day basis more of the decisions and steering them in the direction you'd like to see them go. Let me ask this. When people hear about this, one of the obvious applications that comes to mind is the U.S. auto industry, right?

56:57Like right now they're pulling back on EVs, et cetera. I mean, I think I've seen in my lifetime over and over again, like them make bad decisions, almost go under, get bailed out, agree to a bunch of stuff in the process of getting bailed out. and then backtracking on that stuff the second they can just screw the American public over and over again, selfishly, keeping us hooked on these giant SUVs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Could you imagine the U.S. taking more control over its auto industry or buying some public stake in some of these companies so that we get something out of this and can actually manage a long-term shift to EVs in a way that's not flitting back and forth with market conditions.

57:49How would you envision this state capitalism working in the auto industry, I guess? Well, here's the thing. I don't even need to come up with a hypothetical because we've already done it, right? During the Obama years and the Great Recession, we did take, the government took equity stakes in both GM and Chrysler. And, you know, the difference, I think, between what Obama did And what Trump did is that Obama came in and said, we're going to make this timely, temporary, targeted and get the heck out as soon as we can. We don't want to, like, change company management. We don't want to, you know, micromanage the company's decisions.

58:23We don't want to do any state capitalism. This is an emergency measure and we'll get in, we'll get out. But, you know, imagine a different scenario where if in 2009, Obama had actually said, you know, in addition to this green stimulus, we're actually going to use these equity stakes to require that these companies move in the direction that the global market's going anyway, which is towards electric vehicles. Not because we care about the climate, although we do care about the climate, but because we want these auto companies to have a future into the next generation. And right now they don't.

58:53Right. We would have had a completely different trajectory over the last 20 years. had Obama used his leverage in the way that Trump is doing. But again, whereas Trump's using it to extend, in some ways, try to lock in fossil fuel production, a different administration could be using it for clean and for green. Yeah. And this gets back to my political economy point, which I just think the entire system would have reacted very differently to Obama doing that than they did to Trump doing what he's doing, because Obama would have been trying to push reform, And Trump is trying to defend a bunch of big, bloated, existing incumbents like.

59:28And yet they called him socialist anyway. Right. And I think that's a bit of the lesson of the last 20 years is that they're going to name call you. Now Trump is escalating from socialist to communist. Right. They're going to call you all sorts of names. You kind of at some point, you just need to decide what you want to do and go forward with it. And if you can build a coalition to back you up, then, you know, you got to do that. All right. We're getting close to the end, but a couple more things I wanted to hit, which is there's a Shelley Walton. essay in your collection, which argues, among other things, that industrial policy literature, which has sort of had a kind of a renaissance lately, like everybody's interested in industrial policy now in the last 10 years, has kind of ignored public utility law, which is, she says, a peculiar oversight.

1:00:15Because, you know, utilities are kind of an example of a big industry, crucially important to the economy, crucially important to decarbonization, which we already have considerable public control over. And it doesn't really seem like we're using that to the best effect. Curious what role you see a more muscular state capitalism, where you see utilities in that vision. Well, you know, I think to get back to something we spoke about earlier, You know, what do you do to safeguard clean energy strategy, regardless of sort of who wins the future election? Right. I think that one of this is where, you know, in some ways we're saying federalized stuff and in some ways we're saying subfederalized stuff.

1:01:01Right. And so part of that is recognizing that there's a lot of power in state and local governments to do local economic planning. But in part of that's recognizing the role that utilities play, you know, in many cases, publicly owned utilities. And so Shelley Welton from University of Pennsylvania Law School contributed an essay where she sort of walks through this revival that we're seeing kind of more in the law schools. I sort of see it percolating a bit in opinion pieces and the more public debate. But there's now a whole courses that are being developed to teach law students about networks, platforms and utilities in PUs.

1:01:37And a lot of that is going back to progressive era conceptions of how to use the power of railroads, use the power of electrical utilities as sort of a regional economic planning device. You know, I think that we've put a lot of these entities in kind of a box that Tresda have them mirror as much as possible private sector practices. But in many cases, there's not any reason in the law or in the governing documents that would keep them from prioritizing more build out, quicker build out of clean energy. And so it's a complicated topic. We don't get into all the ins and outs of it in this piece.

1:02:17But we think that, you know, these public utilities have a very undervalued role and underutilized role in doing industrial planning for the country. Well, much like everything else, the public utilities we do have, TVA is herding in the direction of more fossil fuels. So frustrating. It's so frustrating. That is a big tool that is being used for exactly the wrong purpose. Okay, we should wrap up, but I guess as a final question, you know, I just kind of wanted to wrap everything up by asking, this collection of essays presents us with a sort of big basket of things that are somewhat contradictory.

1:02:56So on the one hand, several of the essays acknowledge, you acknowledge, I acknowledge. One of the things that sank some of Biden's initiatives is they didn't move fast enough. You need to do big, fast things that create visible benefits for people quickly. I think we all can see that. And I think the conventional wisdom these days is that a new presidential administration can do maybe like one or two really big things, big bills, before it just sort of like loses its political capital, gets mired in the course of events, gets mired in opposition, gets dragged down, etc. There's that on one side.

1:03:43And the other side we have here, we need filibuster reform. We need court reform. You know, we need these fundamental constitutional reforms. We need rebuilding of agencies. We need this new muscular state capitalism. We need, you know, rebuilding labor supply and making better use of unions. And you know what I mean? Like, there's just so much that seems necessary to do to make this work. And then on the other side, you have this imperative for speed and sort of being less fussy and more crude and fast. And I just don't know how it all kind of settles out. So I guess I would just ask you, like, if we get a Democratic president in 2029 and they have, I don't know, a 52-seat majority in the Senate, what do they do first?

1:04:39If you're in charge, how do they prioritize? I mean, this was the Everything Bagel critique, right? The broader Everything Bagel critique is just liberals refuse to prioritize. They try to do everything every one of their interest groups wants at the same time. And consequently, it all gets kind of watered down and lost. So we need to prioritize. But like there's so much to do. I don't know that there's any answer to this, but like what would you do first? What is your order of operations? Well, I think, again, we could look at Project 2025. I mean, this was, you know, a very ambitious project.

1:05:16They were not sort of calling for the conservatives to pre-negotiate against themselves in terms of the ambition of their agenda. Very expansive. And they've, according to the Center for Progressive Reform, have implemented, as of earlier this year, over 50 percent of the recommendations, including some small, some huge, right? But you and I know that it's much, much easier to destroy things than it is to build them. It's much easier to repeal things than it is to pass them. It's much, they have an easier job. They're just nihilists. Like, you can come in and just throw bombs and destroy things.

1:05:54You can get a lot of that done quickly. But that's not what we're trying to do. Absolutely right. This fundamental asymmetry where if you want to destroy things, it's actually fairly easy to do. And if you want to build, it's much harder. And so that's why, you know, we sort of we identify what we think of as some of the sort of structural constraints to doing a big climate policy and getting dealing with those early. So it's not that they're easy, but we do think that sort of defining, you know, getting rid of the filibuster and defining a somewhat more aggressive posture vis-a-vis the courts are sort of essential preconditions for even from the most modest, the most ambitious climate change policy.

1:06:35Like you're just going to need that. So I think those are some of the things that need to move faster. But then also you've got to between now and 2029, we don't need to sit on our hands. We can actually be debating some of the tradeoffs between these different priorities and coming up with some agreement, probably getting rid of some of the stuff that we have in this volume, but then including some other stuff that's not there and have it be ready as a kind of governing strategy from day one so that we're not spending years kind of debating the fundamentals of what we believe in. So that's part of the reason to get this out early enough.

1:07:08Does that sound like the Democratic Party that you know, Todd? Well, I think that, you know, what we're starting to see, and again, it's early days, but what we're starting to see with some of these progressive administrations at the city level across the country is that old idea that you can only do kind of one big thing a term might not be true if you have a kind of mobilization strategy to go along with your policy. And, you know, I think that what I'm seeing is a lot of these mayors are doing sort of new things every week. So I think that it's not a hard and fast rule of physics that we can't be doing more.

1:07:41But I think it is certainly a rule, at least a political science, that if you're not showing results quickly, you're probably losing that opportunity to build more legitimacy. All right. Well, we'll leave it there. We have a lot of time between now and 2029, and God knows what could happen in the interim. So we'll have to be sensitive to events as well. But anyway, thank you for, you know, starting this conversation, assembling these essays. These are interesting discussions, and I'm sure they'll be ongoing. All right. Great talking to you, David. it. Thanks, everybody. You've been listening to Volts, founded and hosted by me, David Roberts, produced by Nate Peavy, and supported entirely through the generosity of listeners like you.

1:08:26If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider telling a friend about Volts. That's how this show grows and survives, through word of mouth. See you next time.

1:08:43Thank you.