Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Abundance Has Failed and Succeeded

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

A year and a half after 'Abundance,' Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s book about why America has become so bad at building things, the time has come for reflection. Some commentators declare the abundance agenda dead. If you know where to look, however, you might see a different picture. Today, Derek is joined by Representative Josh Harder (D-California) to examine the surprising ways abundance-style ideas are gaining ground, from bipartisan permitting reform in Washington to new efforts to build housing and clean energy in states and cities across the country. Politicians from both parties increasingly agree that America is still making it too hard to build. So what would it take to turn these scattered victories into a new kind of liberalism that prioritizes outcomes over process? Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Josh Harder Producer: Devon Baroldi Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's been a year and a half since Abundance, the book I co-wrote with Ezra Klein came out. And 18 months later, I think this is a good time to ask some important and hard questions about the project. Questions like, is abundance a big fat failure? In June, Vox published an article about how abundance, quote, lost the democratic war of ideas. In October, semaphore asked if abundance was, quote, dead. When you think about the most popular Democrats introduced to a national audience in the last year, I think, if we're being honest, a lot of them have been left-wing populists

or self-described socialists, like Zoran Mamdani, or Abdul-El-Said, or John Assoff, an Obama-ish figure whose favorite A-words are more likely to be affordability, or avarice, or authoritarian, rather than abundance. What's more, every few months or so,

someone will do a control-f search for the word abundance on my Twitter, and finding it too sparse for their liking will accuse me of having abandoned the project entirely. So today's episode takes the question head on. Has abundance failed? I think answering that question accurately requires a brief reminder of what abundance was.

Completed before the 2024 election, our book was meant to be tough medicine for liberals and Democrats. We wanted to understand what made America and blue cities and states in particular so bad at building things like houses and clean energy and infrastructure. We argued that in the last half century, Democrats have become so sensitive

to real abuses of power, like corporations that break the law and destroy the environment, that the parties become too insensitive to the cost of absent power, that is governments who can't do or build what they promise to do and build. Because of this, we argued, liberals have developed a reputation as a slow-footed party of procedure-obsessed bureaucrats, a party that associate success with how much money it authorizes to spend rather than define success by what it actually accomplishes. Houses built, broadband rolled out, and infrastructure developed. We called for a new orientation of liberalism that paid close attention to the supply side of everything, emphasized outcomes over procedure, and valued speed over delay.

A year and a half later, you can find plenty of articles arguing that abundance has failed politically, that it hasn't taken over the Democratic Party, that there's no abundance factions sweeping the Democratic primaries. But this is the paradox. At the very moment that political commentators are writing obituaries for abundance, lawmakers across the country are passing some of the most significant abundance-style reforms in decades. In Washington, Congress passed the 21st century Road to Housing Act, one of the most significant bipartisan housing law in generations. The law uses a variety of policies to make it easier and faster for communities to add housing. In the last few weeks, four senators, two Republicans and two Democrats, introduced

a sweeping permitting reform bill designed to make it easier and faster to build energy projects and infrastructure. This same sort of thing is happening across the country at the state level. From California to Virginia, states are passing laws to make it easier and easier to build houses and clean energy. New York Governor Kathy Hokel has changed environmental review laws to accelerate housing and infrastructure, while New York City mayor, Zoran Mamdani, yes, a Democratic Socialist,

has proposed reforms designed to shave months and in some cases years off the process of approving new housing. These policies are not identical, and I certainly don't want to pretend that the word abundance or the book abundance caused all of them. But what makes this moment so interesting is that beneath the headline showdowns

between Republicans and Democrats, lawmakers in both parties are converging on a remarkably similar conclusion. America has made it too damn hard to build the things America needs. There's a couple different ways, I think, to understand this development. And because this is a ringer podcast,

I'm going to attempt to make a sports metaphor here. God help me. In the early 1950s, The NBA had a problem. When teams got a lead, they could simply hold on to the ball. They would dribble around, pass the ball back and forth, they'd run out the clock. So in 1954, the NBA introduced a 24-second shot clock. An average scoring went up immediately.

I think you could say, without overstretching my metaphorical license here, that American liberalism has developed a bit of a dribble-dribble problem of its own. Coming out of the 1960s and 1970s, out of the environmental and anti-growth movements of that era. America passed a lot of laws and adopted a lot of customs that made it easier for people to slow down government and business. Many of those laws weren't just well-intentioned. I think some of them, like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act,

that exist, are perfectly wonderful. But the environmental and preservation laws of that period, including NEPA and California's SIGWA, purposely slowed down the construction process with procedure. Over the decades, we built layer upon layer of process. Delay itself became one of the most reliable veto points in American government. I think what we're beginning to see now around the country is the emergence of something new. For the sake of keeping the metaphor clean, let's call it shot-clock liberalism.

It's a philosophy that says that government should listen and deliberate and study the consequences of new acts. It should protect the environment. but then at some point we need to actually put up the shot. We need to put points on the board. We need to build houses. We need to build energy. We need to put up transmission lines.

We need to build infrastructure. And we cannot afford to wait and wait and delay and delay just because we're good liberals who love good procedure. The goals of shot-clock liberalism would remain liberal. We want clean power, affordable homes,

modern infrastructure, functioning transportation, But what changes here is the relationship between procedure and progress. Rather than say, oh, let's just take as long as possible to make sure every single stakeholder has a fair chance to stop this project. Instead, we say, let's hear everybody we can on deadline. Today's guest is Representative Josh Harder, a Democrat from California, and the co-chair of the bipartisan Build America Caucus, which has developed its own abundance-style agenda spanning housing, health care, energy, education, and innovation. Today we talk about the surprising political victories of abundance, why some of

its ideas seem to be winning even as commentators declare the movement dead, what it would take to turn a handful of legislative victories into something bigger, a government, and maybe a liberalism, that actually builds, that actually puts points on the board. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain Edition. matters, but so does price. At Marshalls, you don't have to choose. You can get the good stuff for less, the stuff that lasts, because there's no point in tightening your belt if it's just going to break when you do.

Get the good stuff in store at Marshalls today. This episode of Plain English is presented by Comcast Business. Did you know Comcast Business detected 79.3 billion cyber threats last year? That's why they're introducing Security Edge Preferred. It's big business cybersecurity designed for small business. Get started with Comcast Business Internet for $50 a month for one year on a qualifying Internet package and find out how to get one month of Security Edge preferred on them. Plus, ask about a $500 prepaid card.

Limited time offer, restriction supply, requires 300 megabits per second Internet, security edge, security edge preferred, and wireless connect. Call today. Representative Josh Harder, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. You are the co-chair of the Build America Caucus. Your co-chair, Celeste Maloy, is a Republican from Utah. You're a Democrat from California.

You've got members from red states and blue states who, outside of the context, this caucus seemed to me to disagree about all sorts of things in a period where political polarization is infamously high. What is it that your caucus seems to agree on? Yeah, you're right. We're trying to swim upstream at a moment when Congress is unbelievably polarized and deeply unproductive. We're trying to do the opposite on both of those things and actually create a coherent governing agenda that has to be bipartisan, especially in this era with,

especially with the Senate rules, the only way to pass meaningful bills is with bipartisan support. I think we really agree on a pro-growth agenda at a time when it feels like both parties have really stepped away from any sort of positive ideals of what American growth can mean in terms of concrete benefits to folks. I think there's a couple of things that we really agree on, but the most important thing is that America can do better, and that starts with trying to build more of what we need, whether it's housing, energy, health care, or education. I can understand the Reagan conservative argument that says that growth is an inherent good, but I do want to slow down here to allow you to make the liberal, 21st century liberal argument

that says that growth is good. Because I think someone outside of this conference, or outside of this coalition might hear that answer and say, we've got growth in the 2020s. What we don't have is affordability. What we don't have is equality. What we don't have is a sense of belonging and fairness in an economy that is growing, yes, but all the gains are going to the top one and zero point one percent.

So how do you and other Democrats in this caucus see growth as a liberal goal? I agree that we need to do more to make sure that the gains from growth are better appreciated. But I'd actually challenge the assumption that we have that growth because if you look at our housing supply, we don't have the growth that we need. We're five million homes short of where we need to get to. We don't have the construction of transmission lines and generation on energy that could lower the prices that folks are paying every single month. I've got seniors paying $1,000 a month in their electricity bills. That's not affordable. We don't have the growth and

success there and not because it's not equally shared, but because we haven't built enough. And if you look at our health care system, the situation is the same. So I would I would posit that we actually don't have the right type of growth in the exact type of materials that folks actually value. There's three things that our caucus, I think, really agrees on when we're looking at particular issues. One is that there's just huge bottlenecks in the supply of some of the most important pieces of American life, whether that's energy or health care or education. Two, that we can solve a lot of those bottlenecks without spending more money. There's ways to get better results, even with the dollars we have, if we use and spend them

better. And third, that a focus on outcomes over process can actually bring people together across party lines. And I think you can see that in a lot of different parts of America life. So what I'd like to do for the rest of this conversation is talk about several areas where you think that growing the supply side is the answer to what ails America. I want to start with housing where we got some legislation, the 21st century Road to Housing Act. I want to move on to energy and permitting where there's a new, huge landmark permitting reform bill that's before Congress. And then finally, I want to talk about this agenda that you just put out, this Build More agenda, which is not yet a bill, but it's a recipe for what might

be future bills to come on down the line the next few years. We're going to move from laws to bills to ideas for bills. Starting with the law. The 21st century Road to Housing Act, what is it, what does it do, and why does it matter? It's the first major federal housing legislation to pass in over 50 years since 1974 when we put out Section 8 in Community Development Block Grants. And it is the most exciting pro-housing supply thing we've seen in all. long, long time. It's going to do a lot of good, but it's not going to fix every housing problem

we have. It's got a lot of different bills jammed in together because the only way Congress legislates these days is these omnibuses that, you know, make a little bit of a Frankenstein monster out of legislation. But it can be boiled down to trying to make it easier to cut red tape out of bottlenecks to building housing, more categorical exemptions for infill housing, for instance. Two, rewarding communities that are building more. We should be giving more dollars to the communities that are actually building the homes that our country needs. And then third, a whole bunch of reforms for how we do manufactured housing. If you go to many places of Southeast Asia and across Europe, you will often see housing built in a factory, not out in the field. That doesn't

exist in the United States in large part because of policy decisions that we have mistakenly made over the last several decades, including things like the Chassis Act, which require essentially a massive, very expensive chassis on the bottom of every single manufactured house. Imagine a five-story building where every single floor has a huge chassis underneath it. It just doesn't work economically, but that was what Congress was mandating until this year when we were able to pass this landmark bill. There's a lot that it does. There's a couple of things that it doesn't do.

It doesn't address some of the financing considerations, because you can legalize how to everywhere, if interest rates are five or even six percent, if developers are paying even higher, you're not going to get the housing that our country needs. And so that's something that I have a couple ideas for what we can need to be doing more on. And also on construction. We have seen material construction really exploding costs over the last several years, especially with some of these tariffs from the Trump administration, you know, taxing things like lumber coming from Canada. And so we have to do more to bring down the cost of construction materials if we want, to close some of that five million home gap that we need to build across the country.

When Ezra and I were going around talking about the book, people would often ask, what would abundance look like as a federal housing policy? And one of the first things that I, we tried to say was, housing is not like social security. It's not like defense. It's not this sector where the federal government has near total control. It's exquisitely local. And so I remember maybe in one book event, it might have been in San Francisco, I said, you know, there was this policy under Obama for education called Race the Top where we basically said, you know, to the various states, we'll give you extra money if you do what we want you to do in terms of education policy. We've done this in a couple other sectors. It's interesting to see an element of this soft bribery in the Road Act. Being realistic here, how much can Washington, really use its money to shape housing policies at the local level.

Is this a place where we think Washington has an enormous lever to say, if you do this thing, we'll give you $10 million, or is housing such an enormous, like, multi-trillion dollar sector that it's actually really, really hard at the end of the day for Washington to spend enough money to make a difference locally? I think that the power and the leverage are there, the political will is a little bit more difficult. You've seen a number of states, including California, use both a carrot and a stick approach to housing, where they'll sue Huntington Beach,

but then they'll also, you know, try to do a lot of work to legalize housing being built, change the owning practices, and give carrots to cities that play ball. The federal government is much more difficult to use some of those sticks because, you know, you've got to be able to get a political consensus across a much wider range of American landscapes. The reason we were able to get a housing bill built now is just because there is no place in America where housing is affordable at the moment. You could be in Montana, which has seen a whole lot of growth, or you could be in California. We're all facing the same issues, which is why we were able to pass this bill 89 to 10

in the Senate and 396 to 13 in the House, which are incredible bipartisan majorities. That said, to your question of how much we would have to say, spend, I don't actually think it's that much. I think that, you know, the community development block grab program is not going to spend more money. The only piece of it that's going to change is trying to reward those communities that are actually building more. If you want to think about, you know, a real federal investment, we should be rewarding the communities that are trying to welcome more neighbors and are trying to actually create the growth that our country desperately needs. But I think there's more that we could be doing. I have a piece of legislation that we're

working on to essentially double the amount of fees that cities get. Right now, an average city in America gets about $10,000 for every new unit that's built. Some cities get a lot more, some a bit less. If we can double that from the federal perspective, in exchange for countries doing much more, even creating by-right zoning, where if you satisfy the law, you can build what you want, I think we could actually do a much better job of closing that gap on the homes that we need. But it's going to be more ambitious legislation than the road to housing, which was an incredibly important start. It proved that there's a pro-housing supply coalition at a federal level that hasn't existed for decades, but it's only the first step. So you're using federal monies to encourage counties and states to liberalize zoning

and make it easier to build. You are passing elements of this law to reduce the cost of building things like manufactured homes. There's also the financing piece. And this is where I want to pull in your Buildmore agenda because there's several parts of the Buildmore agenda that speak to housing. But one thing I want to ask you about is this issue of financing.

The single biggest problem for builders today, according to the National Association of Home Builders, is high interest rates. But this is tricky because the point of high interest rates is to increase the cost of capital. The point of high interest rate as a tool of monetary policy is to cool off the economy by, in part,

making something like building homes harder. So on the one hand, we, that is you and I, the folks in your caucus, absolutely want to increase housing supply in the long run. On the other hand, reducing financing costs, making it easier to finance housing during a period of high inflation

and high interest rates might deliberately undermine the whole point of high interest rates in the first place. How do you think about this problem? Because as a matter of balancing monetary policy, wanting inflation to come down, and housing policy, wanting homes to be easier to build, it really does seem like there's a little bit of an impasse here. I agree that we don't want to dilute the economic signal that interest rates are sending, right? I mean, that could be an even larger distortion into our economy. And just from a basic common sense perspective, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to be making it really hard to build housing with zoning restrictions and then trying to subsidize it through, you know, subsidize interest rates.

I mean, it's just a massive deadweight loss for the entire economy if we do something like that. That's the wrong thing to do. But I think maybe a better place to start than a federal evolving fund, which I think we should be able to do, is something like mortgages for ADUs. Many states, including my home state of California, have done a lot to make it easier to build ADUs. California has permitted half a million ADUs over the last couple of years, accessory dwelling units. Think about, you know, I have a two-year-old and a four-year-old. Man, would we love for my parents to be able to help out with child care and have some sort of unit close to our house where they could be independent and yet also help support our kids and live a life of a life. a lot of families want something like that for, you know, somebody in their life or just to rent out and to create more housing supply for a state that really needs it.

However, despite half a million ADUs being permitted, very few of them have been built because they're not actually eligible for the same sorts of mortgage protections that your normal mortgage has. And in fact, if you actually try to refinance to get some extra money to actually build the ADU, then your entire mortgage gets refinance, which at these interest rates are absolutely. un-economical for most families, right? Especially families that are locked in to mortgage rates from a couple years ago that were much, much better for folks. And so when one of our proposals is trying to make sure that we can fix that and, you know, ensure that if you need a couple hundred thousand dollars to build a new accessory dwelling unit on your property, you can do that with the same mortgage, you know, considerations

that we give for any other property. That can do a lot to build the housing that we need without actually going the direction that you were suggesting and diluting that economic signal. I want to turn the page here from housing to energy, but before we do, I do want to mark something that I think is really important because it's been somewhat implicit in our conversation. One of the things that really frustrated me and Ezra,

as we were writing the book, is that so much housing policies seemed focused on the demand side. We were constantly trying to solve the problem of affordability by giving people more money to put into a housing market that was constricted by supply, and if you constrict supply and increase the amount of dollars going into that market,

prices have nowhere to go but up. And so it is at the very least gratifying to me that that logic has been overturned and that the Road Act and all these other measures that you're describing are trying to fix what ails housing by working on the supply side,

not just the demand side. Turning out of energy and permitting. The big news from the policy universe in the last few weeks is this new big bipartisan permitting bill, which if it passed, I think, would arguably be the largest overhaul of federal energy and environmental rules in decades, just as the Road Act, as you described, was one of the largest housing bills in housing laws in decades. Before we talk about what's in the bill, out of respect for an audience that I think

might not be, like, doubled over an enthusiasm for the word permitting, what is the problem that we're trying to solve here and why is it so? important. It's trying to make sure that what people want out of their government is actually delivered. If you have a pothole in front of your house that needs to get built, you know, you voted for the city council member who said they were going to build it and it doesn't get built for 15 years, think about the cynicism and the frustration, let alone all the broken cars that that pothole creates. And that's the situation that we see for roads, for bridges, and of course, especially for energy. all across America.

PG&E, our utility in Northern California, has doubled its rates over the last decade while service has only gotten worse. Why? Well, because they haven't been able to actually build that transmission and that generation to lower prices for everybody.

And that's all because it can take three to four times longer to plan and permit a project as it actually takes to build it. That's bonkers. Because this is a bipartisan bill, there's parts of this law that are going to be most appealing to Democrats,

And parts of this law, they're going to be more appealing to Republicans. The bill would make it easier to approve long power lines, transmission lines, which are critical to move electrons across the country that are generated by renewable energy. And so this is a huge issue for folks who are interested in clean energy. But Republicans also got language in here that makes it harder for environmental groups to block natural gas pipelines and oil drilling. Why shouldn't liberals be worried that this bill, if enacted in the law, isn't just going to be used to expand fossil fuel production to feed data centers?

I think on a level playing field, clean energy will wind. And that's largely the bet that I'm making and many other folks are making trying to push this bill forward. 85% of what's called the interconnection queue, which is essentially energy projects waiting to move through and get connected to our energy grid all across the country. 85% of them are wind, solar, or storage right now. And so the market is telling us that people desperately want clean energy, that they're going to pay for clean energy if it can get billed, but right now it can't. Both because of the transmission considerations, right? How are you going to get that wind from Utah all the way into California?

And also because of NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act, which disproportionately is biased against clean energy. It's biased in a couple of different ways. One, because there's a lot of land that's needed, especially. for solar production, and two, because of the complex way that our court system works, where the Ninth Circuit in the West actually is, you know, much better for wind and solar than, you know, the Fifth Circuit is in Texas and Louisiana. And so that creates some really odd considerations about what can actually get permitted and the uneven playing field that we have right now.

I think if we can level that out, ultimately the market will show that because clean energy has gone down so much in price, it's actually the type that's going to get built. How does this bill deal with data centers since an enormous share of the projected increase in electricity is coming from demand for artificial intelligence? It dramatically increases the amount of money that data centers are going to have to pay

to get connected to the grid. It gets a little bit technical, but essentially they're going to pay both the incremental cost of building out new generation for that data center, as well as the average cost to the entire grid. So they're essentially going to be. be paying double to get connected to the grid. In exchange for that, they're going to be able to get their energy projects built much faster. I think the benefit for us is going to be twofold.

One, there's going to be a lot more investment into the grid coming from this. And two, that's going to be a lot more clean energy. Right now, data centers are getting built all across the country that are not connected to the grid. And because of that, they're trying to go as fast and unfortunately often as dirty as possible in terms of their energy use. You see stories of, you know, folks taking massive engines out of aircraft and putting in those as gas turbines to use in data centers. Why? Well, because they can't actually get connected to the grid. They're actually paying a lot more for that energy, and it's a lot dirtier. And so if you can actually get connected to the grid even while paying more, it's going to make all of our air quality and our emissions

profiles much better. What is the most reluctant part of the Democratic Coalition when it comes to this bill, and how do you plan to persuade them? There are two major objections that I'm hearing a lot that I think are worth thinking about. One is, why should we trust the Trump administration at all? This is an administration that has had a war against clean energy. They canceled solar and wind projects again and again and again, that were, in some cases, weeks away from completion just because they have a political vendetta against this. if we make it easier to build all types of projects,

won't they just get all the gains on fossil fuels and then continue to deny clean energy, the type of permits that it needs? I think that that is a really reasonable objection, but actually not true if you look at the text of what's in the bill. One of the things that this bill does, which I'm really excited about,

it was part of a bill that I wrote called the Freedom Act, is it actually tries to take the politics out of the permit process. And so it makes sure that any administration, If the Trump administration wants a war against clean energy, they will not be able to do it. In fact, there's actually going to be huge money that goes towards clean energy developers if they try to play the same shenanigans that they've played for the last two years. And so if you don't trust the Trump administration to build clean energy, I think that's more of a reason to vote for this bill because it enshrines in law the same type of protections for clean energy that fossil fuels are already getting. The second objection that you hear a lot is, you know, hey, look, there's going to be a massive blue wave in another couple of weeks. Democrats are going to win big in the House.

We might even be able to win the Senate. And therefore, we're going to be able to renegotiate some, you know, magical fantasy deal. I think that's inaccurate as well. This has been a carefully negotiated process, two Democrats, two Republicans working on the Senate for the last two years. And no matter what happens in November, and I think Democrats are going to win big. I think things are looking great. We still are going to have to deal with a 60 vote threshold in the Senate, which we're absolutely not going to be able to get 60 votes this year and a president in the White

House. And so I don't think the renegotiation ability, no matter what happens in November, is going to be all that large. I think this is still the best deal that we're going to get for a long time. And again, the basic bet here is if you're optimistic about clean energy, if you think that solar and win can win, then that's the best reason to vote for this bill and make sure that we have a level playing field to compete on. One thing I really like about this bill is that I think there's sometimes a caricature of

the left being the coalition of liberal bureaucracy that does nothing, and the right as the coalition of authoritarianism that does things very, very quickly, moves fast and breaks everything. And here what this bill does that I think is very smart is that it accelerates building, but not at the cost of losing lowercase L. liberalism because you include provisions that prevent the executive branch from unilaterally administering energy policy by, for example, canceling wind projects because the president, for example, just doesn't like wind for a variety of reasons. And I like the fact that you haven't lost liberalism even as you've accelerated energy construction. I think that's really,

really important because one thing I was afraid of was that this project would be picked up by folks on the right who say the classical liberal rules-based way of doing things isn't working. What we have to do is declare perma emergencies for everything and allow the executive branch to run riot. This doesn't do that. It simply says let's have, as in the open I call it, shot clock liberalism. Let's set a shot clock. that says it's going to take a certain amount of time to reach these permitting decisions. If we don't reach that permanent decision at the state level, the federal government gets to decide. So we're going to move quickly, but we're not going to lose our checks and balances and our rule-based

liberalism. I think that's a really, really nice balance that's in the law. Last comment here in energy and permitting. I think you're right. There are actually fewer tradeoffs that are really at play here than people might have considered. How rare is it that we get an opportunity to accelerate economic growth and create more jobs to lower emissions and at the same time to lower electricity prices. We can do all three at once without actually sacrificing the environmental or labor protections that you were

talking about. I want to talk about your Build More agenda, and this is the agenda, the document that came out of your Build America Caucus, the bipartisan caucus that we talked about at the top of the show. We've talked already about housing and energy and permitting. There's lots of further ideas for housing and energy and permitting in the document, but for the sake of time, I'm not going to recircle them. I want to focus on health care and education. And what's very interesting about health care and education is that there's not a lot of health care or education policy in the book abundance.

In fact, you know, Ezra and I talked to a lot of people about what our ideas would mean for health care and education. But they're not there in that document. And I personally just haven't written as much about what abundance would mean for health care and education as I would have hoped to. But this document really does go there. So let's start with some ideas in health care. In a conversation we had to prepare for the show, I asked you which of your bold ideas you wanted to talk about most in the healthcare space. And you said prior authorization. And then I said, Representative, are you absolutely sure that we have to talk about a subject as electrifying as prior off?

And you said, yes, Derek, that's what we're going to talk about. So the floor is yours. Tell me everything and start simple. What is prior authorization? Why does it matter? Why isn't it working? What's the plan to make it better? Prior authorization is the permission that you or your doctor needs to get before you can get most drugs or medical procedures in the United States.

And it absolutely has a place to play because the cost of our health care system is already enormous. And if everybody just got exactly what they wanted and the insurance company wasn't actually able to have some governing role, then health care costs would explode. and probably people would get the wrong medications or the wrong procedures if there wasn't somebody actually watching out. However, the way that it is working right now in our health care system is not at all close to achieving its goals. And the basic way that I would explain it is if you walk into most doctor's offices, you're going to see more people behind that desk dealing with paperwork whose job it is to just call insurance

companies all day and yell at them or get yelled at at, as opposed to the number of nurses and doctors that you're going to see in that doctor's office actually taking care of patients. That balance is way, way off. And if you actually look at the doctor's time, the majority of doctors time in the United States right now is not actually focused on patient care. It's focused on paperwork and especially fighting with those insurance companies. And so what we're trying to advocate for is what we call a risk-based approach, which essentially means that if you're asking for a procedure that lowers cost is focused

on prevention, that should be moving quickly and automatic. If you're asking for something that maybe is on the edge or your doctor is somebody who's known for pushing the boundaries a little bit more, then that should actually go for scrutiny. But we can create some real gains here and lower the cost to our health care system. At the same time, we're actually getting patients what they need much faster than they're getting today. This is very similar to the observation that scientists in America today spend an average of 30 to 40 percent of their time filling out paperwork for their grants, filing their grants again, again, again, just essentially begging the federal government, typically the NIH or NSF for money. And look, I think there's an aspect of the grant

application process that we might want to keep. But the idea that we force American scientists to take seven, eight, ten years to become geniuses in a single subject. And then rather than allow them to express their genius fully in a career, we force them to devote almost half of their working hours to just filling out paperwork, which requires something much less than a genius mind. I think the way that we put it is like, imagine if it became, if we learned that the American academic community developed a disease such that they had a chronic fatigue disorder and had to sleep for 30% of the year. They only really woke up into April or May of any given year. What would we say about our science system? We'd say, well, God, we have to cure this disease.

In this case, we made the disease. The disease is the paperwork that we're forcing these scientists to fill out. So similarly, I am a huge fan of finding ways to reduce bureaucracy that is taking incredibly special professionals, doctors and scientists, giving them back their time so they can do major work, discover cures two diseases, and actually treat patients. I think it's a really lovely idea. There's another idea. Go ahead.

The incredible part about that is not just that we're taking people who we've invested decades in their education, but that less than 10% of the grant application that they're spending so much of their time on is the actual science. The other 90% is the budget. It's about the facilities. It's biographies of everybody working on it. All important stuff. I don't want to give out money to somebody who doesn't have a budget for how to spend it. But the first cut should be focused on, is this a good idea? Do we actually think that the scientific project you're engaged in is going to bear fruit? And if we actually did something like a two-state process where the first cut was, you know, based on the science. And then, you know, the second

was the exact same grant application we have now. I think we could save, you know, enormous, like quite literally 10 to 20 percent of every scientist's dime across the United States. Think about the gains that that would create in terms of the breakthroughs that we can make. Now more than ever, quality matters, but so does price. At Marshalls, you don't have to choose. You can get the good stuff for less, the stuff that lasts, because there's no point in tightening your belt, If it's just going to break when you do, get the good stuff in store at Marshalls today. Welcome aboard Via Rail.

Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and sit. Play. Post. Taste. View and enjoy. Via Rail, love the way. We make Chevrolet vehicles,

but what you do with them makes them so much more. You make them mobile offices, your kid's personal taxi, a concert shuttle, your hockey equipment locker, your recording studio. We make a Chevrolet, but you make it a Chevy. Discover yours at Chevrolet.ca. I know you're also interested in funding research

to discover alternative uses for cheap, generic drugs that have already been approved. And this, I think, is a really clever idea. It's going to sound wonky, but there's real precedent for this. I believe during COVID, researchers realized that, was it, dexamethosone, which is a cheap generic steroid could reduce mortality, by double-digit percentage points. And so here we had this drug that was developed in the 1950s just sort of sitting around,

and it was a kind of quiet or turned out to be a kind of quiet miracle drug for COVID. All sorts of examples of drugs, whether it's GLP-1s or rogain that were initially designed for one purpose, and then we realized, oh, it's not just good for type 2 diabetes. It's also good for weight loss and 10,000 other things. What's a good way to think about how the government could design a policy that would optimize our chance at finding these sort of sideways breakthroughs. We have the FDA approve a drug for one thing, but then we like run clinical trials to figure out if it's good for things B, C, and D. Right. This is really a hole in our patent system and the way that we incentivize drug development

across the United States. And you can think about it in terms of both all of the drugs that are off patent, right? I mean, we have like quite literal. thousands and thousands of drugs that maybe they work for one thing, and we have strong hypotheses that they work for something else, but that's never been tested. And then you can also think about all of the compounds that people are in some cases using all the time, but that actually are not, have never been tested in the clinical trial format because nobody owns the patent on those drugs. And so if somebody spends $100 million of a clinical trial and it turns out to work, well, then everybody's going to benefit. Society's going to benefit. No one drug

company is going to actually be able to take all the gains from that. And I think the opportunities here are huge. You know, you mentioned one example. There's another example of a drug that was much lower cost that was tested for a particular eye disease that ended up spending, I think, $200 million in clinical trials, proving that it worked as well as a very high-cost competitor. It actually saved Medicare $90 billion, $90 billion, which is uninsent. amount of money by incentivizing, you know, essentially all of Medicare patients shifting to this lower cost alternative. There are enormous opportunities to test this for off-patent drugs. And again, we're not saying that we should do this immediately. We should say we should test

and see if it works. Some of them will. And if you talk to the scientific and medical community, they will say that they have strong hypotheses about some of these ideas. But again, nobody's going to put the money up if nobody's actually going to get the gains. And so we want to make sure that there's essentially a prize format where for particular diseases, you know, you have your application considered. If you can actually prove that it is successful, then you can have a certain amount of time to sell that drug, similar to, you know, prizes people talk about for other drug development. I think there's a lot of opportunity and excitement here that can ultimately make some rage or breakthroughs for people's health. And again, for people

who are wondering, how are these ideas abundance? You know, one thing that I try to emphasize is that I am a huge fan of, as I imagine are basically all Democrats, universal health insurance. There's a variety of ways we can get there, but I want to universalize health insurance. But there's one aspect of health care that is, are we helping people get access to an insurance card to purchase care, to pay providers? But then there's the supply side of medicine. That is to say, the time of the providers. Do the doctors have to spend 50% of their time on paperwork, or can they spend 80% of their time

with patients? Are scientists less productive because they have to, you know, spend 40% of their time talking about the biographies of the research assistants? Or can they do actually, can they do more science? Can, for the same amount of dollars, they're spending on Medicaid? Can we get more bang for buck because we cleverly ran some clinical trials to figure out that we can get cheaper medicine that's just as or even better? These are ways of thinking about medicine on the supply side. And I don't, I want to be clear, I don't think either of us is trying to suggest that this should supplant questions of or the urgency of something like extending healthcare to people who don't have it and need it.

But it's a way to make this system work better for those who do have that health care card. And so that's why I think it's interesting sometimes to think about something like health care from that supply side, which is also going to be what we're about to do for education. But again, why don't you take the last word on health care before we flip that page? No, I think you're right. We can give everybody universal health care. If we don't have a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's, then it's not going to cure cancer or Alzheimer's. we still need more cures.

And again, what is abundance in health care? It is a focus on the supply bottlenecks. It is a focus on results, not by spending more money, but by trying to make better use of the dollars we have. And again, by focusing on those outcomes. I think health care is the perfect embodiment of that philosophy. And we can do it for clinical trials. We can do it for new drugs. We can do it for getting more doctors into the system.

And I think it's something that we need to focus on a lot more because no other part of our health care, nowhere the part of our economy has as much paperwork of bureaucracy as health care. So finally, let's talk about education. And, you know, this is a place where I am not an education expert. And one of the questions I found, I have found hardest to deal with an intelligent way is what would abundance look like for education. You have a couple ideas here that I think are quite interesting. And maybe because we have between the two of us, four children under the age of five, let's talk about daycare. You want to create 2 million new child care slots.

One of the problems with child care is that even when parents are willing to pay or even if entrepreneurs are willing to open up some new daycare center, zoning and licensing restrictions can make it very, very difficult to expand supply in this sector. How would you frame the problem here and how would you plan to solve it? There are some problems in child care that we can't solve without actually putting more money into the system. The fact that, you know, parents are paying an arm and a leg for daycare at a time when most providers are barely making ends meet means essentially that we need to subsidize this system, I believe. That said, there are a lot of productivity and improvement gains that we can make just by cutting red tape that shouldn't exist. And so, you know, one example here is I was talking to a woman actually this weekend who told me it took her more than two years to open up her child care center because she had to apply for again and again and again. Her neighbors actually protested and said, well, what about the parking? Who's going to pick these kids up?

You're just doing it from your house. It doesn't make any sense. She ended up actually dropping this project. And now her entire neighborhood does not have a family daycare. One of the ideas that we have is essentially making this. automatic. If you own a house, you should be able to open a daycare in that house, as long as you satisfy all the other safety and health considerations that you would have to do anywhere, but you don't have to go through that same planning process. And your neighbor's saying, well, you know, we're worried

about the sound of kids at, you know, two in the afternoon. That, I think, can open up millions of child care slots all across the country, especially if we create that federal incentive to make it off an automatic. What's the plan to regulate people to trying to start daycares out of their home, considering if we're going to have the government subsidize daycares and we're going to make it easy for people to start daycares, then I can imagine some people who aren't the purest of heart saying, aha, here's an entrepreneurial opportunity for me to start a company that I know I can file for some kind of state, local, federal subsidy for. And if there isn't sufficient regulation, then who knows if it's like a real honest to God

daycare? What's what's the smart way to solve for the problem of we want to make it easier and more efficient for people to start high quality daycares that we subsidize because, as you said, sometimes they're very low margin, but also we don't want to make it so easy that we're like starting a bunch of just like obviously fake daycares in order to grab this subsidy that people are using to just, you know, fatten their wallets. Like, what's the right balance here between ease of starting the business and appropriate regulation to make sure that government money isn't being misspent? I think this is a lot like the energy bill that we were just talking about.

I'm not proposing changing the licensing requirements for child care centers at all. I think we should have an incredibly high bar to make sure that when, you know, my two-year-old shows up that she's going to be getting fed, that the person is, you know, being is well trained to take care of her. I want to make sure that we're putting our kids safety first. But we don't have to do that at the expense of putting up enormous barriers towards opening up that child care facility in the first place. And so this idea is actually not about the licensing.

It's about the restrictive zoning that is required. And the fact that, you know, in most places in the United States, if you actually want to open up a child care center in your home. And I know that probably many of your listeners don't send their kids to a home-based child care center, but it's actually by far the most common way that most families get child care, especially working class families, if they are able to afford and find a program, the barriers that we put up to those home-based programs are enormous. And so we can actually open those up without actually changing any of the health and safety and educational criteria

that states already have in place. I want to make sure that we have a chance to talk about AI because AI is a really difficult subject for my vision of abundance in a few ways. First, data centers are so unpopular that the politics of data center advocacy are just an absolute mess. Second, and more substantively, data centers and houses, let's say, are very different in at least two respects. First, a house is a house for people and abundance is built around a virtue of humanism, it's four people. A data center is a house for computer chips, and abundance was never intended to give construction primacy to computers. So when I read about data center construction, potentially crowding out housing, I certainly get worried.

But third, homes and data centers have this other critical difference, which is that the people building housing do not believe there's a 10% chance that the apartment construction project they're working on is going to collapse and trigger a nuclear explosion that ignites the atmosphere and destroys the world. But a large number of people who are working very, very close to the most advanced internal AI models in the world do think there is a significant chance that their project might end the human species. So it doesn't make sense, I think, to treat houses and AI as exactly the same. How do you, as someone who is taking a lot of these principles, but actually making bills, making policy, making law.

How do you think about AI fitting into this picture? I think two things. One is, I think state capacity absolutely is a major important investment for any abundant future that we have. Right now we're spending about $15 million a year out of the federal budget for all of AI monitoring. That's our entire watchdog agency's budget for AI. That's a fifth of what we spend for a single fighter jet.

It's clearly not enough to understand a portion of the economy that is moving as quickly and is, I think, going to be with us for a long time and is already a huge portion of our economic growth. The second thing is I think we need to be doing a much better job of building out the benefits and trying to think through what are the bottlenecks that are, stopping us from making the most productive use of this technology. There's a lot of fights about AI safety that are important to have. There's a lot of important regulatory aspects to that.

But I'm really concerned that when I hear a lot of these CEOs of the Frontier Labs talk, they're incredibly, they'll talk for hours and hours and hours about all the white-collar jobs that are going to be lost, and then they say, and we're also going to cure cancer. And that part of the speech tends to be only a couple sentences. And so I think what we need to be doing a much better job of as policymakers is, is, you know, not just trying to fight back against some of the cybersecurity harms and the risks of AI, but also trying to double down on any potential benefits. You know, for education, what can we do to get better tutoring for kids?

And is there a way to integrate AI that still make sure that the kid is doing the cognitive load of that learning? How do we use AI to dramatically accelerate research and development? And how do we make sure that the drug discovery candidates that were moving through clinical trials, hopefully much faster because we're cutting some of that red tape are actually going to cure the Alzheimer's and the cancer that we wanted to do. And how do we make sure that AI improves our government processes and our system? So the customer service that you're getting is a hundred times better, not by disintermediating a human who we want to make sure has that final judgment, but by trying to take some of that inefficiency and bureaucracy out of the system. I absolutely

think it's possible to do that. Right now, there's not nearly, enough thinking going on of how do we shape this moment and try to make sure that most average Americans benefit if it's possible to benefit from this tech rate revolution. What I'm hearing you say is that there's at least two planks. One, reduce the risks. And one way to reduce the risks is spending more on monitoring. We don't know what the internal models are capable of. Even the people working on them at OpenAI and Anthropic are surprised on a day-to-day basis of exactly what they're doing, where they are, what external websites they're hacking. And so sort of filling out external third-party monitoring agencies that are in the labs,

integrated into the labs, making sure that we're not on the cost of developing some runaway RSI superintelligence that's going to do some really nasty things to, I don't know, a grid, a Danish cooling company. I just saw that headline today that knocked out a bunch of refrigeration systems in France. So reduce the risks is one side. And that might require spending. more money. But there's this other side that's amplify the benefits. And you know, you said a few minutes ago that we're really interested in understanding which of the drugs that we've already approved might have the molecular capability of serving some other function that would really help patients. I think there's a role for AI there. If AI is really fantastic at reading

faster than any human being, could we find some way, say, of throwing thousands, tens of thousands of clinical trial results at an AI that is specifically tailored to reclinical trial results to make inferences about which drugs that might not have worked for disease A might actually have these design or affect portfolio be really useful for helping with disease B. I mean, that could be a really fantastic use for AI. But right now, I don't see the federal government, certainly at the executive level, using thoughtful policy to amplify the benefits of artificial intelligence in this way. So I do like at least this two-plank approach of we're not doing enough to reduce the risks,

but ironically, we're also not doing enough to amplify some benefits for medicine. The only thing I'd add to that amplification of the benefits is we need to be very focused on alleviating the physical world bottlenecks to making the most out of AI. Because right now, I'm very concerned that we're not going to see those benefits because our clinical trial process takes a decade to actually work through. And so I think that's going to be a really important place for folks to invest because if you look, if you talk to most folks in AI, they are only focused on what actually happens in the data center and the superintelligence gains that are happening there and very little about

how that actually translates into real world benefits. That's a really important investment that we can make for policymakers. How do we speed up clinical trials? How we speed up permitting reform and energy to make sure that these, you know, data centers are not actually increasing electricity prices to folks. And how do we translate some of those data center gains and trying to make life better for everybody? I wonder if we can just try this last question without even using the word abundance, because that comes fraught with so many connotations. What values and ideas do you think we're seeing ascendant in popularity? One that I'm hearing

is it's becoming more common among some politicians to see the world as a set of problems that need to be solved, at least in part on the demand side. You have more politicians, not just in the center, but like Mamdani and Elizabeth Warren, saying we have to build more houses, not just give people more money to buy houses, and that is a welcome change. Another virtue that I'm hearing is speed, whether it's the housing law, the permitting law, or so many of the other ideas in your build more agenda, this is about making it faster to build houses, build energy faster, build transmission lines faster. Are there other ideas or virtues that you think are serving as kind of a connective

glue among this coalition that you're seeing beyond supply and speed? I agree with you on speed completely and obviously on supply. I think there's two more. One is a belief or a hope that the future can be better. And that sounds kind of crazy. I really do believe that both the Republican and Democratic parties have been infected with a bit of a zero-sum mindset, where the only way for somebody to benefit is if somebody else loses. And I think that the philosophy that really binds our caucus and, you know, many of the leaders that I see across the country right now is a more hopeful message, a belief that tomorrow can be better if we take the right steps, if we build the housing, that we can actually lower housing prices, as opposed to this defeatist. attitude where the only way to make housing more affordable is if somebody, some villain somewhere,

is paying the price. There aren't a lot of villains in our story. The villains are really just, you know, well-intentioned people who are often, you know, made mistakes, or maybe they put up a little bit too much bureaucracy, a little bit too much red tape. I think in the real world, there's fewer villains than you often see on cable news shows. And then I think the third is maybe tied to that, but is a real focus on outcomes. I think that we have had a number of institutions in American life that have done a tremendous job. They've really, you know, obviously served their purpose. But they have been, they are now holding us back from achieving our aspirations in a lot of these, and a lot of these sectors. And I think one of the things that is, you know, binding together,

you know, folks that I really identify with are people that have a willingness to shake things up. I think we've seen with the Trump administration a real ability to shake things up much more than I think folks really recognize, right? The bull in the China shop is real. How do we channel that disconnect towards the status quo towards a more productive direction? It feels like the only thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on right now is that something in American life is broken. That's something we all agree on. How do we make sure that we channeled that discontent in discontent towards actually making life better as opposed to just trying to steal from somebody else?

I think it's a very good answer, but you have reminded me that one of the things I rue most about this project is that I never thought of a good answer to the question of who or what is the villain of abundance. It's not that there aren't villains, I think, but rather that there are different enemies in different contexts. There are some places where, for example, in housing markets where there's constricted housing supply, we essentially want to unblock regulations to allow companies to do the thing that those companies do.

Developers develop housing projects, and we want them to develop them more in places where more Americans want to live. But if you simply say, well, the thing that we want to do as an abundance project is to reduce regulations to let companies do whatever it is they want to do, that approach is not relevant

for, say, the oil and gas industries. I don't just want to reorient all of American energy policy to allow oil and gas industries to do whatever it is that they want to do. As a progressive, that's never how I would articulate my energy identity. But you've, I think, circled both maybe a strength and a weakness of the cause, which is that its flexibility allows people to identify the right bottlenecks in the right areas.

to solve different problems with different tools. But at the same time, I think that that flexibility entails a failure to, or inability, to name a single overarching villain of abundance that I think actually has been a challenge for this to become people's political identity if they want their political identity to be defined in antagonism toward a villain. So I think villains, it's just an apropos word that you use because I've been asked about it a lot, and I still find it difficult to, in a really, really pithy way, say, here's the villain of abundance. It is, bada-boom, X. Like, one could say it's like minoritarian interests.

It is procedures that get in the way of outcomes that are for the public good, but there's not a face to those villains, and the best villains have a face. Representative Josh Harder, I really appreciate you not only talking about all the great work that you've done, but also, as in the last answer, just listen to me as if a psychotherapist, just, you know, unpack my own thoughts about abundance. This has been cathartic for me as well. So thank you. Thank you.