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- [00:05]
A
On July 16, I attended the New Liberal Action Summit put on by the center for New liberalism in Washington, D.C. at that summit, I interviewed Representative Josh Harder. Representative Harder represents a district in California and was one of the founders of the Build America Caucus in the House of Representatives. Build America is a bipartisan alliance of members of Congress who are interested in getting America building things again, from housing to infrastructure to a better education system. Representative Harder has been a key player in pieces of legislation designed to advance this goal, like the Road to Housing act that was just passed by Congress and the Speed act, which is still pending in the House of Representatives. In this discussion, we talk about the obstacles to building things in the United States, the importance of building things like housing to reduce housing prices for all Americans, and some of the new ideas for how to approach the facilitation of decision making in Washington, D.C. and then the implementation of these policies all across the United States. I hope you enjoy this conversation and give it a listen. Thanks very much. Representative Harder. It's great to see you again. We're going to talk about a really important issue, which is the ability of the United States to actually start building things again. I don't hide the fact that I'm a fan of the abundance movement. I think that it's a positive project. Maybe we don't use the word abundance. We talk about building, which is really the core of it. You've been at the center of the effort in Congress to get political support for an agenda that will actually get us moving. So you've had one recent success. The Road to Housing bill was, I guess it was not signed into law by the President, but it's now the law of the land. Yeah. So can you just talk about your Build America Caucus and what it is you're pushing, and in particular, is this bill going to make a difference? And if it's insufficient, what's next on the agenda?
- [02:30]
B
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. I was here last year talking about the launch of our Build America Caucus. We now have 20 Democrats, 20 Republicans united around how do we make it easier to build housing, infrastructure, energy, all across the country. And one of the things I talked about last year, right in this very seat, is that we needed to get a housing bill done, and that was the top priority for our caucus. It's tough at a time when Republicans and Democrats can barely agree on what to order for lunch, let alone how to actually work together on real problems. But we did it. This is an era when even things that are important can still happen. In a polarized and unsubstantive Congress. This is the first time we passed a major piece of housing legislation since 1974. Think about that. It's been a long time and there's been so much going on at a state and local level, but no federal leadership on an issue that is the number one budget item for every single household in America, housing. And so this bill is going to do an awful lot of good. It's not going to fix every single problem. We have about a 10 million home shortfall across the country right now that's been building up year by year really since the financial crisis in 2008. And it's not going to build those 10 million homes that we need overnight. But what it's going to do is three things. It's going to incentivize cities and counties to build more. It's got an innovation fund. And it also has incentives towards fast growing areas which is going to make sure that the areas that are growing the fastest are getting the most federal resources. It's also going to cut the red tape. It's going to take a lot of the real crap that has been building up in the Housing and Urban Development office for decades and, and take it out. It's going to give automatic permitting for infill housing for federal, for federal projects, which is really important for a lot of affordable housing projects that still have to go through that federal permit process because they get federal dollars. That's going to be fixed in this legislation. And then third, one of the areas that I'm most excited about is this bill has the chance to reignite our manufactured housing industry, which used to be a thing in the United States. If you go abroad, you go to Asia, you go to Europe, you'll still see manufactured hous that doesn't really exist in the United States because we put in place in Congress many decades ago an accidental rule called the chassis rule, mandating that every single manufactured home in the United States had to have a chassis underneath it. It makes no sense. It essentially killed the manufactured housing industry. Think about a two story home and having a chassis not just on the first story, but also between the first and second stories. It's ridiculous. And yet that is still or was as of two weeks ago. The law, the land, all of that is fixed. This is the most important step forward we've taken on housing in a long, long time. It's not a silver bullet, but it shows that there is a political coalition willing to work together on what I think is probably one of the most important issues we have in the country.
- [05:36]
A
So after this act, what is teed up next? Like you've got a speed act that's still in process. What does that do and what are your hopes for further items on the agenda?
- [05:49]
B
We want to build more. I think the next big project that we have is energy permitting, which is for most households, their second or third largest expense. You know, there are some folks in my area that are paying $1,000 a month to our regional utility. I represent Stockton, California. Folks are paying $1,000 to PG&E, sometimes more than their rent or their mortgage. And those prices have doubled over the last 10 years with actually service going down. It's been absolutely outrageous. And the root cause is we are just not building enough. We're not building enough clean energy, we're not building enough transmission. We need to find more ways to get that wind energy from Wyoming into California. And we have been just way too slow in building those transmission lines because there is essentially organization by committee, decision by committee at the federal level. Any one player can stop that. You talk a lot about the vetocracy and that is absolutely a big issue at play play in transmission. We have to fix that item next and also try to get the politics out of this process. Unfortunately, this administration has canceled a lot of solar and wind projects, not because they don't pencil out, but because they didn't frankly pay the right people. It's a terrible way to make major decisions. It's anti capitalist, despite what the Trump administration likes to say. And it has absolutely chilled investment and energy at a time when, when energy demand, because of artificial intelligence and data centers and just general usage is going up for the first time in a long time. So we need to make sure we put shovels in the dirt on energy projects if we're going to have any chance of lowering ratepayers fees.
- [07:27]
A
So all of this is reform at the national, at the federal level. It seems to me that we both come from California and a lot of the obstacles to actually building stuff is really at a state level. Is that really the next item up that really reformers ought to focus on? On a state by state, especially in blue states like California, where the burdens are much higher. How do you think about that?
- [07:55]
B
You know, we need to do work all over? I think on some of these issues like housing. California has actually been a leader in passing a lot of really important legislation over the last couple of years. It's time for the federal government to move ahead. But look, blue states like California should Be shining beacons on a hill of how great life looks like when you elect Democrats. And that's just not the case in states that have generally some of the highest taxation rates of any states in the union. We don't have the best public services. You can't walk around California and say, look how incredible our public transit is. Look at this high speed rail project. It's exactly the opposite. And it's not just on infrastructure, it's on education. Black fourth graders in Mississippi are more likely to be reading at grade level than black fourth graders in California, even though California is paying two to three times more money per student. That's outrageous. And so what we really need to be demanding in blue states is getting our bang for our buck and making sure that the public services our taxpayer dollars are going for are delivering those world class services that we demand. And until that's fixed, it's gonna be really hard for Democrats to win in swing districts. You know, I'm in a district. Trump won my district in 2024, he won my county. I got elected despite that because a lot of folks, tens of thousands of people, voted for Donald Trump for president and voted for me on the very same ballot. But that argument is tough in states because they just look at some of the disappointing failures of governance. And until that is fixed, it's gonna be tough for Democrats to win consistently across the country.
- [09:34]
A
So I think that what's needed is a careful analysis of what's holding all this stuff up. Some of you may be familiar with Nick Bagley, professor of law at Michigan, who wrote about the procedure fetish. One of the ironic things about the world America today, if you ask, where's all the alternative energy being produced? It's being produced in two deep red states, Texas and Oklahoma. The demand is in California, but California has too much permitting to permit the kind of investments that have been made in places in the middle of the country. And we can't get the transmission lines built out to California to get that electricity from where it's being generated. I think that if you look at the reasons why California's got these problems, it is really this procedural sludge, these layers of requirements. Some of it is zoning, some of it is ceqa, the ability of any citizen of California to sue any project they want. I do think that you got to look on a state by state level to try to figure out where these obstacles are. But let's return back to the federal level and talk about your own party, the Democrats. It seems to me that they have not Embrace the Build America theme in a way that I would hope a progressive party should do, because they really do need to build things right. If you're going to adapt to climate change, you're going to have to have the transmission lines, wind farms and so forth. Can you tell me a little bit about the politics within the party and how many people could really get aboard a serious effort to streamline permitting and get rid of some of these obstacles?
- [11:27]
B
The housing bill, the Road to Housing act, passed the House the first time, 396 to 13. And those 13 no votes were Republicans, not Democrats. Every single Democrat in Congress voted for that piece of legislation in the House. So I'm not quite sure that this hasn't taken off. I think it actually has done a lot to win over the hearts and minds, even in some of the bluest states. If you look at what Mayor Mamdani is doing, doing, some of the ideas that are undergirding his governance are based on abundance. The idea of building more. Not all of his ideas, but some. I think this is going to be a big topic going into the 2028 presidential election. But ultimately, the only long term successful governance approach is one that makes life better for its citizens, and that has to be rooted in building more. We can't just remake the mistakes of the Biden administration again. People went through those four years and they didn't see the impacts. They didn't feel the inflation Reduction act, they didn't feel the bipartisan infrastructure law. They closed their eyes and then they opened again. They didn't see any of those impacts over the four years of President Biden's administration. We can't make that mistake again. The only thing that Republicans and Democrats agree on right now is that things are terrible in America. People were really upset during the Biden administration. People are really upset right now. During the Trump administration. We may have a short term political victory on the Democratic side, both in these midterms and in 2028 as a reaction to Trump. And we should certainly accept that. There's a lot to criticize, but if we're going to earn people support for the long term, the only route to do that is to deliver the services that people are demanding. And that requires us to build more, to build more housing, to build more innovation, to make sure that we have all of the red tape taken out of our health care system. We can do a lot to deliver better public services without actually spending more money, which is especially important at a time when we are under immense fiscal stress because of some of the things the Trump administration and the Biden administration spent money on.
- [13:36]
A
So maybe I can run some ideas by you to get your reaction. I have a project at Stanford that involves a number of people that are interested in this government reform issue. And we are focusing on all of the procedural sludge, the permitting problems and so forth. One of the biggest problems actually is the involvement of the courts in government decision making and rulemaking. If you say, where do all the extra procedures come from? They don't actually come from Congress, they come from the courts. And so, for example, a local court can order a hard look at a particular environmental project. It's already gone through a 3,000 page environmental review. But the judge says that's not enough. You have to create this trial like situation with testimony and back and forth. That adds another two, three years. Then if you don't get the right decision out of that, you can appeal it to the state supreme court and so forth. Do you see any prospect for actually making some progress in kind of separating out and kind of holding the court system at bay and giving actually more authority to the government, to the executive branch? Because that's not something at the top level we should all be excited about. But certainly when you're talking about an infrastructure project, the courts actually become a big obstacle.
- [15:09]
B
That's absolutely right. We've got way too many lawyers in Congress. I'm one of the few that is not. And we have frankly a much too legalistic system for making decisions on which projects that move forward and undercut by recent Supreme Court decisions. But if you actually read some of these court decisions, like the Chevron case, what the Supreme Court said in Chevron is that Congress should actually do its job. And so I actually think the overwhelming preponderance of court decisions in projects is due to the inadequacies of Congress to actually legislate. And so how do we fix that? Well, in a time when our economy is incredibly dynamic, when things are very fast moving, we need to make it easier for Congress to pass bills. We have passed one major bipartisan piece of legislation over the last two years and that was the Road to Housing Act. 1. Think about every single issue that America is dealing with one piece of bipartisan legislation. It is just really hard to get things done. And it's especially hard to revise things that have happened before. Right. So some of you may have read recent press articles about the no Surprise Billing act, which Congress passed a couple of years ago. I voted for it. It was really important to fix our healthcare system at A time when people were going under anesthesia coming out and seeing unbelievably high medical bills because maybe their anesthesiologist was out of network. It was a system that was deeply broken. Congress passed a bill to fix it. And where are we now? Well, it's broken again. The system that we put forward in that piece of legislation has been abused. And so we need to fix it again. But trying to go back again and revise something that's been fixed is absolutely impossible in this current political dynamic. And so I actually think the best way to fix what I see as the court's intruding on executive authority, on legislative authority, is to try to make sure that we actually have a more dynamic legislature that could pass more than one bill every two years.
- [17:15]
A
Right. And I think that one of the important things about bills that get passed is delegating the appropriate authority to the executive branch, quite frankly, because in an infrastructure project currently, if you want to do it at a federal level, go through NEPA, there's like 17 different agencies that have to sign off. They do it sequentially, not simultaneously. And then at the end, if some of the agencies at the end of that process object, you got to start it all over again. And there's actually nobody that has the authority to knock heads and push for things. Unless you have a president that gets involved personally in something, I'm not sure you want that to happen. Under current circumstances, you don't want too much direct presidential involvement in building decisions. But in general, I don't see how you can speed up this whole process unless you actually delegate a little bit more authority. Even in this conservative court. I'm not sure that you couldn't get to that point. You had this seven counties decision last year, which was actually quite important, in which Justice Kavanaugh actually said, maybe these federal agencies need a little bit more authority to actually get past some of these blockages and the courts can't interfere in that. And so it does seem to me that there is a bipartisan, potentially bipartisan basis to solve some of these problems.
- [18:44]
B
That's right. I think the other solution is outcome based policymaking. And so in the lack of a quick feedback mechanism, which Congress clearly does not have right now, we need to be thinking about outcome based measures and setting a goal, not on how much money we're going to spend, but what are the actual public services we're trying to deliver and make sure that agencies are held accountable to that. Right now you have this closed system with no feedback where Congress passes something it goes to the agencies and it's never revisited and maybe even goes to the courts and gets diluted yet further from congressional intent and from originally the voter intent, the voters that put folks in office to make these decisions. And so we have to be able to fix that. I think there's some good ideas on how to address this. I'm trying to think through how we can put more triggers and outcome based metrics in our legislation because ultimately this needs to be a much more self correcting process because legislation is messy, it's hard. We don't always have the right answer the first time. We need to iterate. That's what any business does, that's what anybody does outside of politics. We need to bring a little bit of that intuition into legislation.
- [19:56]
A
I mean, this is the whole agile government movement, right, that you need to be a little bit more like Silicon Valley. The way we do contracting, you do this big multi year contract and five years later you maybe get some feedback. That's not the way Silicon Valley builds products, right? They get immediate feedback and they make immediate adjustments. And that's really important. The other thing is that if you really want to solve this problem in terms of outcomes, you've got to change the culture of the bureaucracy itself. Because, okay, so this is my little sermon here. I think that conservatives are actually 180 degrees wrong about the bureaucracy. So the narrative about the deep state is that the federal bureaucracy is full of these wild liberals that are unelected and they've got their own agenda and they're doing it outside of the authority of anyone in Congress. And I think the reality is actually something the opposite, that there's no organization more controlled than the American bureaucracy. If you want to buy an office desk in a federal agency, you've got to go through the federal acquisitions regulations, hundreds of pages of detailed rules about how you go about doing that. What it leads to is a culture in the bureaucracy where rule compliance is the way you get promoted. If you're a good boy and you follow a good girl and you follow the rules, that's how you move up the ladder and nobody looks at outcomes. You're not rewarded actually for taking a risk. This is another big problem, I think, in the way we do bureaucratic decision making. We don't, we penalize risk. If you fail, you're going to become a political football. Whereas you want a bureaucracy that will actually do innovative things and be rewarded for that. And we somehow have to figure out how to get those outcomes into the way that we evaluate people's. Performance.
- [21:52]
B
Yeah, I completely agree. If you want a really depressing day, go and shadow a federal procurement officer. Oh my gosh. What those folks have to go through in terms of paperwork and requirements is absolutely mind numbing. And we get the process that you would expect from that, something that is as risk averse as possible. But one of the main insights of the abundance movement and what we call Build America in Congress is that Americans are incredibly unhappy with the results of that risk averse culture. What they're getting in terms of the public services back is very disappointing. So we want intuitively a little bit more risk taking in our government. And so hopefully what we can do if we're going to be able. I look at the nih. The NIH when it was first created had an enormous amount of latitude given to individual scientists to go out and pursue path breaking research. And then in the 1980s Congress got involved and in the Ronald Reagan era started hauling in these university researchers and saying, well, we want to make sure that we know exactly what you're doing in your lab, that you're doing the exact type of thing that you told us you were going to do. We're going to make you spend half of your time or more filling out grant applications and accounting as opposed to actually working in a lab discovering the next cure for cancer. It's led to the NIH that we have now where you have scientists that spend 20 years of their life going through school and then spending all of their time typing out a grant application instead of doing the type of life science research we really want. And so it's really disappointing in terms of the services that we get. The NIH does incredible work. The scientists that they fund are tremendous and think about how much more they could do if they had double the amount of time to actually spend in the lab. And so I think, you know, one of the things we're really working with here is trying to lower the amount of red tape, trying to lower the amount of the time tax that people are actually spending working on government projects. And some of that is going to come with a little bit of risk that we're just going to have to accept that sometime if we're going to take all that paperwork out, sometimes there are going to be projects that may not be exactly what, what folks might have wanted with the system that we had before, but in exchange for that, we're going to be getting cures for cancer, cures for Alzheimer's, and research that is actually hopefully going to pay out much faster.
- [24:31]
A
So Representative Harder. Maybe we could wrap this up by you telling me what your hopes are realistic, politically realistic expectations for what could be done not just in the remainder of this administration, but possibly in a different one that may emerge in the next few years.
- [24:52]
B
I would say I have three tiers of goals this year. My goal is to make sure that we do something meaningful on energy, which would be the single most important thing we've done on climate. I would include the IRA in that because it doesn't matter how much money you put in subsidies and clean energy projects. If you can't actually put the shovels in the dirt, it doesn't matter. I think we've learned that lesson. We have to pass energy permit reform to make sure that clean energy projects can move much faster than they are today. Next year, I think we have an awful lot of leeway because if Democrats take back the House, which I believe will do, the only legislation that's going to happen is going to be bipartisan legislation that is really trying to get the best of both agendas. And what that means is not just on housing and energy, but how do we move infrastructure projects faster? How do we make sure that we are taking some of the red tape out of our education system, which my goal is to make that a top issue for both the Democratic and hopefully Republican parties as well. Health care is an area where there is just so much inefficiency and red tape that I think the abundance lens can do an awful lot of good in state capacity is something that we should be wanting to work on more. And especially now that some of the disappointments from Doge have died down, I think how do we reimagine making government work for folks is going to be a renewed topic. So there's a lot going on. And then the third stage, I really want to make sure that in these 2028 primaries, when you sit on the debate stage or watch the debate stage of probably the endless number of people running for the Democratic nomination, I think it's going to be a true circus that you have folks answer the hard questions of how they're going to deliver, not just what their campaign promises are, but how are they going to build the housing, the energy infrastructure, the healthcare systems that we need? If they're able to answer those questions and if we govern better the next Democratic administration than we did the last one, I think this ultimately this movement will be a success.
- [26:52]
A
So the state capacity issue, I think is one that's been central to the way I think about the problem. We don't have enough state capacity. And it really begins with our education. When I look at my students at Stanford, up until this past year, very few of them wanted to go into a government career because they saw that it was just full of red tape, it was obstacles. You didn't get respect. I think that that's been true, really, for a generation. In fact, if you're an idealistic young person, let's say you go to law school because you want to make things better, you're going to go into a public interest law firm that's going to sue the government to keep it from doing something. I think that the mentality towards public service, I think, really has to change. People have to understand that there is a larger public good and that if they want to give back something, if they want to have meaning in their life, that they've got to think about these larger purposes and not just their narrow careers. That means a cultural change in the way that we think about our relationship to the government, what we want to do with our lives, and so forth. And so I really hope that this is a change that the abundance movement can bring about. I see this actually at Stanford. We actually have an abundance club at Stanford of people that actually do think that the government can do things that are positive and, you know, will lead to progressive change in a way that they haven't for quite a while.
- [28:24]
B
Yeah, I agree. And I think this is a great point to close with. I suppose there's a lot of young people in the audience. Whatever issue you care about, I can almost guarantee that the bottleneck to that issue is government leadership. Why do we not have the health care system that we want? Is it because we don't have great doctors? No, it's because we don't have strong enough government and political leadership. What about climate change? Do we not have great scientists and entrepreneurs? We certainly have more than enough environmental lawyers out there. The challenge is we don't have the political leadership and the courage to get the most important issues worked on and done. And I think that is true for every single issue that people care about. And so what I always tell young people is go where the bottleneck is. That's how I ended up in this job, because the issues that I care about were all being bottlenecked by federal leadership, mostly. And so I hope that we have more folks that are going to try to address those problems, because we can need that new generation of leadership asap.
- [29:22]
A
Amen. All right, so thank you very much, Representative Harder, for talking to us. I hope you succeed. I hope that your caucus grows and over time, you know, becomes one of the dominant forces in a Congress that has not done a whole lot, I would say, in the last few years. So thank you very much for appearing.
- [29:42]
B
Thank you.
- [29:46]
A
Thank you for listening to the Frankly Fukuyama Podcast. If you like this podcast, consider subscribing to American Purpose and my Frankly Fukuyama column@www. Persuasion.community. this is a new podcast, so please do share.