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The Realignment
How to Bring Back National Ambition - Inside the Build America Caucus with Rep. Josh Harder
00:58:39
Congressman Josh Harder joins The Realignment to discuss why Americans increasingly feel the country has stopped working—and what it would take to rebuild trust in government. Harder explains the mission of the bipartisan “Build America Caucus,” why housing affordability has become a generational crisis, and how bottlenecks in permitting, infrastructure, and public administration undermine growth and optimism. Marshall and Josh debate abundance politics, private equity and housing, education reform, USAID, AI-era energy demand, and whether America needs to stop managing decline and start governing for outcomes again. Is the problem ideology—or competence? And can a politics of building restore a sense that the future will be better than the present?
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Transcript52 lines
- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. Hey everyone, thanks for the patience between seasons. Couple things to throw your way before we get into today's episode with Representative Josh Harder, who represents California's 9th congressional district and is the co chair of the bipartisan Build America Caucus. First, since today's episode hits on a bunch of abundance topics, this is the perfect time to shout out that that inclusive Abundance, whose founder Derek Kaufman, has previously appeared on the show, has issued an open call for specific policy ideas for an actual abundance agenda. I've linked the announcement and submission link in the show notes, but the agenda aims to serve as an educational package of at least 16 ideas and policy proposals that would illuminate solutions to major economic or governance bottlenecks that holds back opportunities for Americans this They are particularly interested in ideas that cover housing, jobs and the pathway to economic prosperity energy, particularly from advanced and renewable sources, dynamic institutions, and connected prosperous families and places. Submissions are due on June 18th and you can once again find the link to learn more and submit in the show notes. Second, next week I'll be in D.C. for Welcome Fest, the largest annual gathering of political centrists. I'll be conducting some onstage interviews building on the Realignment's past year of work on the challenges facing the political center during an era of populism. Let me know if you'll be there. You could find links to tickets and more info about the event in the show notes as well onto today's actual interview. Today's conversation is with Rep. Josh Harder, focused on his work as co chair of the Build America Caucus. According to the Caucus, quote, Americans have lost faith in government because they don't see results. They see gridlock, red tape and delay. This self imposed scarcity has led to out of control housing costs, a constricted energy grid system, and decades of infrastructure delays, all while foreign adversaries race ahead. It's time to get back to building. That paragraph is obviously music to my ears, so I'm glad I got the chance to chat with Rep. Harder about the past year of the Caucus's work and where they plan on going next. Also, since the Congressman is a millennial, it's great to showcase a new generational face since voters have been pretty clear about how they feel strongly about the need for new blood in all of America's political and policy conversations versus politicians who are past their sell by date. Hope you all enjoy the conversation.
- [02:51]
B
Representative Josh Harder welcome to the Realignment.
- [02:54]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [02:56]
B
I'm excited to chat with you. There is nothing I hate More though, than introducing a guest during the sort of pre show where I sort of articulate your entire life in two or three sentences. So this is your time, this is your show. How would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners and other people in the Niskanon cinematic universe?
- [03:15]
C
Yeah. Well, thanks for all the work you do. Excited to be here. I am from the fruit nut basket of the entire country in Stockton, California. Fifth generation resident. We're about two, two and a half hours southeast from the Bay Area and my family started a peach farm here in 1850 and we never left. And we're just working to try to save the country as best we can, one day at a time.
- [03:41]
B
Sort of jumping ahead in the script then, since you gave that introduction, a lot of folks are going to see the work that the Build America Caucus does and that we're going to really focus on as falling into the broad abundance category, which is really seen as being very urbanist, very growth minded. I think a lot of people are pretty open about the fact that it doesn't seem like a lot of the work that abundance coded organizations do has basically anything to say to a farmer or to someone who's 2.5 hours outside of like a big city like SF. So I'd love to hear both. Not just your sort of interpretation of how all of these big ideas we're going to discuss today have to do with, you know, where you're from, but also just this like broader phenomenon of like rural versus urban and how it represents, like a big challenge for policymaking coming out of D.C. there's a huge
- [04:33]
C
divide and I think we've certainly seen it grow over the last couple of decades. And that's both in terms of policy and also in terms of politics. Right. Democrats have lost rural voters in record numbers across the country. And I think there's certainly a lot of cultural considerations there, but there's a lot of economic considerations as well. You know, one of my farmers, a dairy farmer, told me one time, I don't have Republican cows or Democratic cows. I just have cows that need help. And I think the Democratic Party has just not done a good enough job of listening to that type of voter. But I think the type of pro growth policies that we're working on really span the scope demographically span the scope in terms of the economics and urbanization of the country. Everybody wants a new cure to cancer and a new cure to Alzheimer's. We're not going to get that unless we make it faster to approve and try new drugs, which we can't do to. Given all of the bottlenecks in the clinical trial process today, everybody wants it to be possible to afford to buy a home, but you can't do that in rural America or in urban America. And so I think, you know, these issues have just gotten to such a boiling point across the entire country. No matter where I go, I see the same concerns on affordability, on housing, on infrastructure, on energy. You know, our farmers are more concerned about high energy prices than anybody else because they. They're paying a lot more for it. They use a lot more than an average home. And so I think this is something we're all connected in, and I think it's something we need to work on together.
- [06:13]
B
Something I'm kind of curious about then is this big question I like asking members of Congress, which is basically. And it's also a good way of getting sort of your biography out there in terms of your unironically lived experiences. So you and I are part of the same millennial generation, generational cohort. We've just sort of gone to sort of two different directions of podcasting, which is its own millennial stereotype. I'm not sure being a member of Congress is a millennial stereotype, but just a sort of generation or turnover means that by definition, this will be seen as more of a millennial thing. I'd love for you to sort of talk about the role to which the past, like 30 or 40 years, how you sort of interpret what's gone on in the country, who within that period since our childhood in the 1990s, and how maybe different parts of that story that you've either heard from people on the road or that you have internally influenced how you think about and talk about these issues.
- [07:10]
C
I think we've really lost our national ambition, the ambition that life could be better. You know, when I was growing up, it really did feel like that long arc was bending towards justice and that the future would be brighter. It doesn't really feel that way anymore. And I think it's just become really out of reach in terms of the basket of goods that Americans need. The housing, the good job, the affordable energy season, groceries. That just feels like because of rising prices, years of corruption, it's really out of reach for a lot of families. I mean, the average. The median age for a home buyer in the United States right now is 59. When I was growing up, it was in your 30s. Now you gotta be 59 to own a home. First time homeowner buyers are on average 40, which means most millennials don't own a home. And so it's no surprise that if the future seems so out of reach, people are going to be more cynical and apathetic and frustrated with the pace of change. And I think what is really what I've seen happen over those last 30 years is that mark of cynicism, because people are so skeptical that the future is going to be better. And I think with artificial intelligence, it feels like that is just being supercharged because people are more concerned, and understandably so, at what's going to happen to jobs and our white collar workforce, as opposed to what I might be able to do to accelerate research and development and the like. And, and so I think we have to get back to the basics and we have to really interrogate what went wrong, which is that we made it really difficult to actually build a good life and deliver high class public services. If people don't feel like their life has gotten better over the last couple of decades, they're going to vote for the bull in the china shop that's going to break it all down. And so we have to really ignite that bond of ensuring that the public can actually see the benefits of government, that we can fix. Fix the basic public services that have been broken in order to get that national ambition that's been lost back.
- [09:19]
B
You know, I'm really interested in the specific words you use there, because when you said national ambition, I thought you were going to do the whole we sent a man to the moon thing. We could do and you would that
- [09:32]
C
too, but we just need to get people a house.
- [09:34]
B
Well, and I think I want you to go a little deeper on this because I think there's a. I think this is actually something very important to get people to understand about your politics, because people kind of misunderstand this. And not just like you personally, just sort of like the broader sort of party and ideological cohort you're a part of, which is, I think we look back to the 50s and the 60s and even bringing in that Kennedy moonshot thing during that period. You would not describe basic services as something we're working towards as a country. You would not say, oh, yeah, like you're gonna buy a home, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And once you're going for those moonshots, once that foundation is laid, you could really sort of make those moves. But I think if there's something really critically that the discourse, especially when D.C. tends to miss, it's this sort of trying to offer people great big and grand things and just forgetting about the basic foundation that we had during other previous areas or at least the confidence that we were improving on them is just like really missing. So I'd love you to kind of like talk about that because that's just a way that I imagine a version of view that was 20 years older. Let's say we're doing this interview in 2008. You would have probably said we need to go to the moon and not talked about housing and not talked about basic government services. Because that seems like small ball, but the small ball is actually kind of the whole thing now.
- [10:54]
C
Yeah, look, I mean I think in many ways housing is more important than going to the moon because everybody needs to live in a house. And I actually think these back to basic government services are even more essential than some of these big moonshots we've seen in year past because they're, they are so broadly felt and they are so deeply broken. Everybody feels how our system has just completely failed them. And just to give you one example, we're trying to expand bart, maybe one more BART station in our area. I go up, I talk in front of our commuters who are driving hours and hours a day and they just do not believe ever going to get
- [11:37]
B
built they for the non. Non.
- [11:40]
C
Yeah, BART is, you know, mass transit across the Bay Area right now. It ends outside my district. We're trying to get it just a little bit farther so folks can get on a train. We have 100,000 super commuters that are driving four or five hours a day back and forth. You know, it's a basic light rail system like many cities have, but nobody thinks it's going to happen. And they think maybe it'll happen for their grandkids, certainly not in their lifetime. And the reason for that is they have just seen and the failure of building high speed rail across California, which is a different project, but one that we voted for years ago as a state that has just been over budget, behind schedule and just been this epic failure that has led to a deep frustration. And so you see that all across the board where people just anytime you're talking to them about how life could be better, how we could deliver a better service, we could get a better park, we could get a better affordable housing project. People look around and they see you haven't delivered. And ultimately, you know, if folks are frustrated at the pothole in front of their street, they vote for somebody to fix it. It doesn't happen for decades. It's just going to lead to people Walking away from the political system, feeling like it's so deeply broken, voting for somebody that's going to, you know, break it all apart. And I think that's exactly what's happened. So I totally agree with your premise that, you know, it seems a little bit basic to be focused on these essentials, but I think every single facet of American life is under delivering for the people who care about it most. And I think that is the essential millennial experience and that is what has led people to such a frustration with the system we're living in.
- [13:15]
B
Just to understand the state, local versus looking at this from D.C. from within Congress, to what degree do you have, do you as a member of the House of Representatives have any sort of input, influence on the BART delivery, or is this more just something? Once again, because you're surveying district, you're going to hear those complaints, but it's not really your purview.
- [13:35]
C
It's going to take federal money to do any mass transit project across the country right now. You know, high speed rail in California has taken a lot of federal money. Unfortunately, it hasn't really done much with that federal money. But my real focus is how do we get these projects done faster, cheaper, better? You know, the fact that, you know, obviously China is expanding ismatransit very quickly, but Paris, the fact that Paris is able to expand its subway system at a fraction of the cost of the United States should fill us up with a lot of indignation and fury because it's not like Paris. France is skimping on their labor and environmental standards. Right? They have some of the highest standards in the world. And so there is a pretty big federal nexus in this, both in the permits that are required and in the resources to deliver it. And I think it's essential to actually be able to do good things if we're going to get people inspired about that national ambition that we can actually have a government that works for everybody again.
- [14:33]
B
So I totally agree with you from, like from a mission, what are we waking up and doing first thing in the day perspective when it comes to sort of making the country work better. I guess the question that, and I'm not saying you're being superficial here, but I think where people's skepticism come in is, okay, that sounds nice, but it's not happening. Right. So what are the. Not just like the bottlenecks, because I'm sure you'll be able to name some bottlenecks, especially if I that BART example with the high speed row example, but it also seems to Me, at a certain point, there's a leadership gap. Like my. A lot of my sort of like policy academic expertise is in the arsenal of democracy mobilization era during World War II. And you know, FDR just gives a speech where he says, we're going to do 50,000 planes a year. And from a pure empirical perspective, that should not have been possible. We actually hit that number three years later. You cannot not read that history and not realize the pivotal role that FDR as a person played in getting that done at a leadership level. Now, it's obviously not fair to expect FDR level leadership at the state, local and federal government all at the same time, but that just makes me increasingly just sort of frustrated by the policy and bottleneck discourse. And then started into question. No, I just think that actually the people who are doing these things are not good at their jobs or are not trying or have a conception of what they do as politicians as not being quite what the moment demands. So push back. Because that's just sort of my, like, take as an outsider looking at it.
- [16:00]
C
No, I don't think you're wrong. I think the biggest divide in politics today is not even a political party, although those divides are pretty big. It's whether or not you think the system is working or broken. Voters clearly believe that the system is broken. But if you were to just watch our political leaders, most folks are acting like the status quo is fine. And I would argue most folks are acting in both parties like the status quo is fine. And they're just trying to piece together different, you know, different small changes. I think, you know, we need to go from a government culture of lawyers and a zero risk environment where we're trying to tweak the status quo but not really reimagine it, to a government culture of entrepreneurs where you go out and you try to actually achieve big things. And yes, sometimes those are going to fail. A lot of startups don't succeed, but the status quo is deeply broken and you can't change it just by tweaking 1% every single year. We need a much more fundamental rethink. And I think a culture of entrepreneurship that really questions the basic assumption of why we're not delivering high quality public services will deliver the source of problems that we need. You know, oftentimes when we face. I'll give you an example, you know, on housing is an issue that I work on that is, you know, a major issue to all millennials and most Americans right now. And a lot of times the solution to housing is, oh, we're going to sue a city to try to fix it, to try to force them to build more homes. Well, that's going to take decades. And at the end of it, maybe the city is going to redo their building code, redo their zonings, their zoning that's not actually going to deliver more affordable homes for folks that need to move in. Yesterday if we actually treated this like an entrepreneurial problem, we actually pushed for, you know, the types of mandatory buy right housing, saying if you satisfy these criteria, you can build tomorrow. We can actually solve the root problem of why housing is not more affordable for everybody. And I think that same mentality of entrepreneurship is just essential at every single part of government right now if we're going to improve service delivery.
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B
I want to focus on the lawyer's point because it's funny. So Dan Wong, author of Breakneck is a Friend.
- [18:24]
C
Sure, yeah, absolutely.
- [18:26]
B
The book is, you know, China's Engineering State, America's Lawyer State. And I saw Jake Sullivan and John Finer, formerly of the National Security Council, interview him a few weeks ago home and here home in Austin. And you know, something that, that they were obviously pointing out is this is now sort of broken into the discourse now. So they just did the very open. Too often the Democratic Party is the party not just of like lawyers, but like specifically Yale Law School is disproportionately overrepresented. The two of them both being Yale Law School graduates, they, you know, sort of conceded that point. But I think from a sense of fairness perspective, the, the literal sort of like legal attorney background is actually a problem here in terms of what you're taught but the other side of it. So I'd love for you to give a full spectrum of why we just don't have this risk taking culture because I think when people that just sounds obvious. But if something's obvious and it's not happening, I think the picture is probably a little more complicated. Here's a good example of how even it's not just the lawyer's fault. So you know, we all remember the Solyndra scandal in you know, quotation marks there. Government puts all this money into this green energy producer during the early Obama era and the money is all wasted. This is a three year thing that goes on into the 2012 campaign. Well, it should be noted the same program that funded Solyndra also helped save Tesla. So like within an even political media perspective, there was just this like really, really poor incentive system where if you told the story differently, a lot of people on the right now who, like Elon would not and say, see, like that's actually a good government program. So just talk about the. How our system at just like, at every single level perspective is just. Just not have, I think, a fair and reasonable approach to failure. In contrast, I think we'd really want to desire.
- [20:10]
C
It's totally right. I think the approach to failure is one component of it. But I actually think the bigger issue that I care about is not just accepting failure, it's about having a positive sum mindset. What I really think, sort of the. Again, not to blame everything on lawyers, but I think the challenge with that litigious adversarial approach is there have to be winners and losers at every single point. Right. If you, if you go through in a lawsuit, you know there's going to be a party that wins, there's going to be a party that loses. I think an entrepreneurial approach doesn't just focus on taking risk. It focuses on trying to find opportunities to grow the economy and to develop better public services that are better for everybody. Right. I mean, I've been working with a number of Republicans on efforts to try to make sure that we can build energy projects without political interference. Democrats like it because the Trump administration is doing a whole lot of stuff that's attacking wind and solar projects. Republicans love it because they think Democrats are often against oil and gas and fossil fuels. But this type of accelerant can make public services and lower energy prices better for everybody. It's the classic sort of growing the pie. Win, win. That isn't just adversarial. So I actually think that is even more fundamental than taking risk. But I certainly agree with you that the public sector has a problem when failures are magnified and successes are minimized. I've certainly seen that in my district. Right. I mean, we had a VA clinic where wait times exploded and, you know, they let go of a couple of physicians who took other jobs. And we did a meeting. Hundreds of veterans showed up. The VA was there. People were yelling at them. It was really fiery. We actually ended up. I made this a huge priority. We fixed this problem. We hired even more physicians than it left. We brought down wait periods by 90%. We did another meeting. Two people showed up. Right. Nobody wants to trumpet the successes. Nobody wants to talk about what actually is working. Everybody just wants to focus on the problems, conflict and negativity, especially in this social media, algorithmic information ecosystem proliferates at such a rapid pace. Clip. So I agree with you. I just think that the problems are so fundamental, they're not going to be fixed any other way. And what hurts people, what frustrates people even more than a mistake, is when they don't actually see something improving. And I think we've seen this in Covid, where people are pretty angry at some of the shortcuts. In Covid, they were angry at some of the fraud, which we still need to prosecute, some of the COVID fraud, much more than has been done. But really what people were angry about were the basic failures of public services that should have been delivered and didn't. So I hear you with a Slyndra in Tesla, but I think that the government institutions have been so broken under the Trump administration they can't be remade to what they were just a year or two ago. We are going to have to rethink them from first principles and have a higher level of synthesis and a deeper sense of frustration at what came before. If we're going to be fix it, fixing it for tomorrow, I think people
- [23:17]
B
hear and we'll get to the caucus after this. But I think people hear that line about, you know, remade, not just repaired, which I think is a good, not just like rhetorical, but sort of like mindset shift of like we're just going from managing this sort of concept that Arthur Herrmann writes in his new book, you know, Founders Fire, which is talking about how, like during certain periods you would just kind of manage things. So the 1990s was like a management decade. But when things are actually failing and there's no trust, you have to take a different mentality towards these things. But talk about some of those first. I'm not going to actually expect you to like, because to your point, there's been so much that's been burned down.
- [23:55]
C
No, I'm happy to have to go
- [23:56]
B
through it category by category. But what are sort of some underlying principles for remaking government and rebuilding it? Because you could say a lot of these things very simple.
- [24:05]
C
It's very simple.
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B
What are they?
- [24:07]
C
We have to be outcome driven. We have to think about what is the goal of this agency and is it actually delivering that. So I'll give you two examples. The two agencies that have been most attacked under this administration are arguably USAID and the Department of Education. USAID was doing tremendous work on PEPFAR and doing HIV treatment across the world. More lives saved. One of the huge successes of the Bush administration. But the majority of USAID projects trying to stimulate good governance and economic growth in sub Saharan African countries was frankly, arguably a huge failure. We've spent tons of money probably less as a percentage of GDP than most Americans think, but still an awful lot of money over the years without a lot to show for it. And so a real reform agenda at USAID should be focused on what are the objectives here? How do we grow America's public diplomacy around the world, how do we build more trust with our institutions? And how do we save lives and improve global health and try to help a country so we can use our diplomatic efforts instead of our bullets in our military? And that would be a completely different USAID than what we had in the Biden administration and the Obama administration under Democratic leadership. The same is true on the Department of Education. I think there is a push right now to say that the system as it was a year and a half ago was fantastic. And that's clearly not true. We have had huge learning loss during COVID We lost so much during the pandemic, and we still have not seen that regained in the years afterwards, even among students that were never out of school. And so a Department of Education that takes learning science seriously would be a very different Department of Education than the one we saw a year and a half ago would focus on how do we get good, high quality curriculum, how do we make sure that there is accountability at school so they are meeting their learning outcomes, how can we make sure that kids are learning to read using best in class instruction? The idea that, you know, a fourth grader in Mississippi, a black fourth grader in Mississippi, is two and a half times more likely to read at grade level than a black fourth grader in California, which pays, by the way, two or three times more money per student than Mississippi. That's outrageous. That should be a call to action. And a Department of Education that actually cared about that would be very different than what we are seeing right now. And obviously the wrong way to do it is what the Trump administration is trying to do, eliminating the department, taking a lot of those funds away from schools. But the right way to do it isn't how we were doing it a year and a half ago either. It's trying to focus on what are the outcomes, how do we get better student learning and how do we improve student outcomes and then working backwards from there. And I think if we take that first principles approach, we would have a very different political system than what we had before.
- [27:04]
B
You know, it's interesting. So you obviously, through the work of the caucus, do a lot of bipartisan work. So you're aware, though, but especially when dealing with the right and conservative critiques of some of these systems. It's not just like an outcomes argument. It's also just like a philosophical, like what is the purpose of this thing? So for example, there are a bunch of people on the right who would nod along when you are describing Mississippi versus California and describing how they want their schools to produce things. What they would then say is that's the purpose of the states and federalism. It's California's job to rectify the fact that Mississippi's made different policy decisions that are more effective with their funding than California. So like, why do we need a DOE to ensure that process? And then the same for usaid, they would say, look like America obviously has soft power, but at the core level, like foreign aid was a very specific sort of approach we took during the Cold War that responded to the Soviet union during the 1960s body. So I'll just ask before we move on, what would you say is the purpose of the DOE and then the purpose of usaid? Because like even soft power, right, that's like the language. But like that is not going to get American hearts a flutter, if you know what I mean. So I'm just curious how you would, how would you articulate, moving forward the purpose of both those.
- [28:22]
C
I think this is, this doesn't have to get lost in questions of federalism. I certainly agree with you, but I work with a lot of Republican colleagues on education issues. We've got a bipartisan education bill on trying to take the approach that Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama, these four southern states, all deep red Republican states, have taken to improve reading outcomes and trying to encourage and incentivize other states to do that as well. You can do that in a way that doesn't, isn't top down mandates, but is trying to create both financial support as well as, you know, again, highlighting what actually works, which is high quality curriculum based on phonics and ensuring that that is trained in every single teacher, which is often not the case in states like California that pass bills that sound good but aren't actually implemented well. And so I think we can get past this. And I think again there is huge widespread bipartisan, you know, there's nothing that people care more about than ensuring that kids can actually read and do math. And we can argue about what the role of the Department of Education is there, but we spend a lot of money on education out of the federal budget in terms of, especially in terms of special education and Title 1 resources to low income schools. And so there's a lot of money out there that could be better tailored to catalyze the types of outcomes that Republicans and Democrats across the board. Board want to see.
- [29:53]
B
I'm just curious, and what would you say, your answer to the like, what is USAID 2.0 trying to do like in the world? Like, why should someone care about soft power? Quote unquote?
- [30:04]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think every general would say, you know, you don't give me enough diplomacy, you don't give me enough humanitarian support, you're going to have to buy me 100 times more bullets. And so I think that that philosophy of ensuring that we are building strong allegiances through our public, diplomat, diplomatic efforts and our humanitarian work is really important. But again, it was President Bush that created pepfar, which is by far the most successful institution at usaid or was the most important part of what USAID was doing in terms of the impacts per dollar spent and not just on hiv, but also on the malaria treatment that USAID was doing. It was hugely successful. And so those two twin impulses of ensuring that folks across the world are seeing that America actually cares about them and then the direct humanitarian relief has been very bipartisan. It's been, you know, USAID was something that was strengthened under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Again, it was Bush that created the Millennium Challenge Corporation, another institution of international development. What changed is that a lot of USAID was not accomplishing its mission the right way to do. It wasn't to abolish the agency, which is what Doge and the Trump administration did. But again, how do we make sure that this organization is actually hitting its outcomes, focused on what it was doing best on global health, and not trying to just go back to the way this building was operating a couple of years ago, which I think was really not working for anybody.
- [31:37]
B
So how about you introduce the Build America Caucus for folks? Because that's been the theme of a lot of the conversation. But there's an actual caucus there. It is, we're working on it. What even is a caucus? And then you introduce your caucus. There's a lot of caucuses.
- [31:52]
C
Yeah. Caucus is a group of like minded members. It can be, you know, one party, both parties coming together to try to work on a particular issue. Most of them exist on paper only and people, you know, sign their name, joining and you never actually hear about it again. We're trying to do something different. And so we started this group called the Build America Caucus, which is focused on how do we make it easier to build things in America to build our housing, to build our energy, to build our infrastructure, to build Our scientific ingenuity, which has been clogged by paperwork to build a better education system. How do we do it all better, cheaper, faster? Not by spending more money, but by getting red tape out of the system. And so we've got 20 Democrats, 20 Republicans, we have some of the most progressive Democrats in the country, some of the most conservative Republicans in the country, all united by this one issue. And I think probably the issue that we've been working on most is trying to get a real federal housing bill passed. We have not passed a federal housing bill since 1976. It's been over 50 years. And you've seen the problem just get worse. We are short about 4 million houses across the country in terms of what we need, the families that have formed and the places that they can actually be housed. And. And that has created this huge crunch on pricing where it costs a million dollars across California on average, to buy a home. And that's why you're seeing the median home buyer at B59 just completely out of reach for an entire generation of Americans. The best way to fix that is to try to make sure that we can build more homes for folks. We've been working on this for a long time, and I think that just over the next week or two, we've hit a real breakthrough and we're going to see the first housing built fast in over 50 years.
- [33:39]
B
Just something curious about when it comes to how the bipartisanship model works. So I've always been frustrated by bipartisanship, which is sort of defining civility and good faith is the objective because it leads to sort of. I don't know, it seems kind of like base and kind of like obvious. And instead, I think the approach that sort of works better and is the approach that I think y' all are taking with the caucus is just sort of focusing people's lenses on the right sets of issues, which by the nature of the right sets of issues, makes people be civil and pro social in, like, the first place, versus you could not. You know, and here's what I define as, like, the wrong set of issues. Not that these issues are important, but, like, I would not expect to get effective bipartisanship out of. We're going to debate LGBTQA rights across, like, the spectrum. Right. That that's just something where, like, values and different perspectives. And he. But who's getting. Or maybe someone. Maybe you'll give us the INS scoop. Maybe there are angry, knockdown fights over housing, but I'm just curious how like that. That's just sort of been my theory. I do some stuff with CFR around that idea. But how much. How does what I'm saying sort of like sync or not sync with you?
- [34:47]
C
That's totally right. Some issues are only going to be solved at the ballot box and you're not going to be able to find a whole lot of bipartisan agreement on reproductive rights, on LGBT rights. On a lot of, frankly, some of the most important issues we have as a country, there are huge divisions between the party. There's just not a lot of overlap and bipartisan will to work on these issues. And so we've got to win if we're going to make sure that our values are translated into policy. That said, there's a lot more agreement on a lot more issues than people often expect, especially on issues that are not going to be on Fox News at night. You know, that's sort of the big trick. If it's going to be leading the news at 6pm then it's probably immigration, it's probably trans rights. It's issues that get people on both sides really fired up. And it's very unlikely to be a good scope for bipartisan compromise. We're still working on all those issues, and we don't shortcut our values and our principles. But there is a lot of room to agree. On economic issues, like how do we make it easier to build a home? How do we bring down electricity and fuel prices at a time where people are paying record prices at the pump? How do we build more infrastructure better, faster and cheaper? There is a lot of agreement on these issues. And so you're right, by defining it to a relatively small scope, we're not going to fix every single thing, but we can address some of the most fundamental issues. And the reason why that's important is if you're working on something that can only be solved at the ballot box, you really have to wait. You gotta, you know, work and try hard and win elections, but you have to wait for all the stars to align. And 80% of the last 30 years has been a period of divided government where one party has won as has been in charge of one of the House, the Senate and the presidency, and somebody else has been in charge of one or more of the others. And so either, you know, if you're working on those issues, you're not legislating and doing much during that 80% of the time. And you're just waiting for those perfect stars to come together. We need solutions urgently to some of these problems, and we can't wait to get them.
- [36:57]
B
Here's something I'm curious about. So over the past year or so, especially post 2024, when affordability became kind of the buzzword at the moment, you really saw the housing debate evolve from just like the stereotype, especially at a generational level within our cohort evolve from like the YIMBY NIMBY one, where something very effective that the yimbys did is basically point out that the Y yimby yimby NIMBY dynamic is very, very, very generational. So like, hey, millennial, you know, we should have more housing. And NIMBYISM is something that people who already have housing, that's something that they do. So I saw even in sort of like left spaces who've been like reluctant to engage in NIMBYism because it seemed very neoliberal. What do you mean? We just have to build more and that's going to fix our problems. That had started to really, really, really appeal to people rhetorically, however, and this affected the actual housing. But I'd love to hear like all your thoughts on this in a second. Once the private equity part of the conversation came into housing, you really saw in these different circles from the right, from the left, from weird parts of the center that really stopped because we went from the very effective YIMBY framing of we need X number of houses. There's a gap. That gap explains why the number is now 59. When you could buy a house. It turned it from like a very metrics driven, we're going to roll up our sleeves and build it thing to a values debate. I'm not going to name this person, but a person who you definitely know of and who would not be seen as this type of person just said the sort of build abundance YIMBY people lost me with the private equity and build to rent issue. I just think at a values level, I don't care that we would get 10,000 more homes. I don't want private equity to be there. And I think most Americans actually agree with me. And I actually think there's something to that. At a pure, just sort of like people, we're just not. Maybe this is the difference between China and America. I don't think Americans wake up saying we're going to get to 10,000 homes and we're just going to do it. Maybe we think that way during wartime. I think we struggle during peacetime and values become more complicated. That's my read on what's happened here. I'd love to hear your read on this broader phenomenon.
- [39:06]
C
I Don't think there's as much conflict as there may seem on the surface. I think it's imminently possible to do two things at the same time and to make sure that there are clear institutional safeguards. So we don't have Wall street owning every home in the country, bidding up prices while also building more homes. And the reason why I think this isn't in much conflict is if you look at the earning reports by Blackstone, one of the largest owners of single family homes, although they, you know, I should note that institutional investors own less than 1% of homes across the country. It's, I think, a little bit less of an issue than some Americans feel. They will say that the biggest risk to their business is making it easier to build new homes, because of course it is, because if you own a lot of the existing housing stock, you have a high incentive to make sure that folks are not making it easier to build more. And so the best way to weaken institutional ownership is actually by introducing more competition. You talk about values. I can't think of a more American value than competition. And by making it more affordable to build. And by the way, you can do that in a way that doesn't weaken existing homeowners because you make the land that they own already more valuable when you intruse more public services, higher density, and a better quality of life for folks. And so I think you've seen that time and time again. There's a lot of great studies on how existing homeowners are actually made better off when cities are able to grow and continue to improve their services for everybody. You see home prices continuing to improve, even for existing homeowners, while being affordable for new folks. And so what we've tried to do is thread that lens and make sure that there are understandable safeguards, because in some metro areas, especially I think of someplace like metro Atlanta, you have seen a lot of institutional ownership. You've seen a lot of hedge funds and private equity funds coming up and buying a lot of homes. And there needs to be limits on that for sure. But where this bill went took a. Took a little bit of a wrong turn for at least a couple of weeks is an effort to also ban new investment into building new homes. And there's a big difference between buying up a single family home that otherwise another family might, might have been, been bidding on and actually stopping or freezing investment in building more. And the difference there is that we need to build more homes. And so, you know, the initial ban on what is called build the rent, which was in section 901 of this, of this bill would have killed the construction of 72,000 new homes every single year. Just over the last couple of months that this has been debated, debated. It has already killed $2 billion of investment into building critical new homes across the country. That's the damage that this freeze has already done. And so we tried to, you know, really marry those two issues, keep those values together where Wall street can be at arms bay. But we also were not killing the incentive to put shovels in the dirt of building the homes that people desperately need. And I think we've gotten finally to a very good product here. I led a letter with 75 other members of Congress. It was the single biggest bipartisan policy push on any issue so far this Congress, because this is something that everybody understands. It's a major issue across the country and we have to get right.
- [42:23]
B
Question for you, which I've kind of. So I totally agree with the way you framed that issue. And I kind of wonder if I could play a member of Congress to your left. I kind of wonder why what I'm about to say wasn't the response to what you just said here. And I'm curious if it like either was or like it just didn't enter the discourse. So like you said, 72,000 homes will not be built if this passes. Let's just like stipulate that that's true. Why did those to your left not just suggest then that that represents a market failure and therefore the government should just finance more homes? Because it just seems so weird to me that the concession just because I was, I was just, I was like, well, I mean if the issue is 72,000 homes won't be built because the market will not produce it under conditions the American people agree with, then it's the job of government to sort of fill that gap. Did anyone talk about that? Because I just think like rhetorically it would have been like a interest and once again this maybe would get inside baseball. I think it, I just found that to be a more serious argument then when this is, I guess there are no homes then because you know, 1% could be 3.4% in 10 years. You know what I mean? So I'm just curious, like how do you respond to sort of left wing Marshall representing Austin saying that point countering you?
- [43:40]
C
Yeah, I think that it's a, it's a great point. We already have a ton of federal investment, public investment into building more homes in the affordable housing space. And the biggest problem there is the Amount of red tape we put put on affordable housing, which makes it generally twice as expensive to build an affordable housing unit as to build a market rate unit. And so we absolutely could, you know, ask for, you know, trillions of taxpayer dollars to go out and build more homes. I don't think that's politically realistic in this administration, and even in a Democratic administration, I'm not sure it would be either. But the crux of the problem is, no matter who's paying for it, the private sector or the public sector, we just have made it way too difficult to build homes, period. And again, that's especially true for those publicly sec, public sector or publicly funded types of projects where the amount of red tape is just astronomical. And until that's fixed, I think getting more public resources is crazy. You hear all these stories about, you know, a one bedroom affordable housing unit that is built for $1 million and it's just never going to pencil out. That's a broken system and we have to, you know, really fix that before we throw more good money after bad.
- [45:00]
B
Speaking of your previous point near the middle of the episode around how we need to sort of reimagine things from the beginning, I would love to hear if our definition of affordable housing, whether or not it's public or privately funded, should be just like, reconceived. Because if the number, if the age at which you could buy a house is now 59, is our conception of what affordable housing is, is that just too rooted in like the 70s or 80s? So like, just what is. I'm just imagining a listener being like, well, I mean, I could use some affordable housing. So like, what does that term even mean?
- [45:32]
C
Yeah, look, I mean, I think it means two different things to different types of people. Right? I mean, when, when you say affordable housing and a public policy standpoint, you mean, you know, a housing with very strict income limits. When other people here, when an average voter, an average person on the street hears affordable housing, they think housing that I can afford. And that's completely different. I think the best way to deliver housing that average voters can afford is more competition and more building. And ultimately, you know, there's a lot of different systems. There's, you know, housing models where the government owns a ton of the, of the housing stock, like Singapore and other European countries. I'm not sure that model would be particularly successful in the United States, although we have some proposals there. I'm fairly agnostic about this. The core is, you know, if it is going to cost an arm and a leg to Buy a home in an era when 12 million Americans are paying more than 50% of their monthly income on housing, which is outrageous. We just need to make sure that we are building more, building more of everything, building more transitional housing, more market rate housing, more mixed use housing, more multifamily housing. And until we crux that, I mean the right solution is going to be different from different types of people, but none of it's going to be affordable until we're actually able to put our more shovels in the dirt.
- [46:49]
B
So for the last section, I want to hit just a couple other of the future priorities for the caucus, but then one other last sort of meta question before we get to those other three. So as you said, this is like a pro growth caucus. And I have just found if there's a word that people in your and my age cohort below and below are kind of skeptical of, it's just like the word growth. And I don't just mean, I don't just mean that in like the environmental sense. Like I grew up in Portland, Oregon. So like there's some very specific like growth politics in like the Portland metro area that would sort of make people skeptical. But what I basically just mean is that for a lot of people, growth just feels like, hey, we cut some taxes, we deregulate some things and then like things are just going to deliver. And I actually totally resonate and feel with that, even while believing in capitalism and believing that cutting red tape could be actually kind of a good thing. So my question for you is how could growth as a rhetorical tool, as an objective, as a mission, mean more to people than what it's really meant? The Speaking of our 30 year story, how can it mean more than it has in previous sort of cohorts?
- [48:01]
C
Maybe a better term for it is the pro hope caucus because I think the two are really more, really very connected. You can't have, certainly growth without limits can have enormous amounts of problems. But the reason that I am working towards the two is because you can't actually fight for more growth until you believe that tomorrow is actually going to be better. And that connection is what has I think led to this deep cynicism, this fear that we are actually headed down the wrong path, which most Americans of both parties agree that we are headed on the wrong path on most issues. And so we have to find a way to reclaim that growth and hope agenda. I will say that when voters actually see a successful pro growth agenda in practice, they tend to love it because a growth agenda that for Instance, builds more energy projects, lowers prices for everybody. When people actually see public services delivered on time, on budget, they tend to really like it. And so you look at a, you know, a mayor like Mayor Lurie in San Francisco, his approval ratings are off the charts. He's one of the most popular mayors anywhere in America because of the agenda that he's actually, actually pushed. And we can discuss what the right term for that is. But I see it as a focus on radical competence, on making government services actually deliver. I think instead of complaining about how government is broken, which everybody agrees on, it's the one thing Americans agree on on both parties, is that government is so broken, instead of complaining about it, let's actually try to fix it. And I think it's radical because we're rejecting that failed governance is inevitable. It's not about big government or small government. It's about how do we actually make sure government delivers for people what it actually has promised. And the only way to do that is through that growth agenda, generally where you can actually build those public services. We can't do it through that zero sum mindset. It's just not going to work.
- [50:10]
B
So this is how we'll go through the priority issue areas. So another one is obviously bottlenecks to power transmission and electricity pricing. Obviously that opens up the can of worms. That is a AI data centers. That seems like just like the ultimate sort of like, difficult problem because they, the data centers are just like, obvious. They're just there. I'm not sure the more obvious that sort of, you know, building more power and energy comes in the sort of more politically problematic it's going to get kind of at a local level. So just broadly speaking, like, how are you all thinking about that issue as it comes to sort of like moving forward on the afford? Because basically, if people interpret, I have my own. So I run the abundance conference and something I'm working to do here is like, not allow unhelpful AI discourse to sort of like jump in. So like, I don't want the conversation on power transmission to be sort of turned into like, no, but we're going to use that for data centers. I want people to. I don't want people to think, okay, cheaper at the gas pump or cheaper at my home bill. So how do you think about unpacking that?
- [51:13]
C
We can do both. I think. First of all, you know, PG&E, our big utility in Northern California, has doubled rates over the last 10 years. Some folks are paying more in their electricity bill than they're paying in their mortgage and their rent, which is high enough, as we discussed. And so that has to come down. And the only way it comes down is more competition, more transmission, more generation. And we have to fix this using, I think, a permit package that makes it just easier to build. And that is what America is good at. If we unleash American innovation, we can get more solar built, more wind built. Even given the vendettas that this administration has taken, I think that debate is somewhat disconnected from the data center debate. Obviously they're connected because people see this physical, these physical buildings and they just see how much energy they're sucking up. I think we have to start the data center discussion with some key principles, making sure that our public resources, our water and our energy are held harmless by all of the amount of money that's going into these data centers. I think it is very possible to construct an environment where the investment going into data centers are lowering the rates of ratepayers. As long as you're going to build a couple new energy generation units to power the data center, why not build one more so you actually lower people's rates. If half of the cost of a data center is energy, it doesn't take that much to actually build a little bit more than you may have to and make life better for the community around you, which I think would actually change a lot of these discussions. Some communities are not going to be open, but other communities I think would approach that with open arms. I think the way we're thinking about this in a caucus is really just trying to make sure that these data centers are investing and benefiting the communities around them. And if they don't do it, then it's not going to be sustainable and we're not going to be able to build the data centers. We need to ensure that that AI, that America continues to be the AI leader for, for the world.
- [53:17]
B
We covered the reading priority a bit, but the one question I just have, and this is me being sort of emerging from like the Malcolm Gladwell Here's a crazy anecdote and it's sort of supposed to change your mind, but then actually there's like five years later, like slight correction on it. Do you, how seriously do you take the Mississippi miracle story? Because my sort of framework is I believe 80% of it and then I have 20% allocated for insert. You saw this in the D.C. public Schools story with like Michelle Re in the 22. So how do you just. How do you think about that in terms of. Because that's the way we're telling the story now. I'm curious how you think about this.
- [53:51]
C
I want to build the Democratic Party that cares about kid, kids education, and we don't have that right now. And we can debate the right policies that need to be underneath that. But I think back to the 2000s, when energy, when education was a top three policy priority for both the Republican and Democratic parties. Both parties had a vision for how to improve education across the country. You saw, again, George W. Bush run for president, and his number one idea was the education miracle that happened in Texas, or what he framed as the education miracle that happened in Texas. That ambition going back to what has been lost over the last 30 years, that ambition has atrophied in both parties, and neither party wants to touch education as an issue. And that's why we've seen all of this, you know, state and local action. I think it's time to push education back into the conversation again and to really prioritize, especially after Covid, when we've seen learning outcomes just be completely decimated. The New York Times did a great report on this recently, and you just see that almost every school district in the country has seen kids fall 1, 2, even 3 grade levels behind over the last couple of years. Absenteeism, kids not showing up to school has just exploded. Parents believing that, you know, there's just no hope in making the school district better has gone up and up and up. And so my number one goal here is to regain that ambition, that school is important and that we can improve our school system to make sure the kids can actually learn at a higher rate. I have two young daughters. I care about this a lot. And I think there's a huge amount of potential in scaling up some of the success stories that we can see. There's a lot of mirages in education reform, and we see them time and time again. And I think the biggest reason why education reform has fallen from the agenda and is people have just lost that sense of hope. They just do not think that we can actually fix these problems. They've been burned so many times that they think that there's just no reason that we should try to scale this up. I reject that. I think it is possible to have a better school system, and not only is it possible, it's essential because if we're going to prepare our kids for the future and the technology revolution that we're seeing right now, our kids need to be able to, to do better math and reading than they're able to do in general right now. In terms of your question on what's going on in Mississippi, I think what's really interesting is that it's been replicated and we can debate what's different in different states, but the core mechanics of that, which is a focus on reading, high quality curriculum implemented at the local level, has actually been replicated in multiple other states. It's very rare to see something go from one school to an entire school district to an entire state and then export it to different states. The negative side is we've seen a lot of states try to do that or at least try to pass bills that say they care about kids reading, but they haven't actually implemented it well. And so, you know, I think that's the crux of the issue. But even beyond how true this one success story is in this one state, and I think there's a lot of reasons to be excited about it, I would like to see other people come up with other ideas, other proposals, other success stories of what we can do with the number one goal, making it making the Democratic Party focused on how do we ensure that our kids are being better prepared for the future. I think this is something the Democrats have led on for decades. We've let our leadership slip and it's time to bring it back.
- [57:28]
A
As we close out, I'd stop to
- [57:30]
B
call out how important I think that answer was. Because if we look over this history of post 1990s education reform, I think my critique of why we got to the point where people abandoned it as a topic is we got too obsessed with one specific solution and made that the thing rather than what you just did there, which is the actual thing, is a functioning education system that you as a parent and a community member who pays for that prior year property taxes have confidence in. That's the objective. That's that top three politician issue versus and we all saw this happen. It's charter schools, it's this thing, it's this voucher program. And in Texas, so the conversation is all about vouchers. So like, and now it's like AI in schools. Like, it's all the data that shows that laptop and schools were actually not helpful. Now it's fashionable to say those are bad. So just like zooming out and just focusing people on that, just education as the objective in a way that like all the hot things in discourse doesn't encourage is like just very, very good advice that I hope people take you up on. So, Representative, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for joining me on the realignment.
- [58:33]
C
Thanks for having me.