At a DC conference this September, a coalition of politicians, Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY) activists, investors, academics, and 2000s-era policy wonk bloggers-turned Substack writers rallied behind a common cause: the Abundance Agenda. The guest list had more than tripled from last year, with a waitlist of over 300, according to an internal email. Featured speakers included Ezra Klein, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, and Nvidia policy director Levi Patterson. Attendees discussed pathways to energy, housing, technology, and finance abundance. They cycled through the Grand Ballroom for lunch and enjoyed Happy Hour on the lawn. There was a sense of momentum, of putting the pedal to the metal and steering towards shared goals. Earlier in the year, Open Philanthropy announced their $120 million Abundance and Growth Fund and House Democrats formed a Build America caucus. But as the event drew to a close, Abundance thinkers were left with the same question facing any burgeoning movement: How do ideas scale across ideological divides, both across the partisan aisle and within the Democratic Party itself? In other words, how big is the tent?
The Abundance Agenda was popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s best-selling book in May 2025, but the grist of these ideas have circled in academia and California’s YIMBY affordable housing movement since the 2008 financial crisis. “Abundits” look under the hood of America’s broken infrastructural system to understand why government—particularly in liberal states—struggles to meet demand for essential public goods ranging from housing to healthcare. Why has California fallen years behind countries like Japan, France, and China in building high-speed rail? Why does it cost twice as much to build multifamily housing in California than in Texas? According to Klein and Thompson, the problem isn’t a lack of resources or political will—it’s the process. In the 1970s, good intentions led to unforeseen consequences when progressive reformers built regulatory and oversight mechanisms to thwart corrupt centralized power. In doing so, they hamstrung the government’s ability to act effectively. Rules and regulations bog down infrastructural advancements in layers of bureaucratic procedure while “vetocracy-style” governance allows local interests to stymie attempts to build more housing, transit, and renewable energy. The Agenda advocates for a robust government that can get out of its own way to achieve its goals, steering innovation and stepping in when markets fail to deliver.
Abundance’s critique of status quo liberal governance has polarized Democratic factions, with left-leaning critics dismissing it as a neoliberal Trojan horse that diverts attention from welfarist programs. However, political infighting is not inevitable. Abundance cannot yet aspire to big-tent politics because parts of its theory are still nebulous. Much of its discourse centers on output and technical process while failing to reconcile larger issues of political division. As a result, the Abundance Agenda is less of a fixed ideology than an emerging policy framework that should harness coalition-building toward greater ends.
Many progressives have already recognized Abundance’s potential. At a rally, NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani called for “[delivering] an agenda of abundance that puts the 99 percent over the 1 percent.” On a podcast with Derek Thompson, he acknowledged the importance of an effective and efficient government to manifest affordability and “public excellence.” He interpreted Abundance policies as narrow reforms to state capacity. However, it is unclear whether the Left and center have the same understanding of what inefficiency means in the real world. For instance, when discussing the ballooning costs of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Long Island Rail Road Project, the two reached an impasse: Mamdani critiqued utility corporations while Thompson pointed to costly union regulations.
A look at several failed infrastructural projects reveals that Abundance’s diagnosis of overzealous regulation aligns with the Left’s framing of the “oligarchy problem.” Take the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, former president Joe Biden’s recent effort to fill in gaps of high-speed internet access in rural areas. On the Jon Stewart show, Klein explained what went wrong, rattling off the endless steps of the federal grant applications that resulted in severe delays. “My hair was dark when we started this process,” Stewart joked at the end. The clip went viral, inciting outrage from progressive journalists like Ryan Grimm, as well as Former Deputy Director of the National Economic Council Bharat Ramamurti, who pointed out that Republican senators and telecom behemoths had worked to enervate key provisions of the bill. Both stories are true. Biden envisioned internet access as a public good and aspired to the top-down efficiency of former president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Program. However, congressional politics and waning trust in government chipped away at federal control of the policy. Leveraging Congress’s overcaution and federal agency disorganization, large telecom companies challenged internet affordability requirements, mapping inaccuracies, and existing bids in an attempt to push out smaller or public competitors. The resulting delays in implementing BEAD were therefore partly caused and exacerbated by corporate creep. Senate Republicans now condemn BEAD’s overrgulation, but their criticism is a caricature of Abundance. A sounder approach from the Biden administration would have borrowed progressive antitrust tactics, such as common-carrier regulations or a federally administered bidding process, to enable more efficient coordination.
The BEAD example shows Abundance must contend with political power dynamics. Brown research fellow Marc Dunkelman, who spoke at the recent Abundance conference and published his book Why Nothing Works this year, expands the reformist agenda into a broader theory of power. More than bureaucratic process, his version of Abundance criticizes the creation of an overcautious government tiptoeing around the interests of various non-government actors: Sometimes the problem is corporations, sometimes it is unions, and sometimes it is local home owners. The greater issue is how interest group politics have captured the production of goods. That does not mean government should bulldoze through the concerns of local populations and usurp union bargaining in the name of efficiency. Rather, a more intentional balance must be found in every government endeavor between catering to local demands and putting boots on the ground to see projects to fruition. As Dunkelman argues, it is about contending with two strands of progressivism: Hamiltonian top-down control and Jeffersonian localized leadership. Through this lens, Abundance need not incite a battle within the Left but should promote a thoughtful and interwoven dynamic between centralized and decentralized leadership.
In reality, however, managing these two tendencies requires looking beyond technocratic prescriptions—which nitpick the machinery of policies—to confront political trade-offs. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom was forced to alter provisions of his Abundance-esque affordable housing bill after union advocates protested its wage requirements in budget hearings. This example reveals a current shortcoming of the Abundance agenda: While it diagnoses the traffic jam of competing interest groups, it does not propose a solution for resolving those cross-coalition rifts. At its worst, some Abundance followers resort to blaming unions as part of the problem. Klein and Thompson avoid this political quagmire by asserting that union interests can coexist with Abundance policies, pointing to how European countries carry out cheaper and faster infrastructural projects with high unionization. But they do not address the crucial gap in this argument: Europe’s political economy is fundamentally different from our own. The welfare state means worker wages do not have to shoulder the burden of healthcare and general high living costs. Competing interests of government, employers, and workers are mediated through tripartite agreements, a centralized decision-making process contrasting collective bargaining in the United States. American unions have adapted to political conditions where lobbying instrumentalizes self-interest and low union membership fuels a destructive insider-outsider competition between members and non-members over who gets the share of jobs. It does not have to be this way. Progressive thinkers have an opportunity to build on this gap in Abundance theory. Even modest deregulatory reforms require a powerful realignment of interests, revealing the need for deeper remedies to current structural flaws that embolden self-interest at the expense of the common good.
The Abundance Agenda emerges in a fraught political moment as Trump hacks away at the federal government and the Democratic party finds itself rudderless in the right-drifting tide of the electorate. For better or for worse, politics is about coalitions: congressional bargaining, legislative carve-outs, and a process of give and take between political factions. Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman’s analysis of late-20th century Progressivism reveals how movements are shaped by unforeseen consequences as ideas adapt to policies, and policies gain a life of their own. Now, Abundance is in its theoretical, public-comment stage. To see the movement’s actualization, we need to put shovels in the ground.