Over the last year, the Abundance movement has gained traction in American political discourse. Driven by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of the same name, Abundance challenges the progressive left to focus on overcoming scarcity by rebuilding America’s capacity to build. The framework breaks down in places, and its prescriptions should not be accepted uncritically. But from a center-right perspective, particularly in the tech policy space, there is much to like about the authors’ diagnosis of what has gone wrong in American policymaking and in their insistence that the solution is to remove obstacles to growth.

Two pieces of the Abundance thesis stand out. First is its refreshing optimism: The authors place significant faith in growth and innovation as the key drivers to fix America’s problems. This is an explicit break from the dominant strands of political discourse on the left, which generally assume that the economic pie is fixed and political energy should be focused primarily on questions of distribution. Like Matt Yglesias’s One Billion Americans and other recent works, Abundance wants to shift that narrative from scarcity to growth, by focusing on barriers to expansion. Second is its diagnosis of government’s role as an inhibitor to growth and innovation. Regulatory accumulation increases costs and decreases the degrees of freedom for actors seeking to build. And proceduralism—what law professor Nicholas Bagley has dubbed the “Procedure Fetish”—has allowed activists to turn legal processes into veto gates to slow or block progress.

In the tech policy space, the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program could be a case study illustrating the Abundance movement’s critique of government. In 2021, Congress appropriated $42.5 billion to bring high-speed Internet access to unserved locations. But the Biden-era National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) attached a broad number of funding conditions to BEAD grants. These included preferences for BEAD recipients regarding union labor, wage and benefit standards, contracting with minority-owned businesses, and climate change conditions. They also included micromanagement of recipients’ business practices, such as data caps and other network management practices. Abundance criticizes this tendency to require every project to support every special interest group in the left coalition. These conditions undermine the primary objective—building broadband to unserved areas—by increasing building costs, reducing the number of competitors, and delaying construction. To its credit, the Trump Administration has eliminated these conditions, leading to an estimated $21 billion in savings and accelerating deployment so states can actually begin building later this year—though it is now threatening its own BEAD conditions regarding AI regulation.

While it’s unlikely that Abundance will prompt a revolution of the moderates to revamp the American legal system (that’s not how moderates work), one can foresee a coalition of center-right policymakers and Abundance-minded leftists to achieve meaningful reforms of the singles-and-doubles variety. In the tech policy space, these initiatives could include:

• Focusing on performance-based regulation rather than process-based regulation or regulatory micromanagement;
• Adopting sunset provisions that require Congress periodically to reassess the ongoing value of regulatory initiatives;
• Creating shot clocks for permitting and other government permissions to limit delays; and
• Shifting from ex ante precautionary regulations to liability rules, to encourage activity while providing a remedy for harms that actually result, an approach tech policy advocates have often dubbed “permissionless innovation.”

Where the Abundance thesis goes astray is the shift from removing regulatory barriers to affirmatively building state capacity. While the state can be a catalyst for growth and innovation—the book highlights Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s use of emergency powers to quickly repair a collapsed bridge in the I-95 corridor and President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine initiative during the COVID-19 pandemic—these observations must be tempered by public choice concerns that the book largely ignores. Regulatory czars and soft technocracies can increase the consequences of capture by special interest groups. This means that, far from alleviating government’s drag on growth and innovation, increased state capacity could exacerbate the problem. Instead of increasing bureaucratic discretion, reformers should limit it through predictable rules and clear property rights that allow private parties the space to innovate.

In a sense, the Abundance movement seeks to tap the same vein that has driven MAGA’s ballot box success. There’s a large constituency interested in a politics of optimism, of recapturing the capacity for innovation that established the American Century. While President Trump has largely failed to fulfill that promise, Abundance can help lay the groundwork for a moderate coalition to remove government barriers to future growth. There’s much that Klein and Thompson get wrong. But they are absolutely correct that we shouldn’t settle for a political class obsessed with fighting over the scraps of a decayed American empire. Grow.