Conventional punditry loves the narrative that woolly-headed progressive standards over-burdened federal climate spending and slowed everything to a crawl. In this episode, I talk with Betony Jones about her time designing labor policies at the DOE and what she learned from interviewing dozens of companies that received federal funding. We explore the difference between bad rules and weak administrative capacity, how the DOE successfully streamlined century-old Davis-Bacon compliance, and why creating high-quality jobs is essential for global competitiveness.
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David Roberts
Hello and greetings, everyone. This is Volts for May 27, 2026: “A limited defense of Biden’s Everything Bagel Industrial Policy.” I’m your host, David Roberts.
Last year, in their book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson popularized an argument about the Biden administration’s industrial policy that has since become something like conventional wisdom. It goes like this: by attaching so many well-meaning progressive requirements to every tax break or grant—labor standards, community benefit standards, local hiring standards, domestic content standards—they overburdened the policy and made it slow and bureaucratic. Consequently, the money didn’t get out the door fast enough, so voters’ lives were not changed quickly enough, so Biden did not get any public or electoral credit for his policies, so Trump won. That’s the official line.
Betony Jones ran labor and jobs policy at the Department of Energy under Biden and was responsible for developing those labor standards, which applied to thousands of projects totaling over $100 billion. You will not be surprised to hear that she has a rather different take on the subject.
And she’s not just drawing from her personal experience. She has spent the past year interviewing executives at a dozen-plus companies that received federal clean energy funding to find out what happened. What really did slow things down? What she found was that the labor and community conditions were more welcomed than burdensome. The real bottlenecks were in implementation — permitting delays and contracting timelines.
She wrote up her findings in a report called “The Receipts,” which I find very amusing. I am excited to talk with her today about what we should and shouldn’t be learning from the Biden industrial policy experience.
With no further ado, Betony Jones, welcome back to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Betony Jones
Thank you. It’s great to be here.
David Roberts
I want to start with the abundance critique. Despite my somewhat provocative title for this episode, you are not here to defend the whole bagel, the whole everything bagel. We’re mainly here to focus on labor standards and community benefit standards, the workforce side of things. The question is whether these and other workforce standards are getting in the way of the speed and scale of industrial policy that we want.
There are two questions you could ask about these standards. One is the empirical question: do they in fact slow things down? Did they in fact slow things down? Are they in fact burdensome? Then there is the political question: does attaching these kinds of standards make the policy, make the bill look more explicitly progressive, thereby polarizing it, thereby making it more difficult to pass? There is a substantive critique and a political critique. I want to take those one at a time.
But before we jump into any of that, maybe let’s just back up and I want to ask you, what was Biden’s approach on workforce issues? This general family of issues goes way back in the Democratic coalition. Obama spent a bunch of money and talked about green jobs all the time and had policies that he called green jobs policies. I’m curious, what was Biden’s innovation? What was new about the Biden administration’s approach to workforce issues? How would you characterize that approach?
Betony Jones
We can talk about Biden’s approach to workforce issues. I tend to see these things through the lens of climate policy. We tried for decades — I’ve been working on climate policy since the Clinton administration — and there have been many efforts to advance climate policy through regulation, through Waxman-Markey, a lot of different efforts, a lot of thoughts around carbon taxes. Nothing got across the finish line until we had a climate policy that had a broad agenda and a broad political coalition advancing it that included left-behind communities, environmental justice communities, the labor movement, and climate advocates.
By design, this climate policy — the set of policies, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act, a suite of three policies to address the climate crisis — was intended to deliver to those constituents who lent their political muscle to getting that across the finish line. In some ways, to go back and critique those very things that were baked in by design and the whole reason that we have these policies to implement in the first place as responsible for some failure never made sense to me.
David Roberts
When the green movement tried to be surgical and clean and only go after carbon emissions in the way that was approved by economists and didn’t have any of this everything bagel stuff, it failed. Everybody yelled at the green movement: “What’s this technocratic blah blah? What about the movement? What about the people? What about all these co-benefits?” Then greens go back and, as always, they’re A students, they say, “Okay, we’ll work up a big elaborate policy that has all that stuff.” It involves everybody, it includes everybody. Then people say, “Why did you include all this stuff? Why don’t you be surgical and just go?” There’s a real “you just can’t win” vibe around all this.
Betony Jones
People pretend that politics don’t exist. A lot of people aren’t in the weeds or paying attention to power or what moves it or how it plays out in how policies get crafted. The Biden administration was implementing what was passed. We were implementing what there was political will to execute on. It doesn’t make sense to say, “All of those efforts slowed down this one aspect of the goal.” First of all, the arguments saying that aren’t backed up by any reporting or data, they’re just ideas. That’s what I was trying to correct for.
Second, what was the assignment? Let’s grade ourselves based on the assignment, not based on some other idea of what we think the world should be like.
David Roberts
We should say, and I wanted to say this too, the critique that greens are woolly-headed and naive and want paradise and all these goodies, and we, the level-headed, reasonable centrists, need to come in and discipline them and tell them how silly they are — any critique that fits that basic mold, people love it, people buy it. They don’t ask for any reporting, they don’t ask for any data. They don’t say, “Prove it.” They’re just like, “Oh yeah, that sounds right.” That sounds right to me. That’s the kind of critique that in D.C. just sounds right to everyone.
Betony Jones
It’s unfortunately a bit deeper than that. It’s a critique that aligns with a particular paradigm. It happens to align with this kind of deregulation, let’s drive lowest-cost solutions, this free trade globalization wherever we can get the markets to move — neoliberal paradigm, it fits into that. That’s something that people are very comfortable with. Then they like it. You see that with abundance. Not necessarily exactly what the authors intended, but certainly the people who’ve picked it up and run with it and redefined it or co-opted it in some cases to push for deregulation.
David Roberts
Let’s get back to Biden’s... how did you try to accomplish the assignment?
Betony Jones
You were asking what was different about Biden, because certainly Obama had a green jobs strategy. What was fundamentally different about Biden’s approach is that it was more by design and by necessity. It was more a demand-driven approach to pulling workers into jobs. In the Obama administration, there was a lot of funding for training, workforce education and training to push workers into jobs that we hoped would manifest. The train-and-pray model: “Let’s train everybody in solar and hope they find their way into the industry.”
That just didn’t work out. In the Biden administration, the proposals around investing in workforce development and Build Back Better were gutted. What we finally got across the finish line were investments in projects, and we had to then ensure that those projects were making the investments in workforce development and labor standards and had the strategies to attract, retain, and train the workers they needed to get the job done.
David Roberts
Can I briefly ask, what were some of the tools that got stripped out? People critique the way you do it and say, “We had tons of better ways.” Talk to Joe Manchin. “We had all kinds of ideas about how to do this better.”
Betony Jones
All of those social infrastructure things — childcare, money for training, expanding registered apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships, on-the-job training. All of the funding for the supportive services, barrier reduction side of the workforce equation, side of the labor market, those things were stripped out —
David Roberts
Which meant that the only tool, the only lever you had to implement the things they were telling you to do was on the project side. That was the reason these things got attached to project agreements — because that is what ended up in the legislation.
Betony Jones
It’s a good model. It happened because it happened. But it’s also a good model because it ensured that the workers who were trained were trained to work on actual projects. They weren’t just engaging in training to pull them out of the labor market.
David Roberts
It’s a long-standing critique of job training programs going back decades. Aside from clean energy, people have always had this idea of job training as an answer to economic woes. They’ve never really worked out the way people want. The main critique has always been you’re just training them and sending them out into the wilderness. What you need is a complementary demand-side policy that creates the jobs, that pulls them in so that when they get trained, they have jobs. That was what you were trying to do.
Betony Jones
That’s what we did, both with the grants and loans. That’s also how the IRA was designed — through the prevailing wage and apprenticeship tax credit. You got a much larger tax credit if you were using registered apprentices. That means you got a larger tax credit if your project was investing in training the next generation. There was an incentive to tie those things together.
David Roberts
Maybe it’s worth detailing the family of tools we’re talking about here — these workforce standards — because they do all get lumped together. It’s worth distinguishing. There’s Davis-Bacon, which we’ll talk about a little later, which is old, goes way back, which just says you have to pay prevailing wages. Then there’s the IRA tax credit stuff, where you get a bigger tax credit, as you say, if you do prevailing wage and apprenticeship stuff. Then there was the Department of Energy community benefits plans, which was a separate thing. That was unique to the Biden administration. It’s not all the same thing.
Betony Jones
I love talking to you because you’re such a good reader. I did break it down. We had these different levers that we were using to advance these goals, and I was looking at what those different levers accomplished. You said, the base, the standard on all federally supported construction is Davis-Bacon, which sets a wage floor so that federally funded money isn’t undercutting local labor markets. That’s important because it helps support stability in a volatile and seasonal industry. It helps retain workers.
David Roberts
That goes back to the 30s.
Betony Jones
It’s a century old, and it’s worked very effectively. People complain quite a lot about compliance. One of my goals at DOE was to streamline that to make that a lot less painful, and we were really successful in doing that.
David Roberts
I want to return to that whole subject in a minute and talk about that in more depth.
Betony Jones
Just as a further summary, with the tax credits you got five times more. Your tax credit went up from 6% to 30% if you paid prevailing wage and you registered. It’s so big, and it’s so much more than any cost of paying more or cost of managing the record keeping. It was really treated as a requirement because nobody wants to give up that level of increase. These are $100 million, multiple hundred billion dollar projects. It’s a lot of money. The cost of prevailing wage relative to market wages in a tight labor market isn’t that game changing.
The community benefits plan was a real policy innovation. Huge thanks to not just the colleagues that I, we put our heads together, but also Secretary Granholm who saw the value of doing this. We were trying to get this money out quickly and deploy these first-of-a-kind and large demonstration projects and scale this market at a time when the labor market was really constrained. Unemployment was at some of the lowest levels we have ever seen. Workforce constraints, labor strife, community opposition — these are real execution risks.
There were the policy priorities of the administration, but there were also the practical on-the-ground constraints of getting these projects built quickly. The community benefits plan was designed to get firms to think practically up front about how they were going to think about those execution risks and mitigate them, and aligned around labor standards and benefits to communities.
Also DEI, which got politicized, is really just a critical strategy for getting the workers you need in a tight labor market. That approach of requiring these community benefits plans on all of the projects seeking funding from DOE, both grants and loans, was really novel. It’s conditions on federal funding intended to distribute benefits of these taxpayer dollars more broadly, but also designed to advance projects.
David Roberts
To spell it out for people who may not be familiar with this stuff, community benefits just means if you’re a big developer and you want to build a big new project, instead of just saying you’re going to do it and then stirring up community opposition and then fighting the community and having the lawsuits, etc., you go in early, you talk to community leaders, you work out some way that the community will benefit from the project. You send some money to schools, you help pay for some infrastructure, or you promise to employ within the community, all these kinds of things.
The idea with this — and this is something I want to ask you about a little bit later too — the theory of the case on this stuff is that that does not slow things down, but in fact speeds things up. If you go in early and work out a community agreement, you skip the whole community fight part of things and thus get faster. That was explicitly an effort to make things faster, not to slow things down.
Betony Jones
One caveat to that, because what you’re saying is true. It’s about community opposition. It’s also about securing a workforce that you need. That’s a little bit different — saying, “What are we going to need to build this project on time and on budget? Who can we work with to make sure that we have those workers and that we’re investing in the training early, or that they’re investing in the trainings, so that in two years when we’re ready to break ground, we have the workers we need?”
Collective bargaining agreements, project labor agreements help provide that assurance — they reduce that particular risk. That’s not just about mitigating community backlash or opposition. It’s also a critical supply chain issue to build your project.
David Roberts
You developed these standards, you implemented this stuff. It all got wiped away with OBBB. Since then there has been this abundance critique, etc. You did what I think of as a very characteristically Democratic thing, which is, “I’m going to go study this, I’m going to go figure it out, I’m going to go ask people.” Very A student behavior. I love it.
You went and talked to the companies in question, the ones who are receiving the grants and loans, to ask them from the horse’s mouth what happened. What did and didn’t slow things down? It’s a little maddening to me that you, sitting at a think tank, did this, and none of the dozens of journalists who dutifully replicated this abundance critique went to talk to the people who got the money to find out from the horse’s mouth. They all just passed it on.
Here you go, you’re obliged to go do the reporting, which is crazy to me. Anyway, you went and talked to these people. I would love to hear what they told you. What are their impressions? I rarely hear from them. It’s all punditry.
Betony Jones
I was genuinely curious. In the interest of learning to do better next time, I was interested in what the other side was experiencing. When I was at DOE, I heard many comments in passing that were appreciative and thankful, even from unexpected entities. I was with some southern utilities and they were raving about the community benefits plan and how it changed how they were thinking about community engagement to make it more upfront and less of a tack-on exercise, and how that completely made their project implementation more efficient.
I was hearing those kinds of comments all the time. I was surprised by this critique. It’s not to say that you can’t find people to say the opposite, but it wasn’t just the chorus of people who have already been implementing some of these practices who were appreciative that some of their efforts mattered or were scored favorably, the things they have been doing all along. There were also a lot of converts and people who were saying, “I was really skeptical about working with the steelworkers, but they have improved our productivity and our production efficiency so much. The next location I open, I’m going to work with them from the beginning.”
A lot of comments, especially around working with labor, where firms initially were saying “I don’t know why I’m supposed to avoid unions at all costs. That’s just always what I’ve been told. But you’re telling me maybe there’s some benefits of those partnerships, so let’s explore it.”
David Roberts
You said a lot of them were “labor curious,” which is a phrase I love.
Betony Jones
Not everybody, but there was a lot of that. When we went out to more formally interview people, I wasn’t going to the companies that have always been supportive. It was really trying to capture some of the other firms that I hadn’t heard from and just understand their experience generally. What were the pain points? What could we have done better? A lot of what I heard was how damaging the volatility is with the second Trump administration and how costly that is. A lot of people wanted to talk about that, but when we went back and —
David Roberts
It is on a lot of people’s minds.
Betony Jones
That’s the big thing. But when we went back and I said, “What about these community benefits plans?” it was either, “We had no idea how to do that. That was a steep learning curve, but we figured it out. That made a lot of sense and it wasn’t a problem. We brought in some people who knew how to do that kind of thing. It was interesting.” Or, “That upfront engagement and thinking about the risks and the workforce we needed up front, that was so helpful. We’re doing that on all of these other projects.”
Nobody said anything about it being an insurmountable obstacle that slowed them down. In some cases it was, “Our project is stalled now because we don’t know what the Trump administration is doing to renegotiate it. We’ll see how much those things get implemented.” Many said, “The Trump administration has told us we don’t have to do this stuff anymore, but it’s baked into our project. We’re going to keep doing it. That’s why we don’t want to be on the record. We don’t want to get ourselves into trouble, but these are just smart, practical things to do, so we’re doing them anyway.”
David Roberts
You’re talking specifically about the community benefits stuff. They just go to a community beforehand and do the work. That’s what you’re saying. They found that helped and they’re going to keep doing it.
Betony Jones
Under that umbrella, I include the labor partnerships and the labor agreements. At DOE, it was all part of the same umbrella, but it was those community partnerships. At DOE, what we were really pushing for is not just ideas, but real plans leading to real partnerships formalized by enforceable agreements — community benefits agreements or collective bargaining agreements — things that would really ensure that the plan was implemented as designed with those community partners. A lot of those partnerships are intact.
David Roberts
You say a lot of these companies told you this community benefit approach worked for them and they are going to keep doing it even though they no longer have to.
Betony Jones
We’ve seen that. It’s not just the projects that we touched. There’s spillover. They’re saying they’re going to do it on other projects. States have adopted similar conditions on funding opportunities. The system that we designed was pragmatic. It made sense. It reduced project risks, it ensures some distribution of benefits to beneficiaries beyond the companies and their investors. There’s nothing else to say. It just is working.
David Roberts
What did they complain about that you all did? What did they say? Obviously, Trump messed everything up. Republicans have messed everything up since then. But before that, where were they finding friction, what was slowing them down, what did they have to complain about?
Betony Jones
The inside and the outside have such different perspectives. The laws didn’t pass early enough in the administration. To put out hundreds of billions of dollars in competitive grants across nearly 100 different programs, many of which had to be set up through new offices that had to be set up. DOE had to hire some 3,000 staff. The execution on the inside felt like a race. When the infrastructure law was passed in 2021, the IRA in 2022, in any case, two and a half years or less to execute this. We were trying to follow the law, designing the terms, getting public input.
David Roberts
But this idea that you were slow and pokey was not your experience.
Betony Jones
The idea that we were obsessed with process instead of execution doesn’t resonate with anything that I saw on the inside. I’ve heard Jigar Shah say this, I’ve heard other people say this: the federal government was much faster, more nimble, and less bureaucratic than any of us could have anticipated or anything we’ve experienced in any other sector. That critique just doesn’t match the experience on the inside. It was less bureaucratic than my son’s preschool co-op.
David Roberts
That’s not a fair comparison. There’s very little that is more bureaucratic than that.
Betony Jones
That’s true.
David Roberts
This is what I meant earlier when I said this notion that it’s slow, process-obsessed bureaucrats just resonates with people’s priors so much that they don’t really ask for evidence. They don’t need it. They’re just like, “That sounds...” Because that just resonates with cliches that have been bouncing around in our society since Reagan. Everybody’s like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” But really, nobody I’ve talked to on the inside who is trying to implement these things ever felt anything like sanguine or slow or content. Everybody I’ve ever talked to felt like they were at a full sprint from the minute they entered the federal bureaucracy to the minute they exited. No one. I’ve never talked to anyone who fits the cliche.
There are other parts of the abundance critique. I don’t want to throw the whole abundance critique overboard here. There’s a lot in there and a lot to say about it. Some of the problems in implementation, like with permitting, really are problems and really did slow some of these projects down. In the implementation side, those critiques do land. There is a lot of friction on that side. Do you agree?
Betony Jones
I found it interesting talking to these people about, in a bigger context than just the community benefits plans, because a lot of these are multinational corporations. They do business in a lot of countries and they had perspectives of how things work in Germany — for example, how Germany invests in the commercialization of technology and how it is bureaucratic and politically durable. It is not subject to these political winds.
Some commentary was we had this big industrial policy, in a lot of ways it was comprehensive in this whole-of-government, integrated approach. On the other hand, it wasn’t integrated enough to deploy as quickly as we could have. Things that companies thought would have worked better: if you get through the due diligence for a grant or a loan, can you automatically get fast-tracked permitting? That’s a whole different agency. There wasn’t a big pot of workforce development dollars, but it would have worked better if you got funding for your project — then there’s other funding to support some of the workforce development. Especially things like on-the-job training or new apprenticeship programs, things that companies haven’t had experience with before, a little bit of funding to help them do that.
There is a way you could imagine an even more comprehensive and even more all-of-government approach to unstick some of these things or move them forward. Another thing was around the domestic content and it is this chicken-and-egg thing. You have these requirements even if the supply chain isn’t there. The process for getting an exemption was necessary because if you don’t set the standard, then you don’t have that signal that drives the development of the domestic supply chains.
I understand that this waiver process is necessary, but that was head-scratching for a lot of firms where the timelines were so aggressive in meeting these domestic content standards and not every product even knows what its inputs are. There is a lot of infrastructure needed to make that kind of thing work that just wasn’t yet in place. But again, if you don’t have this signal, you never get there. How do you build the infrastructure as you are also trying to support the productive capacity of the US for these supply chains?
David Roberts
Every conversation I have about this, about IRA, about trying to pull things together and implement IRA, brings me back to the heartbreaking thought of how much could have gotten done in the subsequent four years. The people implementing it had their eyes on these choke points. They knew what was slowing things down. You could have taken more legislative action, more regulatory action to ease these barriers, could have done permitting reform. The whole thing could have gotten running so quickly.
This is what bugs me a little bit about the critique. I don’t think the critique is totally wrong, but it’s more complicated than it’s made out to be. This thing really was, relative to big federal programs passed, moving quickly. There really were a lot of people moving quickly. There were a lot of things just about to happen.
Betony Jones
We all had our 2025 strategies.
David Roberts
Let me ask you about a specific question. You’ve had this exchange going with Mike Schmidt. He was running the CHIPS program at the Department of Commerce, trying to get chips factories built. He writes this Substack called Factory Settings — really interesting, worth checking out. He has said that Davis-Bacon slowed him down. He has complained about Davis-Bacon, which is, he’d approach these chip makers, try to lure them to the US to build factories, and then suddenly they were confronted with complicated US construction requirements and laws, and it baffled them, and it took them time to do compliance, it slowed the whole thing down, etc.
Your response to this was, over at the Department of Energy, we also faced Davis-Bacon requirements, but they didn’t slow us down. Tell us why they didn’t slow you down. You built a system to do it. Tell us a little about the specifics of that system.
Betony Jones
I felt bad for Mike. There was a point when the White House chief of staff called us both in for me to school him on how DOE was doing it. He was saying, “But we didn’t set any of this.” I know Davis-Bacon is a challenge to implement, and I knew that it was going to be part of these bills, so I was proactive. But that was insight that I have.
David Roberts
Just to be clear, it’s been on the books since 1930. No one did not know that they were going to be subject to these requirements. Nothing stopping everybody else in every other department from preparing in advance. Not a surprise to anyone.
Betony Jones
That’s true. Except that I’m a real wonk. I had unique insight into exactly what could work better. When I went to DOE, when I decided to take the job, I had five goals that I thought were audacious. One of them was to streamline and simplify Davis-Bacon compliance. I thought it was probably the most audacious.
David Roberts
What did you do? Tell us.
Betony Jones
It was hard, and I’ll tell you what I did, but I felt for CHIPS, just because they didn’t have that foresight, which was this unicorn foresight, it was challenging to implement. I’m not critical of them. What I was hoping at DOE is that we could demonstrate how to do better, and if we could demonstrate it at DOE, that going forward, other federal agencies implementing Davis-Bacon could also do that. It’s easier to do something when a different agency pioneered it. That was my goal. But that wasn’t in place at the time of CHIPS.
David Roberts
Yes, but again, on the books since 1930. Why is it only after this thing has been on the books for a century that it has occurred to someone to find a way to do it more quickly and easily? Maybe not the other Biden appointees. They just inherited what they inherited. But it is a little crazy that this thing has been around for a century and the federal government has still not accommodated itself to it.
Betony Jones
There’s an interesting story there. The private sector has figured out ways to help firms meet the requirements. There are tools out there that we ended up contracting with. The federal government was also trying to develop — GSA was trying to develop a more streamlined inside-of-government system. They finally, after wanting money to do that for a long time, in partnership with DOL, finally, in this period, either through BIL or IRA or something else, got funding to develop that. It’s not that there wasn’t the will or the interest or the talent to do it. It’s just that it’s one of those super wonky, boring bureaucratic things that is never going to look like a win — nobody cares.
David Roberts
Tell us the system you made in a way that non-deep-inside-the-bureaucracy wonks can understand.
Betony Jones
What Davis-Bacon requires is, and this has been in the books for 95 years, a couple things. One, there is a wage requirement, but it is not a single wage. There are thousands of different wage determinations based on geography, based on craft and classification of the worker. You have to first figure out what is the correct wage determination. The Department of Labor publishes these, but on different timelines and they are published in PDFs. That is the definitive wage determination — PDFs in SAM.gov that are binary text that are — it is tedious.
First you have to figure out the right wage determination. The other thing that it requires is that you have to pay workers weekly. That’s in the law. You have to pay them on a weekly cadence. The third thing is that you have to report those weekly payroll records weekly to the funding agency, to the compliance agency, and in our case, DOE is responsible for making sure that all of that is correct, even in some cases doing site visits to make sure every worker is getting reported and their wage classification is correct.
It’s onerous. As a researcher, what I’ve always wanted is that weekly payroll data, because you have this data that has to be reported every single week for every single hour worked on a federally funded construction project.
That gives you real-time access to job creation. What jobs are we creating? Where are they going? Who’s getting them? The problem is that data has never been usable because it comes in by mail, by email, by PDF, by Excel. It comes in every different way to every different person managing a grant or a contract.
That data is coming in, it’s compliance data, but it’s completely unusable in terms of metrics or tracking what’s going on. My interest was how can we get this data in a usable format to both help us with compliance, but also give us a running sense of how we’re doing on project implementation. The data part was Betony’s interest, that doesn’t have anything to do with reducing the compliance burden. But if we could get the data in one centralized electronic system that integrates with payroll systems, then it’s reducing the burden on the outside for people to figure out what is the right wage classification and hiring their own Davis-Bacon compliance entity to help them track it, because DOE is procuring that tool on their behalf.
It helps on the inside because instead of charging thousands of staff who are managing these grants or these contracts with Davis-Bacon compliance — something they have no idea how to do or what it is — it would allow us to centralize that compliance and have real experts reviewing the data and ensuring that workers are actually paid what they’re due. What worked on the inside, because this required a massive collaboration across all of the program offices and agencies at DOE to all chip in to create this centralized system and centralized staffing. The value proposition was that it would relieve them of staff burnout or more FTEs. It’s just more efficient.
Once they realized how much it would help them on the inside, they were sold. In terms of our efforts to streamline, we are sensitive to the burden of doing business with the federal government. We were all sensitive to that. Anything that we could do to make it less painful on the other side for the firms that we were working with to comply and comply effectively, we were always trying to do that. It was a real win — win.
It’s not that there weren’t other issues that arose with Davis-Bacon. One of them, for example, was with our grid grants, a lot of which went to utilities. Some utilities have bespoke payroll systems and they pay on a biweekly basis. Paying a certain set of workers on a weekly basis is a huge change management undertaking, or so they said. That’s written into the law, it’s just a requirement. Navigating those things and trying to figure out ways to deal with those, we spent time on that. It’s not that it was, but that’s the only thing we had to spend time on. We didn’t have to spend time on the supposed burden of reporting.
David Roberts
I want to pound the table about this because this is a very important, illustrative example of a broader point that I wanted to make in our discussion, which is how much burden a particular requirement, a particular bit of everything bagel, will place on the government and the private sector is not a fixed quantity. You can make it less of a burden for the federal government with thoughtful, well-funded administrative capacity. You can build the administrative capacity to do it well, such that it is not a burden, or you can do it in a dumb way where it is a burden.
There’s not one fixed answer to that question. It’s not inherent to the requirements that they are burdensome. You can do them in a way such that they aren’t. You implicitly made the same point on the side of the private sector with these community benefit agreements. To a big firm who hasn’t done it, it might be awkward and slow the first couple of times, but again, they can figure out how to do it, set up the capacity, set up the systems, and then it’s not a burden anymore. It’s just a routine part of business.
All of which is just to make the point that you can have better or worse federal agency performance. It’s not a fixed quantity. Tell me if this resonates with you because I know you’ve been arguing with the abundance people. If you read the original Abundance book, to me, the heart of the critique had two halves. One was about some of these excessive rules, but then the other half, the book was all about making government work better. That was the thrust of the book.
Part of that is getting rid of silly or unnecessary rules, but the other half is bulking up your administrative capacity so that you have the muscles to do the things you want to do. That half of abundance, which is implicit in the whole thing and is in the book, has dropped out of the discussion. Half of it is supposed to be fund and adequately staff your federal government.
Betony Jones
You look at something like permitting that everybody complains about, and some of it is overlapping and sometimes contradictory requirements from different permitting agencies. That we should fix. Some of it is just the backlog and the understaffing of people to review it. Why is that not part of the solution here? To augment government, to support government, to do its job more effectively, more efficiently, more innovatively.
David Roberts
I would love to hear more of the abundance people making that point a little more often. “Let’s fund. Let’s celebrate and fund the administrators we’re asking to do this competent governance.” Let’s boost that half of the abundance thing. One other quick thing about Davis-Bacon is it applies to construction workers. If the federal government gives a grant to a developer who is going to construct something, they have to use it. It doesn’t cover factory workers. In some cases you had these problematic instances where you’re paying the people who construct the factory really well and then the people who end up staffing and running it not as well. How do you think about that?
Betony Jones
There was a parallel to Davis-Bacon, Walsh-Healey, that was never repealed. It’s still in the books, but it could be reinvigorated. The wages — eventually federal minimum wage just exceeded the wages that were in there and it was eroded by the courts. There were proposals again that didn’t make it into the final versions of the bills that passed to have some labor standards and wage standards on the manufacturing side. The analysis that some of my friends and colleagues have looked at, back of the envelope, is that the tax credits — take the battery production tax credit — are so generous that more union pattern upper quintile wages could have been accommodated and would have spread the wealth of these really generous incentives to the workers building this.
Whatever happens behind closed doors in the final negotiation of these bills, that did not make the final cut. It’s too bad. I’m proud of the work at DOE to think about those ongoing operations and manufacturing jobs and build that into this community benefits plan framework where firms were asked not just how are you going to secure and retain the workers you need for the construction project, but also what is your long-term plan for operations and what is the quality of jobs that you’re creating there? How are you going to ensure that there is advancement opportunity for workers there?
With some grants, we suggested this upper quartile based on BLS, not just average but above average wages for the industry and occupation to try to nudge wages up because the labor market’s competitive and a lot of these manufacturing companies are paying less than Starbucks in a lot of cases. Then they’re saying, “We have 30, 40% turnover, but we’ll just go back to the fast food industry and see who else we can find.” That’s not a way to build a successful, globally relevant, innovative industry, which is what we need to do. We need firms thinking about their workforce strategy and how to retain workers, give workers a reason to make a career in these nascent and emerging industries like batteries and battery supply chains. Thirty percent turnover isn’t going to get us there.
We need a plan to improve job quality in manufacturing and make sure that this is something that workers and parents see as opportunities for their kids and that we can reinvigorate that workforce. The other thing is we got a lot of firms committing to either neutrality agreements or collective bargaining agreements on the production side.
For a policy that was agency discretion and tied to implementation, we got remarkable results in terms of advancing job quality not just on construction, but also in the long-term operations, because we were asking about it and because we were asking firms to think about it up front.
David Roberts
Out there in the American public and even among politically engaged people, there’s still this lingering idea that the business community is full of ruthless self-interest maximizers and rationalists. If you believe that, then anything the government comes in and tells them to do almost by definition is going to make things worse, because they’ve already optimized — and this is the basic conservative critique. But what you find in practice, what you’re describing, is business people are human like everybody else. There’s a lot of inertia, a lot of old thinking, a lot of path dependence, a lot of busyness, don’t have time to think about stuff. Someone coming in and nudging you to do things better can be helpful and then you can change and do things better enduringly. These things are not all optimized. They can get better and government can help them get better.
Betony Jones
They can get better and the government can help. Just to give one other anecdote in the battery space, we developed at DOE this battery workforce initiative. The idea was, look, there are all of these investments in battery manufacturing in the US, there is no coherent, developed pathway into those jobs. It’s each company for themselves. They’re competing on many things. They’re racing to get these tax credits. They’re not thinking about their medium-term workforce needs. Let’s bring them all together, let’s leverage our convening power to bring all the industry players in this space together to figure out what is the common 85% of skills that they all need.
Not the specialized trade secrets, but how do we capture the 85% of the skills that they are going to need so that we can develop some standardized training and credentials to support this industry where we want to develop some U.S. competitiveness, want to and need to for security purposes, develop this industry. That is a role that is unique to government — the convening power.
Industries were at first tepid because they’re like, “Our thing is special and we don’t want anybody to know what our technology is.” Once they realize a lot of the skills are transferable across the industry, there’s benefit to a more cooperative approach, thinking about workforce development and standardizing that in the US or the federal government, state government. We’re uniquely qualified. We have the technical expertise and the convening power to lean in and help there. It’s one of those things that helps everybody and helps our country and helps develop this productive capacity that we need.
David Roberts
Two political questions coming at this from different sides. One of the critiques you sometimes hear is the phrase you’ve used to describe Biden’s approach is “industry-led, government-enabled,” which really captures the vibe here — that the private companies are out front doing the things, government is doing things to help them structure their workforce, boost their workforce, subsidize their production, whatever. Almost all of that is behind the scenes. Consequently, to the public, it doesn’t look like there’s much government happening at all. This just looks like the market and consequently all these good things you’re doing, which I feel that I and eight other people in the world know about, just didn’t get out and didn’t have any political effect.
Do you think that’s a — because it seems that substantively that works pretty well. But politically there are questions about whether it worked. Do you have an opinion on that?
Betony Jones
By design, our industrial policy in the US depends on relationships with the private sector. It goes back to the forming of the Manhattan Project and the establishment of the national labs, which are public-private partnerships to enlist the innovation and nimbleness of the private sector and maintain our competitive edge as a country, mostly for initially military dominance, but to drive continuous R&D. We have this dependence on the private sector and we need them to be engaged and we need them to be part of the solutions. It’s how our system is set up.
I think we go too far in making government invisible. Part of that might be by political necessity, but then it’s this self-sustaining cycle. In the Biden administration, the attribution, the failure of getting credit for this stuff is the big lesson learned. I think there are a lot of people who are responsible for that. Maybe we didn’t do a good enough job. Maybe we should have sent letters with Biden’s signature to everybody who was working on these projects. Maybe require workplace signage: “Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, that’s why we’re here.”
David Roberts
One thing Trump has shown us is you can’t be too crude about it. There’s nothing too crude and obvious. It works.
Betony Jones
The onus is on companies to share the credit. At so many ribbon cuttings they’ll say in private, “This is such a game changer,” but they won’t go up and say it at the podium. All of this work was happening. At the beginning of this call, you talked about how voters’ lives didn’t change. That’s not true. Voters’ lives did change. People were employed at record numbers, wages were up. There are lots of indicators, real valid data that shows that people’s lives were better in communities all across the country. But it wasn’t adding up to something coherent that was part of a coherent federal presidential strategy. That message didn’t get through.
David Roberts
People are fond of blaming Biden for that. They’re like, “He was old, he was weak, he didn’t talk to the press enough, he didn’t give enough speeches.”
He gave speeches. No one paid attention. People in the administration talked about this all the time. No one paid attention. At a certain point, the media has to take some responsibility. You’re asking the government to deliver you a story with a bow tied on it. You’re supposed to be the media. You’re supposed to be out figuring out what’s happening. You’re supposed to tell people what’s happening. You can’t just sit back and say, “Biden didn’t come to me and personally tell me and make me write this story.” Other people need to take some responsibility. A lot of that is pushed on to Biden as a person, as opposed to structural problems.
Betony Jones
The media environment is tough. Even if reporters did cover it more in the New York Times or the Washington Post, that is not where people are getting their news. The lived reality does not necessarily match the headline.
David Roberts
The other political question is from the other side, which is the idea that attaching these well-meaning progressive requirements to what are otherwise fairly bipartisan policies has the effect of coding them as more liberal, polarizing them, destroying the bipartisan, and then thereby — and this is the substance of the critique — making them more vulnerable to being overturned by the next person. This critique also bugs me a little bit. There’s not nothing to it, but I think there’s less to it than is generally made out. Why don’t you tell me your opinion first of this durability critique.
Betony Jones
How did the left lose the billionaires and the working class? Who do we want back?
David Roberts
I would refer us to our previous discussion about the media. That would be my first answer. But apparently I’m alone in that. I’m the only one who wants to talk about that.
Betony Jones
Here’s one thing: with the IRA and the OBBB, the thing that stuck with bipartisan support was the prevailing wage and apprenticeship standards. The underlying credits, the solar tax credits, changed, went away. But the prevailing wage and apprenticeship credits were not repealed. That’s still there. Where is their political support? I don’t think it’s for just climate. I think it’s for economic equity and policies that support that. Can climate fit into that? That’s probably the winning argument. Maybe we have to turn it on its head and look at climate benefits as ancillary and the economic benefits that people feel in their lives as the thing that’s primary.
David Roberts
That is the typical Dem response. Let’s take the critique as though it is made in good faith and come up with a good faith response to the critique. I just don’t think it’s made in good faith. This is the question I would pose to people making this critique: What does it look like to make a policy that is resilient to a nihilist, authoritarian group of morons? Look at that party. What political, what magical policy instrument are you imagining that they would not destroy? Where is this big bipartisan path?
Look at the other side of the bipartisan aisle and tell me what can stop them from destroying things? They destroyed lots of things that they weren’t legally allowed to destroy. They just destroyed them anyway. What could people have done to make those things durable? They were protected by law and they still got destroyed. What do you mean, durability? Look at these people. I’m sure you’re not allowed to say that, but I’m —
Betony Jones
I think a lot about durability and one is the boring bureaucratic fixes are durable. They’re too boring for anybody to care. Look at Davis-Bacon. It’s so boring and it’s been around for 95 years, but it also has power behind it. Some of the problems we run into is we think of these policy solutions — we’re all the A students, like you said, we’re crafting these policies — but they’re detached from any theory of power or how to shift power or how to sustain power or what new political coalitions look like.
I see this in the affordability of, yes, the price of things is too high — affordability is a crisis. Some of the policy responses to affordability are decoupled completely from any path to power. If it is hard to get attribution for direct spending on projects that are improving people’s lives in communities, how on earth do we capture credit for reducing the cost of milk by 10 cents?
David Roberts
Some of the responses to the affordability critique are not only politically inert, some of them are actively politically counterproductive. They concede the premise to their opponents. You see Democratic governors now rolling back energy efficiency programs. We have been arguing for decades that those things lower prices for ratepayers. Now you are conceding that point and rolling them back. If rolling back climate policy is how you do affordability, why bother voting for Democrats? You have got a whole party devoted to rolling back climate policy.
They’re rolling back climate policy, they’re rolling back efficiency policy. The way they want to respond to these critiques is by conceding their opponents’ arguments up front, which will never not drive me insane. I can’t figure this party out.
Betony Jones
It’s this relentless focus on the cost of things and not the equation that affordability is between the cost of things and income to be able to pay for things. That’s short-sighted and dangerous as well, especially for the politics.
David Roberts
A final question: you now have been in the trenches of industrial policy making. The point of your report is to defend a lot of what was done inside the government around Biden industrial policy. But presumably you also saw the problems and the frictions. What advice would you give in the event a friendly administration comes into power and there is a friendly Congress and Democrats work up the will to take another pass at industrial policy? All of those are very large ifs. But if all those ifs line up, what advice would you give them to improve what you did? What did you learn from your experience?
Betony Jones
I hope that we don’t reject this outright. This narrative that it didn’t work is just the foundation for inventing something totally new. We don’t need to invent something totally new. A lot of this is working. The fixes are in, the tweaks.
David Roberts
At this point we’ve tried everything. They keep telling us to try new things and we try the new thing they say to try and it doesn’t work either. If you abandon industrial policy, go back to what —
Betony Jones
The thing is — this did work. We got firms to make irreversible investments in building clean energy supply chains in the US. They did that with hundreds of billions of dollars. Those projects, the vast majority, are moving forward. It did work. We created jobs, we raised wages. Think about climate. We are much better off today than we were six years ago. Still, even with all of the changes, solar is cheaper, clean energy is the norm. The trajectory is more solidified. It did work. Whatever issue you care about, it worked. We can make it work better. But let’s stick with the thing that was working.
It’s not just at this stage, it’s not just for the sake of climate, but also our energy security and our national security, which people are waking up to. We need US industrial policy. The energy system is changing from subsurface molecule combustion to one that is highly manufactured. We need to manufacture those things and get the resources that go into them in the US and with our friends, and secure these supply chains. That is an answer for our economy. It’s an answer for our security, it’s an answer for the climate.
David Roberts
I agree. I understand why liberals are so prone to self-criticism, sometimes edging over into unproductive self-loathing. Of course, when this happened, when the OBBB happened, everybody’s first thought is, “What did we do wrong? God, we screwed up again, we suck,” etc. But maybe the real flaw was they didn’t fight hard enough for themselves and they let Trump win. Maybe the magic policy key to making the industrial policy work was not letting Trump get elected.
That seems the most direct route to making this all work. You don’t need to redo the policy from the ground up. Just don’t let the guy get elected who wants to destroy it all. It seems a much simpler answer, and the way to do that is to be prouder of yourself, to fight harder, to brag more about what you’re doing. Liberals have this idea that if we just lash ourselves and flagellate ourselves in public long enough, we’ll win some sort of sympathy or — what’s the theory?
Betony Jones
It’d be fun to have a whole weekend to just rant, to just continue these rants.
David Roberts
We could go on.
Betony Jones
I’m getting fired up too. Let’s just —
David Roberts
All right, I’ll stop ranting. I wanted to do this pod mainly to make the point that you made eloquently just now, which is that on most fronts, in most respects, the industrial policy of the Biden administration was working. The projects were going in, they were getting built, the workforce was being created, the supply chain was getting stood up. It was working. We shouldn’t just be little scared fawns in the forest who heard gunfire in the distance and are going to go sprint the other direction. Have the courage of your convictions a little bit.
Betony Jones
Hear, hear! Yes. Love it. Thank you.
David Roberts
Thank you for coming on and joining me in this opportunity to rant. I appreciate hearing from the inside and I admire you being like, “Let’s figure out what did happen. Let’s go find out what did happen. Let’s go ask people.” For everyone listening in government or private industry, you should be inspired by this. Go out and find out what’s really happening. Go ask people before you do takes. Go ask. I’ll end there.
Betony Jones
Thank you for doing this, for reading the papers. Love it.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. It is all supported entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf, leaving a nice review, telling a friend about Volts, or all three.
Thanks so much and I’ll see you next time.
