It can be stomach-turning, watching the Trump administration torch federal climate policy. But what if some of what's burning wasn't working particularly well to begin with? Hannah Safford and Loren Schulman of the Federation of American Scientists' Center for Regulatory Ingenuity make the case, not for defending or trying to rebuild the status quo regulatory regime, but for imagining something better.
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David Roberts
Okay. Hello, everyone. Greetings, salutations. This is Volts for April 3, 2026: “Rethinking climate regulation from the ground up.” I’m your host, David Roberts.
The Trump administration is dismantling federal climate policy at dizzying speed. The endangerment finding, the IRA, California’s vehicle standards — it’s all under assault, much of it already dead and gone. If you work in climate, you’re familiar with the sickening feeling of watching years of work get torched in real time.
The instinctive reaction can be to defend what remains and fight to get back what was lost — to try to restore the pre-Trump status quo.
My guests today think that instinct, while understandable, should be interrogated, not because the rollbacks aren’t bad (they are) but because some of what’s being rolled back wasn’t working particularly well to begin with. The tools we built to fight industrial pollution in the 1970s were never really designed to replace an entire fossil fuel economy with something new. And the mismatch between those tools and the actual task in front of us has been accumulating for decades.
Hannah Safford and Loren Schulman are the co-leads of the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity, a new initiative at the Federation of American Scientists. Their argument, in short, is that the opposite of DOGE isn’t a return to the status quo, it’s something better — a government redesigned to actually deliver the clean energy transition.
As Volts listeners know, I am a longtime lover of administrative capacity and a well-designed bureaucracy — listen to my episode with political scientist Doug Thompson, defending the deep state — so naturally this effort caught my eye. I have all kinds of questions!
We’re going to get into what’s wrong with existing regulatory design, what a renewed administrative state would look like, and whether any of this is politically viable on our seemingly cursed timeline.
With no further ado, Hannah Safford and Loren Schulman, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Loren Schulman
Thanks for having us.
Hannah Safford
Really glad to be here.
David Roberts
Let’s start with both of you, in turn. There’s a ton I want to cover, but let’s start very briefly at the beginning, just so listeners can get a sense of who they’re hearing from. Maybe each of you can tell us a little bit about your background and the thread of your work that led you to this. Let’s start with you, Hannah.
Hannah Safford
I am trained as a scientist, trained as an engineer. That was where I got my start, but then began working in federal policy at the White House from an early age. Did a stint under the Obama administration from 2014 to 2016, had a great time there, went back, did deeper technical expertise, and then came back and was doing federal policy work again under the Biden admin. In both of those terms of service, in both the Obama administration and the Biden administration, working on climate policy, it was two very different sets of tools that those administrations were working with.
Obama was trying to push forward climate policy through a lot of executive orders because it was running into all kinds of roadblocks on the Hill with appropriations. The Biden administration had more money but ran into implementation challenges and pushed hard on ambitious regulatory standards, only then to see those get reversed in the second Trump administration.
And now the work that I started doing at FAS and trying to think about what the next chapter of climate policy looks like, it is very clear to me that though there was a tremendous amount of ambition and expertise in both the Obama and Biden administrations and motivation to move on climate, the tools that we had to push that forward weren’t getting the job done in any way that was deeply effective and durable and matched to the pace of the challenge. That’s where I come at it from.
David Roberts
How about you, Loren?
Loren Schulman
My background is pretty different. I started my government career in the national security space during the Bush administration, going into the Obama administration, working at the Department of Defense and the National Security Council. This was, listeners may remember, prime counterinsurgency global war on terror era, where we frequently would make announcements about a shift in strategy — a shift in approach about being a more people-centric, people-enabling strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq from the military perspective, and also how the military would work with the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and others.
It would be at best headline-deep, and all the decisions around personnel and funding and decision-making and how they would work together would be assumed — “oh, we’ll figure that out.” People will also recommend we did not figure a lot of that out. I saw the same narrative play over and over again in different spaces as the United States NSC apparatus started moving more towards using sanctions, an incredibly effective national security tool. There were so few people at Treasury or State who were capable of helping identify potential targets for this, but more importantly, possible risks and impacts.
Similarly, I remember years later as we started being able to say the words out loud, industrial policy or technology strategy, people making assumptions around supply chain risk and so on — “these are the policies we need to set” — and me thinking in the back of my head, Department of Commerce has maybe one person who can do that. We need an entire —
David Roberts
You and what army?
Hannah Safford
Yes, exactly.
Loren Schulman
I gradually shifted from being a national security policy person, which I still care deeply about, to somebody who cares about government capacity. Not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of roles, relationships, decision-making, feedback loops. Are we hearing from people about the impacts that we need and the ability to not be so rules-driven and compliance-focused, but more, are we actually able to meet the outcomes that we talked about? I served as a career official in NSC and DoD for about 10 years, left government for a while to work in the national security think tank, but then decided it was important to have this focus on capacity and move it over to the Partnership for Public Service, and spent more recent time in the Biden administration at OMB. My title was so boring: the Associate Director for Personnel and Performance Management.
David Roberts
Unlike most OMB jobs, which are just sexy.
Loren Schulman
Scintillating, yeah. But this one is the engine. My sexy title that I said for myself was, “we are the engine room of democracy.” We are the folks who are making sure you’ve got the people, the measurement, the evidence, all of that. If you’re doing a good job.
I left at the end of the Biden administration. I’ve been working with Hannah since last fall on both this effort and new efforts to think about what is the future of government, both what should it be from a vision perspective. But then also, no matter what vision we have, do we have those building blocks, those Lego pieces to actually get the job done?
David Roberts
You must be — given the character of your critiques of what you saw in the defense apparatus — delighted with what’s going on right now. Whatever remainder of competent implementation you saw when you were there, we’ve wiped that out now. I wonder, did you — this is to both of you, I guess — was it on purpose that you are launching this thing simultaneously with Trump wiping out the endangerment finding, which is the foundation of all federal climate regulation? Is it odd to you to be launching this right now, or do you think it’s perfectly apropos?
Hannah Safford
We started thinking about these questions even before the beginning of this second Trump administration. We started thinking about this: What does the path forward look like for climate policy? How do you marry questions of policy ambition and policy implementation in ways that take insights from climate experts and insights from state capacity experts really seriously? This was towards the tail end of the Biden administration as we were coming into election season and even at that point starting to do a bit of a retrospective of, “how come we weren’t able to move faster on the regs that were a day one priority?”
How come we weren’t able to push even more money out the door with the infrastructure bill and with the IRA than we had intended to? People, including us, were starting to think about these questions. I was thinking about these questions when I was in the White House and I was working on transportation regulations and we were trying to do fuel economy standards for electric vehicles, which don’t use fuel. You have an actual math problem. It’s this divide-by-zero problem when you’re thinking about miles per gallon, when you get infinite miles per gallon because there are no gallons.
Then the administration changed over and all of a sudden, these questions that seemed like they were there, but they could be back burner. The tools weren’t perfect, but we were figuring out how to make them work because at least there was a tremendous amount of political will at 1600 Penn.
All of a sudden it took on tremendously increased valence once there was going to be a reversal in climate priorities. That’s just built on itself. Built on itself. Built on itself. It did end up being serendipitous in some way, that the day that we formally launched the center after doing this year and a half of build-out, ended up being the same day as the endangerment finding rollback.
Loren Schulman
As this is happening, I’m getting all the explainers of, “here’s what this is, why this matters.” While I care deeply about this and I’m trying to bring the capacity lens, climate is not my original subject matter of expertise. We ended up changing our talking points of how we’re announcing this to a tired/wired bit around: Why are you tired? “Well, the entire legal foundation of why I have been doing this work for a long period of time is more or less gone now.” That’s a good reason to be tired.
But the why we’re excited, why we’re wired is, I guess, a nice way to say it. It was proving the point in a very dark and ugly and tremendously impactful way, but also proving the point that we need to think about this differently, apparently quite a bit more rapidly than we had been hoping, but we need to think differently.
David Roberts
It’s like you look at, anytime a terrorist blows up a building, you could always just squint and say, “hey, look, it’s an opportunity to build a new building, guys.” In that sense, he did you a favor, clearing the way for something new. Hannah, I’ve got a couple for you, and then I’m going to come back to you, Loren. Hannah, a central piece of all this is this notion — I thought one of the more striking lines in all the stuff I read was you saying that the regulatory system we’ve got was designed to produce cleaner technologies within the fossil economy, but is simply not set up to replace the fossil economy.
Can you unpack that a little bit? The way that current tools are not fit for purpose. Can you unpack what that means, what you mean by that? And maybe an elegant example.
Hannah Safford
Our nation’s foundational environmental laws and statutes — most of these, almost all of them, were passed back mostly in the 1970s, but certainly 20th century. There was this era of rampant industrial pollution. Factories dumping chemicals into rivers and belching smoke in the air. These were big environmental problems that we needed to solve. We largely did that. We passed a suite of landmark environmental laws: Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act. That list goes on, that for the most part, did their job. Rivers got cleaner, air got cleaner, and then you fast forward a few decades in the 21st century and we haven’t fully — that kind of classic environmental pollution is still a problem for sure.
We’re seeing this administration weaken protections — it’s becoming more of a problem. Still, I think anybody in the environmental space would agree that the predominant environmental challenge is no longer industrial pollution, though that’s still an issue. The predominant environmental challenge is climate change, which is a really different problem. It’s a different job managing a massive economic transition to new technologies than motivating the stapling on of cleanup technologies to a few relatively stable sources, because you have very entrenched systems.
Our economy was built on fossil foundations that have been in place for more than 100 years. Figuring out how you transition off that foundation in ways that don’t have negative implications on factory communities, on the people and industries and intertwined systems that have been built up around them — it’s really hard and it requires — I said earlier, I’m an engineer and I think about using the whole toolbox and when we need a modern toolbox and a full toolbox in order to address fiscal, economic, distributive implications as well as the pure technological implications that industrial pollution cleanup problem engendered.
David Roberts
One of the points you make that makes this concrete is you make the point that when it comes to EV standards, Democratic states — Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon — were rolling back their own EV rules before Congress killed the California rules they were acting under. I would like to hear you unpack what you take from that. What lesson do you draw from that?
Hannah Safford
You had Emily Grubert on your show a few weeks ago and a lot of the research that she’s done around the mid-transition and this messy period where you’re trying to shift from fossil systems to clean systems, and the clean systems are big enough that they’re not just at the margin, but they’re not big enough to fully displace the fossil systems. How you navigate that — that’s what you’re starting to see play out globally, but particularly also in the United States and some states that have been a little more forward-leaning.
In California, where now EVs are at least a quarter of vehicles on the road and are making up a growing percentage of new car shares, this is tricky. You’re trying to figure out how you build out the charging infrastructure at the same time that gas systems — you need them, but you don’t need them as much. Where’s the revenue coming from? Gas tax is taking up less of a share.
Once you start to have those messy questions and deal with the real-world implications of that mid-transition period, it’s real. It’s not just theoretical on paper and you’re saying, “okay, we’re going to get to 100% EV deployment out in the 2030s.” I think that’s a vision that I resonate with and I want to think about our 100% EV future, but I think there was less attention paid to the lived reality of the 40%, 50% EV future. That is a necessary intermediate step.
David Roberts
Here I think you’re making a point, and this is where I want to raise a question. One way to look at that, the fact that these Democratic states were already backing off on their EV standards before Congress killed the California standards — one way to interpret that is, as you say, the tools they had to use were not particularly well suited for the mid-transition. It was the design of the regulations that turned out to be the problem.
Another way of looking at that, you could spin that around and look at it from the other side and say there was a huge sweeping political shift just before that. All these states knew what was coming. They saw the shift, they saw the voting shifts, they saw the polling. You could explain that just through politics, not necessarily through regulatory design. Do you know what I mean? I’m not sure how you pick apart the consequences of poor regulatory design from politics. Do you know what I mean?
Hannah Safford
I do know what you mean. I think there are a couple of different ways to look at this. One, the tools that we have, and then to the extent that you’re using regulatory tools to try and drive climate progress, there is still going to need to be, no matter what policy package you have, regulatory tools and some regulatory levers are going to need to be some portion of that, whether it’s the load-bearing center or whether it’s the scaffolding. That might look different in different economic sectors. It is at least helpful then to have regulatory standards for vehicles that contemplate the existence of electric vehicles, rather than working with fuel economy standards.
That’s an example of where the regulatory tool fundamentally needs to be updated. Then there’s a piece of saying, “okay, but we can’t put all of our eggs in the regulatory basket,” which is what a lot of climate strategy has done to date — has been very heavily focused on regulatory standards, particularly at the federal level. What we started to see in the Biden administration, and Loren talked about this earlier, is this recognition that regulatory is a piece of it, fiscal and economic policy is a piece of it, industrial policy is a piece of it. All of these things have to work fairly seamlessly together.
You can’t advance a highly ambitious regulatory policy package without the complementary policies that can manage those other effects. To put that simply, you can’t say “we’re going to have 100% EV sales and that’s what we’re going to drive to” if you’re not confident or have a clear roadmap for building out the charging infrastructure at the same pace. Alongside those two things, it’s a chicken and egg problem, but you do need both the chicken and egg.
Finally, there is the political problem and how much political will you have to update tools or to put forward a comprehensive policy package. Sometimes where the politics fails is because constituents aren’t feeling the value of these policies in their day-to-day lives. If constituents aren’t going to see the benefits of climate policy, then they’re not going to rank climate high in their voting preferences. This is what Loren will get at a little bit later on — how do you design and implement policies that are much more responsive and visible in people’s day-to-day lives? That solves one piece of the political puzzle.
Then there’s another piece which is about incumbent interests. There’s certainly fossil and gas actors that have a vested interest in slow-walking the transition. That’s there. I would say it’s one of these four different pieces: regulatory design, regulatory coupling with non-regulatory strategies, the consumer responsiveness piece, and then the incumbent and political interests.
David Roberts
A little later, I’m going to dispute the relative weightings of those, let’s just say. But all right, we’ve got all those on the table. This maybe is a question for both of you because I have heard many times that the big problem with IRA is, passed all these big exciting policies — in your paper, you compare it to the garden hose, Olympic size.
Hannah Safford
I think I said trying to get an Olympic swimming pool through a garden hose.
David Roberts
Yes, exactly. The problem was we had all this money, we had all these policies, but literally getting the money out the door was the problem. There’s this gummed-up bureaucracy and I’ve heard that general point many times, but I would like a little specificity here. What went wrong? Who wasn’t acting fast enough? Can one or both of you flesh out what we mean when we say that? Who, what department wasn’t acting fast enough? What mechanisms weren’t working? Why was the garden hose so small?
Hannah Safford
I’ll start a little on that and then would love Loren to come in and do more. First, I should say, there were a lot of dollars to get out the door. A lot of dollars didn’t get out the door. A lot of dollars did get out the door. It’s always very easy to focus on what went wrong versus what went right. But hundreds of millions, billions of dollars went out the door in ways that did materially advance big-C climate policy as well as small-c, building more climate-resilient bridges and roads and other infrastructure, restoring coastal shorelines, these things that are in people’s communities and day-to-day lives. Just to give some credit where credit is due.
With that said, there were a lot of pieces that got stuck and you can zoom in on a bunch of different facets and see different implementation challenges. I will give you an example of one, which is for any very significant new grant funding opportunity, the notice of funding opportunity, the NOFO, gets developed by the agency that’s responsible for implementing the grant. For NOFOs that are over a certain dollar amount, they need to get reviewed by relevant policy councils at the White House.
There’s some reason for doing that. You’re trying to ensure top-level coherence of these different programs and having them work together and also advancing the same objectives. You don’t want one grant program to have these domestic purchasing requirements that another one doesn’t.
Also, there are only so many people who work at the White House. There are physical limitations. You can only put so many people there. It’s not a very big building and some people work remotely, but a lot of people don’t. I had the experience of having lots of NOFOs just pile up with me. Those are the pieces of paper that are the bottlenecks — until those pieces of paper get approved and go online, dollars cannot start flowing out the door. That’s just one very high-level bottleneck. But I know Loren has been thinking a lot about this, of where it translates into institutional design beyond the White House.
Loren Schulman
There’s a whole lot of examples that we could pull out. I’ll start with just some big points. One, this is the largest climate investment ever. An enormous amount of money, huge numbers of programs to start up all at one time. For almost all of those, you did not have the people in place when that legislation was passed to make sure that was possible. You had some of them, but not many. When the average hiring process for the federal government can take 90 days to six months, particularly for harder-to-find roles, you’re already on a delay. You are already on the delay of, I don’t necessarily have the right people there in the seats that I need for those roles. Many of them, as Hannah was saying, are extremely specialized.
There are great examples of, there are maybe two attorneys you can trust at the Department of the Treasury around specific kinds of rebate packages. They are miracle workers. They did incredible work. But even with that, their ability to suddenly not just quadruple, but whatever it would be — 20 times size — their review capacity, that’s not something you can suddenly overnight say, “please do that.”
With that, there’s a whole lot of elements of government that tend to be under-invested in, under-thought of until you suddenly need it. That is around HR, data management, procurement, IT, even though we spent billions and billions of dollars in IT. It’s all to fix old systems, not to modernize to new ones. These are all the things that you needed to be able to work incredibly well, to be able to deliver an IRA, to hire faster, to be able to get contracts out the door better, to be able to move grants faster through this system.
Those are all things that we hoped would stop breaking and kept breaking on a regular basis throughout the bill and IRA process. With that, you get it compounded with states — they are having the same sorts of capacity challenges times 20 as what the federal government was, because at the same time we were trying to get money out the door at the federal level, we were asking states and localities to be able to absorb it.
David Roberts
Here’s a question for you. You cite numerous examples of what you call the mission state, American tradition. There’s the New Deal, there’s the Apollo Project. These climate people are very familiar with all these because they’ve all been used in analogies at one point or another. New Deal, Apollo Project, there was the Operation Warp Speed in response to the pandemic.
The point you’re making, I think, is that there’s a tradition in America of us turning in a direction and focusing our resources on doing something big. The notable thing about all those examples is that all of them were forced by something like a crisis — the Depression, Cold War, the pandemic. Generally, it seems like America won’t do the right thing until forced.
The idea for decades in our world has been that climate change is going to serve that purpose, that climate change is going to be the equivalent of the Depression or the Cold War, that it would force us to get with it and focus and do something mission-driven. It doesn’t seem like that’s happening. It doesn’t seem like it’s working. Insofar as you all are envisioning some project of renewal, some big new project of renewal of the American state, what is supposed to be the forcing mechanism?
Hannah Safford
It’s a really good question. I think the climate community, and which I say as a proud member, is always wanting climate change to get better, because that’s the point. But also always saying, “if it just gets bad enough, then everybody is going to bump it up the priority list.”
David Roberts
That just keeps on not happening.
Hannah Safford
It keeps on not happening. To be honest, I don’t want — if at this point, it gets so bad that people start paying attention, it’s really bad. It’s not a world that I want to be in. You got to start —
David Roberts
In my experience, when things get really bad, people don’t respond with outbursts of rational policy development.
Hannah Safford
There’s a couple of things that I take away from this mission state conception. One, and we talked about this earlier, that’s all the tools in the toolbox and what that is. If you take Warp Speed, the most recent example — Covid truly upended every corner of our society and it was then truly mobilizing every corner of government at the federal and subnational levels to try and respond to that.
I experienced this firsthand. I did my PhD and was working on water research. Then Covid hit, and my lab capabilities at Davis were mobilized to do Covid wastewater detection in sewer systems, so it’s really like —
David Roberts
Don’t you feel that the full federal government response to the pandemic, which produced a vaccine quickly, was amazing. But don’t you feel it was making use of leftover competence, leftover administrative capacity and competence that the Trump administration had not yet gotten around to destroying, which now, could we do it again if it happened today?
Hannah Safford
There are two questions: what tools are you using? This is where, again, I go back to the design and application. You need to be using the right tools and have the capacity to implement them successfully. The first thing I take away from the Mission State conception is, if you’re going to run a whole-of-economy transition, it doesn’t make a priori sense.
If you’re going to design that from scratch, you probably wouldn’t run it through the EPA, to be honest. It just doesn’t have access to the trade policy levers, the economic levers. It’s not a very big agency and it’s got a lot of other stuff to do. That’s thing one that I take away from it — think about, we say this, we say whole of government a lot. That’s classic DC speak.
But what does it mean if we’re really trying to design a next chapter of climate policy that is truly whole of government? You don’t start with EPA and work out from there necessarily. You look at all of the tools and think about where you need to put it. I think this translates down then to states too, which often have much fewer regulatory levers than federal government does. I think they’ve operated in a way of saying, “well, then what are we supposed to do on this problem?”
But now that you have many of the clean technologies that we need as cost-competitive and commercial, there are a lot of creative things that can be done through financing and procurement policy and through market access and market transparency policy that are part of that creative, entrepreneurial, mission-state ethos. That’s one motivating thing that I take away from that principle or vision.
David Roberts
This brings up a question that — and this is really the central question that I kept bumping up against again and again reading your work — is: one way of viewing the federal response to climate change is to say we made a mistake of regulatory design by trying to do this through the EPA rather than a true whole-of-government, mission-driven effort. The response would be the reason we did it that way is not that we were confused about regulatory design. The reason we did it that way is downstream of politics.
The reason we did it that way is because we’re not gripped as a nation, we’re not in a mission mindset. We sloughed it off on EPA precisely because we’re not taking it seriously. I see those — a lot of these regulatory design issues as being downstream of politics. If we took it more seriously we would probably —
Hannah Safford
Update our regulatory tools?
David Roberts
Yes, exactly.
Hannah Safford
Totally. Again, I was part of the last administration and recognized that it didn’t make sense to apply fuel economy standards to EVs, and at the same time trying to do that because that was the tool that we had and trying to get dollars out the door and recognizing that it was silly that a lot of NOFOs were piling up on my desk. At the same time, there wasn’t a lot of — I couldn’t set aside a couple of years to work on a better institutional design structure because it was very pedal to the metal, let’s try and get the dollars out the door with what we have.
Two things. One is that this mismatch has grown over time. If you go back to the Obama administration, yes, there was still a mismatch between — it was still true that these foundational environmental laws had been passed in the 1970s. Now we’re trying to deal with climate change and grappling with the fact that the Clean Air Act doesn’t explicitly mention greenhouse gases. But we’re also still in a world where EV penetration is negligible and solar panels are expensive. There is still a need to drive down costs before you start thinking about very large-scale deployment and the knock-on economic effects that that’s going to have.
David Roberts
Also the lift required of your regulations —
Hannah Safford
Yeah.
David Roberts
— is lower if you start earlier. Obviously.
Hannah Safford
Definitely. Yes, of course. The political problem or the mismatch problem that you’re talking about — we could have decided in the early 2000s, “okay, climate change is a problem, and we should update our regulations.” But it wasn’t as much of a challenge as we’re facing right now. Now we’re in this moment where, on the one hand, federal climate policy is being gutted. That’s obvious. We’ve written about it. At the same time, the technologies that we need have never been more advanced or more affordable.
In this period, as we’re starting to think about what’s the next big federal play that we might make, maybe it is starting to think about some of these fundamental institutional design questions or regulatory design questions that the value proposition of interrogating those versus pushing for a really big funding investment is different than it was 10, 15 years ago.
Loren Schulman
Can I jump in on that, Hannah? I think that the creaky bureaucracy problem as the political problem, in some ways I get frustrated by the fact that I have to continue to make this argument — not to you guys, but to different audiences — that we haven’t had a candidate run on the promise and potential of government as a political thing that does good things in a real way in I don’t know how long. At best, you had Clinton come in with a reinventing government narrative, but that was all about cuts. That wasn’t about doing things differently.
David Roberts
That was an apology tour for government.
Loren Schulman
Exactly.
David Roberts
That wasn’t about how good government is. It was like, “we’re sorry government is so big and dumb and gross.”
Loren Schulman
You had Carter and in the 70s under Nixon, you had some institutional imagination that was going on there. But ever since then, it’s been a let’s just try as best we can to make sure that people outside of D.C. don’t know that we’re having to put all these band-aids around all of these institutions. At best, let’s maybe talk neutrally about government and maybe a political way. But the average talking point you see from anyone who’s running for office at any level is “government is not here to help. I’m here to go fix government for you and make sure to get those bureaucrats out of the way.” That has clearly been winning enough that people feel comfortable repeating it.
At the same time, people act shocked when you don’t have the personnel who are capable of executing things quickly and getting money out the door, who don’t have the relationships with states, who don’t understand that there’s one permitting officer in the entire enormous state. That mismatch there tells me, yes, it’s a political problem, but it’s also an incentives problem, short-termism problem, or a total lack of recognition of how government capacity is what gets you the political outcomes that you want.
The fact that we have made government the punching bag for so long is clearly biting us in this space, but is also going to continue to do so in any number of policy areas.
David Roberts
Yes, I have much more to say about that political question. But I’m trying to put it off to the end because I know once I get on it, I’ll never get off.
Loren, I have a question for you. Let’s just bracket for the moment the politics. What is the external forcing mechanism that is going to be equivalent to a depression or the Cold War or something that is going to force America into the crisis mode that it seems to need to be in to do big reforms? I don’t really know what that is, but let’s just say — let’s just say we have an opportunity to reinvent things, to start from scratch, to start with a new vision. Loren, you ran this futures exercise with 50-plus participants, asking a bunch of questions, probing what would you want from government if we were going to renew government? What is your vision for a good government?
What you found is there were eight distinct models with different priorities that people grouped under. For instance, there’s an abundance model which says growth and speed are the priority and we can accept a little fraud and some failures around the edges as the price of that speed. Then there’s the equity model, which is, no, slow down. Let’s have communities involved, community co-governance, which prioritizes that aspect of things.
Point being, it’s not simply we all want better regulation. We have at least partially incommensurate visions of what we want from government. How do you cognize that? How do you — even assuming we’re renewing government, on what lines? Based on whose vision? How do you think about that as you turn to this project of renewal?
Loren Schulman
This relates a lot to the rant that I was just on. I feel strongly that Americans have not been given the opportunity to weigh in on that question in a way that would get to a useful answer. I’ll talk a minute about what those possible models could be.
When we ask people, “Do you trust government?” that’s telling you about their immediate feelings about probably their member of Congress or maybe their city council. It’s not telling you what they want out of it and what they would want out of it. Not just in the boxes that you have today of Social Security or Medicare or IRS, but in terms of what are those pain points or opportunities that you experience most acutely and where is it that you feel as though there should be a societal role — a public role — in grappling with those? That is a big meta topper to what I wanted to say.
What was interesting to me as I was doing these exercises, was anything from people who wanted to focus very much on an abundance approach, who wanted to lean heavily into AI, folks who said that we wanted to lean much more into human dignity.
But as I went through all of the answers everyone had of, “okay, what are the ingredients you need in order to make this possible?” The ingredients were quite similar. You needed to be able to have access to the best talent that you could to deliver on public missions at the time you needed it. You needed to be able to have measures of not only is this working in this moment, but is it being responsive to the problem? Are you learning about this on a decision-making cycle that makes sense? You need to be able to, to Hannah’s point earlier, take on structural — meaty — endless problems that feel unsolvable, while also addressing the more immediate, my rent is too high, I can’t afford food, whatever the immediate thing is.
You also needed to be able to communicate on an iterative basis with the American people, not just on election day, so that you are building a participation process that wasn’t just, “I’m going to ask you on the worst possible website of our time for your feedback on an unintelligible regulation.” I want to build a relationship with you such that we’re able to mutually be conscious of what folks are working on.
What all of those have in common is that they have been things that we have been struggling with and identifying as problems in my community — government capacity — for ages: hiring, procurement, measurement, participation, customer experience. These are all things that we’ve said for a while. They are, as I said earlier, that engine room. To the degree we continue to denigrate that engine room and not prioritize it, it is going to fail you in climate, it’s going to fail you in housing, it’s going to fail you in transportation, it’s even going to fail you in national security. We’ve thrown a ton of money at that problem.
The reforms that you might need in that space, they are hard, but not laws-of-physics hard. They are priority hard. We’ve had political moments when that has been possible before, usually in the wake of a crisis. I think that the crisis moment, whether we wanted it or not, could have come a bit from DOGE and a bit from the Trump administration of putting so starkly on the front page what your taxpayer dollars are paying for or not, where your data is being used, whether or not we care that you are being cut off from a program or not. I don’t know that that’s the urgent crisis that gets Congress to suddenly say, “I’m going to talk about Title V reform,” but it has certainly opened the door to it in a way that was not open five years ago.
David Roberts
The vision here is something better. The vision here is something that works better. The point of this is regulatory ingenuity, that is, thinking anew, thinking in response to modern conditions, et cetera. Before we’re done, I would like to hear from both of you on at least a little bit, what does that look like? What does better look like?
There are two things going on here, two things being mixed up slightly. There’s the administrative capacity part of it, like how is government structured? How are agencies structured? That kind of thing. Who’s hired and how many people? Then there’s the regulatory design question.
Each of you is expert in one of those. I’ll start with you, Loren. I would like to hear, what are some administrative capacity type reforms that would show you evidence of a better government emerging? What types of administrative reforms? Is there a list somewhere? Are there things like better agencies, different agencies, more hiring, different hiring? Give us some substance here.
Loren Schulman
There’s a lot of paths you could go down. I think one of the biggest ones is, how do you take federal, state, and local government — because they all have this problem — away from a checklist, compliance, risk-aversion mindset to one where they’re trying to care about outcomes. There’s lots of angles.
David Roberts
This is — I’ll just note it since this is, of course, the heart of the abundance critique that is now all the rage in Democratic circles. Precisely this, that the Naderite lawsuit-based, risk-based, precautionary-principle-based excess caution has woven us into this web of rules and restrictions that is binding us and making it so that we can’t do what we want to do, and we need to sweep that away and focus on outcomes. This is a familiar critique that’s flying around these days.
Loren Schulman
Totally. One of the things that critique smooths over a little bit, or I sometimes disagree with it, is they — it tends to view people, communities, participation as a problem and a barrier. I think participation is a problem now because it is designed to do everything wrong. It is designed to happen too late. It is designed to make sure that you’re not bringing in people’s insights at the beginning to build in the trust that you needed in order to make large significant changes as well as incremental changes.
When it is not bringing in communities from a co-design perspective, it’s bringing them in as a “hey — we’re good — right” perspective, which gives everyone the opportunity for all kinds of catastrophic delays later on, and it avoids the fact that you’re going to be better off, I think, for many of the kinds of policy changes that Hannah could talk about if you are talking about benefits and risks, not just from an immediate community perspective, but from a broader beneficiary and impact community perspective. Not just in the town or the county locality that you are in, but you’re talking about it from a national angle.
That is a very different model of government than we’re in right now. It’s one that both is more trust-based but recognizes that good governance isn’t just about, “we told you what happened and we gave you the opportunity to input on a bad website,” but rather one where you have smaller, deliberative, relationship-based, trust-based co-design throughout.
David Roberts
This is something I hear a lot, and it’s interesting to hear from you. Your position is that community involvement, properly structured, accelerates rather than slows down big government projects? This is the best of both worlds. I’d love to believe this. I’d love to believe that we could get better on community engagement and get faster. I don’t know. Are there examples? How confident are we in this?
Loren Schulman
It will take some testing and we see some of this happening in California with some of the work that they’re doing. The Possibility Lab in California is doing some awesome work around this, both in small levels around, how do we build a park to bigger, higher-impact ones about, what is the future of California over the next hundred years? You see examples in cities and counties across the country that are testing out different ways to pull in community input that isn’t just, I’m asking you a question and you’re giving immediate answer, but more on a continuous, iterative basis. I think the challenge is going to be getting people to think of this as ultimately risk-mitigating upfront if you have more buy-in, rather than waiting to the end and presuming that everyone will be okay with it.
I agree with you that doing both at the same time seems like we’re just going to be spending more time on stuff, but how much time are we spending? How much cost are we doing based on any number of lawsuits that happen at the end? The overall, the absence of understanding of impact, there’s a trust mismatch element that’s going on here too.
The final piece I’ll note on this is I think we overall need to get better at — I’ve mentioned hiring a couple of times, but it’s not just hiring for the sake of bringing people in. It’s recognizing that federal, state, and localities have to work together in very different ways than they have in the past, where it’s not just, I, federal government, am telling you, state, to absorb this billion dollars, good luck. But having a much more fluid relationship in terms of talent, technical knowledge, capacity, ability to advise one another.
It’s not just a state suddenly meeting with 20 different representatives of the federal government, but much more of a regional approach of thinking through how do we work through this system together. Rather than, I’m overwhelmed, so now I’m going to hand this to you, state, to be overwhelmed. Who’s going to hand it to an implementer to be overwhelmed? That’s not how any smart organization works on problems. We can think of government capacity from a polycentric basis rather than just one — is about how do we redesign the EPA.
David Roberts
Yeah, the polycentric model is interesting. Hannah, let’s hear from you. On the regulatory design question, maybe just give us — it’s all very abstract. Maybe just give us some sense or some examples of what regulatory ingenuity would look like on the ground? What are some — ingenious. Is that a word?
Hannah Safford
Yeah, ingenious. When we started designing this, I kept saying “ongenuity” and I was very confident this is why you need stakeholder input. Because the stakeholders on my team then gently took me aside and said, “that’s not how you say it.” This conception of regulatory ingenuity that we’ve come up with — ingenuity by definition means creative and clever. That’s what we’re trying to get at — anything, any approach to climate policy that’s not blindly rerunning the same plays harder and faster because that’s what we know how to do, or that’s what we’re mandated to do, but instead saying, what is the problem that we’re trying to fix and how can we be responsive to those problems?
This word that you heard Loren say a couple of times — being responsive, responsiveness — it’s a normal word and it is absent from the climate think tank world, it’s astonishing to me. If we say that regulatory ingenuity is about how we update old tools, take laws and processes that were built for one purpose and adapt them for today’s challenge, and say, how can we be responsive to that challenge? That to me is at the heart of it.
Let me give you a more concrete example to take it away from being buzzwordy. If you’re somebody in one of many communities whose electric bill is going up because a data center moved into your utility’s territory — I live in Virginia, so this is happening in communities around me — regulatory ingenuity is when a state like Kentucky, which just did this, says, no, where the Public Utility Commission uses rate-making proceedings, which is a typical regulatory process, but to figure out how you more fairly distribute those costs so that consumers who aren’t reaping the benefits of data center buildout also aren’t footing the bill. This has been talked about a lot.
To be honest, that is a type of regulatory ingenuity because it’s a regulatory process that we have. It’s thinking about a new challenge — data centers and rapid hyperscaler buildout — and how do you be responsive to the impacts that that’s having on people’s lives in other communities. Connecticut is doing this too. They’ve built out a regulatory sandbox to test new grid technologies before they commit billions to grid upgrades in light of rising electricity demand and hyperscaling. Regulatory ingenuity to me also looks like — I keep going back to that fuel economy and EVs example because it’s such a concrete one.
It’s not blindly applying that to cars forever and ever, but going back and saying, okay, we’re in this messy middle of the transition from fossil fuel vehicles to clean vehicles, and what are the regulations? How do we build some flexibility and adaptiveness into them?
One more example — this actually happened — is the EPA also sets standards for vehicles. When we were working on the EPA vehicle emissions standards and this tension between how rapidly EVs are being deployed and how rapidly the charging infrastructure is being built out, we incorporated a provision into those regulations that said the EPA was going to — it created an off-ramp by which the EPA could go back for heavy-duty vehicles, where the charging infrastructure buildout is more expensive and more uncertain.
In a couple of years, if the charging infrastructure buildout was not keeping pace with the rate of heavy-duty zero-emission vehicle deployment, then EPA would be able to, without doing a whole big new rulemaking from scratch, just update some of the targets and some of the standards. Yes, that makes sense because the world is unpredictable and sometimes tech goes faster and sometimes tech goes slower.
David Roberts
You’ve laid out this vision of taking administrative capacity more seriously, building out a real competent government that can achieve the outcomes it lays out, and thinking anew about the problems of today rather than simply falling back on old tools, thinking newly and creatively about regulation. I love all of that.
That said, reading all your work was a very familiar experience to me in that my sense of the two primary driving forces that are causing all the problems that you are describing and trying to solve go unnamed. I will name them here. One is the Republican Party, since Ronald Reagan has been telling the United States that the government is stupid and incompetent and that government’s just going to mess things up and that it’s full of waste and fraud and abuse. They have been beating that message and they have become — the Republican Party has become a nihilist party. It is setting out to destroy the federal government. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, it’s just a plain description of what they’re doing. They are now very consciously setting out to destroy precisely the administrative capacity that you all are saying we need and is good.
The second is related — the way the right has taken over the information environment. All the things you’re saying require a couple of things. They require social trust. If you want regulatory agencies to have the freedom of action to be creative and responsive, you need a public that gives them a little room and gives them a little room to move, that trusts them. Of course, the information environment that we have today is utterly corrosive to social trust. Second, you need citizens who know what’s happening, who know what the government is doing and what the results are so that they can ask for better things.
Right now we have an information environment which makes that difficult to impossible. If you survey the public, they don’t know what’s going on, they don’t know who’s doing what, and they don’t have any informational basis on which to make coherent requests of their government. In other words, everything you’re saying, particularly you, Loren, with your odes to the power and effectiveness and democratic necessity of a robust administrative state — yes, I’m cheering, I’m clapping, but that is anathema to the current Republican Party. In other words, all of this looks to me like a partisan fight.
The reason Democrats keep falling back on and using these old tools is that Republicans won’t let them pass anything else. They’ve tried a million times. The reason they’re using these old tools is that that’s all we’ve got. It’s become impossible. Republicans have rendered Congress basically moot. It doesn’t pass legislation anymore. It hasn’t passed serious pollution legislation in decades.
It’s not that Democrats went back to EPA standards because they thought, “ooh, this will be the best way to solve climate change.” It’s just there’s nothing else because Republicans have prevented us from developing anything else. I don’t know what I want you to say about this, but what I mean is the problem you’ve identified, we have thoughts about it.
Hannah Safford
We can talk about it, sure.
Loren Schulman
We can try.
David Roberts
Please share it. I know Democrats also suck on this in a lot of ways. I’m not here saying Democrats are great or this seems like a coherent argument and discussion to be having within the Democratic Party, but when it comes to the administrative state, the Republicans hate it and are trying to kill it. That’s the problem. Are you avoiding stating that clearly because you need this to be a nonpartisan project for image purposes? I’m just curious how you think about partisanship. Hannah, do you want —
Hannah Safford
We both have a lot of thoughts.
Loren Schulman
Yeah.
Hannah Safford
I can start and then Loren can take it, but you gave me a lot there, David, I have a lot of different thoughts. One, I would say the project of fully dismantling the administrative state is not going that well. There’s been a lot of — DOE, for instance, right now is having a big rehiring push. The Trump administration is not particularly popular. It’s not like people are applauding the wholesale rampant destruction of the administrative state and saying, “yes, this is what we were going for and this is what we signed up for.”
I think there is appetite on both sides of the political aisle for a substantively superior alternative to either wholesale destruction on the one hand or layers and layers of kludge on the other hand. Once you start to — before we started taping, you and I were talking about DC, and DC can be just such an ecosystem onto itself. Part of what we are trying to do through this center is build greater connectivity between the DC folks and the rest of the country.
Some of the examples that we talked about already on this podcast upend the political dynamics that are so entrenched in DC. We talked about, on the one hand, that blue states that had pushed forward on EV standards are now running into some challenges that they didn’t anticipate with that fossil-meets-clean, messy middle transition and walking some of that back.
At the same time, you’ve got red states like Kentucky that are doing innovative things with rate design as data centers are being built out in ways that will ultimately be beneficial for an energy transition. Another example that’s very capacity meets rate regulation and policy is when we were trying to administer the charging program from the infrastructure bill and all 50 states were excited about building out EV charging networks. Every single state from Wyoming to California developed an EV charging infrastructure plan. They were excited about using federal funds to go forward and build out that network.
It was very surprising to us who were the first movers and who were laggards. The very first state to open a federally funded fast charger was Ohio. One of our slowest moving states was Washington. It turned out that a lot of that boiled down to capacity at the — it wasn’t political will because they all took the money. It turned out it was capacity at the state level where Ohio just had their shit together. Washington had a lot of other state programs and state incentives for EVs.
We were talking about earlier, there’s one or two guys who do it, and they were just super overloaded. A lot of this transcends partisanship without being naive about which is the more climate-forward party and which isn’t. A lot of the things that we’re talking about in terms of responsiveness and delivering outcomes in energy, housing, and transportation, which also account for two-thirds of US emissions, do transcend partisanship in a very genuine way.
Loren Schulman
Yep.
David Roberts
I will say briefly in support of that, I talk to people sometimes off the record, talk to a guy who’s trying to do geothermal stuff and they’re finding that red states don’t want to do much of anything, but when they do want to do something, they just do it. They just do it. When blue states want to do something, they initiate a meeting to plan further meetings on it. It’s the worst of both worlds on both sides. A little competence in the name of doing the good things.
Loren Schulman
Let me say for the record, blue states, good participation isn’t doing more meetings or more meetings better. There are lots of better ways. Hannah made a lot of the point that I wanted to, which is one of the reasons that this isn’t enormously depressing to me right now is looking at states — not just because they’re an alternative to the corrosiveness of some of what we see in Washington right now, but because the work that they are doing, both to set models for others to copy, for them to take collaborative actions together, for them to think about different ways to share talent or contracts or other things, those are exactly the kind of things we needed to happen anyway.
We are better off having had to turn to states and cities to pull that off. It also hopefully gives us models that we can pull from on a national level to say, “Utah is doing an amazing job at regulatory experimentation. Let’s take this model elsewhere.” Or the Kentucky example that Hannah mentioned where, yes, at the national level, for politics, I don’t think you get any politician on television right now who’s in a national profile to say good things about the administrative state.
But at the state level, people want to see things when they’re owning it in that much more visceral, local way. They want to be able to get things done. They need to be able to have the people who are working for them, the systems that are working through them, and the relationships to get that done.
Where I worry, because it’s not just a left or right issue in DC, it’s a whole bunch of different narratives around whether or not the state is working and we can trust it. Again, that I am concerned about, from abundance to the right to, frankly, to the left, I worry about a desire to go back to status quo ante.
What the moment we’re seeing in Washington, to our conversation earlier, allows us to say is, a lot of the chaff has been cleared, for better or for worse. A lot of the talent space is open. A lot of the agencies that we need to rely on are already being remade. Let’s have a proactive vision for that. We, being whomever, is the next to care about this, to think about how we might do this differently.
If the seats and agencies are already empty, let’s rethink who it is that we need to be able to come in those doors and how we want to utilize them and how we want to talk about them and to the American people. That is not a simple thing to do for any party I know to suddenly go from, “let’s not really talk about the federal bureaucrat” to “this is a moment for American renewal to think about what is it we want out of the tax dollars we’re sending into DC every day.”
David Roberts
You understand that that is going directly into the face of six decades of propaganda in the other direction. This is the thing — they’ve repeated the fact that government is incompetent so often in so many venues that it has broken containment from political discourse and become one of these things that just everybody knows. It’s just kind of ambient. It’s just something you automatically — you’re fighting deep primal forces here.
This returns me to something I said earlier, which is something that’s always absent from these discussions, was if the Democratic Party wants to turn and talk differently about the administrative state, like you’re saying, using what information outlets? They bought the Washington Post and the LA Times and all the local newspapers and all the local TV stations and Twitter and Meta and who? Where? How are Democrats supposed to communicate the merits of the administrative state? They have no communication machine. I know that’s not your job, but that just seems upstream of everything else.
Loren Schulman
I think they’ll just listen to the Volts podcast and it’ll be fine.
David Roberts
There’s the solution.
Hannah Safford
Here’s the communication machine. I don’t think it is upstream of everything else. That’s where much of this can be a circular trap of messaging spiral and buzzword chasing. It’s “okay, it’s abundance.” Now we’ve got to go after abundance. Now it’s going to be affordability or it’s going to be efficient.
David Roberts
Wait, Hannah, I just want to make this clear. I’m not talking about the choice of buzzwords. I’m talking about the money and power required to own and dominate media outlets. That’s different from messaging.
Hannah Safford
Yeah, it’s different.
David Roberts
Power.
Hannah Safford
It is power. We talked about this earlier — the incumbents and incumbent actors and systems. This is a really big problem. It goes beyond — we’re trying to solve a lot of things for the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity. This is one where you have to say, the incumbency and big money is a big problem. We can’t ignore that. Also, given where we’re at, I don’t think that you win the hearts and minds of the American people on the administrative state by trying to heavily push a positive counterargument to try and stanch six decades of the opposite. I think it needs to be much more focused on doing.
If you’re going to have one side say government is bad, the administrative state is just a bunch of lazy bureaucrats taking home paychecks that they don’t deserve. Then you have the other side say, “no, they deserve it.” The obvious question is, “why? What are you doing? How is that showing up for me?” Which is why it comes back to the thing that has to be the North Star — responsiveness and outcomes. That’s what the policy agenda needs to be designed around, rather than spending a lot of time just trying to say, “yes, it’s good.”
Loren Schulman
For all that, I think better messaging and more positive messaging about the administrative state is something that I would value and I think needs to happen. It’s absolutely what Hannah just spoke of in terms of being able to show up with more immediate impacts of, “government is bad. It doesn’t do anything for you.” “Government just lowered your electricity payment,” or “government just cleared your snow,” or “DMVs around the country are doing amazing things to be able to speed up people’s experience with that.” Take away all of the tropes as we see happening both in red and blue states across the country.
As those get taken away, it becomes harder to pull on them over and over again. It will not happen overnight, but it will happen more when people’s experience with government feels more like something they would expect from others or at least, at the minimum, does not feel like a Veep episode.
David Roberts
I would question how much American attitudes are connected to the actual reality of their experience. I think that Republicans, because they dominate the information sphere, can maintain the idea that government’s bad, even if government is underneath that, doing good things, just because everyone’s trapped in their own little bubbles now. But I won’t dwell on this. We all are describing this downward spiral we’re in where government fails to deliver. Trust in government erodes. That makes it harder to build the political will to fix the government, which causes government to fail, more and more trust to erode, et cetera.
We are in this downward spiral now. I think it’s fair to say that makes my tummy hurt. Probably makes a lot of listeners’ tummies hurt. I don’t want to just leave people with a bunch of hurt tummies. Let’s talk about what people can do. This is, as you say, a big society-wide problem. These are big problems. But let’s give people a little agency. What can people do? What are the highest-leverage places where people can put their energy and attention in support of better government delivery of good climate outcomes? Give people something to put their energy toward if they want to.
Hannah Safford
There’s one conversation at the federal level and a lot of those vibes, understandably and for very real reason, are not so good. But then there’s a tremendous amount of agency that state and local actors, and that’s government as well as non-governmental actors too, like private sector, local philanthropy, can do a real amount. It’s easy to say, okay, you can do something in your backyard. But I said earlier, now that many clean technologies are commercial, it just opens the door to innovative policy at the state and truly local level that just didn’t exist before.
Local communities in particular are trying really creative things. Chargers are — you’ll often see this narrative, and I keep referencing EVs because I think it’s very concrete to people’s everyday lives and I’m a transportation person in some way by training. You’ll often see this narrative about the charging ecosystem is a patchwork and chargers are just bubbling up, here and there randomly. I think that’s exciting. It’s exciting to me that a strip mall in Oklahoma sees a business case to build out chargers — that’s cool and creative and locally tailored and in a way that’s deeply entrenched into community fabric that you can’t just have a whipsaw come in and take that all away.
You can rip federal chargers out of federal government facilities, but you can’t go into every community on private property and take them out. I’m sure Loren would too, as we’re continuing to build out the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity. Creative and clever ideas — some of them are in Washington, but most of the ideas in Washington are not that creative and clever, but they sure are across the country. I would love to hear what those examples are. What are the cool charging projects that are being built out? Where is there a solar canopy that’s co-located with a new housing development? This stuff is happening and if we bubble it up, we can scale it because it is now, in most cases, the math pencils.
Loren Schulman
My comment on this is a good complement to Hannah’s, where I think some of the best things to do is when something works well, works for the community, works for the cost, works for the goal that you’re trying to do, make it as much as possible replicable and copy-and-pasteable by others, whether you do it collaboratively with the city one town over or whether you share it with states, whether you share with NGA, whatever the mechanism is that is most appropriate based on what you’re talking about, make it possible for others to be able to pick that up.
Second is more from an average listener perspective. When you see government do something ingenious, I guess is the right word to hit. Say positive things about it. Note it. It is rare that we hear people say anything positive. When you see Boston making their home permitting system much more user-friendly about, “I just need a new roof. I don’t care about the 79 lines of the code that I need to care about this. I just need a new roof.” When you see things like that, talk about them positively and get them on the minds of other leaders elsewhere.
The last thing I would say is, from whatever professional angle you’re at, set a demand signal in whatever way makes sense for you of what government can and should be doing better. Not just, “here’s why it sucks” or “here’s why it was slow, here’s what was really annoying to me,” but instead a more positive vision. “I want to see X, I want to see Y.” Leaders rarely hear it. I think that does gradually and slowly start to make a difference in terms of how we change the messaging on government to go from, “here’s why it’s awful” to, “I would expect this from the biggest investment in climate ever. I would expect these sorts of things to change. And why didn’t they?”
David Roberts
Thanks, you two. I think this is such important work. I go back and forth and sometimes it feels a little early to be talking about rebuilding since we’re still extremely in the downward spiral. But I guess we need to be laying the groundwork. We need to be thinking. I will just say, Loren, in response to the last thing you said, I lived through the Biden administration and as you were saying, Hannah, they were shoveling money out the door toward all sorts of great things. They were doing all sorts of B and C level great things.
Loren Schulman
Yep.
David Roberts
I would get press releases about them every couple of days. Here’s this little cool thing. But as far as I could tell, nobody beyond me and a couple of my fellow cultists were tuned in enough to even find out about this stuff and I couldn’t get — I would tweet them out, throw them out, saying, “hey, look, there’s little good things happening. Government is doing good things.” I couldn’t get anyone to join in the chorus.
Even the green groups who are allegedly supposed to be pushing for this stuff and for whom it is being done — even they were mostly just bitching at Biden for approving some Alaska lease or something. Hearing you talk about it, Loren, the more I heard you talk, the more I thought it just really is no one doing that. No one is doing that. If you are on the left broadly and you think government should and could do good things, you can’t just crap on government doing bad things. Somebody’s gotta go sing the song of good government.
Loren Schulman
Yeah.
Hannah Safford
No one wants a wildfire. After a wildfire, the regrowth is astonishing. I think we’re wanting to see — I think that we’re at that point now too. There’s a bit of a fever pitch to get as much done with things that were becoming increasingly brittle. I think you’re right, we don’t run away from all of them. There’s still a defense, particularly legal defense, for many of the programs and policy decisions being litigated right now. At the same time, that clears the landscape for maybe some green shoots.
Loren Schulman
This is a whole other episode for you to go down at some point in time — not with me, but somebody else. The work that is done at NIH and elsewhere and when they managed to think through who are the trusted messengers in order to get people to do things, it’s really great because they start to think about the places where people are getting information that they would act on and care about. Is that their church? Is that Reddit? Is that their barbershop? It’s going to be different elsewhere, but it’s not a press release.
I’ve written many a government press release, but if we thought that that was not a white paper — if they thought that that was telling anybody anything, then that’s really nice. I hope we had a really good day about that. But you got to think about it in terms of the engagement differently.
David Roberts
All right. Thank you two so much. Thank you for walking us through this. Thank you for doing this work. I hope we move in this direction once the wildfire has burned itself out. I’ll just say that.
Thanks for coming on, guys.
Loren Schulman
Thank you.
Hannah Safford
Thanks for having us.
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.
