Rep. Josh Harder in conversation with Derek Kaufman
Audio Brief
Show transcript
SUMMARY:
Why has the federal government ignored major housing legislation since 1974, and how can we finally break this fifty year stalemate? Representative Josh Harder addresses this urgent question as he discusses the bipartisan effort to rebuild America. By the end of this episode, you will understand how cutting bureaucratic red tape can lower costs and accelerate construction nationwide.
A new political movement is fighting rising costs by building more. This philosophy focuses on cutting regulatory barriers to make it easier to construct physical infrastructure, energy projects, and homes. Harder explains that this bridges traditional party lines, shifting the political focus from cultural debates to a battle between growth and protectionism.
Projects need rules that do not change when administrations do. Billions of dollars in private investments can vanish overnight when political winds shift. Investors are hesitant to fund massive energy projects if a new administration can suddenly pull the plug right before operations begin. Harder argues that establishing legally binding, predictable rules ensures that long term projects can proceed safely without fear of retroactive cancellation.
Subsidizing prices without building more supply actually makes things more expensive. Throwing taxpayer money at scarce housing or childcare only inflates the final price tag. Harder notes that to truly lower costs, we must strip away artificial barriers to building rather than just giving out subsidies. For example, institutional investors state in their earnings reports that building more housing is the biggest risk to their business, proving that increasing supply is the best way to lower prices.
We have the blueprints for housing and energy, but other sectors are blank pages. Decades of research have given us clear policy solutions for homes, but we are starting from scratch in healthcare and education. While policy pipelines for physical infrastructure are well developed, sectors like civil service reform lack these ready to use frameworks. This gap makes it difficult to apply the philosophy of abundance across all parts of the government.
Highly trained scientists are spending most of their time on paperwork. We spend over a decade training elite minds only to turn them into administrators. A significant portion of federal grant funding, such as money from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, is consumed by compliance. This administrative burden forces researchers to fill out applications rather than doing actual science.
Artificial intelligence can bypass decades of slow government procurement. By using artificial intelligence to rapidly upgrade legacy information technology systems, the government can bypass slow buying cycles and massive contractor fees. This modernization can quickly improve how public services are delivered to citizens.
To lower costs and rebuild America, we must focus on increasing the physical supply of goods rather than subsidizing demand. True progress comes when we build coalitions around concrete, material outcomes. You don't fix a food shortage by banning farms, and you can't fix a housing shortage by banning the builders.
Episode Overview
- Representative Josh Harder explains how the bipartisan Build America Caucus is attempting to tackle rising costs by cutting regulatory red tape to accelerate construction, housing, and energy production in the United States.
- The discussion covers key legislative efforts including the 21st Century Road to Housing Act and the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAJA), which aim to streamline outdated federal bureaucracies.
- It highlights a shifting political paradigm moving away from traditional left-versus-right divisions and toward a conflict between pro-growth supply-side abundance and protectionist populism.
- The conversation details how the abundance framework can be applied beyond housing and energy to reform healthcare, scientific research funding, and outdated government technology.
Key Concepts
- The Abundance and Progress Movement: A growing political and civic philosophy focused on making it easier to build physical infrastructure, housing, and energy projects in the US by reducing regulatory barriers and streamlining bureaucratic approval processes.
- Permit Certainty: The establishment of predictable, legally binding, and politically stable rules for project approvals so that long-term private investments cannot be retroactively canceled or stalled due to shifting political administrations.
- Supply-Side vs. Demand-Side Reform: The principle that subsidizing costs (like housing or childcare) without increasing the underlying supply simply inflates prices and wastes taxpayer dollars; true affordability requires stripping away artificial barriers to building.
- The "Half-Drawn Horse" Policy Pipeline: The reality that while housing and energy have decades of well-researched policy solutions ready to implement, other sectors like healthcare, education, and civil service reform lack developed "abundance" policies.
- Red Tape in Scientific Research: The administrative burden on academic researchers where a significant portion of federal grant funding (such as NIH and NSF) is consumed by compliance, forcing highly trained scientists to spend the majority of their time on paperwork rather than actual science.
- Government Modernization via AI: The opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence to rapidly modernize legacy federal IT systems, bypassing decades of slow procurement cycles and massive contractor costs to improve public service delivery.
Quotes
- At 4:09 - "It sort of feels like we used to have two parties that cared about American growth, and now a lot of the time it feels like we have zero." - Explaining why the bipartisan Build America Caucus was created to champion abundance and progress.
- At 9:10 - "We haven't passed major pro-housing federal legislation since 1974... It's been that long since Congress actually cared about housing." - Illustrating the historic nature of the 21st Century Road to Housing Act in breaking a 50-year federal stalemate on housing policy.
- At 12:22 - "You don't fix a food shortage by banning farms, and you can't fix a housing shortage by banning the folks that are actually building housing." - Defending the decision to strip a populist, anti-corporate builder provision from the housing bill that would have inadvertently reduced housing supply.
- At 13:00 - "If you look at Blackstone's earnings reports, they say one of the biggest risks to their business is building more housing. Well, let's build more!" - Explaining why increasing overall supply is the most effective way to address concerns about institutional investors inflating home prices.
- At 17:21 - "What is the cost of this? Is it going to make it easier for polluters to throw stuff into streams? No. It actually doesn't change anything of any of our labor and environmental protections whatsoever. All it does is make it harder to game the system." - Addressing environmental concerns regarding permit reform.
- At 19:20 - "Nobody wants to make it easier to build energy projects, and then to get stabbed in the back the day after the deal was signed... It's terrible for markets when you have companies making billions of dollars of investments, only to have the plug pulled quite literally days or weeks before operation... because of politics." - Explaining why permit certainty is a fundamental prerequisite for any bipartisan energy deal.
- At 26:47 - "We spend over a decade training our scientists... and then what do we do? We say 'you're going to spend the majority of your time filling out a grant application.' That's a pretty terrible use of the folks that have some of the highest human capital in the United States." - Explaining the massive opportunity cost of administrative burdens placed on academic researchers.
Takeaways
- Focus advocacy on increasing physical supply rather than subsidizing demand, as throwing capital at restricted supply only serves to inflate prices in sectors like housing and childcare.
- Build political coalitions around concrete, material outcomes—such as lowering energy bills and building faster—to bypass polarized cultural debates and pass meaningful legislation.
- Reform federal research funding processes by shifting to streamlined, two-stage application models to free up academic researchers from administrative overhead.
- Modernize public sector operations by using AI to upgrade legacy codebases and revising civil service pay scales to recruit the technical talent needed to manage modern infrastructure.
