Welcome to Big Ideas, a Prospect survey of next-generation solutions for pressing policy problems. Our writers scour the policy landscape to find out how to bring power back to the people and make America successful. Visit BIG IDEAS for more.
In the Age of Trump, the idea of discussing policy seems rather hopeless. What is the point of trying to, say, identify the best way to untangle the mess of Obamacare subsidy formulas when Donald Trump and the Republicans are slashing funding for the program, not to mention tearing the entire government to ribbons? “What can men do against such reckless hate?”
This surely explains why policy gets so much less attention today than it did in 2019, when the nitty-gritty details of Medicare for All were the subject of heated debate between sundry centrist “fact-checkers” and leftists. Trump is now back in power, and no argument or citation of facts has ever convinced that man of anything, not least because when you start talking about anything remotely complicated, he wanders off and starts watching television.
Still, government policy always matters, and we at the Prospect have been grimly soldiering on trying to investigate the manifold consequences of Mad King Trump—as well as pondering what to do in the future, with our new Big Ideas series.
In that latter vein, Common Wealth, a relatively new lefty think tank based in both Britain and the U.S., has been attempting to dial up its ambition both to account for the yawning abyss into which Trump is plunging the nation, and also the policy failures that enabled his rise.
Common Wealth’s focus is on public ownership, public provision, and building state capacity. The first reason for this is simple reality: Despite the utter madness of what Trump is doing, the mess he’ll leave is going to have to be cleaned up. A future Democratic president, should there ever be one, will have no choice but to rebuild much of the entire administrative state from scratch—so they might as well build it back better, to coin a phrase. “We’re in a moment where things feel really perilous politically,” said Common Wealth’s U.S. program director Melanie Brusseler, “but also there’s a lot of hope in response.”
Moreover, Trump has also set some unusual precedents that might be usefully exploited. There are “attempts at industrial policy, the trade policies, the new forms of state ownership—meaning state, the federal government, or federal agencies taking equity stakes in private companies,” said Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College who works on Common Wealth’s Green Planning Commission.
Obviously, Trump is doing all this in the most corrupt and erratic way imaginable, but the principles are not inherently terrible. For instance, when the government ended up owning Ally Bank as part of the 2008 Wall Street bailout, it could have kept it and built it up as a public option for banking. (That’s my own idea, to be clear.)
Another major focus for Common Wealth is building out a lefty response to the affordability crisis—one that isn’t just recapitulating the price-lowering strategy of neoliberalism, where jobs are shipped overseas to cut labor costs and where supply chain investment is kept as low as possible. That doesn’t even work on its own terms, as we saw during the pandemic, when supply shocks led to skyrocketing prices for goods and shipping. Today, though, the most important prices are for things that can’t be offshored and imported. “We’re talking about housing. We’re talking about education. We’re talking about health care, talking about transportation,” said economist Alex Williams. “In no situation does offshoring make any of those cheaper.” (The enthusiastic response to Zohran Mamdani’s affordability-focused campaign for the mayoralty of New York City is instructive in this regard.)
What could work is public provision, with Medicare for All, social housing, free college, and so on. Indeed, the health care system is so obviously plagued with hyper-complicated rent-seeking, as uncountable private actors maneuver to swindle each other and/or the government and thereby claim a fat slice of America’s world-historical spending on health care, that the case for state coordination of providers as well as insurance practically makes itself. “If we want to structurally lower prices and rationalize the provision of health care in this country, I think that we will need to do much more comprehensive health care planning,” said Brusseler.
But Common Wealth’s chief focus, naturally enough, is climate change and industrial policy. Here they are building on the lessons of Bidenomics. Joe Biden’s administration achieved a considerable amount by American standards with the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the bipartisan infrastructure law, but it wasn’t enough to reach our climate goals, and as it was hammered out in a last-minute deal with Joe Manchin, lacked a coherent overall framework to plan investment and decarbonization. As Williams points out in an essay, while the fiscal stimulus worked well, Bidenomics struggled on industrial policy, due to tensions between decarbonization and confronting China, and a reliance on traditional tax credits and indirect subsidies rather than direct planning and investment.
That is partly why even before the IRA was effectively repealed by Trump administration fiat, America could not remotely match China’s green investment. In 2024, for instance, the U.S. installed a record 50 gigawatts of solar capacity, but China installed 329 gigawatts—and in 2025, its pace is accelerating, while the U.S. is drastically slowing. “The reason that China is able to build railways, solar, etc., at record speeds, is not because of lack of regulation, but because it has stellar planning capacity that’s been built very methodically over many decades,” said Isabel Estevez, an industrial-policy expert who also serves on the Green Planning Commission. We don’t have to copy China’s communist dictatorship to learn from their model of state coordination of production.
That in turn ties back into affordability. One happy consequence of a state-led crash decarbonization program would be lots of cheap, zero-carbon electricity, which would be an input into practically every good and service. “The adaptations and asset development that the government would need to do to meaningfully engage climate would also create a huge volume of publicly owned electrical generating assets that are totally disconnected from volatile global markets for oil and gas,” said Williams. “In the long run, fixing these problems makes everything that everyone wants to do cheaper.”
Many Trump critics are focused on what he is doing to our basic democratic compact, and rightly so. But there’s a reason that all the presidents who led us through our worst previous crises also had an aggressive program of reform—and these also included public provision and ownership. Abraham Lincoln had greenbacks and land grant colleges; Franklin Roosevelt had Social Security, a massive public works program, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and much more. A core purpose of a democratic republic is to protect the welfare of the citizenry, and if a future government is to repair the damage inflicted by Trump and fight climate change as well, they will have to think even more ambitiously.
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