Derek Thompson

Like, what is the thing we want...

progressive abundance doge to do better.

And there's a little bit of a blank space there.

So let me try to fill out some ideas.

One of the failures of the Biden administration that you and I talked about a lot on the tour was the failure to spend money authorized under the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

You know, I talked to a lot of people at the state level about what they saw as the reason why rural broadband money, tens of billions of dollars of it, didn't actually build rural broadband and why several billion dollars of electric vehicle charger stations money was also not spent.

And the answer that I kept hearing, they felt like the people they were talking to in the Biden administration

They felt like they were coming up with excuses to extend the period of time, to come up with more instruments of delay than were necessary by the rules inscribed by the law itself.

And that brings me to a point that you might think of as sort of like Doge for Better, but I sometimes think of as being like a little bit separate.

It's this idea that abundance is not just a set of ideas and laws and rules.

It's the people who execute them.

And one thing that I think the incoming, hopefully, Democratic administration in 2029 will value is not just a new set of rules that value speed, but personnel that value speed.

I actually think you can go quite far by bringing in people who really, really want to

laws to be passed and then money to be spent expeditiously and are looking for ways to do that legally, not by violating the law, because, you know, as much as it's talked about how much Donald Trump and Elon Musk, when he was in government, just like, you know, ran through everything with a chainsaw and machete.

You look at all the various ways that Trump has lost in the courts that have consistently slowed him down to do all kinds of things.

I mean,

The Trump administration is now paying back $166 billion in tariff fees.

That's not moving fast.

That's moving fast, then moving very slow because you have to undo everything you just did.

So you want to follow the law, but I also think you want to bring in people into government that really, really want to move quickly.