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The request was both audacious and auspicious. A company looking to build a cluster of data centers in Utah needed a lot of electricity to make them run — or more than 25 percent of the state’s current supply.

“An impossible number — there’s no way,” Spencer Cox, Utah’s governor, thought at the time. He started asking other state governors if they, too, were getting these “crazy requests” for power from companies hoping to cash in on the artificial intelligence boom.

They were, and that’s when Cox knew something big needed to happen. Last fall, about a year after the data center developer’s ask, Cox unveiled a multi-pronged strategy to double Utah’s power production over the next decade. And the governor isn’t just moving fast on energy supply. He’s also vowed to construct 35,000 “starter” homes in five years, and to streamline regulatory and permitting processes to enable these and other urgently needed infrastructure projects.

Cox recounted this story at a Policy Forum hosted by the ��ɫֱ�� Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) on May 15. The daylong event, titled “The Abundance Agenda: Bridging Research and Policy to Build More in America,” focused on a growing policy movement that counts Cox, a Republican, among its champions. The “abundance agenda” is based on the idea that governments at all levels — federal, state and local — aren’t fulfilling the country’s most basic needs. And the way to change that is to cut through the red tape, disempower special interest groups, reject zero-sum thinking and otherwise remove chokepoints that impede progress and deepen political divides.

“Our country has a building problem,” Neale Mahoney, the Trione Director at SIEPR, told the audience of public officials, business leaders, academics and students in his opening remarks.

Framing the policy challenge, Mahoney, who is also an economics professor in the ��ɫֱ�� School of Humanities and Sciences, wasn’t referring just to home construction. There also isn’t enough energy infrastructure, public transit or manufacturing capacity to meet the country’s economic, environmental and national security goals.

Proponents of the abundance agenda contend there doesn’t have to be winners or losers in the equation. If building more increases supply, it’s possible for all of society to benefit.

“I felt like we [as policymakers] were constantly being presented with false choices,” Cox said in delivering the Policy Forum’s keynote. “We can either build houses or have a high standard of living. We can have energy production or a clean environment. We can reject these false choices.”

Focus on solutions

The pro-growth abundance agenda is gaining momentum. Two new books — Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back by Marc Dunkelman — have brought the niche movement into the mainstream. More recently, 30 members of Congress announced a bipartisan caucus to advance the abundance agenda.

The SIEPR Policy Forum, which featured a of a dozen experts, focused on three areas topping the abundance agenda: more energy, more housing and more industrial capacity, a term that refers to a country’s ability to produce goods at home.

“Abundance is the antithesis of scarcity,” said Derek Kaufman, a former Wall Street executive who founded Inclusive Abundance, a non-profit dedicated to the abundance agenda, in kicking off the event with an overview of the movement.

Scarcity is real, Kaufman acknowledged.

The problem, said Kaufman, is that “much of the scarcity we experience in America today is self-imposed, driven by bad policy choices, misaligned incentives, powerful special interests, faulty narratives and political gridlock.” Both sides of the political aisle are to blame, he said, whether its environmentalists on the left blocking development or protectionists on the right supporting tariffs.

“We see an extreme aversion to causing [harm to] any specific person or desert tortoise or piece of landscape, but that ends up causing diffuse harm to everyone,” Kaufman said.

So what does an abundance approach look like in practice?

Consider housing. Chis Elmendorf, a law professor at UC-Davis and a panelist on a session on housing, noted that the net increase in housing stock in the U.S. between 1980 and 2020 “is approximately zero.” In the meantime, rents across the country have surged 30-50 percent in the last five years, and homelessness is up 30 percent nationwide in the last two years.

The answer, the panelists agreed, is that state and local governments need to move faster and more aggressively to clear the obstacles to housing development. This means, for example, speeding up approvals for new housing, rezoning more land, getting rid of impact fees and onerous demands on private developers to build more than housing, and defanging not-in-my-backyard opposition that often derail projects. There’s a limited role, too, for the federal government in providing tax incentives.

In Utah, Cox has required cities to develop affordable housing plans and is cracking down on those that don’t comply. He said he’s about to have an “uncomfortable, hard conversation” with 40 mayors who have resisted the mandate. His message to them: “We try to do it the nice way and if you want us to do it the heavy way, we’ll do that, too.”

Energy production: ‘We need it all’

Then there’s the worsening energy crisis, the scope of which became clear when Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, recently warned members of Congress that AI is on track to consume 99 percent of the world’s current energy supply.

At the Policy Forum, Lisa Hansmann, a director at Foundry Logic and current SIEPR Policy Fellow, summed up the problem: “For the first time in over two decades, the most pressing market policy issue in energy is not one of insufficient demand but one of insufficient supply.”

The panelists for the session on energy delved into what can and should be done, like reducing regulations, streamlining permitting processes, and breaking the monopoly power of utilities. They also talked about the promise of technological innovations, such as commercialized nuclear fusion and off-the-grid solar microgrids, which rely on solar panels, batteries and small gas generators.

There are also ways to do more with existing energy capacity, said Tyler Norris, a researcher at Duke University who estimated that about half of the U.S. power system “on average, in any given hour, sits unused.” Norris recently co-authored — one that’s attracting a lot of buzz — that finds that a huge amount of energy could be freed up if data centers and others temporarily reduced their power use when systemwide demand is very high.

“We need to do everything to squeeze as much as we can out of the system [while also investing] in miracle things,” agreed Rick Needham, the chief commercial officer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which recently announced plans to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Virgina. “It’s a false argument to say you should do one versus the other. We need it all.”

The devil is in the trade-offs

The speakers weren’t pollyannish about what’s possible in pursuing an abundance agenda: There are hard choices to be made to build things faster and cheaper — whether it comes to power plants or housing or public transit.

“I’ll be the first the admit that there are some processes that are low-hanging fruit that we should get rid of, that are purely time-wasting and serve no purpose other than slowing things down,” said Bharat Ramamurti, who served as deputy director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration.

But does that mean eliminating or rolling back, for example, construction worker safety requirements? “Very, very quickly you get to some very challenging trade-offs,” Ramamurti said in a fireside chat at the forum.

Another potential hurdle is whether government officials are willing to risk voter backlash for adopting policies that some groups inevitably won’t like. That’s one reason Utah mayors and other local communities around the country are resisting mandates to build more affordable, high-density housing.

As an abundance believer, Cox isn’t having it.

His message to recalcitrant politicians: “Tell [your constituents] that we have this terrible governor and he’s making us approve these projects that need to be done. I’m okay being the bad guy on this one.”