Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment.

Hey everyone, we'll go back to the show.

Kicked off with a great episode of Julius Crine this past Tuesday.

And now we are continuing our quest to delve into the big ideas

that are going to define American politics moving into the 2025 year and the second front presidency.

One of my favorite topics aside from abundance is this idea called state capacity.

Basically has to deal with this question of, to what degree can the American government, whether it's federal, state, or local, actually achieve the goals at once.

So if the Biden administration says we want to build thousands of EV battery charging stations,

can we actually build them?

If we say we want to build more ships for the Navy, can we actually build them?

If we say we're going to spend $42 billion on rural broadband, can we actually deliver that in the first place?

I think we look back to the Biden presidency and the struggles to get political reward for the big bills they passed.

I think it's really at the center of this state capacity challenge.

Despite all of the billions, billions of dollars of funding, the rural broadband wasn't delivered, the charging stations weren't there. The chips fabs did not go up.

The money was not spent in ways it needed to be spent. And there was a real gap here. So I can think

if we're kind of understanding this podcast theme of focusing on the abundance agenda, we should

understand that abundance agenda is about saying, here are our goals. We want to have lots of manufacturing.

We want to have energy. We want to have lots of manufacturing. We want to have energy. We want

to have costs get lower. The question that state capacity brings in is to what degree can the

state actually do these things and how is it actually going to work? So with that in mind,

I've got two great guests, my Niskanen colleague, Jen Pauke and Andrew Greenway. They have a new

report from Niskanon called The How We Need Now,

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