Todd Tucker
@toddntucker
Director, Industrial Policy & Trade, @RooseveltInstitute.org, @RooseveltForward.org. Political scientist of economic transitions, administrative states, Bidenomics, Trumpnomics. PhD.
Jonathan Chait is right: abolish the Senate. Senate malapportionment has always been bad, and it's slated to get worse. It's a great time to begin thinking about how to fix it (and there are fixes that don't involve full abolition).
NEW from @joepeck.co.uk & me @rooseveltinstitute.org: One year after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, we're off track on emissions commitments & tax credits have been pared back. But all is not lost: more clean energy/manufacturing investments are going up than even the original IRA estimates.
And rallying industry towards the cause of national missions is something that the US also once did, particularly in the FDR era with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).
Steering private capital to better align with the public interest in the boardrooms themselves is something many of the US' top trading partners already do.
The latest idea in this space is @BernieSanders' proposal to deposit 50% of the shares of leading AI companies into a new sovereign wealth fund. While it could mean $$, the bigger reason to consider this is greater democratic control over our era's most disruptive technology.
But the tool of equity stakes are very common internationally, including in other advanced economies. And it can help government move at the speed of markets and shareholders.
The administration has also made virtually no attempt to rationalize its actions.
Trump moving into having the US government take equity stakes in private companies is controversial, to put it mildly.
NEW @thenation.com: @elizabethwwilkins.bsky.social and I get into why public equity stakes are as much about democratizing the economy as fixing market failures.
Fun to wrap up a short stint at LSE's Programme on Cohesive Capitalism, working out of the rechristened Sir Arthur Lewis Building - one of my heroes.
We identify five reasons for American policymakers to continue to be bullish about manufacturing.
Every manufacturing job supports four times the comparable number for the service sector.
Even looking just at jobs, manufacturing continues to command a wage premium at all levels of education, after introducing appropriate controls.
Manufacturing contributes more than other sectors on a per-job basis to value added (76 percent greater), exports (688 percent greater), and R&D spending (1,288 percent greater).
We find that conversation too narrow. The US manufacturing sector is still the second largest in the world, the second most important in domestic output, the leading funder of research and development (R&D), the top export sector, and the second largest employer of engineers.
A lot of the debate over manufacturing policy in the US focuses on this graph, which shows that continually fewer American workers are in manufacturing relative to services.
Finally, as an OG global justice activist, there is a poetry that today - the 2026 Bank spring meetings - is the 27th anniversary of labor activists shutting down DC partly over the World Bank's anti-industrial policy stance. Arc, moral universe, bend, justice, something? Dunno, but I'll take it.
As I explore in my piece, that's a major about face from past prescriptions - though it's still missing some of what makes structural changes (such as the energy transition that Jones-Peck explore) unique. Full Bank report here: openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/pub...
In my piece, I explore the bipartisan history of the Davis-Bacon Act, and how it survived to this day - stabilizing construction work - and why other New Deal era policies aimed at stabilizing other industries (NIRA, Walsh-Healey Act) have been eroded. (Hint: it's the courts.)
In the past, when the Court issued opinions with such sweeping economic implications, Congress stepped into the void to figure out, e.g. whether and how to issue back pay. Today's Congress is unlikely to be so nimble. @stevevladeck.bsky.social with the history.
The whole thing is going to do vanishingly little to make any one's life better or cheaper, since Trump is already reimposing the tariffs under other authorities.
Finally, the liberal bloc was in the majority against the tariffs, and got uncomfortably close to endorsing the major questions doctrine (though they protested otherwise). The use of emergency powers to resolve domestic economic problems dates back to FDR, but that didn't get much weight from them.
A second right-wing bloc - in dissent - preferred to keep the major questions doctrine right where it was, as a cudgel against domestic progressive priorities like fighting climate change and pandemics. They sided with Trump, on the basis of (IMO) the fairest interpretation of the law and history.
One right-wing bloc - in the majority - used the decision as an opportunity to extend the deregulatory impulse of the major questions doctrine into beating back MAGA priorities.
Kavanaugh notes that the (libertarian law firms') plaintiffs' non-delegation doctrine arguments would invalidate basically all tariff authority - not just IEEPA.
Kavanaugh does the SCOTUS math in a footnote: the three most MAGA justices won't apply major questions to foreign affairs, and the liberal justices (say they) won't apply it at all.
Kavanaugh suggests that Roberts is creating a Trump or tariff exception to non-deference in foreign affairs.