Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Faith leaders hold signs during a news conference about the Child Tax Credit, December 15, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
In my feature piece on how the Inflation Reduction Act was the result of decades-old policy fights, one set of voices was curiously silent: the think tank leaders, single-issue advocates, and ideological organizations known as “the groups.” The IRA, in the end, was an inside operation that wasn’t penetrated by outside forces.
This wasn’t for lack of trying. Enormous resources—hundreds of millions of dollars, but also the mindshare of thousands of people not in the administration or in Congress—were put to work trying to optimize the Biden agenda. With the one partial exception of climate, this effort didn’t succeed in piercing the Capitol Hill bubble. And many group leaders have been left to wonder why.
The groups were set up for triumph in Joe Biden’s first term, because they fuse so tightly with the Democratic policymaking machine. But the failure was apparent because of the nature of the policy itself, and the way the groups tried to make an impression upon it. The “failure to launch,” as one progressive leader described it, was preordained.
The Democratic Party needs strong outside partnerships that can support policy design and popular mobilization. If the groups pick the wrong strategic paths, the entire progressive project suffers. So the lessons they draw in the aftermath, rather than just basking in the glow of perceived victory, are critically important.
BIDEN BEGAN HIS PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN with a thin policy apparatus, running mainly on ridding the nation of Donald Trump. Once he outlasted the field, dozens of analysts and future public officials were recruited into volunteer policy committees to provide recommendations. Volunteers were pulled largely from the groups.
Unlike past election cycles where the progressive/establishment divide festered, it was a unifying moment, with Biden adopting many of his rivals’ positions. “We were able to shift the mainstream narrative of what we need and deserve in a society,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who was part of the Biden-Sanders unity task force, which helped align mainstream Democratic and progressive preferences.
The work created an exhaustive list of ideas; the unity task force recommendations were 110 pages long. As a candidate, Biden tried to instill order on the chaos, announcing four pillars for his Build Back Better framework: investments in “made in America” manufacturing, clean energy and infrastructure, racial equity, and caregiving. This recognized the role of Black voters in his nomination win, pursued industrial revitalization as the core economic agenda, and gave credit to the groups that made care work an unavoidable challenge.
But the election’s aftermath unfolded in unorthodox fashion. Democrats didn’t secure Senate control until the Georgia special election victories on January 5, 2021. The next day, rioters stormed the Capitol. The dual uncertainties—the possibility of a governing trifecta and the impossibility of moving forward at Trump’s federal agencies, many of which were obstinately against information-sharing amid stolen election claims—interrupted momentum for a broader blueprint of what Biden wanted to accomplish, both administratively and legislatively.
Once Democrats won total, if narrow, control, the administration scrambled to spin up pandemic relief so as to revitalize what was still a struggling economy. Democrats did not want to skimp on recovery like they did after the Great Recession. Also, promises like another round of stimulus checks were key to the Georgia victory, and needed to be delivered.
The comprehensiveness of Build Back Better was both its strength, because everyone had a stake in it, and its weakness, because it was unwieldy and incomprehensible to message.
The American Rescue Plan’s development and passage was the all-consuming policy through March, delaying even the rollout of Build Back Better until near the end of the first one hundred days. Biden was all too happy to forestall the usual priority-setting conversation; since his days in the Senate, he has been known to defer decision-making until the last possible moment. He also was deferential to Congress’s policymaking function. As a result, whatever limitations the “four pillars” approach was supposed to place on the process didn’t take.
The initial legislative frameworks, delivered as two campaign-style blog posts in late March and late April, were named the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan. They summed to around $4 trillion, leaving no conceivable issue behind, including the full climate and care economy agendas; extensions of the Rescue Plan’s welfare tax credits and Affordable Care Act improvements; a giant road, transit, school, water, and broadband infrastructure improvement plan; a $200 billion-plus housing construction provision; a broad education agenda featuring two years of free community college; an entire separate bipartisan bill to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing and expand science funding; workforce development; tribal funding; and child nutrition. Oh, and a redrawing of the entire individual and corporate tax code to boot.
The Rescue Plan ate up one of two budget reconciliation bills available in the first two years. There was some hope for bipartisan cooperation on infrastructure, but every other plank of the Democratic party platform would have to fit into one let-it-ride legislative moon shot, the biggest bill in American history for the thinnest congressional margin in American history.
Yet when each committee in the House got a markup session to add parts under their jurisdiction, committee chairs knew that the package was the only bill leaving Congress solely along party lines. It was therefore the one opportunity to advance long-sought pet projects. This is how worthwhile but out-of-place initiatives got into the bill, like forestry restoration, support for school principals, air quality monitoring, funding for palliative and hospice care nurses, a next-generation 911 system, community violence prevention, urban parks, assistance for the Pacific salmon, and money to purchase an icebreaker in the Great Lakes.
It was in a way an attempt to cater to the groups. But it wound up disempowering them.
THE COMPREHENSIVENESS OF BUILD BACK BETTER was both its strength, because everyone had a stake in it, and its weakness, because it was unwieldy and incomprehensible to message. When everything is on the table, energies cannot be focused on individual policies. One progressive organization leader told me that they never knew whether to write reports on a Build Back Better provision, fearing it would come out of the final compromise and then be a waste of time.
Media discussion about the bill was dominated by intrigue and gossip. “The policy agenda was a list of line items,” the progressive leader said. “The fight was over the relative level of those numbers and not people.” Caregiving groups, which were just starting to build policy momentum and educate the public, were particularly frustrated. It’s hard to connect personal struggles to systemic failures that government could remedy when everyone’s preoccupied with dollar figures. “If I knew the answer to this problem, we would be in a different place,” said Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
What the groups wanted most was to prevent the knife fight that could easily ensue when things get cut. They built a coalition specifically to counteract this called Real Recovery Now, seeded with millions of dollars to both praise Biden and push him to do more. “It was supposed to be climate, care, and immigration,” said one person who was involved. “So those three would lock arms, and not sell each other out when things got tough.” But immigration was one of the few pieces left out of the Jobs and Families plans; creating a budgetary mechanism for a path to citizenship that would survive the reconciliation process was a long shot. And finding legislative partners to take an “all or nothing” stand was unrealistic.
Amazingly, this effort had real money behind it, although today barely anyone can recall it. Along with a second effort known as Building Back Together, led by political consultants and Biden veterans, and other one-off initiatives, there was at least $150 million in paid media and organizing across the groups to get Build Back Better passed. The ads, which dominated states with swing senators, failed to boost tanking Biden approval ratings or move the needle on member support. “There were millions of dollars in TV ads that went into West Virginia and Arizona that were absolutely a waste of money,” said progressive strategist Mike Lux. “You have to start with the political dynamics, what is the power analysis, what do the people voting care about.”
Real Recovery Now was supposed to bring bodies to the fight. While some say it succeeded in generating urgency in Congress, others were skeptical. “It didn’t build any power, it made a bunch of ad consultants rich,” said one person involved. Major mobilizations like a free concert with Saweetie in Philadelphia, or a demonstration with a mascot dressed as the Build Back Better bill on the Capitol steps, failed to generate momentum. “We chose a piece of paper to manifest the problem with the party, not a man with a hard hat,” said one progressive observer.
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) fist-bumps a man wearing a “Build Back Better Bill” costume on the House steps as she arrives at the Capitol, November 19, 2021.
TWO CASE STUDIES ARE EMBLEMATIC of the groups’ struggle to transfer momentum into policy victory. The family care crisis had been building in the U.S. since before Richard Nixon vetoed a national child care bill in 1971. Affiliated groups spent years writing papers, educating voters, raising awareness, and winning policies at the state level. Getting a presidential candidate to elevate caregiving was a “breakthrough” for the movement, Ai-jen Poo told me, and a testament to how the groups can organize usefully when they have a clear target.
There were model bills to use. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), a preschool teacher before running for Senate during the 1992 “Year of the Woman,” introduced a comprehensive bill in 2017 modeled on ideas from the Center for American Progress, guaranteeing that nobody would pay above 7 percent of their income for child care and ensuring a living wage for workers. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-NY) FAMILY Act proposal created a national paid family and medical leave program, funded through a small payroll tax. Care economy items even got seed money in Biden’s American Rescue Plan in the form of demonstration projects that helped reinforce that a long-term investment could work.
But Gillibrand didn’t have a committee chair, and her idea of a payroll tax violated the Biden pledge to raise no taxes on people making $400,000 a year or less. So House Ways and Means chair Richie Neal (D-MA) filled the gap, changing Gillibrand’s plan from a public to a privately administered benefit. This would have created a huge payday for the life insurance industry, which administers private paid leave benefits; they happen to be huge backers of Neal. The benefit later got narrowed down from 12 weeks to four, and included an income test that could have left behind around one-third of all new mothers. Gillibrand tried wrestling the proposal back, but by then it was too late.
Design hurdles also plagued the child care plan. In order to give time to find more child care workers, families above a certain percentage of the state median income would get no subsidy for the first three years. The provisions requiring higher pay for child care workers guaranteed that they would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars more in that time frame. That “subsidy cliff” was present in the model bill, which took its inspiration from the way the Affordable Care Act subsidized health insurance. (The ACA’s subsidy cliff, ironically, was fixed in the final Inflation Reduction Act.)
After criticism from Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, the cliff was moved upward so it affected fewer families. Melissa Boteach, a vice president at the National Women’s Law Center who helped develop child care policies previously at the Center for American Progress, chalked up the controversy to having to effectively build the plane while it was in the air. “If you’re dumping everyone into the system at once, there’s no workforce to support that,” she said. “You’d give everybody a voucher and there’d be no child care to be found.”
Boteach said that doing nothing would cause the price of child care to rise 14 percent by 2025, putting a vital necessity even further out of reach for many. “Families get a hit either way,” she said. Yet in this crucible environment, the groups couldn’t focus congressional attention on that reality. And, when spending was artificially ratcheted down to appease Joe Manchin, care advocates endorsed making the caregiving programs cheaper to just get them started. But with care work, the net effect would have been making the programs worse, and therefore less likely to build a constituency. Scrapping the program may end up being better than annoying families with stingy benefits while locking in a poor design through path dependency.
THE CASE OF THE CHILD TAX CREDIT (CTC) is even more agonizing. The main policy innovation, outlined by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Michael Bennet (D-CO) in 2017, was to increase the payout and structure the benefit as a monthly payment, helping families with financial needs throughout the year rather than just at tax time. In the Rescue Plan, Democrats actually established this for 2021, just as they did with the Affordable Care Act insurance subsidy expansion. The party was confident that both measures would prove so popular, and rolling them back so drastic, that no Congress would ever let them expire.
Why did that gambit work with the ACA but not the CTC? First off, because the CTC was more expensive, it only lasted until the end of 2021, far from any election cycle. The ACA subsidies were set up in the Rescue Plan for two years, so consumers would have seen them go away right before the midterms. Second, as the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt noted, “The expanded premium subsidies created a middle-class constituency. It’s not a surprise that the middle class have more political clout than poor people.”
As with much of the agenda, Manchin’s dim view of poor people’s choices clearly doomed the effort. He told colleagues that parents would just use the extra money to buy drugs. At one point, White House officials pleaded with him to just keep the monthly payment, because if he thought people would be irresponsible, they would be more irresponsible with a lump sum. Manchin’s approximate response was that if families got the tax credit once a year, at least they’d have to work for the other 11 months until they received it.
With paid leave and child support dead, only the climate groups can claim a major victory.
At a more fundamental level, Manchin’s fears were, if not fully expressed, hanging in the back of the minds of many establishment Democrats and wonks. “The tires hadn’t been kicked in the entirety of the econo-blob,” said one supporter. “When the momentum was happening, people weren’t going to stand in front of it and say, ‘I dissent.’ But they were never really persuaded.”
Dorian Warren, a progressive leader with Community Change and the Economic Security Project, thought the groups failed to focus on making the enhanced CTC a success. “If you can’t claim a win, you don’t do the work of claiming to ordinary people the role of government, and don’t give people a sense of agency,” he said. Because families who didn’t file with the IRS were eligible for CTC payments, and no navigators or resources to publicize that were in the Rescue Plan, work actually needed to be done to maximize the scattershot take-up. “What would that look like, if we had a couple hundred organizers going into communities?” Warren said.
The hundreds of millions of dollars spent to run questionably valuable policy ads could have helped get people money to which they were entitled. Nobody else could have done this but the groups. The CTC was a big hit with those who actually got the money, slashing poverty rates for Black and Latino families in particular. But it was curiously walled off from the public debate, with muted messaging from the groups. “Often when we win on policy, we go on to the next policy fight,” Warren said of progressives. “We have serious issues with governing power.”
With paid leave and child support dead, only the climate groups can claim a major victory. Yet as I explained in my feature article, the IRA is quite far from their original policy design. Originally, they pushed for a framework built around investment, standards, and justice, but the justice portion was cut down and standards eliminated almost entirely. Activists deserve enormous credit for putting the climate emergency at the top of the political agenda, but ultimately they had only limited influence over policy.
A FEW BROAD LESSONS EMERGE from the groups’ struggles on Build Back Better. First, omnibus pieces of legislation with dozens of moving parts are just suboptimal. They are in a sense inevitable because of the dysfunction of the Senate and the need to package policy into reconciliation mega-bills. But that clearly didn’t work. Worse, it’s become something of a default setting for the groups. Voting rights legislation was agglomerated together in H.R. 1; the PRO Act throws together all kinds of labor law reforms; comprehensive immigration reform has been a perennial. These have not garnered policy or political success.
The way policy formation happens, with “tables” of stakeholders coming together with their ideas, inevitably leads to these pastiches. As a result, they are difficult for messaging, difficult for generating popular support, and difficult to influence once thrown into Congress’s lap. “You lose political momentum if you put your chips into one big thing,” said Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project. Thinking smaller would do the groups a lot of good.
That may mean allowing priorities to be set. In the end, few progressive groups raised objection to the narrowed Inflation Reduction Act, happy to bank wins and build power for the future. Making that decision at the outset would have saved a year of headache and falling approval ratings.
Next, every dollar spent on issue ad campaigns could be a dollar spent on organizing. The public has not shown an aptitude for keeping large legislative initiatives in their head. Permanent campaigns that define both party goals and the enemies of progress have a greater ability to build off shared sets of values, Hauser said. “The tax system is corrupt and the rich are taking advantage of us,” he offered as an example. “You can deploy that for a reconciliation bill funded by taxes.”
Finally, the groups must play the long game it takes to get to the policy winner’s circle. It’s borderline immoral to force huge challenges to wait their turn, but until Washington itself is fixed, the groups must set their sights over the horizon. They must take the record of a temporary policy, like the single year of the Child Tax Credit, or take the mere elevation of their agenda item, like with caregiving, as fuel for future fights.
Some progressive group leaders certainly understand this. “I think we won generational progress on the narrative when it comes to care,” said Ai-jen Poo. “What’s next is to win the policy. We’re not going back.”
