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abundance
‘One More Billionaire Front Group’: Centrist Dems Mocked Over New Initiative Led by Corporate Lobbyist
Next American Era will be headed by Cheri Bustos, former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who has lobbied for powerful corporations.
Feb 09, 2026
Centrist Democrats led by Cheri Bustos, a corporate lobbyist who previously headed her party's campaign arm in the US House, are launching a policy and advocacy organization aimed at pressuring Democrats to embrace the kind of "pro-growth" deregulatory agenda associated with the so-called "abundance" movement.
The new organization, named Next American Era, was formed "with an eye toward 2028" as Democrats work to recover from their crushing defeat to President Donald Trump in the 2024 elections, Axios reported Sunday, noting that the group describes itself as a "hub for center-left policy and advocacy."
Bustos, whose lobbying client list in 2025 included OpenAI and Larry Ellison's Oracle, said Next American Era plans to "air issue-focused ads during the midterm elections and the 2028 presidential campaign, but it won't endorse candidates," Axios reported.
Bustos said the founders of Next American Era share "many of the same principles as the Abundance movement," a loose assortment of organizations and individuals—including large corporations and prominent billionaires—broadly supporting views expressed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their 2025 book Abundance.
"She said cutting red tape, streamlining regulations, and supporting workforce training are among the top policy goals of her group, which is structured as a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit," Axios reported.
Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank, called those proposed objectives "some of the weakest economic policies we've polled in the last 18 months."
"Not sure why you’d want to put ads out on these for candidates unless it’s an opp," Owens added.
pic.twitter.com/eWbdnyiNig
— Alex Jacquez (@AlexSJacquez) February 9, 2026
Abundance takes aim at what Klein and Thompson characterize as an overly burdensome regulatory approach that is purportedly hindering progress toward more affordable housing, public transportation systems, and a renewable energy revolution. Critics, such as antitrust advocate Zephyr Teachout, have criticized the so-called abundance agenda as far too ambiguous.
"I still can’t tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small-bore and correct (we need zoning reform) or nontrivial and deeply regressive (we need deregulation) or whether there is room within abundance for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American potential," Teachout wrote in her review of the book for Washington Monthly.
Critics have also noted the enthusiasm with which corporations and billionaires have glommed onto the abundance narrative.
"The ambiguity of the abundance agenda’s policy proposals, strategic or otherwise, allows private interests to leverage 'abundance' as a Trojan Horse for their preferences," the Revolving Door Project observed last year. "The growing abundance movement has institutional support from fossil fuel and Big Tech affiliates, including the sprawling Koch network and crypto and AI industry players."
Axios observed that Next American Era is one of "several center-left groups" that "have popped up or expanded in the past 18 months, including the think tank Searchlight Institute, Majority Democrats, and WelcomePAC."
"Just one more billionaire front group. Just one more neoliberal policy shop," reporter and political analyst Austin Ahlman wrote mockingly on social media in response to the launch of Next American Era. "Just one more polling outfit cooking the numbers on behalf of corporate interests and we’ll win bro, I promise."
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Warren Warns Democrats Against Letting Billionaires Dictate Their Economic Agenda
"If Democrats want to win elections, they need to read the room—or I should say, they need to read literally any room anywhere in America that isn’t filled with big donors."
Jan 12, 2026
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday warned the Democratic Party against reshaping its economic agenda in the hopes of winning over billionaire donors.
In a speech delivered before the National Press Club in Washington, DC, Warren (D-Mass.) argued that watering down a progressive economic agenda to appeal to big-money donors made little sense at a time when the richest in America are taking ever greater shares of wealth and US families are struggling to keep their heads above water.
Warren pointed to many US elites maintaining friendly relationships with the late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, even after he pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor, as evidence of a broken system.
"Over the past generation, the wealthy have avoided accountability time and again," she argued. "Regular Americans must play by every rule or face real consequences. You don’t need to read every news article about Jeffrey Epstein and his good buddies like [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers and [President] Donald Trump to understand how consistently rich and powerful insiders protect each other, regardless of politics and regardless of how obscene the situation has become."
Warren acknowledged that Democrats needed to broaden their appeal to more voters given that they lost the popular vote to Trump for the first time in 2024, but she argued that targeting wealthy donors would not accomplish that goal.
"There are two visions for what a big tent means," she said. "One vision says that we should shape our agenda and temper our rhetoric to flatter any fabulously rich person looking for a political party that will entrench their own economic interests. The other vision says we must acknowledge the economic failures of the current rigged system, aggressively challenge the status quo, and chart a clear path for big, structural change."
Warren also criticized the "abundance" agenda that has been promoted by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein over the last several months as a way to fix Democrats' electoral woes.
The senator began her critique by touting what she said were good points that Klein and Abundance co-author Derek Thompson make about government needing to work more simply and efficiently to deliver benefits.
However, Warren said that what their analysis of government failures has often missed is that there are powerful interests that are working to keep these inefficiencies from being addressed.
"For years, I've fought for a simple, free government tax filing system so no one has to pay a couple of hundred bucks just to file their taxes," she explained. "Every step of the way, the giant tax prep companies have thrown up roadblocks to stop it. And when the [Internal Revenue Service] finally built a free—and wildly popular—filing option for American taxpayers, the tax prep companies swooped in to kill it the minute Donald Trump took office."
Warren also said that many major Democratic donors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, have been latching onto "abundance" in order to drive the conversation in the party away from US wealth inequality.
"We are now in a new election cycle, and according to Axios, Reid Hoffman is sending everyone he knows a copy of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book on Abundance and backing pro-abundance candidates," Warren explained. "On his podcast, Hoffman has used the framework to argue against regulations that slow down data center construction. That’s right—when families are already getting crushed by rising costs and a data center boom means even higher utility costs... Hoffman wants Democratic candidates to stand with the billionaires for higher costs."
The senator then said that "if Democrats want to win elections, they need to read the room—or I should say, they need to read literally any room anywhere in America that isn’t filled with big donors."
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Affordability, Abundance, and a New American Agenda
A growing number of Americans are ready for transformative change. Now is the time to forge a mighty movement of movements, one aimed squarely at political action.
Dec 08, 2025
Progressives of various stripes are attracted these days to several political ideas that must be handled with care or they could come back to haunt us. Considering these ideas points to the need for a new agenda for Americans concerned about climate and the environment.
Key Differences Between 'Affordability' and 'Abundance'
"Affordability" is a huge, legitimate concern for Americans and those who purport to represent us politically. Many progressives are using "affordability" as the rallying cry and point to high prices and inflation. As the success of Zohran Mamdani in NYC shows, it is a powerful political issue, and rightly so.
As I write, Trump just confirmed all this by calling affordability a hoax concocted by Democrats.
But here is something on which we should keep an eye. The underlying problem is not inflation or prices but simply that in our land of affluence, most Americans don't have enough money to live normal, secure lives. Progressives should follow Bernie Sanders’ and Robert Reich’s lead and focus heavily on that and on the vast social inequality government policies have allowed to accumulate. In addition to making prices honest, there are many, many ways for government to get actual money into the hands of people who need it. (Disclosure: in 1968—which feels just like yesterday—I helped draft model negative income tax legislation!)
Meanwhile, the "abundance movement" is a growing political force. There are already examples of it seeking to undermine public protection regulations and other guardrails that are alleged to slow or thwart progress towards abundance.
A looming issue here is that abundance advocates are moving to take advantage of affordability concerns and seeking to draw strength and momentum from those concerns. Abundance advocates must be forced at every turn to answer "abundance of what, for whom, and at what costs?"
The easy path to more and more has always been overall economic growth. It is not hard to imagine a focus on abundance supporting an effort to push GDP growth into ever higher gears. But GDP is a terrible guide to creating more abundance where it is needed. Lots of things do indeed need to grow and become more abundant, but many of them are things not reflected in GDP. And lots of things that are included in GDP need to shrink, and many of them, like fossil fuel use, need to shrink dramatically.
Also, a focus on creating abundance can implicitly endorse a national obscenity—our boundless consumerism. We should remember Wordsworth’s warning from long ago, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Americans should now be moving, belatedly, from a consumer society to a conserver society.
Here is my third issue. A position progressives often take is to defend climate action because it “produces jobs,” “lowers energy costs," and in general “helps the economy.” That is often true, but such arguments can be a problem. These arguments can leave environmental and climate advocates in a bad place. We cannot allow ourselves to appear to enshrine the primacy of economic values. We don’t want to be able to save the climate only if it helps the economy. Societies must act to prevent global climate chaos, even if their climate actions slow or hurt the economy in certain ways. Similarly, societies cannot let climate progress be halted or undone whenever the economy heads south.
Also, recall that the US economy still runs on about 82% fossil energy. Doing what now must be done on climate—achieving net zero fossil emissions by 2050, just 25 years away—is likely to be problematic both for low energy prices and the economy. Rather than over relying on the economic benefits of climate action, progressives should focus on measures to ensure economic security for Americans during the dramatic transition ahead, ensuring sufficient income for a decent life for those now living paycheck to paycheck or worse.
(Of course, what we are seeing today from theTrump Administration is the worst of all worlds: a determined attack on all climate progress despite its national economic benefits, all in an effort to sustain profitability of the fossil and AI industries while venomously undoing climate initiatives of the Obama and Biden Administrations.)
Past Failures and a Better Path for the Future
These issues bring into focus three great failures of US climate and environmental advocacy. I have been associated with this advocacy for many years, so I bear some responsibility. I hope these shortcomings will now be addressed with urgency.
1. First is the failure over recent decades to build a powerful political force for climate action. US environmental groups have been weak politically and especially weak when it comes to climate. We should blame section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code for some of that. Except around the edges, our leading groups have not broken out of the 501(c)(3) cocoon and its proscription of political activity and electioneering. The leaders of our environmental and climate groups should now come together and build a powerful, politically engaged movement, a fusion of forces, first among themselves and then with allied progressive constituencies.
2. We can see failure also in the absence of any real campaign to dethrone GDP as a measure of national progress and to replace it with an alternative like the Genuine Progress Indicator or something better. As Herman Daly pointed out, we have been living in a period of "uneconomic growth" for quite a while, with costs of aggregate GDP growth exceeding benefits. The best way to get beyond our current GDP fetish is to adopt a new measure or measures of national well-being and progress. One such measure should be a monetized one so that it can be compared quarterly with GDP. In various economies, analyses have shown that in recent decades while GDP rose wellbeing has tended to stagnate or even decline.
3. The third, and biggest, of our failures is the failure to appreciate and act on the underlying reasons for environmental decline. We environmentalists must confront a haunting paradox. Our groups have grown ever stronger, more sophisticated, and better funded, winning many battles along the way. Yet, 55 years after the first Earth Day, we find ourselves on the cusp of a ruined planet.
How can we make sense of that? We must begin by asking anew: What is an environmental issue? The answer must surely include this: “any issue that significantly affects environmental performance and outcomes.” When answered that way, focusing on roadblocks to environmental solutions, environmental issues will include: 1) our distorted political system; 2) a pervasive economic disparity and insecurity that paralyzes political action; and 3) the materialistic and anthropocentric values that dominate our culture. Environmental degradation is also powerfully driven by a triple imperative: 4) GDP growth at almost any cost, 5) ever-enlarging corporate profit, and 6) insatiable consumerism.
These six factors form an interacting, mutually supportive complex and are dominant features of our current system of political economy. It is no wonder that a frequent banner at climate demonstrations is “System Change, Not Climate Change!”
Regarding our political system, consider the following. When economic inequality mocks political equality, democratic progress is difficult. When corporate power dwarfs people power, democratic progress is difficult. When big money is central to campaign success, democratic progress is difficult. When the voting public is subjected to repeated lies and endless misinformation and propaganda, democratic functioning is difficult. When future generations and the natural world are not accorded political rights, democracy is deprived and unrepresentative.
These are among the underlying, root causes of our environmental decline and the climate crisis to which the US is the dominant contributor. If we hope to ever succeed at the level needed in our climate and other efforts, we must find ways to address these systemic issues, which to date our movement has largely ignored.
As I view America’s political landscape today, I think there are growing numbers of Americans who are ready for transformative change. We see that in the crowds Bernie Sanders motivates, in the many devoted followers of Bishop William Barber, and in the banners and signs at No Kings. Their numbers will continue to grow as the appalling horror show of the Trump administration continues and the need for deep change is laid bare. The message to progressive leaders, I believe, is carpe diem. Seize this day. Now is the time to forge a mighty movement of movements, one aimed squarely at political action. Those who are members of progressive organizations might well ask their leaders to get this job done.Keep ReadingShow Less
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