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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
The Abundance Movement’s Deregulatory Deceit
How Green Amendments, not rollbacks, can help usher in an era of true abundance.
Oct 15, 2025
The nation’s halting and uneven clean energy rollout—exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s hostility to anything green—threatens our prosperity, our climate, and our communities. Left unchecked, rising temperatures—driven largely by fossil fuels and the industries that burn them—will destroy ecosystems, disrupt our economy, and destabilize our society.
Some opportunistic politicians think they have a solution in the latest media fad, the so-called “Abundance” movement. They argue that the rules and regulations put in place to protect the environment are in fact obstacles impeding our ability to build the clean energy our climate needs. Their logic is nonsensical: Cut environmental regulations to protect the environment and unleash energy abundance.
But we’ve been down this path, and it leads not to abundance, but impoverishment. We’ve seen the havoc that unrestricted exploitation of nature brings to our health, our communities, and our environment: Barren hillsides. Air too dangerous to breathe. Workers’ lives devastated, and too often lost. Toxic rivers and underground fires.
In 1971, damage like this led Pennsylvanians to rise up and demand the passage of the state’s Green Amendment. Led by visionary State Sen. Franklin Kury, Pennsylvania became the first state in the nation to enshrine in its constitution a revolutionary recognition of the People’s right to pure water, clean air, and healthy environments, and to create a constitutional obligation for leaders to protect these rights. Pennsylvania’s Green Amendment is now being used to ensure that industry—including a vibrant clean energy sector—is able to advance while also protecting Pennsylvanian’s inalienable right to a clean, safe, and healthy environment, and all the economic benefits that flow therefrom.
Rather than regulatory rollbacks, we need a reorientation—one that advances clean energy abundance without empowering fossil fuels.
But in pushing a stale deregulatory agenda, the Abundance movement threatens to undo the balance healthy environments provide and open the door to a fossil fuel industry more focused on profits than people—an industry that has always overpromised on job creation and economic benefits, while consistently downplaying the harm it causes to our environment and our health.
And make no mistake, the harms are significant. Pollution and environmental degradation can impose debilitating costs through higher rates of childhood cancer, heart disease, asthma, and Alzheimer’s, on top of a broader economic burden and loss of personal well-being.
Moreover, regulatory rollbacks proposed under the false promise of “abundance” will let industry off the hook for its failures while doing nothing to stop companies from attempting to increase profits by foisting the costs of environmental abuses on to the communities they harm. Indeed, far from pushing these companies to meaningfully address project shortcomings, a deregulatory agenda allows them to continue blaming regulation for their failures, however specious the case.
Take for example, the PennEast pipeline, a proposed natural gas pipeline cancelled in 2021. Deregulation advocates blame the inability to secure permits for the project’s failure, but the real issue was a lack of demand. In the absence of genuine need, there was no way to justify the investment, seizure of private property, or harm the project would unleash on the community’s health, economy, or environment.
Faulting regulations that protect communities and prevent wasteful investment for the fossil fuel industry’s failure to deliver is misplaced. Reforming the way that environmental permitting works, even removing the requirement to secure these permits entirely, won’t solve the industry’s fundamental duplicity.
Indeed, in today’s environment—with a federal government that is actively hostile to clean energy, that believes climate change is a hoax, and is fully in thrall to monied interests bent on extracting every dollar possible from the natural world, whatever the consequences to our health, our communities, or our environments—advocating that states roll back environmental protections and shut communities out of the decision-making process is laughably naive at best, and complicit in the resulting harms at worst.
Removing the ability of communities to push back on these harms, and instead counting on the fossil fuel industry to police itself, will not result in abundance for all, but profits for a select few.
Rather than regulatory rollbacks, we need a reorientation—one that advances clean energy abundance without empowering fossil fuels. We must undergird our system with a recognition that all Americans have an inherent right to pure water, clean air, and a healthy environment. That is how Green Amendments will support economic progress while also protecting our environment.
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Musk's xAI Is Showing Us Exactly Why We Need Public Interest Lawsuits
When powerful corporations are able to completely circumvent basic democratic accountability, public interest lawsuits are a final backstop to protect the community’s well-being.
Oct 05, 2025
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center are moving to sue Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company for alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. The company has been accused of illegally operating several dozen diesel-fueled turbines to power Musk’s “Colossus,” a massive data center located on an old industrial lot.
According to SELC, the company operated those generators to power Colossus—and released toxic pollutants—without even applying for a permit to use them.
This entire saga is an excellent example of why public interest lawsuits and strong environmental regulations are critically important. Unfortunately, both are under attack on multiple fronts. The Trump administration and the US Supreme Court have both moved to seriously weaken the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. The White House and the Roberts court, joined by many “supply-side liberals” and proponents of the “abundance agenda,” are also attempting to impeach environmental regulation and public interest lawsuits in the court of public opinion.
Musk’s Memphis misadventures are a case in point of why that’s so dangerous.
No prominent abundance proponent has even attempted to square Musk’s actions with their insistence that we need to remove opportunities to sue to block development.
Colossus went into operation while adroitly sidestepping the democratic process. By dangling promises of tax revenues and economic development, xAI was able to begin operating its massive data center with even some city officials totally oblivious to the process. A company representative who was supposed to speak at a public meeting with the county commission played hooky. Add it all up and it demonstrates how, especially at the local level, powerful corporations are able to completely circumvent basic democratic accountability. In those cases, public interest lawsuits are a final backstop to protect the community’s well-being.
When the government refuses to enforce the laws and allows corporations to run amok, it falls to activists and community groups to force its hand. This is the central premise of Public Citizen founder Ralph Nader’s decades of progressive politics, and something that many centrist Democratic pundits have begun to deride.
What such pundits invariably miss, however, is that despite Nader’s successes, there are still innumerable instances where governments fail to hold powerful corporate interests accountable. In an emblematic example, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their bestseller Abundance that, while Nader’s approach was important in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we are now at a juncture where such litigation serves mostly to delay important policy implementation and no longer serves a critical purpose. But for all too many disproportionately poor and majority-minority communities like South Memphis, a public interest lawsuit of the sort denigrated in sweeping fashion by pundits is their last, and honestly only, means of protecting themselves.
The framework deployed by the abundance movement, which is echoed by the Trump administration and the Supreme Court, assumes away instances like xAI in Memphis. Indeed, no prominent abundance proponent has even attempted to square Musk’s actions with their insistence that we need to remove opportunities to sue to block development.
Unfortunately, Musk’s machinations along the Mississippi are part of a longstanding pattern of the government ignoring, and sometimes engaging in, development that poses acute harms to vulnerable—disproportionately majority-minority and poor—communities. South Memphis has been repeatedly left exposed to toxic waste by exploitative industrial practices and government neglect. The Tennessee Valley Authority dumped its toxic coal ash waste there. The same exact site where Colossus now sits once hosted a polluting factory.
And it isn’t just South Memphis. Across the United States, there are abundant examples of communities hung out to dry. The corridor of petrochemical factories between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, for example, has been dubbed “Cancer Alley” because its residents are subjected to such high levels of carcinogenic pollution. Other areas with heavy fossil fuel infrastructure are called “sacrifice zones” because of how much cancer and chronic disease residents endure.
Even now waste facilities are almost always sited in poor neighborhoods that don’t have the wealth and political capital to block them. Lawsuits are the final bulwark to defend those communities. Calling for them to taken off the table is dangerous, especially with the White House and Supreme Court eager to ape such talking points to justify removing any means of blockading the whims of the powerful.
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Voters Again Shown to Prefer Populism Over Neoliberal 'Abundance' Agenda in New Research
"Majorities of Democrats and independents and two in five Republicans believe the outsized power of billionaires and corporations in our government is a bigger problem than red tape and bureaucracy."
Sep 04, 2025
A new strategy memo written by a progressive think tank and a pair of high-profile Democratic Party operatives makes the latest case that a populist economic message will help the party more than a message centered around the so-called "abundance" agenda, Politico reported on Thursday.
The memo—which was written by Democratic pollster Geoff Garin and Democratic strategist Brian Fallon, in collaboration with Groundwork Collaborative—uses polling and focus group data to argue that a sharp populist message is more effective at winning back working-class voters than a message focused on cutting regulations in order to build more housing and infrastructure.
"While there are elements of the Abundance agenda that have appeal, and the choice on which messages to deliver is not zero-sum, a populist economic approach better solves for Democrats' challenges with working-class voters," the memo states. "If candidates are asking which focus deserves topmost billing in Democrats' campaign messaging, the answer is clear: Though some voters believe excessive bureaucracy can be a problem, it ranks far behind other concerns and tackling it does not strike voters as a direct response to the problem of affordability."
The memo went on to argue that "majorities of Democrats and independents and two in five Republicans believe the outsized power of billionaires and corporations in our government is a bigger problem than red tape and bureaucracy."
In a head-to-head messaging test, voters told researchers that government giving preference to large corporations and billionaires was a bigger problem than government bureaucracy causing inefficiencies by a nearly two-to-one ratio. By roughly the same ratio, the researchers found, voters preferred cracking down on price-gouging corporations to cutting bureaucratic red tape.
The researchers did credit abundance-centric messaging with generating "some fresh ideas that challenge the status quo," but warned that "there are significant questions about whether a focus on it in political messaging adequately meets the moment Democrats face today.
The memo is set to be presented to Democrats on Capitol Hill next week, and Politico noted that it has the support of Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), who represents a competitive congressional district and who in the past has embraced populist messaging.
The "abundance" movement got its name after a book released earlier this year by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who both argued that Democratic-led state governments have put up too many bureaucratic roadblocks to achieve ambitious goals such as affordable housing and high-speed rail.
Some critics of the book, however, argue that it fails to address issues such as corporate power and wealth inequality as the real roadblocks to progressive change.
As Common Dreams reported last week, a recent analysis by Revolving Door Project and Open Markets Institute detailed how the abundance movement "erroneously" claims that environmental reviews hinder clean energy progress while having little to say about "the real causes of delay," including interference by fossil fuel-backed politicians and profit-driven privately-owned utilities.
The memo's release comes just as an "Abundance" conference is set to kick off in Washington, DC on Thursday that will include Klein and Thompson as featured speakers, as well as Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox.
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Detailed Report Exposes Serious Threat of the Neoliberal, Trump-Lite 'Abundance' Agenda
"With the Trump administration, the Republican-led Congress, and right-wing Supreme Court advancing their attacks on bedrock environmental law, Abundance proponents are sounding more like their echo than their opposition."
Aug 27, 2025
The much-discussed 'Abundance Agenda' is not the solution its proponents claim it be, according to a devastating report published this week by a pair of progressive watchdogsdraw which argues the policy framework is more of a neoliberal Trojan Horse than anything else.
Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book Abundance, released earlier this year in the first months of President Donald Trump's second term, was described as a "once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call" to change how the US thinks about problems like housing and the environmental impact of infrastructure projects, with the authors calling on the Democratic Party to fight the Trump agenda with "liberalism that builds."
Instead of getting bogged down in debates over wealth and income inequality or harnessing growing outrage over the hold that the superrich have on the US political system, Klein and Thompson advised the party to reach out to voters by pushing to end the "stifling bureaucratic requirements that killed private sector innovation."
Reining in "burdensome government processes" like environmental and tenant safety regulations—not fighting for programs that would benefit everyone in the US regardless of their wealth or income—was the key to securing "abundance for all," said the authors and their supporters in government, such as Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and Josh Harder (D-Calif.).
But in addition to beginning their book with a "glaring error," said the authors of a new report by the government watchdogs Revolving Door Project (RDP) and Open Markets Institute on Tuesday—asserting that "supply is how much there is of something" without accounting for the fact that private corporations decide how much of a product they want to sell to make a profit—Klein and Thompson ignore the fact that long before they put pen to paper, right-wing politicians and think tanks were already pushing an "abundance" agenda.
"When abundance-supporting politicians are asked about it, Klein's name is often the first word out of their mouth," said Jeff Hauser, executive director of RDP. "But this obscures the powerful coalition of political pundits, politicians, and think tanks that have painstakingly constructed a national movement around 'abundance' for years before the publication of this book. These interested parties have taken on the more detail-oriented work of actually producing policy for abundance, and it is often far more conservative and destructive than implied in Klein and Thompson's superficial tract."
Klein and Thompson rely on a "dishonest or sloppy" interpretation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which they equate with a permitting law and claim requires drawn-out environmental impact reviews, to make their argument that approvals for new infrastructure should be less cumbersome, said RDP.
The law requires the government to assess environmental impacts before developers can build major infrastructure, and has been heralded as a bedrock environmental statute—but it had been a target of the fossil fuel industry and the policymakers that do its bidding long before "abundance" proponents took aim at NEPA.
"When abundance-supporting politicians are asked about it, Klein's name is often the first word out of their mouth. But this obscures the powerful coalition of political pundits, politicians, and think tanks that have painstakingly constructed a national movement around 'abundance' for years before the publication of this book."
Proponents of "permitting reform"—a tenet of the abundance movement—claim that NEPA is a barrier to clean energy development, but the report finds that renewable energy projects are typically delayed for other reasons and that NEPA oppenents' frequently cited examples of "four- to ten-year timelines to complete a NEPA analysis are the exception, not the rule," as University of Utah law professor Jamie Pleune found in a 2023 Roosevelt Institute report.
Quoting Pleune, the report—titled Debunking the Abundance Agenda—notes that "most delays in the NEPA process are functional, not regulatory."
Pleune explained that most sources of delay are "insufficient staff, unstable budgets, vague or incomplete permit applications, waiting for information from a permit applicant, or poor coordination among permitting authorities." Such delays, however, "can be addressed without eliminating environmental standards, analytical rigor, or community engagement."
RDP's report recounts efforts by former right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to pass permitting reform legislation in 2022-23, as the Biden administration fought to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, in the interest of getting approval of the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline fast-tracked.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which raised the debt limit, expedited the MVP's approval, and codified a number of changes to NEPA—including arbitrary time limits on environmental impact assessments—came out of Manchin's efforts.
NEPA has been credited with protecting crucial wetlands near an industrial facility that was built with with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds; providing a process to explain to the public in Stephentown, New York the greenhouse gas savings that could be achieved if the area's new electrical grid shifted away from fossil fuels-based frequency regulation technology; and ensuring soil and groundwater contamination would be remediated ahead of the construction of a senior living facility in Kansas City, Missouri.
But as RDP noted, throughout Manchin's efforts to roll back environmental assessment requirements and pave the way for the MVP, "abundance proponents... criticized progressive skeptics who warned that weakening environmental review procedures would likely benefit the fossil fuel industry most of all."
Klein argued that “stream-lined permitting will do more to accelerate clean energy than it will to encourage the use of fossil fuels,” because "a simpler, swifter path to construction means more for the clean energy side of the ledger."
He claimed that Democratic opponents to right-wing "permitting reform" legislation lacked their own solutions for expediting the construction of clean energy projects—but soon after he made those claims, lawmakers including Reps. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) and
Sean Casten (D-Ill.) introduced a bill "that would expedite the green transition by facilitating quicker construction of interregional transmission lines, incentivizing renewable energy production on public lands and in federal waters, and increasing grid reliability—all while enhancing community engagement and without giveaways to the fossil fuel industry."
As RDP senior researcher and report co-author Kenny Stancil said, "Abundance advocates erroneously blame environmental review for hindering the clean energy transition, for example, but they have little to say about the real causes of delay, including privately owned utilities' profit-driven opposition to building interstate transmission lines, investors' prioritization of short-term oil and gas profits, and interference from fossil fuel-backed politicians."
The RDP report also points to Klein and Thompson's "indiscriminate anti-regulatory ethos" in regards to their arguments about housing supply, which they argue should be increased by reforming land use policy and loosening zoning rules.
"We agree that it’s a good idea to increase housing supply, and that liberalizing zoning rules is necessary in many places (especially in affluent, low-density suburbs, important locations the book ignores almost entirely)," reads the report. "However, abundance advocates seem to lose their way when they begin to veer away from arbitrary restrictions on housing construction... towards regulations that—in their mind—impede housing development. For instance, zoning can keep polluting industrial activities away from residential areas and ensure adequate infrastructural capacity like water, sewers, schools, and hospital beds for a community."
Klein and Thompson claim that requirements for air filtration systems in housing next to highways raise construction costs and contribute to homelessness, and suggest tenant protections could contribute to housing shortages by making "landlordism less profitable."
"In both cases, abundance proponents prioritize aggregate housing supply above all else, spending little time examining the real
world impact of their policy prescriptions," writes RDP. "What percentage of overall construction cost is the addition of a HEPA air filtration system? Will this requirement truly result in increased homelessness? How much? What are the potential long-term health
benefits and financial savings from having these residents breathe cleaner air? Will this requirement begin to alleviate the dire
racial disparities seen in asthma rates? These questions go unanswered in Klein and Thompson's book."
The Abundance authors also support eliminating land-use regulations in disaster-prone areas, even as hurricane and wildfire threats intensify—a policy that would "not only imperil human life, but it will result in post-disaster housing crises and could threaten the stability of crucial financial institutions."
The real estate investors the abundance movement focuses on maximize profits, which do not always correlate with construction output, said RDP—and centering the interests of landlords and developers who aim to cut construction costs distracts from what RDP calls the only solution that would provide affordable housing for all: social housing, or community-owned housing that exists outside of the private real estate market.
The report details how—although Thompson and Klein may identify themselves as liberals—their abundance worldview mirrors that of commentators and policymakers on the right, from the libertarian Niskanen Center to Trump's own appointees.
The stated mission of Trump's National Energy Dominance Council, chaired by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, couches its mission in the language favored by the Abundance authors, calling for "improving the processes for permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation across all forms of American energy"—and has been praised by abundance enthusiasts like author Matt Yglesias.
The administration has also expedited permitting for liquefied natural gas exports while undertaking permitting reforms against clean energy.
"As the report explores, abundance talking points have already been adopted by Trump's energy appointees to justify new fossil fuel projects, while circumventing public participation and transparency in the environmental review process," said Hannah Story Brown, RDP research director and co-author of the report. "With the Trump administration, the Republican-led Congress, and right-wing Supreme Court advancing their attacks on bedrock environmental law, Abundance proponents are sounding more like their echo than their opposition."
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The Anti-Labor Undercurrent of 'Abundance'
The accusation from the neoliberal crowd with their new rebrand project is clear: unions are behind policies that result in scarcity.
Jul 07, 2025
The post-Reconstruction United States has never seen durable progressive change without the labor movement’s involvement. The postwar economy’s rapid, widely distributed gains in material conditions for everyday Americans may be the banner accomplishment, but the movement’s contributions to progress go far further. Working women organized through the labor movement became significant drivers of the suffrage movement. Unions played an essential role in the Civil Rights movement, including the steelworkers and UAW providing crucial support for the March on Washington. Some of the earliest workplace discrimination protections for same-sex couples were won by the United Mine Workers of America.
Since industrialization, the labor movement has been the greatest engine not just of advancing worker interests, but of achieving social progress more generally.
This is not to say that the labor movement is the perfect embodiment of hippie harmony. It has and continues to struggle with issues of sexism, racism, nativism, and other sundry prejudices. But what sets the labor movement apart is the principle of solidarity that has enabled it to build broad-based coalitions in the face of those disagreements.
As Richard Trumka, the late president of the AFL-CIO, wrote, “Progress, steadily gained, is fueled by the power of a mobilized community. Every victory in the fight against oppression has ultimately been achieved by that spirit of solidarity.”
It’s the principle of leaving no one behind that unites the labor movement, both internally and with other causes. Union organizers, members, and leadership are consistently on the front lines of fighting for broadly shared prosperity.
All of this is why the scorn shown by elements of the “abundance” movement—the latest neoliberal rebrand—ought to be deeply concerning for those of us in the labor movement as well as for everyone who believes in building an economy that delivers for working Americans and their families.
The abundance movement is a cross-partisan initiative bankrolled by money from the crypto, oil, and tech industries. What do these well-monied interests want? They seek to create newly ascendant factions within both major parties that focus on “government efficiency,” streamlining building, and eliminating chokepoints where policy implementation gets stuck. As outlined in the book Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, an abundance approach invites its adherents to become “bottleneck detectives” in order to identify where governance gets stuck and who is blocking its way.
As with any broad coalition, there is not uniformity on what exactly this sort of paradigm looks like in practice. But a significant portion of the abundance movement views labor as a barrier that needs to be overcome in the name of efficiency.
There certainly are elements of the abundance movement that are not anti-union. Klein and Thompson, for their part, are at least nominally pro-labor. The opening pages of their book, which sketches out the type of utopia they want to achieve, makes mention of greater worker rights. In a recent column for The New York Times, Klein endorsed making it easier to unionize.
The Breakthrough Institute, a vocal and early proponent of the abundance approach, has explored how industrial unions could help achieve their ‘ecomodernist’ vision.
Others, though, insist that unions stand in the way of achieving abundance, and view Klein and Thompson’s agnosticism towards labor as either misguided or a fig leaf to make their book palatable to elected Democrats. To these abundists, downright hostility toward organized labor is often a necessary precondition for abundance.
This anti-union hostility was clear at WelcomeFest—alternatively dubbed “abundance coachella” or “modchella,” after being announced via festival themed promotional poster emblazoned with the slogan “responsibillity [sic] to win”— the self-proclaimed largest gathering of centrist Democrats. There, prominent writer Josh Barro declared that "when I look at policies in New York that stand in the way of Abundance, very often if you look under the hood, you eventually find a labor union at the end that's the driver."
The accusation is clear: unions are behind policies that result in scarcity. Representative Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), a vocal abundance supporter and speaker on the panel Barro was moderating, mostly demurred, but later posted a video defending unions (Torres is rumored to be a New York gubernatorial aspirant, so asking him to denounce unions was unlikely to pan out). The following day, Barro released an article on his Substack further developing an abundance-flavored broadside against unions. Barro specifically chastised his fellow abundists for shying away from fighting organized labor:
Sometimes the conflict between abundance and the labor movement gets downplayed. If you look up “unions” in the index to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, it takes you to their discussion on pages 126-7 of how the use of union labor did not prevent Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro from using regulatory relief to speed the reconstruction of a destroyed interstate underpass. It does not take you to their discussion on page 104 of how local construction trade unions in San Francisco have sought to block the use of cost-saving modular construction in affordable housing projects.
Barro’s point is only unique in its forthrightness, not in its sentiment. In particular, public sector unions—which constitute most of the organized workforce in the United States—are a common target amongst abundance thinkers. The faction’s main organizing group, Inclusive Abundance (whose CEO was also a featured speaker at WelcomeFest, where he dreamed of “college abundist” clubs to rival college Democrats and Republicans), has identified public sector unions as a barrier to their goal of government efficiency, saying, “Public sector unions are resistant to reforms that make performance-based employment decisions easier.”
Jonathan Chait, in The Atlantic, wrote that “progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement. Their theory of American politics depends on empowering the very groups the abundance agenda identifies as the architects of failure and barriers to progress.” Those groups are, namely, environmentalists (broadly the strand of progressives most maligned by abundists), labor, and activist/issue advocacy groups (importantly only the ones to the abundance movement’s left; when it comes to the myriad abundance-focused groups that have sprung up since 2020, it’s a veritable welcomefest).
This led Todd Tucker of the Roosevelt Institute to criticize the abundance agenda’s “survivor island” mindset, where “first unions and Dems team up to vote enviros off the island, and then Dems turn on labor.” Tucker’s point was demonstrated pretty clearly when Matt Yglesias, opining on Barro’s abundance critique of unions, offered his perspective: “[unions] are useful allies against the greater evil of environmentalist organizations.”
Many of the major groups and funders across the abundance landscape have longstanding antipathy towards unions. The most obvious examples are the elements of abundance that are part of the Koch network. Charles Koch (and his late brother David), well known for their hostility to labor and bankrolling champions of euphemistic “right to work” policies like former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, have seeded or funded multiple groups within the abundance movement with track records of hostility towards unions.
- The Foundation for American Innovation (formerly The Lincoln Network) developed a tool that was deployed to entice public sector union members to opt-out by offering incentives like discounts at major retailers.
- The libertarian Reason Institute, partially funded by the Koch-backed Stand Together, frequently publishes pieces citing unions as major obstacles to progress, particularly teachers’ unions.
- The Cato Institute is the preeminent libertarian think tank and, as such, has published many, many pieces arguing against labor unions’ influence. One 2010 publication declared that “collective bargaining is a misguided labor policy because it violates civil liberties and gives unions excessive power to block needed reforms.”
- George Mason University’s Mercatus Center is a bastion of free-market idealism that was established by major donations from the Koch brothers. It has frequently produced scholarship skeptical of unions and their power.
- The Manhattan Institute—also a beneficiary of Koch funding—has a long history of publishing work opposing unions and organized labor.
- Americans for Prosperity, which has been described as the Koch’s “primary political arm,” has been involved in numerous anti-union campaigns and advocacy efforts, including celebrating “right to work” policies. (It has also been hard at work running a $100 million campaign in support of extending the Trump tax cuts this year).
- (A bit of an outlier, The Aspen Institute, which also has been funded by the Kochs and featured David as a board member, has actually worked to ameliorate executives’ hostility to unions.)
Niskanen, which was formed as a splinter group by the more moderate elements of Cato, also frequently criticizes labor.
This is not to say, however, that skepticism of labor is confined to the abundance movement’s libertarian wing. There are multiple examples of center and even center-left elements of the movement centering critiques of labor. Matt Yglesias, who has been described (by Derek Thompson, no less) as “the OG grandfather of abundance,” has been vocally critical of unions on numerous occasions, including criticizing rail unions for pushing for a two-person crew on freight trains.
Democratic Colorado governor Jared Polis, perhaps the most abundance-pilled politician out there, is now infamous for vetoing legislation (unanimously supported by the state’s Democratic legislators) that would have made it easier for workers to unionize.
This tendency was also strikingly apparent when abundance liberals vociferously accused unions of being rentiers when the UAW spoke in support of strategic tariffs.
In fact, some abundists have been pointing to labor as an enemy in their quest for factional power since before Klein and Thompson’s book kickstarted a flurry of discourse. Niskanen, which, as Chait put it, is “the closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda,” published a manifesto in early autumn 2024 that framed public sector unions as an instance of progressives standing in the way of progress, stating:
On the left, conflicts exist [with abundance] wherever progressives pursue their goals through NIMBY-like mechanisms, such as with historic preservation, public employee unions, and organized interests claiming the mantle of environmental justice.
Niskanen’s call for an “abundance faction” goes on to encourage showcasing a “a willingness to pick fights with public sector producer interests like unions” as a plank of their political pitch. Similarly, Ezra Klein’s column “What America Needs is a Liberalism that Builds,” a seminal work in the formation of the abundance perspective, prompted a clash with The American Prospect's David Dayen that focused in large part on requirements that projects use union labor.
That is not to say that abundance and the labor movement can never be allies. Both, for instance, have champions who advocate for bringing parts of project consulting (largely privatized in recent decades) back in-house to government agencies, which could improve cost-efficiency (more building, more abundance!) and create good, stable unionized public servant jobs (more people in the labor movement!).
However, while an alliance makes sense in specific cases, that does not assuage the general friction between the two movements. In fact, one of the earliest critiques of abundance liberalism came from the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam, who doubted that abundance could find traction on the left because it fundamentally challenges the principle of solidarity that has historically undergirded the progressive movement. That insight is key to understanding why, even among abundance proponents who are not opposed to labor, there’s limited interest in building significant camaraderie with the labor movement. Even when labor and abundance are not directly in tension, their organizing principles are.
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Universalism, Not Abundance, Is the Only Real Defense Against Authoritarianism
Universalism is the only governing strategy strong enough to rebuild what Trumpism has corroded—not as a slogan, but as a material commitment.
Jun 07, 2025
She shows up just after 9:00 am, like she has most mornings since the letter arrived. The lobby is already full—mothers with strollers, older men gripping folders, a teenager in a hoodie with his eyes on the floor. She clutches the same folder she’s been carrying for weeks: pay stubs, proof of residency, a note from her landlord warning the rent will rise again. Her name will be called eventually. And when it is, a caseworker will skim her paperwork, ask a few quick questions, and decide whether she qualifies—for what, she’s not even sure anymore. Rent relief? Help with the electric bill? A food pantry referral? Maybe nothing.
This is what public help looks like in America: a maze, a line, a thousand little gates. Each with a lock that shifts depending on your zip code, your paperwork, or whether the system deems you deserving. Our safety net isn’t built to catch—it’s built to sort. And that structure—the means-tested, piecemeal logic of American social policy—hasn’t just failed to prevent collapse. It has laid the groundwork for authoritarianism.
President Donald Trump came to power on the promise to fight for the forgotten working class—for people like those in that lobby. Millions believed him. Not because they were fooled, but because the institutions that should have offered stability—unions, schools, housing, healthcare—were already gone. What remained were brittle bureaucracies that asked everything, offered little, and always arrived too late.
We cannot out-message collapse. We must out-govern it.
Trump didn’t fill that vacuum with solutions. He filled it with vengeance. Not policy that delivered—but posture that blamed. While Republicans translated grievance into governing power, Democrats lost their map.
After 2024, the party was hollowed out. Young men walked away. Working-class voters of every background followed. The party that once stood for labor and civil rights began to feel like the party of college towns and tax credits. People didn’t switch sides—they stopped believing anyone was on theirs.
In that vacuum, the Abundance Agenda gained traction. Promoted by liberal technocrats, it focuses on clearing bureaucratic thickets: zoning reform, streamlined permitting, housing acceleration. Build more. Build faster. Let growth lift all boats.
But abundance doesn’t ask who’s in the boat—and who keeps getting thrown overboard. It solves for scarcity without addressing exclusion. It tackles supply, not distribution. It removes friction but doesn’t restore trust. Growth is not solidarity. Innovation is not inclusion. And no one will rally behind a politics that treats them as consumers before recognizing them as neighbors or workers.
Now, in his second term, Trump no longer pretends. He is using the federal government not to build—but to punish. Agencies are purged. Civil rights protections erased. Grants come with loyalty tests. Through executive orders and loyalist appointments, he is dismantling the federal infrastructure of inclusion, plank by plank.
This isn’t small government. It’s selective government—enforcement without support, punishment without provision. It survives because public systems remain fractured and cruel. When your right to basic services depends on proving your worth, solidarity dies. People stop defending each other’s needs. They’re too busy proving their own.
The single mother in the lobby doesn’t call this authoritarianism. She doesn’t have to. She feels it in the form that changes overnight. In the disconnected phone numbers. In the line she waits in each morning—only to be told again: You don’t qualify.
Abundance won’t help her.
Zoning reform won’t keep her housed.
Solar panels won’t make her feel seen.
She doesn’t need a productivity agenda. She needs a government that shows up.
Because this is how democracy unravels—not in a cataclysm, but in the quiet, daily normalization of abandonment.
Trump must be stopped. But we won’t defeat authoritarianism with messaging. Not with moral clarity. Not with speeches. Democrats will not win by being right. They will win by delivering.
Universalism is the only governing strategy strong enough to rebuild what Trumpism has corroded—not as a slogan, but as a material commitment. We cannot out-message collapse. We must out-govern it.
Ask that woman in the lobby what failed, and she won’t name a policy theory. She’ll say: the office stopped calling. The money vanished. The form changed. Beneath that is something deeper: a belief that survival must be earned. That belonging must be begged for. And once that belief takes hold, it doesn’t just break programs. It breaks democracy.
Because when help is conditional, it becomes contestable. When people compete for scraps, they stop believing in the public. They stop believing in each other. When democracy fails, it’s not because people stop believing in freedom.
It’s because freedom stops being useful.
A ballot won’t quiet a hungry child. A speech won’t refill a prescription.
If democracy is to survive, it must show up in people’s lives.
And to show up, it must trust them first.
That woman is still waiting. Not for charity—for recognition. For someone to say: You matter. You belong. You should not have to beg to be seen. Universalism answers that hope. Not with pity, but with presence. Not with exceptions, but with guarantees. It does not ask what she did wrong. It simply says: You are part of this country. You are not alone.
Because if this republic is to endure, it won’t be because people begged for help.
It will be because we chose to build a government that finally refused to look away.
We chose to show up—not with hesitation, not with disclaimers, but with resolve.
Because in a nation this rich, no one should have to stand in line just to be seen.
No one should have to plead for the dignity that should already be theirs.
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WelcomeFest’s Billionaire Backers Reveal Its True Mission
Like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council before it, Welcome is yet another donor- and elite-driven operation seeking to drag the Democratic Party rightward on economic policy.
Jun 04, 2025
If the Abundance universe is to be believed, the hottest ticket this summer is WelcomeFest.
Wednesday’s confab is the second such annual gathering organized by the centrist group Welcome Party and its political action committee WelcomePAC, with this year’s event touting a distinct abundance flair. The conference boasts a rogues’ gallery of corporate-friendly cosponsors, including Third Way, the New Democratic Coalition, Inclusive Abundance, and the Blue Dog Caucus. A sizzle reel from last year’s event paints WelcomeFest as an Internet Hippo tweet come to life, complete with cameos from A-listers like ex-CNN anchor John Avlon and Democratic influencer Olivia Julianna.
Taken together, WelcomePAC’s leadership and funding are at odds with their claimed opposition to the “buttoned-up [politics] of Washington elites.”
This year’s “Responsibility to Win” session (misspelled on the event’s official poster) has drawn viral attention online—both for its bizarre AI Ghibli promos and stacked lineup of neoliberal pundits, conservative Democratic lawmakers, and wunderkind pollsters serving up Dick Morris’ reheated leftovers.
Speakers include:
- Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance.
- Matt Yglesias, confidently-wrong pundit and, per Thompson, the “OG grandfather of Abundance.”
- Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who doesn’t think Democrats should use the term “oligarchy.”
- Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), Abundance champion and darling of AIPAC and crypto lobbyists.
- Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), Adam Gray (D-Calif.), and Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Mich.), founding members of the Abundance-themed Build America Caucus.
- Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash). and Jared Golden (D-Maine), current and former co-chairs of the conservative Blue Dog Caucus.
- Adam Jentleson, anti-”Groups” crusader currently distancing himself from his 14-month stint as Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) chief of staff.
- David Shor, pollster and prolific party animal.
WelcomePAC’s Donors
Campaign finance records reveal that WelcomePAC, the primary organizers of WelcomeFest, has raked in sizable contributions from billionaires and corporate oligarchs:
- Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has given over $1.8 million to WelcomePAC since 2021. A major donor to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign and the pro-Harris SuperPAC Future Forward, Hoffman strongly opposed the Biden administration’s anti-monopoly policies and publicly demanded that Harris fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan if she won the election. Hoffman has also bankrolled the Mainstream Democrats super PAC, which spent heavily in Democratic primaries in 2022 and 2024 to defend conservative Democrats like Kurt Schrader and Henry Cuellar and defeat progressives like Cori Bush and Nina Turner.
- Walton family: WelcomePAC has received over $1.1 million from relatives and heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton—the richest family in America.
- S. Robson (Rob) Walton: Rob Walton, the eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since 2024.
- Samuel R. Walton: Samuel R. Walton, grandson of Sam Walton and owner of a natural resources holding company, has given $625,000 to WelcomePAC since 2024.
- Christy Walton: Christy Walton, widow of one of Sam Walton’s sons, has given $125,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022.
- Alice Walton: Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, has given $25,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022.
- Carrie Walton Penner: Walton Penner, daughter of Rob Walton, has given $150,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022. She is also a prolific donor to the anti-public education charter school movement.
- Greg Penner: Penner, the husband of Carrie Walton and son-in-law of Rob, has given $150,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022. Penner is also Chairman of Walmart’s Board of Directors and a managing partner for the Walton family’s private equity firm.
- Bekenstein family: Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein and his wife Anita have given a combined $375,000 to WelcomePAC since October 2024.
- Michael Bloomberg: Billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since August 2024. Bloomberg is best known for his controversial mayoralty (which saw the expansion of racist “stop-and-frisk” policing tactics and anti-Muslim surveillance) and his expensive, widely-mocked 2020 presidential campaign.
- James & Kathryn Murdoch: James Murdoch—the estranged younger son of News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch—and his wife Kathryn have given a combined $2.5 million to WelcomePAC since April 2024.
- Rob Granieri: Granieri, the co-founder of Wall Street quantitative trading firm Jane Street, has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since June 2024.
- Edward Fishman: Fishman, a managing director at hedge fund D.E. Shaw, has given $200,000 to WelcomePAC since February 2022.
- Mark Heising: Heising, the founder of private equity firm Medley Partners, has given $250,000 to WelcomePAC since June 2024.
- David Nierenberg: Nierenberg, an investment manager and former national finance co-chair for Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and his wife Patricia have given a combined $726,600 to WelcomePAC since March 2024.
- Americans Together Inc: Americans Together Inc, a centrist group founded by former Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) daughter Heather Manchin Bresch, has given over $1 million to WelcomePAC since February 2024. A core plank of Americans Together’s policy platform is opposing any repeal or reform of the Senate filibuster (the goal, ironically, of a 2021 book by WelcomeFest speaker Adam Jentleson).
- Bresch, the former CEO of pharma company Mylan, attracted national attention in 2016 for defending Mylan’s EpiPen price-gouging.
Who’s Actually Welcome to the Party?
While WelcomePAC’s donor roster makes clear who the group wants to welcome into the Democratic tent, its website is quite explicit about who they wish to exclude. WelcomePAC blames the Democratic Party’s woes on an “extreme right and socialist left […] conspiring with conflict-driven media to trash the Democratic brand.” In a poorly-aged 2021 Substack post calling for a “Jim Clyburn Day,” Welcome co-founder Lauren Harper celebrated Clyburn’s 2020 endorsement of Biden for “steering the party away from further polarization that would have led to a second Trump term.”
WelcomeFest organizers have explicitly juxtaposed their event with the purportedly left-wing Democratic National Committee, offering a refuge to those put off by the Democratic Party’s current leadership. They firmly reject unspecified “progressive purity tests” (read: having values), but lack a compelling explanation for why swing and red state voters are flocking to the progressive-populist fight against oligarchy.
Bafflingly, for a group that promises to offer “a vision for a depolarized United States,” WelcomeFest only features Democrats speaking about the need to moderate. The group, which proudly touts the label of “centrist insurgency,” has seemingly little to offer a polarized Republican Party—which is perhaps why their previous campaign to convince five House Republicans to caucus with Democrats failed so spectacularly. This has hardly hampered their push for moderation at all costs. In pursuit of this end, the group has even invented a metric that claims safe blue congressional seats are undemocratic, encouraging Republican challengers to pursue previously uncontested blue seats.
Some of WelcomePAC’s top staff have also spent their careers working to move the Democratic Party to the right. Co-founder Liam Kerr previously spent 10 years working for Democrats for Education Reform, a charter school advocacy organization founded and funded by hedge fund managers. Welcome Party board member Catharine Bellinger has also spent her career working for the same pro-charter school groups as Kerr. WelcomePAC’s political director, Daniel Conway, spent nearly six years working for No Labels, the centrist dark money group co-founded by the late Joe Lieberman that repeatedly attempted to recruit a third party candidate to run for president in 2024.
Taken together, WelcomePAC’s leadership and funding are at odds with their claimed opposition to the “buttoned-up [politics] of Washington elites.” Like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council before it, Welcome is yet another donor- and elite-driven operation seeking to drag the Democratic Party rightward on economic policy. That “rebranded neoliberalism” approach risks further alienating the very constituencies that Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024, and ceding further ground to right-wing faux-populists like Vice President JD Vance.
Given the WelcomeFest lineup, it’s clear that the donor class views Abundance as key to carrying out this self-serving crusade against populism.
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