Here is the uncomfortable truth that most people in the tech policy world are still too polite to say out loud: the damage done to American science and technology infrastructure in 2025 was not accidental. It was architectural. According to a former White House OSTP official writing at Tech Policy Press, the story of the 47th presidency is less about specific policies and more about who owns what processes, what they want, and what they intend to do with them. That reframe changes everything about how rebuilding should work — because you cannot fix a machine you never truly understood.
- DOGE, OPM, and OMB dismantled significant portions of federal agency function within weeks of the second Trump administration taking office.
- OMB Director Russell Vought has explicitly stated his intent to restructure how agencies and universities operate in ways that could fundamentally alter American science funding.
- The author of the Tech Policy Press piece served as Assistant Director for International Science and Technology and later Assistant Director for Research Security and Infrastructure inside Biden’s White House OSTP starting in 2021.
- The US power grid is already underperforming due to policy distortion rather than technical limits, according to reporting from AIER — and AI data centers are accelerating demand faster than bad policy can adapt.
- The Abundance movement, driven by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of the same name, has gained measurable traction in 2025-2026 political discourse as a cross-partisan framework for removing barriers to growth.
Process Ate the Policy. Process Has to Fix It.
The phrase “people and processes drive policy” sounds like something you’d cross-stitch onto a pillow in a congressional waiting room. But it is the actual operating theory behind both Project 2025 and its spiritual sequel, Year Zero: The Five Year Presidency. Both documents treat process mastery not as a means to an end but as the end itself. Control the Office of Personnel Management, control who gets hired. Control the Office of Management and Budget, control what gets funded. The specific ideological outcomes follow automatically.
Rebuilding in 2026 means accepting this on its own terms. Any reformer who thinks they can parachute in with a great climate tech proposal or a bold AI research agenda and make it stick — without first understanding the regulatory plumbing beneath it — is going to get eaten alive. The OSTP, the NSF, DARPA — these are not idea factories waiting for better ideas. They are bureaucratic organisms shaped by decades of internal process. Whoever comes next needs to be fluent in that language before they write a single policy memo.
This is not cynicism. It is a prerequisite.
Energy Policy Is the Most Immediate Wreckage
American energy policy in 2026 is a patchwork of technology-specific rules that reward being in a favored category rather than delivering measurable results. AIER put it plainly: the US power sector underdelivers not because of technical constraints but because of institutionally distorted policy design. Programs like the Renewable Portfolio Standard and the Renewable Fuel Standard were written to privilege specific technologies — not to achieve specific outcomes around emissions, reliability, or cost.
Meanwhile, AI data centers are pulling electricity demand upward at a pace no one budgeted for. Electrification is accelerating. The grid cannot keep up. Blackouts and higher prices are not hypothetical warnings — they are trajectories that current policy is actively enabling.
The fix here is conceptually simple and politically brutal: move toward technology-neutral policy that sets clear performance targets and lets markets find the most efficient path. Stop picking winners. Start measuring results. That approach draws support from across the political spectrum right now, which makes it one of the few places where post-Trump rebuilding has a real opening. A growing coalition of voices is already forming outside traditional political lines to push exactly this kind of structural reset — and the energy sector is where that coalition has its clearest near-term argument.
Does the Abundance Framework Actually Help?
The Abundance movement deserves credit for reframing the conversation. Klein and Thompson’s argument — that the real crisis is America’s failure to build things, and that regulatory accumulation is a primary cause — is not wrong. From a tech policy angle, the diagnosis is sharp. The US does have a proceduralism problem. Law professor Nicholas Bagley’s concept of the “Procedure Fetish” is real: activist litigation and administrative overcaution have made it genuinely difficult to build anything at scale, whether that is a transmission line or a semiconductor fab.
But Abundance is not a blueprint. It is a permission structure. It tells reformers they are allowed to care about growth and still be on the right side of history — which, in 2026, is more politically useful than it sounds. The lesson from adjacent fields is consistent: better data and better process design unlock outcomes that better intentions alone never reach. The Abundance crowd is right about the barriers. They are less specific about who, exactly, is going to tear them down and in what order.
That specificity is the whole job now. Anyone who wants to rebuild US science and technology policy needs a list of institutions, a list of processes inside those institutions, and a list of people with the clearances, the relationships, and the stomach to operate inside systems that were deliberately broken — and that means the next two years of confirmation hearings, budget negotiations, and regulatory comment periods are going to be the real fight, not the manifestos.
Watch the Office of Management and Budget before you watch anything else — whoever controls that budget pencil in the next administration controls whether any of the good ideas ever become real.
