Center for Regulatory Ingenuity

Rebuilding public participation starts with something simple — treating the public not as a problem to manage, but as a source of ingenuity government cannot function without.

Don’t like the Chinese-backed EVs that are undercutting your market? Start with a well-designed statute to strengthen market oversight and competition while also providing American companies with support.

Cities and states are best positioned to design policies to accelerate clean energy, innovation, and economic development because they can design approaches that work in different social, political, and economic contexts. 

If properly implemented, a comprehensive reform program to accomplish regulatory democracy that is people-centered and power-conscious could be essential for addressing complex policy changes such as the climate challenge.

The question is not whether the capital exists (it does!), nor whether energy solutions are available (they are!), but whether we can align energy finance quickly enough to channel the right types of capital where and when it’s needed most.

To ensure an energy transition that brings broad based economic development, participation, and direct benefits to communities, we need federal policy that helps shape markets. Unfortunately, there is a large gap in understanding of how to leverage federal policy making to support access to capital and credit.

Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.

Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.

FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.

The American administrative state, since its modern creation out of the New Deal and the post-WWII order, has proven that it can do great things. But it needs some reinvention first.

Remaining globally competitive on critical clean technologies requires far more than pointing out that individual electric cars and rooftop solar panels might produce consumer savings.

Cities need to rapidly become compact, efficient, electrified, and nature‑rich urban ecosystems where we take better care of each other and avoid locking in more sprawl and fossil‑fuel dependence.

To maximize clean energy deployment, we must address the project development and political barriers that have held us back from smart policymaking and implementation that can withstand political change. Here’s how.

In a new report, we begin to address these fundamental implementation questions based on discussions with over 80 individuals – from senior political staff to individual project managers – involved in the execution of major clean energy programs through the Department of Energy (DOE).

Achieving energy abundance requires reforming electricity markets, refreshing electric utility regulation and rethinking the way we pay for grid infrastructure.

Of course badly designed regulatory approaches can block progress or dry up the supply of public goods. But a theory of the whole regulatory world can’t be neatly extrapolated from urban zoning errors.

As federal uncertainty grows and climate goals face political headwinds, a new coalition of subnational actors is rising to stabilize markets, accelerate permitting, and finance a more inclusive green economy.

The Trump Administration has moved with alarming speed to demolish programs, regulations, and institutions that were intended to make our communities and planet more liveable.

To fight the climate crises, we must do more than connect power plants to the grid: we need new policy frameworks and expanded coalitions to facilitate the rapid transformation of the electricity system.

As the efficacy of environmental laws has waned, so has their durability. What was once a broadly shared goal – protecting Americans from environmental harm – is now a political football, with rules that whipsaw back and forth depending on who’s in charge.