Project 2029: The Full Plan

This document presents the plan, its sequence, and the choices it asks the country to make. The appendices explain the financing, implementation, law, and historical evidence. The appendix index lists them all; links beside each part lead to the relevant explanation.

The premise

Project 2029 is a plan for a president who campaigns calling America to take on the Mission for America (MFA), or a similar national economic mobilization, and is elected with a mandate from the people to carry it out, but who will be initially blocked by Congress. Its premise is that the timidity of the president’s own party in Congress, and its unwillingness to leave the Senate filibuster behind, will likely prevent an MFA president from immediately embarking on the Mission at full scale.

This is a plan for an MFA president to use their first two years to make the case for the full Mission for America while showing that it would be possible and successful if voters elected a pro-MFA Congress bold enough to leave the filibuster behind.

It is possible that an MFA president taking office in 2029 will have a Congress willing to go all the way. If that happens, this plan will be unnecessary and the country can advance straight to the Mission for America. But if the White House is blocked by a caucus of the president’s own party who are beholden to corporate donors and old economic dogmas — call them the balking donkey caucus — then this two-year plan is the way forward.

The Mission for America

New Consensus is an economic policy think tank. We write plans for economic renewal at a scale most institutions have stopped believing is possible, detailed enough for a government to act on. We wrote the Green New Deal. Our current project is the Mission for America.

Our guiding principle is that the people of every nation and community can control the means to make a prosperous living sustainably. Humanity already has everything it needs to build that world inside a single generation. The technology that would let us live comfortably without wrecking the planet exists and is not deployed. The clean energy to run it is effectively unlimited and barely touched. What stands in the way is politics, not physics.

The country is walking into several crises at once. The first is a crisis of economic decline and despair for the bottom half of American income earners that has been unfolding for decades. That has fueled a political crisis, which gave Donald Trump the Republican Party and the White House. Then arrived artificial intelligence, which is beginning to eliminate entire categories of work and will bring mass unemployment across the professional-managerial class. Though global warming has been forgotten by the media and political parties, temperatures continue to rise at an accelerating pace, triggering catastrophic climate feedback loops. Most immediately, a new global financial crisis looms. When the crash comes, all the other crises will intensify.

The Mission for America (MFA) is a comprehensive plan to overcome all these crises at once. It is a 10-year national mobilization on the model of the American economic mobilization for the Second World War, a period of massive government-led industrial transformation and job creation. It is organized as a set of targeted national missions covering clean power, electric vehicles, steel, hydrogen, buildings, water, transport, the care and health economies, and more than a dozen others. It answers the coming mass unemployment by putting tens of millions of people into necessary, well-paid work, building the things the world needs, and it comes out the other side with an economy that delivers prosperity, security, and freedom for everyone, not subsistence checks for the people the technology displaced.

The engine of the mission is a resurrected Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The original was created in 1932 to deal with a collapsing banking system, and within months it was also lending for relief and public works. For more than a decade it was the largest corporation in America and the biggest banking organization in the world. It acted as a bank, a venture investor, a shareholder, and a strategic coordinator, whichever the problem in front of it required. It created industries that had not existed, built the infrastructure the country ran on, financed the industrial mobilization that won the war, and returned an overall profit to the Treasury across its life. A new one would do the same work for this transition. Chartering it requires an act of Congress.

The full Mission for America is available at newconsensus.com.

The first two years

Project 2029 is the bridge to make the Mission for America possible by pulling off something normally considered impossible, a larger mandate for the president in Congress at the first midterm elections. Normally, the president’s party loses ground. To carry out the sweeping reforms the coming crises demand, the president must win a majority in both the House and Senate willing to support them, and a majority in the Senate (50 votes plus the vice president) willing to leave the filibuster behind. Only by killing the filibuster will the MFA president be able to pass all that is required.

To achieve that, Project 2029 proposes three lines of dramatic action that will make a tangible difference in millions of lives and give America a taste of what would be possible with the full Mission for America:

1. A national investment mobilization to build new industries, expand existing ones, and upgrade our housing, buildings, and public infrastructure. This will be funded by existing federal loan programs and other tools available to the executive branch.
2. A state-level pilot to demonstrate the power of the full Mission for America, mobilizing local and national private capital and corporations led by local, state, and federal governments.
3. The largest possible legislative program that the 121st Congress can be pushed to pass to restore what the Trump terms took away and to pack in every possible gain for the American people.

Keeping the existing lending tools usable requires Congress to act before the 2028 election. The plan expects those renewals, because continuing established programs with bipartisan constituencies and comparatively modest credit costs is a different congressional task from chartering a new, general-purpose RFC. The financing account below explains the expectation and the prerequisites.

Project 2029 assumes that the president's first Congress will not charter the Reconstruction Finance Corporation or anything like it. The full funding needed for sweeping national economic renewal will therefore not be available right off the bat. In reality, this is not a fatal blocker because investments take time to ramp up. The president can use existing federal lending programs, procurement, contracts, and other administrative powers to fund the first round of investment. The work begins by getting the means of expansion in place. In industry, that means the machines, materials, workers, and customer orders that make a new production line possible. In buildings, the first federal projects get the teams and contracting process working; the pilot concentrates those methods and private financing in a state whose banks, builders and property owners are ready to put them to work far beyond government buildings. The first projects prepare the way for many more.

The state pilot program is for showcasing in one or more states what the Mission for America would deliver nationally if it were given the chance. Mass-scale immediate job creation will not be possible nationally with only executive power funding sources. The president will call for a state to step forward whose political and business leaders are willing to organize the financing for the full MFA-style mobilization. The federal government will assist with coordination, financing, and guarantees. To be eligible, a state's entire business community and state and local governments need to show a willingness to mobilize on an unprecedented scale. The core of these state pilots will be construction projects to upgrade homes and buildings in every community for quality of life, safety, and energy efficiency.

The legislative side of Project 2029 prepares the largest possible legislative package that a mainstream center-left Congress will pass, with the details worked out in advance so that the benefits of this Actually Big Beautiful Bill truly reach the people. This package will restore benefits and assistance to working- and middle-class people, raise taxes on the rich while providing relief to most Americans, and will include a long list of common-sense reforms to government and regulations that will directly make millions of Americans’ lives better and easier.

Additionally, Project 2029 includes political and administrative strategies to allow all of this to succeed. Most administrations spin their wheels for the first two years, bogged down in vetting, hiring, and just getting their feet on the ground. This plan aims to avoid the worst of it.

The test of success for this plan will be tangible improvements in Americans’ lives on a scale never seen before. It must be great enough to give Americans the hope to vote for more.

Part One. National investment mobilization

In the first months of Donald Trump's second term, America was introduced to a radical new government effort called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Led by America's richest man and staffed by software engineers, this agency announced that its goal was to fire federal workers, eliminate government agencies, and generally take a wrecking ball to the U.S. government and civil service. Who could be better at reforming government than a handful of 20-something software developers? Turns out, just about anyone. DOGE was a spectacular failure.

An earlier president used a similar team to far better effect. Almost two years before the U.S. entered World War II, Franklin Roosevelt assembled a team of engineers and industrial leaders not to attack government, but to mobilize and direct the failing private sector, to get it building new industries again and expanding existing ones. The government provided the courage and capital to invest, the leadership to act, and a national goal to organize the work, all of which the private sector had come to lack.

The national economic renewal agenda of this plan will be personally led by the president through a team that will remind some of DOGE but really is a resurrection of the World War II mobilization model. It combines investment in building new industries and upgrading and expanding existing ones, with upgrades to buildings and infrastructure that communities can see and use. It brings manufacturers, banks, builders, and public owners to the work, then connects their projects to the programs that can finance them.

This administration will use the federal government's existing lending programs to their full power. But a program on the books today is not necessarily a program a president can use in January 2029. Some authorities are permanent. Others need Congress to extend them before inauguration, and some need money replenished before they can finance new work. Each program remains limited to the projects its statute makes eligible, but the president should push the bounds of those definitions as far as possible to do what needs to be done.

What happens in the Ballroom

Using the DOGE model, the president will create a Reconstruction Finance Corporation-in-waiting by staffing a small coordinating unit in the Executive Office of the President under existing temporary organization authority. The RFC staff can begin as a few dozen people in the White House, each eventually assembling their own teams, with presidential cover and no political careers to protect. Their immediate job is the heart of the RFC's work, convening leaders across industry, finance, and government and making things happen by all means available.

Obviously, it must be located in Donald Trump's White House Ballroom. Everything gold will be sold, and the room will be filled with folding tables and chairs, power strips, and monitors. Bring the White House press corps along for the Costco runs!

A small RFC team will organize investments much larger than its own operating budget, drawing on paid agency staff as well as its own appointees. Its job is to unlock billions in existing federal lending. But its power does not lie mainly in its ability to push federal dollars out the door. It will convene leaders of industry and broker deals worth hundreds of billions in investment and wages.

As an informal body, the staff of the RFC-in-waiting coordinates, pushes, and pulls, working directly with and through the holders of formal power in government agencies, who will be aligned appointees of the president.

The team reports directly to the president, without a departmental chain of command to travel through. Its fixed term is a feature, because the job is to prove that the full Reconstruction Finance Corporation is worth chartering.

Its first task is routing. It is the single place a manufacturer, a governor, a co-op, or a hospital system can describe a project and be told which of the hundred-odd federal credit programs can finance it. The applicant is then supported through the application process, not handed off to a website and a 24-month guessing game.

Its second task is finding bottlenecks and naming who has the authority to clear them. That takes people standing in warehouses and permitting offices, not people reading reports about them.

The RFC's weapon against bureaucracy will be transparency. It will publish a register of blockages, one public list of every blocker to investment anywhere in government, business, or banks. What is being held up, who is holding it up, and how many days has it been? It costs almost nothing, it makes the work legible in exactly the way the midterm requires, showing progress and building public support for the administration's goals, and it puts every official on the list under pressure.

The president leads the mobilization

With a team in place to coordinate the mobilization, the president must lead it. The president will mobilize the nation in a project of economic renewal. The president will call the country to embark on a great national mission to rebuild the U.S. economy with the goal of making it the most advanced, most dynamic, and most broadly prosperous in the world again. Concretely, this will mean convening and calling on leaders of industry and finance to invest in new industries and into expanding existing ones. If domestic capitalists remain uninspired and unencouraged, the president will call on foreign companies to invest and to look for domestic entrepreneurs willing to build with start-up funds provided by federal loan programs. For example, if the Big Three and Tesla are no longer interested in building cars in America, then we will invest in new companies who are. This is how China has come to dominate global EV sales even though the U.S. literally had a 100-year head start, and there is no reason the U.S. cannot now do the same.

The president must lead in one-on-one contacts with leaders of business and finance, but the real work is between the president and the American people. This will happen on television, radio, social media, podcasts, and in stadiums. The president must generate enthusiasm among the people for what could be, and then either cheer private sector and government leaders as heroes if they mobilize or as villains if they sit on their hands. If the president communicates well enough, and the message gets through, then even if this whole plan is blocked by a recalcitrant Congress and business community, the president can still win a bigger mandate if the voters see an administration fighting tooth and nail for them. This is exactly what happened with President Roosevelt in his first midterm.

The investment mobilization will mainly push forward on two tracks:

1. An industrial mobilization that begins the work of creating the new and expanded industries America needs to make a prosperous living for all; and
2. A construction mobilization that builds and upgrades homes, buildings, and public infrastructure.

Building and expanding industries

We need new and expanded industries because making useful things is how a country creates wealth and makes a living. Automation does not change the need for batteries, steel, machines, power equipment, and everything else a modern economy uses. Even a factory with few workers produces something the country needs, and supports work among its suppliers, builders, and customers. We cannot base lasting prosperity on the expectation that other countries will supply everything while we lose the means to produce. The United States has fallen behind in industries it needs, and it has to build again.

To build an industry, start with the industries that equip it. In 1940, William Knudsen went from General Motors to Roosevelt’s mobilization effort and pressed machine-tool manufacturers to expand. Aircraft and tank orders could not be filled without the machines to make them. The RFC’s Defense Plant Corporation placed advance orders for a pool of equipment while the plants that would use it were still being organized. Existing factories kept producing as toolmakers expanded, new buildings went up and workers learned new jobs. Appendix C tells that history and follows the same problem through today’s industries.

The transition team can begin by asking manufacturers, suppliers, engineers, and unions two questions. What would it take to build here, and what stopped the last attempt? It should arrive in January with projects, customers, financing routes and specific obstacles already identified. Conversations can begin before inauguration; commitments of public money must wait for authorized officials and usable funds.

For example, follow a battery from supplier to customer

America needs batteries for cars, trucks, trains, homes, appliances, and utility-scale storage. The United States already makes them, but China dominates the industry and important parts of the supply chain remain missing here. The RFC team should be able to follow a battery from its materials to the customer who will buy it.

Picture a cell manufacturer with a buyer ready to order more batteries. It cannot expand without separator film, the material between the electrodes. The film maker will not add a production line without a reliable customer. Both need equipment, power, trained people, and finance. The RFC team brings them together with their suppliers, utility, and lenders, so the orders and investments can proceed together. That could produce an expanded battery plant, a new materials supplier, and a business recycling production scrap.

For example, follow a chip beyond the fab

The nation will also need to make more of the microchips that run vehicles and appliances, as well as advanced processors. Some producers can add equipment in an existing plant; a new fabrication plant takes longer. A fab requires specialized equipment, chemicals, power and water, and its chips need packaging and testing before a customer can use them.

The RFC team brings equipment and materials suppliers, utilities, contractors, and training institutions into the same discussion. An expansion may require a packaging plant serving several producers or a nearby supplier adding a line. A completed factory building is one milestone. Qualified production and shipments are the result.

For example, build more transformers

Transformers will be needed to connect new factories and power plants to the grid. Expanding their production can mean more electrical steel, winding equipment, trained workers, and space for final assembly and testing. The RFC team brings utilities' expected purchases together with manufacturers' expansion plans and follows the demand back to the suppliers that have to grow with them.

The same questions apply to heat pumps, industrial motors, water-treatment equipment, medical supplies and the machinery that makes all of them. Who needs the output, who can produce it, what is holding them back, and which investment would remove the constraint?

The national building program supplies part of that demand. As agencies and building owners assemble projects, the RFC team can show manufacturers the equipment those projects are preparing to buy. A list of scheduled heating-system replacements helps identify the demand for heat pumps and controls. Manufacturers can plan against actual procurement and customer commitments as they are made. The Smart Tariff adds a proposed longer-term investment incentive; the work of assembling buyers and suppliers begins with the projects and authority already available.

The first stage of a mobilization is getting the work ready to multiply. A new production line has to be installed, tested, adjusted, and staffed before its advertised annual capacity becomes sustained output. The first projects also expose delays in lending, contracting, and utility connections that the team has to solve and stop repeating. These preparations happen alongside expansion in factories that already operate. Some firms can add a shift or remove a production bottleneck while others are still constructing their plants.

The RFC team should publish that progress in terms people can check, such as finance closed, equipment ordered and installed, workers trained, products meeting the customer's specifications, and shipments leaving the plant. A groundbreaking belongs on the record, but it is not the final result. The first two years must produce working examples as well as the larger investments that take longer to mature. That is how the opening effort prepares the country for a much greater expansion when Congress charters the full RFC.

The Smart Tariff

A tariff is worth having when it causes something to get built here, and worth nothing when it only raises the price of what people buy. So this plan uses one instrument, the Smart Tariff. It is a dated wall, a tariff announced years ahead and legislated rather than decreed, paired with an open offer of federal capital to anyone who builds behind it. The public gets the factories and the jobs that come with them. Where the government lends, repayments come back to the public; guarantees can bring private lenders into eligible investments. And nobody pays a surprise tax on their groceries in the meantime.

The hard tariffs land in 2031. The announcement is made during the campaign, to start the clock while there is still time to build.

Anyone who wants to sell into the American market after 2031 needs to be making the goods inside it. The accompanying investment offer aims to provide low-cost federal capital for eligible projects, using the programs and financing described above. It is aimed by name at Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and German manufacturers, and it is aimed at them in 2029 and 2030, so that construction begins while there is still time to build domestic capacity. The offer must identify which program can finance each plant and whether the authority and funds are already available or still require congressional action.

The offer builds productive capacity rather than simply transferring money to an incumbent. Private capital is welcome alongside; where an available public instrument can lawfully finance a project without it, the work need not wait for private investors.

Import as needed, while domestic capacity grows

The trade war with China is one the United States is losing, by ceding its industrial capacity and its future jobs, and this administration will end it. Cheap imported goods have kept inflation from eroding American wages in the commodities the country buys daily and does not make.

A plan that produces inflation loses the midterm, and losing the midterm ends the Mission for America. Staying commercially open to China while building domestic capacity behind a dated wall is a strategic position.

The tariff must be legislated. A company considering a factory needs a policy it can build against for years. The 2026 tariff litigation shows why a disputed executive declaration cannot supply that assurance. Reconciliation is a possible route for provisions that satisfy its budget rules. The proposed 2031 tariff still requires Congress to act. Appendix J explains the investment calendar and the legal routes.

Getting construction moving

Building and upgrading homes, workplaces, and infrastructure requires investment in the construction industry itself. The RFC team must organize that expansion alongside the projects. The president’s promise of a sustained wave of work gives builders a reason to invest, but they also need customers, financing, equipment, and experienced people to lead the crews.

Start with the contractors and building trades unions already doing the work. Bring their next projects together with banks and suppliers so they can see what is coming and plan to expand. Large firms can organize portfolios of buildings. Small contractors can handle scattered properties and subcontract packages, but need money to carry payroll and materials between payments, and confidence that another job follows the first. The team will organize private lending and use eligible federal programs where they fit. It must not confuse financing an individual retrofit with financing the capacity to deliver many of them.

Appendix D explains construction capacity, working capital, and the contracting process.

Federal buildings establish the process

The federal government owns nearly 250,000 buildings. It can begin with properties it controls using an established contract that pays for upgrades from the energy they save. Under an energy savings performance contract (ESPC), a contractor arranges the capital, installs the improvements, and guarantees the savings. The agency repays the work from its existing energy budget. No new up-front capital appropriation is required for each project.

The first executive order directs every cabinet agency to inventory and assess its buildings, identify the worst performers, and bring forward projects ready to proceed. The number still unassessed is published monthly until it reaches zero. Existing law already requires recurring evaluations and action on qualifying cost-effective measures; the order makes delivery a presidential priority.

Federal buildings are where the administration gets the delivery process working at the pace the mission requires. Picture the first group of office buildings. Engineers inspect the heating and ventilation, the contractor prices the work and guarantees the savings, a lender supplies the capital, and the agency signs. Crews install the equipment; the contractor tests it and verifies the savings. Each agency needs people who can carry a project through that whole sequence. DOE already supplies the process, model documents, and technical assistance to build on.

Those early projects establish working relationships among agency staff, contractors and lenders. The team finds the approvals that stall, improves the common documents, and carries those improvements into the next group of projects. The first round does useful work while making later rounds easier to deliver. It also gives manufacturers a developing order book for the equipment the crews will install. This is the opening stage of the larger building mobilization, which gets the process working, repeats it, and keeps widening the work.

National building targets

By November 2030, every federal building will have been assessed, with the outstanding count published monthly. The administration will award at least 200 federal performance contracts a year, reporting awards each month. The current federal pace is about 16 DOE-program projects a year. Reaching the new targets requires willing owners, suitable financing, and enough contracting capacity; the targets are the work to organize, not a list of projects already funded.

Taking the work beyond federal buildings

Schools, hospitals, housing authorities, cities, and private owners can use the same kind of savings contract. The federal team will provide common documents, a standard way to measure savings, one application to begin the process, and people who help owners reach a signature. Each owner remains responsible for its property and each project needs the authority and financing appropriate to it.

The best candidates are organizations managing a large portfolio of structures, such as a housing authority’s buildings, an apartment owner’s properties, a school district or homes reached through an electric co-op. Working in bulk brings materials, crews, and training together. It makes room for small contractors within an organized succession of jobs rather than leaving every household to assemble a separate program.

Public housing authorities bring buildings they own; private and nonprofit owners bring tax-credit housing. State housing-finance agencies can strengthen energy standards for future qualifying tax-credit awards to create more demand. Schools can turn lower utility bills into money available for teaching once financing payments are met. Hospitals, libraries, transit depots, water facilities and other public buildings have their own opportunities. Co-ops can finance home improvements through utility bills; community lenders and mortgage insurance can help reach private owners. The administration organizes the work nationally, wherever owners are ready.

A federal guarantee can help a lender finance an eligible project, but existing programs have different borrowers, purposes and limits. Some buildings will need commercial financing. The absence of one broad instrument reaching any suitable building, at the scale the work requires, is part of the case for the full RFC. Appendix E explains the owners, portfolios, and financing routes.

Financing the mobilization

Congress must act before the 2028 presidential election. The current Congress or the next must extend the expiring lending authorities this plan needs in 2029, meeting any earlier deadlines along the way. We expect these renewals to pass. Federal credit often supports large amounts of lending with a comparatively small budget provision for the estimated cost after repayments and fees. Established industrial and export-finance authorities have long renewal records and bipartisan constituencies.

The newer Energy Dominance Financing and Office of Strategic Capital lending authorities expire in 2028 and need their own extensions. If a renewal fails, the affected projects must find another financing route or wait.

The RFC team will match each project to the programs that can finance it and push their lawful reach as far as possible. It cannot turn an energy program into a general manufacturing fund or use money already committed to another project. Historical lending totals show the scale of the instruments; they are not balances waiting for the president in 2029. Appendix A explains federal credit and the proposed financing package. Appendix B gives the renewal case, calendar, and eligibility rules.

The same national team will help eligible EV-charging and broadband projects move through existing programs, put blocked approvals on the public register, and bring obstacles requiring new law or funding into the legislative program. Those proposed legal changes are not counted as powers the president already holds.

Part Two. The state Mission for America pilots

Alongside the national policies above, which benefit every American, the administration opens a competition to make one state the working demonstration of the Mission for America. Any state may enter, on terms published on inauguration day and described below. The winner gets federal money to train a cohort of workers, and an in-state RFC team that moves into the state and stays there, brokering the deals, handling the federal government on the state's behalf, and getting things moving.

The pilot brings the national building and housing program into one state at a much greater concentration. Performance contracts, public housing upgrades, tax-credit housing rehabilitation, co-op loans, community lenders, eligible federal guarantees and every other mechanism described in Part One are brought to the projects they can serve. The embedded team works with the banks, builders, and property owners the state has recruited, assembling portfolios of work and arranging financing for them together. The state takes the processes put to work on federal buildings and extends them across schools, hospitals, apartment complexes, businesses, and homes.

Picture a housing authority, an apartment owner, and a school district bringing their next projects to the same table as local banks and contractors. They still sign separate contracts and qualify under the programs that fit their properties. But the team can coordinate the schedule, help lenders evaluate the projects, and give contractors a succession of jobs around which to hire and train. The co-op brings another group of homes; the community lender helps reach owners who cannot arrange a large loan on their own. Private financing pays for work beyond the reach of a small training grant. The amount of that work depends on the projects that can repay their financing and the owners, capital, and crews the state can bring forward.

The same embedded team helps local manufacturers bring expansion projects into the national industrial investment effort. A supplier in the state may serve plants elsewhere in the country; the battery and chip supply chains will still cross state lines. The state pilot concentrates the organizing work without trying to put every industry or every stage of production inside its borders.

Federal staff on loan supply the embedded RFC team, which packages projects for the national financing programs and private lenders. Under the full Mission for America, every state would have an RFC office doing this work. The pilot establishes that model in one place, with the people close enough to the buildings and factories to visit them.

The state does not get a lending program of its own, and it does not go to the front of any queue. Each agency decides applications under its program's rules, including any geographic or borrower restrictions; selection as the pilot confers no exemption. What the state gets is people who know which program can lawfully finance each project, and who write the application and file it, so its applications arrive early and arrive complete.

If enough private capital comes forward during the application process, the administration could extend the pilot to more than one state. In any case, the states that apply and lose will already have done the valuable part, getting their builders, banks, and unions into one room and pointed at the same work. Nothing stops them from financing it anyway, and any project in any state will be able to come to the RFC team in Washington and ask for a loan or a guarantee.

The pilot seeks about $30 million over two years from the Labor Department’s national reserve for dislocated workers. That combines a demonstration grant of about $8 million, the size the department routinely awards, with a larger grant under a long-standing appropriations provision that lets the reserve fund a statewide response to job losses across many industries. The state must apply for and win both. The money pays for the start of training and the small number of state posts needed to administer the program. It comes from the national reserve, not another state’s formula allocation.

The work and its scale

The pilot begins by assembling projects, closing financing, recruiting supervisors, and putting paid training and support into operation. Established contractors can proceed with their existing workforces while trainees prepare to join them. It expands as owners, capital, crews, and usable sites become ready.

We do not yet know how many workers the pilot will train or employ. Its scale will depend on the state, the work it brings and the experienced people available to supervise. Recruiting those people is one of the hardest constraints. Registered apprenticeships specify supervision ratios, and applicable prevailing-wage rules enforce them on covered work. That limits supervised apprentice places; it does not impose one federal headcount cap on every worker or every kind of project.

The stages are to establish projects and training, move people into supervised building and care work, complete deep retrofits and basic upgrades on suitable structures, open and expand childcare and community services, and then repeat at the scale the state can support.

Paid training and support from the start

A state competing for the pilot must present a practical way to pay people from the first week of learning, get them into work, and expand training quickly. It must identify state and local rules that hold up payments or training, commit to changing those within its power, and identify any statutory changes it will need. Federal conditions must be identified by the funding and work they actually govern.

The Labor Department award supports classroom training; once participants join crews, their work pays their wages. Registered apprentices receive the appropriate apprentice rate and progression. Other workers receive the rate required for the labor they perform. Experienced tradespeople supervise skilled work. Short safety credentials allow particular tasks to begin; they do not substitute for an apprenticeship.

Every participant’s health coverage, childcare where needed, mileage, tools and boots begin in the first week. Tools and boots are provided, not deducted from pay. The state must arrange coverage for classroom trainees as well as employees, and identify which benefits each person qualifies for. Food assistance and welfare programs help finance eligible support but do not cover everyone automatically.

Picture a participant entering through the state’s training system. Before the first class, she knows what she will be paid, how she and her children are covered, and where childcare is available. Some learning can begin online while the state arranges the hands-on instruction. She then joins a supervised crew on work a participating owner has already financed. The training and support bring her to a job; the continuing succession of projects gives her a reason to expect another one. This is the experience the state must organize, with each payment and coverage route established before it promises a place.

Appendix G sets out the training, pay, supervision, coverage and grant-budget questions.

Care and community hubs

Childcare is part of the capacity to work. The pilot will train new care workers, support them through their qualifications and raise what the state pays providers so the improvement reaches the entire sector, not only the pilot’s own payroll. A center that recruits its staff from the daycare down the road has not created more care. The program has to add workers and places, with pay that makes staying worthwhile.

Community and workforce hubs bring training, employment services, medical care and childcare together, open to the public. Existing job centers already bring several programs under one roof; health-center and childcare programs can add the missing services. Suitable public or educational space can house urban hubs, while community-facilities lending offers a rural route. The model should be one other states can copy.

Care graduates can later staff the services that help the next trainees enter work, but the first cohort needs childcare before those graduates exist. Appendix H explains the care workforce, provider pay, eligibility transitions and hub funding.

What a state must bring

The competition opens on inauguration day, with joint terms prepared by Labor, Agriculture, Health and Human Services and Energy. The application must bring the governor, banks, large and small contractors, unions and major owners to the same table. It names actual projects, proposed financing, crews and supervisors, and distinguishes an expression of enthusiasm from a commitment to lend or build.

The governor’s commitments include claiming eligible SNAP training reimbursements; using available TANF transfer room for childcare where the state has it; maintaining childcare as earnings rise within federal rules; raising statewide provider payments to the 75th percentile of the local market; strengthening housing-credit rehabilitation standards; directing a qualifying state financing institution toward the work; and putting the relevant state agencies in one building. The state also brings its plan for immediate paid training and the changes to its own rules needed to deliver it.

Federal project loans can finance the full construction contract, including apprentice wages and contractor contributions to registered apprenticeship programs. A state that makes local hiring and apprenticeship a condition of its pilot projects can fold much of that training cost into the financed budget.

Federal teams visit serious applicants within 60 days and make the award inside 90. Selection turns on commitments and speed, not whether the state is rich or poor. Territories enter on the same terms. Runners-up finish their agreements and any required legislative preparations so they are ready if the pilot expands. Appendix F gives the competition, full state commitments, staffing and reporting requirements.

How success is measured

The state publishes results from the first month. The public should be able to see:

• Days from application to money out of the door, with consistent start and end points so delays can be compared.
• People still employed at 12 months.
• Loans closed and dollars delivered, compared with the present completion rate and delays.
• The average annual energy-bill reduction per retrofitted building, in dollars.
• Hubs open and people using each service.
• Childcare places created and care workers trained and still working at 12 months, reported alongside construction results.

These measures can be chosen before the state is known. The volumes will be what the work actually produces. Appendix F gives the reporting account and the earlier delivery failures the pilot must improve on.

Part Three. The largest useful legislative program

The administration will work with Congress to do as much as it possibly can. The president will call for a genuinely big and beautiful bill to restore all the benefits the Trump administration took away from Americans and to undo all the damage done. If the balking donkeys fight it, the president will take the argument to the country and launch primary campaigns against the leading balkers. The president's mission here is to pass the biggest and most beautiful bill possible.

With the filibuster still in force, the administration will use budget reconciliation for the provisions that qualify, allowing certain budget and spending legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority. Other changes will need separate legislation and additional votes; administrative improvements within existing authority can begin while those bills are being negotiated. The American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act all passed this way.

Assuming narrow majorities in both chambers, and the balking donkeys limiting what can be done, the bill will focus on affordability, health care and undoing the damage of the Trump administration. Within those priorities, it will concentrate on mainstream, uncontroversial progressive policies that could readily win a simple Senate majority. The key is having a well-crafted plan for the legislation to make a difference in Americans' lives.

Many of the major policy initiatives of the last 50 years have failed to turn their promises into quick, visible improvements. This bill must be designed around implementation from the beginning, with benefits that reach a majority of Americans. Modernizing and streamlining the federal bureaucracy will be a major priority, so that a large bill produces improvements people actually experience.

Restore benefits and public capacity

The bill will restore Medicaid coverage, the expanded Affordable Care Act tax credits, food assistance and its eligibility for lawful immigrants, and Medicare support and drug-price negotiating powers. It will rebuild scientific research and public-health capacity, weather forecasting and climate monitoring, emergency management, veterans’ health staffing, and the national parks and public lands workforce. USAID will be reconstituted with the emphasis on actual aid and development. Appendix I sets out the restorations and their legislative routes.

The bill also replenishes and enlarges the investment instruments where Congress will support it. The proposed package requests roughly $18–54 billion across energy and vehicle lending, community lenders, defense production and industrial-base finance. The financing scenarios lay out approximately $148–448 billion in combined financing and direct investment, with different assumptions for each instrument. These are conditional calculations, not a promise that the lending has already been authorized or funded. Appendix A elaborates on all six scenarios.

Make government easier to use

Getting a benefit, resolving a health care problem, dealing with a school, obtaining a permit or opening a business should not mean starting another maze of forms. The bill will revive the United States Digital Service and give it a mandate to make every American's interactions with the federal government as short and easy as possible.

Estonia shows what a modernized public-service system can accomplish. These are some concrete projects the Digital Service could build:

• Return-free tax filing. The IRS already receives your W-2s and 1099s before you do, so it should send you a finished return to approve or correct, the way dozens of other countries already do.
• Automatic enrollment in what people already qualify for. Billions go unclaimed every year purely because claiming is difficult, so enroll people automatically in SNAP, Medicaid and CHIP, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and federal student aid wherever the government already holds the data to know they qualify.
• Same-day federal payments. Refunds, benefits, and disaster assistance move over the instant payment rails Treasury already has access to, turning a wait of weeks into a wait of seconds.
• Medicare and Medicaid customer service. Replace the hold times, the fax machines, and the coverage letters nobody can parse with a system that tells a beneficiary what they are covered for in plain language on the first try.
• One front door for all government benefits. One login, one form, and enrollment that carries across programs instead of restarting at each one.
• A free national curriculum and free textbooks. Publicly owned, openly licensed materials for every K-12 subject, built once at federal expense and offered to any state or district that wants them.
• Veterans' claims processing. A disability claim that now takes months of paper-shaped process becomes software, and the backlog is already measured and published monthly.
• One-stop business registration and free small-business filing. Register once and file once, instead of repeating the same information to a state agency, the IRS, and several federal offices every year.
• One free school operations application. Replaces the 10 separate vendors a typical district pays for, with the saving to each district calculated and announced.
• Free permitting and inspection software for cities. Supports the nationwide retrofit program by removing the permitting delay in front of every local build.
• A federal permitting status page. Every project in one public place, with real dates and the name of the agency holding it up.

Build chargers and broadband faster

The bill applies the same delivery standard to charging and rural broadband. Public chargers should use standard designs and contract terms, with automatic approval for states adopting them and construction able to begin the week money arrives. Congress should lift the prohibition on sales at interstate rest areas. Broadband should use one federal approval round and a firm deadline. A provider claiming an address is already served must prove it, or the address counts as unserved and funding moves. States that have selected vendors should keep them.

Some changes need legislation beyond reconciliation and therefore bipartisan votes while the filibuster remains. The administration should pursue those votes and be willing to veto bills amended to protect incumbents at the expense of delivery. Appendix I explains the specific reforms.

Staffing and delivery

Federal employment fell 12 percent between September 2024 and January 2026. Much of the capacity to underwrite loans, write contracts and administer grants left with the people who knew how to do it.

There are two jobs. The first is to put a few hundred people at White House desks within weeks, including the few dozen on the RFC team. The second is to put several thousand more into the agencies within the first year. The RFC team coordinates. Appropriately authorized agency officials make and administer the commitments.

The temporary White House organization can borrow experienced staff and recruit under existing authority. Rebuilding agencies uses direct hiring where shortages justify it, assignments from state governments and other eligible institutions, interagency details, experts, consultants and other available appointments. Most of this work is unclassified; clearances should not become an excuse for leaving desks empty. Suitability and any actual security requirements still have to be met.

The administration chooses the energy-lending director before the election, so that person is at work on January 21. It fills the other offices that move lending, property, childcare, apprenticeships, and digital services early. The four OMB program associate directors are among the people who set the pace of the work. Where a department’s nominee awaits confirmation, a lawfully designated acting official can exercise its powers within the applicable succession and time rules. The priority confirmation list is about 35 posts, a small part of the roughly 1,300 positions requiring Senate action. Appendix K names the posts and explains the staffing tools.

The administration keeps the hiring reforms that test ability and let agencies recruit more efficiently, and removes the presidential-policy essay from career hiring. On day one, it begins restoring the civil service protections, including whistleblower protections, of employees moved into Schedule Policy/Career.

The RFC team must make public who serves, what they did before, which projects they work on, and how conflicts are handled. Its connection to industry is useful only if people can trust its decisions. The administration begins restoring the Department of Education by reversing the dismantling directives and reviewing the agreements and staffing changes made under them. The department still exists in law; restoring its operations requires actual people and resources as well as signatures. Appendix L covers career protections, ethics, transparency, and Education.

The two years, in order

When	What
Now to 2028	The reauthorizations that decide how large any of this can be, including the Defense Production Act extension now running only through December 11, 2026. Establish which authorities and funds can support new commitments in 2029. The personnel list, assembled before the election, starting with the Office of Energy Dominance Financing. The campaign announcement of the 2031 tariff, so that investment decisions start being made in 2029, not 2031
The transition	The conversations with governors begin, so that a state is ready to move within days of the offer being made, not months
Day one	The call on Congress to charter the Corporation, and the competition opened to every governor in the country with its terms published. The executive order directing every cabinet agency to audit its own buildings and bring ready projects forward. Every appointment that requires nobody's permission
Week one	Acting principals make the second-tier appointments. The administration writes an additional health-coverage condition for workers on covered new federal service contracts. Appendix G explains the coverage and legal basis that must be established. The register of blockages opens with whatever is already known
First 30 days	Agencies implement the terms published on inauguration day; states assemble applications and the federal team begins reviewing readiness
First 100 days	The pilot state is chosen and signs. The bill goes up. Direct hire authority granted by occupation. The wage determinations needed for the first sites are secured before those crews begin; later determinations are requested far enough ahead to protect the construction schedule
Year one	The first federal building projects establish working teams and contracting methods. Industrial buyers and suppliers close eligible financing, order equipment, and start expansions; existing plants add production where ready. Training cohorts enter the field and the first housing complexes are finished. Pilot banks, owners, and contractors assemble the wider work. The pilot state closes out the one or two commitments its own law required a statute for. The aim is to pass the bill and secure the requested financing. Work proceeds through available programs while projects needing extensions or refills wait for those provisions to become law
Year two	The pilot state runs its second cohort and moves on to the next housing complexes while its wider building program expands with committed private financing and crews. National teams repeat the methods established on the first federal projects. Industrial projects report installed equipment, qualified production, and shipments as they reach those stages; longer projects continue construction. The runners-up stay ready. A visible result in communities in every state before November 2030, from the nationwide retrofit work, not from the pilot

The mandate for the full Mission

By the fall of 2030, tangible improvements to American life will be visible across the country. Crews will be working on buildings in every state, new plants will be going up, and one state will have the mission already running. The president and their allies will make the Mission for America a defining issue of the midterm elections, celebrating the lawmakers who support it, and campaigning against the opposition in both parties.

If the president can deliver this plan, MFA-aligned candidates will sweep the House and the Senate, delivering majorities supporting radical political and economic reform, including a Senate majority willing to end the filibuster. Within days of the new session of Congress beginning, the charter for the full Reconstruction Finance Corporation will arrive on the president's desk.

The Mission for America begins.