Today we are releasing a report that we’ve been building for the past seven months on the virtual pages of this substack: a comprehensive look back at what the Biden Administration got right and wrong on technology and innovation.

The report is called “Democrats’ Techlash Trap” and I hope you’ll check it out here.

This report is vital to understanding where the party has shifted from being the party of innovation, and the political consequences of that shift.

One of the key things I set out to accomplish with this report was understanding exactly why so many leaders in the tech industry turned against Democrats during the Biden Administration. So over the past several months, I discussed this project with people who had close-up and behind-the-scenes perspectives on the Biden Administration’s approach to technology policy, including former administration officials, industry advocates, and Silicon Valley leaders.

The next era of politics will be shaped by artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, clean energy, crypto, defense innovation, autonomous systems, digital services, and global technology competition. Democrats cannot lead that era while fighting the people and companies building it. We do not need to choose between accountability and optimism. We can protect consumers, enforce the law, and address real harms while still being unmistakably pro-innovation.

But in order to embrace a tech-forward future, Democrats have to understand how and why we took a turn against tech in the Biden era - and what it cost us. We can’t chart out future without fully understanding our past.

The Party of Innovation

The report begins by reminding Democrats who we used to be.

From the Atari Democrats of the 1980s to the Clinton-Gore technology agenda to the Obama era, Democrats built a durable identity as the party of technological progress. The Atari Democrats argued that emerging industries and knowledge workers were central to economic growth. Clinton and Gore turned that vision into policy, expanding R&D, supporting the internet economy, and helping build the conditions for a historic tech boom.

Obama deepened the relationship by using digital tools in his campaigns, creating new technology roles in government, and bringing tech talent into public service. With the New Democrats Coalition in Congress came a new Democratic identity: An optimistic one that believed technology could make government work better, create jobs, and strengthen American leadership.

The Road to the Techlash

That tradition started to crack after 2016. Hillary Clinton’s loss shocked Democrats, and many looked for explanations outside the party’s own strategic failures. Facebook, Russian disinformation, and Cambridge Analytica became convenient villains and laid the foundation for a belief that technology platforms had betrayed Democrats.

At the same time, foundation-funded post-neoliberal economic thinking gained influence among party elites. A critique that began as concern about inequality and market power increasingly hardened into skepticism toward technology itself. The result was the “techlash trap”: Democrats stopped treating platforms as tools to compete on and started treating them as adversaries to be punished.

The irony is that while influential parts of the party drove the techlash forward, Democratic voters themselves never became broadly anti-tech.

What Biden Got Right

Despite my criticisms I want to be clear: it is vital not to flatten the Biden record to a pure anti-tech story.

Some of the administration’s strongest accomplishments came when the tech-friendly elements of the Administration led the way. The CHIPS Act, clean energy deployment, electric vehicle supply-chain strategy, international digital tax diplomacy, defense innovation, and the early crypto executive order all showed that Biden often had the right instincts to advance innovation and national competitiveness.

The CHIPS Act implementation effort receives special attention in the report because the Commerce Department succeeded by bringing private-sector expertise into government over the objections of Elizabeth Warren and outside groups. When Democrats combine public purpose with people who truly understand technology and markets, they can deliver a major administration victory.

Biden’s Closed Door Policy

However, too much of the administration moved in the opposite direction.

Instead of recruiting technologists and business leaders, Biden’s team often treated industry experience as a political liability. Progressive pressure over the “revolving door” made officials wary of hiring people from technology companies or even meeting with industry leaders. The result was a reflexively closed-door posture when dealing with tech executives: fewer conversations, less expertise, slower execution, and a growing sense in Silicon Valley that Democrats no longer wanted to listen.

By seeking to manage the left-wing faction of the party, the coalition managers Biden put in charge of building the Administration’s tech policy team ended up unresponsive to the politics. Voters want leaders who understand business and the economy; they do not reward an administration for insulating itself from the people building the future.

Faculty Lounge Populism

“Faculty lounge populism” describes how Biden’s tech regulation agenda was driven by elite academic theories and activist priorities – rather than the concrete concerns of voters. Biden-era tech regulators focused too heavily on abstract fights over mergers, targeted advertising, crypto enforcement, and anti-corporate symbolism while voters cared more about privacy, security, scams, prices, and practical consumer protection.

The critique is not that regulation is wrong. It is that regulation should solve problems people actually feel - an especially important lesson as inflation ramped up and became the dominant issue on voter’s minds. Biden’s regulatory teams too often conflated headline-grabbing lawsuits with a governing agenda that would resonate with consumers.

The Digital Deficit

Some might ask, what were the costs of Biden-era tech hostilities?

The Biden Administration’s anti-tech elements limited the government’s ability to maximize the societal benefits that American technology could deliver. The “digital deficit” showed up in several ways: failing to defend U.S. technology companies against discriminatory foreign regulation, allowing Obama-era digital government modernization efforts to languish, missing the chance to build a national tech jobs strategy, and moving too slowly on life-improving technologies like autonomous vehicles and drone delivery.

Sound technology policy feeds directly into good governance, and Democrats are clearly the party most closely associated with government solutions. A party that wants to make government work cannot afford to be indifferent or hostile to the digital economy.

Lose-Lose Politics

Anti-tech populism was sold within the Biden Administration as helping Democrats reconnect with working-class voters. This simply failed.

Non-college voters did not come back, while many parts of the tech community shifted rightward or disengaged. Young men, many of whom use, build, invest in, or aspire to work in technology, increasingly experienced Democrats as the HR Department party of restrictions and scolding. Democrats gave up an advantage on innovation without gaining a new coalition in return.

The path forward is a Democratic reset: rebuild relationships with innovators, recruit people who have built things and understand innovation, defend American tech leadership abroad, modernize government, connect workers to tech jobs, and tell a story of progress that is optimistic, practical, and grounded in Democratic values.

The techlash trap was built over years. Escaping it will take work. But Democrats can once again be the party of innovation.

Polling shows that voters are uneasy about the AI boom, but the internet can distort scale. Online, it can feel as though data centers and AI are the only things happening in politics. This should serve once again as a reminder that social media is not real life.

Online discourse and Congressional offices are dominated by highly-educated, tech-savvy professionals who spend all day sitting at a computer. These are exactly the people who you would expect to care the most about AI - they use it professionally, and the most likely to have it disrupt their work and professions.

But the campaign and Congressional Staffer Class is not at all representative of the American electorate. As of 2024, about 36% of Americans who are 18 or older have a bachelor’s or advanced degree. For most people, AI issues are not top of mind and they do not anticipate that it will dramatically change their lives.

David Shor’s Blue Rose Research found that AI has risen in importance faster than any issue over the past year, but it still ranks only 29th out of 39 issues. Cost of living is at the top. In Blue Rose’s 2024 retrospective, Shor highlights that voters are considering AI as part of a broader economy that they view as rigged, or not working for them. In voter’s minds, AI is a subcategory about their concerns about the cost of living or jobs.

Before Democrats build their campaigns or legislative strategies around opposition to AI, it is important to put the issue into perspective. Pew found that among Americans they polled about the benefits of AI, their overwhelmingly most popular answer was “Medium” with “Not sure” outpolling “Low” and “Very low.”

Of those ranking the benefits as low or very low, job loss was cited as the reason by only 7% of respondents. This is not the kind of national hot button issue to center in a political agenda.

Despite this polling data, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed an AI Data Center Moratorium Act that would pause AI data-center development until national safeguards are in place on safety, workers, electricity prices, communities, and the environment. The left wing of the party may think that “No new data centers until every federal guardrail is settled” sounds responsible, but in reality it means waiting for a federal consensus that will never arrive.

In practice, an anti-AI posture feeds into the narratives about Democrats that helped make Biden and the party brand so unpopular. We are the nanny state scolds, we are anti-business and innovation, and not focused on the issues that voters care about most.

Democrats need to be able to respond to real concerns and issues around AI implementation, but starting from a position of banning data centers puts Democrats in a bad negotiating position with AI companies to implement and adhere to voluntary standards and puts Democrats out of step with voters who are generally supportive of American innovation.

Fortunately, the more moderate elements of the party are not following Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez down this path. Even as he argues that Democrats should tune out the threats from political spending groups looking to avoid AI regulation, Democratic political strategist Rob Flaherty shoots down the idea of an AI moratorium:

Moratoria on AI are profoundly ill-advised. Whatever we do, the technology is coming, and it could be genuinely and positively transformative. Right now AI is set to be used by a handful of billionaires to further entrench their wealth – either because they run a frontier lab or they run a company that will benefit from “efficiency.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. We should utilize this technology to ensure that it benefits all of us in myriad ways. Everyone talks about cures for cancer, but imagine something even bigger than that: a world where huge productivity gains enable everyone to lead better, more fulfilling lives. That’s only going to happen if we institute rules of the road.

Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor in my home state of Iowa, is a useful example for how the party should handle the issue on the campaign trail. As state auditor, Sand discussed using AI in auditing to save time and let staff focus on higher-value analysis. But his public campaign priorities don’t focus on AI or data centers at all. They are built around growing Iowa’s economy, strengthening public education, lowering costs, improving health, and restoring accountability in government.

That emphasis fits Iowa. Donald Trump carried the state by about 13 points in 2024, and Iowa has a lower share of adults with a bachelor’s degree than the country overall. A campaign in that environment cannot be optimized for white-collar internet discourse. It has to speak to people who are asking whether their bills are going up, whether their kids can find good jobs, whether government works, and whether politicians are focused on ordinary people. And it is working. Sand is leading in the polls against his most likely Republican opponent.

Democrats especially must be careful not to turn regulation into an anti-innovation brand. Voters are not anti-science or anti-technology. A 2025 Science Coalition poll found that 74% of voters support federal investment in scientific research, and 85% say it is important for the United States to lead the world in science and technology.

The right message is not “let the AI labs do whatever they want.” It is also not “freeze the future until Congress reaches bipartisan consensus.”

The right message is not an AI-exclusive message at all. Build what improves people’s lives, drive down energy costs with greater production, and use AI now to make government faster, better, and more accountable.

CNN’s recent article on Lina Khan and the 2028 Democratic field makes a provocative claim: Democrats with presidential ambitions are calling the former FTC chair as they search for a new economic message. But the article’s own evidence that this is happening is thinner and more revealing than the headline suggests.

The piece reports that Khan is receiving outreach from Democrats eyeing future campaigns and that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is sharing her contact information with presidential hopefuls. But when the article turns to actual 2028 figures, the support becomes much more ambiguous. Even the candidates voicing support for Khan provided statements about governing better and supporting workers that weren’t really about her or her regulatory policies at all.

The clearest praise for Khan in the CNN story comes from Warren and Bernie Sanders, but neither is a likely 2028 presidential contender.

Beyond the headline however, the article quotes several Democrats, including likely 2028 hopefuls, expressing skepticism about Khan’s approach.

During the last presidential campaign, Maryland Governor Wes Moore said “I think we have to” when asked if Kamala Harris should shift her regulatory views away from Khan’s. Asked about Kahn more recently, a spokesperson for Moore said that he “doesn’t have thoughts about her one way or the other.”

In casting doubt on Khan’s proposed solutions, Rahm Emanuel put it this way:

“Rather than say ‘Lina Khan,’ which has its own explosion, the guiding light should be where Teddy Roosevelt was more about regulation and Woodrow Wilson was more about breaking out: that spirit is important, and that mindset.”

Rep. Josh Gottheimer voiced a worry about further alienating the innovation and growth voters within the Democratic party:

“You may fire up some portion of the base, but you’re also going to alienate a lot of people who, while they want competition and success for everybody, they also believe that you can start a business and be successful in America.”

The real question the 2028 Democratic hopefuls need to ask themselves: Should they look to the architects of Bidenomics to map a winning way forward for Democrats?

Data for Progress’ post-election report found that inflation and cost of living were the top issues in the election, that voters were deeply dissatisfied with Biden’s economy, and that Harris struggled to separate herself from Biden’s legacy on economic issues.

WelcomePAC’s Deciding to Win report similarly argued that voters see Democrats as not sharing their priorities. Voters viewed Democrats as insufficiently focused on cost of living, the economy, health care, taxes, immigration, and crime, while too focused on issues that rank lower in salience. It also found that highly educated and affluent Democrats prioritize issues differently from working-class voters, including placing relatively less emphasis on cost of living, gas prices, border security, and crime.

That analysis should make Democrats wary of confusing elite anti-corporate theory with working-class politics.

The Biden tech regulatory approach of “faculty lounge populism“ and anti-corporate politics rooted in academic theories about power and concentration, but often disconnected from immediate consumer needs. Biden’s tech regulators elevated fights over mergers, targeted advertising, and anti-bigness theories while voters were asking for affordability, privacy, security, scam prevention, and government competence.

The Biden administration already tried a version of this politics. It appointed Khan at the FTC, Jonathan Kanter at DOJ Antitrust, and other post-neoliberal regulators who treated corporate power as the central economic story. Yet the promised political payoff did not arrive.

Anti-tech populism became lose-lose politics, straining and breaking relationships with innovation-economy allies without winning back working-class voters. Public postmortems point in the same direction: voters wanted lower prices, practical economic management, and a party that shared their priorities.

We can’t count on the anti-corporate regulators of the Biden Administration to learn these lessons and pass them on, as Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen pointed out on X:

In the context of the collapse of Spirit Airlines, former Biden officials were using the same lines about corporate greed instead of reflecting on the wisdom of preventing a merger on their watch.

Democrats do not need more anti-tech regulatory crusades. Voters judge economic policy by whether it improves their lives. Lower prices, safer products, faster services, better jobs, stronger privacy, fewer scams, and a government that works are tangible elements of an economic policy that voters will support.

CNN’s article reveals a party still searching for economic identity. Democrats are right to be wary of just rallying around Biden’s economic agenda for the next four years, even as a vocal set of activists, intellectuals, and elected officials who want them to, but to win Democrats need to build a more consumer-focused cost of living agenda that learns from where Biden fell short.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving faster than almost any other issue, and the pressure on lawmakers to respond is mounting. The good news is that Democrats aren’t starting from scratch. Across both chambers, members have introduced legislation that points toward a serious, worker-first approach to AI, focused on training, education, research infrastructure, and better data on how AI is actually affecting jobs.

But alongside that real progress, some ideas gaining traction on the left would either fail to deliver for workers or actively undermine the gains AI could produce. Getting the future of work right means doubling down on what’s already working and steering clear of proposals that miss the mark.

Where Democrats are making strides

1. Job-connected training

The bipartisan AI Workforce Training Act, led by Representative Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ-5), recognizes a simple yet important reality: most training decisions happen inside firms rather than in government programs. By offering tax credits to employers that invest in AI-related career development, including accredited courses, workshops, in-house training, and practical skills like data literacy and prompt engineering, it pushes companies to upskill their own workers rather than replace them.

Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D-AZ) AI for America roadmap complements this with calls for apprenticeships, community college credentialing, and employer-provided training, along with expanded individual training accounts that put upskilling resources directly into workers’ hands.

2. AI education

Bipartisan efforts like the NSF AI Education Act, introduced by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Representative Andrea Salinas (D-OR-06), seek to expand access to AI training and scholarships, particularly for those traditionally excluded from the tech industry.

Senators Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), and Adam Schiff (D-CA) have also introduced legislation, the Workforce of the Future Act, which would authorize up to $160 million in Education Department grants to expand access to AI education, including teacher training and recruitment.

Recent proposals from Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR-01) emphasize a “human-centered” approach to AI education, including investments in teacher training to equip educators to bring these concepts into the classroom.

A bipartisan bill led by Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Literacy in Future Technologies Artificial Intelligence (LIFT AI) Act, further builds on these efforts by focusing specifically on K-12 AI literacy. This legislation would support National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to develop AI curricula, expand professional development for educators, and promote hands-on learning to help students understand and use AI technologies responsibly.

3. AI research infrastructure

Recent bipartisan efforts from Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and John Hickenlooper (D-CO) propose expanded federal investment in AI research infrastructure, including testbeds, standards development, and public-private partnerships to accelerate deployment. This is a foundation that future job-quality initiatives can build on.

4. Measuring AI’s impact on jobs

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have pushed to strengthen the way the Department of Labor tracks AI’s impact on the workforce, including improvements to core datasets such as the Current Population Survey and the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Their proposed AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act (S.3108) reflects a broader effort to expand reporting on hiring, job loss, and direct displacement due to AI to better understand its labor market effects.

Taken together, these efforts show that Democrats are already beginning to build the infrastructure for a worker-first AI agenda. The task now is to expand on them – and avoid the traps that could hinder their impact.

Avoid policies that miss the mark

Democrats should steer clear of policies that promise more than they deliver:

Income replacement over work

While some propose universal basic income (UBI) as the primary solution to AI-driven job loss, this overlooks the core goal of economic policy: increasing access to meaningful, well-paying jobs. Recently, Elon Musk publicly called for “universal HIGH INCOME“ through federal checks as the solution to AI-driven unemployment. The idea is gaining traction among many Democrats, too, in the form of an “AI dividend.”

New York House candidate Alex Bores’s proposed “AI Dividend“ would trigger direct payments to Americans once AI “meaningfully displaces” workers, funded by taxes and equity stakes in AI companies. Former Harris deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty made a similar case in the New York Times, calling for an “AI dividend modeled on Alaska’s oil dividend” and arguing that “the basics of middle-class life can’t depend on having a traditional job.”

Both proposals treat income replacement as the answer to a question about work itself. Bores softens that premise with “insurance policy” framing, while Flaherty states it outright. Either way, the conclusion gives up too much, too early, accepting a future in which most Americans lose access to meaningful work, and the government’s role narrows to distributing the proceeds of a shrinking job market.

The case for income replacement also rests on a shaky economic premise. Flaherty’s framing also treats AI as a zero-sum transfer of wealth from workers to capital, ignoring that technologies have historically reshuffled labor rather than destroying it in aggregate. It also ignores consumer surplus: AI already provides inexpensive tutoring, coding help, medical information, and translation to people who could never have afforded those services before.

As Gene Sperling argues, replacing work with income support neglects the need to improve wages, job quality, and mobility, potentially accepting a future with limited opportunities for contribution. Although transition-based income support is helpful, the main focus must be on actively expanding and shaping job opportunities instead of substituting for them.

The robot tax trap

Another approach gaining traction is to tax AI or automation directly. Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has long backed a “robot tax” on companies that replace workers with automation, and Bores’s and Flaherty’s dividend proposals share the same basic premise: fund payouts through taxes on AI companies. But that same logic would have called for taxing tractors, washing machines, ATMs, and self-checkout kiosks. Each displaced jobs. Each also made the economy more productive and created new ones.

Leaning on an “AI tax” to fund healthcare, housing, and childcare deflects from the real reasons those sectors are broken: restrictive zoning, provider consolidation, licensing barriers, etc. These problems long predate AI and require direct supply-side fixes.

Research on automation taxation finds the same pattern: higher costs, firms relocating to friendlier jurisdictions, slower productivity growth, and no clear gains for workers. The better move is to shape where AI gets deployed, steering it toward uses that support workers rather than replace them.

Retraining without a destination

Standalone retraining programs, disconnected from real hiring demand, have a persistently weak track record. Programs that measure success by enrollment instead of employment, lack employer coalitions, or fail to track wage outcomes tend to produce weak results. This is a fixable problem, and aligning training with real jobs is one of the highest-impact changes policymakers can make.

The risks of getting AI policy wrong are clear. Poorly designed policies could allow AI to deepen insecurity, widen inequality, and slow innovation, all without making workers meaningfully better off. That would be the worst of both worlds.

Democrats have a real chance to shape how AI transforms work, but only if we resist the temptation of easy answers. The goal shouldn’t be to replace work with checks or to slow progress with taxes. It’s to build an economy where more people can contribute, adapt, and get ahead. That means doubling down on what works, and having the discipline to walk away from what doesn’t.

Hope Ledford is the Director of Civic Innovation Policy at Chamber of Progress, leading work on autonomous vehicles, the gig and sharing economies, workforce issues, delivery, public safety and parking technology, and telemedicine.

Over the past year, AI has risen in importance faster for voters than any other issue. There’s an opportunity for Democrats to lead on building a future that is inclusive and prepares our current workforce for what comes next. And Democrats have confronted technological transitions and economic disruption before:

• FDR’s New Deal helped the country recover from the economic collapse of the Great Depression, which left millions of workers unemployed, by building the country’s safety nets.

• JFK’s Manpower Development and Training Act created the first federal programs to retrain workers displaced by machinery.

• LBJ’s Economic Opportunity Act built pathways into the workforce through job training and education after postwar prosperity failed to reach millions of Americans.

• Clinton’s Workforce Investment Act created a nationwide system of job training and career centers to help workers respond to the changing demands of the new economy.

• Obama’s Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act opened new pathways as globalization and automation hollowed out manufacturing communities.

• Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act invested directly in domestic technology manufacturing to keep American workers competitive in the AI era.

Each time, our party’s task was not to resist change but to ensure that the gains were widely shared. This moment is no different.

Here are seven concrete ways Democrats can lead and shape how it shows up in the economy and at work:

1. Incentivize investments in job-connected training

Most training decisions occur within firms rather than in government programs, which means the most effective lever is to shape what employers already do. Democrats should build on this reality by incentivizing employers to implement short, employer-linked programs such as apprenticeships, with clear hiring commitments, wage benchmarks, and transparent outcome reporting.

Lifelong learning accounts, funded by contributions from workers, employers, and government, can support continuous re-skilling as job demands evolve. Tax incentives should reward employers who invest in paid training time, redesign jobs to improve quality, and pass productivity gains on to workers. The goal should be to steer AI adoption toward better outcomes.

2. Expand access to AI education

Workforce programs too often prepare workers for abstract skills rather than specific labor market openings. Preparing workers for an AI-driven economy will require renewed investments in education and training.

At the K-12 level, there is growing momentum to treat AI literacy as a foundational skill alongside reading and math, with a growing focus on ensuring that schools in lower-income communities are not left behind. However, the Trump administration’s closure of the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology has weakened the federal government’s ability to support this work, limiting access to resources schools rely on.

Community colleges will also be central to this effort. They serve a large share of students, including adult learners and career changers, and are well-positioned to offer short-term, job-connected AI programs aligned with local demand.

3. Direct job growth toward high-human-value sectors

As Gene Sperling argues, the measure of a successful AI-driven economy is not based on productivity alone. It is also one that expands economic dignity, which he defines as the ability to earn a living, contribute to society, and find purpose in one’s work. This requires actively guiding the labor market toward roles that are both economically valuable and socially meaningful, especially in sectors defined by the relational, judgment-intensive, and fundamentally human work that AI cannot replicate, and where America’s labor shortages are most severe and consequential.

The U.S. currently faces a growing shortage of nurses and care workers as demand rises with an aging population, while a long-standing shortfall of home health aides is already straining access to care. Childcare systems are also under pressure, with staffing declines and persistent shortages limiting supply and raising costs for families. At the same time, teacher shortages remain widespread, especially in high-need subjects and regions. These are not isolated issues but structural gaps in the care economy, and they will deepen without targeted workforce investment.

This presents a clear opportunity. AI-driven productivity gains can reduce administrative burdens, including paperwork, scheduling, and documentation, that drive burnout and attrition in care roles, freeing workers to focus on the human work that drew them to these fields in the first place. Paired with training pipelines, wage support, and workforce incentives, this approach creates a viable path for redirecting displaced workers toward roles that are not only in demand but meaningful – exactly the kind of economy Sperling’s vision of economic dignity demands.

4. Create an ARPA-AI Jobs Initiative

Democrats can take a more active role in shaping how AI is used by launching an ARPA-style initiative focused on job-enhancing innovation. ARPA, or Advanced Research Projects Agency, refers to a model the federal government has used for decades to fund high-impact, experimental projects with clear goals and strong accountability. The most well-known example is DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which helped drive breakthroughs like the internet and GPS by funding ambitious, outcome-oriented projects and rewarding what works.

Democrats can apply the same logic to AI and work. An ARPA-style initiative could fund real-world deployments that show how AI can improve jobs, not just replace them. This includes targeted tax credits for companies that raise both productivity and job quality, competitive grants for local governments that develop replicable workforce models, and demonstration projects in sectors such as care, manufacturing, logistics, and education. Public procurement can reinforce this by awarding contracts to vendors that deliver measurable gains for workers.

5. Put targeted guardrails on algorithmic management

AI is reshaping how workers are hired, evaluated, and managed, often leaving them with little recourse or transparency. Democrats do not need sweeping regulation to address this. But the party must be careful not to over-index on regulation without a parallel job strategy. Proposals that focus primarily on restricting AI deployment, increasing compliance burdens, or slowing rollout miss the bigger picture. Without a clear agenda to improve jobs, regulation alone does not deliver better outcomes for workers.

What is needed instead are targeted protections that safeguard workers while preserving room for innovation. Workers will want mechanisms in place to understand how automated decisions will impact them and what their options are should their role be affected. Policy can also set transparency and safety standards for productivity quotas and workplace monitoring systems, especially when these systems risk pushing workers toward unsafe or unreasonable conditions.

6. Make economic security portable

When benefits and credentials are tied to a single employer, workers bear the full cost of labor market volatility – and so does their willingness to take the kinds of risks that a dynamic economy requires. Democrats can make it easier for workers to navigate a faster-changing labor market by ensuring that economic security follows the worker, not the job.

Portable benefits enable health care, retirement savings, and training support to follow workers across employers and work arrangements. Expanding work-sharing programs can help employers reduce hours rather than cut headcount during periods of adjustment, keeping workers connected to their jobs.

Licensing reciprocity and streamlined credentialing also help reduce barriers to mobility across states. A more portable system makes change more manageable and the broader economy more adaptable.

7. Measure what is actually happening

Good AI labor policy depends on good data. For too long, policymakers have been guessing about how technology affects jobs. Democrats should establish a federal-state collaboration to develop a quarterly “AI at Work” dashboard that tracks shifts in tasks, wage trends, hiring patterns, and job displacement in real time.

Improved measurement would enable earlier identification of emerging disruptions and more precise responses, serving as an early warning signal rather than a lagging indicator. Without better measurement, policy will continue to chase headlines instead of evidence.

Democrats have a real opportunity to shape what the next era of work looks like.

These ideas are a starting point.

Done right, AI can be a force multiplier for the important work humans undertake. Taking over routine and administrative tasks frees workers to do more of what only humans do well. This is how human-centered AI adoption can drive better jobs, higher wages, broader opportunities, and a stronger sense of economic dignity.

But this story is still being written. As we learn more about how AI transforms jobs, tasks, and industries, the policies we adopt today must also adapt.

This is not a choice between embracing technology and protecting workers. It is a chance to do both and prove, once again, that the party that built the middle class can advance and reshape the next one.

The Democrats’ post-2016 “techlash” turned a historically pro-innovation party into Biden Administration governance that relied on novel regulatory ideas, was risk-averse about losing the left wing of their governing coalition, and often came across as culturally scolding about the technologies that shape daily life and high-wage jobs.

To the Democratic party’s credit, most people are looking forward to our future instead of back on our past. Which raises the question - why bother to look back at the Biden Administration’s tech policies at all?

We can’t move forward without understanding where we went wrong.

It is important to understand how far we have come from the tech-optimist strategies that worked well for President Clinton and President Obama. We are using the same playbook that alienated working class voters and opened up a 31-point gap in the presidential candidate preferences between young men and women.

The core governing lesson is pragmatic: Democrats win and govern best when they are the party that makes things work by modernizing government services, building opportunity pipelines into the tech and tech-enabled economy, defending U.S. innovation in global competition, and regulating for concrete consumer outcomes (privacy, security, scams, affordability) rather than ideological posture.

Learning from Past Success

Democrats have had a long arc of success by leaning into tech optimism from Atari Democrats to Clinton/Gore to Obama, and the party’s recent anti-tech turn was an avoidable break from a winning tradition.

Post-2016 scapegoating of Facebook and “do something about Big Tech” politics encouraged hostility toward the very digital tools Democrats used to dominate during elections and weakened Democrats’ online competitive edge.

President Biden ran for president very much on the theme of normalcy after four years of Donald Trump and on his key role in shaping the Obama presidency. But once Biden was elected, the staffing choices driven by a desire to avoid conflict with Senators Sanders and Warren, along with their affiliated outside organizations drove “purity test” staffing norms, shutting out key private-sector and technical expertise even when voters broadly value business experience in government.

The anti-tech regulators of the Biden Administration practiced a form of “faculty lounge populism” that was intended to win back working class voters by applying novel antimonopoly and consumer protection theories to the tech industry, but the approach backfired. Instead, focusing regulators on niche fights over mergers and ads rather than bread-and-butter consumer protection, the Biden Administration created a lose-lose politics that alienated tech allies without winning back working-class voters.

Technology policy is most durable politically when it is genuinely pro-consumer and pro-safety. Democrats across the country should campaign and govern on the promise of safer roads through autonomous vehicles, cheaper and faster deliveries with drone technology, and lower costs through increased efficiency.

Lessons for Politics

While Democrats are poised to make significant gains in the midterm elections, the prospect of an overwhelming blue wave is still tempered by the enduring unpopularity of the Democratic brand, with just 28% of Americans holding a positive view of the party.

Democrats can help shed their image as being out of touch on economic issues and far-left scolds, by taking some specific actions.

First they can focus on embracing tech that lowers costs and saves lives in economic messaging. The lowest-hanging fruit here is to embrace the deployment of AVs and new rules that make it easier to get them on the road. This is a pro-tech, pro-safety message that is aligned with much of the emerging Democratic coalition, may require taking on unions seeking to protect their narrow member interests. As fewer unions are endorsing Democratic candidates and using their organizing power to help them win, there is an opportunity to appeal to a broader base of support, which includes everyone interested in safer roads and neighborhood streets.

Second, Democrats should reject the disproven notion that “anti-tech populism” is an effective blue-collar turnout strategy. The party will need to recruit candidates with strong working-class credentials and ideas, and embrace policies that are popular with the median voters of their districts and states. There is no shortcut to wrestling with hard questions of culture, identity, and economics by just blaming “oligarchs or Big Tech”. It just doesn’t resonate with voters.

Similarly, there is no substitute for leadership in crafting the guardrails for kids’ use of social media, the building and implementation of data centers, and establishing clear rules for cryptocurrencies that embrace the technology while helping to eliminate scams. The key here is that all of this work will be far more effective when working with the technology companies and people with industry expertise to encourage best practices, understand tradeoffs and unintended consequences, and maximize the benefits for society.

Lessons for Governance

Staff for competence: normalize private-sector and technical expertise as a governing asset

A key lesson from the Biden Administration is to build a “Democratic talent pipeline” for appointments that includes experienced technologists alongside staffing from think tanks, law firms, and academia. In the face of left-wing critics, the Biden Administration did bring in the experts they needed to implement the CHIPS Act, which is likely to remain as a key legacy of effective governance and economic policy from the Administration.

Democrats should create clear norms for balanced engagement (meet competitors and critics, publish calendars, enforce recusals), rather than treating meetings themselves as corrupt.

Embracing expertise has a political payoff as well. Voters see business experience as a positive credential for governing the economy.

Make “government that works” a flagship: modernize federal digital service delivery at scale

The key contrast of the Obama and Biden Administrations was the extent to which IT modernization focused on service delivery, not procurement theater. Following the healthcare.gov rollout debacle, the Obama Administration focused on expanding and protecting digital service teams; scaling proven systems quickly; aggressively retiring high-risk legacy systems; and using funding vehicles like the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) with milestone-based oversight. While many of the same tools and teams remained in the Biden Administration, there was no senior-level White House push to make progress and these efforts languished.

Build a real tech jobs strategy that matches the actual labor market, not a nostalgia economy

In the modern U.S. economy, putting tech-enabled services and digital skills at the center of workforce policy. Every administration provides hollow promises of revived American manufacturing in sectors that are not feasible. If the promises are not hollow, the policies, such as massive tariff disruption, are worse than doing nothing.

Alongside a manufacturing strategy, an administration should have a clear technology policy to train and equip American workers for the most dynamic sector of the economy. A strategy should be focused on apprenticeships, community college pathways, portable credentials, and placement partnerships with employers, link broadband expansion to workforce pipelines, and support regional tech hubs so opportunity is not geographically gated.

Compete globally and deliver locally: defend U.S. digital exports while accelerating life-improving tech deployment

A future Democratic administration should treat the American tech industry as the major advantage in global competition that it is. The US lead in venture capital and technology startups gives us a security and prosperity advantage over the entire world and helps to cement our status and the global leader.

We must treat technology and innovation as strategic national assets in diplomacy and trade and push for non-discriminatory application of rules like the EU Digital Markets Act and sustained digital trade engagement. Allowing Europe to write the rules for American tech undermines our strategic advantage and hurts American companies.

Democrats do not have to choose between accountability and optimism. Democrats can be tough on real harms (fraud, privacy violations, unsafe products, abusive market conduct) while still being unmistakably the party of innovation, opportunity, competence, and state capacity. A tech-optimistic party is a key part of the playbook for rebuilding durable Democratic governing majorities, and governing effectively when we are in control.

The anti-tech populists gained traction during the Biden years by effectively turning an intellectual critique into governing leverage, by aggressively engaging in intra-party Democratic battles over administration staffing, legal enforcement, and the shaping of policy.

But Democrats have misread the movement if they assume its leading figures and the advocacy ecosystem around them are invested in helping Democrats win elections.

Their own statements, coalition choices, and self‑described missions point to a different priority: winning victories for their pet causes, imposing Democratic purity tests, and even embracing Republicans in the name of “horseshoe politics”.

It’s time for Democrats to understand that these people do nothing to help Democrats win and build lasting governing majorities.

Incredible Influence and Access, Without Providing Support

Start with Matt Stoller, the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) research director profiled by Politico. The profile centered on Stoller’s willingness to praise and boost Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s anti‑monopoly agenda when Hawley was already radioactive to much of the Democratic coalition over Hawley’s actions around certification of Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election and the January 6th riot at the US Capitol.

Politico described Stoller as “known for” a dogmatic trust‑busting worldview so urgent that “nearly any other cause or political relationship should be sacrificed” to it. And the profile reports Stoller’s ideal political end state as one where opponents compete to “out‑anti‑monopoly” each other to the point that “burning nominal allies” is portrayed as an acceptable price of movement success.

The extremely online Stoller was open about his admiration for Hawley, praising him on X even as the Biden Administration was coming to power. This should have caused Stoller’s Democratic allies to be extremely wary of his political instincts and goals. Instead, he was embraced. His 2023 Politico profile states:

Stoller also holds remarkable sway in Biden’s Washington. Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who until recently served as Biden’s point person on competition in the White House, says Stoller — who, per Wu, maintains a “direct line to the White House” — helps Biden avoid something that has plagued past Democrat presidents: Crafting good policies no one understands.

Despite this lack of investment in Democrats’ success, the Biden Administration embraced Stoller’s group. It also hosted a December 2021 “town hall” featuring top National Economic Council officials Brian Deese and Bharat Ramamurti alongside Wu. The Biden White House treated this movement as a partner: Lael Brainard, as NEC Director and chair of the White House Competition Council, delivered prepared remarks at AELP’s Anti‑Monopoly Summit and thanked the organization for bringing key constituencies “to the table.” The 2024 version of the event featured Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter as the Keynote Speaker.

The Anti-Corporate Watchdog that Only Barks at Democrats

Jeff Hauser’s Revolving Door Project (RDP) fits the same pattern through a different policy lens. Hauser has embraced Senator Warren’s argument (updated from the Reagan Administration) that “personnel is policy,” making appointments and ethics rules the main battlefield for structural change.

Hauser’s approach is explicitly comfortable with creating friction inside the party: a profile in The Forward noted that his combative style annoys some fellow Democrats, but he accepted that as the cost of enforcing his worldview about conflicts and corporate influence.

A Democratic operative put it this way to Politico:

“While Democrats spent the past four years organizing to beat Donald Trump, Jeff was instead out there doing opposition research on potential Democratic appointees for a then-fictitious administration.”

That posture is visible in Hauser’s relationship with Gary Gensler. In a 2021 statement, Hauser had “applauded the nomination and confirmation of Gary Gensler,” then publicly castigated him for choosing “a paradigmatic Wall Street attorney” in Alex Oh as SEC enforcement director and demanded the SEC chair “do vastly better.”

RDP and a coalition of progressive organizations sent a letter to Gensler demanding that the highly-respected Oh, with both government and private sector experience, be forced from her job. Within days of being announced for the role, Oh resigned, specifically citing the “distraction” she would cause because of the pressure from these outside groups.

Hauser does not use language of a party‑adjacent group prioritizing his goals within the coalition, rather he uses the language of an umpire grading Democrats in power against an activist rubric and broadcasting the grade. By his own scorecard, he said Biden had earned a “C” compared to Trump’s “F.” Yet, since Democrats are the only ones listening to his grades, he focuses his time and energy on attacking Democrats; creating an entire website attacking Biden’s Commerce Secretary Gina Riomando for being willing to meet with and hire tech expertise to implement major initiatives like the CHIPS Act.

These elite populists used their influence to pressure the Biden Administration and helped steer Democrats toward a brand of anti‑tech politics that often read as out-of-touch, niche, and electorally misaligned. I have described this Biden‑era approach as “faculty lounge populism” rooted in elite academic and nonprofit networks, casting Big Tech as the villain while assuming ordinary voters shared the same priorities.

When Kamala Harris became the nominee, Hauser used his influence to try to shape the campaign in the interest of his organization:

“It’s an obvious missed opportunity to make some noise in a populist way amidst a populist moment,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of Revolving Door Project, a progressive watchdog. “I think she is ceding that populist energy to [Donald] Trump, and it’s an enormous miscalculation.”

This campaign analysis rings hollow when voters viewed Harris and the Democratic Party as too left-wing on economic and cultural issues, and too focused on holding positions that are popular with elites, but not everyday voters.

Democratic Politics Should be Led by Those With a Stake in Their Success

The Biden Administration too often treated anti-tech advocates as an auxiliary to their efforts to build a strong and effective party coalition. Democrats must realize that they are a movement with its own agenda and scoreboard, with very little interest in Democratic coalition needs or focus on winning elections so that their allies can govern instead of imposing purity tests on the party out of power.

Third Way’s poll of Democratic primary voters clearly shows that the left wing of the party is by far the least willing to compromise for the sake of winning and getting things done. At the same time, they only make up a tiny fraction of the Democratic Party. The “socialist” and “progressive” categories only make up 17% of the Democratic electorate, while the “liberal” and “moderate” make up 77% of the party.

Stoller’s willingness to build a bipartisan “realignment” around anti‑monopoly politics, even if it meant praising Hawley and “burning nominal allies”, makes it abundantly clear and should lead those of us with a vested interest in revitalizing the party to keep him on the sidelines of that effort.

The anti-tech, anti-business movement is not going away, but rather than hand them the keys to campaign and govern, Democrats should ignore them and utilize the expertise of the national leaders of American innovation. It is what voters want and will help Democrats win and govern effectively.

Jim Messina, the longtime Democratic strategist who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, argued in a recent article that Democrats are developing a major relationship problem with young men as we try to regulate emerging technologies they like.

As they see Democrats try to enact bans and tech regulations, many young men increasingly experience the party as the “scolding” side of politics, functioning as the HR department of American life intent on seeking to critique, regulate, or restrict their lives. That perception is leading to resentment and has real political consequences.

Between 2020 and 2024, Democratic support among men aged 18–29 fell sharply and the youth gender gap widened significantly, representing a shocking 31-point difference between young men and women. This is even greater than than the 18-point gap between voters of all ages, indicating that the issues behind the divergence are especially resonant with young men.

Comparing the overall vote count makes the shift between 2020 and 2024 look even worse since turnout was lower overall in 2024. Joe Biden received roughly seven million more votes for president than Kamala Harris did four years later. Given that young people are less likely to show up to vote, alienating a younger demographic has serious electoral consequences.

This shift could come to represent a structural change in the Democratic coalition and it coincides with a period when many of the most visible cultural and political fights centered on technology. The technology angle is crucial because young men disproportionately live in and build the digital economy.

The Gender Divide on Tech

Cryptocurrency is the most stark example of the gender divide, with 42% of men aged 18–29 have used, traded, or invested in crypto, compared to just 17% of women the same age. While the gender divide is not nearly as stark, about half of young adults use TikTok daily, placing the social media platform near the center of their social and cultural lives.

So when politics turns to regulating or banning these technologies, it is personal to young men. Messina’s analysis on this is right. If one party is associated with using your favorite apps and the other with banning them, the emotional alignment is obvious even with a limited understanding of policy and regulatory particulars.

Biden Sought to Regulate Digital Life

The Biden Administration clearly became associated with regulatory posture hostile to technology. In 2024, President Biden signed legislation requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest or face a potential U.S. ban. While this was not strictly a ban, the action was widely framed in public debate as an attempt to “ban TikTok.”

At the same time, the administration pursued aggressive regulatory approaches toward cryptocurrency through agencies like the SEC, and issued a sweeping executive order on artificial intelligence focused on safety, oversight, and risk mitigation. Even before addressing the nuances of whether these policies are well-designed or useful, the protection and safety framing strongly reinforces the nanny party perception.

Polling shows that voters perceived that shift clearly. In 2024, 60% of Democrats said the government should do more to regulate tech companies, compared to just 45% of Republicans—a notable divergence from 2020, when the parties were roughly aligned.

More detailed polling shows the same pattern across specific technologies: Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to support increased regulation of AI (72% vs. 52%), social media (51% vs. 33%), and cryptocurrency (62% vs. 41%). Even beyond regulation, Democrats are more supportive of restricting online content and support government limits on false information online.

Taken together, this creates a coherent perception: Democrats are the party that wants to manage, moderate, and regulate digital life.

Tech Is Often Where Young Men Work

That perception that Democrats are anti-tech is especially damaging with young men because for many, technology helps shape their identity and is tied to their career aspirations. The tech industry remains heavily male-dominated. Men make up roughly 74% of workers in computer and mathematical occupations, and about 77% of computer science bachelor’s degrees go to men.

If Democrats are seen as hostile to tech and innovation in the name of safety and protection, it challenges young men’s livelihoods. The Democratic politics of scolding is then both cultural and economic push away from the party.

Innovation and Democratic Values Can Go Together

Importantly, none of this means Democrats should abandon their values or even regulation. Americans of all ages, genders, and political stripes have concerns about the future of technology and don’t want to see crypto scams. We certainly do not want politicians using shady crypto deals to line their own pockets.

However, there is a way to pursue tech sector regulation that is from a pro-innovation perspective. One that encourages and fosters the industries where young men spend their lives and generates national prosperity, but establishes clear rules of the road within the industries.

There is also evidence that pro-innovation framing could help Democratic politicians. Polling on crypto policy, for example, shows that voters respond more positively to candidates who emphasize fostering innovation alongside reasonable rules, rather than restrictive enforcement alone. Given the strong male skew in crypto participation, this kind of positioning could disproportionately resonate with young men.

Messina’s prescription follows naturally from this data: Democrats don’t need to become anti-regulation, but they do need to stop sounding anti-technology. The goal should be competence, not condemnation. Protect consumers without belittling them. Address harms without implying that participation itself is suspect.

I would argue that the opportunity is even greater. Third Way published “Young Men In 2025: Not Sold On Trump, Alienated By Democrats” based on extensive focus group research. The key takeaways are that men are looking for:

From the memo, young men are looking for:

• Economic opportunity + ability to provide

• Respect and recognition (not being talked down to)

• Validation of masculinity and traditional roles

• Cultural moderation and less judgment

• Authentic, plainspoken leadership

• Simple, concrete policy messaging

• Substance over pandering

Notably, the 3,200-word memo does not include the words “innovation”, “technology”, or “crypto.” The focus is on cultural issues, but a Democrat adopting a pro-technology and innovation posture would help address nearly all of these issue areas and can be a key part of the playbook for winning back the votes of young men.

In the 2020 Democratic primary, voters treated Joe Biden as the moderate choice.

And then Biden governed as something else. Especially at the regulatory agencies responsible for regulating technology companies, Biden installed a team that was intent on implementing a populist agenda on technology that pitted the administration against Silicon Valley.

Their theory was that this anti-tech posture would be very popular, especially with the working class, and would rebuild a strong foundation of support under Biden and the Democratic Party.

When this agenda turned out to not move the needle and Biden became less popular, especially with the very working class voters the Biden team was expecting to win back, the far left came up with a cope: the anti-tech push would have been popular if it had better marketing and had Harris not run away from it when she replaced Biden as the nominee in the 2024 election.

The essential myth of the 2024 cycle is that real anti-tech populism has never been tried.

In reality, we know that the Lose-Lose Politics of anti-tech populism caused voters to see both Biden and Harris as too far to the left, and it should be rejected as a political strategy as Democrats revise their national brand to be more popular and win nationwide.

Bidenomics: Party Unity Through Populist Economics

Once in office, Biden moved quickly into an economic program much more explicitly left-leaning than the Obama Administration. A key element of this economic and regulatory posture focused on anti-tech populism.

This governing turn was largely driven by who shaped policy and what intellectual tradition they represented. Biden’s economic team elevated figures closely linked to the Warren-style “corporate power” critique: the White House named Bharat Ramamurti as an adviser for strategic economic communications. Ramamurti’s Roosevelt Institute bio notes he previously served as “the top banking and economic policy advisor for Senator Elizabeth Warren” and ran a “Corporate Power” program.

And Biden’s anti-tech posture was embodied most clearly by his choice to elevate Lina Khan as FTC chair. Just a few months into his presidency, Biden has assembled what WIRED magazine called a “Big Tech Antitrust All-Star Team”.

Tech regulation: From Antitrust to Anti-Bigness Politics

Bidenomics showed up very clearly in tech and competition policy. Biden issued and executive order to launch a “whole-of-government” competition agenda aimed at “overconcentration, monopolization, and unfair competition.” Under his appointees at the regulatory agencies, enforcement escalated into marquee actions: DOJ sued Google for monopolizing ad-tech markets and Apple for monopolizing smartphone markets.

By design, this push did not focus on traditional consumer-welfare antitrust policies intended to drive down costs for working families, it looked much more like “big is bad.” But part of the challenge that the Biden Administration had in selling this concept is precisely because they were using anti-monopoly arguments and agencies as a mechanism to try to address the size and power of tech companies, which is something else entirely.

While opinions varied widely about whether this highly-visible and aggressive use of regulatory agencies was a good idea, there was little doubt that it was taking place. The major cases brought against Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta prompted breaking news headlines, industry insights, legal analysis, and press releases.

This is far from an area of the Biden Administration that was kept quiet or swept under the rug. Khan herself made the case that her tenure at the FTC made big, visible changes on tech regulation:

“I think our record speaks for itself, I think all of the ways that we are delivering enormous benefits for the American people speaks for itself, and I’m just enormously proud of the just win after win that we’ve been able to deliver for the American people.”

The Cope: Biden Administration Didn’t Sell the Policy

In spite of the high profile lawsuits and cult celebrity status of Khan, the argument among the anti-tech advocates outside of the administration is that the Biden Administration is not really marketing their positions clearly enough for the public to understand.

Matt Stoller, the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project, argued that despite having the right policies and instincts in at the regulatory level, the Biden Administration was “incoherent” in making the case for itself as an explanation for a poll showing a 59% disapproval rating for Biden’s handling of the economy.

On an anti-trust case, he took issue with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre not articulating a price-fixing critique.

In a subsequent tweet, he writes, “Jean-Pierre is just insanely bad at the job.”

Similarly, Martin Sandbu, an economics commentator at the Financial Times, wrote in his post-election piece:

“There is nothing here to suggest that the policies themselves were not the right ones…Two largely uncomfortable conclusions emerge […] “vibeonomics” undermined economics: those voters tempted by populist economic promises were not being sold Biden’s effective economic populism hard enough to shift the vibes.”

Yet the arguments that the problem was that the public and working class voters didn’t know about what the Administration was up to ring hollow in light of Lina Kahn’s celebrity. According to the American Economic Liberties Project, the Wall Street Journal alone has published 122 pieces attacking Khan’s FTC. Jacobin states that “the spotlight on Khan has been relentless since well before her term as FTC chair began in June 2021.” Khan’s tactics at the FTC led to the resignation of a commissioner, and a prominent Wall Street Journal article giving her reasons for departure.

Fundamentally, the complaints about “bad marketing” are just a cope for the product itself (in this case, Biden’s policy record) being bad. Voters were rejecting what the Biden Admin was selling, and it wasn’t a failure of bad marketing.

After Harris lost, the left denied that their policies had been tried and demanded more populism

Despite rejecting his moderate and return-to-Obama image on economics, when Biden became unpopular, the economic populists just acted as if he had not shifted at all.

Cenk Uygur, founder and host of The Young Turks, leveled this criticism of both Biden and Harris immediately prior to the 2024 election:

When I criticize Joe Biden or Kamala Harris as simple servants of the donor class, a lot of people assume I’m supporting Trump because they think politics is two dimensional. But it isn’t—and until the Democrats figure out that they’re playing the wrong game on the wrong field, they’re going to keep getting surprised by the populist wave Donald Trump has caught.

After Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in 2024, the postmortem from the left was striking: the left wing of the party did not view it as a reckoning for Bidenomics, they simply pretended that Biden had governed as the moderate he appeared to be during the campaign.

There was no acknowledgement that his regulatory agenda was executed by the team that Warren and Sanders picked. To the extent that there is any recognition that Biden governed as a populist, they fault Harris for failing to double down on a populist agenda during her truncated campaign.

Bernie Sanders’ indictment of the Democratic Party after Harris’ defeat was brutal:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power? Probably not.”

Jacobin was even more explicit, claiming Harris “ran away from a winning economic populist message.” They speculated that her campaign messaging and policies were not based on her actual beliefs or out of a desire to move closer to the median voter.

Rather, they write that “perhaps criticism of landlords and price gougers proved uncomfortable for Harris’s big-money backers and top advisors, like her brother-in-law Tony West or former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who have occupied roles as Uber’s senior vice president of policy and chief legal counsel, respectively.

The Nation similarly argued that the economic left was being used as a scapegoat for the loss:

“Why, after every electoral loss, is the left always the scapegoat? It’s easier to blame activists for pushing a progressive agenda than confront the real issue: the Democratic Party has long been shaped by far more powerful forces—corporate interests, lobbyists, and consultants—whose influence has neglected the real crises facing everyday Americans. We see this cycle again and again.”

The Electoral Problem: Harris Was Already Seen As “Too Liberal”

The issue that the populist critique of the Biden Administration and Harris campaign fails to acknowledge is that both politicians were very closely associated with the anti-tech populism that their champions had put in place during the Biden Administration.

We also have evidence that the economic policies were unpopular. By November of 2021, well before inflation hit its peak a year later, 55% of voters disapproved of Biden’s economic performance, which was 6 points more than Donald Trump’s highest disapproval rating on the economy.

Blueprint surveyed 3,262 national and swing state 2024 voters fielded over web panels from November 06 to November 07 and weighted to education, age, gender, race, and 2020/2024 election results. The margin of error is +/- 2.1. The swing state oversample included 1,883 voters.

The Blueprint Poll taken immediately after the election vividly shows that Kamala Harris was viewed as too similar to Biden and too liberal. The lowest-ranked concerns were that she wasn’t enough like Biden and that she was too conservative. Voters’ reality simply does not match progressives’ cope.

While the pundits pushing for Harris to embrace Biden’s economic populist vision or move even farther left, the reality is that she never “shook the Etch-A-Sketch” as Matt Yglesias put it. To voters, her campaign looked very much like a continuation of the Biden campaign and administration policies that she inherited when he dropped out.

As I have written about previously, we know that the Biden Administration version of anti-tech populism simply does not move working class voters toward Democrats.

The issue is not that we didn’t lean in hard enough to tech-bashing and anti-business policies. Biden championed these positions throughout his presidency and when they proved to be unpopular with voters, the populist left just pretended it never happened or we just didn’t explain it well enough.

The Biden Administration’s tech policy appears to have been guided in part by a political theory: that taking a confrontational posture toward the technology industry would help Democrats reconnect with working-class voters who had drifted away from the party. This view reflected a strain of what I’ve called “faculty lounge populism”, a style of anti-corporate politics popular among left-leaning activists, academics, and Democratic staffers that assumed ordinary voters shared the same hostility toward large technology companies.

But the expected political payoff never materialized. Anti-tech populism did not generate gains among working-class voters, while it strained relationships with long-standing Democratic allies in Silicon Valley and parts of the broader tech ecosystem. In venture capital terms, the strategy produced value destruction – burning existing support without generating new political returns. What was intended as coalition expansion instead became lose-lose politics: no new working-class voters gained, and weakened support from allies in the tech sector and innovation economy.

In this series of posts on the lose-lose politics of anti-tech efforts of the Biden Administration, I will look at how the policies meant alienating Silicon Valley without winning back the working class.

The White House made anti-tech policy a working‑class signal

The Biden administration tried to sell novel antitrust crackdowns and “big is bad” policies as a pro‑worker, pro‑consumer crusade based on a type of faculty lounge populism meant to reassure working‑class voters that Democrats would fight corporate power. But the strategy intensified alienation among Silicon Valley executives even as Democrats kept bleeding support among non‑college voters.

The premise of the Biden posture was explicit in the administration’s own language. The White House Competition Council framed market concentration as a direct threat to workers and household budgets, quoting Biden: “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation,” and arguing that reduced competition “drives up prices for consumers and drives down wages for workers.”

The policies matched the message. In Biden’s executive order on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, he explicitly points to “technology developments” as a barrier to unionization, stating:

In the past few decades, the Federal Government has not used its full authority to promote and implement this policy of support for workers organizing unions and bargaining collectively with their employers. During this period, economic change in the United States and globally, technological developments, and the failure to modernize Federal organizing and labor-management relations laws to respond appropriately to the reality found in American workplaces, have made worker organizing exceedingly difficult.

In his New York Times editorial board interview during the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said that he was “not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg”, said that Section 230 (of the Communications Decency Act) should be revoked, and made the case that the technology revolution will require heavy government regulation. Doing this interview is a signature campaign event for any candidate, so you can be certain that these answers were what the campaign thought would be the most compelling to win working class support.

The anti‑corporate/anti‑tech posture was repeatedly framed as a worker‑aligned fight against exploitation and rip‑offs, which is exactly the rhetoric Democrats reached for as their working‑class brand eroded.

Coalition management: progressives up close, unions at the center

Personnel is policy, and Biden’s antitrust staffing was a concession to the party’s left flank. Reuters described Lina Khan’s ascent to FTC chair as a “victory for progressives seeking a clampdown on tech firms,” underscoring that the administration chose a figure celebrated by the left and feared by much of industry. Jonathan Kanter’s confirmation to lead DOJ Antitrust likewise drew praise from the anti-corporate organizations aligned with Senator Warren.

By election season in 2024, the political meaning of Khan’s antitrust project was plain and had became a flashpoint between Silicon Valley and the left wing of the party. The intra-party political fight came at a cost as Kamala Harris looked to take over the reins of a national presidential campaign and formulate a winning message.

Even as voters viewed Harris as too liberal, she was unwilling to signal a shift from the Biden Administration on tech regulation and staffing. It isn’t hard to see why Harris was unable to credibly signal a shift when the left wing of the party is publicly saying they would fight her on if she did. During the campaign sprint to the finish, Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez was warning of an “out and out brawl” if Harris removed Khan.

Before he dropped out, Biden’s team was encouraging him to address his blue‑collar problem by urging him to “pick fights” with corporate “villains” and rely on labor institutions to communicate benefits as they portrayed Biden as unusually pro‑union in symbolism and outreach. They were sure that Democrats could tolerate antagonizing the tech community since it would pay dividends with the working class.

The numbers show the loss: non‑college voters didn’t come back

The core failure of the strategy is visible in the education divide. Juan David Rojas captures the decline in working class support from Obama to Biden and the electoral college hit that came with the loss of support:

Yet despite Biden’s larger 4.5 percent victory, Obama secured 332 electoral votes compared to his Democratic successor’s 306 electoral votes. While it’s technically accurate to describe the discrepancies as an undemocratic feature of the Electoral College, a less flattering reason derives from Democrats’ hemorrhaging of working-class voters. Obama won 51 percent of voters without college degrees, including 40 percent of working-class white voters. In contrast, Biden won 48 and 38 percent of the same groups, with Kamala Harris securing only 45 percent of all non-college voters in 2024.

The slide continued as Harris replaced Biden on the ticket. Pew’s validated‑voter analysis of 2024 shows Trump beating Harris among non‑college voters 56%–42%, while college graduates favored Harris 57%–41%.

Working class voters simply don’t buy the argument that technology companies and corporations are the cause of their economic issues. This is best summed up by Mitch Landrieu, a leader of the extensive election post-mortem conducted by American Bridge, “not one person in all of our focus groups mentioned the word ‘oligarchy.’”

Instead, their surveys found “a candidate focused on taking on big corporations and the wealthy” received 43 percent, while a “candidate focused on fixing the economy so those who work hard can get ahead” earned 52 percent.

Writing for Vox, Eric Levitz says that:

The problem is that voters…do not consider regulating the companies a priority. When Gallup asked Americans what their country’s most important problem was this month, only 1 percent named “corporate corruption” while 0 percent picked “technology.”

Silicon Valley shifted and Democrats paid a political price

While the Biden Administration’s theory that aggressive tech regulation would lead to working class gains at the ballot box backfired, the backlash from parts of the tech community from being targeted became a clear problem. The most obvious issue was Elon Musk choosing to spend nearly $300 million to get Donald Trump elected president. He spent an unprecedented sum of money that bought ads, organizational structure, and paid canvassers to Trump’s campaign.

However, the primary issue is not simply a matter of campaign contributions. After all, Kamala Harris also raised a large sum of money from the tech industry during her 2024 presidential run.

The Silicon Valley loss is the failure to capitalize on voter’s favorable view of tech companies, innovation, entrepreneurship and business success by embracing the most dynamic and successful industry in the country. A campaign season filled with article after article about why the tech community is abandoning your party is bad for general election candidates trying to signal that you are the right candidate to build a prosperous economy.

Venture capital titans Marc Andreessen focused his pro‑Trump arguments on the view that policy under Trump would better serve tech’s future on startups. Democrats had been the party of innovation and progress for a generation. They gave up their advantage on that issue while getting nothing in return.

Why Lose-Lose Politics matters

It is difficult to prove causation in politics: inflation, immigration, culture war dynamics, and candidate‑specific factors moved votes in 2024, but it is clear that the advisors pushing President Biden and his Administration thought that taking on the tech industry would generated a winning issue with working class swing voters, and it is clear that logic was a political loser.

The administration advertised antitrust policies as worker‑friendly populism, yet Democrats failed to regain non‑college voters. At the same time, highly-visible members of the tech world defected – financially, rhetorically, and organizationally – toward Trump and Republicans by painting Democrats as out of touch with the private sector and anti-success. Swing voters took notice and it helped put Donald Trump back in the White House.

What makes this toll increasingly troubling is that much of it is preventable. Autonomous vehicle technology, especially in robotaxis and long-haul trucking, offers a realistic pathway to dramatically reducing traffic deaths. Yet federal policy during the Biden Administration too often emphasized caution and process over deployment, slowing the rollout of technologies that will save lives.

Failure to support the adoption of private-sector innovation in autonomous vehicles was another key element of the Biden Administration Digital Deficit. Life-saving technologies exist, but the Biden Administration refused to move them forward.

And while it may not have similar life and death consequences, the Biden Administration also held back progress in helping consumers by limiting the employment of drone delivery technology.

Human Drivers Remain the Primary Safety Risk

The case for autonomous vehicles begins with a simple reality: humans remain the most dangerous component of the transportation system.

NHTSA research found that the critical reason for crashes was attributed to the driver in 94 percent of cases studied, reflecting the central role of human error in road fatalities.

Human drivers become distracted, fatigued, impaired, or aggressive. Autonomous systems, by contrast, are designed to remain attentive and rule-following within their operating environments.

Secretary Buttigieg correctly identified the problem:

“Just to be very clear, human drivers aren’t just problematic. They are murderous. Forty thousand people a year die in a car crash. And we have been bathed in this level of carnage all our lives. And so we’re a bit like people who grow up in a place that’s experiencing a war, in terms of how normal we think that is.”

Technology is not always the answer to everything. But frankly, it would be hard to do worse than human drivers when it comes to what we could get to theoretically with the right kind of safe autonomous driving.”

What Buttigieg did not do is push his own department to advance this life-saving technology as quickly as possible.

At the end of the Biden Administration Jeff Farrah, who heads the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, said in an interview, “The federal government is the one that needs to lead when it comes to vehicle design, construction and performance, and we just have not seen enough action out of the federal government in recent years.”

Robotaxis Could Have Paved the Way for Autonomous Cars

For robotaxis, the central federal constraint is that the U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) and closely related rules historically presume a “traditional” car with a human driver and associated equipment (controls, displays, etc.). NHTSA itself has acknowledged both that compliant AVs can be deployed under existing rules and that FMVSS modernization is needed for AVs. That is exactly the policy space where a pro-adoption DOT would be expected to deliver: clear, timely, scalable regulatory pathways and updated standards for vehicles built around autonomy. This just did not happen in the Biden Administration.

The Biden Administration DOT did not complete the modernization (or robust exemptions) that would let companies deploy purpose-built driverless robotaxis broadly in the U.S. during Biden’s term. Building a “driver-in” car, then removing the driver will never be the most cost-effective way to deploy this technology, but it is what robotaxi companies were stuck with.

Even as Secretary Buttigieg was saying the right things, NHTSA told Congress in its May 2024 report:

“As the technology develops, the Department and NHTSA will advance their research and policy agendas to identify areas of economic benefit and risk and give workers a seat at the table in shaping innovation to create benefits for workers and prevent workforce disruption.”

This “seat at the table” ended up functioning as an organized labor veto over autonomous vehicles. Biden DOT officials signaled in numerous meetings with industry that the Administration would not do anything to cross organized labor, which meant AVs would stall.

Finally, after years in office, the administration’s principal federal framework for AV operations was proposed late, voluntary, and not finalized in time to govern the market – leaving adoption largely to state and local regimes and company-by-company compliance strategies.

Autonomous Trucks Could Have Addressed a Major Highway Safety Problem

If robotaxis represent the most visible form of autonomy, autonomous trucking may represent the largest safety opportunity.

Large trucks are involved in a disproportionate share of fatal crashes. According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, more than 5,000 people die annually in crashes involving large trucks, most of them occupants of passenger vehicles.

In spite of this opportunity, the Biden Administration again held back progress. The Administration denied Waymo and Aurora’s request to use cab-mounted warning beacons instead of human-deployed triangles or flares for stopped driverless trucks. The request had been in the docket since March 2023, so the agency took roughly 21 months to decide. In the denial, FMCSA said the application showed “promise” and that DOT “embraces” innovation, but still rejected the exemption because the data and device details were “insufficient” for a broad nationwide exemption.

This was another missed opportunity for the Biden Administration, but Democrats in the House and Senate can still support the legislative fix. Right now, the legislative language for the surface transportation bill that would resolve this issue has no Democratic co-sponsors.

Delivery Innovation as Stuck in Regulatory Limbo

Autonomous mobility is not the only technology facing a digital deficit. A similar pattern appears in drone delivery services.

During the Biden Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) failed to adopt new rules and regulations to take advantage of drone deliveries, a technology that can make products available to more people at a lower cost. According to the FAA’s own rulemaking committee’s 2022 report, “Notwithstanding these benefits for the American public, current Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations do not enable the domestic UA beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) industry to scale and achieve meaningful results from those benefits.”

The lack of effective rules and regulations meant that delivery providers are left with a patchwork of exemptions and pilot programs.

Although the FAA acknowledged the potential for expanded drone operations—including package delivery—the comprehensive rulemaking framework remained delayed for years, costing Biden a potential win in this area.

The Trump Administration was quick to propose rule changes that the Biden Administration failed to implement. In 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced Part 108, a proposed FAA rule that would transform how businesses obtain permission to fly drones beyond the pilot’s visual line of sight. “In the past, drone operators had to apply for waivers on a case-by-case basis,” Duffy said. “Because of that complication, I don’t think we saw the innovation we should have in America.”

The Cost of Failing to Support Innovation

As I have written about before, the seeds of the Biden Administration “war on tech” were planted in Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, and “Big Tech” has become an easy attack angle for Democratic politicians. While unhelpful, these attacks could be written off as consistent with a general “Big is Bad” mentality and residual anger at Facebook’s role in the election.

However, the failure to seize the opportunity to embrace autonomous vehicle and drone delivery technology told voters that the Democratic party no longer valued innovations that would improve their lives.

The real question for Democrats is whether they will be the party to accelerate the deployment of breakthrough technologies that put American lives and consumer interests first – or continue allowing them to sit on the shelf while we cede the breakthroughs of American innovation to Republicans and red states.

Nothing is clearer in American politics than that voters care the most about jobs and the economy. It is mentioned in poll after poll after poll.

Of course President Biden and his advisors know this and have known it for years. Despite having that knowledge, the Biden Administration focused its national workforce strategy on the narrow segment of the population in manufacturing and private sector unions, even as the share and importance of those jobs in the American economy have receded.

This missed opportunity is especially frustrating when workers across the board viewed tech as an opportunity – another part of Biden’s Digital Deficit.

As Biden took office, tech was in a hiring boom. According to CompTIA, the core US tech workforce reached nearly 6.5 million workers by end of 2024, with a median salary of roughly $104,556, which is more than double the national median wage of $49,500. Even more importantly for the future of the American economy, tech occupation employment is projected to grow at approximately twice the rate of overall employment in the coming decade.

Technology and tech-enabled roles are often well paid, increasingly remote-compatible, and frequently accessible through pathways other than a four-year degree. If your goal is broad-based national prosperity, the technology workforce is one of the most scalable and effective ways to get there.

The Biden Administration clearly understood parts of that story. It backed major efforts to expand broadband access and talked often about innovation. But when it came to jobs—especially in the public narrative of “Bidenomics”—the strategy narrowed to manufacturing and unions, leaving the country without anything like a coherent tech jobs strategy.

The jobs narrative centered on manufacturing and union labor

The Biden Administration “industrial policy” push included the CHIPS Act, Inflation Reduction Act manufacturing provisions, and large sections of the bipartisan infrastructure law, and was almost always framed as a manufacturing revival story, frequently paired with the language of “good-paying union jobs.” That framing was central to the Administration’s branding.

But manufacturing is a relatively small and structurally declining share of U.S. employment. Manufacturing’s share of total jobs peaked around World War II at roughly 38% and has fallen to around 8% over the past decade, while services rose to a little over 86% of total payrolls. That mismatch matters because a jobs message built around manufacturing is, by definition, built around a small minority of the labor market.

The U.S. economy is overwhelmingly services-based and modern services are increasingly tech-enabled.

The union framing was even narrower. BLS reports the overall union membership rate was 9.9% in 2024, and private-sector union membership was just 5.9%.

You can believe strongly in unions and still recognize that a “union jobs” frame speaks directly to a small portion of private-sector workers, especially in the fastest-growing white-collar and tech-related categories.

Broadband investments were real but they weren’t a tech workforce strategy

To its credit, the Administration made a major play on broadband. The BEAD program alone is a $42.45 billion federal effort to expand high-speed internet access nationwide, exactly the sort of enabling infrastructure needed for remote work and digital opportunity to spread beyond coastal hubs.

However, connecting people to the internet doesn’t connect them to quality careers in technology. A national tech jobs strategy would pair connectivity with a talent pipeline: credentials employers trust, portable training pathways, apprenticeships, and job-placement partnerships that explicitly aim to disperse tech employment geographically.

The tech workforce was already opportunity-rich

The missed opportunity becomes clearer when you look at how big tech employment already was. CompTIA’s State of the Tech Workforce 2025 estimates net tech employment (a combined measure including core tech occupations across the economy plus business professionals employed in tech companies) at 9.6 million workers in 2024.

BLS data reinforces the scale and quality of these careers. In its Occupational Outlook Handbook overview for computer and IT occupations, BLS projects about 317,700 openings per year on average from 2024–2034 and lists a median annual wage of $105,990 (May 2024)—far above the median wage for all occupations.

These are jobs that can exist around the country and increasingly accessible through nontraditional education pathways. If your goal is to create opportunity in more places, you don’t have to invent a new industry or force an industry back from overseas. You have to be willing to build and support the workforce that already exists and is projected to expand.

The pandemic tech hiring boom came but federal strategy didn’t follow through

During the COVID pandemic the tech labor market whipped between surge and retrenchment: rapid pandemic-era hiring, then layoffs and hiring freezes across parts of the sector, then signs of stabilization.

That volatility is precisely why a national strategy matters. When an industry grows quickly, especially an industry so central to productivity and service delivery, public policy can help smooth pathways for workers and build durable talent pipelines. But there was no equivalent of “CHIPS-for-tech-workers” or an IRA-scale jobs message for digital services.

Regulation and labor politics got attention; workforce expansion didn’t

The Administration was publicly engaged in labor politics around major employers, including high-profile moments around Amazon unionization efforts. At the same time, the U.S. tech labor market was absorbing the shocks of post-pandemic normalization without a clear national-level plan to sustain or expand the talent pipeline for tech-enabled service work.

Internationally, major U.S. platforms also entered a new compliance era in Europe. The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) was adopted in 2022, entered into force in November 2022, and became applicable in 2023, imposing wide-ranging obligations on designated “gatekeepers.” Europe’s efforts to go after American tech companies was never treated by the Administration as an attack on America’s workers, but that is certainly what it amounted to.

What a real tech jobs strategy could have looked like

The Biden Administration built real assets and made real investments, especially semiconductors and broadband. But it never paired those assets with a clear national strategy to grow and sustain tech employment as a geographically distributed opportunity engine. That blind spot was a strategic miss at a moment when the tech workforce was projected to grow quickly, but also faced clear headwinds from post-pandemic societal changes, rising interest rates, and the drying up of venture capital investment.

This moment came and passed while the economy was, as nearly always, voter’s number one issue and they are optimistic about the role of technology in providing good jobs.

Last week I argued that the Biden Administration’s failure to stand up for U.S. tech leadership on the global stage created a “Digital Deficit.”

There was another aspect of the Digital Deficit: how the Biden Administration largely squandered a digital advantage from the Obama Administration, failing to make dramatic progress on how the government uses tech to deliver services efficiently.

Despite the right rhetoric and some pockets of innovation, the deficit in tech leadership, talent, and strategy opened a vulnerability that ultimately reshaped the governing landscape with Trump’s return to office.

Democrats “Owned” Government Tech Reform

For decades, Democrats positioned themselves not just as defenders of government but as reformers determined to make it work better through technology and management innovation.

In the 1990s, Vice President Al Gore led the Reinventing Government initiative aimed at making the federal government work better and cost less. This effort involved federal workers, private-sector partners, and a focus on streamlining processes, cutting red tape, and introducing technology into how government operated.

The initiative saved billions of dollars, eliminated hundreds of thousands of federal positions through attrition and buyouts, and helped reshape government service delivery. This long tradition of reform helped create a brand identity for Democrats as the party that could manage and modernize government effectively.

What Worked: The Obama Legacy in Government Tech

In the Obama Administration, the federal government made real progress toward modernizing its digital tools and services by building institutions that brought technology talent into public service:

• In 2014, after the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, the White House created the United States Digital Service (USDS), a team of technologists tasked with fixing digital systems and improving citizen interactions with government. By 2024, USDS had worked with more than 30 agencies to deliver better digital services.

• USDS changed how digital services delivery happened in government, embedding teams with existing agency employees, changed hiring practices, and empowered people to make significant organizational change. The origins of the USDS have their own program and history at Harvard, where it is described as a movement

• Alongside USDS was 18F, a digital services unit inside the General Services Administration (GSA) that paired designers, engineers, and product managers with agencies to build, buy, and improve technology for public use. Its practices spread agile, user-centered methods throughout government IT.
  
  Professor Kayla Schwoerer described 18F as “an in-house digital services consulting agency that brought Silicon Valley expertise to government, challenging decades of outdated procurement practices and introducing a radical new approach to building digital public services.”

These initiatives delivered tangible improvements to systems that Americans rely on every day and, along with the Presidential Innovation Fellows program (another Obama Administration initiative), helped create a pipeline for top tech talent to serve the public in meaningful ways.

At the heart of this effort was Jen Pahlka, founder of Code for America and a former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer. Pahlka and her CTO colleagues played a major role in shaping USDS and the broader civic tech movement precisely because she saw deep flaws in how government traditionally operated and knew how technologists could help fix them.

The Biden Administration Tech Modernization Efforts Languish

Stepping into office with the Obama Administration institutions still largely in place, it would have been reasonable to assume that Biden and his senior team would look to reinvigorate this Obama era legacy and double down on efforts to improve government services through modernization and technology.

Early signs from the Administration looked good: President Biden issued an executive order focused on making government services user friendly and accessible, explicitly calling out the role of tech in making this happen.

In practice, however, a lack of strategic leadership and prioritization slowed progress.

• Despite creating ambitious digital policy frameworks and launching initiatives to recruit tech talent, key modernization priorities stalled due to misalignment between U.S. Digital Service, GSA, and the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer — with senior leaders failing to articulate a coherent, unified vision.

• Even as Biden pushed executive actions on issues like AI and digital skills, he never filled a long-vacant Chief Technology Officer role, leaving no single, Senate-confirmed advocate for technology leadership at the heart of the administration. This lack left a vacuum in driving cohesive change and communicating the value of technology to government transformation.

• Talent pipelines frayed. While efforts like a federal “talent surge” for AI hiring were promoted, there were challenges in attracting and retaining top tech experts. Biden’s team fundamentally did not view having experienced Silicon Valley technologists as an asset, and even avoided hiring from industry for coalition management purposes. So they made no effort to recruit and place industry experts in key roles, or rally their expertise to make government work better.

In short, the Biden years saw some good signals and pockets of innovation, but not the sustained strategic push that would fully extend the Obama-era momentum into a durable modernization effort.

This perhaps should not have been a surprise, with tech adoption and modernization never being a top priority of President Biden himself, Elizabeth Warren and her allies creating a revolving door panic that limited tech talent and progressives focused on closing the digital divide around access to broadband, not government services.

What Happened Next: A Political and Institutional Fallout

The costs of this digital deficit became clear once the Trump Administration returned to power in 2025. Instead of building on established digital modernization teams, the new administration reorganized or dismantled them under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE):

• By March 2025, GSA’s 18F unit was shuttered, with layoffs sent in the middle of the night to dozens of digital specialists — signaling a stark departure from the collaborative, mission-driven approach of previous digital teams.

• In late February, more than 20 civil-service technologists at USDS resigned rather than work under DOGE leadership, citing concerns about political interference and lack of needed expertise; a dramatic breakdown of internal capacity to modernize government tech.

The failure of Democrats to sustain and scale digital modernization opened space for an entirely different model of government tech: one that prized destruction over improvement. And when government tech falters, voters notice even if they don’t see the nuance behind the causes.

Why This Matters for Democrats

Democrats are widely understood as the party of government. When government works well, delivering benefits, modern services, and seamless experiences that identity can be a strength. But when services are slow, digital systems obsolete, or experiences frustrating, Democrats pay the price.

A weakened technology backbone in government feeds two political narratives:

• Republicans seize on dysfunction to argue that government is inherently bloated and inefficient, pushing privatization or radical deregulation.

• Democrats, by default, are left defending the status quo and when the public’s experience is poor, that defense feels hollow.

In the era of digital expectations shaped by private-sector experiences, ineffective government tech is a political vulnerability.

Closing the Digital Deficit

Obama’s investment in digital talent and user-centered systems showed what was possible. The Biden Administration’s pause in strategic leadership allowed that advantage to fade. And the resultant political terrain empowered narratives that weaken public institutions and shift power to private markets.

If Democrats want to reclaim the story of effective governance, they must make government tech excellence a core part of their narrative for what governing in a Democratic administration will look like in the future.

Most people know what a trade deficit is: when a country imports more goods and services from other nations than it exports to those same countries.

The technology industry is America’s top export, and our tech industry leads the world. The United States began the Biden Administration with unmatched global leadership in technology, but instead of defending and accelerating that advantage, it was treated as a political liability.

That choice created a digital-policy version of a trade deficit - call it a Digital Deficit - where American leaders squandered a dominant national asset by failing to fully leverage the world’s strongest tech industry.

The Biden Administration’s Digital Deficit wasn’t a matter of exports minus imports. Instead, it was about failed leadership and missed opportunities.

In my next series of posts I will look at the areas this Digital Deficit caused the Biden Administration to miss opportunities to capitalize America’s extraordinary tech prowess

This Digital Deficit appeared in three particular areas:

• The Administration’s failure to stand up for U.S. tech leadership on the global stage;

• Its failure to use tech to make the government work better;

• Its lack of a strategy to create more tech jobs and opportunities;

• And its failure to embrace new innovations that could save lives and help consumers

Foreign Regulators Target Silicon Valley Giants

The wealth and position of US tech firms makes them easy targets for foreign regulators looking to extract some of that wealth and bolster their own domestic tech industries. Under the Biden Administration, when U.S. tech companies faced aggressive competition and heavy-handed regulation from foreign governments, the administration often failed to stick up for U.S. tech leadership.

Instead of defending American firms, the Biden team frequently stood by, or even aligned with, foreign regulators’ actions. This lack of support not only harmed individual companies like Apple, Google, and Meta, but also threatened broader U.S. economic and security interests.

From Europe to Asia, foreign regulators launched unprecedented offensives against America’s top tech firms during the Biden Administration. Nowhere was this more evident than in the European Union’s regulatory efforts. The EU rolled out sweeping new tech laws, most notably the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), explicitly aimed at reining in “Big Tech” platforms.

Under the DMA, five major U.S. companies – Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft – were officially designated as “gatekeepers,” subjecting them to strict antitrust rules and obligations. These rules force U.S. firms to open up their platforms at the risk of hefty fines.

European regulators argued such measures were needed to curb monopolies, but conspicuously no major European firms were targeted. A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers pointed out that Brussels “inexplicably failed to designate any European retailers, content-sharing platforms, payment firms, and telcos” under the DMA.

At the Pentagon during the Biden Administration, my colleagues and I grew increasingly concerned about the national security implications of major Chinese tech and software companies dominating the tech infrastructure of our US allies.

Even as we voiced these fears to our NATO Allies across Europe, Chinese tech champions such as Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent escaped EU scrutiny entirely.

American lawmakers warned that this imbalance “threatens to upend the U.S. economy, diminish our global leadership in the digital sphere, and jeopardize the security of consumers”.

Beyond laws like the DMA and DSA, foreign authorities also slapped American tech firms with record fines and back-tax bills. EU courts revived a €13 billion tax demand against Apple for allegedly unpaid taxes in Ireland, despite Ireland not levying the taxes.

These actions by Europe were clearly designed to constrain U.S. tech companies or extract revenues from them, prompting the Trump Administration to label the approach as “overseas extortion”.

A Silent Biden Administration

One would expect the U.S. government to push back forcefully against discriminatory treatment of its companies. Yet during President Biden’s term, the response was largely muted. When the EU enacted its revolutionary DMA in 2022, explicitly targeting Silicon Valley, U.S. officials stayed silent. Under Biden, there was an implicit transatlantic consensus: U.S. regulators like the FTC and DOJ turned up the heat on Big Tech at home, while European regulators went after them abroad, with the encouragement of Biden Administration officials.

A bipartisan letter from Congress in late 2023 urged President Biden to address the EU’s targeting of American companies. Those 21 House members warned that Europe’s digital regulations “damage American economic and security interests” and pleaded with Biden to ensure the rules are applied fairly. Yet there was little indication of any strong action from the White House.

In fact, no Administration objection was raised when the EU designated only U.S. companies (and a single Chinese firm, TikTok’s owner ByteDance) as DMA gatekeepers.

In some cases, Biden officials even hampered U.S. defensive tools. A notable example was the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) under Biden withdrawing support for key digital trade protections at the World Trade Organization. For decades, America pushed for trade rules ensuring free flow of data and no forced data localization, which protected U.S. tech firms operating abroad. But in 2023, USTR Katherine Tai abruptly dropped these demands.

Data localization laws require companies to store data within a country’s borders, imposing steep compliance costs on U.S. cloud and internet businesses, and makes no sense in a world where information resides in the cloud and can be transported around the world in milliseconds. Backtracking on opposing such burdens “heralds a new era where U.S. firms might face serious challenges accessing foreign markets,” Robert Winterton wrote.

Senator Ron Wyden cautioned that stepping back from U.S. leadership in digital trade could “enhance China’s leverage” to push its own state-controlled tech standards globally. Unfortunately, the Biden team’s stance ceded ground in exactly this way, abandoning the defense of U.S. interests related to technology on the world stage.

An Uneven Playing Field in Global Tech Competition

Beyond regulation, U.S. tech firms also face intense competition from foreign companies, often on an uneven playing field. Here too, critics charge that the Biden Administration failed to support American companies effectively. A glaring example is the reciprocity gap with China.

Beijing has systematically walled off its internet market, with The Great Firewall blocking U.S. companies like Facebook and Google from operating in China’s vast online space. Meanwhile, Chinese tech companies freely access U.S. markets and users. Under Biden, this imbalance widened. The Chinese-owned app TikTok exploded in popularity in the U.S., competing directly against American social media platforms and opening Americans to potential security and data protection risks, even as apps like Instagram and YouTube remain banned in China.

While India outright banned TikTok on national security grounds, the Biden Administration hesitated, opting for drawn-out negotiations and half-measures. After Congress passed a law requiring a TikTok ban or sale, the Biden Administration allowed the app to continue operating without meeting the conditions of the law, effectively kicking the can for enforcement to the Trump Administration. This showed lack of resolve to protect U.S. tech leadership: foreign competitors benefiting from open U.S. markets while U.S. firms get shut out abroad.

The U.S. antitrust crusades made it harder for American firms to innovate through acquisitions and mergers, even as Chinese and European firms faced fewer barriers. Antitrust overreach at home became a gift to overseas competitors. The Biden Administration’s “big-is-bad” approach to tech mirrored Europe’s and ultimately served the interests of foreign competitors by hobbling America’s most successful companies.

A New Path Forward

If Democrats want to close the Digital Deficit that opened during the Biden Administration they must once again stand up for American innovators on the global stage.

This doesn’t mean a complete lack of regulation, but this means insisting on truly fair application of laws like the DMA. European and Chinese firms must face the same scrutiny as those in the United States, and our companies should not be punished for providing the best product available around the world.

The Biden Administration’s term will be remembered by many in Silicon Valley as a time when US tech was left to fend for itself against a hostile international environment.

America cannot afford to let its most dynamic industry be pulled down by foreign regulation or unfair competition. Standing up for US tech leadership in the world will send a powerful signal to Silicon Valley that Democrats want a better relationship with tech and we can ensure America continues to shape the future.

My recent focus on the Biden Administration’s record on technology policy in the Blue Horizon Project posts has been largely critical. I think that this is for good reason.

First, I think that mistakes were made that cost Democrats dearly, both in our ability to deliver on government services and capabilities and politically with our longstanding tech allies.

Second, the point of this retrospective exercise is to understand what mistakes were made so that we can do better. There are lessons that can be used now and some that will have to wait for a future Democratic administration, but the idea is to do the work to understand what should be done differently now so that we can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

That said, I think it is also very important to catalogue the places where the Biden Administration had the right instincts on tech policy and worked hard to implement the right solutions.

This doesn’t mean the execution of these policies was perfect; several of the ex-Administration officials involved in these programs have acknowledged significant bureaucratic barriers, and I have previously highlighted where the Administration failed to capitalize on available tech talent and expertise. But I think it’s important to recognize where the Administration’s instincts were sound.

This is less about patting ourselves on the back as it is understanding what worked and can be the building blocks for a successful tech policy going forward. For those of us committed to rebuilding the strong relationship between Democrats and the tech sector, and to using tech tools to make government as effective and responsive as possible, knowing what we got right is vital.

1. Rebuilding State Capacity for Industrial Policy Execution

One of the most under-appreciated achievements of the Biden era has been restoring the federal government’s ability to set industrial policy to accomplish key national security and economic goals.

Rather than flashy one-off deals, the Commerce Department established transparent criteria and an iterative process to allocate semiconductor funding under the CHIPS Act. Over 600 companies responded to Commerce’s open funding calls enabling tough negotiations to maximize impact.

Secretary Raimondo made clear that chipmakers must “do more for less,” saying that she’s “not on the Christmas card list” of many CEOs because the government is “squeezing every dollar” of value. This hard-nosed approach, paired with regular industry engagement and public timelines, built credibility.

The CHIPS program wasn’t a corporate welfare project; the Biden Administration executed on a strategic plan to onshore critical capacity and manage supply-chain risk while establishing and maintaining guardrails against offshoring sensitive tech. Raimondo estimated that the CHIPS investments will help the U.S. produce 20% of the world’s most advanced chips by 2030 from zero in 2024. By keeping companies “in the tent” through clear rules and milestones, the administration reduced uncertainty and unlocked massive private co-investment alongside public funds.

Some, most notably Ezra Klein in the New York Times, criticized the CHIPS implementation effort for “everything bagel liberalism”, attaching too many Democratic priorities, like child care mandates or unionized labor, to the program. Democrats will have to avoid the desire to appease all coalition members as they look to implement ambitious tech projects and policies so that the additional requirements and procedural hurdles don’t turn good ideas into implementation failures. Despite this criticism, implementation of the CHIPS Act is viewed as a success and provides good examples of using industry talent to cut through bureaucracy and achieve highly ambitious goals.

Successful implementation of the CHIPS Act served as a supply-side catalyst for the recent U.S. compute boom. By triggering a surge in domestic semiconductor capacity and adjacent ecosystem buildout, it reduced a binding constraint and improved the investment climate for hyperscalers and AI infrastructure builders to commit huge compute capital expenditures in the United States.

2. EVs: Demand Pull and Supply-Chain Strategy

The transition to electric vehicles (EVs) faces a classic “chicken and egg” problem: many consumers are hesitant to buy EVs without confidence in widespread, reliable charging infrastructure, while private firms are reluctant to invest in that infrastructure until there are enough EVs on the road to make it profitable. This feedback loop can slow adoption unless one side is jump-started, which is why government stimulus and strategic public investment in charging stations can help break the deadlock by reducing range anxiety and signaling market potential to private investors. Public build-outs not only encourage more EV purchases but also help achieve broader climate and equity goals by ensuring access to charging for drivers who can’t charge at home. The administration reinvented federal electric vehicle (EV) incentives to boost both consumer adoption and domestic manufacturing.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) overhauled EV tax credits so they no longer simply say “buy EVs” – they now explicitly steer the supply chain toward North America and allied nations. The rules require EV battery components and critical minerals to come increasingly from the U.S. or free-trade partners, and bar materials from foreign adversaries.

This demand pull is matched by supply-chain push: automakers have responded by announcing battery plants and sourcing deals in the U.S. and friendly countries to qualify for credits. Equally important, Biden’s team operationalized EV adoption so that incentives truly reach consumers.

Starting in 2024, a point-of-sale rebate lets buyers take up to $7,500 off the car immediately (the dealer is repaid via IRS) instead of waiting for a tax refund. In fact, over 100,000 EV purchasers have already used point-of-sale transfers, gaining more than $700 million in upfront savings.

By coupling consumer rebates with “Made in America” rules, the administration turned EV policy into both a climate tool and an industrial strategy, jumpstarting electric car sales while building a domestic supply ecosystem for the long run.

3. Turning Climate Policy into a Renewable Deployment Engine

On renewable energy, Biden transformed climate ambitions into a concrete deployment engine for clean power. A key move was providing long-term tax certainty. The administration’s policies extended and expanded clean energy tax credits (Investment Tax Credit and Production Tax Credit) for roughly a decade, ending the prior cycle of short-term extensions that had stymied investment.

As Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo noted, by ending the “short-term” fixes, the IRA gave developers “clarity and certainty to undertake major investments” in new projects. Investors now know that if they build a wind farm, solar array, or battery storage facility, the credits will be there through at least 2032, dramatically de-risking financing. The credits are also stackable and targeted to maximize impact: projects get bonus credits for using U.S.-made equipment, for locating in energy communities, for advanced technologies, etc., which in turn spurs domestic manufacturing and good jobs.

Alongside tax incentives, the administration provided clear guideposts (through Treasury/DOE guidance and state-specific factsheets) that made the policy legible to markets and streamlined implementation. The results are evident in the investment surge: as of early 2025, over $230 billion in new clean energy manufacturing investments have been announced, spanning more than 920 new or expanded U.S. facilities. Biden’s climate policy wasn’t just about international targets or goals on paper.

Perhaps most importantly, by actually passing legislation, it is harder for the Trump Administration to roll back the incentives through executive action. So while the Trump Administration has been harmful, doing the hard work of getting legislation has blunted the damage. As the demand for energy grows, the Biden Administration focus on increasing renewable energy production looks even better.

4. Crypto: A Sound Executive Order

When it comes to cryptocurrency and digital assets, the Biden administration moved proactively to shape policy before crisis struck. In March 2022 – months before high-profile crypto collapses – President Biden issued a first-of-its-kind executive order directing a whole-of-government review of crypto’s risks and opportunities.

This sweeping order forced agencies to coordinate on issues ranging from consumer and investor protection to illicit finance, financial stability, technological innovation, and even the potential for a U.S. central bank digital currency.

By mandating reports and recommendations across these domains, the White House created a structured agenda rather than the fragmented, ad hoc approach that existed previously. In effect, Biden’s team set the policy table so that when the crypto market did experience turmoil (e.g. exchange failures and fraud revelations), regulators were not flying blind.

Of course, the executive order wasn’t a cure-all. SEC Chair Gary Gensler was largely excluded from the White House process to craft the order, and his legal and regulatory actions against crypto ended up defining the Administration’s crypto posture.

But credit is due to Biden’s White House staff for sounder instincts on crypto. They had a framework in place to respond by protecting consumers and financial stability while still allowing responsible innovation. This early, coordinated strategy helped the U.S. avoid simply letting a crisis dictate policy, positioning the country instead to lead in setting prudent ground rules for the crypto economy.

5. International Digital Tax: Global Solutions over Trade Wars

Another quiet win has been on international digital taxation, where the administration chose multilateral diplomacy over bilateral trade skirmishes.

Under the first Trump administration, disputes over countries’ digital services taxes (DSTs) – aimed largely at U.S. tech giants – were escalating toward tariff wars. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pivoted the U.S. back to the OECD negotiations for a global solution.

In October 2021, that effort yielded a landmark agreement: over 130 nations (including all G20 members) endorsed a two-pillar plan to rewrite international tax rules, including a 15% global minimum tax on corporate profits. This approach directly addressed foreign concerns about taxing digital economy profits, reducing the pressure for each country to impose its own DST. In return, the U.S. paused and later negotiated the withdrawal of existing DST measures.

The cooperative outcome benefits American firms by avoiding a patchwork of taxes and retaliatory tariffs. As Yellen observed, a harmonized global framework creates “a more stable and certain environment, with fewer tax and trade disputes” for innovative companies operating worldwide. In short, Biden’s team showed that re-engaging in international rulemaking can protect U.S. economic interests more effectively than unilateral brinkmanship.

Unfortunately, Congress failed to enshrine Yellen’s plan in law, perhaps due to Republicans wanting to deny the Biden Administration a concrete win.

Today, the second Trump Administration is inadvertently highlighting the wisdom of this approach as our international trading partners and American companies try to deal with Trump’s announcements, delays, and constant changes to his tariff regime.

6. Defense Innovation: Marrying Tech Priorities with Capital and Speed

Finally, the administration modernized how the government drives defense innovation, aligning national security tech priorities with capital formation and agility.

A prime example was the creation of a new Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) at the Pentagon, launched in late 2022 to help promising “dual-use” tech companies bridge the infamous funding “valley of death.” Rather than solely funding R&D and hoping the private sector picks up the rest, OSC actively partners with private capital markets – using tools like loans and loan guarantees – to scale up critical technologies for defense.

As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin put it, “We are in a global competition for leadership in critical technologies, and the Office of Strategic Capital will help us win that competition and build enduring national security advantages.”

In 2023, the Deputy Secretary of Defense announced the launch of “Replicator”, an initiative to field attritable autonomous systems at scale. The goal is to deploy “multiple thousands” of cheap, smart drones and other unmanned platforms across multiple domains within the next 18–24 months. This represents a radical shift toward systems that are “small, smart, cheap, and many” – a complement to traditional big-ticket defense programs. By publicly announcing Replicator and stressing collaboration with industry and Congress, the administration gave focus and urgency to overcoming bureaucratic inertia.

Additionally, the Pentagon stood up a new Chief Digital and AI Office to accelerate adoption of data analytics and AI, and has strengthened its cybersecurity posture across agencies. Together, these moves blend technological ambition with pragmatic financing and governance reforms – ensuring the U.S. military can tap cutting-edge innovation at the speed and scale required to maintain a military advantage.

At its best, the Biden Administration demonstrated that clear priorities and well-designed policy can translate into real gains for innovation and American competitiveness.

The lesson going forward is not to defend every Biden Administration decision, my future posts will largely focus on what I view were the Administration’s mistakes on tech policy. But it is important to understand and build on what worked; to pair sound instincts with disciplined execution in order to show that Democrats can be the party of American innovation, economic growth, and long-term prosperity.

During an administration that faced intense backlash from voters frustrated with high inflation, they favored ideological experimentation over practical gains for consumers.

These academic theories prompted Biden’s tech policymakers to target three areas far from voters’ priorities: corporate mergers, targeted advertising, and an obscure and abandoned anti-discounting law.

A Default Hostility Towards Mergers

Prior to the Biden Administration, most corporate mergers and acquisitions had been allowed by the government to proceed. Some large mergers would go through a “second review” process by the FTC or DOJ, where the merging parties would have to produce documents and answer questions about the deal. And some mergers would be either challenged by the government in court, or allowed to proceed with conditions attached.

Biden’s “Neo-Brandeisian” antitrust appointees, FTC Chair Lina Khan and DOJ’s Jonathan Kanter, reversed the default presumption towards mergers, and immediately adopted the posture that most mergers should be deterred.

To achieve this goal, Khan and Kanter took two significant steps:

1. Ending the agencies’ practice of “clearing” deals in an initial stage, by sending a letter to merging parties indicating a lack of government concerns with the deal; and

2. Replacing that process with “warning letters” for all merging parties, warning them that the government could bring a legal challenge to the deal at any time, and that the merging parties would close the deal at their own risk.

Khan and Kanter’s posture was rooted in academic theory: that acquisitions by large firms primarily serve to kill off potential competitors, and that acquired firms could alternatively instead go public and challenge today’s large firms. This posture also substituted the judgment of the government for the judgment of the acquired company’s leadership, suggesting a “we know what’s best for you attitude” - despite the reality that many startup founders saw acquisition as the best option available to them.

From 2020 to 2023, federal agencies challenged 14 startup acquisitions, up from just three between 2012 and 2019. Several high-profile deals were blocked or abandoned, and many more were deterred by aggressive scrutiny.

This resulted, unsurprisingly, in a sharp decline in the number of mergers.

This merger enforcement chill came at a cost. Fewer mergers meant fewer exit options for startups, which in turn dampened venture investment. As tech insiders warned, when acquisition is off the table, many great ideas may stay just that—great ideas. Founders and venture capital investors need to see a path to an exit in order to invest, regardless of how good the idea is.

To adapt, companies resorted to “license-and-hire” deals—acquiring technology licenses while absorbing most of a startup’s staff. In one case, Microsoft paid $650 million for such a deal, avoiding formal acquisition review. Ironically, these deals - a byproduct of Khan and Kanter’s reflexive hostility towards mergers – resulted in sometimes worse outcomes for the rank-and-file workers in the “licensed” company.

CCIA, an industry association, released a report in January that examined this period of aggressive enforcement. In their summary, the report finds (emphasis mine):

During an increasingly aggressive antitrust enforcement paradigm from mid-2021 through 2024, smaller startups have had fewer opportunities to be bought out. As smaller startups generally lack the option to exit via an IPO, reduced access to exit via acquisition led to more businesses shutting down, fewer startups selling for more than they raised, and lower overall returns for investors. These are all bad outcomes for startup founders and venture capital (VC) investors. Since the U.S. is a global leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI), which plays a big role in about one third of recent VC investments, overly strict antitrust enforcement could harm future economic growth, weaken the U.S. in global competition, and harm U.S. national security.

The “Commercial Surveillance” Rule That Stalled

Another ivory-tower assumption embraced by Biden’s appointees was that the public deeply loathes targeted advertising and would happily pay premiums for subscription based services instead of free, ad-supported services.

FTC Chair Khan sought to redefine online advertising as “commercial surveillance,” pushing a sweeping rulemaking to curb data-driven marketing.

This push had its roots in academia, notably the work of Harvard Professor Shoshanna Zuboff, who coined the phrase “surveillance capitalism.” Zuboff was cheered by fellow neo-Brandeisian academic Tim Wu.

But public sentiment told a different story. Surveys found 80% of consumers prefer ad-supported services to paying out-of-pocket, and nearly 90% favor ads tailored to their interests. The FTC’s ambitious proposal lacked buy-in from the very consumers they are ostensibly protecting.

After an initial burst of headlines, the rulemaking effort stalled. Faced with legal complexity, industry pushback, and tepid consumer enthusiasm, the initiative failed to produce concrete results. It became another case of regulators treating agencies as ideological sandboxes, experimenting with theories unrooted in public demand.

Reviving Robinson-Patman at Consumers’ Expense

The clearest case of theory over pragmatism may be the administration’s revival of the Robinson-Patman Act, a 1936 law prohibiting price discrimination in favor of large buyers. Progressive academics argued that enforcement could protect small retailers—even at the cost of higher prices for consumers.

In 2025, the Biden FTC sued PepsiCo for allegedly giving Walmart better prices and promotional perks than smaller grocers. In other words, Biden’s regulators deliberately took on a case whose theory of harm was that consumers were paying too little at a dominant retailer – a striking inversion of the usual antitrust focus on consumer prices. Scholars from the Mercadus Center at George Mason University concluded:

Net welfare is likely to be maximized by an outright repeal of the RPA, which will prevent ideologically motivated officials from expending public resources in RPA lawsuits that are likely to diminish consumer welfare and make the American economy less competitive.

Equalizing terms meant raising prices at mass retailers like Walmart; a tough sell during inflation. Khan defended the move, saying such favoritism “tilts the playing field”, but if the policy worked as intended, the result would hike consumer costs to protect small retailers.

The lawsuit fizzled. Trump’s FTC dropped the case in May 2025, labeling it a “legally dubious partisan stunt”. The episode revealed the Biden-era disconnect: instead of delivering savings, the FTC pursued abstract fairness at the expense of affordability.

Ideology Over Impact

Across these cases, a clear pattern emerges. Biden’s tech regulators often treated their roles as vehicles for intellectual fulfillment rather than tools for real-world protection. Their campaigns—against mergers, targeted ads, and price differentials—frequently produced headlines, but not enduring benefits for consumers.

• The merger crackdown chilled startup activity while spurring workaround deals like license-hires.

• The surveillance rulemaking stalled due to weak public demand for costly privacy trade-offs.

• The Robinson-Patman revival risked higher prices for working families in pursuit of small-retailer equity.

These were not policies built from the ground up, an effort to meet consumer demands at a time of rising inflation. They were top-down impositions of academic models.

As Democrats make the case to voters that they should trust us with their economic interests, we need to keep a key idea in mind: Bold ideas must still deliver practical results. Otherwise, we will alienate the very people we aim to serve.

As the anti-crypto campaign played out, the perception grew even worse. Democrats couldn’t even get guidance and rulemaking right, undermining the public’s trust that the government could effectively perform the role of consumer protection.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s crusade against crypto, which emphasized ideological posturing over pragmatic regulation. Instead of crafting modern rules or clear guidelines, Gensler launched an aggressive crackdown in an anti-crypto campaign heavy on enforcement and light on clarity.

This approach may have played well with Gensler’s chief Senate ally Elizabeth Warren, but it failed to deliver effective consumer protection or smart regulation, and it risked alienating a generation of tech-savvy voters that Democrats can’t afford to lose.

Regulation by Enforcement, No Clear Rules

From day one, SEC Chair Gensler declined to issue clear “rules of the road” for the crypto industry, insisting existing securities laws were enough and that crypto firms simply needed to comply or “come in and register.” In practice, there was no real path for compliance.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce acknowledged that under the Gensler regime, market participants were told to “just come in and register” with no viable path to do so. This lack of guidance left even good-faith actors guessing how old rules might apply to new technology. When U.S. Senator Pat Toomey pressed Gensler for clarity in late 2021, saying:

“For investors to benefit from a fair and competitive marketplace, federal agencies should answer questions about whether – and if so, how – new and emerging technologies fit under existing regulations,” Chairman Gensler’s failure to provide clear rules of the road for cryptocurrencies underscores the need for Congress to act.”

Gensler’s written responses to Congress on which tokens are securities versus commodities were famously vague or non-answers. The message to the industry was essentially: We won’t tell you how to comply, but we’ll punish you if you guess wrong.

Enforcement became the tool of choice. Instead of defining digital asset rules or creating new registration categories, Gensler’s SEC moved to classify most crypto tokens as unregistered securities and filed high-profile lawsuits accordingly.

Gensler repeatedly argued no new laws were needed – the law is already clear. In his view, the crypto world was just another security that needed to fall in line with longstanding securities laws. He flatly dismissed complaints about “lack of clarity,” insisting the field “has clarity” and that industry players simply chose to ignore it.

This dogmatic stance meant that legitimate companies seeking to register or get guidance hit a brick wall, while the SEC doubled its crypto enforcement budget and ramped up penalties. The resulting policy posture was a hostile standoff: the agency wielding lawsuits as a first resort, and an innovative industry left in limbo.

Courtroom Setbacks Expose a Flawed Strategy

Gensler’s hard-line approach not only failed to stop bad actors and provide a clear regulatory guidelines for those looking to follow the rules, it also hasn’t held up well in court. In case after case, judges pushed back on the SEC’s overreach, handing the agency stinging rebukes.

For example, in the landmark Ripple case, a federal judge ruled that the sale of XRP tokens on public exchanges did not violate securities laws, sharply undercutting the SEC’s broad claims. Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres cheered the outcome, noting that “crypto regulation by enforcement had a dreadful day in court” and urging the SEC to “reassess its reckless regulatory assault on the crypto industry”.

Around the same time, the SEC faced a defeat against Grayscale, when the D.C. Circuit found the agency “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” in denying a Bitcoin ETF while approving similar products. The court unanimously ruled that the SEC’s inconsistent logic “did not comply with the law,” forcing the agency to retreat and reconsider its stance.

Even Gensler’s signature enforcement action against Binance ran into trouble: a federal judge refused to grant the SEC’s request to freeze Binance’s U.S. assets, denying the agency’s overzealous emergency motion.

One by one, these legal setbacks have exposed the weakness of a strategy built solely on force. They highlight that cracking down is no substitute for clear, lawful regulation.

Political Backlash and Alienated Voters

Ironically, this anti-crypto posturing has also created political collateral damage for Democrats. The Biden Administration’s stance, what Jeff John Roberts described yet another flashpoint in America’s culture wars, was increasingly out of step with many voters. Younger and tech-savvy Americans, in particular, see digital assets not as a scourge to be eradicated, but as an innovative technology akin to the early internet. Crypto owners are demographically more diverse than the average U.S. adult: 68% of crypto owners are Gen Z or Millennials, 48% are non-white, and 70% earn less than $100k.

While party elders may want to snuff out the technology, younger Democrats like Rep. Ritchie Torres see crypto’s potential for financial inclusion. The crypto crackdown thus threatens to alienate a key constituency of the Democratic base – the under-40, digitally fluent generation – at a time when their enthusiasm is vital for the party’s future.

Furthermore, by turning crypto into a partisan football, Democrats ceded the narrative to Republicans. GOP leaders have eagerly seized the opportunity to cast themselves as pro-innovation and pro-consumer-choice. House Republicans have accused Democrats of “blocking innovation” in blockchain tech, painting the crackdown as anti-progress.

Senator Warren proudly touts herself as building an “anti-crypto army” as part of her re-election campaign, solidifying the image of Democrats as hostile to crypto. This may score points with her base, but it’s proving a dubious electoral strategy. Even industry-neutral observers warn that writing off a transformative technology (and the voters who understand it) is a mistake.

Posturing vs. Protection: A Missed Opportunity

At its core, the Biden/Gensler “war on crypto” was never truly about protecting the little guy – it was about projecting a political stance. Gensler’s ideological push led him to prioritize a show of toughness over the nitty-gritty work of effective regulation.

The administration could have pursued a nuanced approach: strong consumer protection and support for responsible innovation. Instead, they chose legal posturing. The sad irony is real consumers did get burned in the crypto industry. FTX’s collapse happened on the SEC’s watch, and thousands of ordinary crypto users lost savings in scams that proactive regulation might have prevented. Likewise, the abuse of memecoins could have been prevented if the SEC had acted to clearly regulate them instead of largely ignoring them.

A faculty-lounge populist might find it satisfying to denounce crypto as a predatory mess. But demonizing an entire industry does little to stop the actual predators; it only drives the activity offshore or underground, where U.S. laws and regulations have even less influence.

Democrats don’t need to love crypto to recognize the folly of this approach. Effective consumer protection comes from engaging with new technology and setting sensible rules, not pretending it can be wished away.

The Biden administration’s crypto crackdown, led by Gensler, has been a case study in how not to regulate a nascent industry. By waging a war no one asked for, Democrats created an opening for opponents and estranged many of their own forward-looking supporters.

It’s time to learn from these missteps. A smarter regulatory posture – one that prioritizes clear guidance, workable compliance paths, and targeted enforcement against true bad actors – would do far more to protect consumers and nurture innovation than any ideological crusade ever could.

The Biden Administration worked to execute an “economic populism” agenda meant to win back working-class voters. In practice, however, their actions towards industry, and tech specifically, amounted to faculty lounge populism – policies generated from Ivy League theorists focused on the interplay of corporate power and politics, but that did little to directly address the everyday needs and concerns of consumers.

Biden’s regulatory policymakers in particular pushed an anti-corporate brand of populism, casting Big Tech as the villain. Populism typically relies on an “us vs. them” narrative – pitting “the people” against a corrupt elite – and these officials embraced a “Big Tech vs. the people” storyline.

Yet as Adam Jentleson observed, Democrats looking to blame billionaires while relying on the critiques from elite scholars generates candidates that:

“are the inverse of what voters want—people with the cultural sensibilities of Yale Law School graduates who cosplay as populists by over-relying on niche issues like Federal Trade Commission antitrust actions.”

In the next few posts, we’ll explore how this ivory-tower approach to tech policy ignored consumer priorities and ultimately failed to deliver for voters.

Ignoring Privacy and Security for Big Tech Grudges

Consumers have consistently signaled they want digital privacy, data security, and protection from scams. Biden’s tech enforcers instead launched ideological crusades against technology companies.

An August 2024 Slingshot Strategies poll of voters’ thoughts on FTC actions was striking: when voters were asked which actions of Lina Khan’s FTC benefited them the most and least, the top-ranked were common-sense protections (data security, breach notifications, junk fee bans, easy cancellations), while the lowest-ranked were Khan’s headline-grabbing tech merger lawsuits.

Voters clearly valued traditional consumer protections far more than these anti-merger battles.

Biden’s regulators fixated on making examples of Silicon Valley giants even when those cases offered little tangible payoff for consumers. White House adviser Tim Wu argued that enforcers should punish Facebook’s past mergers even long after they were approved.

The FTC and DOJ followed this playbook, pouring resources into headline-grabbing litigation to punish the largest and most successful tech companies as their valuations and revenue increased, but ordinary people weren’t asking for that. They were worried about their privacy and data, not whether Facebook owns a fitness app or Microsoft owns a game studio.

By prioritizing academic crusades over bread-and-butter protections, Biden’s tech regulators left consumers’ real concerns on the back burner.

Cost of Living vs. “Post-Price” Antitrust

Nothing better illustrates the faculty-lounge mindset than its attitude toward prices. At the height of inflation during his administration, Biden’s tech advisers argued that low prices shouldn’t be the focus of antitrust.

Lina Khan’s landmark law review article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” criticized the “narrow focus on consumer welfare as largely measured by prices” in antitrust enforcement. She urged regulators to pursue monopoly cases even when companies were cutting prices – prioritizing abstract theories of market power over consumers’ immediate savings. Khan writes:

“[The article] argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output.”

That theory collided with reality when the cost of living soared. As the columnist Matt Yglesias noted, the administration rarely prioritized keeping goods affordable over narrow political interests, an approach that looked especially foolish amid the worst inflation in decades. Voters facing higher prices saw an administration preoccupied with esoteric fights against tech companies instead of single-mindedly trying to lower everyday costs.

It’s no surprise that this “populist” message failed to resonate. Noah Smith wrote:

“Warrenite anti-corporate approach was populism without popularity — an elite intellectual project that was mostly wrong on the actual economics while also failing to spark enthusiasm among voters.”

From “Know Before You Owe” to Tech Obsessions

The contrast between two eras of Democratic consumer protection is telling. Under President Obama, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) scored a practical win with its “Know Before You Owe” initiative, simplifying mortgage forms so homebuyers could actually understand the fine print.

The CFPB produced a single, easy-to-read disclosure (with input from consumers) that demystified the mortgage process. It delivered real value to millions of Americans making one of their biggest financial decisions.

Under President Biden, by contrast, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra largely abandoned those efforts in favor of high-profile skirmishes with tech firms.

Instead of focusing on practical wins to protect consumers, Chopra pressured Apple to open the iPhone’s tap-to-pay chip (arguing Apple’s ban on third-party payment apps harms consumers) and warned people not to keep money in nonbank apps like PayPal or Venmo, urging stricter oversight of those services.

Few Americans wanted a war on Apple Pay or Venmo; they cared more about credit card fraud, predatory loans, and hidden bank fees. The CFPB went from being a selling point for Democrats to an organization that handed ammunition to the administration’s critics by picking fights voters disagreed with or didn’t care about at all.

The incoming Trump administration seized on this overreach, declaring an intent to “totally eliminate” the CFPB. An agenda that delivered few tangible wins during the Biden Administration ended up as an easy target: An example of liberal hubris that didn’t do anything to help the average consumer. As Yglesias noted:

“Biden’s…second term C.F.P.B. paid much less attention to coalition building…[seeking] to expand its authority to encompass regulating most of America’s major technology companies. …An agency that narrowly targets large banks can have some business community allies, while an agency that goes out hunting for new enemies can end up in trouble.”

Populism as Pretension

Biden’s tech regulation was supposed to be populist, but it was hatched in academia with little input or buy-in from voters to address their immediate concerns. Blaming “tech monopolies” or “the billionaire class” for everything makes for rousing rhetoric, but it doesn’t make the internet safer, online purchase secure, or prices lower.

These remain the top concerns of voters, and policies that drifted into other realms to address a post-neoliberal economic theory helped to lose their votes. The gap between what fires up anti-corporate activists and what matters to voters have proven politically costly for the party.

Joe Biden’s presidency produced a paradox. A lifelong centrist – surrounded by veteran Democratic operatives shaped by the party’s pro-growth, pro-innovation era – ended up presiding over an anti-tech administration that rejected traditional economic assumptions in favor of post-neoliberalism.

This was not an accident. It was the result of several major factors: a left-driven strategy to interpret the 2016 results, a governing strategy rooted in coalition management, and a staffing process in which progressives were organized while moderates were not.

As I’ve addressed in previous posts, the intellectual backdrop was the Democratic Party’s response to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. Much of the party converged on a “blame tech” narrative, arguing that Facebook and other platforms helped deliver the presidency to Donald Trump. This explanation shifted blame for Clinton’s loss to external factors and redirected internal frustration toward a powerful, unpopular villain.

In the final months of Biden’s 2020 campaign and during his transition into the presidency, these factors guided Biden’s senior advisors as they charted the direction of the Biden Administration’s approach to tech.

By the time Biden entered office, skepticism toward tech was no longer a factional position within the party; Biden’s advisors adopted that skepticism as the Administration’s default.

Former Biden official Stef Feldman observed that Biden’s senior staff optimized for Democratic “coalition management” - and didn’t like saying no to “The Groups,” noisy Members of Congress, or Biden’s own activist staff:

The Biden inner circle was, with two exceptions, made up of people who did not love tough conversations or having to say no to members of the Cabinet or other senior White House staff. I know they sometimes approved ideas because they did not want a confrontation.

The key question is why these advisors - Biden’s “Coalition Custodians” - recalibrated from tech optimism toward placating an increasingly activist base, even when that shift diverged sharply from Biden and the advisors’ own records.

I see three key reasons why.

Throwing the Left a Bone

First, many in Biden’s senior advisory circle saw opportunity in this shift. Embracing an anti-tech, anti-monopoly posture offered a way to manage internal party tensions without threatening Biden’s core priorities.

After a contentious primary, Biden needed Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren supporters on board. Sanders and Warren cared a lot about agencies like the FTC, SEC, and CFPB - agencies which Biden personally didn’t care much about and wasn’t likely to spend his time or political capital. Supporting Warren and Sanders’ personnel and policies gave them and their progressive allies a win without forcing Biden to compromise on foreign policy, institutional stability, or executive authority.

Cracking down on Silicon Valley became a symbolic offering. It signaled that the administration was listening to the left, while costing relatively little in areas Biden personally cared about most.

This dynamic played out quickly. Biden’s early rhetoric shifted toward trust-busting themes, culminating in his declaration that “capitalism without competition is exploitation.” By elevating outspoken tech critics and adopting Warren-Sanders language around corporate power, Biden insulated himself from an early revolt on the left. With a 50-50 partisan split in the Senate and Republicans unlikely to support anything substantive in his agenda, he could not afford factional infighting if he wanted to move forward with any partisan legislation (or appointments).

As Feldman later explained, many senior aides were less interested in adjudicating ideological disputes than in avoiding them. Tech regulation became a tool of coalition convenience, designed to keep the loudest factions happy with Biden while preserving room to maneuver elsewhere.

Biden’s Coalition Custodians Prog-Washing Their Records

For some Democrats, the turn against Big Tech reflected genuine belief. For others, it reflected adaptation.

A cohort of ex-Obama and Clinton officials once identified with market-friendly economic growth rebranded themselves as “reformed” policy leaders fluent in the new progressive economic critique of the party. This was not a wholesale ideological conversion so much as progressive-washing: selectively emphasizing new rhetoric while minimizing past alliances with industry.

The release of the American Economic Liberties Project’s The Courage to Learn report in January 2021 formalized this shift. The report sharply criticized the Obama-Biden years for tolerating consolidation and failing to enforce antitrust laws, urging the new administration to break decisively with neoliberal orthodoxy. Its message was not subtle. The old approach had failed, and courage now meant reversing course.

For Biden’s senior aides, many of whom had helped shape the Obama economic approach, the report gave them cover: changing their views was “courageous.” Aligning with its conclusions allowed them to adapt to the party’s new economic framework without dwelling on or defending their own responsibility for the past.

Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s trajectory captures the pattern. Once a central figure in the Clinton wing of the party, Sullivan publicly reassessed Democratic economic thinking after 2016 - even coauthoring a piece with the leader of the Hewlett Foundation’s anti-neoliberalism project. Though he reportedly considered a role at Google, Sullivan instead repositioned himself as a critic of neoliberalism, urging Democrats to embrace the party’s leftward shift.

This does not mean these figures were necessarily insincere, but incentives mattered. As activist pressure intensified and progressive norms became dominant within elite Democratic spaces, adopting an anti-tech stance became the path of least resistance.

Warren’s Persistence

If Biden’s Coalition Custodians were adapting on the fly, Elizabeth Warren and her allies were already prepared.

From the earliest days of the transition, the progressive ecosystem treated staffing as the central battlefield. Warren’s long-standing belief that “personnel is policy” translated into action. More than 40 progressive organizations delivered a detailed list of roughly 400 recommended appointees to the Biden transition, targeting agencies where regulatory power mattered most.

The logic was straightforward. Even without sweeping legislation, an administration staffed with committed progressives could reshape antitrust, consumer protection, and tech regulation through executive action.

Moderates offered no comparable counterweight. As Feldman noted:

Left-leaning advocacy organizations had better structures set up to recommend candidates for political appointments…Powerful, left-leaning Members of Congress – including but not limited to Warren and Sanders – effectively advocated for their preferred candidates.

There was no coordinated effort to advance centrist candidates, no unified response to progressive pressure, and little public advocacy for pro-growth expertise. Many assumed Biden’s instincts would naturally favor familiar pro-growth figures. But, at least for key regulatory posts, they were wrong.

As a result, Warren-aligned candidates filled key roles, from the FTC to the Justice Department and CFPB. Cabinet secretaries found their staff recommendations overridden in favor of progressive favorites in order to balance the hiring from Biden’s rivals during the primary campaign, which was a goal given to the transition team managers.

Warren’s anti-tech agenda prevailed within the Biden Administration not because it commanded majority support from the rank and file of the party – but because Warren and her allies were organized, persistent, and aligned with the incentives of Biden’s inner circle.

Conclusion

What began as a tactical effort to “throw the left a bone” became a defining feature of Biden’s administration. Tech policy, antitrust, and corporate regulation moved sharply left, not because Biden ran on that agenda, but because coalition convenience rewarded accommodation over resistance.

The result was an administration far more aggressive toward tech and markets than many anticipated, driven less by conviction than by internal coalition management. Importantly, the shift was not a demand to live up to a campaign promise to the working class, or an appeal to swing voters. This focus on appeasing activists and the MSNBC wing of the party ultimately weakened the party’s appeal with voters, who hold a positive view of tech.

Something interesting is happening inside the Democratic Party. It’s also familiar.

Ezra Klein predicted that “the next really successful Democrat…is going to be oppositional” to the tech industry. Rahm Emanuel is urging the United States to follow Australia’s lead and restrict social media for kids under 16. MSNBC host Chris Hayes has been raising alarms about algorithmic design. Rep. Jake Auchincloss is developing an agenda against what he calls “digital dopamine.”

As Lauren Egan recently noted in The Bulwark, some Democratic leaders see political opportunity in raising concerns about the effects of technology, social media, and AI — particularly on families and kids.

Tech writer Max Read has given this trend a memorable name: “platform temperance.” It’s an agenda of “restriction, restraint, and regulation” rooted in concerns about public health and general welfare amid rapid technological change.

But unlike the antitrust obsessions of the Biden era, this new Democratic approach isn’t primarily focused on corporate power. Instead, it’s animated by a broader concern about moral and social corrosion, enabled by unfettered technology.

Echoes of the 1990s

This moment echoes an earlier chapter in Democratic politics. In the 1990s, Second Lady Tipper Gore and Senator Joe Lieberman pushed the entertainment industry toward voluntary content labeling that helped parents understand what their kids were consuming.

I worked for Senator Lieberman and saw firsthand how those efforts broadened his appeal. By addressing family concerns while avoiding heavy-handed regulation, Lieberman’s criticism of violent and sexual entertainment helped him be seen as “a different kind of Democrat.”

As Democrats explore today’s version of technology temperance, that history offers both inspiration and caution. Temperance movements tend to succeed when they reshape norms, and struggle when they drift toward prohibition.

I’m a proud Democrat. I want the party to widen its tent, reconnect with average voters, and rebuild a durable governing majority. I’m also excited by the range of ideas Democrats are offering to refresh and challenge ourselves.

At the same time, I’m a technology optimist. That makes me cautious about solutions that risk turning Democrats away from innovation and toward fear of it. I watched the Biden administration’s hostility toward tech erode Democrats’ long-standing advantage as the party of innovation.

So my assessment is twofold: I find much to admire in this new technology temperance moment. And I worry about what happens if we take it too far.

What This Movement Gets Right

First, Democratic leaders are responding to real concerns. Auchincloss points to suburban parents worried about screen habits. Hayes, Emanuel, and Klein are responding to similar conversations. These anxieties are showing up in kitchens, carpools, and school meetings across the country.

Second, the movement is strongest when it focuses on kids. Jonathan Haidt’s work on the crisis of adolescence has resonated because it reflects what many parents are already seeing. His “four new norms” — no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more outdoor independence — provide a framework many families and communities find useful. It’s striking how quickly school phone bans have spread at the state and local level; this is one of the clearest examples of regulation aligning with widely shared intuition.

Third, it’s healthy for Democrats to talk more openly about the texture of family life. Our party often focuses on the countless norms broken by Donald Trump rather than the daily realities parents actually navigate: screen time, attention spans, mental health, and childhood independence. Addressing those concerns helps reconnect Democrats with families.

History also shows that the bully pulpit matters. Many people forget that video game ratings and explicit lyric labels emerged because of pressure from Lieberman and Gore, not because Congress passed sweeping laws.

Finally, this moment moves Democrats beyond a narrow Biden-era antitrust fixation. Breaking up companies doesn’t address compulsive scrolling, collapsing attention spans, or the decline of unstructured play. When Klein recently called antitrust law “inadequate” to address tech’s cultural effects, the antitrust brigade reacted defensively — a sign they’ve spent too long treating competition policy as a cure-all. Technology temperance is about family life and norms, not corporate structure.

Where I Worry We Could Go Too Far

Still, the risks are real.

Democrats already struggle with being seen as the “HR department of America,” well-meaning but scolding. And news-obsessed politicians and journalists glued to their own phones may not be the most credible messengers telling teens to unplug. Young people have strong hypocrisy detectors.

Another concern is coalition politics. Technology temperance may resonate most strongly with voters who Democrats already dominate: white, college-educated, suburban women. A recent Citrin/Politico poll found that nonwhite voters, men, and Gen Z were notably less supportive of banning social media for kids under 16.

For many working-class voters, young men, and Black and Hispanic communities, digital platforms are tools for connection, learning, and economic mobility. Low-income and minority teens report higher internet use than their wealthier and white peers. Could tech temperance be like college loan forgiveness - a myopic concern of our college-educated base, rather than something appealing to the voters we need to win back?

Enforcement is another problem. Australia’s under-16 ban was immediately met with teens explaining how to bypass it using VPNs. In the U.S., many parents already help their kids lie about their age online, a sign that the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) doesn’t align with everyday family behavior. When law moves faster than culture, people simply route around it.

Some proposals also feel mismatched to their goals. Blue state legislators passing new teen warning labels on social media have compared scrolling to smoking. But speech isn’t a toxin, and these labels risk becoming as annoying and ineffectual as Europe’s hated cookie banners. Likewise, proposals to “tax social media ad revenue” as a response to digital vice wouldn’t meaningfully alter how people use these platforms, suggesting more symbolic punishment of companies than serious attempts to change user behavior.

There’s also a developmental concern. Shielding teens from digital environments may leave them unprepared for the world they’ll inherit. Digital fluency — content creation, collaboration tools, media literacy — is increasingly essential. Surveys show that teens want guidance on how to use technology well, not blanket bans. As Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro recently put it, there’s a difference between protecting teens in the digital world and trying to protect them from it.

Finally, there are legal and privacy constraints. Age-verification mandates require collecting more data from both adults and minors, a tradeoff many families dislike. And courts have repeatedly struck down laws restricting access to lawful content, even for minors. However frustrating that may be for policymakers, it’s constitutional reality.

The Risks of Prohibition

Even Jonathan Haidt is cautious about broad regulation. His work emphasizes norms over laws — and norms can be powerful. When I was a kid, I watched unlimited TV. My own kids now have tightly capped screen time. No law made that happen; culture did.

The historical temperance analogy matters here. The original temperance movement successfully reshaped social norms around drinking. But when it escalated to Prohibition, it collided with public resistance and enforcement failure. Temperance endured; Prohibition collapsed.

That’s the lesson for digital policy: norms often succeed where laws fail.

A Better Path Forward

Modern temperance works best through culture, not coercion. Today’s alcohol moderation — Dry January, mocktails, wellness culture — spread without government bans. As Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein showed, nudges usually outperform prohibitions.

Lieberman and Gore didn’t pass sweeping legislation; they nudged industries. Today’s parents already have more tools than ever — from Apple and Google’s controls to apps like Life360 and Qustodio — a sharp contrast to my own childhood in the 1980s, when unlimited television was the norm and no law, but culture, ultimately changed that.

As Shapiro noted, lawmakers should work with industry to encourage investment in tech literacy and education for both children and adults. This sort of investment can give parents a lot more familiarity with the technology their children are exposed to, while helping kids get ready for the future.

Democrats can also learn from Barack Obama. He didn’t lecture people about family life; he modeled it. Imagine a prominent Democratic leader saying: “I don’t support more government intrusion, but in our family we’re waiting until 13 for phones and 16 for social media.” Politicians often underestimate the power of example.

This connects to what Derek Thompson calls “touch grass populism” — encouraging real-world connection over algorithmic loops. Democrats should decide whether they want to emphasize the virtues of balance or the villains of technology.

There are real problems with tech, and accountability matters. But modeling healthy habits may change behavior more effectively than blamestorming. Will Democrats pursue the digital equivalent of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move — or something closer to RFK’s new vaccine schedule?

Temperance built a healthier drinking culture; Prohibition built speakeasies. Democrats should remember the difference as we decide whether to lead technology’s next chapter, or try to ban it.