Activism / February 17, 2026
America should build things back, and we the people should own what we build.
Russell Vought (left), architect of the Mandate for Leadership, more commonly known as Project 2025, and director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), stands with Mark Paoletta (right), OMB general counsel, during the Trump administration’s announcement of the reversal of the Obama-era endangerment findings in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, February 12, 2026. (Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images) The New York Times recently reported that four conservative operatives spent the Biden years quietly building legal and regulatory infrastructure to kill the federal government’s ability to fight climate change. Russell Vought. Jeffrey Clark. Mandy Gunasekara. Jonathan Brightbill. They wrote decrees. They received money from the Heritage Foundation. They requested white papers from friendly scientists. They built everything in secret so no one could stop them before it was finished.
They are now poised to revoke the endangerment finding, the scientific determination that has underpinned every federal climate regulation since 2009. Myron Ebell, who has attacked climate science for nearly three decades, told the Times they were “pretty close to total victory.” He’s not wrong. They didn’t change the rules. They removed the foundations on which the rules were based. Any future administration wanting to regulate greenhouse gases will have to start from scratch. Four people did this. Four people and a plan, money from a think tank and 16 years of patience.
I love Bernie Sanders. Let me just say this. It was thanks to him that I got into politics. My first political job was in the Sanders campaign. I co-founded Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats because of what he started. I’m a Bernie Stan and I will be until the day I die.
But when Bernie says we have to reverse Citizens unitedI need him to finish that thought. Because spill Citizens united requires constitutional amendment. Two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or a convention of the states. Qualified majorities in the House and Senate. Facing a Supreme Court openly hostile to everything we believe in. These are massive generational undertakings, and no one on our side is building the infrastructure to accomplish any of them. The crowd applauds because the idea is good. Then everyone goes home and nothing gets built.
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Build a wall. Round up the immigrants. Drill, baby, drill. These are terrible ideas. But they are simple. The mechanism is obvious. Reversal Citizens united isn’t that it. Taxing the rich is not that. These are bumper stickers with no engine under the hood.
And even if we solved the latter problem, even if we got the vast majority and taxed every billionaire in America, we would still be stuck. Because where does the money go?
Take health care. The progressive answer is Medicare for All. Tax the rich and pump that money into the health care system. I support Medicare for All. But the system has already almost reached 6 trillion dollars per year. Six trillion dollars. We have fewer hospitals per capita than in the 1970s. We pay the highest prices in the world for drugs that our taxes helped develop. Insurance companies refuse 30 percent claims routinely, only Tuesday for them. The system is corrupted and produces stunning results for what it costs. You pump more money into a broken machine and the owners of the machine get richer. That’s it. You just make the platform more profitable.
And that’s the whole problem with the current progressive framework. It’s circular. Tax billionaires, of course; bring the money. But we then inject it into a financialized health system which does not produce health. In a real estate market that does not produce affordable housing. In an education system that puts children in debt and doesn’t produce the workforce we need. Money flows directly into and out of the pockets of those who extract wealth from these systems. Tax, spend, extract, repeat. And every few years the other side steps in and cancels the tax part anyway. It’s not a plan. It’s a hamster wheel.
The right wants to demolish everything. The dominant left wants to pour more money into the rubble. And almost no one talks about building something that actually works.
We’ve done it before.
America should build things back, and we the people should own what we build.
Build the public competitor. On a large scale. A public energy company that produces and sells clean energy. A public AI laboratory, therefore the most transformative technology in human history, does not belong to three billionaires. Public pharmaceutical manufacturing so that we stop paying the highest prices in the world for the drugs we have financed. Public hospitals that actually provide care instead of extracting it from communities.
THE Reconstruction Finance Corporation built businesses during and after World War II. Government ownership and management. Government owned and contractor operated. The RFC did not need to tax its way to solvency first. It has strengthened productive capacity, and productive capacity generates wealth. This is how you free yourself from debt. Not by reducing, not by taxing and circulating money in failing systems. By building things that produce value. The biggest problem with our debt, national, personal and professional, is not its size. It’s that we put the stupidest, most unproductive shit imaginable on this huge credit card. The solution is to start putting productive investments into it.
And look, we’re already spending money. We simply let individuals keep the wealth. Elon Musk is becoming the richest human in history in government contracts, government grants, and government intellectual property, shooting rockets into space with our money. We won’t let him have a nuclear weapon. Why do we let him keep all the benefits of publicly funded work? Why isn’t NASA doing this for the American people?
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My friend and former colleague Saikat Chakrabartithe architect of the Green New Deal, is building a framework for this type of construction on a public scale through what is called Mission for America. Saikat understands. He understands that the progressive movement needs a fundamentally different approach. Don’t fight over how to share what the billionaires have. Strengthen our own capacity to produce the things this country really needs.
The right built its demolition plan during the Biden years. They were building while we were doing victory laps. The Trump years are our building years. The right had a construction plan for demolition. We need a construction plan for construction. Either you’ve already built the thing or you haven’t. It’s time to build our own.
Corbin Trent Corbin Trent is an Appalachian factory owner turned political strategist, co-founder of Justice Democrats, and former communications director for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He writes about rebuilding America AmericasUndoing.com.
