Biden’s industrial policy: what worked, what didn’t, and why it still matters

President Biden's industrial policy, anchored in the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS Act, and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, marked a historic shift toward explicit state intervention in the economy—reversing decades of laissez-faire orthodoxy. Yet while critics dismissed it as 'everything bagel liberalism'—overloaded with competing goals—Andrew Schrenk argues the administration’s real innovation was embedding pre-distribution: shaping economic outcomes before taxes and transfers, through tools like antitrust enforcement, performance standards, means testing, and place-based investments. This approach aimed to ensure industrial growth benefited workers and communities, not just corporate elites. Even as the Trump administration rolled back many of these equity-focused elements, it preserved and expanded core industrial goals—proving that industrial policy is now a permanent fixture in American politics. The future, Schrenk warns, won’t be decided by economic models alone, but by the ongoing political struggle over who controls the rules of the game—and whether technology itself can be designed to promote equity. The episode reveals that Biden’s industrial policy wasn’t just about rebuilding supply chains or fighting climate change—it was a deliberate effort to reshape capitalism’s starting line. By tying subsidies to prevailing wages, childcare, and minority contracting, the administration treated equity as a design feature, not an afterthought.