Introducing the Mission for America
A comprehensive plan to build a clean economy that delivers prosperity for all
We’ve been pretty quiet on this substack for a while. At New Consensus we’ve had our heads down working on a project called The Mission for America. I’m breaking our silence to tell you about it and to ask for your feedback. We’ll be writing (a little) more frequently in the coming months with highlights and news about the Mission for America, and other topics we’re working on. You can check out the Mission for America here (and please remember, it’s still a work in progress).
The Mission for America is a detailed, comprehensive plan for a rapid and sweeping effort to achieve two intertwined goals:
To build a clean economy that can provide prosperity for everyone in the United States, and
To build up U.S. industrial capacity to help supply the fastest possible global transition to a clean economy.
This is not a case of spreading ourselves thin by trying to do two things at once — and our international goal is not an act of charity. Neither goal can be achieved without achieving the other. There’s no way to deliver prosperity to everyone in the U.S. without dramatically scaling our clean industrial capacity to sell to world markets (while helping to accelerate demand with a global green Marshall Plan). And there’s no way to build up U.S. industries to a global scale except by beginning with the domestic economy and a galvanizing mission to reach net-zero at home as fast as possible.
Here’s an analogy I use in the introduction to the Mission for America to explain this “both and” idea: The present state of the global transition to a clean economy is like a building burning while four fire trucks are parked at a gas station next door with the crews standing in line for coffee. The U.S. is one of those trucks, the others being China, Europe and the rest of the world — each representing roughly one quarter of the planet’s GDP and manufacturing capacity. In the race to overhaul global industry and infrastructure, the U.S. is an absolutely essential inventor and producer. The U.S. contains only about five percent of the world’s population, but it produces one quarter of global GDP and still contains 17% of its manufacturing capacity, including some of the most technologically advanced and high-value manufacturing capacity in the world. If any major part of the world fails to rise to the industrial challenge of building a new, clean economy, then we will encounter catastrophic global warming. The U.S. is one of those parts. We have a responsibility to add to the total industrial capacity of the world available for the green transition both because it is needed and because we have the means to supply it. And it just so happens that fulfilling that responsibility is the only path to providing prosperity for everyone in America.
It is still very difficult for many leaders, journalists, and activists to imagine how our society that is mired currently in so much dysfunction could ever pick itself up and successfully leap into action reinventing itself. Scores of pages in the Mission for America are devoted to exploring how America can do it. It will take a mostly forgotten kind of missional presidential leadership, and it will take creating some new institutions with the authority and capacity to lead and coordinate the mission.
To give you a glimpse of what this mission might look like in action, here's the opening of our introductory chapter. In future posts, we will delve into the various aspects of the Mission for America and share excerpts from its chapters.
Prologue
It’s May 2029, and President Kate Park has just completed history’s most remarkable first 100 days in the White House. Her campaign took place during a summer of extreme heat, storms, floods, and wildfires so relentless that even the U.S. public finally started to panic over global warming. Those events then helped trigger a financial collapse in the fall which appeared to have no bottom since the two parties could not agree on a response. In the midst of this double crisis, the Democratic candidates rambled about modest yet complex reforms. The Republicans shouted about the border. In the end, voters chose Park, a General Motors engineer, who ran as an independent calling the nation to a world-war-scale mission to build a clean economy big enough and powerful enough to provide prosperity for all Americans.
Park’s campaign was an accident. It all started when she lost her patience in a management meeting when plans to scale back EV production in America were announced. Her rant, caught on video, made her an instant social media celebrity. After General Motors fired her, she gained even more attention, with news and comedy shows inviting her on to say more. She turned out to be a natural in the limelight — surprising herself more than anyone. “Park for President” trended on social media, and political consultants came knocking on her door.
In what turned out to be a brave stroke of genius, Park refused to campaign in any traditional sense. Instead, she spent two years traveling the country, developing her “Mission for America” with other experts and leaders. She posted hundreds of conversations where she got to the bottom of America’s biggest problems and crafted a comprehensive set of practical solutions. She spoke with CEOs, middle managers, governors, mayors, civil servants, regulators, investors, academics, union leaders, workers, teachers, parents and children — as millions followed on social media.
Along the way, she recruited her future cabinet and other team members in full view of the public, winning commitments from them in livestreamed conversations that were sometimes tense and emotional. In one of these, Park’s old boss, the General Motors CEO, said no to leading the mission to revive the U.S. auto industry. Park would not take no for an answer and said she’d be back after Election Day.
As Park rose in the polls, more and more voters decided that casting their vote for an independent might not be a waste, which in turn pushed her even higher. In the final months of the campaign, when the news media was forced to recognize that Park had become the front runner, hundreds of millions of dollars in donations poured into her campaign. Park used that money to flood the airwaves with an inspiring ad campaign that called on voters to give the Mission for America a sweeping electoral mandate.
On the night of her victory speech, with most of the country watching live, Park said that every American needed to make a choice: join the mission to fix their nation, or watch from the sidelines as it continued to decline and as the planet continued to heat. Everyone, from front line workers to CEOs, would need to heed this call if the Mission for America was to succeed. She reminded viewers of her failed attempt to recruit her old boss, and said she was flying to Detroit that night to try again. The next day, she secured a yes after a long conversation with the CEO, and the two exited GM’s headquarters holding hands high above their heads to speak to the waiting media.
From that point on, president-elect Park’s transition had incredible momentum. She no longer needed to pursue the other leaders who had resisted her recruitment efforts. Now, they were chasing her. Thanks to her status as the first independent president since George Washington, the worsening financial crisis, and lingering climate panic, coverage of the transition drove high ratings across the news media. Park and her battle-hardened PR team did not disappoint, giving the media a constant stream of announcements, conflicts, and controversies to cover. Every day, Park introduced a new cabinet member or other team member, explaining the national missions she was charging them with and detailing their tangible goals and the impacts they would have on people’s lives. Some of these leaders came with controversy — as when she appointed an oil company executive to lead the mission to wind down the oil industry. These controversies gave the media exciting drama to cover, made the Mission for America leaders household names, and allowed Park to show Congress, the press, and the people what kind of leader she would be.
As a production engineer, she understood the importance of lead time and instructed her national mission teams to start working immediately, to dive into their research, fill out their teams, line up contractors, and make detailed plans for action. By the time of her inauguration, her entire Mission for America leadership team was hard at work as volunteer leaders-in-waiting for nearly all the component national missions that made up the Mission for America. They had already begun to recruit their own teams, working remotely and in a donated space in Washington DC. By inauguration day, they had already launched many parts of their missions that didn’t require government funding or authorization — for example, convening CEOs and investors to build support for sweeping investment initiatives.
In Park’s inauguration speech, she asked the American people one more time the same question that had been at the center of her campaign: “Are you content watching your country decline forever? Or are you ready, together as a nation, to embark on a mission to truly make America great?”
Just as with her campaign and transition, Park made the first 100 days of her presidency a sensational, non-stop televised and live streamed event. Instead of bailing out big banks made insolvent by the financial collapse, she insisted on converting them into mission-driven nonprofits that would be dedicated to investing in productive capacity, not financial speculation. This was a dramatic showdown that pitted her against both parties in Congress, which the media covered with enthusiasm. She relentlessly called out the injustice of once again using taxpayer dollars to cover the gambling losses of big banks — and ultimately, Congress relented. The spectacle of the most famous names on Wall Street being fired and their banks being converted into community institutions electrified the nation, showing that Park’s iconoclasm was no act.
From then on, each week she built pressure on Congress to pass the full Mission for America legislative package. For example, she convened leaders from industry to secure conditional commitments to make massive investments in the U.S. as long as Congress passed the parts of the Mission for America that were needed to make those investments successful. In this and other ways, she set up a situation in which Congress would look like a gang of anti-American saboteurs if it refused to pass Park’s agenda.
In daily live “emergency briefings” from the Oval Office, Park re-introduced America to the national missions that made up the Mission for America, and the leaders she had recruited to accomplish them. Each mission had a specific, tangible goal:
Build an electric vehicle industry large enough to double the pace of the global transition to EVs — and earn the U.S. billions in export revenues.
Develop new zero-emissions trucking and shipping industries — also not only for the domestic transition but for export as well.
Build a national EV charging network dense enough to make EVs more convenient than gas-powered cars.
Develop a zero-emissions aircraft industry in a moonshot-style program in collaboration with the American aerospace industry — making the U.S. the first country to mass produce and export clean jets.
Build a 100% clean power electricity grid.
Crisscross the nation with new long distance, high-voltage electric transmission lines.
Build a national hydrogen infrastructure.
Launch “Manhattan projects” to develop greenhouse gas drawdown technology, emission-free concrete, solid state batteries, and other important missing technologies.
Build out a new nationwide water system to get ahead of regional water shortages.
Launch a massive investment project to work with consumer brands to keep toxins out of human bodies.
Create a new Civilian Conservation Corps to re-forest millions of acres and to prevent and control wildfires.
Resurrect the World War II-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation to provide financing, coordination, and leadership to ensure the success of all of the above projects.
Taken as a whole, these and a number of other national missions constituted a sweeping program for national renewal that Park was demanding Congress to fund and fully enable with legislation.
By organizing the nation’s leaders of all types across society, and by winning the support of the American people, President Park had set the Mission for America in motion. Now, instead of waiting for a notoriously inert Congress to approve it, the nation waited to see if Congress would dare to stop it.
After creating the highest possible hopes and expectations among the public, the president then called on Congress to approve her appointees and pass legislation to authorize and fund the Mission for America in a series of emergency Oval Office addresses, in which she laid out the dire consequences of failing to respond adequately to the double crisis. Her sky-high approval ratings affirmed that voters had been waiting for a politician who would throw herself at our biggest problems without restraint or excuses.
President Park politely lobbied representatives and senators to get on board with the Mission for America. Simultaneously, she organized mass stadium rallies around the country where she asked voters to pledge to replace politicians who blocked the mission. To make this threat concrete, she used the rallies to openly recruit independents and primary challengers in every district and state with an opposed or uncommitted representative or senator. If Congress balked, it would be up to the people to clear the way for the Mission for America by selecting a new set of representatives and senators in the midterm elections.