At a Glance

The Mission for America is a comprehensive, detailed plan for a 10-year national mobilization to build a new, clean economy capable of providing prosperity, security, and freedom for all. We are writing this blueprint for the president who enters the White House in 2029, their administration, and the leadership of the 121st Congress.

They will inherit a historic double crisis:

• The AI and economic crisis: the mass replacement of workers by artificial intelligence, intensifying decades of wage stagnation, deindustrialization, and the systematic dismantling of America's means of making a living

• The climate and environmental crisis: the breaking of a 2.6 million-year climate cycle, threatening the conditions for life on Earth — even as climate has fallen off the political radar

Technology has been automating away jobs since long before AI, which is why real wages for the bottom half of U.S. workers stagnated for decades while GDP skyrocketed. Until now, lost jobs were replaced by low-wage service work, gig labor, or what anthropologist David Graeber called "bullshit jobs" — roles that are largely unnecessary and do not make the economy more productive. AI presents an unprecedented challenge: the new industries it makes possible will be staffed by AI, not humans. They will not replenish the jobs they destroy.

In one of history's most unexpected twists, AI will rapidly displace professionals, managers, and knowledge workers before it replaces manual laborers. The physical infrastructure for this white-collar replacement is already in place — it is the same network of screens, keyboards, and enterprise systems that enable remote work. When an AI can perform tasks, make business decisions, and control those enterprise systems as well as a human, the marginal cost of making the switch is zero. While the replacement of manual laborers with robotics will also accelerate, it will proceed more slowly because building, installing, and maintaining physical robots still carries a tangible unit cost.

Imagine January 2029: a vast segment of the professional-managerial class is sitting at home without income, unable to make their house payments, and stripped of their imagined futures. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the working class is laid off as collateral damage from the ensuing collapse of consumer demand.

The Mission for America is a roadmap for what the president and our government must do in that moment. It includes sweeping, immediate programs to get people into meaningful, lucrative work while simultaneously laying the groundwork for a new, clean economy that guarantees shared prosperity forever with radically reduced working time.

Even after the great AI replacement, there will still be an enormous amount of vital work to do that requires humans:

• Building a replacement for the doomed fossil fuel economy, which continues to radically alter our atmosphere and heat the planet, even when the news media and policymakers look away
• Rebuilding and upgrading our homes and buildings for energy efficiency, health, safety, and quality of life
• Restoring our public infrastructure and hardening it to withstand severe climate impacts
• Establishing the care economy as a source of rewarding, well-paid jobs that ensure dignity for our elders and everyone who needs care
• Building the best health care and education systems the world has ever seen

Capitalism alone does not possess a mechanism to channel labor and resources into these essential missions, even with the incredible productivity gains brought by AI and robotics — especially not when most potential customers have had their incomes cut off. If we want this work done, society must organize to make it happen. We need comprehensive plans and institutions with the power and resources to execute them.

To achieve this, the U.S. must switch from "decline mode" back into "mission mode" — a state of national action modeled on the exceptional U.S. industrial mobilization around World War II. The Mission for America calls for restoring our capacity for public investment and economic coordination, primarily through a revived Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The RFC will operate as a massive public development bank and venture fund, financing the launch of entirely new industries, creating tens of millions of high-wage jobs, and supplying the world with the technology required to transition to a clean economy.

The plan is organized into a series of targeted, 10-year "national missions." Most are associated with a specific sector of the economy — such as clean power, electric vehicles, public transportation, or green steel. Others are designed around solving specific challenges, like drawing down atmospheric greenhouse gases or guaranteeing access to clean and safe water for all Americans. Each mission will require relentless "Mission Leadership" — a president willing to eliminate the filibuster, battle obstructionism, and use executive powers to push the mobilization forward.

The Mission for America is not merely a plan to deal with AI. It is not just a climate plan. Or a jobs plan. It is a blueprint for the total, sweeping upgrade of our economy needed to solve the defining crises of the 21st century and unleash an era of radical abundance.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was created in 1932 to handle what no other institution could: a banking system in collapse, mass unemployment, and an economy that needed to be fundamentally restructured — not just stimulated, but rebuilt from the inside out. For more than a decade, the RFC was the largest enterprise in the world. It fixed systemic failures, created entire industries, built critical infrastructure, and financed the industrial mobilization that won World War II. It earned a profit for the U.S. treasury every year it operated.

AI is about to create disruption on that scale again. As automation eliminates whole categories of work — not just factory jobs but professional, managerial, and creative work — the economy will need the same kind of deep restructuring the RFC was built to deliver. Not stimulus checks. Not retraining programs. An institution with the power, capital, and mandate to launch new industries, restructure failing ones, and put tens of millions of people to work building things the world actually needs.

The Mission for America calls for resurrecting the RFC to play exactly that role. The original RFC functioned as a bank, venture capital firm, private equity firm, and strategic coordinator — whatever the nation's biggest challenges required. It was a capitalist institution, run by leaders from the private sector serving a public mission. Its vast expenditures did not come at the expense of other national priorities. The RFC demonstrated that a national economy is not a zero-sum system — it can be expanded in ways that benefit everyone.

Under the Mission for America, the new RFC will be financed by federal appropriation, bonds, and private capital. Structured as a publicly-owned independent corporation, it will be free to participate in any sector of the economy, in whatever way is necessary to build a prosperous and sustainable economy. The RFC will be organized into dedicated teams, each one responsible for leading a single national mission — clean power, EVs, steel, hydrogen, buildings, workforce, and so on. Each team will have the expertise, authority, and capital to drive its mission from planning through execution.

Our plan calls for the president-elect to begin assembling the RFC before Inauguration Day — recruiting top private-sector leaders, engineers, and operators to volunteer their expertise and start planning immediately. Think of it as DOGE in reverse: instead of private sector leaders taking a chainsaw to the government, they serve in publicly accountable positions to build up our economy. By the time the president takes office, the RFC will already have teams in place, plans drafted, and deals in the pipeline. The mission starts on day one.

Converting to zero-emissions electricity while dramatically increasing output is an essential step in building a clean economy. Electricity generation is the second largest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., accounting for 25% of annual emissions. Converting to 100% clean power is necessary to eliminate those emissions; increasing overall production is needed to support the electrification of nearly the entire economy. The national mission for clean power will:

• Transition electricity production to 100% clean sources in 10 years by financing and coordinating investments in clean energy, instituting a Clean Energy Standard (CES), and radically reforming the siting and permitting process for power production and transmission projects.

• Increase total energy production by at least 100% to accommodate electrification of the general economy as well as power-hungry applications such as CO2 drawdown and hydrogen production.

• Build new high voltage, long-distance power lines to provide affordable power to population centers while eliminating bottlenecks and shortages during demand peaks.

• Make energy storage capacity ubiquitous at every level of the nation's electricity infrastructure from power plants to homes and consumer appliances.

• Expand distributed power generation solutions such as commercial and residential rooftop solar and ground-source heat pumps.

• Upgrade the nation's power grid and utilities to accommodate massively increased demand for electricity.

• Launch a D.O.D.-led nuclear program to massively increase electricity production. (Its own national mission.)

The United States is already in the midst of a clean energy boom. Billions of dollars have been invested in clean energy projects over just the last few years. Despite this progress, the United States is not on track to reach 100% clean power within the next decade — or even by 2050.

A range of obstacles is holding back America's transition to clean power despite the economic advantages of clean power. These include a prohibitive, slow, and redundant regulatory system, backwards incentives and inadequate planning and investment at utility companies, failed attempts to engineer electricity markets, and more. Our plan contains measures for addressing all of these.

The key mechanism for driving the country to 100% clean power is the Clean Energy Standard (CES), administered by the Department of Energy and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which requires that utilities replace all fossil-fuel power sources with clean power in 10 years.

The policies introduced in this national mission will do more than build a clean energy grid. This national mission will create high-paying jobs for workers across multiple industries including utilities, manufacturing, energy development, and R&D firms. The energy transition also gives America an opportunity to rectify some of the injustices the current energy system has placed on low income and marginalized communities.

The national mission for electric vehicles (EVs) is a comprehensive strategy to reposition the United States as a leader in the global EV market, accelerate the global transition to EVs, and provide millions of new high-paying jobs in the U.S. This mission will:

• Ramp up EV production to reach approximately 30 million units annually in 10 years, returning America to the position of top global auto exporter, and greatly accelerating the global transition to EVs.

• Ensure that 100% of new light-duty vehicle sales in America are EVs in 10 years.

• Provide generous subsidies and buy-back programs to encourage EV sales and to retire fossil-fuel vehicles.

• Construct the world's most efficient and user-friendly EV charging network to make EVs more convenient to own than gas-powered vehicles.

This mission aims to greatly accelerate the global shift to EVs by adding significantly to the total global EV supply. In doing so, it positions the U.S. to capture a significant portion of the burgeoning global EV market, creating millions of high-wage jobs for Americans. We have set a numeric target of 30 million EVs produced each year in America in 10 years.

The key to achieving such high production goals will be automation — which is also the key to ensuring EV jobs are high wage. Though EV production uses less labor per vehicle — especially when highly automated — the enormous overall increase in EV production means the auto workforce in America will grow significantly from today's levels.

The transition to EVs is a process already in motion, primarily driven by consumer preferences. However, production lags far behind demand. As the global auto industry stands on the brink of a complete shift to electric vehicles, the U.S. has a narrow window of opportunity to lead this transformation and reclaim its historical status as the world's foremost auto exporter.

More than with most other missions, success here depends not on public financing, regulations, standards, or laws, but primarily on the leadership. The president and the RFC EV team must convince automakers and investors to bet on big investments in America.

After lack of supply, the inconvenience of charging is the most important blocker to EV adoption. Fast chargers must be available in abundance everywhere people park their cars. The EV mission will subsidize the building and operation of public fast chargers in every community to kickstart the EV economy.

By aligning federal resources, legislative action, and private sector innovation, this mission will not only revive the American auto industry but also significantly contribute to reducing national and global carbon emissions over the next decade.

The national mission for a sustainable steel industry is central to the Mission for America because so many of the other national missions depend on large supplies of clean steel and because this is an industry that can provide many high paying, high quality jobs. This mission will:

• Revitalize and decarbonize the U.S. steel industry while increasing total U.S. steel production by approximately 50% — adding many high-wage jobs to the economy.
• Make all production of steel clean in 10 years by investing in electric arc furnace and green hydrogen reduction processes.
• End the shortage of electrical steel and other specialty products that threatens the American transition to EVs and a clean power grid.

The American steel industry was the largest and most advanced in the world for almost a century but has declined in relative and absolute terms since the 1970s. Though it retains the #4 position in the world, it produces less than 1/10th of China's output and 1/2 of India's. Japan, a high-wage country with less than half America's population produces slightly more than us. The decline of the American steel industry resulted in the loss of millions of good jobs, an increasing reliance on imports, and shortages of specialized steel that have burdened other industries in the U.S. Most major American steel companies have shown little to no interest in reversing this downward spiral.

The world stands at the precipice of a revolution in steel production. Electric arc furnaces powered by clean electricity and the green hydrogen direct reduction processes have given industry the means to replace dirty steel production with clean. Though clean steel still involves some CO2 emissions, they are a small fraction compared with the status quo.

The U.S. steel industry is cleaner than most countries' because it is mainly driven by electric arc furnaces which use recycled steel. The U.S. recycles a very high share of the steel it produces, but some new steel still must be fabricated. Making that process clean requires the building of hydrogen-powered "direct reduction" furnaces — this relatively new technology will require significant investment by the RFC to kickstart at a scale sufficient to meet America's present needs and the increased demand from the Mission for America.

So far, U.S. steel makers have been slow to invest in this new process. The national mission for steel calls for an end to the apathy of the American steel industry and a new focus on building the world's first clean steel industry.

The global steel industry accounts for 7% of total global emissions. Solving the climate crisis will require a significant increase in global steel production while at the same time converting all steel production to clean processes. The U.S. must step up to provide sufficient amounts of clean steel to ensure the global transition to a clean economy move as fast as possible.

This national mission will build the world's first clean steel industry by focusing on the following actions:

• The president will use all the tools of mission leadership to challenge the intransigence of steel industry leaders and pressure them to invest in new clean steel capacity — going so far as to use the RFC to kickstart new companies if necessary.
• The Reconstruction Finance Corporation will invest billions of dollars in both existing companies and start-ups to build new clean steel production capacity.
• The Reconstruction Finance Corporation will convene an emergency council to end the electrical steel shortage and to monitor other types of specialized steel to prevent future shortages.
• Congress will incentivize clean steel production through new subsidies as well as regulations that phase out the production of dirty steel in 10 years.
• Congress will create a Carbon Border Adjustment Tax that taxes the importation of dirty steel, thus supporting America's clean steel industry and encouraging other countries to invest in their own clean steel production.

For sectors of the economy that cannot be electrified, green hydrogen, produced by 100% clean electricity, is one potential alternative. Despite receiving billions in public subsidies and investments, hydrogen is still a controversial solution for greenhouse gas emissions reduction for several reasons: leaked hydrogen indirectly acts as a greenhouse gas (and is the leakiest gas on the periodic table), hydrogen requires large amounts of clean electricity to produce (though far less water than is often assumed), and it is difficult and expensive to safely store and transport. Despite these challenges, hydrogen stands as one of the most promising technologies for scalable replacements of fossil fuels for some applications.

It is important that hydrogen not be used in areas where it is clearly inferior to other technologies — such as large scale electricity production, heating, cooking, cars, and trucks.

This mission will build the infrastructure necessary to supply green hydrogen to every relevant application. The national mission for hydrogen will:

• Build a national green hydrogen industry with scalable capacity to replace all current dirty hydrogen production and to power applications where hydrogen turns out to be an appropriate fuel.
• Invest heavily in industries needed to build the hydrogen economy, such as electrolyzers.
• Require, assist, and finance producers of dirty hydrogen to convert to green hydrogen production facilities.
• Build green hydrogen production at the airports and ports the aviation and shipping missions will need, so the fuel supply is ready as those fleets scale. (See the national missions for aviation and shipping.)

Hydrogen has long been touted as a fuel of the future, but, until recently, was limited to only niche industrial uses. The falling price of clean electricity and other technologies will soon make unsubsidized green hydrogen competitive with dirty hydrogen. Recently initiated Biden administration subsidies make subsidized green hydrogen competitive now (against dirty hydrogen which is also subsidized via subsidies and support for fossil fuels).

With almost every application for hydrogen, a chicken-and-egg problem prevents the private sector from accomplishing a transition in the absence of public leadership and financing. Without an affordable and convenient supply of hydrogen, it doesn't make sense to invest in new hydrogen-powered planes, ships, industries, and infrastructure. Likewise, without large-scale demand for hydrogen, investing in hydrogen production and distributions is a non-starter.

The national mission for hydrogen calls for, among other projects, building green hydrogen production facilities at every airport and port to solve for the supply side of the chicken-and-egg problem. Other national missions, such as those for clean aviation and shipping, will solve the demand side of the problem. The specifics of hydrogen transport and clean hydrogen production make it most efficient to build production facilities very close to where hydrogen is needed. Unfortunately, conversion of long-distance gas lines to be used with hydrogen is not technically feasible.

Buildings and homes are a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and of energy waste. Much of our housing stock is old, unhealthy, or unsafe for residents. A housing shortage is driving prices beyond affordability for most Americans. Since the COVID pandemic, cities and towns face a glut of unoccupied office space, some of which must be refashioned for other purposes or replaced. All of this will require millions of new construction workers, creating as many good, high-paying jobs. The national mission for homes and buildings will:

• Organize millions of workers — many of whom will be new entrants into the workforce — to overhaul America's homes and buildings for CO2 emissions, energy efficiency, comfort, health, and safety.
• Require states to streamline permitting and approval processes for building projects — tying federal aid and funding of all types to compliance, in the same way the federal government does today to enforce national transportation rules.
• Establish a federal project to provide training and support for millions of new workers to enter or reenter the construction workforce.
• Finance and coordinate the upgrading of most homes and buildings in 10 years through long-term green bonds, issued by the RFC, that are paid by utility companies out of savings from efficiency.
• Compensate homeowners and tenants for the inconvenience of upgrading homes to ensure uptake.

The United States housing sector has two major problems: millions of homes are contributing to the climate crisis by using fossil fuel-powered heaters, stoves, and other appliances; and a national housing shortage has caused the costs of owning or renting a home to skyrocket. A comprehensive national housing policy must focus on both problems by retrofitting existing homes for sustainability, comfort, and safety — and building millions of new zero-emission, highly efficient homes.

Residential building emissions primarily arise from homes using fossil fuel for heating, cooking, and laundry. These processes contribute to the climate crisis and produce pollutants that harm the health of residents. Investing in home electrification and energy efficiency retrofits will decrease a home's carbon footprint and impact on the grid, lower monthly utility bills, and improve the health of those living there.

An important way to make housing affordable is to build more homes. The 2010s were the slowest decade for new home construction in modern American history, and since then, the total supply of homes has remained consistently below demand. Investing in sustainable housing will help lower costs and make housing affordable for all Americans.

America's stock of commercial buildings is another major source of carbon emissions. Building owners are nowhere near on track to decarbonize buildings. As with homes, public financing will be necessary, and will be provided by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. American cities are now filled with empty office buildings. Though it is difficult, many of these buildings can be converted to other purposes. Others will need to be dismantled, recycled, and replaced with apartment buildings or other kinds of buildings.

Homeowners, tenants, and landlords cannot be expected to pay the costs of upgrades. Requiring them to pay will render this mission, and likely the entire Mission for America, politically unpopular. Moreover, when the typical homeowner, renter, and landlord are all struggling with high costs, it makes no sense to add an additional burden on them.

The workforce required for this mission will be enormous. One of the Mission for America's goals is to build an economy that can provide prosperity for everyone. Home and building upgrade work has jobs of all skill levels and will be needed in every community. This is the perfect project to provide good jobs to people who have been out of the workforce for a long time or who have no work experience. It can provide good work for people reestablishing their lives after prison, drug addicts in recovery, and others who have difficulty getting into the workforce today. There will also be much work for high-skilled and specialized construction workers.

We recommend that the RFC finance this huge project by issuing long-term green bonds that will be paid back by energy savings paid out by utility companies. Instead of seeing energy savings on their utility bills, rate payers will enjoy all the benefits of the upgrades for free.

Air travel is one of the fastest-growing sources of CO₂ emissions, producing about 3% of global emissions. As global incomes rise, more people are flying, and this trend could lead to a fivefold increase in air travel by 2050. Banning or limiting aviation is unlikely, so we need to either develop zero-emissions aviation technology or find ways to remove all greenhouse gases released by aircraft. Greenhouse gas drawdown at that scale is still highly uncertain.

For clean aviation, we advocate trying every reasonable approach simultaneously until the best long-term solutions emerge. This might involve investing in technologies that don't ultimately succeed, but that's part of how progress works. Even unsuccessful technologies can teach us valuable lessons and be repurposed to meet other needs.

Our national mission for aviation will:

• Support truly clean and sustainable jet fuel approaches. Most current so-called sustainable jet fuels are more harmful than helpful when their total life cycle emissions are counted, and/or hold no hope of scaling beyond small, highly-subsidized demonstration projects. Nevertheless, technological developments often surprise, and many different kinds of sustainable jet fuel approaches are currently being developed.
• Invest in electric aircraft: Electric planes are already in commercial use for short flights. While it's unlikely that battery technology will ever power long-haul flights due to fundamental limitations, advancements in this area are still worth pursuing.
• Develop hydrogen-powered jets: We are aware of how controversial this proposal is, but after carefully evaluating their potential, we are compelled to call for a moonshot-style partnership between the federal government, military, RFC, and U.S. aerospace industry to develop hydrogen-powered long-haul jets. Hydrogen-powered jets have flown as early as the 1950s, and Boeing has an operational piloted hydrogen jet working today. The main challenge is engineering safe, energy efficient, large-scale storage of liquid hydrogen. Redesigning aircraft to a more efficient "flying wing" design is also necessary to make room for the fuel storage systems. This innovation in commercial aviation is needed regardless of the future of hydrogen as a fuel, will rejuvenate the U.S. aerospace industry, and give it an edge globally.

Producing hydrogen in sufficient quantities will require vast amounts of electricity, but transitioning to a clean electricity system is already necessary. Our national mission for clean electricity is designed to make it possible to scale clean electricity production by orders of magnitude.

American trucking emits a large share of greenhouse gas emissions and environmental pollution and must be transitioned from fossil-fuel powered vehicles to zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) powered by batteries. This mission will:

• Establish an industry producing electric semi-trucks in 10 years, capable of supplying America and the world for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.
• Build a national truck battery charging and swapping infrastructure that can support the entire electrified U.S. trucking fleet.
• Ramp up production of small and medium sized electric trucks (and all class 4-7 vehicles) to reach 100% ZEVs in 10 years.

Other goals which are necessary to make the above possible are found in the missions for EVs and clean power, such as improving the grid and providing assistance to utilities to accommodate the needs of truck charging facilities at truck stops, trucking companies, warehouses, and other sites.

The diverse range of vehicles included in this national mission — from small delivery trucks to large semis — requires policymakers to consider each vehicle type's needs and recent progress carefully. Some medium and heavy-duty vehicles, such as buses and delivery vans, already have ZEV options for sale and on the roads. For those vehicles, policymakers simply must accelerate a process already in motion. Other vehicles, particularly the largest ones like long-haul semi-trucks, are more challenging to decarbonize and will require more aggressive public investment and coordination.

We allow a longer timeline for the heaviest vehicles to transition because new battery technology will need to be developed, and the sheer quantity of materials for those large batteries may be difficult to acquire in a short timeframe.

This mission is imperative for two reasons. The first is that fossil fuel-powered trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles are an environmental disaster. Although they represent only about 5% of the total vehicles on the road, they account for approximately 21% of the transportation sector's emissions. Fossil fuel-powered MHDVs also contribute to local pollution that disproportionately harms marginalized communities. Second, the global market for ZEVs is young and undefined — providing America the opportunity to lead the world in manufacturing ZEVs should policymakers and industry leaders act quickly.

This national mission will accomplish its goals with the following and other strategies:

• The president will convene leaders from the vehicle manufacturing and fleet operations industries to win their support for the national mission.
• The Reconstruction Finance Corporation will invest in new ZEV manufacturing and provide financing to fleet managers to purchase American-made ZEVs.
• Incentivizing companies to purchase ZEVs through generous financial subsidies and a future ban on fossil fuel-powered MHDVs.

Shipping is the source of 2-3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is expected to grow by 50% or more by 2050. As with aviation, it is not yet certain which technologies will power the clean shipping fleets of the future. Options include:

• Hydrogen powered ships. Commercial H2-powered ships are already transporting goods and passengers. With less weight and space restrictions than on planes, hydrogen storage is much easier for ships. Remaining questions include problems with harmful H2 leakage, and the challenge of establishing a global system of H2 refueling infrastructure.
• Ammonia powered ships. Ammonia is more stable and thus easier to store and transport than hydrogen. Making ammonia with green hydrogen, however, involves a fundamental inefficiency that may not be compensated for by ammonia's advantage in stability and ease of storage and transport. Ammonia creates 60-90% less greenhouse gas emissions than traditional shipping fuel. Since the greenhouse gas equivalent emissions of using hydrogen for shipping fuel is still not precisely known, ammonia could turn out to be a better fuel than hydrogen with respect to indirect greenhouse gas emissions.
• Carbon capture. Promising experiments with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology on ships are underway. Like hydrogen and ammonia, however, carbon capture on ships will require a very large-scale and elaborate system of transporting and loading the CCS materials and equipment.

The national mission for shipping will:

• Organize investment into all reasonable approaches to clean shipping, with the goal of building a clean shipping industry that aims to supply the world with clean shipping capacity. Our plan calls for this new export industry being in full swing in 10 years.
• Reach 100% clean shipping in U.S. domestic shipping and inland waterways in 10 years.
• Modernize America's ports' deteriorating shipping infrastructure, and build out clean fueling infrastructure.

Modernizing America's ports and transitioning to a zero-emissions shipping fleet would decrease U.S. emissions and set a new international model for other countries to follow. America's inland waterways make up our domestic "water highways" and transport vast amounts of goods across the country. The US marine transport system is vital to the American economy, contributing over $500 billion to America's GDP and employing more than 10 million workers.

Investments in domestic ports and inland waterway infrastructure have not kept pace with changes in shipping practices. As a result, America's waterway infrastructure has begun to deteriorate. Infrastructure studies consistently find America's ports to be falling behind that of countries like China or Japan. The shipping industry is also a significant contributor to global warming, responsible for around 3% of America's yearly emissions.

This national mission provides a comprehensive plan to modernize America's waterway infrastructure, transition the industry to zero-emission shipping technologies, and rebuild a domestic ship-building industry.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation will provide the financing and cross-industry coordination necessary to rebuild America's ship-building industry around clean shipping.

Congress will need to significantly increase its funding for the maintenance, upgrade, and expansion of its inland waterways. The president will work with key international peers to create a global network of refueling stations at major international ports.

A handful of corporations decide what Americans eat and what farmers earn. Nineteen million Americans live with no supermarket within reach, more than a mile away in the cities and more than 10 miles out in the country. The farmers who feed everyone else carry the highest debt on record, much of it owed to the same meatpackers and processors who set the prices they are paid. And the fertilizer that grows the nation's food is made from natural gas, so every spike in the gas market becomes a spike at the grocery store. The Mission for American Farming will rebuild the food system end to end: affordable, healthy food within every family's reach, real buyers and fair prices for the farmers who grow it, and clean American fertilizer in place of imported gas.

This mission will:

• Feed every American through the American Food Corporation, a publicly owned food utility that opens real grocery stores in the neighborhoods the supermarkets abandoned, cooks affordable ready-made meals from regional ingredients, delivers to anyone who cannot reach a store, accepts SNAP and WIC at every hub from the day it opens, and holds a national food reserve that steadies prices in good years and lean ones.
• Break the monopolies that control meat, seeds, fertilizer, and grocery shelves, with antitrust enforcement across the food chain and a network of publicly owned processing plants that give independent farmers an alternative buyer for the first time in a generation.
• Buy out the farmers trapped in the predatory debt that ties them to a single processor, tie the subsidies farmers already receive to protecting their soil and water, and pay any farmer who wants it a second income for hosting clean energy and water infrastructure on land they keep and still farm.
• End the worst forms of factory farming by changing the economics of land and feed, converting corn-ethanol and stranded export acreage to pasture and regional food, and cleaning up the runoff that has left farm-country families drinking their own contamination.
• Build the first domestic clean-fertilizer industry in American history, producing ammonia from clean power and water instead of natural gas, and breaking agriculture's dependence on the fossil fuel market.
• Fund the next generation of American food and the public science behind it: advanced proteins grown without animals, gene-edited crops and public seed banks released as open-source public goods that break the corporate seed monopoly, and a rebuilt agricultural research and extension service that carries better practices to every farm.

The food system stays rigged because it is monopolized at every layer at once, and because the tool meant to fix it, the annual Farm Bill, is held hostage to commodity lobbies and yearly appropriations. When one administration writes rules to protect contract farmers, the next freezes them: the poultry payment rule finalized in early 2025 was shelved before it could take effect, and federal grants for independent processing were frozen mid-construction. A narrow fix at one layer just moves the extraction to the next.

The Mission's answer is patient public capital that no single budget cycle can freeze. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation will finance the debt buyouts, the processing plants, the clean-ammonia industry, the land transition, and the American Food Corporation, while federal purchasing power and antitrust enforcement break the monopolies from the other side. Farmland becomes a platform that pays several times over: food, clean power, and water storage from the same working acres. Every piece already works somewhere in America. The Mission will build all of it, everywhere, at once.

The payoff is a food economy that is competitive, independent, clean-powered, and abundant: hundreds of thousands of jobs across processing, clean energy, distribution, and agricultural science; the next generation of farmers put on the land as the current one retires; drinking water in farm country made safe again; and nutritious food within every American's reach and every family's budget. The country grows more than enough to feed everyone well. The Mission makes sure it does.

The Manhattan Projects are the Mission for America's research engine, the RFC Advanced Research Division. Its job is narrow and hard. It works only on the handful of breakthroughs the rest of the Mission genuinely cannot succeed without, not a wish list of technologies that would be nice to have. Every program has to answer one question before it starts. Which mission fails if this is not solved? If the answer is none, the work belongs somewhere else.

The Division will run its programs the way the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, and DARPA ran theirs, with brilliant people, real authority, multiple teams racing each problem in parallel, and a tolerance for the failures that come with taking real risks. What is different is that the public will own what it creates. When a Division-funded breakthrough reaches commercial scale, the taxpayer will get a share of the upside through equity and royalties, instead of the gains being handed to private shareholders the way the transistor and the internet were.

The core portfolio is the short list of problems where a whole sector's plan stalls until the science lands:

• Carbon-free cement, the chemistry that makes concrete one of the largest sources of emissions on earth.
• A fossil-free feedstock for the chemical industry, and a clean source of the aromatic molecules behind plastics, fibers, and fully clean aviation fuel.
• Clean ways to make the materials carbon still makes, like silicon and the ferroalloys, plus clean industrial heat above 1,800 degrees.
• Storage that holds more and lasts longer, to run a clean grid around the clock and carry electric transport past short hops.
• Zero-carbon fuel for long-haul aviation, the flights that do not decarbonize at all without a breakthrough.
• Clean power for the hardest freight, the heaviest long-haul trucking and the ships that batteries cannot yet move.

Across all of it, the goal is not only to make the clean version work but to drive it down to the cost of the dirty version it replaces.

A second, smaller set of programs are honest hedges, funded because the payoff would be enormous but the Mission does not depend on them. Fusion is the clearest example. It would remake the energy system, but it will almost certainly arrive too late for the Mission's targets, so it is funded as a long-horizon bet rather than dressed up as a schedule.

The Division will be built to last and to stay honest, with competitive selection, conflict-of-interest rules, clawbacks, and a public dashboard of every award and outcome, so a permanent research institution serves the country rather than hardening into a bureaucracy that outlives its purpose.

The national mission for nuclear power introduces a groundbreaking approach to expand America's nuclear energy capacity. After the transition to a clean economy, America will be producing several times more electricity than it is today to power vehicles, homes, buildings, and industry — and to meet the enormous electricity needs of producing green hydrogen to power shipping and aviation, and perhaps for powering CO2 drawdown projects. Meeting all of these needs using only wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal will take a terrible toll on the environment in terms of materials that will need to be mined and fabricated, and land and water use.

We can only safely and sustainably achieve our clean energy needs by greatly increasing nuclear power capacity. Unfortunately, the current civilian nuclear regulatory regime makes developing new nuclear power facilities practically impossible. Adequately changing that regulatory regime will probably be politically impossible within the scope of the Mission for America, due to the deeply entrenched misunderstandings and fears of nuclear power among the American public. We offer a novel approach to expanding nuclear power in America that we believe is the only current politically feasible path available.

This mission will:

• Launch a campaign to educate the public about the safety of nuclear power and dispel long held myths and misunderstandings of its imagined dangers.
• Utilize the military's existing nuclear power program, which operates outside civilian regulatory frameworks, to construct nuclear power plants on military bases across the United States.
• Employ the civilian nuclear industry, including start ups working on Small Modular Reactors and other innovative technology, to build the nuclear plants — as a way of preparing for a large civil nuclear sector once the military program establishes nuclear power as safe and necessary.
• Connect military-based nuclear plants to the national grid, significantly boosting the country's power supply.
• Allocate a substantial portion of the energy generated by these plants for critical processes like CO2 drawdown, green hydrogen production, and other high-energy-demand applications.
• Leverage the president's emergency powers and executive orders, along with Congressional legislation, to overcome traditional regulatory roadblocks and accelerate the deployment of these nuclear facilities.

No energy source or industry is more misunderstood than nuclear power. Nuclear power has been stigmatized by a worldwide fascination with the destructive power of atomic bombs and the seemingly magical power of atomic energy, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of and dangers of radiation. Social movements and popular impulses that rightly object to and hate the destruction of the environment by modern technology and industry have often seen nuclear power as the most striking representation of the problem.

Nuclear power plants, however, are the safest form of energy production if you count actual deaths, injuries, and harm to humans — and even safer if you include animals and the environment in the equation. That is true when including all of the old-fashioned nuclear power plants in the world. New technologies, however, can make destructive accidents as good as impossible.

Industrial accidents related to chemicals or fossil fuels are virtually uncountable and have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people over the years. Meanwhile, pollution from burning fossil fuels kills millions of people every year.

You can count on one hand the number of nuclear power plant accidents that injured humans. The famous accidents that released significant radioactive materials into the environment — Chernobyl and Fukushima — killed less than 100 plant workers through radiation exposure. While that is a great tragedy, far more workers than that are killed in oil drilling jobs alone every year. The trauma from those two, and other nuclear accidents such as Three Mile Island, came not from radiation but a fear of radiation. In Fukushima, more than 100,000 people were unnecessarily evacuated due to an irrational fear of exposure to low level radiation. Dozens of people were killed during transportation of the evacuees alone, and thousands more died as a result of the evacuation. If they had stayed home, they would either not have been exposed to additional radiation at all, or to elevated levels equivalent to taking a long distance flight.

This innovative strategy for nuclear power development is both necessary and feasible, given the urgency to increase America's electricity production capacity, especially for clean and carbon-neutral sources. Building nuclear power plants on military bases presents a unique solution to bypass the extensive national, state, and local regulations that typically hinder nuclear power expansion. It capitalizes on the military's proven expertise in nuclear energy, cultivated through its long history of safely operating nuclear reactors.

Our proposal will rely on developing Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technology, contracting with existing startups and established players in the industry. As alluring as the ideal of SMRs is, many experts argue that building new large plants from existing designs is the fastest and safest way to add capacity if regulatory blockers can be cleared away. Our plan remains open to the possibility of building large traditional facilities from existing standard designs if that's what it takes to get new capacity up and running in time to make a difference.

The mission acknowledges the critical role of nuclear power in achieving a carbon-neutral future. It seeks to marry the untapped potential of military resources with the nation's broader energy goals, creating a synergy that accelerates progress toward sustainable energy independence. This approach not only addresses the immediate need for increased electricity production but also sets a precedent for innovative, cross-sector collaboration in tackling the nation's energy challenges.

The United States loses 6.75 billion gallons of treated drinking water every day, pipes water through lead lines into millions of homes, and leaves more than a million people with no running water at all. The Mission for Water will rebuild the country's water systems end to end and restore a guarantee the federal government abandoned: water that is safe to drink, a pipe that delivers it to every home, and a bill every family can pay.

This mission will:

• Guarantee safe, affordable water in every home: every lead service line replaced by 2037, the PFAS limits reinstated by statute, and a permanent assistance program so no household loses water service over a bill it cannot pay.
• Connect the 1.1 to 2.2 million Americans who still live without running water or basic plumbing, from the Navajo Nation to Appalachia to the Texas colonias.
• Stop the leaks that waste a fifth of the country's treated water, with a national water loss standard and cheap 30-year financing for the pipe replacement that utilities have deferred for decades.
• Catch the rain: pay farmers to bank wet-year floodwater underground in the nation's aquifers as insurance against drought, while repairing the aging dams and levees that protect communities from the floods.
• Recycle wastewater into new supply, build clean-energy desalination on the coasts, and require new data centers and factories to run on recycled water instead of competing with families for drinking water.
• Build a national water market that pays farmers to free up water for cities, rivers, and tribes, starting with a durable, paid settlement on the over-promised Colorado River.

The obstacle is not technology. The country does not have a water system; it has 50,000 separate ones, each with its own budget and backlog, most too small to finance major repairs on their own. No private investor will coordinate 50,000 entities, and the federal government has retreated, rolling back contaminant limits while venture-backed water companies move in to serve whoever can pay and abandon the rest.

The Mission's answer is a national water grid: all 50,000 water systems brought under one binding National Water Standard, financed by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as master developer, with storage underground and a market that moves water to its most productive use. In wet years the Mission will bank floodwater in the nation's aquifers as insurance against the dry ones. Year in and year out, it will pay willing farmers, who use most of the water consumed in the West, to free up what cities, rivers, and tribes need. Every piece is already working somewhere in America; the Mission will build all of it, everywhere, at once.

The 10-year build runs on the order of $1.1 trillion, and roughly three-fifths of it is lending that repays itself from ordinary water bills over the life of the pipes and plants. It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, give rural communities new income from hosting water storage on their land, and end the quiet emergency of unsafe taps in the wealthiest country on earth. Every year the country waits, the pipes get older, the aquifers drop further, and the repair bill grows. The water underneath America is either the next crisis or the next great public work.

The national mission for eliminating toxins from the food and water supply is a crucial step towards ensuring the health and safety of all Americans. This mission will:

• Establish a new branch of the EPA that investigates where and how toxins are entering human bodies and find their ultimate sources in industrial and other processes.
• Implement federal regulations to ban — or make safe — processes in industry and elsewhere that are responsible for toxins ultimately entering human bodies.
• Offer grants and financial incentives to assist companies in transitioning to toxin-free production and packaging methods.
• Invest in research and development of alternative, safe materials for use in food and water processing industries.
• Launch national monitoring and compliance programs to ensure adherence to new standards and to track progress in toxin reduction.

The presence of toxins in our food and water supply poses a significant threat to public health. From pesticides in agriculture to chemicals in packaging, numerous harmful substances enter our food, water, air, and products we put on our skin. Reducing human exposure to toxins requires an approach that combines regulatory action with support for businesses and consumers.

By banning harmful toxins, the government sets a clear standard for food, water, air, and product safety. Understanding that such a transition can be challenging for producers, the mission includes financial and technical support to help industries adapt. This support is crucial for smaller businesses that might otherwise struggle to meet new requirements.

Investing in research and development is critically important. We must develop safe, sustainable alternatives to current practices, ensuring that eliminating one toxin does not lead to the introduction of another.

The success of this mission also hinges on robust monitoring and compliance mechanisms. These will ensure that the new standards are not only implemented but also effective in reducing toxins in our food and water supply.

The national mission for public transport is a transformative initiative aimed at modernizing and expanding the United States' public transportation systems. This mission will:

• Provide substantial grants to state and local governments for the electrification and expansion of public transport networks, facilitating a nationwide shift to more efficient and clean modes of transportation.
• Establish a national clean public transport standard, mandating the complete electrification of all public transportation in 10 years. States and cities failing to meet this target will face significant penalties, including the loss of federal funding in various areas.
• Leverage the capabilities of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to drive investment in industries essential for this transition. This includes manufacturing electric buses and trains, converting ride-sharing services to electric vehicles, and fostering the development of light electric vehicles for short-distance urban transport.
• Work with ride sharing companies, taxi drivers, and local public transport systems to establish a new mode of public transportation in light electric vehicles for getting around town — for example, from a subway station to a home, or to locations not adequately served by subways and buses.
• Make accomplishing high speed rail between major cities a patriotic test of whether America is truly great. Today, seemingly insurmountable cost and permitting obstacles make building high speed rail practically unthinkable. The Mission for America calls for confronting this challenge head on as a patriotic test of whether America is a "can do" nation or a "can't do" nation. Clearing away the state-level blockers to high speed rail can only be accomplished with an energetic embrace of this challenge by the nation as a whole. This will require creative political leadership that forces Americans to grapple with the fact that people in many low-income, developing nations speed between cities and from airports at hundreds of miles per hour while we are stuck in traffic. Why was China, decades ago, able to build tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail while today the U.S. still struggles to connect its first two cities, or even a single airport with a city center?

This mission recognizes the crucial role of public transportation in reducing emissions, alleviating traffic congestion, and improving urban livability. Electrifying public transport systems not only addresses environmental concerns but also enhances the quality and reliability of services, benefiting commuters across the nation.

The large-scale funding provided to state and local governments will accelerate the electrification of buses, trains, and other forms of public transport. The national clean public transport standard sets a clear and ambitious goal, ensuring a unified effort across the country towards a greener future.

Adding a system of light (possibly automated) electric vehicles is the last step in public transportation that will allow the vast majority of people to no longer need cars for their everyday transport needs.

Furthermore, the RFC's active involvement in scaling necessary industries is a testament to the mission's comprehensive approach. By supporting existing companies and launching new ventures in vehicle manufacturing and related sectors, the RFC will play a pivotal role in creating a robust ecosystem for electric public transport. This initiative will not only meet immediate transportation needs but also foster long-term economic growth and innovation.

The national mission for workforce development and integration is a comprehensive federal initiative designed to significantly expand and enhance the American workforce. This mission will:

• Attract up to 30 million additional workers into the workforce, targeting "discouraged workers" and unemployed young workers in part by providing paid training, healthcare, childcare, and special services and treatment for people struggling with addiction, untreated mental illness, and other problems that are preventing millions of Americans from joining the workforce.
• Pay every family a direct monthly benefit for each child they are raising, treating the work of raising the next generation as the essential labor it is, and giving parents steady income with no income test. This makes permanent the fully refundable, monthly child benefit the country ran in 2021, which cut child poverty by roughly a third in a single month.
• Implement a proactive international recruitment strategy to attract qualified immigrants, focusing on skills and qualities aligned with workforce needs.
• Establish a network of federal workforce training and support centers in every community that will provide a range of services including transportation, childcare, healthcare, career coaching, counseling, and more to support new workers in joining the workforce.
• Operate this federal program essentially as a staffing agency, offering competitive wages and benefits to workers while solving labor shortages for employers across various sectors, with a particular focus on supporting the national mission for homes and buildings.

This mission is inspired in part by the transformative impact of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which mobilized millions of unemployed workers in beneficial projects all over the country. As with the CCC, the approach of this mission is holistic, recognizing that barriers to employment often extend beyond the lack of job opportunities.

At the heart of this mission are community labor centers, envisioned as hubs of support and resources, addressing the diverse needs of workers and their families. By offering comprehensive services in one location — and transportation between home, the centers, and job sites — they will remove many of the logistical and practical obstacles that currently prevent individuals from entering or re-entering the workforce.

By actively engaging discouraged workers, young unemployed individuals, and immigrants, the initiative seeks to tap into a vast pool of potential that has been largely underutilized. This approach not only addresses current labor shortages but also enriches the workforce with a diverse range of skills and perspectives.

The integration with other national missions, particularly the homes and buildings mission, ensures that the newly trained workforce has ample opportunities to apply their skills. This not only aids in the successful execution of other missions but also guarantees steady employment and growth opportunities for the workers involved.

This mission is currently designed primarily to add millions of new workers to a labor force that is stretched thin. In America today, we don't have an unemployment problem, rather our problems are that too many jobs are low quality and low pay, and that too many workers are employed in sectors that do not contribute to economic development and building real wealth. In this context, it will be necessary to bring a huge number of workers into the workforce — similarly to what happened in World War II. If, however, the Mission for America takes place in a context of high unemployment — e.g. due to advances in AI or an economic crisis — then the workforce mission will need to be reimagined to focus on retraining and reintegrating laid off workers back into the workforce in new roles and even totally different industries.

Though U.S. industrial and trade policies of the past several decades have caused domestic industries to atrophy, the U.S. is still one of the largest industrial economies in the world. From machine tools to chemicals and everything in between, we need to modernize and scale up domestic industries to supply the ambitious projects of the Mission for America. Simultaneously, we need to transition industry away from fossil-fuels and greenhouse gas emitting processes. The mission for industry will:

• Facilitate the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to make substantial investments in various industries, aiding them in transitioning to cleaner, more sustainable production processes.
• Implement a Clean Manufacturing Standard (CMS), establishing rigorous emission reduction targets for different industrial sectors based on their unique technical and physical capabilities.
• Make strategic investments to scale industries up to meet the demands of the Mission for America and the world transition to a clean economy.

This mission addresses the critical challenge of decarbonizing industries that are significant sources of CO2 emissions, such as cement, chemicals, and other manufacturing sectors. The approach recognizes that each industry has its own set of possibilities and constraints when it comes to reducing emissions.

The RFC's role is pivotal in providing the financial backing and coordination necessary for industries to overhaul their production methods. These investments are designed not only to support the adoption of existing clean technologies but also to spur innovation in new, more efficient processes. The RFC will work closely with industry leaders, experts, and other stakeholders to identify the most effective paths for decarbonization, reduction of other greenhouse gases, and scaling to meet the needs and expected needs of the Mission for America's projects and world markets.

The Clean Manufacturing Standard (CMS) is another cornerstone of this mission. It will set clear, achievable targets for emission reductions, tailored to the specific circumstances of each industry. The CMS will be dynamic, evolving with technological advancements and increased understanding of what is feasible for each sector. This standard will encourage industries to strive for continuous improvement in their environmental performance.

Through this mission, the United States aims to lead by example in industrial decarbonization, demonstrating that economic growth and environmental stewardship can go hand in hand. This initiative is not just about meeting emission targets; it's about transforming industries into more sustainable, efficient, and competitive entities in the global market.

Ending fossil fuels, however fast it happens, will not be enough. The atmosphere already holds more carbon dioxide than at any point in at least 800,000 years, and much of the damage is locked in. Cutting emissions is necessary, but the world will also have to take carbon back out of the air, measure the atmosphere honestly, and have the science ready on every option. This mission builds that capacity.

The Mission will:

• Build a domestic direct air capture industry. A growing fleet of plants that pull CO₂ from the air and store it deep underground, financed by the RFC and paid by the government for every verified ton removed. Each plant runs on its own dedicated clean power, and no plant or storage site goes anywhere a community objects. The goal is to turn a handful of subsidized pilots into a real American industry, remove well into the millions of tons a year by 2039, and drive the cost down from the high hundreds and low thousands a ton toward the mid-hundreds, with tens of thousands of jobs in former fossil fuel regions.
• Replant forests and verify the carbon nature stores. A reforestation program funded on a polluter-pays basis restores forests and degraded land, while the soil-carbon work on farms, paid for through the Farming and Water missions, is measured and verified so every ton counted is real.
• Build a Planetary Dashboard. Satellites, ocean buoys, stratospheric balloons, and ground stations that measure the atmosphere and oceans in real time, verify every ton of removal the government pays for, and publish every reading free to the world.

It will also fund open, international research into ocean-based carbon removal, but will not bet on it. It will be studied honestly and deployed by no one, and is not a priority of the Manhattan Projects.

Carbon removal complements the managed fossil fuel wind-down detailed in the Fossil Fuels chapter. It does not replace it.

No country will build a clean economy alone. The minerals, the factories, the shipping lanes, and the financing all cross borders, so the transition depends on nations that can cooperate and keep their word. The system that cooperation runs through is in shambles, and the United States did most of the breaking, withdrawing from 66 international organizations, gutting its foreign assistance, and replacing a coherent trade policy with four contradictory tariff regimes in 18 months. That system was never as good as advertised either. The institutions built after 1945 wrote rules that suited the rich countries writing them.

The Mission for America will build something better, with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as the engine. It has four parts.

• The Green Marshall Plan. The RFC will stand up an export financing arm with a loan book of $150 to $200 billion over 10 years, lending to developing nations so they can buy American-built clean technology. Terms will be public, labor standards will be written into the contracts rather than into press releases, a meaningful share of loans will be in the borrower's own currency so a devaluation cannot turn a working solar farm into an unpayable debt, and payments will pause automatically when disaster strikes. Partner countries will be helped to build their own manufacturing, not locked into buying American forever.
• Critical mineral security. China does roughly 70 percent of the world's mineral processing and more than 90 percent of rare earth separation. Any single point of failure in a supply chain the whole world depends on is one dispute away from stalling the transition everywhere. The RFC will finance domestic refining and separation, run a Strategic Mineral Reserve that buys low and sells high to blunt price shocks, and secure at least three independent sources for every critical input.
• The Climate Club. The United States will rejoin the trade alliance it helped found and abandoned, and build it into a bloc with common clean-manufacturing and labor standards, a shared carbon fee on high-carbon imports from outside, and internal trade opened product by product on a published schedule tied to what member countries can actually make. Protection for a genuinely new industry is a normal part of building one, and every member gets to use it.
• Reform the Fund, build the Bank. The United States will back a real transfer of voting power at the IMF toward the countries that borrow from it, and accept losing its own veto as the price of being believed. It will push for debt cancellation where the debt cannot be paid, and use New York law to stop holdout creditors from blocking relief everyone else has agreed to.

Much of this is about ending dependence on Chinese processing and Chinese financing, and giving other countries the same freedom to choose. That is not a campaign against China. It is what any nation would want for itself, and it is what China did, deliberately and well, over 30 patient years. There is no version of a livable climate in which China does not build an enormous share of the world's clean technology. So the Mission will work with China as an equal on the transition itself, on research, on standards, and on climate finance. A country that can make its own batteries negotiates from confidence instead of fear, and confidence is the only footing from which a real partnership is possible.

The goal is not to put the United States, or any single country, back on top. That era is finished. What replaces it is an order where the countries doing the building set the rules together, money arrives on terms the borrower can live with, and the cost of crossing a border depends on how a thing was made rather than on who made it.

The national mission for ocean conservation and restoration will transform the United States' Exclusive Economic Zone into the healthiest, best-monitored, and most economically productive large marine area on Earth within 10 years. This mission will:

• Clean the sea by removing 90% of floating macro-plastic and all newly lost fishing gear each year. A per-ton producer fee on virgin plastic will capitalize the provision of cleanup contracts, robotic skimmers, and seed funding for a domestic advanced recycling industry.
• Rebuild living infrastructure through a stock subsidy fund that matches state, tribal, and philanthropic dollars 2:1 to restore oyster reefs, kelp forests, corals, and mangroves. By deploying randomized control trials and utilizing the frontier of mechanism design and ocean ecology research, we can achieve efficient nutrient reduction at scale.
• Protect nature by placing 30% of U.S. coastal and EEZ waters in fully protected Marine Protected Areas linked by migratory blue corridors. Tradeable biodiversity credits will create a market that pays for enforcement.
• Harvest clean energy by installing floating wind arrays 30-60 km offshore.
• Counter acidification and warm-water die off by investing in ocean-alkalinity enhancement research and seeding a gigaton of blue-carbon sinks through large scale kelp cultivation tied to cattle feed methane reduction and bioplastic feedstock.
• Sustainably manage seafloor mining to accelerate mineral abundance while maintaining ocean ecosystems. Empower the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to perform a high-resolution habitat mapping of the U.S. EEZ and enforce offset multipliers for projects certified through the biodiversity credit market.

Through these efforts, the national mission for ocean conservation and restoration aims to revitalize our oceans as natural environments and economic platforms. Achieving this objective will require a coordinated planning effort predicated on experimental institutional design and cutting-edge research, a comprehensive approach to ensure the long-run vitality of the planet's most expansive ecosystem.

The "Mission for America" is a plan for a decisive transition away from fossil fuels over a period of 10 years. According to some estimates, up to one in 10 jobs in the U.S. are directly or indirectly attached to the fossil fuel industry. The transition away from fossil fuels is coming whether the U.S. achieves the Mission for America or clings to climate denial. We believe that the best results for fossil fuel workers and communities will be accomplished by a decisive and coordinated transition rather than a slow process that allows communities to atrophy without the rest of the country even noticing.

As with all the other national missions, the fossil fuel industry phase out will be the responsibility of a team at the RFC. The RFC will employ various mechanisms such as negotiated buyouts, or utilization of government stakes to assume control over significant fossil fuel assets. This can be financed by treasury bonds that will be repaid from industry revenues and the sale of repurposed assets.

For this transition to work, the president must make a good case to the American people that a carefully managed transition is necessary to avoid sudden overwhelming job losses, economic distress, and dangerous health consequences from a chaotic decline of the fossil fuel industry.

The RFC will ensure a stable fossil fuel supply during its demand decline to prevent market disruptions and price spikes. Profits from these operations will be used for several critical activities:

• Environmental remediation: Plugging wells, decommissioning rigs, and other forms of environmental cleanup to minimize long-term ecological damage.
• Worker transition: Supporting workers displaced by industry changes with retraining and financial aid to facilitate movement into sustainable energy sectors.
• Community resilience: Directing investments toward infrastructure enhancement, economic diversification, and social programs to aid communities transitioning from fossil fuel dependency.
• Innovative repurposing and asset management: Reusing fossil fuel assets for renewable energy and other sectors — for example, the same companies that build and service offshore oil rigs can work on offshore wind.

Strategically, the RFC will either sell off assets to the private sector under favorable market conditions or retain them to continue generating revenue. This approach not only fosters market stability but also ensures ongoing financial support for the transition.

The managed decline orchestrated by the RFC will stabilize markets, secure jobs, and ensure community and environmental health. This strategy not only mitigates the immediate impacts of the industry's contraction but also catalyzes a broader shift toward a fully clean and sustainable economy.