There is a version of the next twenty years that would be genuinely extraordinary. It requires making choices we haven't made yet.
The dominant register of American political discourse is decline. The country is polarized, the infrastructure is crumbling, the political institutions are dysfunctional, the middle class is hollowed out, the young are anxious, the old are angry, and the rest of the world is either catching up or already ahead.
Some of this is accurate. The structural problems are real.
But there is another story available, one that is less emotionally satisfying for people invested in the decline narrative but more empirically supportable: the United States remains, by almost every measure that matters for the next wave of economic and technological development, extraordinarily well-positioned.
The question is not whether America has the assets. It clearly does. The question is whether we can build the political will to deploy them — to make the choices that convert latent capability into actual progress.
Here is what that could look like.
The Nuclear Revival That's Already Started
For most of the past 40 years, nuclear power in the United States has been in managed decline. No new reactor had come online in decades. The economics were terrible — cost overruns, regulatory delays, and competition from cheap natural gas made new nuclear construction essentially unfinanceable.
Something shifted in the past three years.
Advanced reactor designs — small modular reactors, molten salt reactors, high-temperature gas reactors — have moved from paper concepts to construction-ready designs. The NRC approved the first small modular reactor design in 2023. Companies like NuScale, TerraPower (backed by Bill Gates), Kairos Power, and dozens of startups are building physical prototypes and signing power purchase agreements.
The economics have changed too. The Inflation Reduction Act created production tax credits for nuclear power that make new construction financially viable in ways it hasn't been in decades. The explosion of AI data center electricity demand — data centers are expected to consume 9% of American electricity by 2030 — has created a new class of large power consumers actively seeking carbon-free baseload power and willing to pay premium prices for it. Microsoft has already contracted to restart Three Mile Island. Amazon has contracted with several advanced nuclear developers.
This is not a policy fantasy. It is a market development underway right now, driven by the intersection of maturing technology, favorable policy, and genuine demand.
If the United States fully embraces this moment — streamlines the regulatory pathway for new reactor designs that have already been proven safe, invests in the supply chain for advanced reactor components, trains the nuclear workforce that will be needed at scale — it could position itself as the global leader in advanced nuclear technology. The export market for safe, reliable, carbon-free power in a warming world is enormous.
The Grid Modernization Imperative
The American electrical grid was substantially built in the 1960s and 1970s. Parts of it are older. It was designed for a world where power flowed in one direction — from large centralized generators to consumers — and where demand was relatively predictable.
That world no longer exists. The grid now needs to manage bidirectional power flows (rooftop solar sending power back into the system), highly variable generation (wind and solar producing power only when the wind blows and sun shines), rapidly growing demand (electric vehicles, heat pumps, AI data centers), and increasing weather stress (heat waves and storms that test the system in ways its designers didn't anticipate).
The gap between what the grid needs to do and what it currently can do is large and growing. The economic cost of that gap — in outages, inefficiency, and constraints on new development — is substantial. The Department of Energy estimates that grid-related outages cost the U.S. economy between $150 billion and $200 billion per year.
Modernizing the grid is not primarily a technology problem. The technologies required — advanced sensors, grid management software, transmission infrastructure, storage systems — exist and are commercially available. It is primarily a permitting and investment problem.
The permitting timeline for new high-voltage transmission lines in the United States averages over a decade. Building the transmission capacity needed to connect renewable generation in the windy Great Plains and sunny Southwest to the population centers that need the power has been stalled for years in regulatory review, state jurisdictional disputes, and opposition from communities along proposed routes.
This is a solvable problem. It requires federal streamlining of transmission permitting, investment in the transmission infrastructure itself, and probably some form of federal siting authority for nationally significant transmission projects — the equivalent of the interstate highway system's approach to interstate commerce. These are not technically complex interventions. They're politically difficult ones.
The Biotech Decade
American biotech is, by global measures, the most productive in the world. The United States produces more biomedical research than any other country, attracts more biotech investment than any other country, and has produced more life-saving medical innovations than any other country.
This is not an accident. It is the result of decades of public investment in basic research through NIH, a venture capital ecosystem built around translating that research into products, a regulatory system that (for all its inefficiencies) provides a credible global approval pathway, and a concentration of talent at institutions like MIT, Stanford, Harvard, UCSF, and their surrounding ecosystems.
The next decade of biotech is likely to be transformative in ways that dwarf the previous one. mRNA technology, validated dramatically by the COVID vaccines, is being applied to cancer immunotherapy, cardiovascular disease, and infectious diseases where no vaccine previously existed. Cell and gene therapies are moving from rare disease applications to more common conditions. AI-driven drug discovery is dramatically compressing the timeline from molecule identification to clinical candidate.
The policy agenda to maintain American leadership in this space is not complex. It requires sustained NIH funding...regulatory modernization at the FDA...and immigration policy that continues to attract the global scientific talent that has always been a critical input to American research productivity.
The biotech opportunity is the clearest case for what American innovation looks like when the system is working. The question is whether we maintain the conditions for it to keep working.
The Infrastructure Multiplier
Every study of infrastructure investment finds the same basic relationship: infrastructure has a multiplier effect on economic activity. Roads, ports, broadband, water systems, and energy infrastructure are not just useful in themselves — they are the platform on which private economic activity occurs.
The American Society of Civil Engineers grades American infrastructure a C- and estimates that the cost of inadequate infrastructure — in lost productivity, increased business costs, and reduced competitiveness — runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 was the largest federal infrastructure investment in decades. Its full effects are still being felt — infrastructure projects take years to plan, permit, and build. Early results suggest the investment is flowing to high-impact projects: broadband expansion to underserved communities, bridge replacement, port capacity increases, water system upgrades in communities with lead contamination.
This is not a story about government spending for its own sake. It's a story about the return on investment from repairing and upgrading the physical platform on which the private economy runs.
What It Would Actually Take
The version of America described in this piece — leading in advanced nuclear, operating a modern grid, dominating biotech, competing on infrastructure quality — is not a utopian fantasy. Every element of it is currently underway in some form.
What it would take to accelerate from "underway in some form" to "decisive national advantage" is a specific set of policy interventions: permitting reform that doesn't sacrifice environmental review but compresses unnecessary delay, sustained research investment, immigration policy that attracts talent, and a willingness to make long-term infrastructure commitments in a political environment that rewards short-term positioning.
None of this requires resolving the political polarization that makes American governance so difficult. It requires finding the issues where there is sufficient cross-partisan overlap to move — and on each of these dimensions, that overlap is larger than the political debate suggests.
Advanced nuclear has support from defense hawks, clean energy advocates, and industrial policy nationalists. Grid modernization is a bipartisan infrastructure issue. Biotech investment has support from anyone who cares about healthcare costs or American competitiveness. Physical infrastructure enjoys the broadest support of any policy domain in America.
The gap between what's possible and what's happening is not primarily a lack of resources or a lack of knowledge. It's a lack of sustained political attention on questions where the answers are less emotionally activating than the questions the political advertising industry prefers.
The country that could be built if that attention were redirected is extraordinary. It's also, in most of its contours, still available. That's the part the decline narrative misses.
This is the first installment of "The American Possibility," a series examining the structural forces that shape American political spending. Next: "Why the Next American Economic Boom Will Be Built on Energy."