Though President Biden and Vice President Harris are leaving office in January, the ramifications of four pieces of economic legislation the Biden-Harris administration passed with the 117th Congress will continue to impact local economies across the country.
The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) signified a new federal commitment to building the productive capacity of the nation―and importantly all its regions―to respond to global geopolitical competition, the ongoing threat of climate change, and economic inequities that have left many people and places behind.
Those three objectives―national security, energy abundance, and place-based economic opportunity―uniquely converge in a nearly $80 billion portfolio of “place-based industrial policies” authorized by these major bills. A prior Brookings Metro report selected place-based industrial policies using a two-part definition, requiring that such strategies should:
1. Encourage economic transformation through interventions in key industries
2. Explicitly leverage concentrations of talent, suppliers, and knowledge that cluster and interact in place to spur development
This brief offers a first-of-its-kind analysis of the technological, geographic, and socioeconomic footprint of public investments flowing from place-based industrial programs.