The abundance movement is having a moment.
Earlier this year, two books — “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and “Why Nothing Works” by Marc J. Dunkelman — captured the imagination of lawmakers, tech billionaires and funding leaders by arguing that more housing, energy and technological innovation can solve society’s most vexing challenges. In mid-August, Axios’ Alex Thompson reported that the ideas are driving a wedge between Democratic lawmakers searching for a compelling rebuttal to Trump’s economic populism in the run-up to the 2028 elections. And later this week, thought leaders will convene in Washington, D.C., for Abundance 2025, a self-described “forum to promote a politics of abundance that expands prosperity while revitalizing governance.”
Sponsors of this year’s conference run the ideological gamut. They include John and Laura Arnold’s Arnold Ventures, libertarian Charles Koch’s Stand Together Trust and Open Philanthropy, an umbrella LLC comprising several affiliated philanthropic organizations funded primarily by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and wife Cari Tuna.
In March, the movement received a massive boost when Open Philanthropy announced its three-year, $120 million Abundance and Growth Fund (AGF) “to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific and technological progress while lowering the cost of living.” The pooled fund, which has been awarding grants throughout the year, received a $60 million commitment from Moskovitz and Tuna’s Good Ventures, an undisclosed contribution from Stripe cofounder and CEO Patrick Collison, and other donors.
The flurry of activity comes as progressive detractors are ratcheting up concerns about the abundance movement’s billionaire backers and how its calls for deregulation bear a disconcerting resemblance to the failed neoliberal policies of the past. Conceptually speaking, practically everyone can get behind some degree of technological progress, especially if it lowers the cost of living — but one funder’s maze of superfluous red tape is another’s bulwark against environmental degradation, unrestrained AI and unsafe clinical trials.
Having spent the last 10 years supporting housing policy reforms and the broader Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement, Open Philanthropy stakeholders acknowledge skeptics’ talking points and are eager to articulate how accelerated but responsible growth can deliver tangible benefits to all Americans.
“We care a lot about getting this balance right — we don’t want to be funding work that disproportionately hurts the environment or makes safety worse,” said Matt Clancy, who leads the AGF as a senior program officer at Open Philanthropy. “However, we think that in many cases, the work we’re funding is actually going to make these problems better, not worse, as some critics allege.”
How the Abundance and Growth Fund came together
Open Philanthropy’s support for abundance and growth dates back to 2015, when it made its first grant to what Clancy classified as a “YIMBY organization” — Smart Growth America’s Greater Greater Washington Education Project. In 2021, Open Philanthropy began making grants centered on innovation and science policy to accelerate scientific and medical progress. “So in that sense, we’d been funding this work for a long time before we officially created the AGF,” Clancy said.
The AGF was the outgrowth of a confluence of factors, beginning with the fact that Open Philanthropy’s previous investments were generating results. For example, its funding advanced accessory dwelling unit reforms aimed at addressing housing shortages in California and Washington, as well as reforms to single-stair building codes to allow construction of new residential buildings with only one exit stairway.
At the same time, “there was a rising recognition that the same types of problems we were confronting in our existing grantmaking also applied to other areas,” Clancy said. “Regulations were making it hard to build solar plants, not just housing, and there were limits on the supply of new physicians that were driving up healthcare costs, etc.”
Last but not least, the publication of “Abundance” and “Why Nothing Works” suggested the zeitgeist finally caught up with Open Philanthropy’s way of thinking. (In July, Reid Hoffman said he “sends everyone a copy of ‘Abundance.’”) The buzz around these books, coupled with the recognition that Open Philanthropy’s grantmaking approach around housing and innovation policy could be applied across other domains, “meant that we thought there was a big policy window to get more done and it made sense to expand our work in these areas,” Clancy said.
Representative Abundance and Growth Fund grantees
The AGF is looking for organizations whose work supports policies to promote growth and reduce costs. Applicants can directly advocate for policy changes, use the courts to enforce existing laws, or host conferences that bring together thought leaders.
A review of the grants made through the AGF — which has also subsumed previous grants made through Open Philanthropy’s Innovation Policy and Housing Policy programs — underscores how its strategy has played out in practice.
In May, the AGF recommended a general support grant of $1,100,000 over two years to Convergent Research, which helps to develop, launch and support “focused research organizations” that seek to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. The fund also made a two-year, $450,000 grant to the Center for Scientific Integrity to support efforts to identify fraud in scientific research. “These are examples of grants that we think will help accelerate the kind of scientific progress that has been a central driver of economic growth over the past few centuries,” Clancy said.
Open Philanthropy’s innovation policy grantmaking serves as a connecting thread to AGF’s more expansive approach. The work “has traditionally focused on the invention and discovery of new technologies, but discovery on its own doesn’t make people’s lives easier,” Clancy said. “You need to get those technologies out into the real world, and sometimes, that process is slowed or even stopped by policy choices.”
A project can also be delayed by the prosaic fact that the government can’t bring it to market efficiently. Cognizant of this common roadblock, Clancy cited “state capacity” — that is, the “competence and efficiency of government itself” — as a “common cross-cutting thread” in the AGF’s grantmaking. “The government designs and administers these policies,” he said, “and so having a highly effective civil service affects all of the above.”
This roadblock has become all the more formidable given that, in July, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized 10,000 layoffs at the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal health agencies. Perhaps the mass purges will force the agencies to become more efficient. Then again, philanthropy’s best-laid plans to accelerate clinical breakthroughs could be significantly hampered by the departure of government staffers with deep institutional knowledge and area expertise.
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How the AGF balances the trade-off between speed and public interest
Looking ahead, the AGF may support efforts to promote energy abundance, reform clinical trials, and limit noncompetes and occupational licensing.
Clancy said clinical trials are especially ripe for accelerated progress, but also acknowledges the risk of moving too quickly. “Operation Warp Speed is both an example of how it is possible for us to bring drugs to market years faster than the status quo, but also an illustration of how important it is for people to trust the process that approves drugs,” he said. “So we plan to take a lot of care here.”
This sentiment goes to the crux of the abundance debate animating progressive and left-of-center circles. The expansion of material resources to produce more housing, energy and technological innovation requires stakeholders to make contentious and inherently subjective trade-offs. New housing units and thousands of wind farms can lower the cost of living and generate plentiful renewable energy. They can also disturb environmentally sensitive habitats, depress property values and alter a neighborhood’s character.
Consider recent developments in California, which has the nation’s highest housing costs as a percentage of household income.
Earlier this summer, lawmakers passed a bill exempting infill urban development from the landmark California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to accelerate housing construction, and another bill creating additional CEQA exemptions. Over 100 environmental and community groups penned an open letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom before the decision, calling the latter bill “an unprecedented rollback to California’s fundamental environmental and community protections.”
When I asked Clancy for his thoughts on CEQA, he referenced the familiar scenario whereby legislators’ good-faith efforts to protect the state’s most vulnerable landscapes, wildlife and communities undermined the intended benefits of the legislation.
“CEQA lawsuits — or even just the threat of those lawsuits — made it very hard to build new housing, driving the cost of living up in cities like San Francisco,” he said. “When we make it too expensive to live in urban areas where higher density and access to transit means people can live a low-carbon-intensity lifestyle, people get pushed further out into the exurbs, where they are much likelier to drive on long commutes, or out of state, to higher-carbon-intensity places like Phoenix.” Open Philanthropy expects CEQA reform to make housing more affordable, but also to be a “net positive on environmental grounds” by reducing sprawl, shortening commutes and lowering emissions.
Time will tell how things ultimately play out in the Golden State and whether abundance can ultimately deliver where neoliberalism failed. In the interim, Clancy and his team will continue to drum up additional support for organizations whose work falls under the rubric of abundance and growth.
“It’s still our experience that our grantees struggle to attract enough funding to accomplish all of their goals,” he said. “We’d love to work with more donors who share these goals — we think there’s a lot more we can fund that would move the needle on housing, science, energy, and beyond.”
