President Biden regularly emphasizes how the major pieces of legislation he has signed — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — expand opportunities for Americans.
This is especially true for rural Americans. Those three laws appropriated billions of dollars — about $464 billion — that is particularly relevant to rural communities, allowing them to dream of a different economic future.
I am often asked if rural voters will give Mr. Biden credit for all that money and the changes it could bring, and will show their appreciation at the ballot box. My answer is that it is unrealistic to expect place-specific investments to have an immediate impact on elections.
Rural places remain skeptical that federal policymakers have their best interests at heart. Proving otherwise will take intention and time.
Above all, implementation matters. These investment opportunities will be meaningless unless they reach rural America. For that to happen, federal and local officials, and many people in-between, will need to focus on intentional targeting and sensitivity to the challenges that rural places face.
It is important to keep in mind that many rural governments are led by unpaid elected officials, and few rural city halls have staff to work on planning, project development and grant writing.
Only 15 percent of Michigan’s smallest jurisdictions, for example, express confidence in their ability to access federal grants — whereas the rate for jurisdictions over 30,000 people is close to 40 percent. A national survey published in 2019 found more than half of rural counties experienced moderate or significant fiscal stress, so for programs where local governments must match the federal funding, those counties face an additional challenge.
This does not bode well for equitable distribution of those federal investments. According to analysis I did with a fellow researcher, just 2 percent of the appropriations in the bills are reserved exclusively for rural places. Accessing the remainder means vying successfully with larger jurisdictions.
The demand among rural and small towns clearly exists. For two new programs geared toward energy improvements in remote and rural communities under 10,000 people, the Department of Energy received more than 1,000 submissions combined. The new Recompete pilot program, intended to enable economic renewal in distressed places and overseen by the Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce, received a similar deluge of 565 applications — the most applications the E.D.A. has received for a national program in its history. About half of the geographic areas that were eligible are rural.
The scale of interest compounds the challenge. These and other programs’ popularity, combined with rural communities’ limited resources, means that success rates will be exceptionally low. It highlights the importance of leveling the playing field so the most vulnerable communities are not left out.
A critical first step will be to make sure that local communities have the staff and access to the expertise and administrative capacity necessary to secure and manage these investments.
As the Biden administration makes major investments in creating technical assistance centers in communities across the country, rural places must get to participate and benefit.
Congress also has a vital and continuing role to play. The Rural Partnership and Prosperity Act is bipartisan legislation that has been proposed in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and it is now included in the negotiations for the 2024 Farm Bill. Such a measure could be a game changer in getting flexible support directly to rural partnerships so they can unlock these opportunities.
The processes and requirements to access those investments could also be simplified — no one should be required to fill out a 400-page application. We’ve already seen some improvements. The administration has put so-called navigators in selected communities to help them identify funding opportunities, and some agencies like the U.S. Forest Service have modified their processes to help communities apply for grants. These advances ought to be more widely adopted across the federal government.
States or financial and nonprofit intermediaries will also have the final say on the fate of much of the investment that is important for rural places, like broadband and water.
It’s not just about access to these opportunities. The extent to which local communities are in the driver’s seat, and how widely the benefits accrue beyond local elites, will be instrumental in avoiding the extractive practices that have often haunted rural economies. This means taking the time and providing the chance for local people to influence the decisions that will affect them.
Take rural Humboldt County, Calif., where plans are underway to put immense wind turbines off its coast, a clean energy installation large enough to provide 6 percent of the state’s supply of electricity. A decision is still pending by a state agency as to whether any of that electricity will land in Humboldt itself, where some federally recognized Native tribes do not have dependable power to this day.
The biggest risk is that politics stops the momentum created by these laws, because the investments are just getting started. For example, the money has not even begun to flow to local projects from the infrastructure act’s signature $42.5 billion investment to close the broadband gap.
Leading policy voices on the right have proposed dissolving or consolidating agencies like the Economic Development Administration and pulling these resources without offering an alternative vision for supporting rural development. That will simply once again starve rural places of investment. It does not seem like a long-term winning strategy.
Nor does vilifying an entire segment of the rural population based on specious analysis, as parts of the liberal elite seem wont to do.
The struggles that portions of rural America are experiencing were decades in the making. Common sense dictates that the solutions will not transpire overnight. Congress and the Biden administration have put the initial pieces in place to help many rural places transition to a brighter economic future. The president’s campaign pitch to rural voters ought to be the opportunity to stay the course. The political rewards may be far in the future, but it’s the right thing for rural communities — and for the country.
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