The Stockton Democrat and Utah Republican Celeste Maloy have laid out more than 60 proposals to speed housing, energy and transit, aimed at the next Congress.
Rep. Josh Harder has spent much of this year arguing that the fastest way to bring down rents, power bills and commute times in the Central Valley is to make it easier to build. This month he and his Republican counterpart in the Build America Caucus put that argument on paper.
The Build More Agenda, released Oct. 5 by Mr. Harder, a Democrat who represents California’s Ninth District around Stockton, Lodi, Tracy and Manteca, and Rep. Celeste Maloy, a Utah Republican, is a 60-plus-point plan spread across seven areas: housing, health care, energy, scientific research, transportation, child care and education, and the capacity of the federal government itself. Mr. Harder described it to constituents in his Build America newsletter two days later.
“We used to believe that America was the only place in the world where the boldest dreams could be realized, and we need a new politics of action to restore that national ambition and trust in government,” the two co-chairs said in a joint statement distributed by caucus member Rep. Sharice Davids, a Kansas Democrat. “The Build America Caucus was founded a little over a year ago with that goal in mind, and the Build More Agenda is our bipartisan roadmap to make growth and prosperity the cornerstone of American life once again.”
The document is not a bill. It is a menu for 2027, and Mr. Harder has said as much. The goal, he told Multifamily Dive, is to “kickstart the conversation of what comes next” after this year’s housing law.
What is in the housing chapter
Housing is the agenda’s longest section and the one closest to the Bay Area’s own debates. It starts from an estimate of a five-million-home national shortage and proposes federal carrots rather than mandates. Localities that adopt “Right to Build Zones,” with by-right approval for housing that meets clear standards, could receive federal payments for each home built above a baseline; the document offers $10,000 a unit as an example.
Other proposals would put federal land to work. The caucus points to roughly 80 million square feet of non-essential General Services Administration space and to postal properties it says could host as many as 237,000 homes. It would exempt affordable housing from Buy America requirements, which it estimates add 15 to 25 percent to costs, and seek targeted tariff relief on building materials, citing estimates that tariffs add about $11,000 to the price of a new single-family home. The Trump administration has defended its tariffs as a way to rebuild domestic manufacturing and protect national security, and the agenda frames its request as narrow relief for housing inputs rather than a broader rollback.
The plan also leans on a California example. It would create federally backed second mortgages for accessory dwelling units, arguing that if the national share of new homes built as ADUs rose from about 1 percent to California’s roughly 3 percent, the country would add more than a million homes. It calls for categorical exclusions from environmental review for infill projects financed by the Federal Housing Administration, noting that an FHA multifamily loan can take nine to 12 months to process, compared with two to three months for a conventional loan.
Energy, transit and the permitting fight
The energy chapter opens with household costs: electricity prices, the caucus says, rose more than 5 percent over the past year and about a third over five years. Its central diagnosis is delay. Citing federal data, it says the median environmental impact statement completed from 2021 to 2024 took 2.4 years and the average 3.8 years.
The fixes it proposes include online permitting, automated reviews of grid interconnection requests, wider use of grid-enhancing technologies, interregional transmission planning, faster nuclear licensing and support for superhot-rock geothermal. Most contested is a call to shield final project approvals from open-ended litigation and later reversal, on what the document calls a technology-neutral basis.
For transit, it would let local agencies apply categorical exclusions themselves, noting that about 95 percent of Federal Transit Administration projects already qualify; fast-track projects that voters have approved at the ballot; expand the FAST-41 permitting dashboard; allow early construction work; and use federal bus money to reward agencies that buy standardized models, noting that a diesel bus costs about $500,000 in the United States compared with about $350,000 in Europe. For BART, Caltrain and the Valley’s ACE commuter line, those are not abstract ideas.
The remaining chapters are more modest: redirecting graduate medical education money toward primary care, limiting prior authorization, extending Medicare telehealth, adding two million child-care slots, expanding interstate licensing compacts and apprenticeship templates, and updating the federal job classification system, which dates to 1949.
What has already moved
The caucus can point to one large result. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan package of housing supply measures, passed the Senate 85 to 5 on June 22 and the House 358 to 32 the next day. It became law at midnight on July 11 without President Trump’s signature; the president withheld it, HousingWire reported, in protest of the Senate’s failure to pass the SAVE America Act, his voter-citizenship bill.
The Build More Agenda treats carrying out that law as unfinished work. It counts 124 actions the law assigns to 11 agencies, 58 of them due in the first year, with more than 70 percent falling on the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which the caucus says faces staffing cuts of about 30 percent.
“We don’t want to rest on our laurels, and we’ve proven that there’s a bipartisan coalition of folks that want to do more pro-housing legislation,” Mr. Harder told Multifamily Dive. “This is a set of ideas that get people excited and thinking about what can come next, and our hope is to flesh it out over the next couple of months and work on it next Congress.”
The next test is in the Senate. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, S. 5653, a permitting package written by Senators Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Mike Lee of Utah, both Republicans, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, both Democrats, is expected to get a floor vote around Nov. 9, Latitude Media reported. The Build America Caucus issued a statement of support for the deal, according to the abundance-movement group Inclusive Abundance.
“We can’t power America’s future with red tape,” Ms. Maloy said on Oct. 22 in her role as chair of the Congressional Western Caucus. “This bipartisan bill cuts delays, gets transmission built, and clears the way for the infrastructure our economy needs. It’s time to get things built.”
Who supports it, and who is wary
Groups in the so-called abundance movement have welcomed the agenda. Abundance and Growth, which counted 62 separate proposals, published a list of its favorites.
Major environmental groups are more cautious about the permitting piece, which is where the agenda’s ideas meet a live bill. The Natural Resources Defense Council said it was “encouraged by the transmission provisions” in the Senate package but that “other elements of the bill are deeply flawed.” Earthjustice argues that the bill “aims to freeze federal analysis in time and cast permits in stone,” and the Sierra Club and other critics have warned that provisions protecting approved projects from later challenges could favor fossil-fuel development and narrow the role of the courts. Supporters answer that the same certainty is what transmission lines, solar farms and housing need to get financed.
Mr. Harder’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Harder, first elected in 2018, sits on the Appropriations Committee. He faces John McBride, a Lodi Republican, in next Tuesday’s election in a redrawn Ninth District; he took 60.8 percent of the vote in the June primary to Mr. McBride’s 23.3 percent.
Ingrid Lindqvist covers Northern California’s members of Congress on Capitol Hill, from committee rooms and floor votes to the bills and spending that reach the region, for The Delegation. More from Ingrid Lindqvist
