I want to tell you a story about the small town where I grew up. Montrose, Pennsylvania, the county seat of Susquehanna County in the northeastern part of the state, is home to just over 1,200 people. When I was growing up, Montrose had a tremendous community where people supported one another through church, community groups, and volunteering where it was needed. The Rotary Club supported exchange students from across the world. Volunteers supported numerous festivals, the Independence Day Parade routinely welcomed over 10,000 people each summer, the library hosted an annual Blueberry Festival as a fundraiser, and the volunteer firefighters organized a summer carnival.
I loved growing up in my town. It had the intangibles of Main Street USA, but its backbone consisted of jobs and career opportunities that enabled people to settle down and build a family. Most of my family immigrated to Northeastern PA in the 1930s from Poland to work in the coal mines and later transitioned to dairy farming in Montrose due to the harsh realities of black lung. My family and friends were supported by farming, but many others could find work through teaching, construction, and manufacturing. In the 1950s and 60s, Bendix, supplier of airplane parts, was a major employer in the town. Many people moved to Montrose for these jobs. Beyond the confines of Susquehanna County, people could find work in neighboring cities like Scranton, which hosted railroad and manufacturing companies, or Binghamton, New York, where IBM had its headquarters. You could either work in Montrose or commute to one of these neighboring cities to support your family.
While I am describing Montrose, you probably know where this story goes next because it happened in countless communities across the country. By the late 1990s, Bendix shuttered its entire facility, and its abandoned office building still stands today surrounded by a chain-link fence. IBM moved its headquarters to be closer to New York City. Manufacturing jobs disappeared throughout the region. And small, family farms–unable to compete against large farms supported through major federal subsidies–had to sell out.
I understand why people are angry about what has happened to their communities and why that anger is pointed at the federal government. Such anger is not misplaced. For the past four decades, our federal policy has essentially outsourced economic development to Wall Street, which often leads to outsourcing jobs to other countries. Our economic solutions have been a mix of tax cuts to preference company mergers and consolidations to cities; free trade agreements that encourage moving jobs abroad; a patchwork of grants and tax credits across numerous federal agencies requiring long applications, if someone from a small or mid-sized city or town even know they exist; and now a cascade of tariffs aimed at raising prices on international goods to bring manufacturing back to the United States.
This is not to say countervailing policies don’t exist. Recent research by the Brookings Institution shows there are more than $40 billion in federal resources available for communities like Montrose.
The problem? This money is “spread across more than 400 programs, 13 departments, and 50 offices” making it difficult for regular people to identify and access the resources appropriate for their needs. There is no clear, overarching strategy to help communities and towns like the one where I grew up.
Good intentions likely started each of those 400 programs, but the lack of a clear plan to connect all these resources hasn’t helped these communities, towns, and cities like Montrose, Scranton, and Binghamton survive in a twenty-first-century economy. What’s more, the solution lies in providing resources and support to these communities and then getting out of the way to let states and communities decide how best to build growth rather than creating more bureaucracy and solutions centered in Washington, DC.
Amidst all the righteous anger, Americans truly want stable communities with jobs that allow them to support their families and neighbors and attend the local festivals like the Fireman’s Carnival or your local county fair. Right now, the national dialogue has myopically focused on bringing back manufacturing jobs, which misses the point that the real goal should be stable communities. Tariffs–and the preceding years of bipartisan growth of policies and programs–offer a false solution.
Instead of tariffs and a hodgepodge of scattered programs across the federal bureaucracy, we need a massive reform of federal policy to prioritize communities under a cohesive strategy rooted in local growth–not just expanding the size and control of the federal government and programs. While Congress has a role to play and more research is needed to reform federal policy for communities, the White House can take immediate action to coordinate resources better through the Domestic Policy Council. The DPC can act decisively with all agencies to streamline regulations that currently make it more difficult for communities to access resources, reduce administrative burden to ease applying for funds strewn across different parts of the government, and prioritize making agencies more accessible to the average community so good ideas and programs can receive the funding they need. Funding is available even with the ongoing widespread and nonstrategic cuts to federal spending, but we manage the bureaucracy inefficiently to help communities.
I know what a stable community looks like because I was raised by one. And had there been the same economic opportunities, the same growth and education opportunities, the same chance to live the life that existed for my parents and grandparents, maybe I wouldn’t have had to leave.
Until we reorient federal policy towards community development, our economic policy will fail to solve the underlying issue and leave us nostalgic for past years when the good life seemed more achievable.
Image Credit: Eugène Boudin, “Le Havre, Sailboats in the Port” (1883) via rawpixel.
