The first years of the 2020s have forced the United States to contend with a litany of major issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic, digital disruptions, climate change, racial and gender divides, and the continuing need for more middle-class jobs. But they have also ushered in a period of bold, urgent responses. Across the federal government, agencies are launching larger-scale, more in-depth initiatives for accelerating innovation, optimizing supply chains, mitigating climate change, and addressing demographic and geographic inequities.

An important part of this response is the surge of programs using place-based, challenge-oriented designs to generate experiments with the potential to fix the nations largest problems, as displayed first by the Economic Development Administrations (EDA) $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC).

These experiments see federal agency leaders mobilizing regional networks, building collaborative financing approaches, and aligning it all with the nations most urgent priorities. They are also piloting a new era of national problem-solving across geographies and in service of economic inclusion.

Specifically, the BBBRC provides five-year grants ranging from $25 million to $65 million across 21 competitively selected regions. These investments will support the local development of nationally critical technology clusters, and attempt to do so in ways that deliver economic opportunity to traditionally underserved people and communities.

In that context, it is well worth the effort to study the initial blueprint of early programs like the BBBRC, with an eye toward extracting guidance for the $77 billion in new place-based programmatic investments in the coming years. In a Brookings report published earlier this month, we distilled six key policy design features that inform this new era of place-based economic policymaking:

The BBBRC represents the early stages of a major federal investment agenda to create better, more accessible jobs in the nations regional economies. In addition to the EDAs efforts, there are tens of billions of dollars in other new place-based programs inside the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. As federal leaders design those programs and regional and state leaders seek their funding, we hope this initial analysis proves useful in undertaking such critical work.

This report was prepared by Brookings Metro using federal funds under award ED22HDQ3070081 from the Economic Development Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Economic Development Administration or the U.S. Department of Commerce.

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Six keys to unlocking a new era of place-based federal investment - Brookings Institution