I didn’t post anything here for the last sixteen months for two reasons. First, I was somewhat occupied with another, unrelated project.

But second, far more importantly, it was obvious at the outset that 2024 was going to be an unusually ‘interesting’ year. There seemed little chance that significant or even minor improvements to federal infrastructure loan programs would get much traction in the swirling gyre. Since that’s my main goal here, there didn’t appear to be much point in further description of possible changes that might or might not be feasible, or even relevant, depending on the overall outcome.

To be clear, I love the analytical aspects of loan programs, as the nature of this site reflects. But there seems little value – to me anyway – in a purely academic exercise on the subject. The point of the analyses is to prompt and guide realizable change in a political context. When the basic parameters of that context appear generally fixed and somewhat clear, practical policy refinements that work within those parameters can be supported by detailed analyses, something I had been calmly doing for a while.

But when the political context’s main parameters are obviously changing in some radical way, the priority must be to understand the change and what it might lead to. That’s what I was trying to do for the last sixteen months. It was (and continues to be) a steep learning curve. I’m no expert in current politics or political science, yet at least some knowledge in those areas suddenly seemed highly relevant even to my very narrow focus on federal infrastructure loan programs. More than once, I thought “Damn, I wish I’d paid more attention at university”.

Gradually, I felt I understood the political context well enough to see the dynamics at play, at least as far as they’re relevant to loan program policy. The election last November crystallized the fact of change. But the months since the Inauguration have shown that the scale of change is not far short of revolutionary. This is not a grinding realignment of tectonic plates with occasional tremors. A full-on earthquake is happening. And it’s not at all clear when the earthquake will end or what the landscape will look like at that point, much less what the nature of new or rebuilt structures will be. Only that things won’t be the same.