The Return of Industrial Policy and the No-Longer Hidden Developmental State in the United States

Abstract

After decades of market fundamentalism, the resurgence of industrial policy worldwide marks a major shift in economic governance. In the United States, this turn accelerated under the Biden administration, which enacted a series of landmark laws that put industrial policy squarely back at the center of national economic strategy. But to what extent did this wave of state activism mark a true departure? Skeptics have argued that “Bidenomics” marked a continuation of pro-business policies that merely “derisked” private investment. A second camp contends that US industrial policy never disappeared but persisted in “hidden” forms. This article advances a different interpretation. It contends that Bidenomics represented a fundamental reconfiguration of state-market relations and signaled the emergence of a twenty-first-century American developmental state. Three features distinguished this shift: directionality, targeting strategic sectors, regions, and communities; conditionality, linking corporate support to broad social objectives enforced by state discipline; and politicization, as industrial policy became a “visible” site of political contestation. Using policy analysis, expert interviews, and media sources, the article traces how this strategy has reshaped the architecture of state-market relations in the post-neoliberal era.