What is public power? For many, it means publicly generated electricity. Indeed, an estimated 49 million people in the United States get their electricity from publicly owned power authorities, including residents of Los Angeles, Seattle, Nashville, and Memphis.

But at the EconCon conference held in Washington, DC, in June, hosted by the Omidyar Network and a dozen nonprofit think tanks, speakers offered a far broader definition of public power—namely, the power of government to act on behalf of the public.

Why focus on “public power”? Behind the conference speeches was the recognition—sometimes explicit, sometimes less so—that even as budgets have grown, direct public provision of services has atrophied. In a word, a large share of public services during the neoliberal era of the past few decades has been outsourced. Often, the federal government distributes grants or writes checks as if it were a gigantic private foundation rather than implementing public programs directly.

This outsourcing of services is a major reason for the rapid growth of the nonprofit sector. Of course, for-profit corporations are the primary beneficiaries. For example, the Guardian reported that in 2020 the United States had twice as many contractors on the ground in Afghanistan as soldiers. In a masterstroke of understatement, the reporter noted that “much of the wartime expenditures were highly wasteful.” Alas, while the military may be the worst offender, the problem of a regularly deficient federal administrative structure extends far beyond it.

In the past two years, President Joe Biden’s administration has persuaded Congress to approve investments totaling hundreds of billions of dollars for infrastructure and climate legislation, the latter misleadingly named the Inflation Reduction Act. The ability of the public sector to perform after decades of underinvestment is about to be tested.

Read the full article about public infrastructure by Steve Dubb at Nonprofit Quarterly.