Jan. 22, 2025, 5:46 p.m.
Democratic Rep. Gabe Amo, one of two members in the House representing Rhode Island, was first elected in a 2023 special election. Amo spoke with Lauren Green about his legislative priorities for infrastructure and climate, his experience working in the White House during a presidential transition, and how he believes he can work across the aisle. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
From someone who has worked in a presidential administration, how will a Trump administration differ from a typical administration?
I started my job at the White House from my couch in the COVID era. I was the deputy director of intergovernmental affairs, serving as a liaison to state and local elected officials across the country, serving as an internal leader in the White House as a liaison to those folks, but also externally, having your phone blow up from a governor's office, from a mayor, from a county leader across the country.
To do that in the first two years is hard work, especially when you're doing it transitioning from another administration of a different party, which we were doing in 2021. What you'll see is a lot of, I hope, relationship building with those elected officials across the country to help execute against the agenda.
Now my hope is that the Trump administration, as they pursue what they're doing, doesn't go back on some of the historic investments that we saw from the infrastructure law, from the Inflation Reduction Act, or the CHIPS and Science Act, things that are affecting communities across the country. They’re going to put out their own agenda. We will respond to it in Congress, but that first year in particular, you're building, you're building, you're building. It’s relationships. You're building policy, you're building structure, you're building process, but you're also building vision, and unfortunately I disagree with that vision, but I look forward to finding opportunities to work with them if that exists.
How hard will it be for the Trump administration to roll back the Biden administration's big pieces of legislation, such as the IRA, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act?
My theory of the case is they'll discover that infrastructure is not a thing that they want to touch. Remember, they tried for infrastructure week. Joe Biden got infrastructure decade. He did something they couldn't do, so I imagine that they tried to take credit for a lot of those things that happen. They're going to spin it a little bit, but I imagine President Trump, those Cabinet secretaries, will be at a lot of ribbon cuttings for things that are driven from Joe Biden.
You also look at something like the Inflation Reduction Act—they don't have the same belief in the impact of climate change. Whether you call it climate change or not, you're seeing that phenomena exist across the country—extreme weather. Look at the poor people of California who are dealing with those wildfires, and you see it across the country.
When you look at some of those climate-change protections and policies in the IRA, they may not spin it as climate change, but they're not going to undo everything. And again, there are ribbon cuttings to be had, there are checks to deliver, and my sense is they will see how it benefits their agenda and pursue them in the same way that President Biden did.
Are Republican communities aware of the benefits and funding they are receiving from the IRA?
Across the policies, particularly the focus on industrial policy, you're seeing new manufacturing plants be built in red areas. That stuff doesn't just accidentally happen. It happens because there is vision to do it. You're seeing money for environmental justice go to red areas. You're seeing bridges built. You're seeing water systems affected. You're seeing electric school buses and the whole supply chain there—from jobs to actually having the buses and cleaner air, they're benefiting from it, and that's good.
There is no red or blue way to make America as strong as it needs to be, and I would hope that the credit is borne by many, especially when there is an opportunity to come together in a bipartisan way.
When it comes to energy policy, where is there room for bipartisanship in the next few years? Are there specific members you would like to work with on this?
We are going to need to out-innovate in order to secure our clean-energy future. When you look at nuclear fusion and fission technologies amongst them, we can have breakthroughs. We can do it clean, we can do it cheap, but we have to commit to innovation. When you cut at the bone in government, like we are about to see at least theorized through the [Department of Government Efficiency] gang and whatever they want to do—you’ve got to invest in America to make those things happen.
As a member of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee that drives a lot of R&D in the federal government, especially the R&D programs at [the Energy and Transportation Departments and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]—that requires the same boldness that John F. Kennedy had when he said, "We've got to go to the moon." How do we have the same level of real, aspirational thinking about how our country can have the clean-energy future that it deserves? That should be bipartisan, just like that mission was in the '60s. We can do that on energy.
When we have been in conversations, and a lot of the roster on the Science committee is interested in this space—the deck chairs should have changed a little bit in this Congress, but I think you'll see Republican members want to step up on this. I'm going to make more friends this Congress so I can dig down on the list of folks who want to get to work.
