Frustration in rural America, which has long felt left behind in federal attention and dollars, has been a major driver of right-wing populism. To counter that, the Biden administration has bet literally billions on the idea that federal investments can turn those places around. The infrastructure act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act all contained special incentives aimed at improving the economic prospects of rural towns and small cities across the country.

It’s too early to tell whether it worked. Much of that money hasn’t even been spent. But a new report by the Brookings Institution gives us a clue. It tracked $525 billion in private investment in advanced technologies like clean energy and semiconductors that have been announced since 2021. The report found that a significant portion has gone into economically depressed places that hadn’t seen those types of investments before.

“The previous three years of data indicate that after decades of economic divergence, strategic sector investment patterns are including more places that have historically been left out of economic growth,” the report said.

It cited Haywood County, Tenn., where Ford and SK On, a South Korean battery company, have partnered to build an electric vehicle manufacturing plant, and Matagorda County, Texas, where HIF Global is investing over $6 billion to build what the company describes as the “first large commercial scale e-fuels facility in the world.” Of the $26.6 billion of private clean-tech investments that have been made in the U.S. since 2021, $6.6 billion ended up in employment-distressed communities, the report said.

The Wall Street Journal