Justin Pidot believes in the government's ability to get things done for the public it serves. But he has some thoughts about how to improve that process.

Pidot, a professor of law in the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and co-director of the Environmental Law Program, has had a front-row seat to the inner-workings of the federal government. He was deputy solicitor for land resources at the Department of the Interior during the Obama administration, and later general counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Biden administration. He's also served as an appellate lawyer for the Department of Justice focused on environmental issues.

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During those appointments, Pidot spent countless hours helping the government collect and understand the concerns of ordinary citizens and advocacy groups when considering new projects.

His latest scholarship, which has been selected for publication in the Stanford Environmental Law Review, adds to the national debate about abundance, a political movement that has taken hold in liberal-leaning circles. Its proponents argue for stripping away much of the process that administrative agencies are required to go through before building infrastructure, managing climate change and more. The movement's name was coined, and its ideology popularized, in the 2025 book "Abundance: How We Build a Better Future," written by the journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

In this Q&A, Pidot, who also holds the Ashby Lohse Chair in Water and Natural Resources, explains what abundance is, the basics and value of public participation, and why he argues in his new article to simplify the process to make government more effective, not eschew it entirely.

Q: What is the abundance movement and why are policy wonks writing books about it?

A: Abundance is a political movement or idea that has arisen among some in the Democratic Party that a core problem facing this country is that we don't build enough and deliver enough of the things that people need to live flourishing lives. The notion behind abundance is we should restructure the rules, the regulations and the laws of government to deliver more of those things – to deliver an abundance of those things, if you will. 

You can think about it with renewable energy or transportation options or affordable housing. All of these places where Americans feel squeezed, the solution from abundance is, let's get government out of the way so that we can do better and let's supercharge government when it is directly advancing those things.

Klein and Thompson named it, but there are other seeds to this concept around a center and center-left critique of the way that the administrative state has become bogged down in rules. 

Q: Can you explain your central argument in this article?

A: The conclusion I draw is let's not get rid of all of the process. Instead, let's think hard about the rules that we have. What values do they pursue? What dysfunction do they have? And public participation is a really rich context to think about those questions because public participation can be misused. But public participation is also a place where people get to express their views about the things that affect them. And I think there's a deeply held value in this country that people should have a say. 

Q: Since you've seen public participation up close, can you explain how it works in practice?

A: At a very general level, public participation is any way for the public – people, businesses, and the like – to communicate their views to the government about something the government is doing. The way this usually happens, especially with the federal government, is through what we call a public notice of a proposed decision and then a comment process. But it could also be like a public hearing at the local level. The zoning board, say, might have a public hearing on a building application.

But there are a lot more informal mechanisms, too. For example, you place a phone call to the Bureau of Land Management field staff and you say, "Hey buddy, I noticed that you were out doing some surveys. What are you doing? I don't like it." All of these formal and informal methods of communicating views are part of public participation, broadly speaking. 

Q: What are the current rules about what the government must do with that feedback?

A: On the informal side, there's aren't really any rules about what they do about it. On the formal side, a public notice goes out and there's a 60-day comment period. And the government generally has an obligation to respond to those comments. And that response process is, at least in my experience, largely driven by trying to avoid possible litigation down the road. It's a process where lawyers like me spend a lot of time poring over comments and thinking, "Well, if there's a lawsuit, what is a judge going to think about this comment and whether we adequately responded to it?" 

Q: What is the core piece of reform that you advocate for in your article to improve the public participation process?

A: The notion in the article is not that the government should never respond to comments, but that its obligation to do so – and the ability for courts to then police whether it has done so – has turned the process into one that is very time consuming and very driven by litigation. So, if I don't like a project, I can send in lots and lots of comments in hopes that I can lay a trap and exploit that in litigation if the government doesn't respond. 

So, the proposal is, let's say to the government, "You don't have to respond – you could, it's your choice, but you don't have to." And that makes it so that it doesn't become a way for opponents to try to game the system on the front end, and it doesn't become sort of this trap for the government on the back end.

Q: Why should the average American care about these frankly convoluted approaches to government process?

A: Two things: Do you care about how much you're paying for electricity? Do you care about climate change severely crippling the future for your children? If you care about both of those things, then you have to care about both the government's ability to act and its ability to act wisely. And that's really what I'm talking about. 

We need to shape the rules government operates under to enable it to do the things that matter and to do them well. And at least in my view, a government free of any procedural obligations is unlikely to act wisely. But a government that is overly burdened is not going to do much either.