With President Joe Biden’s victory last November, the year 2021 has drawn comparisons to the situation faced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) as he entered office in the midst of the Great Depression, and calls for reviving parts of the New Deal have been heard from many quarters. This is not idle speculation, because today’s challenges of inequality, injustice, unemployment, and global warming are so grave that they can only be met by sweeping federal policies comparable to the New Deal of the 1930s.

For example, in his 2020 presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders pushed a plan for spending $171 billion for a Civilian Climate Corps. By late April of this year, Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — leading proponents of a Green New Deal — had also unveiled their ambitious plan for a Civilian Climate Corps that would employ a diverse group of 1.5 million young people over five years.

Recruits would work on projects to address climate change (land, water, and energy conservation), community development (schools, clinics, parks, and social services), and environmental justice (impacted communities would provide half the recruits and receive half the projects). In the meantime, President Biden included a Civilian Climate Corps as part of his own American Jobs Plan (AJP), looking to provide perhaps $10 billion over ten years to drive the program. A new Civilian Climate Corps continues to be one of the programs that progressives in Congress are pushing to include in the $3.5 trillion spending bill that is expected to be put into final form and voted on next week.