This is the rare reshoring story told from inside the governor's office, and what stays with me is the line O'Grady almost throws away: the hardest part wasn't the workers, wasn't the capital — it was the Clean Air Act offset. A 1970s law written for Detroit and western Pennsylvania, jamming permits in a state that contributes 20% of its own ozone. That admission alone is worth the whole interview.
But notice what the interview actually draws. O'Grady borrows Dan Wang's engineers-vs-lawyers frame to explain why Arizona can build. Put it another way: what he describes isn't Arizona possessing China's capability — it's Arizona rebuilding it by hand. By hand, in one state, in one category, once. The tripartite agreement. The governor's office as the single front door. One Commerce Authority CEO for twenty years, coordinating counties, water districts, and utilities that are otherwise separate entities. On the other side of the Pacific that coordination is structural, endogenous. In Phoenix it's the governor's office personally arbitrating refrigerators and porta-potties for 10,000 workers — and the kind the legislature can kill at will, the way it just declared both data-center proposals DOA.
Then look at who Arizona sends to Washington. Both senators are the template. Mark Kelly — Navy combat pilot, NASA astronaut, chief CHIPS Act negotiator. Ruben Gallego — Marine, Iraq. One Navy, one Marine, opposite parties, both converging on the supply chain. And Kelly's Building Chips in America Act carries, on the same bill header, Todd Young (R), Bill Hagerty (R), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) — the thirty-year UAW protectionist. People who are irreconcilable on abortion and immigration signed their names together to streamline the very Clean Air Act review O'Grady is fighting. The headlines all say division. The actual bills converge.
A 1970s statute blocking a 21st-century fab — that is the American condition today. Arizona did the thing the national effort hasn't. It's also the thing America has to do, in the 2026 midterms and in 2028.
I can't get enough of these interviews in which people talk about their roles in taking policy and turning it into tangible, transformational nationwide outcomes. The seemingly mundane things that are anything but mundane, calling for hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches of bureaucracy over long periods of time. It's not just the combination of top-down political power and bottom-up advocacy; it also leans heavily on middle management: the people who understand how 'the system' works, and know how to work the system. They also understand their critical (and under-appreciated) role in pulling the right levers of power, policy, and process at the right times.
So… in Tucson this year the school board voted to phase out the premier Chinese language program.
Voters gave a resounding NO to a data center with non-transparent NDAs, no known customer, way too much water usage and destruction of an untouched natural site. Guess what? It’s being built anyway, using Tucson’s water and draining the aquifer.
More data centers are planned in more places around Arizona with not nearly enough available water.
Despite years of local opposition Arizona has awarded an open-pit copper mine in the middle of Navajo land.
The border wall building contractors plowed straight through a native artifact that’s thousands of years old, despite the tribe having filed every permit on the face of this earth to protect it.
And our Congressional representative holds “town halls” but emails out the wrong starting time so constituents can’t join.
“Abundance” isn’t quite the word that springs to mind as I read this. How about “Arizona’s total disconnect playbook”?
This is the rare reshoring story told from inside the governor's office, and what stays with me is the line O'Grady almost throws away: the hardest part wasn't the workers, wasn't the capital — it was the Clean Air Act offset. A 1970s law written for Detroit and western Pennsylvania, jamming permits in a state that contributes 20% of its own ozone. That admission alone is worth the whole interview.
But notice what the interview actually draws. O'Grady borrows Dan Wang's engineers-vs-lawyers frame to explain why Arizona can build. Put it another way: what he describes isn't Arizona possessing China's capability — it's Arizona rebuilding it by hand. By hand, in one state, in one category, once. The tripartite agreement. The governor's office as the single front door. One Commerce Authority CEO for twenty years, coordinating counties, water districts, and utilities that are otherwise separate entities. On the other side of the Pacific that coordination is structural, endogenous. In Phoenix it's the governor's office personally arbitrating refrigerators and porta-potties for 10,000 workers — and the kind the legislature can kill at will, the way it just declared both data-center proposals DOA.
Then look at who Arizona sends to Washington. Both senators are the template. Mark Kelly — Navy combat pilot, NASA astronaut, chief CHIPS Act negotiator. Ruben Gallego — Marine, Iraq. One Navy, one Marine, opposite parties, both converging on the supply chain. And Kelly's Building Chips in America Act carries, on the same bill header, Todd Young (R), Bill Hagerty (R), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) — the thirty-year UAW protectionist. People who are irreconcilable on abortion and immigration signed their names together to streamline the very Clean Air Act review O'Grady is fighting. The headlines all say division. The actual bills converge.
A 1970s statute blocking a 21st-century fab — that is the American condition today. Arizona did the thing the national effort hasn't. It's also the thing America has to do, in the 2026 midterms and in 2028.
REF：https://chinarbitrageur.substack.com/p/the-trembling-iron-throne?r=71ctq6
I can't get enough of these interviews in which people talk about their roles in taking policy and turning it into tangible, transformational nationwide outcomes. The seemingly mundane things that are anything but mundane, calling for hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches of bureaucracy over long periods of time. It's not just the combination of top-down political power and bottom-up advocacy; it also leans heavily on middle management: the people who understand how 'the system' works, and know how to work the system. They also understand their critical (and under-appreciated) role in pulling the right levers of power, policy, and process at the right times.
So… in Tucson this year the school board voted to phase out the premier Chinese language program.
Voters gave a resounding NO to a data center with non-transparent NDAs, no known customer, way too much water usage and destruction of an untouched natural site. Guess what? It’s being built anyway, using Tucson’s water and draining the aquifer.
More data centers are planned in more places around Arizona with not nearly enough available water.
Despite years of local opposition Arizona has awarded an open-pit copper mine in the middle of Navajo land.
The border wall building contractors plowed straight through a native artifact that’s thousands of years old, despite the tribe having filed every permit on the face of this earth to protect it.
And our Congressional representative holds “town halls” but emails out the wrong starting time so constituents can’t join.
“Abundance” isn’t quite the word that springs to mind as I read this. How about “Arizona’s total disconnect playbook”?