This week marks two years since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, arguably the Biden administration’s signature legislative achievement. So how’s it doing? A lot better than recent headlines would have you believe. As the November election draws nearer, however, Vice President Kamala Harris and her team will have to confront some lingering questions about the policy’s strengths and weaknesses.

On Monday, the Financial Times published an investigation finding that 40 percent of the largest manufacturing announcements made since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act—which together invested some $400 trillion in building up domestic clean energy and semiconductor industries—have been delayed. “The delays raise questions around Biden’s bet that an industrial transformation can deliver jobs and economic returns to the U.S.,” the investigation’s authors write.

The other way of reading that data, of course, is that 60 percent of projects are on track. “It was surprising that there weren’t more delays,” says Jonas Nahm, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, whose research focuses on green industrial policy in the United States, Europe, and China. Nahm, who until recently served as a senior economist on the White House–based Council of Economic Advisers, notes that manufacturing construction spending is up 130 percent, adjusted for inflation. In that context, he told me, “you can imagine there is a limited amount of resources to go around and competition for what’s needed.”

Manufacturing projects can hit any number of snags between when they’re announced and when construction and production actually start. Most siting for plants happens at the local level, and a burst of investment nationwide can mean that prime sites preselected by development authorities—those that have already navigated the necessary regulatory processes—can get used up quickly. Companies might then need to start their search and approval processes over again. Depending on where sites are and the types of manufacturing slated to happen there, they might have difficulty finding workers. Increased demand for resources like steel and cement can drive up costs, as well. In the case of the IRA and the CHIPS and Science Act, all that work has also taken place amid rising interest rates. Industries are still waiting for the Treasury Department to finalize the last rules around which projects are eligible for IRA tax incentives, creating some amount of uncertainty for investors.

For those who study industrial policy—essentially, government-led investment to drive private-sector investment in strategic export sectors—these sorts of growing pains aren’t all that unusual. “When it comes to state capacity, the agencies and capabilities and staff and knowledge to organize and coordinate these things, most democracies are probably underprepared for their industrial policy visions,” says Nathan Lane, associate professor in economics at University of Oxford and co-founder of the Industrial Policy Group, which focuses on empirical evaluations of industrial policies. “People act as if the states that do this stuff drop from the sky and........

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