Capability 02
Which public programs a project can reach.
Applied America reads the federal and statehouse program landscape daily, as a matter of its own operation, and tests a project against what a program conditions its award on. Reading the landscape is continuous; the test is project by project.
Why alignment matters
The program is rarely the constraint. Qualifying is.
With public programs, the gap is almost never secrecy. Federal rules and notices, presidential actions, statehouse reporting and development-agency awards are all published as they happen. A project misses them because nobody was holding each one against a defined set of requirements in the week it appeared.
The second half is harder. A program rewards the project that arrives in the form it can act on, and that form is demanding. We assemble that file for a project that is not ours, before a public body asks, to survive the review rather than win the meeting.
What the weekly brief sorts
Four sections, and what falls in each.
The theme an item scores highest on decides which section carries it.
- 01
Capital & facilities
Plants, expansions, sitings and the capital behind them.
- 02
Incentives & public finance
The public money: credits, abatements, bonds and awards.
- 03
Workforce & skills
Training, apprenticeship, credentials, labor supply.
- 04
Enabling infrastructure
What has to exist first: power, broadband, water, freight, permits.
How the work runs
From what is published to what survives a review.
Three steps of reading, two of preparation, and a hand-off numbered like the rest.
Sources
Federal Register rules and notices, presidential actions, statehouse newsrooms, and first-party feeds from governors’ offices and state development agencies.
Themes
An item enters on the theme it scores highest, and only above a fixed threshold.
Jurisdiction
A state government feed is authoritative about its own state; other sources are read positionally, earliest mention first.
Eligibility
Statute and program review: what the award is conditioned on, who can grant it, and whether the project meets that as defined.
Evidence
The file a public body will have to defend: a written but-for statement (that the project would not proceed without the award), and employment by role and wage band against the county average.
Hand-off
Then it stops — the terms are negotiated by the jurisdiction that will defend them.
What stands behind it
The landscape, counted.
Counted from the Briefings source register and the SelectUSA FDI database, both published and free to read.
Common questions
We do not negotiate the award.
No. We take no part in negotiating the state’s incentive award; the office that will defend it negotiates it. What we prepare is the evidence that negotiation runs on.
No. Applied America is not a consultant, a lobbyist or a broker. It develops and holds projects of its own, so its interest is in projects being completed. It does not lobby, and it declines any mandate that would require registration as a foreign agent.
From published sources, each probed before registration. The register gives, per entry, the publisher, its newsroom, how it is fetched, what may be done with its content and why, and when a person last confirmed it. The fetch address is not printed; it belongs to the publisher.
By a deterministic score against a fixed term list, so the same corpus always produces the same brief. A term in the headline carries full weight; in the summary alone it counts for one. An edition with nothing above the threshold says so rather than reaching lower.
No. An edition is renderable only once a named human has approved it, so an unapproved brief is invisible rather than a labelled draft. An editor can kill an item, reorder one, rewrite a headline or refuse an edition, but cannot insert what the score missed.
Three federal newsrooms that belong in it. The Economic Development Administration, the Commerce Department and the BLS release feed each refuse any non-browser client. All three stay in the register as excluded, with the reason: we do not vary addresses to defeat a block.
Governors’ offices and state development agencies are read first-hand, as primary records; statehouse newsrooms are read as journalism — headline, dek and a link out. Nothing below the state level is registered, so anything municipal arrives only because a newsroom covered it.
It holds only what each investment office submitted, and it names what a jurisdiction did not submit, so a blank does not read as a zero. The snapshot date travels with it.
No. The decision rests with the body that administers the program. What preparation removes is a different failure: not being considered on the terms the program actually sets.
Yes. Alongside the briefs themselves, the source register and the state register are published and free to read, so what was read and what it says about each state can be checked by anyone.
Bring us the project and the jurisdiction.
Tell us what the project is, where it would sit, and which program you believe it needs. We will say what the landscape holds, what the project would have to look like, and which part of that is not ours to do.