From Citadel to Congress: How Derek Kaufman Is Turning ‘Abundance’ Into Policy

Lexey Swall for Bloomberg Markets

Derek Kaufman spent years running fixed-income trading at hedge fund giant Citadel. Today he’s applying that same operator’s instinct to a very different arena: turning the “abundance” movement, a loose intellectual push to make building things easier in America, into actual bipartisan legislation.

Kaufman is founder and CEO of the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, a nonpartisan nonprofit that has assembled a network of policy experts, think tanks and advocacy groups around a shared goal of tackling what he calls “self-imposed scarcity.” As Kaufman puts it, “much of the scarcity we experience in America today is self-imposed, driven by bad policy choices, misaligned incentives, powerful special interests, faulty narratives, and political gridlock.” For Kaufman, abundance isn’t just a talking point, it’s a practical strategy for dismantling those self-inflicted constraints one policy fight at a time.

That approach produced its biggest test yet with the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, the most significant piece of US housing legislation in decades. Kaufman worked behind the scenes for months to help shepherd the bill through Congress, and with less than two days to go before a final decision, he was reportedly resisting the urge to celebrate. The clock ultimately ran out in the bill’s favor: it was enacted on July 11, 2026.

The law is designed to expand the supply of housing and make it more affordable, largely by pushing local governments to strip away regulatory barriers that have long slowed new construction, and by expanding the use of manufactured housing as a lower-cost building option. It’s exactly the kind of concrete, supply-side fix the abundance movement has been arguing for: less about new spending programs, more about clearing away the rules and incentives that make it hard to build in the first place.

Kaufman’s pivot from trading floor to policy shop reflects a broader pattern within the abundance movement, which has drawn support from figures across the political spectrum who agree that scarcity in housing, energy and infrastructure is often a choice rather than an inevitability. Whether that coalition can replicate the housing bill’s success on other fronts may determine whether abundance becomes a lasting fixture of American policymaking or just one well-timed legislative win.