The bill would provide public, private, and nonprofit employers a subsidy to hire temporary employees for up to 18 months at a time, with opportunities to extend the placement for another year, according to a copy of the bill, titled Promising Jobs for All, which Khanna, D-Calif., shared with The Intercept. Khanna’s use of the private sector is a departure from other plans that have been advanced of late. “Maybe it’s working for government or working for a union that’s doing drywalling or painting for a company,” Khanna told me of the possible guaranteed occupations. “It could be working for a local retailer or child care company.”

Ro Khanna , the Silicon Valley member of Congress who has been pushing the boundaries of progressive policy in the House, is wading into the debate over a federal job guarantee with a new draft bill.

Both in the proposal itself and in an interview with The Intercept, Khanna referenced Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights, the first point of which outlines the “right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation.” But despite Khanna’s reference to the iconography of the New Deal, his bill is decidedly more moderate than a high-profile effort by a handful of progressive economists that has been gaining steam lately. Khanna’s plan, by contrast, includes a range of new caveats, time limits, restrictions, and income thresholds — in some ways mirroring the kind of public-private compromise that appears in the dizzying complexity of the Affordable Care Act.

Khanna’s plan, much like the ACA, is an attempt to grapple with political and feasibility concerns that have dogged the more ambitious job guarantee proposals. Some in beltway policymaking circles have raised concerns about how difficult it could prove to implement such a program. The right argues that a job guarantee would fuel government excess and cronyism, helping the country creep ever-closer toward socialism. Some on the left see lionizing the value of work as a moral hazard, while tech-utopians see it as a threat to their preferred vision: a universal basic income, which would provide a salary for everybody regardless of whether they worked.

Khanna is clear-eyed about the fact that his plan is not the most progressive one on the market, explaining that his more modest approach is driven in part by a concern that a more radical intervention might backfire in certain parts of the country. Citing “Strangers in Their Own Land,” Arlie Hochschild’s sociological account of Trump country during the five years leading up to his win, Khanna warned that in “communities where there’s great suspicion toward government jobs … we need to give people a path and a choice to succeed in the market economy or to succeed in government work.”

In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, economists Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker praised the aim of a job guarantee, but expressed concerns that existing proposals could pull tens of millions of workers out of low-wage work in the private sector. Such a plan could “increase the size of the federal workforce by a factor of 10,” coaxing as many as 20 to 30 million workers out of the private sector, which they suggest would be both bad policy and terrible politics. Moreover, Baker predicts that some red states might refuse federal funds altogether, as they did in response to programs ranging from the Works Progress Administration through Obamacare.

For those reasons and more, Bernstein and Baker — who wrote a 2013 book, titled “Getting Back to Full Employment” — advocate for exploring a “less interventionist approach to job creation.”

But the argument from the left is that incrementalism is insufficient — both politically and as policy. In a paper for Bard College’s Levy Institute for Economics, economists Stephanie Kelton, L. Randall Wray, Pavlina Tcherneva, Scott Fullwiler, and Flavia Dantas, called for a $15 per hour federal job for anybody who wants one. Another plan, by Mark Paul, William Darity, and Darrick Hamilton, commissioned by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, similarly suggests a robust public role in guaranteeing work indefinitely. The authors of the latter two plans have been in talks with Sen. Bernie Sanders’s policy team as he crafts his job guarantee proposal, and Paul, Darity, and Hamilton’s work was a major influence on a bill introduced by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., to set up pilot programs in a handful of rural communities.

Kelton was an economic adviser to Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and his chief economist on the Senate Budget Committee. She argues that Khanna’s bill flows from a flawed understanding of the nature of unemployment. While Khanna characterizes high unemployment as a market failure, Kelton calls it “a feature, not a bug, of capitalism.” High unemployment, after all, keeps wages down and profits up. The goal of a job guarantee, she said, shouldn’t be “to mitigate unemployment or improve things at the margin. We’re actually trying to do something that’s fundamentally transformative” — eliminating involuntary employment altogether.

If the plan seems moderate, it’s not because Khanna lacks progressive bona fides: He was an early backer of “Medicare for All” and is a champion in Congress for Justice Democrats, a left-leaning group working to elect progressive candidates in general elections and primaries alike. Khanna has also co-sponsored a measure declaring that the U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led assault of Yemen isn’t authorized under the legislation that green-lit the Iraq War.

While there doesn’t seem to be bad blood between Khanna and the supporters of the different approaches — Khanna’s team sent versions of the proposal to Kelton, Hamilton, and Baker to solicit feedback — Kelton and Hamilton each said that they were wary of framing Khanna’s proposal as a “job guarantee,” and had reservations about the program’s design. Kelton sees in Khanna’s proposal a basic contradiction: If Americans have a right to a job, she argues, that right should be absolute, and work should not be apportioned out in fits and starts. Under Khanna’s plan, a full-fledged job guarantee featuring $15 minimum wage jobs would be limited to a set of to-be-determined cities around the country, while elsewhere, jobs are limited to 18 months. “You can’t pilot a right, and it shouldn’t depend on your ZIP code,” she told me.

In light of recent momentum around full-fledged federal job guarantee proposals, Hamilton, when asked about Khanna’s proposal, warned against that enthusiasm “being co-opted, watered down, and deviated from its intended goal.” He asked: “Why be self-defeating, why introduce a compromised position before the transformative position has actually had a chance?”

Hamilton, whose research focuses on stratification economics, was particularly concerned that Khanna’s proposal would not actually keep applicants out of unemployment, instead requiring them to apply after having been unemployed for some time. Nor would Khanna’s plan address hiring discrimination.

Leaving hiring up to the private sector would preserve that sector’s rampant hiring bias, which inordinately impacts applicants of color and formerly incarcerated people. Making government employment unconditional — giving a job to anyone who wants one — provides another option. As Hamilton explained, “The universal guarantee that the FJG provides moves away from the ‘disciplining the poor’ frame to an economic ‘rights’ frame, which serves to alleviate racial, gender, and social stigma and discrimination in general.”

Despite those benefits, Baker argues that progressive policymaking should be moderated by a healthy dose of political pragmatism. “[Khanna’s proposal is] obviously much more modest than a full-scale job guarantee, because I don’t think we’re in place for a full-scale job guarantee,” Baker told me by phone. “The right can make mistakes all the time. On the left, it’s not the same story. We have to make sure our things work.”