Announcing our new report
Coming soon: "The How We Need Now: A Capacity Agenda for 2025 and Beyond"
Today’s post is a preview of a report I have written in my role as a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. I wrote it with Andrew Greenway from Public Digital in the UK, a consultancy headquartered in London that has advised dozens of governments around the world to radically change how they work. I asked Andrew to write this with me because I've compared notes with PD (and PDers in their former roles in the Government Digital Service, which inspired my work on the US Digital Service) for fifteen years now and have found that having an international perspective helped push my thinking. The report describes the dysfunctions that have degraded our capacity as a government to achieve our policy goals — what I jokingly refer to as the recitation of the maladies — and then covers what to do about them. These are actions the next Presidential administration and the next Congress could take, with a nod at the end to what civil society could do to help. We wrote the report with the federal government in mind, but most of the diagnoses and cures are easily adapted to state and local governments….and of course, governments around the world.
If you want to get notified when the report is ready, sign up here, and check the “state capacity” box. Andrew and I are also recording an episode of Statecraft with Santi Ruiz today, so stay tuned for that as well.
No matter who won the election on November 5th, they were going to face the same challenge: an administrative state that’s no longer fit to deliver the outcomes Americans need.
The creation of the Department of Government Efficiency with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at the helm suggests the new administration is aware of the need for change in the machine. But this has been unhelpfully framed as a challenge of eliminating programs and agencies. In fact, the vast majority of our agencies have vital missions that cannot simply be wished away. The answer is to change those agencies so that they execute their missions effectively. And once the DOGE duo dig into that work, they'll find it's plenty radical.
Whether you voted for Trump or not, there is no joy to be taken from federal institutions that are stuck. The obstacles that thwart the designs of one’s political opponents today become the frustrations your side faces when the political cycle turns again.
Taking the foot off the brake is scary when you’re uncomfortable with the direction your country is going. It is understandable to have concerns about capacity in this moment. But if we only consider how to degrade the government's ability to deliver things we don’t like, we can’t be surprised when the same obstacles come back to bite us later, or when that imperils objectives where there is bipartisan consensus, like keeping our nation safe from adversaries. If governments of any stripe fail to deliver for the American public, it is faith in our system’s core values, our democracy, that suffers. Without state capacity — the ability for government to achieve its policy goals — we all lose.
If you want government to be able to get stuff done, you need to prioritize four things:
1. Be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones. Civil service rules, policies, and practices need dramatic reform, and the Office of Personnel Management should be accountable for fixing an imbalanced workforce where compliance checkers outnumber doers.
90% of competitive, open-to-the-public job announcements across the federal government rely solely “on an applicant’s answers to a self-assessment questionnaire” and “an HR resume review to determine whether their experience made them eligible for the position.” Candidates who cut and paste from the job description into their resume go to the front of the line. 50% of all hiring actions fail, often because the candidates presented to hiring managers are demonstrably unqualified. A program to fix this started during Trump’s first term, but it has not scaled as it should. It is time to reignite it.
We have to make government work so the very best people can justify making public service a part of their career journey. The criteria for promotion into the higher ranks of public service are outdated, stymieing progression. Rules prohibiting taking salary history into consideration in compensation make government jobs even less competitive than before. We can’t continue to rely on people with skills and experiences in huge demand to simply suspend reason and ‘do their duty’.
And it must be possible to fire underperformers. According to a MSPB study, even the “most effective” methods of resolving unacceptable performance available to federal managers are effective in “less than half of cases.” The biggest reason managers cite for not firing underperformers is the enormous amount of time it takes. We need to reduce the number of paths disgruntled employees have for protesting action taken against them and ensure that disciplinary actions don’t drag out over months or years. It is possible to have a fair system in which employees have proper recourse and in which terminations occur for performance, not ideology.
2. Reduce procedural bloat. You cannot expect to hire and keep brilliant people if you leave them mired in bureaucracy rather than doing the things they’re brilliant at. Swathes of procedures and policies have accreted over decades and no longer serve the mission. There are signs of promise: the Army, burdened by decades of accumulated requirements governing the acquisition of equipment, has identified and inactivated 52 legacy requirements documents that have been holding the service back from prioritizing “war-winning capability.” This will be the tip of the iceberg. We are working with the Stanford RegLab team on several projects to use LLMs to clean up old rules and regulations at the state and local level; it’s time to bring that work to federal agencies too. (And agencies should be doing this in anticipation of DOGE’s likely capabilities to use AI in this regard.)
We should be bolder in cancelling programs that have trivial impact in proportion to their administrative burden. The Social Security Administration, for instance, still offers a “Lump Sum Death Payment” of $225 to surviving spouses or children of eligible workers. Designed to help families with funeral costs, the program was established almost 90 years ago. Congress capped the amount in 1954 and has not revisited the issue since. The costs of administration of a program like this are not insignificant, but the juice now isn’t worth the squeeze.
As well as tackling the legacy of policy and program cruft, we need to be far more mindful of creating yet more. That means fighting trade-off denial in both policymaking and implementation, so that the bureaucracy can focus on achieving clear goals instead of trying to do everything at once. For instance, while we can use our purchasing power for good, we can’t burden every procurement with proving zero harm, and we can’t make sure every grant promotes every social policy we would like to see. We must be clear-eyed about the operational, compliance, and anti-competition costs of any requirement, and cognizant of the already constrained environment in which they land.
3. Invest in digital and data infrastructure. Implementing law and policy today inevitably requires technology and data systems. Ours are not only old, they’ve evolved over decades in archaeological layers that are now fragile and maddeningly unfit for the jobs we need them to do. We must invest, of course, but first transform how we invest, since our current investments aren’t working as they should.
To properly confront the decades of legacy hardware and software debt we’ve built up across the public sector, we must fundamentally shift the way we fund technology transformation from a project model to a product model so the Technology Modernization Fund and other investments get the return we expect.
Talent matters as much as capital. The US Digital Service thrived under the first Trump administration; funding it properly in 2025 so they can help agencies avoid disasters and buy effective products and services could save billions of dollars and dramatically increase the effectiveness of the government's digital services. Tidying up the overlapping authorities for digital programs that cause constant logjams in agencies would also up the pace.
Applying a growth mindset doesn’t mean throwing out safeguards, but it does mean being more entrepreneurial in weighing up risks. The new administration could thoughtfully reconsider some of the provisions of the AI Executive Order that require, for example, studies that currently take an average of four years to conduct before AI be used. However well-intentioned these are, timelines like these get us neither progress nor equity; instead sparking a “Cascade of Rigidity” that is serving nobody well.
4. Close the loop between policy and implementation. Policy implementation is currently an open loop process. Policymakers and legislators make a bunch of guesses about what the future will be up front, write laws accordingly, and let the implementers do their best to translate that into reality. As the world gets more complex, the gap between policy and reality widens. Congress rarely gets what it wants when it sends its directives into the cascade of rigidity that is federal bureaucracy.
With the Loper Bright decision rolling back Chevron deference, we have both the opportunity and the need to change that. We can create affordances for Congress to be in much more frequent and useful contact with agencies (and outside actors who can provide ground truth) to ensure the implementation of our laws matches their intent. We can build teams that combine policy, operational, technology and other skills together, in the same room, working to deliver a shared outcome.
The language and approach of ‘test, learn and repeat’ has become second nature in the most successful companies of this generation. It is increasingly taking root in other governments, like the UK. But it remains exceptional in the U.S. federal context, called upon only in crises, if ever. We need to close the loop.
In the next few days, with the support of colleagues from the Niskanen Center and Public Digital, we will publish a paper that explains why the U.S. got here, and what we need to do to renew America’s public realm. It will spell out the how we need for now; a set of tactics and approaches that are urgently needed to change how government thinks and acts.
The prize of delivering these changes is powerful but devastatingly simple: a government that can do what it says it wants to do. That something so basic can seem so ambitious is testament to how far faith in state capacity has fallen. But should we duck this challenge again, America will be more insecure, unhappy and poorer for it — whoever is in charge.
Again, that link to get notified when the report is posted is here.
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On point (4) -- if I were going to redesign the US government from scratch, I would make our system more Parliamentary, with a proportional election system from multi-member districts, a significantly larger legislative body (maybe something like 5000 members, which would have each Congressmember representing somewhere in the neighborhood of ~65k people, comparable to the mayor of a smallish city), then have the body elect from within itself an Executive Board of perhaps 100, which would be the only people doing debate in full assembly. You'd have at least one EBoard member on / chairing each of the major Committees. But I'd have many, MANY topically-focused Subcommittees. These Subcommittees are what's relevant to your point here. Every agency could be in regular touch with the 10-20 members of Congress charged with overseeing their work, and helping to adjust the law to enable it. They'd normally report issues up through their parent Committee, but could be empowered, by some super-majority vote, to forward an urgent request for a change of law / policy directly to the EBoard. The expectation would be that the EBoard would in most cases review the factual record developed by the conversation of the committee with agency personnel and other outside subject-matter experts, and sign off on their recommendations.
When I was still working in the biopharma industry, the Food and Drug Administration was in dire shape. They lacked the resources to meet the statutory time frame for new drug reviews and the IT system required improvement. In 1992, then Commission David Kessler approached industry and pledged that in return for user fees to support increased personnel, FDA would commit to timely actions on reviews. The User Fee Act was approved and subsequently reauthorized every five years with tweaks to the performance goals. I was on the original negotiating team on behalf of the industry and the subsequent reauthorizations until I retired in 2010.
The underlying laws and regulations remained unchanged and companies still had to demonstrate safety and effectiveness. However, uncertainty about product review time was no longer an issue. Though there have been "complaints" about the FDA being in the pocket of industry because of this program, the truth is far different. There is and has been no compromise of standards. In this specific example, government works.