Consider these recent headlines:
- “The U.S. Navy Can’t Build Ships,” Foreign Policy, May 2024.
- “New report estimates U.S. fraud losses exceed $233 billion annually,” The Washington Post, April 2024.
- “Tens of thousands of Afghans applying for US visas still face major delays,” CNN, July 2022.
- “The U.S. ‘Fast-Tracked’ a Power Project. After 17 Years, It Just Got Approved,” Wall Street Journal, May 2023.
- “How the VA Fails Veterans on Mental Health,” ProPublica, January 2024.
These outcomes are not the result of lack of diligence by our nation’s public servants. Our administrative state’s structures, processes, and ways of working are simply no longer fit for the jobs we need them to do. Both our airwaves and discourse on Capitol Hill are overwhelmed with debates about policy. What our government should do sets the terms of debate. But the what matters little if our nation’s leadership doesn’t put equal consideration into how to do it.
Government can and must be reorganized to meet the current moment. This requires prioritizing the government’s ability to achieve its policy goals – what we term “state capacity” – in a way not seen since the early 1900s. It’s time.
This paper provides a thorough diagnosis of today’s state capacity challenges, as well as a promising path forward. Transforming our government for the modern era is a long-term effort, but we must start now.
Part 1: Introduction
President Trump and the 119th Congress will inherit profound challenges: an unstable global order, massive disruptions from changing technology, crumbling infrastructure, rising healthcare costs, and an unprecedented budget deficit, just to name a few. At the same time, the U.S. government stands at the helm of the largest public budget on the planet and a set of institutions created to address these challenges in the service of the public good. In steering these incredible resources, it is charged with answering difficult and enduring questions: What strategies will keep Americans safe and secure, at home and overseas? What investments are necessary to make this an increasingly prosperous nation, and who should be making them? What must be done to make sure citizens have access to quality healthcare, education, employment, and housing? Who should pay how much in tax to fund all this?
Yet a question all too rarely asked is: How well do our institutions actually work in addressing these and other questions? Can they translate the political intent – of any party – into public impact? Once we decide what our policies should be, do we know how to implement them in real life?
For Republican and Democratic leaders alike, the impact of their time in office will rest upon the government’s capacity to successfully implement the policies they devise and enact. The prospect of piloting a government critically low on state capacity poses a deep problem for either party. That is true not only when it comes to establishing a policy legacy. Our politics have become so chaotic in part because the public has lost trust in the government’s ability to deliver on its promises. Restoring this public trust is both a moral and a political imperative for leaders who want to leave their mark.
The time is now also right for a focus on effective government because any fiscal margin for error we might have enjoyed earlier in this century has evaporated. In the last eight years, the Trump and Biden administrations have committed to unprecedented public investments for economic recovery, infrastructure, and national competitiveness. Meanwhile, borrowing costs have risen steeply and obligations to our aging population like Social Security and Medicare have grown — but domestic and global challenges will create new fiscal needs.
We believe in the old adage about making the most of a crisis. In that respect, the pandemic was something of a missed opportunity. It forced our government to work differently and meet needs faster. But as the sting of crisis abated, things slid back towards the status quo. Now, the constraints facing the next administration provide an unmissable opportunity to change how government works for the better. But we need to be committed to turning this urgency into lasting change, and applying it to slow-boiling problems, too.
Rebuilding our state capacity — the how of our government — is an arduous task that requires a stomach for learning and fixing the rules and culture of the bureaucracy. But make no mistake: whether or not we do it is not a technocratic choice. It’s a political choice — a leadership choice. Previous administrations may not have actively set out to make dealing with public services a burden, or to cripple our nation’s military readiness with policy clutter amounting to hundreds of copies of War and Peace, or create a veto-cracy that limits our ability to build infrastructure. But neither have they made fixing it a priority. This one can, and should.
Underneath the sound and fury of politics, hundreds of thousands of civil servants who form the backbone of our government, serving through administrations of both parties, are going about their job of keeping the country going. Many are comfortable with the status quo, for sure, but a growing band is hungry for permission to reinvent the bureaucracy in pursuit of the mission that inspired them to serve in the first place. These public sector patriots want to make government work better, to have a firm and capable grip on the problems it is charged with solving. They are an enormous national resource; the incoming leadership would do well to recognize them and leverage their energy to the fullest extent.
“I’m in year 34 of Federal civilian service. I’ve never before seen the kind of bureaucratic squeamishness I’ve seen in the last 5 years. There’s so much fear of making a mistake and getting embroiled in a lawsuit that people are maximally risk-averse. This is murdering the mission.”
– Online post from civil servant
Some agents of change are successful, thanks to unusual circumstances that created political cover for them to do things differently. They have been given the space to apply new ways of working, often driven by an emergency — and they delivered. Yet these exceptions have remained just that — exceptional. When the change agents move on or the exigency of the crisis they are finally empowered to solve subsides, the magic often disappears. With greater political will across the executive and legislative branches, we can make a culture of experimentation and improvement the norm rather than the welcome surprise.
Our two parties (and even the factions within them) often speak about state capacity in very different languages and have differing priorities for where that muscle should be deployed. But the vast majority of elected leaders on both sides of the aisle would like the bureaucracy to be capable of achieving the missions it is assigned. This report is a guide to regaining that capability. Though we focus on the federal government here, the report draws on lessons from all levels of U.S. government and from countries around the world that are struggling with similar challenges. We take a particular look at the UK, home of one of the authors, for inspiration about how to move forward.
We first look at both structural and cultural drivers of incapacity and then turn our attention to prescriptions. We offer four priority areas for building state capacity – the how of our government – over the coming decade, and detail what reformers must do to enable each of them. While the picture we paint of our government’s capacity today is not always pretty, we believe that achieving a more responsive, effective, and confidence-inspiring government is a matter of will. Putting capacity at the forefront will help even a highly-constrained administration to reduce risk, save money, and deliver what the American people need. It will enable government to address the complex problems we have failed to unravel for decades and to face the new challenges this disruptive century continues to bring.
As a country, we will continue to disagree about what the government should do. But we can, and must, agree that it must be more capable of doing the core things it sets out to do. Getting there will take more than new policies. Now is the time to fix our how.