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The past year has shown that the concept of “abundance” has legs. A bestselling book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. An expanding shelf of other well-received volumes on similar themes. Policy organizations with abundance in their name. The simultaneous emergence of a more right-coded “progress” movement that identifies many of the same problems and offers similar solutions. An annual Abundance Conference, the most recent with 15 different organizations represented on its host committee. A new, bipartisan, abundance-themed congressional Build America Caucus. And a vociferous, sometimes hysterical opposition whose main impact is to Streisand-effect its target to even greater prominence.

OK, so abundance has legs — but what kind of creature are they attached to? And where are those legs capable of taking us? What are the appropriate contours of the concept — we want an abundance of what, exactly? And what’s the social vision behind this desire for more — we want abundance for what?

What fits inside the abundance frame?

An early challenge for the abundance movement is figuring out — and limiting — its scope. “I think we could all use a reminder that while ‘abundance’ has real value as a conceptual frame,” my Niskanen Center colleague Matthew Yglesias wrote recently, “there are limits to what we can address through lumping.” He elaborated here:

What matters is whether the ideas are good. It would be easy to think up policies to make alcohol more abundant, but that would be bad — alcohol fuels crime and traffic accidents and is unhealthy. America’s recent experiment with an abundance agenda for sports gambling seems to have been harmful. More broadly, though I have already disavowed the “smartphone theory of everything,” it absolutely seems to me that the superabundance of streaming video that we now enjoy is creating a lot of problems for society.

My old friend Adrian Wooldridge has made the case for an “anti-abundance agenda” to address the addictive junk that we can’t stop stuffing into our mouths and minds:

The abundance agenda needs to be balanced by an anti-abundance agenda. For in many significant areas of life, we suffer from a crisis of overproduction rather than underproduction — too much stuff (or stimulation) rather than too little. This overproduction is bad for our physical and mental health. And the bizarre combination of too much bad abundance and too little good abundance (like too much bad cholesterol and too little good cholesterol) is at the root of our civilizational malaise.

The birth of abundance: A sense of brokenness

The idea of an “abundance agenda” made its first appearance in a Derek Thompson piece for The Atlantic in January 2022, and a growing group of wonks and scribblers has been running with it ever since. The unifying theme of this developing agenda has been combating dysfunctional government policies and institutional structures that restrict the supply of key goods and services. Either the government is actively blocking private actors from meeting market demand, or it’s unable to get out of its own way in providing public services.

The “Big Three” core concerns that have emerged thus far are housing, energy, and transportation:

• In housing, zoning and other land-use regulations have resulted in a rolling affordability crisis for would-be homebuyers in metro areas across the nation.

• In energy, over-the-top permitting restrictions are slowing the transition to clean energy.

• In transportation, a tangled mess of “state capacity” deficits has sent costs per road- and track-mile in the U.S. soaring to multiples of those in other advanced countries.

Meanwhile, efforts to broaden the abundance agenda have focused on problems as varied as the bureaucratization of scientific research, which gets its own chapter in Klein and Thompson’s Abundance, and the host of supply constraints that drive up healthcare costs.

From the dots connected thus far, we get a pretty clear picture of the kinds of policy issues that fit comfortably within the abundance frame. The point isn’t to boost the supply of every bit of frippery that 21st century affluence can support a market for. The abundance idea has taken off because of its focus on core inputs to a high-functioning economy and core elements of a typical family’s budget. When you can’t afford a decent home anywhere near where you work, the economy feels broken no matter what the topline stats may say. When a big public construction project can’t get completed without huge delays and cost overruns — or maybe can’t get completed, period — government feels broken.

The abundance movement has arisen in response to this sense of brokenness.

Furthermore, there needs to be some identifiable bottleneck that is holding back supply and driving up prices: A reform agenda needs something dysfunctional to reform. When you examine the targets for reform that the abundance movement has identified and look for the underlying causes of dysfunction, you generally find some combination of regulatory capture, in which powerful insiders dominate the policymaking process and twist the rules to feather their nests by restricting competition — and thereby limiting supply — and a lack of state capacity typically brought about by the buildup of “red tape,” the old-fashioned name for what we’re now beginning to refer to as the “procedure fetish.”

Abundance and the atoms/bits divide

Though the ideas behind the abundance movement originated in technocratic policy wonkery, they resonate at much deeper levels. That’s because when you look at where abundance is most conspicuously lacking — namely, the movement’s central targets of housing, energy, and transportation — you see that that the common denominator is blocked action in the physical world — the world of atoms as opposed to the world of bits.

The idea of lost abundance thus ties into the disillusionment with the digital revolution — and, with it, the growing recognition of the need to reprioritize and reengage with the physical world — that has been steadily building cultural momentum over the past decade or so.

This cultural turn started with the same kind of narrow, technocratic focus that has animated the abundance movement to date — namely, disappointment in the wake of the Great Recession with the slow pace of productivity growth and underlying technological progress. Out of these discontents has emerged the fledgling “progress” movement, which overlaps substantially with abundance in its analysis and goals while expressing them in more right-coded terminology. We can trace the origins of this movement to Peter Thiel’s memorable lament from 2011: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Previously, in the decades since Ronald Reagan first won the presidency, boosters of free markets and low taxation (i.e., people like Thiel) had been almost uniformly bullish on U.S. economic performance and ongoing technological prowess, dismissing concerns about “deindustrialization” voiced by generally left-leaning advocates of “industrial policy” during the during the 1980s and early ’90s. “Computer chips, potato chips — what’s the difference?” a quote attributed to Michael Boskin, George H. W. Bush’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, summarized their viewpoint. What mattered was the overall level of GDP, not its components.

The internet boom that began shortly thereafter — and with it the resumption of robust productivity growth after a prolonged slump during the 1970s and ’80s — only strengthened the belief on the free-market side that the “dematerialization” of economic life was the path of progress. (The roaring stock market of the ’80s and ’90s didn’t hurt, either.) If anybody ever looked backed at the old midcentury dreams of continued progress in the physical world — moon bases and underwater cities, nuclear fusion, supersonic air travel, and, yes, flying cars — it was only in rueful acknowledgment of the impossibility of predicting the course of technological advance. When I read Robert Heinlein’s great juvenile sci-fi novels aloud to my boys back in the ’90s and early ’00s, we all laughed when they used slide rules to calculate the jump to light speed.

Then came the Great Recession and the subsequent collapse of productivity growth, which triggered a rapid shift in perspective. No longer did the ’90s boom look like a resumption of normal vitality after the temporary slump of the ’70s and ’80s; now the ’90s looked like an exception to the new normal of low growth. In 2011, the same year that Thiel’s oft-repeated crack about flying cars first appeared, Tyler Cowen came out with The Great Stagnation, which includes Thiel in its dedication. J. Storrs Hall followed up in 2018 with his Thiel-inspired Where Is My Flying Car?, a quirky, brilliant book that derided the cultural turn of the 1970s that knocked us off the path of progress in the physical world and which I’ve termed the anti-Promethean backlash. The following year, Cowen teamed up with Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison to write “We Need a New Science of Progress” for The Atlantic — and the new progress movement was off the ground.

This turn in ideas was occurring just as changing circumstances provided both a push and a pull in the direction of renewed interest in “hard tech” — i.e., innovation in the world of atoms. The looming threat of climate change, combined with the emergence of China as a technologically formidable adversary, posed serious and difficult challenges that could not be met with a new phone app.

Meanwhile, a couple of unexpected spurts of technological progress — rapidly declining production costs for solar and wind power, and SpaceX’s similarly spectacular reductions in launch costs — reawakened entrepreneurial optimism and ambition in the hard-tech sector. Now we’re seeing promising developments and increasing investment in nuclear energy, including nuclear fusion, and in advanced geothermal power and supersonic flight.

Can the abundance movement scale?

The combination of the progress movement and the hard-tech mini-boom is helping to reorient policymaking elites toward reengagement with the physical world, an unabashedly good thing. However, worries about the long-term rate of growth and the organization of scientific research are far too abstract and recondite to stir the wider public and provoke changes in mass culture. The problems of affordability that the abundance agenda targets are much more salient to the everyday concerns of ordinary people but on their own aren’t enough to awaken the passions out of which broad-based social movements arise.

What is packing an emotional wallop is our growing disenchantment with the other side of the atoms/bits divide. Here, Thiel really was ahead of the curve with his “flying cars” line: He was throwing shade at social media just as the hit movie The Social Network was inspiring a new generation of tech founders, and as the early hopes of the “Arab Spring” seemed to demonstrate social media’s power to promote positive change through “people power.”

Trump’s surprising 2016 win, and the surrounding controversy over Russian and other online “misinformation” during the campaign, marked the turning point. While fears of the purposeful manipulation of public opinion have proved overblown, we have met the enemy online, and it is us: The broader perception that social media elevated extremists and degraded discourse overall was spot on. Is it even possible to imagine Trump’s rise in a pre-Twitter world?

From there, the bottom dropped out of the dream that the internet would “connect the world” and bring us all together. On the contrary, it became increasingly clear that our smartphones were weapons of mass distraction that we were training compulsively on ourselves. Teenage driving, after-school employment, and just hanging out with friends all declined as kids withdrew into the virtual simulacrum. Not coincidentally, mental and emotional problems among the young began skyrocketing. People even started walking blindly into traffic while staring at their phones, or falling off cliffs while posing for selfies — these were outliers, but most of us have sat at a dinner table in stony silence with everyone lost in their own social media feeds. Virtually all of us have felt our attention spans slipping. A century of “Flynn effect” increases in raw IQ scores has begun to reverse itself. Personality tests reveal precisely the trends you might expect: rising neuroticism, falling extraversion and agreeableness, and a collapse in conscientiousness.

‘Mass brain rot’

The latest twist has come with the astonishing breakthroughs achieved by ChatGPT and other large language models. Once again, we are confronted with a miraculous technology that can amplify our brainpower in potentially transformative ways. And once again, we are watching it steadily evolve, under the selection pressures of ferocious commercial competition to monopolize and monetize our attention, into yet another source of mass brain rot. Students are using it en masse to cheat themselves out of the hassle of learning anything in school. It’s a problem that started well before ChatGPT showed up and now reveals itself, even in the most elite institutions, in the widespread inability to work through and comprehend college-level reading material.

Moving from the pathetic to the outright creepy, we’re seeing increasing reports of desperately lonely people getting hooked on “relationships” with chatbots, as a result of which “AI-induced psychosis” has now entered our vocabulary. And employing the utter shamelessness that has emerged as the characteristic vice of the 21st century, Elon Musk’s xAI has already come out with pornographic “waifu” AI companions, and now OpenAI plans to follow suit in December.

Just as the post-2009 slump prompted a reconsideration of the past half-century of U.S. economic performance, so has the one-two punch of social media- and AI-related dysfunction triggered what looks like the beginnings of a wholesale reappraisal of the mass media era. The “What, me worry?” side of the debate points out correctly that dire warnings about media consumption are nothing new; in centuries past, people got the vapors over the deleterious effects of novel reading. This kind of response used to carry the day, but increasingly people are coming around to the idea that, at least since the advent of TV, the Chicken Littles have had a point. Here’s Matt Yglesias, for example: “The multi-generation moral panic about improved video entertainment driving social isolation is largely correct. The technology keeps improving, but it’s not making our lives better.”

I’m certainly an example of this: I had no use for Neil Postman’s diatribe against TV when it came out in the 1980s, and now I can’t stop quoting the man. And I’m not alone: Postman is cropping up all over the place these days. Derek Thompson dropped this amusing footnote after citing him recently:

Believe me, I tried to keep old Postman out of this — he’s over-exposed enough these days — but as I wrote, I could hear the ghostly thump-thump-thump of his posthumous fists knocking on the door of this essay, and I had to let him in.

Worries about “post-literacy” are now going viral.

And this shift in opinion isn’t confined to scribblers. The movement to ban phones in schools is gaining traction and registering wins all over the world. A recent survey found that 68 percent of Gen Z adults feel nostalgia for times before they were born — i.e, before the digital tsunami swallowed everything. Jake Auchincloss, a Democratic member of Congress from Massachusetts, refers to social media, online pornography, and online sports gambling as “digital dopamine” and proposes that we treat them like we treat alcohol or tobacco: restrict use by children and subject online providers to special sin taxes — for example, on advertising revenue.

Thompson, who interviewed Auchincloss for his podcast, sees him and Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who castigated social media as a “cancer on our society” in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, as representing a new “touch grass populism.” “Rather than identify the enemy of America as specifically left, or right, or corporate, or foreign,” Thompson wrote on X recently, “the enemy they name is the digital hellscapes that summon the worst demons of our nature. They call us to re-invest our attention and our resources in the world of people and atoms.”

Raising the abundance movement’s ambitions

This wider cultural turn against the sordid excesses of online life could be the wave that carries that abundance idea from its current niche status — the preoccupation of technocratic elites — and transforms it into a genuinely popular social movement. The negative motivations are already in place. Fears of genuinely dystopian dangers have been awakened — and what’s more, the people most exposed to those dangers are our children, rousing our passions all the more.

What is needed now is something clear and compelling to fight for. Abundance proponents must raise their ambitions and offer a bold, long-term vision for social change — one capable of inspiring hope and excitement, one that can unite people across current divisions and galvanize them into action.

The idea here is to appeal to ordinary people — not technology enthusiasts who thrill to the ingenuity and brilliance of the new and pathbreaking, but regular, risk-averse folks who tend to be suspicious of change because of their natural focus on holding onto what they’ve already got. To generate mass support for a resumption of large-scale progress in the physical world, you’ve got to hold out the prospect of big, tangible gains in ordinary people’s lives.

Jerusalem Demsas did an excellent job of making this point in a recent essay in her new publication The Argument, so let me quote her at some length:

Technologists and techno-optimists need to realize that the way we talk about innovation in articles, in ads, and in manifestos is often suboptimal for the goal of trying to convince skeptics of the value of progress. Take this 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” from Marc Andreessen that speaks in grandiose terms about the value of technology. I agree with much of what he writes, but it reflects an orientation toward scientific achievement that is more focused on the adventure of invention than it is the point of all that progress….

The broader problem for technologists is the widespread impression that their “progress” is merely about accomplishing something technically impressive even if that breakthrough has limited or destructive impacts on humanity. I don’t care that it’s incredibly difficult and impressive to create addictive short-form video platforms. I care that it’s wasting our time. I don’t really care if Mark Zuckerberg is a genius if the impact of his brilliance has been to create platforms that degrade social trust.

I want a techno-optimism that is focused on human progress. I want vaccines and geothermal energy and supersonic flight and high-speed trains. I want to venerate the boring technological achievements like the doctor who halved the C-section rate at his hospital and lowered the maternal mortality rate in California by recommending a “hemorrhage cart” that prevented new mothers from bleeding to death. Technology isn’t just about pushing the frontier. It’s about making people’s lives better.

So how can physical abundance transform lives for the better? We’re not talking about just piling up more random stuff; the offsite storage industry exists because we already have more stuff than we know what to do with. And we’re not talking about more trivial, enervating comforts and conveniences — not another “Uber for X,” not “smart” refrigerators and toasters with endless features that normal consumers can’t be bothered to learn and use.

What we want is a vision of the future in which physical abundance acts as a genuinely liberating force. But what is it that most ordinary people still yearn to be liberated from? Well, for one thing, people are increasingly feeling trapped in the endless digital maze and yearning for reconnection to the IRL physical and personal. A world in which the built macro environment is once again, after decades of stagnation, visibly changing and improving could go some ways toward restoring our collective sense of groundedness and real-world efficacy.

What I’m looking for, though, is some important deficiency in life offline that abundance can remedy. We are already so rich that economic growth and technological progress have substantially erased — to the extent they are capable of doing so, at any rate — various great deficits that traditionally menaced and degraded human existence: hunger, physical drudgery and suffering, ignorance, and premature death. Our main problem with food these days is too much of it. Our lives are now so sedentary that we pay money to go to gyms to get the physical exercise our bodies need. We have all the world’s knowledge available at our fingertips, just a click away on our phones — if we can be bothered to choose learning something new over the umpteenth TikTok video of the day. Funerals for children are now as rare as they are soul-wrecking; they were just as soul-wrecking before, but dreadfully commonplace.

The promise of abundance is that it can take us to the next level of rich, one in which another pervasive deficit that shadows our lives is progressively whittled away. It’s the deficit of freedom that comes from dependence on a lifetime of paid employment and that gives so many of our lives such ceaseless precarity.

The premise of my new book is that the “economic problem” as John Maynard Keynes defined it has been solved. The threat of serious material deprivation has been pushed to the margins of life; as a result, the “permanent problem” of humanity — how to “live wisely and agreeably and well” with all our blessings — has now come into view.

But while it’s true that the vast majority of us in rich countries can now expect our basic material needs to be satisfied — and a whole bunch of less urgent needs and wants as well — it’s true subject to an important qualification: We can expect to satisfy our basic needs and many more besides provided we spend a big chunk of our waking hours throughout our decades of adulthood working at some job to earn the money to pay for it all. And for most of us, that job requires us to do work that we would never choose to do for its own sake. A lucky minority is employed in work that, even if we might not keep doing it if we won the lottery, is sufficiently challenging and absorbing that we derive many intrinsic rewards from it as well as the extrinsic reward of the paycheck. But for all too many of us, those intrinsic rewards are few and fleeting, outweighed considerably by spiritually emptying tedium and stress. And even if we hate our jobs, we usually hate the idea of losing them even more. Yet this happens regularly, often for reasons completely outside our control.

The implicit vision of progress that underlies our current economic order — and it’s rarely stated explicitly, maybe because too many people would immediately see through it — assumes that mass adult employment, with employment-to-population ratios comfortably above 50 percent, is a necessary and enduring feature of modern economic life. Progress, then, takes the form of better (i.e., more intrinsically rewarding) jobs at higher pay with a steady rollout of new and improved gizmos and doodads to buy.

No wonder people are pessimistic about the future. I’ve come to the conclusion that the overall quality of paid employment opportunities is unlikely to keep improving. And we know that many of the new and improved gizmos and doodads we’ve been buying are actually making our lives worse; there’s certainly no reason to expect that we’re going to get to living “wisely and agreeably and well” through a wider array of possible consumer purchases.

But there’s another possible future, and the idea of physical abundance points the way. Imagine a future in which core elements of a household budget — housing, transportation, energy, healthcare — are now so cheap that it’s possible to fund a comfortable retirement with a fraction of the lifetime working hours needed today. Imagine a social movement — or perhaps a competing variety of social movements — that seizes upon this possibility and encourages lifestyles designed to minimize dependence on paid employment. You’d see lots of people retiring in their 30s and 40s, a higher share of part-time workers among those who do work, and more people entering and exiting the labor force episodically as life circumstances change. And you’d see a lot more small businesses, online or in the home.

This is the next level of rich that abundance-based policies can get us to: societies in which mass full-time employment is no longer the norm — not because people are dropping out of the workforce under competitive pressure from machines, but because people are “graduating” from work for pay because they now have better ways to spend their time. The prize that abundance offers us, then, is a big and ongoing increase in the ranks of the independently wealthy.

It is a truism that the solutions of one generation become the problems of the next. But sometimes, reformers in the present rediscover problems that their predecessors never solved, only sent into abeyance.

“The federal government is filled with good people trapped in bad systems. When we blame the people and impose more controls, we make the systems worse. No one would offer a drowning man a drink of water.”

Those are, slightly out of order, the evocative lines the Clinton administration used 31 years ago to introduce its ambitious government-reform initiative, known as Reinventing Government. It is a diagnosis that parallels almost exactly what abundance-oriented thinkers like my Niskanen Center colleague Jen Pahlka offer today. Just as Pahlka does, the authors of Reinventing Government noted the specter of auditors ready to snap at any violation of procedure. As they grimly concluded: “Federal employees quickly learn that common sense is risky — and creativity is downright dangerous … Those who dare to innovate do so quietly.”

That raises an uncomfortable question. As my colleague Gabe Menchaca puts it: “If the federal government figured this out 30 years ago, why are we still in the same place?” This issue of Hypertext aims to answer that question, excavating the project of Reinventing Government for lessons we can apply today.

• puts Reinventing Government in the broad context of American debates over how bureaucracy should interact with democracy. She warns that neither the Trump administration nor the abundance movement have adequately grappled with some enduring questions.

• argues that Reinventing Government went wrong by turning headcount reductions into a goal rather than one measure of progress — and that the Trump administration has made the same mistake.

• offers a more balanced view of Reinventing Government, noting that some of its enduring changes were for the good — but that its efforts to transform bureaucratic culture did not last.

• says Reinventing Government went wrong because it turned work that at the state level had been focused on policy outcomes into a federal project framed mostly in political terms.

• And to conclude, Menchaca argues that Democrats’ great error in the Obama and Biden administrations was to fool themselves into thinking they could manage around government dysfunction rather than work with Congress to tackle it head-on — a mistake they cannot afford to repeat.

One answer to why Reinventing Government failed is that its authors misunderstood the problem, or preferred not to understand it. In this view, the problem is not that good civil servants are trapped in bad systems. It is that civil servants constitute a “deep state” that undermines elected officials and does the bidding of an unaccountable elite. Whatever the merits of this position, the second Trump administration has advanced a breathtakingly extreme version of it. In the words of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, the administration’s mission is to rescue us from a “postconstitutional” order and from “the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us.”

If that is the world we live in, then the best we can do is slash government to the bare minimum and bludgeon civil servants into obeying the commands of their political superiors, making expertise conditioned on loyalty. That counsel of despair won’t get us a high-performing government, but it will restore electoral accountability, save us a few bucks in taxes, and allow the economy to rip — at least until investors realize they no longer have the statistics, macroeconomic stability, emergency services, disease surveillance, and other public goods that make business tick.

Another answer to the question of why Reinventing Government fell short is that the problem of bureaucratic reform is hard. That means it requires not only brilliance at building organizations but also sustained political commitment. Such a political commitment must grow out of a vision of how bureaucracy can enable democracy and be anchored by substantive policy goals. Believers in that vision must then be relentless and willing to absorb costs in order to advance it over the long term.

How long? We could date the Progressive Era from the 1880s through the 1920s – a 40-year stretch that was followed by even more sweeping changes with the New Deal. Reinventing Government may have been the start of something, not the end. As early as 1994, its authors appreciated the size of the challenge we face today: “As the Industrial Era has given way to the Information Age, institutions — both public and private — have come face to face with obsolescence.”

It’s time to stare back, study the lessons of history, and start again.

David Dagan is director of editorial and academic affairs at the Niskanen Center. Find him on LinkedIn.

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On the morning of September 7, 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Albert Gore Jr. shared a lectern on the White House’s South Lawn flanked by two yellow forklifts, each groaning under the weight of thousands of pages of paper. Thousands more pages, in fat binders, were stacked on pallets next to the trucks. They were filled with rules governing the management of the federal government. After their speeches, Clinton and Gore — self-styled “New Democrats” — strolled around the columns of paper, marveling at all this evidence of waste and bloat.

Did U.S. Army cooks really need several pages of instructions for how to bake chocolate chip cookies? Did the Department of Commerce really need to use more taxpayer dollars purchasing a floppy disk than an ordinary American consumer would spend on the exact same item at Office Depot? Clinton and Gore’s answer was clear: Of course not.

The South Lawn spectacle on that fall morning three decades ago fêted the first report by Gore’s National Performance Review, popularly called “reinventing government.” Later rechristened the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, this initiative ultimately continued through Clinton’s departure from office. Its first administrative head, White House advisor Elaine C. Kamarck, pointed out two decades hence that it constituted the longest continuous “government reform” project in U.S. history.

Kamarck told Congress in 2013 that the initiative had, among other achievements: reduced the federal workforce by nearly half a million employees; shredded the “equivalent” of “640,000 pages of internal agency rules;” and eliminated wasteful expenses like Department of Agriculture subsidies for sheep and goat farmers (since reintroduced). Advocates of “reinventing government” including Gore and Kamarck — none of whom ever spent much time in the private sector — were keen to emphasize how their reforms made the federal state more businesslike or even “entrepreneurial,” an implicit claim that government was, ipso facto, ineffective and wasteful. But the litany of recent dysfunction recounted in Jen Pahlka’s Recoding America, and the declaration of Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan that “it is crazy the extent to which we have clogged up our delivery,” suggest that despite its ambitions, Reinventing Government did not turn the aircraft carrier away from the rocks.

To understand why, we must not merely look at how Reinventing Government was implemented, as Kevin Hawickhorst and Gabe Menchaca ably explain. We need to understand the origins of the campaign within the project of reforming the Democratic Party in the 1980s. Government reform, I believe, ought to take shape as a method for achieving a positive policy goal. It should not comprise a political end in itself. By contrast, the Clinton-Gore initiative emerged as a political project unmoored from broader policy objectives. That is why its substantive results remain contested, and its electoral footprint is invisible. When politicians set “reform” as its own outcome, the effort will tend to focus purely on cuts or on mainly cosmetic fixes for small problems – or, conceivably, blend both into a bureaucratic farrago! Before embarking on institutional reform, policymakers need to very clearly define what it is they are optimizing government to do. Ideally, this should be an ambitious growth agenda.

In our own age, yet again “reinventing government” for its own sake, even if individual procedural reforms are salutary, will likely prove both politically and substantively perilous. Hubris and incompetence played no small role in the many blunders of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, but Elon Musk’s team was able to run so wild in part because DOGE suffered from a more extreme version of Reinventing Government’s problem: It was untethered from broader policy aims.

Less is Gore

Clinton and Gore borrowed the argot of “reinventing government” from an eponymous 1992 book coauthored by public policy consultant David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, former city manager of the tony Bay Area suburb of San Rafael. Osborne and Gaebler’s Reinventing Government explored how state and local governments were achieving results with fewer resources by adopting less rigid bureaucratic hierarchies, adopting new technology, and collaborating with the private sector. Osborne, who subsequently worked in Gore’s office, described his and Gaebler’s book as about “replacing large, centralized, command-and-control bureaucracies with … decentralized, entrepreneurial organizations … driven by competition and accountable to customers.” Existing public agencies were “Industrial-era,” unsuited to the new “postindustrial” knowledge economy. Osborne joined Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign as a policy advisor, where his and Gaebler’s calls to technologize bureaucracy and improve personnel management complemented a key Clinton interest: modernizing the workplace and upskilling workers along the lines suggested by the candidate’s old Rhodes Scholarship confrere Robert Reich.

As historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein describe in A Fabulous Failure (2023), the public-sector innovations Osborne and Gaebler chronicled arose from three successive and interlocking challenges: urban decay since the late-1960s, “tax revolts” modeled on California’s 1978 Proposition 13, and reductions in state and local funding by the Reagan administration. In other words, the long fiscal crisis battering American states and cities across the 1970s and 1980s necessitated governmental rethinks.

Critically, it was recognized that the most successful of these adaptations did not merely aim to manage austerity with abstract ideals of “efficiency.” Instead, they were anchored by a clear vision of desired social and economic outcomes. None other than David Osborne made this exact point just four years before he and Gaebler inspired Clinton and Gore. In Laboratories of Democracy (1988), Osborne profiled the efforts of six governors to do “more with less.” Some of the book’s subjects presided over states whose industrial economies had been hollowed out: Michigan’s James Blanchard and Massachusetts’s Michael Dukakis (both, like Clinton, avowed “New Liberals”); moderate Republican Richard Thornburgh in Pennsylvania; and center-left sweetheart Mario Cuomo in New York. The New Liberal governors firmly believed in high-technology “sunrise” industries. They sought to inject private-sector “performance standards” into more “entrepreneurial” public administration. As this efficiency jargon implies, these governors had true technocratic impulses. But they embedded them within broader efforts to use state governments to shape and manage growth — a leaner species of what is called “market-crafting” today. Indeed, efficiency-oriented government reform tended to take a backseat to the broader agenda.

For example, Massachusetts’ Dukakis talked a good game about apolitical technocratic management. Programs like the Bay State Skills Corporation (an existing agency focused on retraining) were, in Osborne’s words, “demand-driven”: They would only fund projects that private-sector businesses agreed to co-finance. Other measures seemed like classic government “efficiency;” for example, Dukakis contracted out some state tax-collection services. Such measures helped illustrate Dukakis’s political argument that he was not simply a “big government” Democrat (Time frostily dubbed this “liberalism on the cheap”).

But efficiency was secondary to the broader agenda. Dukakis channeled significant public resources into existing, and multiple new, agencies. These usually drew on outside expertise to help the Bay State get money to its people and businesses (Dukakis’ administration was stuffed with advisors from business and academia). A newfangled “public venture capital fund” offered early-stage loans, made equity investments, and brokered private funding for tech firms with long-term innovation potential. An industrial financing agency invested in infrastructure and funneled cash for modernization and technological upgrades into older industries. An existing “community development” agency was retooled to support housing development. Areas outside of affluent Boston, like the Berkshires or southeastern Massachusetts, received more funding later in Dukakis’ governorship. Osborne (who was scrupulously sober in his assessments and didn’t claim his governors got “everything” right) reported that Dukakis focused as much on trying to regionalize development and “redistribute growth” as he did on top-line economic numbers. In the 1980s, manufacturing employment gains in Massachusetts outpaced most of the country. The 1990-1991 recession struck New England hard; Massachusetts’s leading role in computing was largely ceded to Silicon Valley. But its innovation ecosystem — comingling government, business, and universities — inculcated first economic resurgence in the 1990s and then Massachusetts’s 21st-century global leadership in biotech and R&D.

Clinton, whose time as governor Osborne also wrote about in Laboratories of Democracy, tried to take notes. Clinton created several state agencies similar to those in Massachusetts and endeavored to cultivate a tech sector in a state that had historically lacked an industrial economy as sophisticated as those in the Northeast and Midwest. (Returning from a tech conference in 1989, one of Clinton’s aides cheerily reported that “someone in Manhattan had asked … if Arkansas was becoming ‘a little Boston.’”) And his efforts in Arkansas appeared to work in the short- to medium-term: By the mid-’80s, the state’s manufacturing jobs were increasing at 11 times the national rate.

Results among states, sometimes within states, varied. For instance, Pennsylvania — and especially Pittsburgh, the hometown of Governor Thornburgh, whom Osborne had profiled — is equally praised and criticized for its postindustrial record. But I believe the core insight of Osborne’s earlier book is that government reform needed to be in service of a broader agenda.

Fishing in the “mainstream”

What seems to have been lacking when Clinton and Gore decided to “reinvent” government from the White House was the joining-up of government reform with a positive vision akin to New Liberals’ earlier growth agenda. And the key fault for this lay with the Reinventing Government initiative’s biggest champions: the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).

The DLC’s role in Reinventing Government was a microcosm of the Council’s agenda writ large. Popular narratives suggest that the DLC was the engine room of New Liberal politics. In reality, it brought together a variety of New Liberals in order to advance a particular electoral, political agenda — not a grand policy program. Its cofounder Al From described this as a “mainstream agenda” concerned with “values” like “responsibility” and “patriotism.” In one 1990 memo, From suggested backing away from “government clients, government workers, minorities and organized labor … whose values are hostile to those of middle America.” An uncomfortable truth for today’s Left is that From was onto something. Council members from Missouri’s economic-populist congressman Richard Gephardt to Arizona’s pro-business but environmentalist governor Bruce Babbitt (profiled in Laboratories of Democracy) won over middle-income, often suburban or exurban voters who might otherwise have been GOP-curious.

At the same time, the DLC’s narrowly political focus meant that Clinton found its policy cupboard a little bare once he entered the White House. Marquee DLC ideas like a national service program for America’s youth were occasionally handy for political ads but substantively inconsequential. And DLC staff leaders saw everything through a purely political lens, a point Lichtenstein and Stein illustrate in A Fabulous Failure. For instance, to Al From, a seismic internal budget debate over industrial policy v. deficit reduction (in which DLC figures played basically no role) was simply about Democrats’ “tax and spend image” — not long-term policy goals. Welfare reform, which ended up being highly consequential, interested From and DLC policy guru Bruce Reed mainly because it “demonstrates … willingness to break with old Democratic orthodoxy,” not because of precise policy details or aims for social programs themselves.

The story was largely the same for Reinventing Government, which became, apart from welfare reform, the biggest policy the DLC pushed in the Clinton White House. The DLC recruited Osborne as an advisor, but when he went to work in the White House, the fuller picture so expertly limned in Laboratories of Democracy seemed to be left behind. The push by Vice President Gore (a DLC member long before Clinton) to “reinvent” government too often lapsed into messaging untethered from a clear agenda like “market-crafting” growth. Indeed, some of the NPR’s flashiest horror stories of government waste turned out to be wrong. Remember those overpriced Office Depot goodies? A Government Executive reporter soon uncovered evidence that the government had actually been paying less for them than had commercial buyers. As Gabe Menchaca and Kevin Hawickhorst demonstrate, the emphasis on demonstrative efficiency rather than policy outcomes led into a trap: Bureaucratic capacity was often hollowed out, but bureaucratic culture did not change.

When we ask how successful “reinventing government” was at the federal level, it is vital first to ask what motivated it and how these motivations shaped its goals. And would-be government reformers today should consider what it is they want a reformed government to achieve.

Rethinking “Reinventing Government”

Many state and local officials took up “reinventing government,” usually focused on performance management systems and performance-based budgeting. But in a 25^th anniversary retrospective on the Reinventing Government initiative, Governing’s John Bunting noted sorrowfully that many of these systems wound up hardening into “just another stale compliance regime.” Mourned Bunting: “Despite a generation of reinvention, government is less trusted than ever before.”

The great flaw, I believe, is that setting measurable standards often wound up becoming more important than setting the right goals and achieving buy-in for them. “Reinventing” the state is too often construed in terms of procedures themselves, rather than what bold ideas the better procedures may instantiate. In this way, government reform à la Clinton-Gore risks becoming a sort of strange mirror image of modern liberalism’s “procedure fetish.” Put another way: The abundance movement has persuasively argued that today’s Democrats tend to try and “do too much” in policymaking. Equally, we should be wary of government reform efforts inverting this problem by doing too little. Democrats’ north star should be policy outcomes. They should design the most effective government mechanisms to attain them, but the north star should not be “efficiency” itself.

Reinventing Government, according to political scientist Paul Light, produced “a shell game” in which streamlining via job cuts as offset by “contract- and grant-generated jobs.” Did this improve American state capacity? The last two decades suggest that it did not. To repurpose the framework of Dan Wang’s new contribution to debates about state capacity, “abundance,” and America’s future: It is not necessarily enough to replace our “lawyerly society” with a new “engineering state.” (Who, incidentally, have been America’s only engineer presidents? Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.) What matters most of all is what we want to engineer.

Henry M. J. Tonks is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Study of American Democracy at Kenyon College. His academic research focuses on the transformation of American liberalism since the 1960s. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter/X.

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The pink slips have been flying in Washington of late. The Trump administration has axed civil servants by the tens of thousands, and the country is tuned in: Journalists cover it, citizens protest it, and judges are ruling on it. In response, observers are looking back to the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative, which similarly cut the federal workforce.

Current commentary has focused on the blow those personnel reductions dealt to bureaucratic capacity. But this story overlooks the fact that Reinventing Government was a comprehensive effort to revitalize the federal bureaucracy; the layoffs were just one part. The full history of Reinventing Government’s civil service overhaul offers broader lessons in what makes government reforms either take root or fade away under later administrations.

Reinventing Government — at the time the most ambitious federal reform effort since the 1940s — sought a more dynamic and entrepreneurial government. In civil service reform, as in other issues, it shunned hierarchy and commands, instead aiming to inspire the bureaucracy. While this approach led to short-term successes, the effort only left a lasting mark through its institutional reforms. The initiative claimed to break with bureaucracy as usual, but the lasting reforms were those that embraced bureaucracy.

Reforming government reform

Presidentially sponsored government reform efforts like Reinventing Government have a long pedigree, running from the Theodore Roosevelt administration to DOGE today. The improvements that these efforts sought ranged from modernizing government technology to streamlining procedures for hiring and firing bureaucrats. For most of the 20th century, these efforts aimed to strengthen top-down management of the bureaucracy, perhaps most successfully in the Hoover Commission of 1947–1949, which, among other efforts, advocated for giving Cabinet secretaries greater power over their agencies’ budgets, personnel, and internal organization.

Reinventing Government was another such effort, but it rejected this managerial orthodoxy as a relic, declaring that the main problem was “industrial-era bureaucracies in an information age.” Like past efforts, it aimed to speed up hiring and modernize government technology. But unlike previous reforms, Reinventing Government was inspired by the perceived failures of top-down management. It drew upon contemporary management styles such as Total Quality Management and the Reengineering movement, which aimed to flatten hierarchies to move faster. Above all, it was inspired by (and named after) the book Reinventing Government by journalist David Osborne and city manager Ted Gaebler. This collection of stories of entrepreneurial local government was a favorite of Bill Clinton’s, whose 1992 campaign included promises to bring the same approach to the federal leviathan.

Following Clinton’s victory, Vice President Al Gore took on Reinventing Government — formally the National Performance Review (NPR) — as his signature initiative. NPR alumnus Morley Winograd told me that Gore got the job by process of elimination — healthcare reform was First Lady Hillary Clinton’s issue, and welfare reform was reserved for the president himself, leaving government reinvention available for Gore. In March 1993, Gore was given six months to review the government’s performance and offer proposals for improvement. He carried out his job with gusto and convened roughly 250 career civil servants to study government procedures such as budgeting, as well as individual government agencies. When he and his team reached the September deadline, they presented their main report, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less, which was bolstered by 38 accompanying reports. The administration then moved from research to implementation, which lasted until the end of Clinton’s second term.

One main pillar of Reinventing Government was personnel reform, where it aimed to “redefine accountability in terms of results” through decentralization, deregulation, flexibility, and delegated authority. It pursued these goals through four main lines:

• giving agencies flexibility in personnel procedure;

• offering training and awards to employees to inspire better performance;

• judging government managers on outcomes;

• and laying off central staff to lock in this new culture.

Streamlining procedure

Reinventing Government attacked cumbersome personnel procedures that its leadership viewed as impeding agency flexibility. For instance, the Department of Agriculture’s HR procedures weighed literally half a ton when printed out. The reformers declared that HR offices must instead henceforth “assume the primary role of consultant, providing expert advice and assistance, not acting as an obstacle to progress.” Accordingly, they reformed the governmentwide personnel requirements that they saw as rigid, one-size-fits-all solutions.

The federal government had a single standardized form for job applications, SF-171, an eight-page document that took eight hours to complete on average. Much worse was the Federal Personnel Manual from the Office of Personnel Management, which set HR policies for the entire government. The 10,000-page tome was notoriously complex — the guidance for merely handling notices of personnel actions took 900 pages. As if this weren’t enough, individual agencies added their own additional requirements.

Reinventing Government pared back centralized solutions so that agencies could craft simplified procedures tailor-made for their unique needs. SF-171 was eliminated, allowing agencies to accept resumes. Meanwhile, the Federal Personnel Manual was condensed into a tidy 350-page OPM handbook. NPR officials even made a show of tossing the unlamented Federal Personnel Manual into a dump truck. Gore and company hoped they had ushered in a new era of flexibility.

Over the longer term, the outcome was positive but limited: red tape had been cut, but the hoped-for benefits were mainly unrealized. Replacing the incomprehensible Federal Personnel Manual with a streamlined handbook was an impressive accomplishment — but agencies mainly didn’t use the flexibility it offered. Meanwhile, the complex SF-171 was replaced by equally complex formats for federal resumes. Agencies still followed the old way of doing things and the Office of Personnel Management still distrusted innovative proposals. Reinventing Government’s improvements had focused on eliminating bad procedures instead of creating better procedures, whereas system change would have required training agencies on their new flexibility and demanding that they use it.

Awards and training

NPR’s second personnel initiative was creating new awards and training to promote government innovation. The reformers believed that bureaucratic culture was stymied by the risk-averse oversight that their report called a “theater of the absurd.” To combat this risk-averse culture, NPR aimed to teach entrepreneurialism and highlight government successes.

To that end, Reinventing Government created the “hammer awards,” jokingly named after a notorious (if mythological) symbol of government waste, a $400 hammer purchased by the Pentagon. Hammer awards recognized government teams that streamlined bureaucracy, saved money, or delivered better service to the public. More than 1,200 teams received this award, which consisted of a hammer, ribbon, and note from Vice President Gore. One bureaucrat, for instance, reformed the permitting process for building fish ladders over dams, cutting one and a half years off the average approval time.

This investment in bureaucrats was also seen at the Federal Executive Institute (FEI), which trained top career government officials. Since its founding in 1968, FEI had mainly featured academics who lectured on constitutional law and civics. Clinton appointed the first director with a business background, Barbara Garvin-Kester, who revamped the curriculum by bringing in lecturers from local government and business who taught a can-do attitude. FEI took its own medicine: It began offering online education and, for the first time, began measuring the impact of its training. Director Garvin-Kester had been pleased to conclude, for instance, that an Army reform proposal — crafted at an FEI training session during her tenure — had saved $387,000.

But despite saving money and briefly changing agency culture, the reforms didn’t last under the next administration, which had different priorities. Following 9/11, federal training under President Bush was swiftly refocused on improving interagency cooperation, which might have prevented the tragedy. The Clinton administration’s Hammer awards were closely associated with the defeated Gore and were discontinued. These reforms were only the administration’s pet projects and, as they were never institutionalized, didn’t last.

Performance bonuses

The third personnel initiative was focusing top government managers on results by tying their bonuses to agency performance targets. Agencies had traditionally ignored results in favor of outdated and frequently meaningless procedures. NPR’s deputy director John Kamensky told me of his amusement at discovering, for instance, that one agency maintained a travel reimbursement policy that still included stabling a horse.

The administration attempted to reorient agencies towards results by setting customer service standards and negotiating performance agreements with them. Working with Congress, the administration codified this approach in the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, which it then invested significant effort into implementing. As part of this effort, the administration made the bonuses of members of the Senior Executive Service — the top government managers — depend upon hitting the law’s targets, as well as upon improving public and employee satisfaction.

Tying bonuses to Performance and Results Act goals had been intended to get agencies invested in the law’s success, and by the end of the Clinton administration it was fully implemented. Moreover, its implementation was continued and even expanded by the succeeding Bush administration, which went so far as to rearrange seats at meetings to move high-performing agencies closer to the president. Today, while SES bonuses are no longer necessarily tied strictly to agency performance targets, the Government Performance and Results Act is well established. The law, in turn, codified useful new tools for presidential management and congressional oversight — so it lasted.

Government downsizing

A final personnel initiative was, famously, reducing the federal workforce. The elimination of 426,000 positions — mainly in back-office roles such as procurement — was intended to lock in flexibility by eliminating the staff viewed as imposing burdensome procedures. This measure was controversial, with internal disagreement about whether publicly committing to workforce downsizing would capture the public imagination or prove to be a damaging gimmick. It all might have gone differently: David Osborne told me that Gore made the final call after more than 24 hours without sleep. He decided in favor of downsizing. The main report accordingly called for slashing hundreds of thousands of jobs.

To accomplish this, the administration established the President’s Management Council, in which the deputy heads of agencies jointly set managerial priorities and shared best practices. This council’s first major task was implementing the job cuts. The deputy directors discussed best practices for identifying redundant positions and shared progress updates. They then used their knowledge for congressional outreach and, as the council’s first public initiative, won legislative approval for workforce reductions.

These workforce reductions were accomplished mainly through voluntary buyouts: Employees would be paid a bonus to resign, which they would repay if they accepted federal employment again. Congress granted the authority for these buyouts in three statutes from 1994 to 1996. The great majority of workforce reduction was accomplished via these buyouts (and ordinary attrition), with merely 25,000 employees being laid off.

Although the cuts were intended to lock in Reinventing Government’s flexibility reforms by eliminating the central bureaucracy that rigidity had wrought, they instead hollowed out the government’s capacity. In the short run, the downsizing eliminated the talent that agencies needed to capitalize on their newfound flexibility. The long-term consequences were much worse: In the succeeding Bush administration, the War on Terror demanded complex acquisition programs that the government could no longer competently handle, thereby empowering contractors at the expense of government.

This initiative ultimately was a double-edged sword. As commentators today note, the workforce reduction, despite being the signature initiative of Reinventing Government, was in many respects the least successful. And it was a lasting failure, because it was written into law in the buyout statutes. However, these commentators overlook the initiative’s underappreciated success: The President’s Management Council was continued by succeeding administrations and played a major role in improving management. Ironically, the machinery created to implement the layoffs was more successful than the layoffs themselves, which never led to the intended cultural changes. Institutionalized change was what lasted.

Reform in the eras of grunge and DOGE

On the whole, these four personnel initiatives gave the U.S. a hard-charging bureaucracy during the Clinton administration. They shared a common mindset: that inspirational leadership and the removal of perceived obstacles would lead to lasting cultural change. But these hopes were dashed. By contrast, institutional changes —new laws, new regulations, new organizations, and yes, new vacuums of capacity—were Reinventing Government’s lasting impact.

This history should inform the work of reformers who once again aim to reshape the bureaucracy. DOGE, unlike Reinventing Government, is focused on spending and personnel cuts above all else. It should nonetheless heed the lessons of the Clinton years. DOGE is similarly unlikely to change the bureaucracy’s culture through its personnel cuts (which, unlike with Reinventing Government, have not even been written into law). Instead, lasting impact will require new laws and regulations, and a commitment to implementing them well. The Trump administration has, for instance, issued personnel reforms that attracted bipartisan praise, and is rewriting government acquisition procedure. However, experience suggests that unless agencies are compelled to use this improved procedure, these reforms will go nowhere. DOGE and any successors will only defeat the bureaucracy by embracing bureaucracy.

Today, with decades of hindsight, Reinventing Government shows that far-reaching change is possible, but it is only achieved by examining the guts of bureaucracy. So why didn’t Clinton’s reformers focus more on institutions? In a sense, they did; had Gore won the narrow 2000 election, a further eight years of reinvention might have led to these reforms taking root. As it happened, under the Bush administration, the War on Terror led to totally new priorities for the bureaucracy, causing reform efforts to be abandoned that might otherwise have continued. If history had gone differently, their approach might have succeeded institutionally.

But this qualified defense doesn’t change a basic truth: The very unpredictability of the future is one of the strongest arguments for locking down reforms. Even observers at the time criticized Reinventing Government’s disregard for institutions. Ultimately, the effort was a product of the 1990s — more comfortable with stories of corporate transformation than with government personnel manuals. And yet, it still led to reforms that help the government succeed today.

Looking back on the era of reform he inspired, David Osborne noted, “It was very much of the time.” But Reinventing Government’s influence endures because it sometimes rose above its time.

Kevin Hawickhorst is a Research Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation.

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It’s the gag Americans of several generations grew up with: Wile E. Coyote hanging in midair, having chased his interminable enemy, the Road Runner, so fast that he doesn’t realize he’s run off a cliff. We watch him hang there as he realizes his predicament, and then plummets to his painful fate.

Since their debut in 1949, the pair have been locked in an endless battle waged with ACME Corporation anvils, pianos, explosives, and lots of falls. If there’s a moral kids are supposed to learn from these cartoons, it is perhaps that gravity always wins, eventually: Even a cartoon can’t outrun the laws of physics. No matter how hard Wile E. Coyote tries, he always seems to rubber-band back down to earth.

Over the last 20 years, Democrats have kept finding themselves in a similar predicament. They pass a major piece of legislation, and when the time comes to implement it in the real world, they wind up disappointed. Time and time again, they have found themselves out beyond the edge of the cliff, running really fast until they look down and physics kicks in: on Healthcare.gov, on the post-financial crisis stimulus, on the FAFSA student-aid form, on the Inflation Reduction Act, on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, etc., they keep plummeting into the Looney Tunes canyon. At some point, Democrats have to ask themselves why this keeps happening and what can be done about it.

If Wile E. Coyote cartoons are really about the laws of physics, then these unfortunate episodes are about the laws of management. These laws – not immutable, but rather set by Congress and codified in the U.S. Code – determine how the government can hire people, buy things, budget for IT investments, etc. And, like the laws of physics, they define what’s possible for the government to achieve (or not). Much of the recent policy discourse about the Biden administration, for example, is really about these laws. For all their success in passing really large policy bills, the Biden team could not translate them into lasting wins because the rules on the books prevented the government from moving fast enough to matter.

But, unlike the immutable laws of physics, Americans can change the laws of management by pushing Congress to pass a bill, asking the president to sign it, and implementing it zealously. So why don’t they try? Why did neither the Obama nor the Biden administrations even ask Congress to make their lives easier when they were trying to implement the CHIPS Act or the Affordable Care Act?

Because, as the Democratic Party has increasingly been defined by managerialism, Democrats have convinced themselves that they are able to outsmart the systems they operate in, or “hack the bureaucracy.” That they – unlike their myopic neocon predecessors or vulgar Trumpist opponents – were capable of managing the place so well that changing the laws was a luxury rather than a necessity. That if they just deployed their considerable human capital advantage to address hard problems – like bringing in civically-minded digital experts and sprinkling them across the government – they didn’t need to bother with the slow, frustrating, uncertain, unsatisfying political process of changing laws about how the government does its business. That if Democrats just implement really hard they can hit escape velocity to defeat the laws of gravity.

Democrats need to start approaching governing with a level of humility about what management alone can accomplish. This means acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: no matter how smart, dedicated, and well-intentioned Democratic appointees are, they cannot consistently overcome the laws of physics through superior execution alone. They have to change the rules of the game by actually wielding political power and changing the law.

The disappearance of Democratic reformism

For much of American history, managing the executive branch was a joint effort between Congress and the President. When government systems broke down or proved inadequate, the response wasn’t just to try harder, it was to troubleshoot the system.

Take, for instance, the federal government’s personnel system, which is the result of a long-running debate dating to the very first Congress. For the first 150 years of the republic, Congress and the president tinkered with a variety of systems to balance political, pay equity, practical, and market concerns. In 1789, Congress rigidly defined the salaries of each role. In 1795, legislators started granting Cabinet secretaries flexibility. In 1818, they took that flexibility back before ultimately re-granting it in 1830. In 1853, they created the first government-wide salary system, and in 1923, they began differentiating by type of work. Along the way, both the executive and the legislative branches wrote a dizzying number of reports with various diagnoses, recommendations, and arguments about what the government ought to do: in 1836, 1838, 1842, 1871, 1887, 1902, 1907, and 1931, to name just a few. The familiar 15-grade General Schedule and accompanying rules have only been with us since 1949, when Harry Truman (a Democrat) signed them into law.

The tinkering habit continued well into the 20th century. When the personnel system started to show its post-war inadequacy, especially at senior levels, both Kennedy and Johnson (and, in fact, Eisenhower and Nixon, too) spent time trying to come up with proposals for a new system that would work for the type of executive management that many senior civil servants were now charged with. In late 1978, Jimmy Carter finally persuaded Congress to actually act on these proposals by making civil service reform a centerpiece of his domestic agenda, declaring to Congress in the 1978 State of the Union that “even the best organized Government will only be as effective as the people who carry out its policies. For this reason, I consider civil service reform to be absolutely vital.” This effort created the Senior Executive Service and the modern Office of Personnel Management and totally transformed the process for employee removal.

Carter had good reason to believe in the power of government reform, having come fresh off a similar effort in Georgia, where he dramatically reorganized and reformed the bureaucracy as governor from 1971-1975. In his second State of the State speech in 1972, he foreshadowed his 1978 State of the Union when he argued that large-scale government reform could enable reform to Georgia’s schools, prisons, colleges, tax code, etc.: “The truth is that we cannot solve these long existing problems either effectively or within our present tax laws without a well organized Executive Department.”

Bill Clinton, several years later, cut a very similar profile as the last Democrat to seriously prioritize this kind of structural reform. Like Carter, his immediate prior experience had been as a governor; in Arkansas, he had spent 11 years effectively leading one of the poorest states in the country. When he got to Washington, he set about attempting to “reinvent” the federal government and to make it “work better and cost less” through systematic changes to federal operations. While the effort had mixed results and some unintended consequences that weakened long-term state capacity, Clinton at least recognized that institutional change was required and tried working with Congress to that end.

But something shifted after Clinton. Barack Obama came to office fresh out of the Senate and with perhaps the most talented technocratic policy team in modern Democratic history. Yet, unlike his predecessors, he made virtually no effort to work with Congress on government reform, preferring to stress executive action. Despite facing implementation challenges on everything from the stimulus to healthcare, the Obama administration’s instinct was always to manage harder and create ever-more czarships, but not to change the underlying constraints. The same pattern repeated under Joe Biden: a former senator, surrounded by smart people, pushed through well-designed policies, yet paired those efforts with (at best) deprioritization and (at worst) disinterest in the structural reforms that would make implementation of those policies easier.

Some will argue that this is due not to disinterest but congressional dysfunction that would make changes to the law impossible. Surely, some of this is Congress’ (and self-admittedly Mitch McConnell’s) fault. But as former legislators, both Obama and Biden were able to tame congressional coalitional politics enough to pass large, complicated, and high-impact laws like the ACA or the infrastructure law by making them a central part of their agendas. However, neither president seemed to see reform as the necessary precondition of effective government that it turned out to be. To be sure, both administrations continued the tradition of releasing President’s Management Agendas that started under the George W. Bush Administration, but those focused primarily on marginal management strategies rather than structural reform. In 2010, the Obama team did pass a bill on management reform. But the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act’s title was revealing: It primarily updated the complicated, familiar-to-consultants system of performance measurement and goal-setting procedures established under the Bush administration rather than making material changes to how agencies did their work.

The Obama-Biden years thus represent a fundamental break with Democratic tradition. Where previous Democratic presidents saw institutional reform as essential to their policy success, recent administrations have treated it as either an afterthought or an impossibility, as something that could or needed to be handled through superior execution rather than legislative change.

The rise of liberal managerialism

This shift didn’t happen in a vacuum. Educational polarization is now perhaps one of the most well-documented and argued-over trends in politics. According to Pew, in 1994, Republicans had a 10-point advantage among registered voters with a college degree and by 2023, that group had flipped to favor the Democrats by 13 points.

This shift changed how the Democratic Party approached its work. As Jia Lynn Yang recently argued in the New York Times:

Soon the need for moral integrity and technical mastery to run a complex government became not just a mode for governing but also ends in themselves. Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of Democratic leaders arrived to tout these values to voters, more so than their Republican rivals. Experience in gnarly hand-to-hand political combat was fading out. Expertise, ideally honed at an elite university, was in.

However, while most of the ink spilled on this shift has been about its impact on Democratic electoral outcomes, comparatively little has been said about its impact on the party’s approach to governing outcomes.

The technocrats that increasingly serve as the primary labor pool for Democratic political operations (i.e., highly-educated lawyers, management consultants, and non-profit professionals) have specific worldviews honed by their training and prior experience. In particular, they exhibit what Megan Stevenson succinctly describes as the engineer’s view, which “presumes [that the world adheres to] a mechanistic structure that can be predictably manipulated to achieve social goals.” In this view, deft operation of the levers of power is all that is required to bring about social change, rather than large-scale overhauls of systems. One sees it reflected in the public policy master’s programs that produce many of these people: core curricula are dominated by statistics and microeconomics classes to support elegant policy design. Legislators, too, are attracted to this type of thinking because it follows that incrementally better legislative language will allow them to deliver on their promises.

It’s no surprise, then, that the party dominated by technocrats embraced Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s work on “nudges” in 2008, with President Obama eventually appointing Sunstein as head of the powerful Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees regulations and form design for the federal government under the promise to bring a keen behavioral scientist’s approach to governing. Similarly, in 2014, after the catastrophic implosion of Healthcare.gov, this same impulse led the White House to create the U.S. Digital Service under the assumption that rotating deployments of highly-capable management professionals (this time, technologists) would also address these problems – something of a “nudge” for the bureaucracy to guard against future blow-ups.

The Biden team took this approach and put its own spin on it. In their political and staffing strategy, they attempted to make progress on as many discrete, individually-highly-polling priorities as possible to deliver for various parts of the coalition. This ‘deliverism,’ plausible in the manager’s mechanical worldview, rested on a “presumption of a linear and direct relationship between economic policy and people’s political allegiances.” This approach created awkward tradeoffs – for example, the tension between both wanting to usher in a new era of clean infrastructure investment while also rigidly enforcing domestic sourcing requirements – and left management to clean up the mess on its own. Rather than acknowledging that there are tradeoffs in governing, the president insisted that superior execution could overcome them, arguing that “[t]hey’re all important ... We oughta be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.” But actually, it turns out that walking and chewing gum at the same time is really, really hard and sometimes you faceplant. This, in turn, sank the entire agenda at the ballot box both because it meant many agencies failed to implement their big goals and because voters didn’t connect with this status-report approach to government of “ticking down the issues as opposed to having a theory.”

Twenty years into this turn, it is time to start thinking more critically about whether re-running the same play will work again after Democrats failed to outrun gravity again and again. Both USDS’ founders and behavioral economists eventually came to find that the problems they were addressing in the 2010s were more fundamental than managerial. Democrats would do well to learn from their reflections.

The closing of the conservative mind

Democrats are mulling their failures at the same time as they watch a president ignore countless rules to impose his will. While the mainstream of the party still believes that core liberal norms are both a moral imperative and a differentiating advantage with the public, some voices are calling on Democrats to similarly test the limits next time they take power – to mimic the MAGA and tech-right model and “just do things.” Constitutional and philosophical concerns aside, this strategy would be unlikely to succeed as a matter of governance; early indications are that it isn’t working well for the Trump administration, either.

Increasingly, the MAGA right has decided it prefers illiberal domination to the hard work of institutional reform. When they have dipped their toes into reforming the operating model of government, they’ve chosen largely to waste their time on performative culture-war gestures like banning paper straws or implementing partisan loyalty tests. And as the GOP has moved away from traditional conservative policy expertise toward populist performance, many of the wonks and policy professionals who might have provided alternatives to Democratic approaches have either left politics entirely or switched sides. This exodus accelerated during the Trump era, when certain factions discovered they could gain more from attacking expertise itself than from demonstrating mastery of complex issues.

The “brain drain” from the Republican Party is well-attested to and increasingly obvious to outside observers, and in some ways, it has made conservatives as path-dependent as Democrats. In a recent interview with Ross Douthat, anti-DEI crusader Chris Rufo admitted that conservatives’ human capital problem had gotten so bad that they “cannot fully staff the Department of Education” and therefore had to dismantle it to accomplish any of their policy goals. This incapacity – the Department of Education is by far the smallest cabinet-level agency with only about 4,200 total staff – has led the MAGA movement to eschew the pursuit of structural changes to make government work better in favor of turning the “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley mantra into a governing strategy, aiming to bypass legal and democratic constraints entirely rather than reform them.

To be sure, the MAGA movement can combine the conservative preference for domination with bureaucratic efficacy on its top priorities. This combination is most visible in figures like Russ Vought, the OMB director mythologized for his bureaucratic acumen. But normative concerns aside, even Vought’s signature issue concedes a fundamental limit of the “just do things” strategy: His exotic ideas about impoundment merely expand the president’s ability to decline to do things. The conservative strategy is inherently destructive—it can tear down existing systems but struggles to build anything lasting in their place. Even the signature project for which the administration did get congressional approval, the construction of a $170 billion deportation machine, is off to a shaky start, given the trouble the administration has run into with the courts and public opinion.

Rather than following Republicans through the looking glass, Democrats should embrace the only alternative: working with Congress to actually change the system.

You can just do (effective) things (with Congress)

For all the retrospectives on the Biden administration that focus on the negatives, there was (in fact) a huge policy bill that avoided falling into the cartoon canyon.

When legislators crafted the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 2022 to provide healthcare and benefits to veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins, they recognized that the Department of Veterans Affairs would need fundamentally different capabilities to handle a massive influx of new claims and provide expanded healthcare services. So, they gave the VA new authorities: streamlining hiring procedures for medical professionals, investing in IT and HR staff to handle the crush of onboarding, expanding contracting flexibility for healthcare services, and simplifying the benefit determination processes for toxic exposure claims. This came also on the heels of Congress moving in 2011 to a two-year advanced appropriations cycle for large portions of VA activities, freeing the agency from the tyranny of constant shutdowns caused by Congress’ own inability to legislate. In other words, they made the structural reforms necessary to enable effective implementation.

The results speak for themselves. While other major federal initiatives have struggled with implementation, the PACT Act has been rolling out with remarkable success. Between September 2022 and the end of 2024, VA hired over 45,000 new staff on net, growing its workforce by about 10 percent in just two years. While no major implementation is free from challenges, in general veterans are getting care, claims are being processed, and the system is scaling up to meet demand. This didn’t happen just because the VA suddenly got better at managing within existing constraints (although the dizzying speed with which the quality of management at VA has improved over the last decade under both Republican and Democratic leadership is notable); it happened because Congress changed the constraints.

This is just an example of what is possible when policymakers think systemically about implementation challenges rather than just hoping that good intentions and hard work will overcome structural obstacles. It shows that the choice isn’t between ambitious policy goals and practical implementation, but rather that it’s between doing the political work of institutional reform and accepting repeated failure. In VA’s case, it was particularly fortunate to have had an uncommonly-seasoned leader in Denis McDonough who had personally learned hard lessons about implementation failure with Healthcare.gov and deftly anticipated issues with enough time to influence the bill this time around.

But one successful example doesn’t mean that Washington has cracked the code. Part of the reason that the PACT Act worked was because it had a discrete, well-defined problem where the implementation challenges were obvious, leadership was exceptionally experienced, and the bipartisan constituency demanding results was powerful. Most Democratic policy priorities don’t have these advantages. Climate action, healthcare reform, infrastructure investment—these require sustained implementation across multiple agencies over many years, exactly the kind of complex execution that the current system handles poorly. There are too many forces that act on any one program for management to outrun them all.

The bill is coming due

Consider this highly plausible scenario: It’s 2028, and there’s a new Democratic candidate shaping an agenda. Political strategists are mapping out the first 100 days, and someone raises the question of government reform legislation. “Well,” comes the inevitable response, “the candidate has lots of other priorities, and voters don’t really care about federal operations. They want action on healthcare, climate, and the economy. Can we manage for a couple years without burning political capital on bureaucratic reform?”

The answer has to be no. If they neglect government reform again, Democrats will fail and it will be their fault. This kind of thinking is exactly what has trapped Democrats in the Wile E. Coyote pattern. Every Democratic administration tells itself it can manage around broken systems long enough to achieve its policy goals, and every Democratic administration discovers too late that the systems shape the outcomes more than the managers do – that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

If your after-action report on BIL implementation or IRA deployment doesn’t include recommendations for structural, government-wide changes to federal hiring, procurement, or budgeting systems that go beyond executive action, you’re missing the real lesson. Any serious, forward-looking policy agenda must insist on government reform as an unavoidable and non-negotiable first step, including:

• Reforming the civil service so that it is simpler to administer, faster to deploy, and more competitive in the labor market. The entire system is an outgrowth of an industrial-age approach to management and needs to be replaced wholesale, not just tinkered with at the edges;

• Reducing administrative procedure that binds government more excessively than industry and puts publicly-sponsored enterprise at a structural disadvantage. Helping people is hard enough without having to comply with increasingly onerous rules on things like public comment and procurement that add lots of time and little value;

• Taking back control from contractors and vendors, that is, investing in internal capacity first before turning to a services and technology industrial base that is too often incentivized to keep the government broken. The government doesn’t need to do everything itself, but it needs to close the sophistication gap with industry to ensure it can actually manage vendors; and

• Fixing the broken appropriations process that denies both Congress and presidents the ability to make deliberate choices, instead favoring arbitrary adjustments to continuing resolutions. Complicated budget scoring and procedural arcana haven’t stopped yawning deficits, but they have made the process so cumbersome and unintuitive that agencies and Congress have given up.

If this seems hard, that’s because it is. But, the good news is that it’s been done before. Throughout American history there are windows that open and allow for transformative legislative session progress. The last two were in the postwar 1940s and throughout the 1970s, a decade of remarkable productivity both before and after Watergate. Americans are still living today in the world built by Congress in those years. However, just as companies build up “technical debt” by putting off upgrades to their systems for years, the government has built up significant “policy debt” by refusing to make these updates to its operating model while the system decayed.

Now the bill is coming due.

Fixing things, though, requires engaging with the political process that Democrats have increasingly tried to avoid. Congressional politics are indeed awful. They’re slow, frustrating, often irrational, and almost always unsatisfying. But they’re also the only way to change the underlying rules that govern how the federal government operates. You can’t avoid Congress forever and Democrats who think they can are deluding themselves. While it’s true that conservative legal theorists and the Supreme Court continue to grant new powers to the President, Democrats must understand that these are asymmetric tools not fit for their purposes: they can break but they cannot build. Prioritizing government reform may be politically or personally painful for committed partisans, but it’s the only way to prevent greater pain later.

If Democrats don’t internalize and act on this lesson now, the next Democratic president, whoever and whenever that is, will find themselves in the exact same situation as their predecessors and as Wile E. Coyote: running fast in midair off the side of the cliff, feeling like they’re making progress right up until they look down and realize they’re in free fall.

Wile E. Coyote never learns his lesson, but that doesn’t mean Democrats can’t now. The cartoon physics of American politics may be absurd, but unlike actual physics, Congress has the power to change them. The question is whether anyone has the guts to try.

Gabe Menchaca is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center and, among many other things, is a former management staffer at the Office of Management and Budget and former management consultant. At Niskanen, he writes about civil service reform, the state capacity crisis, and other government management issues.

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In an 1887 essay on “The Study of Administration,” Woodrow Wilson celebrated that the subject was finally getting its due. Administration, concerned with the implementation of policy rather than its creation, had long been overlooked. Generations of political thinkers had asked, “Who shall make law, and what shall that law be?” Only recently, Wilson noted, had scholars begun to grapple with a second, equally vital question: “how law should be administered with enlightenment, with equity, with speed, and without friction.”

Wilson, who began his career as one of the nation’s first scholars of public administration, would marvel at our current moment, when questions of administrative governance have moved to the forefront of political discourse. Across the ideological spectrum — from DOGE’s attempts to eliminate bureaucracy to Abundance’s push to strengthen it — debates over how public administration can be made more fair, effective, and democratic have become central.

In these debates about the future of the administrative state, Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s National Performance Review — the initiative popularly known as “Reinventing Government” — has become a touchstone. Whether viewed as a promising model or a cautionary tale, Reinventing Government is frequently cited as a case study in the challenges and possibilities of executive-led administrative reform.

But the lessons we draw from Reinventing Government will be incomplete if we fail to recognize how it was shaped by more than a century of debate and reform of American administration. Because in the hundred-plus years between Wilson’s “The Study of Administration” and Clinton and Gore’s “Reinventing Government,” Americans never really stopped arguing over how to make administration both effective and democratic.

The long view reveals that public administration in the United States has been shaped by competing ideas about how to discern a public mandate and hold officials accountable to it. Evolving answers to this question gave rise to different formulas for navigating the three major tensions that shape every bureaucracy: between central control and flexibility, political responsiveness and neutrality, and managerial efficiency and democratic input. In the prewar era, administration was legitimated on the premise that it was a politically neutral vehicle for the execution of a unified political will emanating from the top. After World War II, however, this belief in administrative neutrality collapsed. New theories and practices of administration instead emphasized decentralization and responsiveness to diverse political and market forces.

Today’s reform efforts are reconfigurations of these existing paradigms: on the left, Abundance-aligned thinkers call for an empowered bureaucracy free of both top-down and bottom-up constraints on administrators’ ability to act in the “public interest.” On the right, Trump allies seek to recast the bureaucracy as a partisan instrument for advancing the president’s agenda. Neither effort adequately resolves the tensions that have bedeviled administrative reformers since Wilson, leaving the future of American bureaucracy — and democracy — uncertain.

The president and his technocrats

Modern public administration developed at the turn of the 20th century, when Americans explored new theories of government suited to an expanding administrative state. As Wilson had observed in his 1887 essay, the study of politics had long neglected administration. With the post-Civil War state assuming new responsibilities in response to rapid industrialization, and beginning to shrug off the discredited patronage system, Americans sought new principles to guide how a growing cadre of civil servants would operate within democratic government.

Early scholars of administration like Wilson offered answers, declaring administration a nonpartisan science separate from, but accountable to, political will. “Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” Wilson argued, likening it to a science or a “field of business.” Wilson therefore welcomed the advance of a “a technically schooled civil service” which, “drilled … into perfected organization, with appropriate hierarchy,” would impartially execute the law, realizing the will of American democracy. It was a prescription consistent with his view of the president as a figure who would lead an enlightened public to grant him mandates, which the bureaucracy would then implement without meddling from petty interests.

In the decades that followed, Wilson’s politics-administration binary became standard in the emerging discipline, which legitimated the expanding administrative state on the premise that it would faithfully execute top-down political ends. Frank Goodnow’s 1900 Politics and Administration: A Study in Government affirmed the distinction between the two domains, emphasizing that administration would be “subjected to the control of politics.” Other works in the burgeoning field stressed the role of the president in ensuring administrative accountability. In 1926, Leonard D. White’s Introduction to the Study of Public Administration recommended centralized administrative hierarchies; these would enable the chief executive to guide the activities of administrators, whose purview was limited to “the most efficient utilization of the resources.” Thirty years on from Wilson’s essay, his thesis had become orthodoxy: Administration was a technical function carried out by trained experts under the direction of elected leaders, foremost the president. Limited exceptions for independent agencies (justified, in part, by their perceived neutrality and quasi-legislative functions) did not alter the Progressives’ commitment to presidential direction over the lion’s share of the administrative state.

Over the same period, these logics were haltingly incorporated into the development of the Progressive-era federal government. From the 1880s onward, the expansion of the merit system — formalized by the Pendleton Act of 1883 — gradually replaced the patronage; by World War I, a majority of federal jobs had been reclassified as merit positions. When the administrative state expanded further during the New Deal, classical public administration doctrine governed its development. In 1937, FDR appointed Louis Brownlow — a protégé of Wilson — to lead a reform of the executive branch. His team of public administration experts sought to establish the president as the “center of energy, direction, and administrative management” over an impartial civil service, recommending that the merit system be extended and the executive branch centralized to better ensure presidential oversight.

When the reforms took effect in 1939, public administration scholars hailed them as the fulfillment of their longstanding vision of a neutral, expert-led bureaucracy accountable to the president, a political authority who would channel the will of the public. It would be a short-lived triumph.

Disillusionment and the New Public Administration

During World War II, as the administrative state drew increasing criticism from Americans frustrated by wartime bureaucracy, public administration scholars began to question the structures they had once championed.

Under the shadow of totalitarian regimes, the politics-administration binary that had underpinned prewar administrative theory collapsed. For many public administration experts, the Nazi state exemplified the perils of impartial administrative bodies that imagined themselves as merely executing orders. Neutral administration, once seen as an instrument of democracy, now appeared dangerously susceptible to authoritarian manipulation. Wartime scholars argued that treating politics and administration as separate — as had become standard the field — was a “dangerous fallacy” that could enable the use of “administrative techniques intrinsically incompatible with the underlying philosophy of democratic government.”

In response to these concerns, public administration experts revised their doctrines. Scholars argued that the “complete separation of means from ends is usually impossible” and that administration needed to be “related to and pointed toward the political.” In 1948, Dwight Waldo’s pathbreaking The Administrative State cemented the new paradigm when it declared the “simple division of government into politics-and-administration … inadequate” and asserted that public administration was “at its heart normative.”

In contrast to prewar scholars, who called for the creation of centralized hierarchies that would assert political control over impartial administration, postwar scholars emphasized the merits of decentralized forms that enabled individual administrators to exercise discretion. Reform efforts throughout the 1940s and 1950s reflected these new directions. The major reorganization effort of the late 1940s — a follow to up the Brownlow Commission a decade earlier — recommended that many agency functions be decentralized. Other reforms sought to reassert a relationship between politics and administration by exempting some federal employees from the merit system, thus creating more political roles within the civil service.

In the 1960s, demands for reform heightened as new political movements mobilized around persistent dissatisfaction with the administrative state. Theories of interest group pluralism — which held that administration remained sensitive to citizens via interest groups representing their preferences — fell out of favor, giving rise to a public interest movement that sought to augment citizens’ direct participation in the administrative process through lawsuits and legislation like the 1966 Freedom of Information Act. At the same time, New Left–inspired demands for participatory, bottom-up democracy amplified the postwar doubts about Wilsonian ideals of administrative neutrality. In response, a new generation of public administration scholars not only rejected the traditional politics–administration dichotomy, but took the next step with theories that envisioned administrators as active agents, empowered to engage with and respond to the publics they served.

On the right, proponents of public choice theory rejected Wilson by name, arguing that the neutrality and centralization he endorsed made administration rigid and undemocratic, unable to “respond to diverse preferences among citizens.” Instead, they argued that administrative bodies should operate like private sector firms, competing to meet the needs of citizens as “consumers of public goods.” Competition and market logics — not hierarchy and impartiality — would enable democratic administration, they argued, advocating the contracting out of government functions.

By the close of the 1960s, the field had undergone so much revision that scholars were declaring the advent of a “New Public Administration.” Observers noted that it amounted to a full-circle shift in administrative doctrine. Wilson and his prewar cohort had asserted “politically neutral competence with executive leadership” as a necessary corrective to Jacksonian patronage. Now, public administrators were in search of mechanisms that would ensure bureaucracy remained responsive to bottom-up democratic demands.

Markets as the model

Administrative reform efforts in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s reflected this shift. Carter’s 1978 civil service reform, driven by advocates of New Public Administration, abolished the Civil Service Commission, marking a partial retreat from the longstanding belief that impartiality needed to be preserved through hierarchical merit systems. In its place, the reform established the Office of Personnel Management and introduced pay-for-performance systems, borrowing from private-sector models in an effort to create incentives for responsiveness and results.

The Reagan administration continued the postwar shift away from prewar ideals and injected a stronger ideological coloring with its attacks on “big government.” Donald Devine was appointed to lead the newly created Office of Personnel Management; an outspoken critic of Wilsonian theory, he rejected past generations’ efforts to neutralize administration, arguing that a civil service ostensibly insulated from politics had produced a bureaucracy unaccountable to democratic control. Under his leadership, OPM pursued reforms that attacked this structure by slashing the career civil service and expanding the influence of political appointees. “There is no value-free public administration,” Devine declared, calling instead for a system “organized and administered according to political principles.”

The administrative state no longer presumed a singular public will, but instead sought to accommodate a multiplicity of interests through competition and marketized service delivery. As one scholar observed in the wake of the Reagan-era reforms: “Any emerging administrative doctrine must rest politically on a … bottom-up, market-oriented progressivism that has successfully challenged the tradition of top-down positive government.”

It was under this paradigm that Clinton and Gore’s “Reinventing Government” initiative took shape. Drawing on a 1992 bestseller by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, the reform sought to reorient administration around the principles that had displaced prewar doctrine. In the book, Osbourne and Gaebler argued that the administrative forms pursued by “Young Progressives” like Woodrow Wilson had become “slow, inefficient, and impersonal.” Instead, they sought to make administration “lean, decentralized, and innovative” by employing “competition, consumer choice, and other nonbureaucratic mechanisms to get things done as creatively and effectively as possible.”

Osborne, who became a senior adviser to the administration, helped translate these ideas into the National Performance Review, which directed agencies to treat citizens as “customers,” decentralize authority to frontline workers, reduce regulations, and use competition and incentives to drive performance. In addition, the administration authorized voluntary departures from the civil service, reducing it by 400,000. Assessments of the program emphasized that — in direct contradiction to the Wilsonian paradigm — the reform elevated “values of individual choice, the provision of incentives, the use of competition, and the market as a model for government.” It seemed to have done so at the expense of a unified sense of the “public,’” with one critic remarking that the concept been reduced to “the sum of atomistic individuals” or the “aggregate of private interests.”

The president’s partisans v. the nebulous “public interest”

Over the 20th century, competing theories of administration shaped the American administrative state. The prewar model, anchored in a rigid politics-administration dichotomy, envisioned a centralized, merit-based bureaucracy as a neutral executor of a unified, top-down political will. In the postwar era, growing doubts about the feasibility and desirability of neutrality led to a new paradigm. This vision recognized administration’s inherently normative character, favored decentralization, and embraced the demands of bottom-up political engagement. This perspective eventually evolved into a market-oriented approach prioritizing choice and competition over centralized control and collective purpose.

In contemporary reform efforts, we see new configurations of these priorities. As Andrea Katz and Noah Rosenblum have shown, allies of Donald Trump have revived and adapted a Progressive-era theory of the “unitary executive” in which “all nonjudicial and nonlegislative government actors must report to the President in an unbroken chain of command.”

This appeal to Progressive-era theories of executive leadership is striking, especially given that the Trump administration largely rejects the broader Wilsonian vision of a professional, merit-based civil service insulated from partisan influence. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — authored in part by Donald Devine, the ardent Wilson critic who led Reagan’s reform efforts — called on the president to “dismantle the administrative state” by shrinking the career bureaucracy and expanding presidential control through political appointments. In office, Trump is realizing much of this vision. Mass layoffs carried out by the “Department of Government Efficiency” have reduced the size of the career service. Meanwhile, via executive orders now under court challenge, Trump has established classifications to expand the number of political appointments in federal agencies. It’s a combination that suggests, contra Wilson’s vision, a return to patronage politics and a government comprised of partisan loyalists.

On the left, Abundance-aligned thinkers have begun their own quest for new theories and practices of administration. While strongly rejecting the Trump administration’s approach, they share its sense that administration is overdue for reform. As they tell it, a dysfunctional bureaucracy is to blame for the yawning gap between policy goals and actual outcomes.

Their diagnosis is that — whether from a prewar impulse to limit bureaucrats’ policymaking power or a postwar one to ensure their democratic accountability — we’ve put too many limitations on what the civil service can achieve, creating a crisis in 21^st century administration. As Jennifer Pahlka tells it in her 2023 Recoding America, requirements that “administrators simply follow orders from above and not exercise their own judgment” are not only “a delusion,” but an impediment to collaboration and problem-solving. However, the bottom-up, participatory ethos that challenged Wilsonian theory has proved equally problematic. Efforts to “democratize” administration by making it accountable to the public were meant to prevent an “arbitrary authority who might act imperiously,” Pahlka observes, but they’ve resulted in “procedure-heavy, cumbersome, and lengthy decision-making processes.” Efforts at contracting out have been equally unsatisfying, hampering the government’s abilities to develop its own capacities.

The solution for Pahlka is to empower administrators, giving them more control not only in “the art of getting things done,” but in “deciding what to do in the first place.” We need to “trust people in government to make smart tradeoffs in the service of meeting people’s needs,” she argues, holding that “they must be able to decide what to do,” impeded neither by overly rigid top-down directives nor by bottom-up procedural hurdles that stall action.

Other Abundance-aligned thinkers place even greater emphasis on postwar efforts to prioritize “citizen voice,” which they argue have made government ineffective. As Marc Dunkelman describes it, Abundance seeks a middle ground between “Hamiltonian” faith in centralized power and “Jeffersonian” aversion to it — the latter of which has dominated since the 1960s and has inserted “so many checks into the system that government has been rendered incompetent.” Steve Teles explains: “The counterintuitive insight that unites Abundance is that to achieve big goals, bureaucracy requires fewer procedural constraints.” Abundance demands the opposite: “bureaucratic autonomy.”

Their calls reflect a nostalgia for Progressives’ affirmative understanding of bureaucrats as champions of a now-eroded sense of a “public interest.” “Progressive and New Deal state-builders embraced a results-oriented, non-legalistic approach to administrative power,” Nicholas Bagley writes. Abundance wants that back, along with its appeals to a “public interest” that went extinct in the postwar era. It’s a term invoked throughout the Abundance literature. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson lament that administration has become “so consumed trying to balance its manifold interests that it can no longer perceive what is in the public’s interest.” Dunkelman argues that the concept should be the current “movement’s north star.”

How this “public interest” should be deciphered is less clear. Abundance thinkers argue that bureaucrats need to be held “accountable to outcomes” — but they don’t specify who would determine them. In the Progressive era, the president — as head of the administrative branch — was charged with enacting the public’s will. But Abundance-aligned thinkers are unlikely endorse the “unitary executive” theory now favored by Trump. Instead, they reject both the postwar emphasis on bottom-up accountability and the prewar model of top-down presidential control, leaving open what mechanisms will ensure accountability within the empowered administrative state they envision. Thus, the Abundance movement’s call for bureaucratic autonomy and renewed commitment to the “public interest” echoes Progressive ideals but lacks the institutional clarity that underpinned the Wilsonian framework. By dismissing both proceduralism and centralized executive authority, Abundance advocates propose revitalizing the administrative state — yet leave ambiguous to whom, and how, it should ultimately be answerable.

The upshot is that contemporary efforts at reform have scrambled the matrix of 20th century administrative theory — breaking apart the ties between a neutral civil service and executive control on the one hand, and between a more normative spirit of administration and bottom-up responsiveness on the other. Once-dominant binaries —politics versus administration, centralization versus decentralization, neutrality versus responsiveness — have fractured, leaving behind a field animated by unresolved tensions. Today’s reformers seek a government that is effective yet democratic, decisive yet deliberative, and accountable yet autonomous. But the underlying theory of how to reconcile these competing demands remains unsettled.

Thus, the century-long evolution of administrative thought circles back to a familiar dilemma: how to construct a government capable of bold action without sacrificing democratic legitimacy. Whether contemporary reformers can resolve this tension remains the central question for the future of the American administrative state.

Casey Eilbert is a postdoctoral fellow at the SNF Agora Center at Johns Hopkins University, where she’s writing an intellectual history of bureaucracy in the modern United States. She received her PhD from the History Department at Princeton University in 2024.

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After almost a year packed with news about mass layoffs, “voluntary” resignations, and early retirements, the effects of the Trump administration’s campaign to remake the federal workforce are coming into focus. The total impact of headcount reductions for 2025 is around 300,000 positions on net, according to the Director of the Office of Personnel Management. This would put the federal workforce at around 2 million to 2.1 million at the end of 2025 – a reduction of 10-15 percent, primarily achieved through voluntary separations and early retirements. In other words, for the first time in a while, this chart will look a little bit different next year:

Many Americans would be surprised to learn that the federal workforce has remained remarkably stable since the late 1960s, fluctuating between 2 million and 2.3 million employees. As a result, the size of the civil service has decreased dramatically as a percentage of the population, even though it does a lot more today than it did in the Johnson administration. The federal bureaucracy, in other words, has already been doing more with less for decades. A headcount reduction of the magnitude we saw this year, however, is almost unheard of – almost.

As the chart suggests, this is not the first time Americans have indulged the fantasy of running a modern state on an even smaller headcount. The 1990s saw reductions at a similar scale to 2025’s (albeit spread out over many years), and that period has much to teach us about what the public can expect this time.

Thirty years before Elon Musk arrived in Washington, Bill Clinton began his first term by assigning Al Gore to lead an initiative aimed at “reinventing government.” This multi-year effort focused on shrinking the federal workforce, improving efficiency, and positioning the government for the post-Cold War era. From 1993 to 1998, the National Performance Review (NPR) and the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (the latter incorporating the former) pursued this vision with notable results — by 2000, the government looked and functioned very differently compared to 1992.

Reinventing Government has served as a convenient foil for both critics and defenders of the Trump administration’s “efficiency” push. Critics from the left point out that Clinton’s effort proceeded more methodically, involved Congress, and tried to treat federal workers with dignity — all values that this White House appears to eschew in favor of swinging the hammer and just seeing what breaks. On the other hand, defenders from the right point out that the Clinton administration successfully reduced the federal workforce by 400,000 people, or about 20 percent of the civilian workforce, through many of the same mechanisms that the Trump administration is now employing, such as layoffs (or Reductions in Force in the jargon of government).

But if the outcome we are focused on is effective government, both narratives miss the point.

Clinton obeyed red lights while Trump is speeding through them, but both paths lead into the same trap. Both administrations became overly focused on headcount as their measure of success and (in the process) started making many choices that undermine the government’s long-term state capacity.

The Clinton administration had good ideas about reform

In the classic diagnosis of the Clintonites, the federal government of 1993 was procedurally bloated and full of middle management that did little to advance agencies’ missions. Writing in 1993, the National Performance Review diagnosed the problem this way: “Is government inherently incompetent? Absolutely not. Are federal agencies filled with incompetent people? No. The problem is much deeper: Washington is filled with organizations designed for an environment that no longer exists.” It added: “The federal government is filled with good people trapped in bad systems: budget systems, personnel systems, procurement systems, financial management systems, information systems.”

The idea was to improve the government’s ability to deliver by reducing red tape, providing federal employees with more flexibility, partnering with the private sector where it had more expertise, and moving to more ‘performance-based’ approaches to carrying out the business of government. If this sounds like it rhymes with the work of contemporary critics like Ezra Klein or my colleague Jen Pahlka, that’s because it does. Much of the Clinton administration’s diagnosis still rings true today. One could imagine this line from the NPR’s report being pulled from a New York Times op-ed discussing the Biden administration’s rural broadband program: “It is almost as if federal programs were designed not to work. In truth, few are ‘designed’ at all; the legislative process simply churns them out, one after another, year after year. It’s little wonder that when asked if ‘government always manages to mess things up,’ two-thirds of Americans say ‘yes.’”

This critique was basically correct in 1993, and it remains so in 2025. Which begs the question: If the federal government figured this out 30 years ago, why are we still in the same place?

“The era of big government is over”

Notwithstanding the official rhetoric about good people in bad systems, underlying the NPR’s argument was a very dim view of the (at the time) 2.1-million-person federal workforce and its role in hindering efficient government. Bob Stone, who directed the effort, expressed this position in stark terms:

Roughly one of three federal employees had the job of interfering with work of another two. We called them the forces of micromanagement and distrust, and we wanted to reduce the number of inspectors general, controllers, procurement officers and personnel specialists.

The thinking was that if a significant portion of the federal workforce was mostly serving as an obstacle, it was worth shedding their jobs entirely. Congress, agreeing with this view, granted the Clinton administration the authority to make the cuts legally and expeditiously. By the end of the decade, the Clinton team reckoned they had managed to reduce the federal workforce by 426,000 jobs. Taken at face value, this approach is completely reasonable. If a third of the federal workforce is doing nothing to add to mission effectiveness, and if you could reorganize to be successful without them, then reducing the size of the federal workforce by 20 percent seems like a great first step. To its credit, the administration set about doing just that.

However, political and practical realities asserted themselves. The president, wanting to promise something tangible and measurable to show progress, walked into the Capitol for the 1996 State of the Union and declared: “The era of big government is over.” He promised to cut the size of government by several hundred thousand people. In making that commitment, however, he turned a useful measure of transformation (savable headcount) into a target (roles cut). The critical step of achieving larger programmatic reforms to keep things running with a smaller workforce dropped out of the conversation. From there, the old management heuristic that “when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure” insisted on its rightness again.

Some of this is Congress’ fault. Leaders on the Hill got behind the administration’s effort to cull the workforce, but did not uphold their end of the bargain. The personnel cuts were supposed to be downstream of program reform; instead, they ended up coming first and the reforms never materialized. As John Kamensky, the Deputy Director of the NPR, wrote in 2020:

The ‘thoughtful’ cuts did not happen as envisioned. Congress intervened, mandating cuts at a faster pace, without providing the flexibility envisioned by streamlining personnel or acquisition requirements.

This meant that agencies were left scrambling, trying to figure out how to reduce headcount without the ability to actually de-proceduralize the work. To minimize the damage, agencies were forced to eliminate positions that they felt they could make do without or easily outsource. That meant either eliminating entire functions or trimming large numbers of junior, clerical, and administrative roles that could be replaced by contractors or were primarily intended to prepare new hires for more challenging work.

Cutting the jobs, leaving the red tape

Process reform was an afterthought. Most of the signature changes to the process were cosmetic at best or operationally-challenging at worst. Take the Byzantine world of federal human resources. As Jeff Neal, a former HR leader at DOD and DHS argued, the reforms:

…gave recruiting authority to agencies, but made them follow a 350-page OPM Handbook.…It eliminated the [Federal Personnel Manual], but kept the complex regulations and eliminated many of the OPM staff who were the real experts who could explain all those regulations. Not to worry – agencies had HR experts who could help. At least they did until the NPR cut them by half, leaving federal HR offices unable to do anything but the most essential work. The initial ideas of the NPR may have been sound, although the original report had a lot of snarky anecdotes. But, at least with respect to federal HR, the NPR was a half-baked set of reforms that broke the mold and did not put something functional in its place.

By only going halfway and adopting a cut-first approach without a plan to meaningfully transform the entire system, the Clinton team wound up hobbling the HR enterprise rather than reforming it.

At the same time, the administration made several logical but shortsighted human capital management choices. To hit its aggressive reduction targets, it used blunt instruments like voluntary buyout offerings, early retirement, and layoffs.

As we are currently witnessing in the Trump administration, these tools are poorly targeted. In the case of voluntary offerings, the best employees (who consider themselves as well-suited to compete for private sector jobs) are often more likely to self-select into the programs.

Layoffs had the opposite effect: Because of the rigid statutorily-mandated procedure required to execute them, they disproportionately led to the most junior and least-tenured staff being pink-slipped.

Between 1992 and 2000, the total number of human resources staff fell by 24 percent, including a 43 percent drop in HR assistants; the number of procurement specialists dipped by 16 percent while the number of procurement support staff slid by 59 percent; the number of budget assistants dropped by 27 percent; the number of financial management/accounting jobs by 27 percent; and so on.

These cuts had a knock-on effect that was no less transformative. The share of federal workers under the age of 35 shrank from 26 percent in 1992 to under 17 percent in 2000, while the share over the age of 50 jumped from 25 percent to over 36 percent.

Due to the primarily administrative and white-collar nature of government work, the federal workforce had long been somewhat older and grayer than the broader national workforce. However, these reforms supercharged this trend, taking the federal government even further out of sync with the rest of the labor market. By 2000, in many sectors of the government, there were simply no junior people learning the ropes.

Taken together with the departure of people who had enticing private-sector options, this meant that the government walked both its best talent and its future leaders out the door together, all at once, to hit a target.

Government didn’t actually shrink; it just got harder to see and manage

In retrospect, by focusing on what they could control – namely, headcount reductions – the Clinton team succeeded in making good on the president’s headline promise, but at the expense of long-term state capacity. They succeeded in convincing the public that government’s size was the core issue, yet failed to meaningfully reduce the scope of the government’s responsibilities. In doing so, they constrained the management options available to future administrations. In fact, as the country entered the 21st century, the Clinton-era mantra of “do more with less” became “do the same with more, but hide the headcount.”

With agencies under intense political pressure to keep official headcounts steady, over time they turned to contractors to fill in the gaps. This led to an explosion in the “blended workforce” – which included contractors, grantees, and other forms of non-public employees directly supporting agency missions. By 2005, this total workforce had more people than it did in 1994 when accounting for contractors and grantees, according to analysis by a team at Brookings. Outlays to contractors shot up, especially at civilian agencies, smashing records every year. By 2023, there were nearly 2.1 contractors for every federal employee. Over time, various analyses have generally found that these contractors are more expensive than their federal counterparts. In other words the government is likely paying a premium for the dubious benefit of running a hidden workforce.

To make things worse, Reinventing Government had decimated the contracting workforce, meaning that fewer personnel had to manage more and increasingly complex contracts. The size of the procurement workforce didn’t rebound in nominal terms until 2009 and, when accounting for the real growth in contracting outlays, has never really recovered. In 1992, the government spent $13.8 million (in 2024 dollars) on contractors for every procurement professional. In 2024, that number was nearly $17 million. At the same time, the federal procurement agents’ mechanical workload grew significantly: the average contracting specialist processed 622 discrete contract actions in 1992; by 2024, that number had grown to 2,718. Some of this can be attributed to higher productivity, but it’s also the case that contracts are more complex now than they were 30 years ago.

This mismatch is implicated in some of the most visible failures in federal program delivery over the past few decades – think Healthcare.gov in 2013 or FAFSA in 2023. But they also manifest daily in less-publicized ways, creating persistent challenges for federal managers across the government.

This is not to suggest that contractors are inherently problematic. On the contrary, when deployed wisely, they can bring valuable expertise and efficiency. But doing so requires skilled, experienced federal management – a capability that weakened significantly after the Clinton-era cuts. Like any muscle, this one atrophied when it wasn’t used.

Government’s HR is still broken

Not everything can be outsourced. And when the government does hire directly, the lingering effects of Reinventing Government are still deeply felt. For one, despite staging a funeral for the 10,000 page Federal Personnel Manual in 1993 in the lobby of the Office of Personnel Management and firing a quarter of the HR professionals in the federal government, the Clinton team did little to change its fundamental hiring process.

There were some attempts at reform. The administration experimented with workforce innovations, including converting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Federal Aviation Commission, and Federal Student Aid into “performance-based organizations” that had exemptions from many civil service rules. It also launched personnel demonstration projects like AcqDemo at the Defense Department.

While these initiatives showed some promise, broader reform has remained out of reach. Many of these pilots have simply lingered in “trial” status for more than two decades. Meanwhile, a meaningful update to the foundational framework – the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which still governs most of the federal civil service – has stalled due to Congress’s persistent lack of interest in comprehensive reform.

Meanwhile, the damage Reinventing Government inflicted on the federal government’s talent pipeline has never been reversed. The top-line headcount returned to “normal” in the late 2000s as the War on Terror and the expansion of the security state elongated the executive branch’s to-do list, but the number of early-career federal employees never fully rebounded. In 1992, the median pay grade for federal workers on the General Schedule – the main pay table for the majority of federal workers since the 1940s – was GS-09, which roughly corresponds to the entry level for those with master’s degrees or a bachelor’s degree holder with two to three years of experience. By 2000, the median job was a GS-11, which roughly corresponds to the entry level for a doctoral degree holder. In 2024, the median federal employee was a GS-12, which typically requires years of specialized experience on top of a bachelor’s and graduate degree. For someone just starting out in their career, there simply aren’t many jobs in government anymore.

This problem isn’t unique to government, but it is uniquely rigid in government given the legally-mandated qualification standards from the 1940s and 1950s. Recent efforts to address these challenges via skills-based hiring have shown some promise, but will not radically change the shape of the federal workforce to something more sustainable without rethinking the underlying classification system entirely.

This means that while other large employers are re-embracing modern versions of the apprenticeship model, training their workforce from novice to expert and into management, the federal government has increasingly closed itself off to early-career talent. Instead, the government continued to fill in only the middle and senior levels of the career ladder, relegating those more junior jobs to contractors, in an effort to manage to the informal ceiling of 2.3 million federal employees that has persisted for decades.

We need to stop digging

The DOGE project, for all its Silicon Valley branding and promises of revolutionary efficiency, has essentially recreated Bill Clinton’s 1990s playbook.

As in the Clinton administration, the 2025 reductions were accomplished primarily by incentivizing both the most experienced employees to retire and the most marketable employees to find private-sector jobs. Similarly, because this round of reductions happened with minimal congressional input and virtually no action to reduce the scope of agency duties, agencies are likely to be left scrambling again to figure out how to do more and more with fewer people. While detailed demographic data about the scope of these changes will not be available for several more months, there’s no reason to think that this bloodletting won’t have the same impact as the last: driving the government’s youngest and brightest out of public service. Inertia may carry the current workforce through the remainder of this term, but the executive branch is, once again, cutting off its pipeline of future leaders — the very people we’ll need to navigate the crises of 2035 and 2045.

Meanwhile, Congress has also largely abdicated its responsibility for managing the executive branch’s to-do list. For all the discussion about reducing the scope of government, Congress passed just one single rescissions package of about $9 billion for foreign aid and public broadcasting, representing less than 0.2 percent of the federal budget. Meanwhile, total federal spending for 2025 has consistently outpaced 2024 as DOGE’s focus on deficits gives way to the practical reality of federal budget economics. The highest-profile cuts (e.g., the dismantling of USAID) have had relatively immaterial impacts on the federal government’s scope of work, and agencies will now, once again, be called on to figure out how to complete their missions without adequate personnel.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s approach may create even graver challenges for the government than Clinton’s did. While the Clinton administration may have held a skeptical view of the federal workforce, it still made an effort to treat public servants with a measure of dignity and respect. Instead, the current approach centers on creating a hostile work environment – one that demoralizes civil servants and drives them out of public service altogether. Careers in government are deliberately being made unattractive to the people we need most: public-spirited, high-achieving, middle-class professionals who want to make a difference. Aspiring public servants must now assume they will always be just one election away from an arbitrary firing, and they will be unsurprisingly hesitant to stake their family’s financial future on such uncertainty. Only the independently wealthy or those with no better prospects will choose to serve, and we will all suffer for it.

The White House and Congress now need to reckon with the ways we’ve diminished both the current administration’s own capacity and the capacity of future presidents to accomplish their congressionally authorized duties. Some agencies, like the IRS, are already looking for ways to unwind the “voluntary” reductions they encouraged just a few months ago. Meanwhile, the administration is asking agencies to prepare strategic workforce plans that presume the ability to hire in targeted areas. But it remains to be seen whether qualified applicants will raise their hands, given the contempt the Trump administration has rained down on public servants. Absent a change in strategy, it seems likely this administration is about to learn the same lesson that the Biden team discovered too late: Hiring is hard. That was true even before this year, and it will be much harder now.

It took years for the architects of Reinventing Government to come to terms with the mistakes they made, but it doesn’t have to be that way this time. Rather than shifting blame or dodging accountability, the administration and their colleagues in Congress need to realize that they’ve fallen into the Clinton trap, get serious about breaking free, and chart a new course.

The best time to fix a mistake is before you make it; the second-best time is today.

Gabe Menchaca is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center and, among many other things, is a former management staffer at the Office of Management and Budget and former management consultant. At Niskanen, he writes about civil service reform, the state capacity crisis, and other government management issues.

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Abundance: How We Build a Better Future, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang

One of the most important challenges of the social sciences is to be able to answer one important question which we ought to be regularly asking ourselves as a society. That question is something like, “Have our decision-making systems become pathological?”

Or perhaps even more pointedly, “Have our decision-making systems become pathological yet?” We know from the past that there is a constantly repeating cycle of institutions being built to solve a particular set of problems, persisting as the world around them develops and changes, then gradually becoming obstacles to progress themselves and needing to be reformed or overturned. It’s just that it’s quite difficult to see this happening without the benefit of hindsight. Denial and sclerosis can be surprisingly comfortable to sink into, particularly when every single year always brings up a new crop of idiots demanding revolution whether it’s needed or not.

Abundance and Breakneck ask whether pathological rot has indeed beset the fleet of institutions we might call the “privatized regulatory state:” the equilibrium that was reached in the USA (and the other Western democracies, although there isn’t much about them in the books) around the end of the 1970s. Broadly speaking, the post-Reagan settlement was that the size and capacity of the government would be reduced as a proportion of society, and it would operate by setting rules that could be enforced by mostly private parties using litigation or a similar judicial process. As the state shrank, the importance of being able to afford a good lawyer grew.

The two sides of the trade go together – assessing compliance with rules on a “yes/no” basis is a less complex task than planning and designing things for yourself. As the public sector developed from producing and constructing things itself to regulating them or drawing up outsourcing contracts, its task became less complicated and the administrative state was able to shrink (in principle; in practice, states kept growing as they were asked to do new things). You can see this as the cognitive basis of the New Public Management approach, of “steering rather than rowing”.

Did it work?

It’s useful to look at a book from 2017, which I think has to be seen as an important precursor of both Abundance and Breakneck. That book was The Captured Economy, by Brink Lindsey (whose earlier book The Age of Abundance discussed the emergence of the compromise we’re talking about) and Steven Teles (who is thanked in the acknowledgements by both Dan Wang and Klein/Thompson). The Captured Economy is an interesting book not least because it represents one of the most rare and surprising things in modern life: public intellectuals who are prepared to consider the possibility that they might previously have gotten it wrong.

The theme of the book is summarized pretty well in the title, as it is all about the ways in which the libertarian, deregulatory, and pro-business agenda from the 1980s onward had ended up creating a society of rent-extractors of various kinds, in which much more energy was expended on protecting those rents than doing anything productive. The subtitle, “How the powerful enrich themselves, slow down growth and increase inequality,” sounds like it could have come from a socialist tract.

In fact, it’s even more interesting than that – it’s a clear-eyed examination of how the underlying model of the post-Reagan years broke down, and particularly how the assumption that market outcomes and property rights would lead to optimal outcomes failed in the real world. It isn’t by any means a total repudiation of “Cato Institute libertarianism,” containing chapters about the perils of occupational licensing and land use regulation alongside those on intellectual property and finance. But the reason it ought to be seen as a precursor to Abundance and Breakneck is that it was an early attempt to take seriously this question that I think is at the heart of Abundance politics: “Have our social and political institutions ceased to deliver?”

Lindsey and Teles were trying to tell some home truths to the Right in 2017: that in the absence of state capacity, the private sector had stopped being the engine of the abundant society and turned into a rent-extraction machine. Klein and Thompson, at least in part, appear to be trying to gently tell similar home truths to the modern Left – that many of them, and many of the institutions they value, are part of that same rent-extraction machine.

The early chapters of Abundance, dealing with housing and urbanism, are the ones which seem to have generated most Discourse, but in many ways the most interesting and serious part of the book comes later on, when Klein and Thompson look at the administration of scientific research in the USA. This is an area where the pathologies of the system can be seen in their clearest form. The business of applying for grants, jumping through procedural hoops, and satisfying requirements of very questionable relevance seems to be one that satisfies nobody, makes nobody happy, and doesn’t deliver results. But of course, it provides a decent living for quite a lot of administrators, all of whom might think of themselves as hard-working public servants, and who would presumably get very angry at being told that what they were doing was extracting rents.

And as with science research grant administration, so with quite a lot of the modern regulatory state. It is a hard thing to accept that you might be part of a system that impedes overall prosperity, or that your primary income stream may come from acting as a type of bridge troll representing some legally privileged party that must be paid off to get out of people’s way. Rent extraction is, of course, what the other guy does; even hereditary landlords prefer to construct a story about themselves as custodians of the shared patrimony. But in the nicest and mildest possible terms, Klein and Thompson are trying to deliver the same message in 2025 as Teles and Lindsay were in 2017: The system isn’t working as intended. There are too few people rowing and too many pretending to steer.

So if a regulatory system with no state capacity turns into a rent-extraction machine, what happens when you have a system that’s all capacity and no regulation? That’s the main subject of Breakneck, in which Dan Wang combines broad admiration of China’s progress since the 1980s with a forthright accounting of the costs.

On the one hand, the “engineering state” has been able to drive rapid industrialization, and Wang makes a strong case that China is either close to or already at a position of technological superiority for any practical purpose. The de-industrialization of the West and the decision to outsource manufacturing industry has meant that all the “process knowledge” of the last few decades has accrued to Chinese companies and industries. Meanwhile, American manufacturing has spent the period “not learning by not doing.” Process improvements and technological gains seem to have a compounding effect, and reshoring production of many advanced products might literally be impossible. If this was all that was happening, a century of Chinese dominance would be a relatively conservative forecast.

But Wang also argues that the massive blunders the Chinese leadership committed in the same period – the one-child policy, the response to the pandemic, the incipient real estate and financial crises – cannot really be seen as anomalies or misfortunes. They are also part of the system. The Chinese government is bad at listening to people, and for this reason its mistakes often have to get really big before they are corrected. An “engineering state” is good at solving the problem presented to it, but information which was not included in the initial problem specification has a very tough time being taken into account at any later date.

And, as the New Zealand road safety slogan used to put it, “the faster you go, the bigger the mess.” It is possible that the Chinese system will end up running out of vitality, as increasing numbers of creative and educated young people decide to leave, or that the overhang of the one-child policy will slow its growth. But these are the optimistic projections. The fear for everyone ought to be that sooner or later, the genius engineers will miss something really important and create a disaster that they cannot contain with a sudden reversal of policy. As anyone who remembers the golden years of finance in the early 2000s might tell you, an unregulated system often looks really fantastic right up until the moment of the crash.

These two books, while similar in message, are very different in style. Dan Wang is racy and outspoken, regularly throwing out sentences like “Engineers can’t take a joke,” or “Europe is a mausoleum,” which make you do the Anthony Bourdain chuckle and mutter, “Really? Wow. Ok, we’re doing this.” It makes for a fun read, and for an interesting contrast with Klein and Thompson’s measured and gentle way of making similar points.

I think this reflects different audiences and objectives. Breakneck is partly a bid to explain China to the outside world and partly a rather touching family and personal memoir of an unrepeatable historical moment. Abundance, although it wears its social science research lightly and carries its argument well, is more consciously structured as a contribution to the national debate, and occasionally makes you a little uncomfortable to be reminded how important it all is. The extent to which Klein and Thompson’s book nevertheless turned into what Mike Konczal called a “discourse generating machine,” despite the authors’ obvious determination to try to persuade rather than enrage, shows how difficult a problem it is to get people to take this thing seriously as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity for self-expression.

Righting the balance between what Jen Pahlka calls “stop energy” and “go energy” is also a problem in which the solution isn’t necessarily as obvious as the authors of these books might hope. Making China’s engineering state a bit more lawyerly is a tough enough ask, but could we really make America’s regulatory society work more like China? Would we want to if we could? The solution to a crisis isn’t always to reverse the actions that caused the problem; you can’t mend someone’s leg by reversing the truck that broke it.

Importantly, “process knowledge” exists in services industries as well as manufacturing ones. America’s society of lawyers has some really good lawyers. Likewise, its bureaucrats, administrators, and bankers are not only good at extracting rents, they are good at defending the system of rent extraction. Many of them seem to have jumped on the new technology of right-wing populism and turned it to their own interests, for example, and those who haven’t should not necessarily be counted out when it comes to developing strategies of self-protection.

The Abundance movement itself is not entirely free of currents whose sincerity could reasonably be doubted, after all. And the syncretic variety of abundance arguments make it potentially a little bit more vulnerable to distortion than some other political tendencies. Rent extraction is, once more, always what the other guy does. It is, I think, very easy to convince yourself that regulation of the things you want more of is an affront to human progress, regulation of things you don’t care about is one more burden on the economy, and regulation of things that affect your life is simply a necessary protection against a runaway engineering state. There are, for example, quite a lot of people whose only Abundance view is the belief that natural habitats are a luxury we can no longer afford, which sounds more like scarcity.

And so I think there is quite good reason to fear the possibility of a state that combines Chinese myopia with American levels of rent extraction. Both nations might be on the way there already, from different directions. To achieve the happy medium rather than the monstrous combination, it’s not enough for the engineering state and the lawyerly society to learn from each other. Both sides would have to be less of themselves.

It is hard to persuade a rent extractor to leave rents on the table, even if they know that doing so is a necessary condition for the survival of the remaining streams of rent, let alone the creation of new ones. And it is often hard to persuade an engineer that all the constraints on a job matter, even when some of them don’t look like the problems studied in engineering school. Unfortunately, necessary changes to social institutions tend to only come when their failures have become absolutely manifest, not when clever authors spot that there is a problem.

If Lindsey and Teles’ book was an obvious precursor to the Abundance agenda, there’s also a less obvious forerunner we might consider. It’s a book that’s concerned not with abundance at all but rather its opposite, bankruptcy. Greece’s Odious Debt, by Jason Manolopoulos, was a polemic published in May 2011, in the very earliest days of the Greek debt crisis. While all three books discussed here so far are attempting to address the question of how we can stop our once-productive social and political institutions from becoming pathological, Manolopolous was forced to ask the same question shortly after the bill became due.

Greece’s Odious Debt contains a thoroughly unsentimental but nonetheless moving history of how the Hellenic Republic got to where it was, and importantly how the combination of financialization, political myopia and the economics of European Monetary Union caused it to spend a decade in a world of false abundance. For a few years, Greek citizens lived well beyond their means, importing Mercedes cars and enjoying a real estate boom. When the crisis happened, they were brought face to face, as few peacetime societies ever are, with two facts: Their system of governance was rotten, and their prosperity was fake.

The economy of Greece has still not recovered; GDP is about 20 percent below its 2008 peak. And its politics have by no means been transformed. So there is no solution here, but there is a lesson. Environmental debts will come due, just like financial ones. So will political and social problems that have been put off to the future because they didn’t appear to have engineering or lawyerly solutions. If we don’t start to address the questions raised by Abundance, we may find that the future contains something that’s capable of breaking our necks.

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After generations of progress, young Americans are falling behind.

We see a nation in decline, with not enough homes, energy, or healthcare to go around, and a government ill-equipped to tackle today’s most pressing challenges. We see the American Dream slipping out of reach, with dwindling opportunities to get ahead and build a good life. We see people stuck, with declining trust, shrinking communities, and a society adrift.

It shouldn’t be this way.

When there’s not enough to go around, it can be tempting to hoard opportunity and mistake caution for progress. In a diminished society, it can feel like a victory to grab what pieces we can, then close our doors, put up barriers, and accept a smaller, less ambitious future. Or perhaps to gamble that in a world of too little for too many, we can join the few at the very top.

But we must resist those impulses. When the problem is that there isn’t enough, the solution is to make more: more homes, more infrastructure, more healthcare, more research, more energy.

Students for Abundance is shaping a generation of leaders to advance programs, policies, and infrastructure that renew our institutions and rebuild the American Dream. We face a long road ahead to break from a status quo that froze the world around us, hobbled the government we rely on, and closed off paths to a better life, but a new era is emerging.

Most of American history is the story of building up. We built great cities where people came to make better lives. We powered our way to mass prosperity. And we invented and deployed the technologies that defined a century of progress.

It felt like we were forever on the upswing. Then we stopped building.

Since the 1970s, American politics has been defined by suspicion of progress. While both parties fought about taxes, foreign policy, and whatever culture-war provocation got people angriest, they largely agreed on two big ideas: that it should be harder to change things and that it should be harder for the government to do things. For our generation, the ladder that allowed our parents and grandparents to ascend was pulled away.

In this era, we made it harder to build houses and apartments. We made it harder to introduce new energy technologies and nearly impossible to build nuclear power. And we made it harder to manufacture and roll out new technologies, even those we invented ourselves. As if building wasn’t hard enough for the private sector, we made it even harder for our government. We layered onerous processes on the government that no private company would ever have to follow. We opened every government project up to lawsuits, giving everyone a veto. And we stripped government of the competence to plan and deliver on big projects. Earlier generations broke the government on purpose and then told us "government" was the problem when it didn't deliver.

We are now facing a crisis: We don’t have enough of the things we need most to build a good life.

These are things like:

• Housing — the foundation of a good life. We haven’t built enough homes in decades, driving prices out of reach. Half of renters now spend more than 30 percent of their income on their home, and the median home costs a record five times the median income. These crushing prices choke mobility, weaken communities, worsen climate change, and deny us jobs and progress.

• Infrastructure — the backbone of movement and connection. We take longer and spend more to complete projects than our peers abroad. Even massive infrastructure investments leave us with fewer trains, buses, and safe roads than we need and longer commutes than anyone wants. These broken systems shrink the map of where people can work, live, and gather, and with it, the hours we have for family, friends, and community.

• Education – the ladder of opportunity and engine of innovation. Higher education costs are soaring, with more and more money going to administrators. Admissions rates at the most prestigious universities have sharply declined while public universities and community colleges have been starved of investment. Meanwhile, our best researchers spend almost as much time navigating bureaucracy as they spend actually doing science.

• Healthcare — the foundation for a long and healthy life. Americans pay the highest prices for healthcare while getting some of the worst outcomes. Among the reasons behind this failure is a shortage of more than 1 million nurses and 65,000 physicians. Shortages are perhaps even more stark for mental health and addiction treatments. Meanwhile, a dearth of hospital beds or alternative places to receive care, exacerbated by market consolidation, drives higher prices that exploit patients.

• Technology — the ideas that build a better world. We once built railroads, airplanes, and rockets and regularly developed cures to deadly diseases, but scientific progress has slowed. The government invests less in bold research, while grant systems reward safe bets over transformative ideas. Even when breakthroughs emerge, we lag in deployment, causing us to fall behind countries racing to build the future.

• Energy — the power that makes everything possible. Energy heats our homes, keeps the lights on, moves us from place to place, and powers the technology we use every day. When energy becomes scarce, everything gets expensive. AI and other breakthroughs will require more power than ever, just as climate change forces us to mobilize clean energy faster than we’ve ever built before.

Addressing our failure to provide each of these goods will be its own challenge, but we see a common pattern. This is a repeated failure of policy, of institutions, and of culture:

• Policies that manufacture scarcity: In nearly every part of life we care about, the rules are rigged to make life harder for those starting out and easier for those already at the top. When we restrict the supply of things we value, their costs soar the moment people need more, and nearly everyone suffers except those who already have more than they need. For example, zoning laws restricting apartments protect the property values of local homeowners while hurting young families. Artificial caps on the number of new doctors and barriers to opening hospitals and clinics keep healthcare costs high. Changing this means challenging the many interests that profit from scarcity.

• Institutions that can’t deliver: From housing to high-speed rail, clean energy to scientific breakthroughs, we need a government that can make big things happen. But our government is stuck in another century. Outdated systems, red tape, and broken processes drag out good projects for years or kill them outright and leave behind a bureaucracy that only the well-resourced know how to navigate. When the government fails, we respond by layering on more of the kinds of procedures that caused it to fail in the first place, fueling a death spiral of mistrust. Earning back trust means rebuilding a government that can deliver.

• A culture of risk aversion and complacency: Achieving big things requires risk-taking and sustained focus. But our funding systems, regulatory processes, and career incentives reward the predictable and legible over the ambitious and potentially extraordinary. In turn, young people with transformative ideas are often told to wait their turn, and our emerging leaders are funneled into familiar tracks rather than pushed to chart new paths that we can’t yet even conceive of. Solving the great challenges of the 21st century demands nothing less than the grit and daring that once built railroads, cured polio, and sent humans to the moon.

Policies, institutions, and culture don’t exist in a vacuum. These failures reinforce each other. Bad policies make weak institutions, and weak institutions make us pass worse policies. Together, weaker institutions and bad policies foster a risk-averse culture. A risk-averse society, in turn, layers on constraints that weaken its institutions and passes policies that produce more scarcity by making change and growth impossible. It’s a system whose worst tendencies exacerbate each other, hurtling our country towards a bleak future where we have to accept decline as inevitable.

Yet certain moments remind us that progress is still possible. During a global pandemic, we created and delivered life-saving vaccines in under a year. Over the course of merely a decade, we cut the cost of solar power by nearly 90 percent. When an overpass on I-95 collapsed in Philadelphia, we rebuilt it in just 12 days. These examples prove that we still know how to build when we choose to.

We believe we must direct the same ambition, the same urgency toward all of the things people need most. This would mean a future where:

• We can afford a home by the time we’re 30 and have affordable options at every stage of life, even in the most sought-after areas.

• Quick, reliable transit connects places with few opportunities to those with many, and makes it easy to reach friends and family, whether by high-speed rail, buses, subways, or safe, modern roads.

• Colleges serve more students, lift up the disadvantaged, and prepare their graduates to work for the public good.

• Healthcare is affordable and readily available, with better treatments for chronic illnesses and new life-saving cures deployed widely.

• Breakthrough research turns technology into useful products within months, freeing us to spend more time on what matters most.

• Clean, cheap, and abundant energy drives down all costs and fuels industries beyond our imagination.

This is the world we envision. It’s a world where we deliver on the things people need to live a good life and push the frontiers of what people imagine their lives could be. It’s a world where broken institutions like Congress, federal and state bureaucracies, and universities have earned back our trust. And it’s a world where Americans can once again find community and purpose, act with agency, and rest assured that their lives are getting better.

Students for Abundance exists to realize this future. We are fighting to improve policies, reform institutions, and cultivate a hopeful and forward-looking culture. By shaping a generation of leaders, Students for Abundance is laying the foundation for a new era in which we renew our institutions and rebuild the American Dream.

Representing red and blue states, public and private schools, and institutions big and small, our chapters will advance the Abundance Agenda through education, engagement, and community. Across the country, students are already hosting speaker series, teaching courses, starting projects with campus administration — and we are only getting started.

Victoria Ren is co-founder and Executive Director of Students for Abundance, which grew out of a group she founded at Stanford in early 2025. Matthew Meyers is co-founder and Policy Director of Students for Abundance and serves as Abundance Coordinator at the Niskanen Center. Maxwell Stern is co-founder and Organizing Director of Students for Abundance and is establishing a chapter at the University of California, Berkeley.

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This article was previously published at EconLib.org.

In 1961, Vera Coking and her husband purchased a home in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They paid $20,000 for the modest three-story house, or about $215,000 in 2025 dollars. Coking was looking for a summertime home, not an investment. But if she had been looking to make money, she would have been hard pressed to do better. Twenty years later, Coking received an offer of $1 million from Bob Guccione of Penthouse, who wanted the land for a casino he was developing. She turned it down. Then, in 1993, another casino developer tried to buy the land to use as a limousine parking lot. Once again, Coking refused the offer.

This time, however, the developer refused to take “no” for an answer. Since a voluntary exchange wasn’t going to work, the developer went to the state instead. Specifically, he turned to the state’s Casino Redevelopment Agency, which sought to use the power of eminent domain to kick Coking out of her house against her will. A new parking lot, the developer argued, would better serve the public interest than an old, single-family home. And if it happened to serve the developer’s private financial interest along the way, well, that was just a one of those happy accidents along the road to progress.

Luckily for Coking, her case attracted the attention of The Institute for Justice, the public interest law firm. With their help, Coking was able to secure a modest victory in court. She kept her house, not because the court rejected the principle of eminent domain altogether, but because in this particular case, the state’s plan put “no limits” on what the developer could do with the land, in the words of Superior Court Judge Richard Williams. The developer, one Donald J. Trump, would have to park his customers’ limousines somewhere else.

Markets, government, and the barriers to abundance

I was reminded of the Coking case while reading two recent books, both of which argue persuasively that America has made it too difficult to build new things, and that making building easier again could unleash a new wave of prosperity and growth. Those books, Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, are noteworthy in many respects, but not least because of their rather surprising political orientation. Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman all identify as progressive liberals, and their books are aimed at convincing the center-left to adopt the kind of pro-growth position that is more often associated with the political right. To a liberalism that has devoted much of its energies to arguments about how to divide the economic pie more equitably, Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman seem to suggest that we focus instead on how to make that pie bigger for everyone.

That suggestion – which I should stress is only implicit in the two books – echoes a point that has long been made by conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians. And, indeed, there is much else in these books for such readers to appreciate. As the authors demonstrate with a vast range of specific examples, a big part of the reason why Americans haven’t built as much as we could and should is that government has gotten in the way. Left to their own devices, free markets are generally amazing in their capacity to discover innovative, efficient, and scalable ways to produce the things that people want. But when government rules impede markets’ ability to build new housing, we wind up with a crisis of affordability and homelessness. When government puts up barriers to the development and marketing of new pharmaceuticals, we wind up waiting decades for cures that could have been delivered in years or months. In these and a host of other similar cases, unleashing abundance means cutting back on the size and scope of government and letting the creative destruction of free markets rip.

However, cutting back on government regulation of the market, according to the authors, is merely a necessary step toward abundance. It is not a sufficient one. The problem is not merely that government has hobbled markets; it is that government has also hobbled itself. A variety of factors, including the “rights revolution” of the second half of the 20th century and an increasing emphasis on rigid proceduralism, have left government crippled in its ability to get things done. However well-intentioned these developments may have been, their effect was to establish a host of new “veto gates,” each capable of bringing projects to a grinding halt. And thus we find ourselves in a situation where extending subway lines in New York City takes decades and winds up costing 20 times as much as similar projects in other cities around the world, where the projected costs of a clean energy project in Maine almost doubled seven years after its approval without a single mile of line ever being built, and where California has been struggling to even start a functioning high speed rail line that was first approved in 1982.

If we want to start building again, something must change. But what, exactly? Economic growth is a tremendous good, but as the case of Vera Coking shows, we don’t necessarily want economic growth at any cost. So, what sort of framework do these books offer for understanding the nature of our problem, and for distinguishing good growth from bad?

The Jeffersonian trap and procedural paralysis

For Dunkelman, much of the problem can be traced to the rise of “Jeffersonianism,” a philosophy of governance driven by a skepticism of large, centralized institutions, and which seeks to protect individuals from overbearing authority by pushing state authority down and out. It is this Jeffersonian philosophy which supported the creation of a vast new array of rights over the course of the 20^th century, rights designed to protect individuals, communities, and the environment against the oppressive power of big government and big corporations alike. Some such protections are necessary, Dunkelman concedes, but a central claim of the book is that Jeffersonianism has been carried too far, and what is needed now is a corrective swing back toward a more “Hamiltonian” philosophy of centralized, expert authority.

Dunkelman’s distinction captures two broad public attitudes toward political authority, but those public attitudes fall well short of the coherence we might expect from rigorous philosophical systems. And this limits their utility in understanding – let alone guiding – political decision making. For example, Dunkelman recounts how, in the 1970s, progressives and police unions joined forces to limit the discretionary power of police chiefs. The goal of the movement was to protect officers from various abuses of power, which sounds Jeffersonian. But by limiting the discretionary power of police chiefs, the reforms wound up increasing the discretion of beat cops, thereby leaving ordinary citizens more vulnerable to the unchecked authority of the police.

A similar pattern can be found in many other Jeffersonian reforms. Laws enacted to protect the natural environment from exploitation by big corporations necessitate the creation of large new government bureaucracies to define, adjudicate, and enforce those rights. In each case, we can describe the change as decentralizing power in a sense. But often, attempts to abolish power simply redistribute it, and the framework of Jeffersonianism vs. Hamiltonianism doesn’t tell us much about the net power wielded over individuals. Nor does it provide a useful guide for thinking about how power ought to be distributed in order to promote either economic growth or the other values we might wish to pursue.

Klein and Thompson offer less in the way of an overarching theoretical framework than does Dunkelman. But one theme that runs clearly throughout their book is the idea that abundance has been thwarted by an overemphasis on proceduralism. Proceduralism, in this context, means the conviction that governmental legitimacy is to be earned by compliance with an “endless catalog of rules and restraints.” Laws and regulations prove their merit by surviving notice-and-comment sessions, environmental reviews, court challenges, and so on. These procedural constraints are designed to serve two legitimate laudable goals – legitimacy and accountability. But the actual result, according to legal scholar Nicholas Bagley, on whose work Klein and Thompson draw, has been a system that “frustrate[s] the very government action that progressives demand to address the urgent problems that now confront us.”1

Instead of focusing on procedures, Klein and Thompson argue, we should focus instead on what actually matters to people – outcomes. No one cares how many reports were written in the process of approving the construction of a new bridge. What they care about is whether the bridge gets built, safely, cheaply, and quickly.

All this sounds like common sense, except for one big problem: Governments have no way of directly selecting outcomes. Governments can create institutions; they can create laws; they can create taxes and subsidies. And they can hope and intend that these creations will ultimately generate certain outcomes. But whether those outcomes materialize or not is a matter that depends on a whole host of factors, the vast majority of which are outside of government’s direct control.

Consider an analogy. I might want my son to become a talented runner. But he won’t make much progress toward that goal by simply focusing on the outcome. (“To-do today – become a great runner!”) It simply isn’t actionable. A good coach will break the outcome down into concrete steps or procedures. Focus on your form, control your breath, and put in the miles. Trust the process. A good process doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. But it makes that outcome more likely by making clear the steps you need to take to get there. The same is true for government. Procedures are a way of focusing the government’s attention on the things that are under its control, in order to make the outcome which is not under its control more probable.

Procedures are not only helpful, but they’re also unavoidable. The only way to achieve an outcome is through some kind of process. The only question is whether we’re going to clearly and carefully define that process or leave it up to chance and the discretion of the parties involved. Ill thought-out procedures will not only make the desired outcome less likely; they also create opportunities for the process to be captured and manipulated by groups seeking to promote their own special interest at the expense of the common good.

Capture, cronyism, and government failure

All this leads to one of the most surprising omissions of the two books. For all their focus on the failures of government policy — either to build things itself, or to properly incentivize and support market actors in doing so — there is shockingly little discussion of the field of study which has developed the most systematic account of the nature and causes of government failure: public choice theory. With the exception of Klein’s brief discussion of Mancur Olson’s classic, The Rise and Decline of Nations, there is precious little discussion of rent-seeking, agency capture, or the underlying structural incentives that generate the many pathologies that Dunkelman, Klein, and Thompson observe. And without a clear diagnosis of the problem, the authors struggle to provide a cure that is clear, compelling, and politically realistic.

Many of the core findings of public choice theory were usefully summarized in Peter Schuck’s 2014 book, Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better.2 Schuck draws particular attention to the problems of information and incentives that bedevil so many government undertakings. In brief, government officials often lack the detailed, context-specific, and rapidly changing knowledge necessary to produce socially desirable outcomes and often are under-incentivized to pursue those outcomes anyway, even if they knew how to do so. Moreover, these defects are not temporary or easily corrected. They are, according to Schuck, rooted in an “inescapable, structural condition: officials’ meager tools and limited understanding of the opaque, complex social world that they aim to manipulate.”

Schuck’s concerns especially apply to Klein and Thompson’s call for a more expansive government role in fostering innovation. Klein and Thompson claim that the popular idea that government is “lousy at picking winners” is a myth that “bears little resemblance to history.” Drawing heavily on the work of Mariana Mazzucato, they argue that the American government has in fact played an expansive role in developing many of the technologies and conveniences that shape our modern world.3 From the iPhone to shale drilling to federally subsidized mortgages, there is hardly any aspect of our lives that is untouched by government “picking.”

But the story told by Mazzucato is not without its critics. A greater familiarity with the public choice literature, or with Alberto Mingardi and Deirdre McCloskey’s detailed criticism of Mazzucato’s book, might have led Klein and Thompson to at least take these criticisms seriously.4 Unfortunately, there is little in the way of acknowledgement of these objections, let alone critical engagement with them.

It is shocking, for instance, that the words “cronyism” or “rent-seeking” do not appear a single time in the pages of Abundance. If government is to be in the business of identifying and subsidizing potential “winners” in the economy, we will of course hope that it will do so based on the best available scientific and economic insight. But both theory and ample experience (do we still remember Solyndra?) show that this is far from certain. Government favors will often be awarded not to the most deserving but to the most politically well-connected. And the bigger the prize, the fiercer will be the competition to forge those connections. The outcome of such a competition will almost certainly not be favorable to the poor, the small, or the outsiders.

Innovation is a process of trial and error, and both markets and governments will produce plenty of failures. But there are massively important differences between the nature of these failures. Private businesses are gambling with their own money, giving them an important incentive to carefully balance risk and reward; when governments invest, they’re playing with other people’s money. Private businesses fail in a way that tends to be small and localized; government failures occur on a much larger scale. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the failures of private businesses are temporary – failing firms are driven out of the market by the ruthless process of market competition. Government failures, in contrast, face no such screening process. Even the most abject failure of a government program tends to benefit some small, concentrated interest group, and that interest group has much stronger incentives to fight for the preservation of that program than anyone else does to end it.5

Abundance and comparative political economy

The point of these criticisms is not to discredit the abundance agenda. To the contrary, the overall vision offered by Dunkelman, Klein, and Thompson is grand and inspiring. It is an agenda that has the potential to unite progressive liberalism’s traditional concern for advancing the interests of the poor with classical liberalism’s emphasis on the creative power of free, competitive markets — a brilliant adaptation of what Brink Lindsey called the “liberaltarian” agenda.6 It is, moreover, an agenda that channels our energies in a positive-sum direction, one that yields compounding dividends over the long term.7

For introducing and popularizing this agenda, the authors of these two books deserve our praise. Where they fall short is in the question of how — what are the concrete steps we can take from here to meaningfully and sustainably promote abundance?8 Answering this question will require a deeper engagement with the methods of comparative political economy — methods advanced by scholars like Peter Boettke, Mark Pennington, and others.9 Many difficult questions and challenges lie ahead. But if we are lucky, the abundance movement is just getting started.

Matt Zwolinski is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, and co-author, most recently, of The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism (Princeton, 2023) and Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2023). He tweets at @Mattzwolinski.

The abundance movement has burst into the national consciousness at an awkward time.

Democrats are obsessed with becoming more electorally competitive, and key party players are feeling vulnerable about their failures. Republicans who were optimistic that Donald Trump’s disregard for party orthodoxy would lead him to promote science and effective bureaucracy are now left to hope the slasher movie still gets to a happy ending.

The latest forum of Hypertext asks how abundance advocates should think about partisan politics now. The essays will be coming to your inbox one by one over the next two weeks. Here’s a preview.

Should the abundance movement embrace party affiliations at all, and if so, where and when?

Frank DiStefano warns that abundance advocates should avoid becoming too wrapped up in Democratic Party politics, countering Steve Teles and Rob Saldin’s call in these pages for a Democratic “abundance faction.” Abundance has the potential to offer Americans a broad vision to restore agency and dignity to their lives, DiStefano argues. But as a strictly partisan project, it will be doomed to tinker with slight improvements to people’s material conditions before fading into oblivion.

Chris Elmendorf and David Schleicher counter with an argument focused on the local scene, where YIMBY activism is most potent. They argue that the case for more housing can only be successful if fused with an agenda to make cities more livable. That project, they say, involves broad policy and cultural problems that inevitably require party politics.

On the Democratic side, where the debate over abundance has raged the hottest, how should the movement’s advocates frame their project?

Matthew Yglesias warns Democrats that an abundance agenda driven by a blue-state aesthetic of urbanism is unlikely to do much for their national fortunes. Instead, he counsels that abundance Democrats should lean into cultural moderation and puncture the progressive argument that populist economics is enough to draw in working-class votes.

Meanwhile, Henry Tonks shows that much of the bad blood between Democratic moderates and progressives rests on a flawed understanding of the 1980s and 1990s. He rebuts the widespread assumption that “New Democrats” willfully jettisoned the developmental economics of the New Deal. Instead, Tonks argues, they failed to execute on it politically–and we should study why to avoid repeating their mistakes.

Finally, in the nuts and bolts of Democratic governance, what might accommodation and success look like?

Olivia Kosloff dives into the debate between advocates of abundance and antitrust. Using the example of healthcare, she shows why the two approaches actually represent two sides of the same coin.

And finally, Chris Elmendorf explores how California Democrats bucked conventional wisdom by pushing through an ambitious reform of the state’s environmental-review law to enable more housing construction.

Please share the essays, let us know what you think on Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack Notes, and Bluesky, and reach out if you are moved to write a response.

And if you can’t get enough abundance content, check out the podcasts of our Niskanen Center colleagues Geoff Kabaservice and Marshall Kosloff—and stay tuned to Hypertext.

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The idea of abundance is everywhere. Prominent new books by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Marc Dunkelman, and Yoni Applebaum bemoan the artificial scarcity created by sclerotic institutions and explore paths out. New York Times columnist David Brooks has declared an era of abundance to already be sweeping through the intellectual world: “Over the past several years, various versions of something called the abundance movement have been growing at libertarian-leaning think tanks like the Niskanen Center, at right-leaning tech hubs like Andreessen Horowitz and at a wide array of left-leaning think tanks.”

The challenge now for abundance advocates is to turn intellectual ferment into durable power. Much of this work will be political — building alliances of supportive interests, injecting abundance themes into elections, and forging legislative coalitions. But as the movement well knows, in America, victories in the arena of politics are tentative until they are confirmed in the arena of law.

Law, broadly understood, is at the core of the abundance movement’s analysis of what has gone wrong in the American economy. Most of the thinkers associated with the movement point to some combination of anti-competitive rules and processes driven by concentrated interests on the one hand, and an absence of state capacity to design and manage large projects on the other. Both of these obstacles to abundance are rooted in fundamental changes in American law that picked up steam in the 1970s and have reduced the productivity of both the private and public sectors ever since.

Some of these changes can be reversed through brute statutory revision. But the “Law of Constraint” that emerged over a half-century ago is deeply rooted. It consists not only of rules on the books, but also implicates how lawyers are trained and how we understand what it means to do lawyering in the public interest. Moving toward a “Law of Abundance” will require that we re-examine wide areas of the law as a system, focusing on how different collections of practices either generate what Nick Bagley has called a “procedure fetish” that impedes new initiatives or, alternatively, a bias toward action (even where that means taking on greater risk).

In this issue of Hypertext, we ask what changes will be required to move us from the old system into the new. (Most of the essays presented here are based on papers that were written for the Center for Law and Society at Johns Hopkins and funded by Arnold Ventures, which is also a Niskanen Center supporter.)

We begin by clarifying the stakes in an essay by David Schleicher of Yale Law School. In rebutting critics of the recent crop of abundance books, Schleicher argues that the movement has an incisive vision of political economy that takes power seriously and makes consequential recommendations, but does not claim to offer a full-spectrum economic program.

Tom Burke of Wellesley and Jeb Barnes of the University of Southern California begin our exploration of how the law creates scarcity by connecting Nicholas Bagley’s arguments against “the procedure fetish”—central to the abundance movement—to the deep roots of proceduralism and “adversarial legalism” in the U.S. To dislodge litigation as a policymaking tool, they argue, “Abundance liberals must find other ways to generate authority that people can accept.”

Dan Davies then uses cybernetics, which we covered in Volume VIII, to show how the system of adversarial legalism reinforces itself in practice. It takes very little actual NIMBYism, Davies argues, to create an industry of professionals dedicated to warding it off through expensive and time-consuming reviews. The odd result, he argues, is that developers effectively end up financing their own opposition.

Making progress in this dysfunctional system will require strategic changes, as our next two essays show.

Alexandra Klass and Matthew Appel of Michigan Law School argue that in the energy realm, abundance liberals should avoid an “all of the above” approach and explicitly seek a coalition with clean-energy environmentalists.

Meanwhile, Zachary Liscow of Yale Law School makes the case that building credibility for those alternative forms of authority Burke and Barnes describe is possible if reforms “improve broadly representative front-end participation but reduce back-end litigation.”

To put such ideas in motion, Anika Singh Lemar of Yale Law School writes, we need to train a new generation of public interest lawyers who will practice the law of abundance, adapting the traditional law school “clinic” model to this new field.

Beyond the realm of infrastructure and day-to-day policy, Alex Tabarrok asks what lessons we can learn about public-private partnerships from the stunning success of Operation Warp Speed — but cautions that the powers authorized for that project should not be extended beyond the crisis context.

Remaking the law for an abundant future is a daunting charge, but we close with an essay that offers some inspiration. As Rick Hills of NYU Law and David Schleicher argue, YIMBYism is a “legal tradition” in America that dates back to the Founding era’s rejection of a landed gentry and the property law regime that created it. The law of abundance may be confronting a decades-old culture of blocking progress, but it is tapping into a deep-rooted American ethos of supporting builders and people chasing opportunity in new places.

Steven Teles is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. David Dagan (@daviddagan.bsky.social) is Director of Editorial and Academic Affairs at the Niskanen Center. Matthew Meyers (@matthew_meyers5) is Abundance Coordinator at the Niskanen Center.

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Claude Shannon is probably known to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as the legendary mathematician who laid the groundwork for modern computing by inventing a way to conceptualize information as “bits” — binary digits.

The tech titans are also likely aware that Shannon’s ideas spawned a new field of study, “cybernetics,” that reached well beyond computing, treating information as a unit of analysis as fundamental as matter and studying how it moves through systems ranging from thermostats to the human brain. They may realize that this broad framing made cybernetics appealing to a remarkably diverse range of figures, from American systems engineers to Soviet planners, from weapons designers to philosophers, and from 1960s countercultural champions to PC revolutionaries.

What they might not realize is how Claude Shannon could help them in the here and now, as they swagger into their campaign to reshape the federal bureaucracy through their self-styled “Department of Governmental Efficiency.” Instead of grandiosely promising to cut trillions or targeting individual public servants, the DOGE team could consider how lessons from the fundamental architecture of computing could help us fix government.

Cybernetics sounds like an oddball concept when you encounter it for the first time, as I did upon reading Dan Davies’ brilliant new book The Unaccountability Machine (already published in the UK, forthcoming stateside). The name “cybernetics” feels like something straight out of the 1950s, the range of eccentrics associated with the field inspires skepticism, and its basic concepts — that many systems rely on dynamics of feedback, for example — seem so obviously true as to be unremarkable.

But as with any great theory, the simple precepts of cybernetics become illuminating when they are skillfully attached to real-world scenarios. In the case of computing, that grafting was done with mathematics. Shannon developed equations that reduce information to bits and modeled a system’s capacity for processing them, thereby opening the door to the digital age. As Davies shows, the cybernetic thinker Stafford Beer reduced information to categories appropriate to different levels of an organization, and modeled how the whole enterprise can adapt to its environment — or not.

Management cybernetics was widely written off after it became associated with economic central planning — due in part to a bizarre episode in which Chile’s Salvador Allende recruited Stafford Beer to apply his methods before Pinochet’s 1973 coup and the era of the “Chicago boys.” But in the second decade of the “polycrisis,” in which one institution after another seems to be failing, the cybernetic approach is worth a second look. It’s a method completely consistent with market capitalism. And it gives us new tools to think about how institutions confront the complexity of the real world — theorizing information as something more than raw price signals, and management capacity as something more than brute market discipline.

The cybernetic spirit also aligns well with Niskanen Senior Fellow Jen Pahlka’s emphasis on letting bureaucracies focus on results rather than procedure, on end users rather than compliance czars. That’s one reason the political scientist Henry Farrell has grouped Davies and Pahlka together as leaders of the “adaptive” school of state capacity.

As Farrell explains:

Large-scale organizations (suffer from a) liability to produce outcomes that nobody plans and nobody actually wants, not because of malice, but because that is how big systems tend to work. They are specifically bad at dealing with complex environments, unless they can either attenuate that complexity, or model it internally, through better systems of feedback.

If we do not fix this growing problem, it’s hard to see how we will solve any of the pressing policy challenges that confront us. Farrell distinguishes the “adaptive” approach from a “big-fix” method that accepts the futility of most government interventions and focuses on just a few big bets to break out of our malaise. Operation Warp Speed is an impressive example of such a moonshot approach — but it’s hard to see how a government that combines political chaos with bureaucratic rigidity would execute other “big fixes” without the knife of an existential crisis at its neck.

It is also important to note that the diagnosis of institutional failure extends well beyond government. Plenty of private-sector actors have lost the trust of the public and seem to be flailing in a newly volatile, and politicized, world. Left-behind regions, inflation-pinched workers, and bailout-weary taxpayers might wonder whether the financial firms lubricating our economy are all that good at recognizing and responding to socially significant information.

It is tempting to cast bureaucracy as merely an “arm” of a government (or corporate management), controlled fully by elected officials (or board members) who act as the “brain” and are directly accountable to the citizenry (or shareholders). But that simple, anthropomorphized metaphor simply isn’t fit for purpose in a modern economy. Instead, we might turn to a military metaphor, in which elected officials are the generals and the bureaucracy forms the platoons. Those platoons understand the mission and the rules of engagement and are given the autonomy to execute within those parameters. To do that, bureaucracy cannot just be a limb. It needs a brain of its own.

And the brain, cybernetic thinkers will tell you, is merely an organ of information processing.

In this volume of Hypertext, Davies makes the case for cybernetics as a worthy supplement to the tools of economics and public choice by examining the case of public-sector outsourcing.

In response, Stanford political scientist Margaret Levi says Davies has uncovered a valuable new resource for thinking about public management. But she notes that our institutional crisis is not just about organizational maladaption to information flows. It’s also about powerful interests and how they respond to uncomfortable information.

We return to the outsourcing theme by sharing Pahlka’s eminently readable discussion of the problem in the American context, from her important new report, The how we need now.

Finally, Marc Dunkelman, author of Why Nothing Works, urges us to think not just about how too little information processing capacity can slow down projects, but also about the problems that come from having too many decision-makers and an unwillingness to make a decision in the first place.

As always, please share these essays widely, and if you’d like to write a response, send me your pitch — ddagan@niskanencenter.org.

David Dagan is director of editorial and academic affairs at the Niskanen Center.

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Images: Shannon: Jacobs, Konrad, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons; Oz: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

— In partnership with Modern Power —

Over the last two years, a group of thinkers coming from the center-right and center-left has coalesced around a set of important propositions regarding governance and economics that goes by various labels, including “abundance” and “state capacity.”

Advocates of this emerging consensus still have many differences to debate, but the latest Hypertext forum asks a different question: How will they build political power

• Our forum kicks off with Steve Teles and Rob Saldin arguing that the likeliest path to success is for an “Abundance Faction” to rise within the Democratic Party, led by intellectuals and certain segments of business.

• counters that political coalitions emerge from the ground up, led by people who perceive concrete interests rather than high-flying intellectualism, and explores how that process is playing out on both sides of the aisle.

• says that if Democrats are undermining their collective fortunes with bad housing policy that drives people to red states, they’re not the first party to make such a mistake - the GOP faced a similar challenge with regard to public employee unions decades ago.

• explores what makes the emerging “abundance” ideology different from mere “moderation” in his essay “Abundant v. moderate,” cross-posted on Modern Power. 

• Colin Mortimer weighs whether abundance advocates are better off pursuing a highly visible strategy or going the “Secret Congress” route.

• In her essay, “From stakeholder capitalism to state-capacity capitalism,” Didi Kuo dives into business' role in remedying the American government's dysfunctions in an era of populist turmoil. She argues businesspeople should learn from their 19th and early-20th century forebears, who recognized that a changing economy required an overhaul of state capacity.

• A longer introduction summarizes some key points of abundance thought and provides links.

Images generated with Microsoft Image Creator and Image FX AIs.