After 100 Days of Chaos, 23 Progressives on How We Create Stability and Prosperity

This week marked the 100th day of the second Trump administration. Comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days abound—as one Washington Post editor put it, “no president has matched the sheer drama and disruption of that 15-week sprint in 1933, which rewrote the relationship between Americans and their government . . . until now.”

Drama and disruption are where the comparison ends. President Franklin Roosevelt used his first 100 days in office to build up government, to assure Americans that when their lives fell into chaos, the federal system would be there to provide some basic stability. In his own assessment of his first 100 days, FDR emphasized that his actions had “not been just a collection of haphazard schemes but rather the orderly component parts of a connected and logical whole.”

In contrast, our current administration has done the opposite, pursuing a shock-and-awe strategy with domestic and international policy that has stoked instability and fear while dismantling key government offices. This is a deliberate policy choice that has caused chaos in our markets, our civil service, and our very sense of the future: Consumers now report feeling “like they’re on ‘a very scary rollercoaster.’”

This week also marks the publication of the Roosevelt Institute’s 2025 collection of essays, Restoring Economic Democracy: Progressive Ideas for Stability and Prosperity. This collection begins a conversation about the policy choices that can help get us out of wonderland and back on solid ground. These essays start from a shared understanding: that for far too many Americans, the personal economic instability that has defined their lives for decades is made all the worse by the unique macro chaos of this moment. To prove “that democracy can deliver, better and more quickly than any alternative,” as President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins puts it in the collection’s foreword, we need policy solutions that respond both to new crises that emerge almost daily and to the long-term challenges that brought us to this point.

The essays in this collection, written by 23 authors from a variety of backgrounds and expertise,  range in topic from taxes, to housing, to the labor movement, to industrial policies. But they share the belief that animated FDR: that the government’s role is to help provide stability because instability and chaos deprive us of agency. As Osita Nwanevu writes in his contribution to the collection, “We are all fundamentally entitled to a measure of agency over the conditions that shape our lives.” There are many policies required to build that agency for all Americans, but a prerequisite for them all is the political and economic stability that allows people to plan for their futures.

We see the theme of stability across this collection, in calls for new forms of advance planning applied to housing supply, commodities chains, and the climate crisis. For example, former California YIMBY Policy Director Ned Resnikoff argues that to fix some of the fundamental problems underlying our housing crisis, “Instead of making land use decisions on an ad hoc, project-by-project basis, governments should develop and stick to comprehensive plans that take the needs of an entire region into account.” Likewise, Employ America’s Arnab Datta and financial services expert Alex Turnbull lay out a proposal for reshaping the US’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve into what they call a Strategic Resilience Reserve, designed to protect “consumers and producers from the worst effects of market volatility” by storing the modern materials—beyond petroleum—needed to insulate households for a decarbonized, modern economy.

Other essays respond to the more immediate chaotic choices of the current administration. In her essay on taxes, for example, executive director of the Tax Law Center at NYU Law Chye-Ching Huang argues that tariffs are an inherently “shaky revenue source.” While tariffs can play a role in advancing specific goals, if they are succeeding in that mission they raise less revenue. Thus proposing to replace income tax revenues with tariffs is, at best, a promise to reduce federal revenue, weakening the government’s ability to run the kinds of programs that provide stability to families and businesses during a crisis.

Creating a more stable politics and economics requires not just policies that prioritize stability, but also institutions that can sustain a stable power structure. This means we need a federal government ready and willing to check the outsized power of corporations, which brings us closer day by day to oligarchy, as multiple essays in this collection explore. We also need institutions that provide countervailing power to corporate actors. As AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler argues in her contribution, labor can provide that kind of important counterweight no matter who is in office. Shuler writes, “Our mission and goal doesn’t change regardless of who is in office. We are always on the side of people who work for a living. We are always striving for people to have better jobs and family-sustaining wages, and we will continue to fight for that ideal—for an economy that works for everyone.”

Together, these essays tell a broader story: We deserve a government that is committed to ensuring a modicum of economic stability for us all, as it is uniquely able to do, and we deserve a government that is stable enough to deliver on this commitment. These essays begin to offer some ideas for what such a government might do. Just as importantly in this moment, they remind us that “chaos is a policy choice, and that the best remedy for chaos is bold and diverse ideas—to create democratic institutions that deliver for people, and shape the innovative and inclusive economy we need.”