“[The men and women of the Republic] . . . will insist that every agency of popular government use effective instruments to carry out their will. Government is competent when all who compose it work as trustees for the whole people.”

– Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1937 Inaugural Address

At the Roosevelt Institute, we’ve written often about the untapped potential of public power.

“When public power is used to serve ordinary Americans, it can counter skewed power dynamics in markets, provide universal access to goods and services, and harness our national potential toward broadly shared economic growth,” our 2019 report New Rules for the 21st Century said. “Alternatively, concentrated power in the private sector can stunt public power, turning it into a tool to enrich those at the top.”¹

For five discontented decades, our leaders chose the latter path. They failed to use public power with the urgency and ambition Americans demanded. They allowed immense concentrations of wealth and power for the few, and an ever-decreasing sense of security for the many. That path paved the way for a dark alternative: Rather than curbing corporate influence, the second Trump administration has allowed corporations and billionaires to write their own rules and rig the economy with increasing brazenness. With breakneck speed, Trump 2.0 has deployed every tool and agency it can to enrich friends and punish and silence enemies. Meanwhile, the administration’s relentless slashing of agency staff and budgets—driven initially by the world’s richest man and his cronies—has hollowed out our government’s ability to meet people’s needs, provide basic services, and respond to emergencies.

While all of these actions have scarred our democratic institutions, it’s not too late to change course. To do so, we must understand what changing course really means, and what it will require. We must reckon honestly with how we got here and why the American public has been so frustrated with these institutions for so long. And we must make concrete plans to do better—for the people, and with them.

That’s what this report does. In Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration, former Biden-Harris senior officials Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph draw from the insights, recommendations, and candor of more than 45 former public servants and tell a broader story we can’t forget: The problems with these institutions did not start with Donald Trump or Elon Musk, worse as they now are. These problems are, in part, what results from decades of bipartisan neglect, disinvestment, and deference to markets. But just as importantly, they are the product of institutional cultures, norms, and practices that—even when well-intentioned, even when originated for good reasons—no longer serve the public.

As these interviews show us in new detail, in agencies across the federal government, the default mode of operating is risk-averse, incremental, and wed to process at the expense of outcomes. It’s no accident that people feel disengaged with and unseen by their government when “federal institutions are designed to passively receive inputs from well-resourced corporate lobbyists and insiders, rather than being optimized for connectivity with ordinary Americans with busy lives,” as Garden-Monheit and Joseph write.

Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph draw from the insights, recommendations, and candor of more than 45 former public servants and tell a broader story we can’t forget: The problems with these institutions did not start with Donald Trump or Elon Musk, worse as they now are. These problems are, in part, what results from decades of bipartisan neglect, disinvestment, and deference to markets.

Overcoming that status quo could be difficult even at agencies with ambitious populist agendas and clear mandates, as I experienced firsthand as a former public servant.

At Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where I served as chief of staff and head of policy, our charge was to democratize our agenda-setting and create meaningful channels for public participation. One of our first projects when I started was to revamp the merger guidelines, which our litigators consider when reviewing a merger.² Merger review is really the first line of defense against increasing concentration in the economy, so while these guidelines may seem esoteric and technical, they are crucial to constraining corporate power.

In prior revisions of these guidelines, lobbyists and big law partners, hired by major companies or industries that could spend the money to understand them in detail, were the most engaged parties. But merger guidelines have profound impacts on all kinds of market participants—workers, farmers, small business owners, creators. The FTC decided to break with the agency’s norms and democratize the process, opening a Request for Information that received more than 5,000 comments.

We also decided that a general invitation for information wasn’t enough, and that parties less sophisticated or well-heeled might not know about the opportunity or how to take advantage of it. We affirmatively reached out to affected people in various industries to hear their perspectives and lived experiences in a series of listening sessions.³ This seemed like a no-brainer to us, to make sure we hear from the people who should be the beneficiaries of our laws, people for whom the merger guidelines were supposed to preserve competitive markets.

What happened next is the kind of hurdle we see again and again in Garden-Monheit and Joseph’s interviews: staff pushback in the name of “government expertise.” Their argument was that our outreach was one-sided, and we would be accused of “bias.” To be clear, these were dedicated public servants, concerned about the efficacy of the agency and their perception that a certain type of reputation was key to preserving it. But where that good intention took them—the thought that we needed to make the same effort to hear from well-resourced corporations as we did from previously voiceless and less powerful market participants—was symptomatic of a deeper disease.

We overcame that resistance, to the benefit of the resulting product. My lesson from that experience, and from the stories of this report’s interviewees: Layers of overcautious bureaucracy and fear of corporate retaliation are not conducive to the bold action the public expects from its government.

We need modern, nimble institutions that channel people’s concerns and aspirations into tangible results, and a more expansive view of what it takes to create policy momentum. As one interviewee said, “Build the campaign, not just the policy.” That requires leaders to position themselves to drive real change forward, both in roles with governing power and in spaces that influence governing—such as advocacy organizations, base-building groups, academia, legal and judicial roles, and media. Cultivating civic leadership is a top priority for our Roosevelt Society, which equips our participants with the skills they’ll need to build coalitions and networks, think strategically, and execute successfully.

The rising authoritarianism we see today shows us the stakes of all these efforts. As I wrote in Democracy Journal recently, “Defending the anemic institutions that frustrate the public is not a viable strategy.” ⁴ Designing truly democratic and bold institutions is, and this hopeful report is a step toward that future.

– Elizabeth Wilkins, President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute

Executive Summary

We know the tragic effects of President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the federal government. But the truth is, Trump and Elon Musk alone didn’t break our governing institutions. Even prior to the current administration’s actions, both parties presided over decades of disinvestment in federal government capacity, too often abdicating power to private market forces where public institutions once shaped outcomes in the public interest—as Roosevelt has written much about.⁵ Conservative efforts to undermine the federal government and hamstring its very ability to function compounded the problem. Decades of underfunding and hollowing out agencies, outsourcing expertise, layering on procedural hurdles that slow action to a crawl, and stacking courts with ideological allies have weakened the government’s ability to deliver for working families, stand up to special interests on their behalf, and earn the public’s trust. And while the Biden-Harris administration had a fundamentally different vision of the government’s role in the economy—rejecting laissez-faire, hands-off approaches to markets—it often sought to restore the governmental institutions and norms that had existed prior to the first Trump administration, rather than dramatically reimagining them to create more progressive, action-oriented government institutions.

The long-running undercutting of the government’s capacity to solve national problems is not just a bureaucratic problem. It is a democratic one, because democratic legitimacy requires a government capable of speedily and visibly responding to ordinary Americans’ aspirations and discontent. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned, “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations—not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government.” ⁶

To avoid that fate, American policymakers must prove that democracy can still deliver—that democratic institutions can operate with urgency to meaningfully improve the lives of ordinary people, and that the government is answerable to the people, not just the monied few. Doing so will require reimagining and building a new, more responsive, and more effective set of federal government institutions, rather than simply restoring what existed before Trump. Future administrations must flip the government’s risk profile away from status quo bias and toward delivering bold, timely, and resonant results for working people.

To ground conversations about government institutional reform in practical experience, we interviewed more than 45 recent federal officials—senior political appointees from the Biden-Harris administration who worked on economic policymaking—to capture while still fresh their candid insights into the institutional obstacles to execution and innovation. To better understand the bureaucratic hurdles and gaps in capacity that undermine robust federal economic policymaking and delivery, we interviewed appointees from a wide range of agencies, roles, and modes of government administration—including specialists in regulatory policymaking, enforcement, service delivery, federal funding deployment, personnel processes, communications, and more.⁷

In this report, we recount their lessons learned, and we provide 161 practical ideas they offered for institutional reforms to create a more effective, nimble, and responsive government. These ideas are not meant to be consensus recommendations—i.e., they were not each endorsed by every interviewee. Rather, they serve to provide an “options menu” of credible, actionable solutions offered by practitioners with a shared passion for building a democracy that more quickly and effectively delivers for working people. Of course, we could not speak with every appointee, and we recognize that there are different perspectives; this report offers a window into the experiences and ideas of those we interviewed. We organize the report around core principles for reform gleaned from these interviews, as follows:

To ground conversations about government institutional reform in practical experience, we interviewed more than 45 recent federal officials—senior political appointees from the Biden-Harris administration who worked on economic policymaking—to capture while still fresh their candid insights into the institutional obstacles to execution and innovation…We recount their lessons learned, and we provide 161 practical ideas they offered for institutional reforms to create a more effective, nimble, and responsive government.

Chapter 1: Relentlessly Prioritize Bold, Resonant, and Timely Policies

Future administrations must flip the government’s risk profile toward bold, swift action, rather than restoring a system that wasn’t working well for working- and middle-class families even before the Trump administration implemented its current policies. Interviewees explained that the government has a strong built-in bias toward incrementalism, thanks to both the inertia associated with moving complex bureaucracies and the fear of politically embarrassing failures. Rebuilding public trust and democratic legitimacy will require instead visibly and boldly proving that the government is fighting to improve ordinary people’s lives. Many interviewees accordingly advised that a future administration’s policy portfolio should include some signature big swings that speak to working people’s immediate economic needs and that can be tangibly felt on the ground within the term. Interviewees stressed that a future administration must do more homework in advance so that it is ready to execute such a proactive agenda on Day One—arriving prepared to prioritize a known set of “must do” deliverables, even as it stands up more modern, effective government institutions, addresses the crises of the moment, and negotiates with an unpredictable Congress.

Interviewee Recommendations

Prioritize crisp, resonant, and timely policies: Both Congress and executive branch leaders should choose—and relentlessly prioritize—some broadly resonant big swings whose results will be felt concretely on the ground within the term. Interviewees identified several design features that can help:
- on-the-ground execution timelines that match the timelines of elected mandates;
- simple, crisp designs that are memorable, easy to communicate, and well-suited to reaching and mobilizing the public via the bully pulpit;
- universal designs, rather than means-tested or discretionary programs that have narrower constituencies and/or bury the win in paperwork;
- directly administered programs that don’t rely on intermediaries who can add delay, increase costs, and obscure credit;
- policies with identifiable outside champions and beneficiaries ready and willing to mobilize and fight for them; and
- hooks for direct outreach and on-the-ground organizing that help beneficiaries understand the policy and take civic action based on their experience with it.
Do the homework now: To be able to execute within the term, an administration must do the homework in advance to be ready to launch such policies within weeks or months of taking office, not years. Interviewees flagged the need for parallel planning workstreams to ensure bold, swift execution of a positive economic agenda even while government institutions are being rebuilt:
- Engage in deep listening and work with community and membership organizations now to develop priorities: There is tension between launching policies swiftly upon taking office and the need to mobilize on-the-ground coalitions behind them. To mitigate that tension, everyone from think tanks to policymakers to organizers to philanthropic funders should prioritize regularly engaging in on-the-ground listening sessions to better understand the economic challenges faced by average Americans—i.e., to hear from actual working Americans in their own voices—and then use those insights to identify top policy priorities. For example, focus groups and on-the-ground field listening sessions in communities can provide more authentic insights than consultant-driven polling, and they can serve as important checks on DC groupthink and the long-standing assumptions of policy wonks and experts.
- Legislate early and directly whenever possible and set and enforce deadlines: Congress should eliminate implementation delays by passing marquee bills as early in the term as possible and by enacting policies directly in statute (rather than delegating policy choices to an agency). Congress should also specify deadlines for implementation—including not only launch dates but completion deadlines (e.g., in the investments context, deadlines for obligating funds and completing work; in the regulatory context, deadlines for finalizing, not just proposing, a rule). It should use its oversight tools to enforce deadlines, and it could even build into statute a “springing” funds transfer to another agency or funding recipient if deadlines are missed. As elaborated in Chapters 4 and 7, Congress should pair new programs with legal flexibilities that speed implementation, such as waivers of Administrative Procedure Act requirements and flexible hiring authorities.
- Hitch a ride on “must pass” legislative vehicles: “Must pass” legislative reauthorization bills can provide valuable opportunities to codify key priorities. Future administrations should map in advance concrete plans for making the most of such vehicles during the term, including sending Congress its own draft bill. (That said, the opportunities to deploy this strategy may be diminishing, with Congress increasingly turning to short-term extensions rather than reauthorizations.⁸)
- Canvas existing legal authorities in advance and deploy them early: The executive branch can run out of time to execute if it waits for Congress to fire the starting pistol. Instead, each agency should enter office having systematically mapped its existing statutory mission and authorities, and they should know on Day One what three-to-five “must do” signature deliverables they will prioritize. As elaborated in Chapter 3, existing authorities should be paired with federal and state legislative pushes—waging public campaigns that pursue policies through multiple policymaking channels in tandem, rather than thinking of legislation and executive action as separate, siloed tools. To the maximum extent possible, rules and guidance should be pre-drafted or at least heavily scaffolded in advance (including legal analysis), and the White House should direct acting officials to launch deliverables immediately, rather than waiting for potentially lengthy confirmation processes. Starting from the statutes on the books is critical, because administrations often inherit authorities that have lain dormant through years of laissez-faire practice and accumulated norms or that have been “shame repealed” by powerful industries’ lobbying campaigns.
- Prepare a parallel track for rescission and unwinding work: Advance homework should also include detailed mapping and pre-drafting or scaffolding of work to rescind harmful Trump-era actions and unwind lingering litigation. Once in office, this work should be parallel tracked so that it does not detract from the proactive policymaking agenda.
- Create a “deletion docket” and purge low-impact activities: Executing high-impact priorities swiftly, particularly while simultaneously rebuilding the federal workforce, requires not wasting precious resources and bandwidth on low-impact activities like long-standing programs that lack demonstrable benefits, make-work reports, pet projects, or activities contrary to the administration’s goals. Before taking office, future administrations should develop a “deletion docket”—i.e., catalog in advance low-impact programming and then, upon taking office, immediately communicate to staff what to stop doing (or otherwise time-box low-priority matters). Congress could facilitate this by granting agencies transfer and reprogramming authority, but in the absence of legislative changes, future administrations can draw a lesson from DOGE about the efficacy of bold resource-allocation decisions.
- Plan for emergency-response capacity: Future administrations should plan for swing, standby capacity to respond to disasters and emergencies, so that they do not require pulling staff away from executing the proactive economic agenda. For example, at times during the Biden-Harris administration, the National Economic Council had a dedicated staffer—a person without other policy portfolios—who was ready and available to coordinate disaster and emergency responses. One interviewee recommended that for longer-running emergencies—such as the COVID pandemic—the White House should use detailee slots from agencies to create the response team, rather than devoting White House personnel slots, of which there are fewer.
Change public servants’ risk calculus: Interviewees identified a number of practical solutions for changing the government’s risk profile:
- White House and agency leadership must set the tone for a new governmental culture that rewards bold, calculated bets and honest reporting of failure—not just risk avoidance. Senior government leaders, including the White House chief of staff and the White House counsel, must communicate their risk-tolerance levels clearly and directly, because otherwise staff tend to project concerns about risk onto them, with a chilling effect on the boldness and ambition of policies.
- Every agency should have a general counsel (GC) who is a political appointee who understands their role is to advise on how senior leaders can achieve their goals, rather than simply “issue spotting” problems or preventing any risk-taking. After the agency head, GCs are the primary tone-setters on risk tolerance—a role that can make the difference between being mired in bureaucracy and nimble, team-spirited problem-solving.
- As elaborated in subsequent chapters, staffing projects with cross-functional teams organized around a mission can also promote this problem-solving culture and reduce inefficiencies. White House and agency leaders should create a “one-team” culture of collaboration and have zero tolerance for turf battles that distract from achieving the mission.
- Agencies should also create formal mechanisms for rewarding risk-taking and proactively removing inefficiencies, such as using public recognition or existing incentive pay authority to reward staff who pursue innovative approaches.⁹
- Congress could go further by statutorily authorizing new, larger innovation prizes for staff, such as a share of a risky project’s financial upside or of the savings from reforming obsolete, inefficient processes or line items.
- Senior leaders should have plans to deal with losses when they come, as they inevitably will from time to time when taking more risks. For example, agencies can plan for how to publicly communicate about a judicial injunction or a failed federal investment, and/or they can be ready to execute a fallback policy that is less risky. Staff will be less gun-shy about being bold and taking calculated risks if they know there’s a “Plan B,” because a loss isn’t the end of the road or a blemish on them personally.
Streamline the White House’s organizational structure and empower agencies to execute: A more streamlined White House organizational structure paired with empowered, trusted agency heads should be combined with much earlier, faster channels for escalating unresolved issues to a clearly empowered decision-maker. One option is to consolidate the Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council, and various specialized domestic policy councils into one centralized domestic policymaking structure—much like the National Security Council covers matters of national security and international affairs.¹⁰ Whatever the precise White House organizational chart, there should be a clear hierarchy and escalation channel for quick decisions. As an interviewee put it, “More decisions should be produced in an hour after hearing from all the sides.” Moreover, once key policy objectives are identified, agency heads and their teams should be empowered to execute them; too often, policy development gets stuck in an endless analysis phase, instead of agency leaders and their teams being clearly directed and empowered to go forth and execute.
Create a lab for economic policy experimentation and innovation: By creating a new “DARPA–Main Street,” an administration could provide an institutional space to experiment with more nimble, bold, and cross-cutting economic policy—a space to tackle economic challenges without being hemmed in by the limits of any single agency’s organizational structure, authorities, budget, bandwidth, or institutional culture.¹¹ A DARPA-style sense of urgency, drive, and creative problem-solving could pilot solutions to the economic problems faced by regular people and Main Street businesses without the constraints of preexisting institutional boundaries. Small Business Innovation Research funding could potentially be used to create such a space.
Create a Congressional Implementation Office: Congress should establish an independent Congressional Implementation Office to provide nonpartisan “time-to-implement” scores for every major bill. Just as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates fiscal costs, the implementation office would analyze staffing needs, rulemaking complexity, and interagency or other dependencies, then attach an expected launch date (e.g., “benefits received nine months after enactment”). Requiring such a score would surface hidden delays, discourage lawmakers from loading new programs onto agencies already over capacity, and let them compare policy options not only on price but on how quickly constituents will feel the results. Over time, the office would build a deep well of institutional expertise on successful implementation, and it could proactively pitch implementation approaches to the executive branch—making Congress a proactive partner in ensuring timely, effective implementation of its enactments. The goal should not be to eliminate all longer-term programming in favor of pursuing only shovel-ready projects, but rather to support informed decision-making and to surface opportunities to speed and improve implementation.
Conduct a “lessons learned” project on congressional capacity: Many interviewees noted that much dysfunction was downstream from the declining capacity of Congress to act on pressing national problems. This project did not tackle questions of congressional institutional reforms, such as changes to the filibuster, campaign finance reform, or other reforms to make Congress more structurally responsive to the American people. But, as one interviewee put it, “You can’t have a serious conversation about state capacity without looking at that branch and acknowledging the structural problems there.”

Chapter 2: Fling Open the Doors and Proactively Engage with the Public

Another reason that the federal government has a built-in status quo bias is that federal institutions are designed to passively receive inputs from well-resourced corporate lobbyists and insiders, rather than being optimized for connectivity with ordinary Americans with busy lives. This leaves the voices of regular people too often drowned out by the well-resourced lobbyists and big businesses that fan out across DC to protect their own financial interests, and it creates a persistent gap in whom federal officials hear from and who can be mobilized to support and defend a policy. Interviewees offered a range of options for building the infrastructure and capacity for the federal government to instead proactively sustain two-way engagement with the American people—to understand people’s problems on their own terms, to learn what solutions actually work on the ground, and to build the on-the-ground coalitions that can mobilize behind those solutions.

Interviewee Recommendations

Build proactive public engagement into policymaking processes from the outset: The model of public campaigning for bold, resonant policies through multiple policymaking channels outlined in Chapter 1 and elaborated in Chapter 3 below requires reimagining public and external engagement roles and breaking down the silos between policy and engagement teams, so that the latter are not merely handed a policy for announcement at the final “rollout” stage. Engagement personnel—including communications, legislative affairs, and intergovernmental affairs personnel, among others—should be fully integrated with policy staff from the get-go, ensuring policies are designed to resonate with ordinary Americans and on-the-ground coalitions are mobilized to fight for them. Interviewees identified numerous ways to reconceive engagement roles to support this model of governing through public campaigns for policies:
- Incorporate personnel with organizing backgrounds: Teams should include personnel with experience in proactive coalition-building, community organizing, and digital organizing. These personnel should play a hands-on role in obtaining early public input on policy problems to prioritize and organizing allies behind a public policy fight—including building trusted relationships and mobilizing engagement across federal, state, and local policymaking levers.¹² Such community organizers could be incorporated as standing roles, and/or fellowships could be designed to bring organizers into agencies to help with specific initiatives.
- Systematize and scale substantive collaboration with state and local policymakers: The role of intergovernmental affairs personnel should be reconceived to include proactively helping state and local policymakers enact the administration’s priorities at the state and local level—rather than the current model of principally focusing on convening state and local policymakers to celebrate federal wins. These roles should expand and systematize the kind of collaborative intergovernmental work that CFPB did with states to pass state medical debt laws, or that the FTC and DOJ Antitrust did in bringing enforcement actions jointly with state attorneys general.
- Expand expert capacity for proactive engagement tools like surveys, user research, and user testing: The federal government should expand its expert capacity to use proactive engagement tools like surveys, focus groups, user research, and user testing. One option is to retool the “Information” component of OIRA to provide expertise and capacity support to agencies to conduct such public engagement. (As recommended below, repealing the Paperwork Reduction Act would also make it easier to use such tools.)
- Adequately staff and resource new media engagement: Much discussion has emphasized the failure to look beyond elite national media and the need to instead engage authentically and reach people where they are—through social media, podcasts, local outlets, influencers and other trusted messengers, and venues or platforms that don’t traditionally cover politics.¹³ This was wholly uncontroversial among interviewees, but they stressed that administrations need to actually allocate resources for this—including staff, equipment, and training.
- Increase political appointee slots for public engagement: Agencies’ communications and outreach offices need more political appointee spots, instead of relying overwhelmingly on career staff who are less well-positioned to be proactive stewards of an administration’s engagement strategy. A former senior communications official cautioned against populating such slots exclusively with political campaign staff, at least without further training or relevant experience, because official governmental engagement strategies require a rich understanding of the relevant substantive policies, institutions, external stakeholders, and reporters and influencers on the relevant beat. Several interviewees also recommended that administrations train all political appointees on media engagement and make regular public engagements a core part of their duties.
- Expand in-house technologist capacity: Much as agencies lacked social media personnel and resources, agencies also generally lacked in-house technologists capable of designing and building modern websites (whether in house or by adequately supervising contractors). As elaborated in Chapter 6, agencies need in-house, empowered experts—such as a chief product officer and experts in human-centered design—who can ensure the online public face of the federal government is user-friendly.
Foster sustained, two-way engagement: The federal government should make sustained, two-way public engagement a core part of its mission, instead of merely delivering top-down talking points or press releases. Interviewees offered many strategies for doing so:
- Invite unscripted engagement: Political appointees should regularly create opportunities for unscripted input from the public, such as public listening sessions—including virtual options and options outside of business hours—and open-ended public comment dockets or complaint portals that help surface economic challenges and trends on the ground to inform policy and enforcement priorities. Additionally, several interviewees noted that—counter to many political appointees’ instincts—it can be quite valuable for a senior official to simply show up and listen, making traveling beyond DC worthwhile even without a perfectly crafted message or new policy announcement prepared. Moreover, doing such listening tours with members of Congress can better connect the executive and legislative branches in understanding and solving policy problems.
- Use the convening power and bully pulpit to build power for regular people: Administrations should proactively use their convening power and public platform to help grow outside organizing capacity that can drive durable change. For example, a former senior DOL official recounted how a convening of new union organizers at the White House wasn’t just a symbolic photo op—rather, it seeded real power on the ground by boosting organizers’ credibility back home in their workplaces and communities, including helping organizers secure a first union contract in a region typically hostile to union organizing.¹⁴ An interviewee noted that one strategy for expanding the administration’s reach is to allow invited guests to bring guests of their own—bringing new faces and voices into the room.¹⁵
Proactively and directly communicate with citizens: The federal government should communicate with citizens much more directly—including directly contacting Americans when they are eligible for a benefit, circling back to tell them the outcome of a policy process they participated in, narrating who stands in the way of a policy from taking effect (such as when Congress seeks to cut a program or a court blocks a policy), and providing opportunities for feedback on whether policies are working well on the ground. Future administrations should build out tools for this kind of proactive, direct contact between the federal government and American citizens, such as building hooks for direct communication between the federal government and beneficiaries into programs’ design and creating digital platforms and tools that can be used to directly message citizens who are likely to be impacted by a policy.
Create a system of federal navigators: A future administration should work with Congress to create a corps of federal navigators to help working people and small businesses navigate federal government programs and services—providing “one front door” so that busy people don’t have to navigate the alphabet soup of federal agencies and programs on their own. The federal navigator program could be integrated with congressional offices’ constituent services teams, so that members of Congress and the executive branch work hand in glove to improve Americans’ experience of government.
Use better branding and single front doors for related programs and services: To make the federal government easier for citizens to navigate, every federal program or service should have lay-friendly branding that readily communicates what it does for people, and related programs or services should be provided under one brand via one front door—even if they’re administered by different agencies. For example, an interviewee noted that the new, separate broadband programs created at the Treasury Department and DOC during the Biden-Harris administration should have been consolidated into one “universal broadband” brand.
Invest in and sync up with external organizing capacity: Outside of unions and purely seasonal political campaign field operations, the organizational muscle for organizing and mobilizing regular people behind issues and policies that would benefit them is lacking. This leaves powerful, monied special interests’ voices as the loudest ones in the DC rooms where decisions are made. Political leaders and philanthropy should invest more in building year-round, on-the-ground organizational strength to counter powerful corporate interests. Congress could also provide funding for on-the-ground community organizations to help citizens access government services and benefits and advocate for their continuation and improvement, although guardrails would be needed to ensure funding goes only to high-quality support for working people.
Create more regional offices: As of fiscal year 2023, about 80 percent of the federal workforce was located outside the DC area.¹⁶ But creating more regional offices could further deepen federal agencies’ connection to on-the-ground realities and make federal service an option for candidates with a broader diversity of backgrounds and experiences. For these offices to be effective, there has to be a high premium on DC-located officials bringing them into decision-making processes—consulting them regularly for insights from the field. Importantly, existing personnel should not be forced to relocate against their will, and relocation of agencies should not be used to indirectly fire or penalize federal workers.
Publish data on state-by-state impacts on average Americans: Where possible, policymakers should publish state-by-state data about the impacts of a policy on average Americans. Such data is highly useful for regional communications and outreach, state legislative advocacy of parallel policies, and amplification of policies by members of Congress.¹⁷ That said, such analysis should not be imposed as a legal requirement that adds red tape or delays.
Remove red tape that blocks or slows proactive engagement: Time-consuming bureaucratic processes that prevent the federal government from proactively engaging with Americans should be repealed or significantly narrowed:
- Repeal or narrow the Paperwork Reduction Act: Congress should repeal the PRA outright, or at least substantially narrow its application to large, ongoing, mandatory data collections—not one-time collections or voluntary requests like surveys. In the absence of legislative reforms, the OMB should shorten and limit its review to assessing whether the agency could reduce burdens by using information the government already has and whether the information collection is “fit for purpose”—such as ensuring form language is readily understandable to the end user.
Simplify the Federal Advisory Committee Act: Congress should simplify FACA to make it easier for agencies to convene outside experts, community leaders, and ordinary Americans to provide recommendations to the government, without requiring months of procedural delay. Congress could continue requiring agencies to provide public transparency about such meetings, while scrapping the protracted process for seeking approval from the General Services Administration (GSA). In the absence of legislative reforms, GSA should publish guidance to make clear that FACA requirements apply only in very limited circumstances.

Chapter 3: Recalibrate the Executive Branch Tool Kit for an Era of Hostile Courts and a Dysfunctional Congress

The Biden-Harris administration lost precious governing time honing regulatory policies for years, only to see them immediately invalidated by courts stacked with conservative and/or corporate-friendly ideologues. Interviewees recommended a range of legislative options for cabining unelected courts’ meddling in economic policy choices made by leaders accountable to the public, including reforms to course-correct from an ideologically captured Supreme Court, to prevent forum shopping, and to limit the scope of judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act. In the absence of legislative reforms, many interviewees recommended recalibrating resources away from notice-and-comment rulemaking, or at least not relying on notice-and-comment rulemaking as a standalone tool. In that vein, some agencies had more success producing faster, more durable on-the-ground results by waging public campaigns that deployed multiple levers in tandem, instead of relying on rulemaking alone.

Interviewee Recommendations

Use “all the tools” and wage a public campaign: Administrations should treat their highest-impact priorities not as isolated regulatory tasks or as projects for Congress alone, but rather as full-scale public campaigns that deploy multiple levers in tandem across federal and state policymaking channels. And they should launch early in an administration’s tenure, not as a last resort after other approaches fail. This approach necessitates different staffing and public engagement models, including using more collaborative, cross-disciplinary teams that proactively seek to build people-powered momentum across policymaking channels, as described in Chapter 2. This strategy is especially important in the absence of legislative reforms to the courts (or reforms that create a more functional, speedy federal legislative process), though it should not be thought of as a substitute for such reforms.
- on-the-ground execution timelines that match the timelines of elected mandates;
- simple, crisp designs that are memorable, easy to communicate, and well-suited to reaching and mobilizing the public via the bully pulpit;
- universal designs, rather than means-tested or discretionary programs that have narrower constituencies and/or bury the win in paperwork;
- directly administered programs that don’t rely on intermediaries who can add delay, increase costs, and obscure credit;
- policies with identifiable outside champions and beneficiaries ready and willing to mobilize and fight for them; and
- hooks for direct outreach and on-the-ground organizing that help beneficiaries understand the policy and take civic action based on their experience with it.
Recalibrate executive branch resources toward more resilient levers, especially in tandem: Similarly, when allocating finite resources, administrations should calibrate resources toward tools more likely to have durable impacts. In particular, enforcement actions and service delivery improvements tended to be systematically under-resourced relative to their upside potential, as elaborated in Chapters 5 and 6. And in some cases, administrative guidance, federal funding levers, and the bully pulpit may be able to more efficiently shift private-sector behavior than large-scale, elaborate notice-and-comment rulemakings. Indeed, rulemaking and legislative efforts often benefit from taking prior actions that can serve as proof points that a policy is workable—such as successful enforcement actions or state efforts.
Cabin judicial review and revamp the APA: Many interviewees, including three agencies’ general counsels, underscored the importance of Congress reforming judicial review of administrative action and the APA to restore the legitimacy of the courts and to ensure the executive branch can fulfill its electoral mandate. Our interviews surfaced a range of reform options (we separately address procedural reforms to speed up notice-and-comment rulemaking in Chapter 5):
- Eliminate forum shopping: Congress should require cases challenging federal agency action to be randomly assigned to a panel drawn from across the country or require such cases to be filed in one venue, such as the DC Circuit. In either approach, Congress should protect access to justice for litigants, such as providing remote-access options for judicial hearings. All interviewees who discussed the topic were supportive of legislation to curb forum shopping, viewing it as a table stakes no-brainer for restoring the legitimacy of the courts as neutral, apolitical arbiters.
- Cabin industry trade groups’ ability to get universal relief from economic regulation: Interviewees’ views on whether and when nationwide relief from federal action is ever appropriate were mixed, but several noted that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. CASA¹⁸ cabining the availability of nationwide equitable injunctive relief will not stop corporate-friendly courts from providing industry-wide relief from economic regulation—thanks to the continued availability of universal vacatur and lax associational standing rules.¹⁹ Congress could change this dynamic by amending the APA to prohibit representative suits on behalf of regulated entities (requiring individuals or firms purportedly harmed to come forward themselves), while eliminating regulated entities’ ability to obtain universal vacatur. As an alternative to eliminating representative suits for regulated entities altogether, Congress or the Judicial Conference could amend the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to require a specific certification that individual members have a cognizable harm and in fact wish the association to represent them in the litigation.
- Reform the Supreme Court: Conservative, corporate-friendly capture of the Supreme Court means that the legitimacy of the courts will suffer for years to come, and that without reforms the Supreme Court will continue to pose an existential obstacle to center-left economic policymaking for a generation. Revitalizing the capacity of the federal government to solve national problems requires preventing the judiciary from politicizing and kneecapping that capacity. To that end, interviewees identified several options for reforming Supreme Court review of administrative action and/or pushing back on the Supreme Court’s assault on administrative agencies:
  - Expand the Supreme Court, such as by having one justice per circuit (13 total).
  - Create a new specialized court for review of administrative action, and remove the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to review its decisions.
- Cabin the scope of judicial review: Interviewees proposed a range of modifications to the scope of judicial review under the APA, with an eye toward ensuring judges focus on questions of law and individual liberties within their expertise, rather than substituting their own policy judgment for those of economic policymakers accountable to the electorate. Interviewees identified several options for Congress:
  - Several interviewees recommended creating different APA standards of review for different types of agencies and/or agency actions, such as providing the government more leeway when it is acting as market regulator and more oversight in areas where it is potentially impeding individual liberties.
  - One interviewee would repeal arbitrary and capriciousness review altogether (as distinct from review of whether an agency acted within its statutory authority), but others worried that would leave an insufficient check on truly arbitrary action and could push hostile courts into more sweeping rulings about agencies’ legal authorities.
  - Some interviewees recommended heightening the standard of review for arbitrary and capriciousness challenges, so that truly arbitrary action is checked but courts are less able to substitute their own policy judgments for those of the executive branch. One such option would be to shift to “rational basis” review of agency action, which is more deferential to agencies. This would allow agencies to offer ex post justifications for actions in litigation briefs, rather than courts policing the adequacy of agencies’ written responses to comments in the regulation itself.
  - Another option would be to more clearly identify the bases on which agency actions may be invalidated. For example, in creating the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, Congress specified that judicial review is permitted only for corruption or misconduct (and provided for exclusive jurisdiction in the District Court for the District of Columbia).²⁰
  - To override an undue focus on make-work proceduralism, several interviewees recommended keeping the requirement to seek public comment, while eliminating judicial review of the adequacy of an agency’s written responses to comments. This would refocus the comment process on showing public support or opposition to the rule and offering recommendations for improving the policy—rather than the comment process being used by special interests and conservative courts to second-guess agencies’ written responses to commenters’ arguments.
  - Similarly, an interviewee recommended that procedural review be cabined to whether the agency sought public comment on the policy, full stop, rather than requiring the agency to have sought public comment on every piece of evidence cited in the final action.
  - Another option recommended by an interviewee for preventing minor procedural issues from being used to invalidate entire regulations is to specify a very high bar for challengers to show that procedural errors were not harmless—i.e., that the agency would not have finalized the rule but for the process mistake.
- Speed judicial review: The slow pace of judicial review can leave agency action in limbo for years. Interviewees offered several options for Congress to speed judicial review, including:
  - Amend the APA to replace district court review with petitions for review filed directly in appellate courts (as many agency-specific statutes already provide).
  - Expand the judiciary to decrease caseloads.
  - Create shot clocks for decisions.
- Override the Major Questions Doctrine: The Major Questions Doctrine, at least as articulated by the Supreme Court thus far, purports to be a statutory interpretation principle. Given that, Congress should override it across the board through legislation, such as by providing in the Dictionary Act that the political or economic significance of an administrative action is not a basis for overturning it. A more tempered option would be to create a Congressional Review Act facilitating congressional override of judicial decisions that rely on the Major Questions Doctrine.²¹
- Override Corner Post with a statute of repose: To bring finality to agency actions and promote certainty for market participants, Congress should adopt a statute of repose requiring APA challenges to be brought within a delimited time frame after the agency takes action—overriding the Supreme Court’s Corner Post decision that allows challenges to be brought many years later.²²
- Counter the deregulatory bias of judicial review: More work is needed to assess whether and how to address the APA’s baked-in bias toward blocking administrative action while offering almost no remedy for government inaction, delay, or forgone benefits. For example, Congress could add a cause of action for citizens or states when an agency misses a statutory deadline or forgoes the benefits of regulation.
Increase public accountability for courts blocking popular economic policies: Especially in the absence of legislatively enacted reforms, political leaders should increase public oversight and accountability for corporate-friendly courts, such as by publicly naming and shaming the Supreme Court when it invalidates popular economic policies adopted by the politically accountable branches, holding oversight hearings on justices’ ethics issues, holding hearings about the unreliability and instability of judicial decision-making, and timing implementation deadlines (to the extent possible) so that Supreme Court review occurs in election years—deterring justices from striking down popular programs. As recommended in Chapter 2, the federal government should directly communicate with Americans to narrate who got in the way of a popular policy taking effect, educating the public about antidemocratic, corporate-friendly courts that invalidate economic regulations on dubious grounds.
Change how Congress delegates to agencies: In the absence of wholesale changes to the APA and judicial review of agency action, Congress will need to rethink how it delegates authority to agencies, because broad delegations to agencies to engage in rulemaking leave the resultant policies highly vulnerable to hostile courts. Alternative strategies offered by interviewees include:
- Legislate much more specific substance directly in statute and make any delegations to agencies as clear as possible.
- Articulate strong statutory standards in statute and then delegate regulatory authority to the agency to create safe harbors or exemptions. This strategy changes regulated entities’ incentives to challenge rulemakings, since the rulemaking effectively reduces burdens or provides additional compliance pathways—rather than rulemaking being a condition precedent to regulation of the industry in the first instance.²³
Consider program-specific exceptions or limitations on judicial review: In the absence of wholesale reforms, when enacting a new programmatic requirement, Congress should consider including program-specific carveouts from judicial review or channeling challenges to less-biased venues. For example, as noted above, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law cabined judicial review of the BEAD program. (It also provided exemptions to the APA, Paperwork Reduction Act, and the Regulatory Flexibility Act.)

Chapter 4: Remove Red Tape That Slows Regulatory Implementation

In addition to its vulnerability to hostile courts, there is another problem with rulemaking: its multiyear timeline. Interviewees described obsolete government organizational structures, layers of procedure, and vetogates that add delays and risk-aversion. They recommended removing such impediments, including eliminating the current role of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) as a skeptical gatekeeper—a role originally created by conservatives to hamstring government regulation of markets. They also recommended repealing or significantly narrowing statutory procedural requirements that add make-work and delay, including the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Regulatory Flexibility Act.

Interviewee Recommendations

Relentlessly prioritize key rules and finalize them in Year One: Agencies should arrive on Day One with priority rules already drafted or heavily scaffolded, so that they can launch immediately and be finalized within a year. One agency’s former chief of staff added that agencies should resist the political pressure to extend comment deadlines to accommodate stakeholders, which adds delays beyond the 60-day comment period generally required by Executive Order 12866.²⁴ Additionally, agencies should avoid lengthy compliance periods and be prepared to expedite litigation to defend a rule as needed.
Deploy collaborative, cross-disciplinary teams with direct access to an empowered decision-maker: Policymaking teams should be staffed from the outset as cross-disciplinary, hybrid teams—treating policy staff, offices of general counsel, economists, engagement officials, and the litigators who will eventually defend the rule as one team pursuing a shared mission.²⁵ These hybrid teams should have a designated project manager, and they should have ready access to an empowered decision-maker. As explained in Chapters 2 and 3, they should also work with engagement teams from the outset—for example, pairing a proposed rule with model legislation for states and working with organizing, communications, and digital personnel to build a base of support for the policy.
Abolish or significantly redesign OIRA’s regulatory review: All interviewees who discussed the topic agreed OIRA’s oversight of regulations should be significantly changed. They raised the following options, which can be accomplished without new legislation and are not necessarily mutually exclusive:
- Rescind EO 12866 and return OIRA to its original statutory information-resources mission only, rather than substantive regulatory review. As described in Chapter 2, this could include making OIRA a home for proactive engagement expertise and capacity. This option would require reassigning rulemaking project management and coordination functions to another component of the White House, such as another part of OMB, a policy council, or the chief of staff’s office, where a new culture of collaboration could be nurtured. Additionally, substantive review of policies by political appointees in those components, rather than career OIRA staff, is more appropriate for ensuring policies are consistent with the president’s agenda and values.
- Revise EO 12866 to reduce OIRA’s role in regulatory policymaking to that of project manager, removing it as an independent substantive reviewer but continuing its role of coordinating White House and interagency feedback, enforcing deadlines, and providing a clear escalation channel for resolving disagreements.
- Revise EO 12866 to remove the requirement that agencies submit a cost-benefit analysis to OIRA. That said, some interpret Michigan v. EPA, 576 U.S. 743 (2015), as strongly suggesting rules would be deemed arbitrary and capricious if they do not consider costs at all; however, the case expressly declines to hold that “a formal cost-benefit analysis in which each advantage and disadvantage is assigned a monetary value” is required.
- Require OIRA or other White House component clearance before an agency undertakes significant work on a policy, rather than requiring clearance at the back end of agencies’ drafting processes.
- Retool OIRA personnel slots for reviewing regulations into a centralized well of capacity to assist, not impede, agencies in regulatory policymaking—such as creating a USDS-style SWAT team that can provide surge drafting capacity and expertise to help agencies execute priority rules quickly.
- Raise the dollar threshold in EO 12866 for policies to trigger OIRA review, or otherwise narrow the types of proposed policies that must be submitted.²⁶
- Substantially shorten the 90-day window for OIRA review, while requiring agencies to give the White House advance notice of submission timing.
Right-size proposed rules and regulatory analyses: The length of proposed rules and the economic and legal analyses supporting them has grown substantially in recent years—often spanning hundreds of pages. Agencies should pursue “skinnier” notice-and-comment rulemakings at the proposal stage. Administrations should be more open to releasing proposed rules and other draft policies that are not entirely complete or fully decided, limiting work at the proposal stage to that necessary to inform the public and to meet legal requirements that final actions be a “logical outgrowth” of the proposal. Reforms to the scope of judicial review elaborated in Chapter 3 and reforms to OIRA review elaborated above would also help relieve much of the burden of such analyses.
Simplify cost-benefit analysis: Even if Executive Order 12866 is rescinded, agencies would generally still be required by the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (UMRA) to publish cost-benefit statements for significant rules, and, as noted above, some also read Massachusetts v. EPA as requiring agencies to consider costs. Agencies should streamline these cost-benefit analyses by focusing on a policy’s most important and knowable sources of costs and benefits, rather than devoting excessive time attempting to quantify tertiary or highly speculative costs.²⁷ Notably, UMRA limits judicial review of agencies’ cost-benefit statements to whether the agency prepared one at all, and Massachusetts v. EPA declines to require a formal cost-benefit analysis that monetizes each effect, so economists should tailor their analysis to what is actually useful to improve decision-making.²⁸
Repeal other unnecessary procedural layers: Congress should clear the thicket of procedural add-ons that stack additional months—sometimes years—onto timelines without measurably improving substance, including the Regulatory Flexibility Act and SBREFA, the Paperwork Reduction Act, mandatory advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPR), and the extra Magnuson-Moss Act steps for FTC consumer protection rules. Short of outright repeals, Congress should at least remove duplicative vetogates from these processes (i.e., the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy and OIRA/OMB), leaving compliance to the agency. In the absence of legislative reforms, OIRA/OMB and agencies should administratively reduce the burdens of these procedural requirements by doing the minimum amount of work necessary to satisfy them—such as by sharing an actual draft rule with a SBREFA panel, instead of wasting time creating a separate rule outline for panelists to review, or by timeboxing and page-limiting ANPRs.

Chapter 5: Speed and Scale Corporate Accountability Enforcement

Bold, impactful affirmative litigations to stop corporate lawbreaking—i.e., to enforce worker protection, consumer protection, and competition laws—are some of the most effective remaining federal tools for delivering concrete results for ordinary Americans. However, to make them a central part of an administration’s strategy for ensuring the economy works for ordinary Americans, interviewees described a need to adequately resource, speed up, and lift up such actions—so that large corporations can’t treat lawbreaking as a mere cost of doing business.

Interviewee Recommendations

Dramatically expand enforcement resources, prioritize high-impact cases, and lift them up: Congress should markedly increase funding for enforcement, because robust resources are the single most effective way to translate statutory authority into real-world protections. Agencies should also redirect resources from less impactful or durable activities to enforcement, and they should pursue high-impact litigations rather than small-ball one-offs. Political leaders (including at the White House) should lift up and champion enforcement work.
Incorporate public input: Public engagement can and should be integrated into the enforcement mission, such as through the field listening sessions and public-facing complaint portals described in Chapter 2. These inputs can help shape enforcement priorities and can also add narrative heft to lawsuits—ensuring the negative impacts of corporate abuse on regular people are front and center, rather than cases merely being esoteric legal matters. The CFPB’s Consumer Complaint Database provides a particularly strong model worth replicating.²⁹ The system automates complaint intake, transmits complaints to companies, and publishes their responses—spurring many companies to provide consumer redress voluntarily, while the system also surfaces emerging or systemic abuses for enforcers.
Build up trial capacity: Trial litigation is a different skill set from investigating or negotiating a settlement, and it requires significant resources. Having credible capacity to go to trial is an important part of adopting a “willing-to-sue” posture, which facilitates not only actual wins at trial but also greater deterrence and stronger leverage for settlement negotiations.
File federal court complaints faster: Agencies can shorten the life cycle of a case by filing a complaint in federal court faster, ideally in jurisdictions known for moving cases efficiently (so-called rocket dockets). Although civil investigative demands (CIDs) are valuable tools for pre-suit investigation, agencies must shift the culture away from letting investigations drag on behind-the-scenes for years. Staffing enforcement units with more former plaintiffs’ attorneys can help counter this culture, because such attorneys are more accustomed to relying on publicly available information and post-complaint discovery to build cases. Agencies can also accelerate timelines for federal court litigation by seeking emergency relief where appropriate.
Bring strategic CID-enforcement actions early: Agencies should consider filing a strategic CID enforcement action early in the term, establishing judicial precedent that slow-walking or ignoring a CID is unlawful. The signaling effect of such an action could deter future foot-dragging, shortening the investigative timeline for cases that follow.
Embed economists in enforcement units: Agency economists should use the CFPB model of embedding economists directly within enforcement units, where their empirical skills can shape case strategy in real time. Such integrations improve evidentiary rigor and prevent economic analysis from becoming a siloed, gatekeeping layer.
Hire technologists and deploy modern technology: Digitization now touches nearly every aspect of our economy, meaning enforcement teams must be capable of understanding fast-evolving, complex technical systems and digesting reams of digital information. To scale enforcement rapidly and sustainably, agencies should hire technologists with deep expertise in software, data science, and emerging tech—embedding them as partners to enforcement teams. Alongside talent, agencies should deploy modern tools (e.g. AI-assisted document review and advanced analytics) to compress investigative timelines and detect misconduct at scale.³⁰
Break down silos around legal authorities: Enforcement teams should be organized around markets, issue areas, and/or investigative targets rather than around legal causes of action, so that investigators can pursue misconduct holistically instead of in stovepipes.³¹ Reorganizing around cross-authority teams can reduce duplication, avoid missed opportunities for coordinated action, and increase deterrence. Interagency teams could also be created when markets and issues span multiple agencies’ jurisdiction, or interagency teams could even be target-specific—such as when a known bad actor is likely in violation of multiple agencies’ statutes.
Scale and systematize collaboration with state attorneys general and the private public interest bar: Federal enforcers can multiply resources, maintain durable pressure on large defendants, and promote the sound development of the law more efficiently by making work with state attorneys general and the private plaintiffs’ bar a routine part of their playbook. The retooling of outreach positions described in Chapter 2 would support such efforts. Partnerships can include joint complaints, federal intervention in meritorious private actions to add government heft, and amicus programs that steer doctrine and bolster private cases without the time and expense of full enforcement actions. Agencies should also consider hiring private firms to prosecute cases on the government’s behalf, particularly while they are in the process of rebuilding their own in-house capacity.
Recruit impact litigators into the DOJ Civil Division: The DOJ Civil Division should be seeded with lawyers (at both the political and career levels) who view impact litigation as an engine of structural reform, deliberately recruiting movement lawyers steeped in aligning courtroom work with broader policy objectives. Although Big Law corporate defense bar experience need not be a categorical disqualifier for DOJ positions, there should be a heavy thumb on the scale toward ensuring DOJ personnel are eager to be creative, nimble, and savvy about using litigation to advance the public interest.
Provide accruing monetary penalties sufficient to create deterrence: Congress and agencies should ensure financial sanctions are large enough that lawbreaking isn’t simply a corporate cost of doing business. Financial penalties structured to accrue while violations remain ongoing—such as per day rather than per violation fines—also increase defendants’ incentive to quickly stop unlawful conduct. In some cases, agencies may be able to interpret their statutes to authorize per day fines, while in others new legislation is needed.³²
Establish financial penalties for failure to promptly comply with CIDs: Similarly, Congress should enact financial penalties to deter targets from slow-walking their responses to agencies’ CIDs. A per day fine for each day a district court finds a respondent failed to be in timely full compliance with a CID could fundamentally change targets’ calculus around foot-dragging.
Increase the availability of “rocket dockets”: To prevent meritorious enforcement actions from languishing in court for years, Congress should expand the Article III bench to reduce caseloads and/or create expedited litigation tracks for government enforcement cases. Such measures would shorten time to judgment and lower litigation costs for both the government and defendants.
Reassign enforcement responsibilities to agencies with a track record: Congress should place primary enforcement authority in agencies that have demonstrated both capacity and an institutional culture of vigorous action, rather than entrusting exclusive powers to chronically underperforming agencies.³³ Meanwhile, motivated regulators like the DOL, FTC, CFPB, and DOJ Antitrust Division should not be forced to clear unnecessary vetogates—such as mandatory sign-offs by DOJ’s Civil Division.
Expand external litigation capacity to stop corporate wrongdoing: States should expand the capacity of state attorney general offices—filling the gaps left by the current administration’s nonenforcement of the laws while also seeding cases that could become state-federal collaborations in a future administration. Congress can also multiply enforcement capacity to stop corporate wrongdoing by expanding capacity beyond federal government enforcement agencies. By establishing private rights of action, and by eliminating forced arbitration clauses, Congress can empower consumers, workers, and states to serve as force multipliers when federal agencies lack the bandwidth. Congress should also enable federal Legal Services Corporation (LSC) funding to be used more efficiently by removing the appropriations rider that bars LSC-funded organizations from pursuing class actions, enabling low-income citizens’ lawyers to stop widespread lawbreaking in one suit instead of playing case-by-case whack-a-mole.³⁴
Track and publicize impacts: Enforcement agencies should develop systems for tracking and publicizing the impact of their work. For example, the CFPB’s supervision authority enabled it to quantify and report publicly how much money had been refunded to consumers in response to its campaign against banking junk fees.³⁵ In the absence of such standing supervisory authority, agencies could build requirements for reporting impacts into the remedies they seek from corporations.
Create federal victim relief accounts and directly distribute relief: Similarly, enforcement agencies could increase the visibility and traceability of their work by using victim relief accounts to distribute compensation directly to victims. For example, monetary penalties secured by the CFPB are deposited in its Civil Penalty Fund, which is used to help compensate victims who wouldn’t otherwise receive compensation from the defendant.³⁶ This approach should be expanded so that all victim compensation flows through a federal account to the victims—making it clearer that the federal government, not the corporate wrongdoer, is the one who secured relief.

Chapter 6: Modernize Government and Abolish Needless Paperwork

The Biden-Harris administration had many successes using human-centered design to transform government services from frustrating to seamless, such as free and easy tax filing, online passport renewal, and click-to-order COVID tests. But interviewees still regretted that the Biden-Harris administration did not make human-centered design and technological transformation more of a core priority across agencies. They underscored that future administrations could rebuild public trust and reduce inefficiencies by going all-in on human-centered design and in-house technological modernization capacity—including automating benefits through better data-sharing and eliminating needless government paperwork.

Interviewee Recommendations

Dramatically expand technological capacity across government and empower modernization teams to execute: Centralized, specialized teams like USDS and the Government Service Administration’s 18F play important roles in government modernization—providing surge capacity to agencies and building in-house, cross-governmental software products. Those teams must be rebuilt and expanded, but to truly realize the full potential for technological transformation, agencies also need in-house transformation teams. Political leaders must clearly empower such teams with the mandate and resources to execute—making customer service and human-centered design a core priority, not a spot project.
Build human-centered design into policy design from the outset: Human-centered design needs to be incorporated at the policy and program development stage, rather than treating implementation as a secondary process that’s downstream from legal or policy work establishing program terms and requirements. That means embedding technologists in program design teams, using early user research and user testing to inform design, and designing program terms and requirements to limit burdens on end users that undermine program efficacy. The United Kingdom’s Policy Lab provides one such model, integrating evidence, participation, and experimentation into the policymaking process.³⁷ (As noted in Chapter 2, the federal government should dramatically expand its capacity for user research and user testing, including removing the PRA as an impediment to it.)
Eliminate needless paperwork and streamline agency data-sharing: The federal government should use fact-specific proxies and pre-populated forms to eliminate needless paperwork, drawing on information already in the government’s possession to confirm eligibility and simply notify Americans of their benefits and services when possible, instead of forcing them to provide details the government already knows. Interviewees identified several changes needed to facilitate this:
- Congress should amend 26 U.S.C. § 6103 so that agencies can access IRS taxpayer data for the purpose of delivering a government benefit, removing the duplicative burden of having to prove one’s income to establish program eligibility.
- Congress and agencies should also align IRS income reporting time frames and benefits enrollment timelines, so that income data is not stale for purposes of benefit eligibility determinations.³⁸
- The federal government should develop a streamlined process—with appropriate purpose limitations and cybersecurity and privacy protections—for interagency data-sharing that eliminates the need to negotiate bespoke agency-by-agency agreements. The streamlined process could also address data-sharing with state governments.
Maximize enrollment: Congress should create an affirmative obligation for agencies to maximize uptake of service and benefits, achieving the full legislative intent of programs, including requiring automatic enrollment wherever possible. Such legislation should include a safe harbor for agencies that try in good faith to reduce burdens, so that fear of relatively small-scale or one-off incorrect spending does not prevent them from striving to minimize burdens on end users.
Fund marketing to increase uptake: Congress should appropriate dedicated marketing and outreach funds to help agencies increase awareness and participation in public programs—supporting coordinated, evidence-based campaigns that reach eligible populations through trusted messengers, digital channels, and community partnerships.
Counterbalance the political emphasis on eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse”: Interviewees proposed a number of options to ensure that politicians better weigh the risks of “waste, fraud, and abuse” against the costs of imposing procedural frictions on eligible, deserving Americans:
- Share user testing videos: As explained in Chapter 2, user testing can be an invaluable tool for understanding whether and how programs work for Americans on the ground, in real life. In addition to performing user testing much more often, the federal government should publish videos of user testing (with testers’ permission) and share them with members of Congress—making more concrete how hard and frustrating it can be for Americans to obtain benefits and services to which they are entitled.
- Congressional Implementation Office: As outlined in Chapter 1, Congress should create a Congressional Implementation Office to report on implementation burdens and pitch implementation approaches to the executive branch.
- Expand the mandate of inspectors general (IGs): Administrations should nominate IGs committed to thinking more holistically about both the costs and the benefits of procedural protections against waste, fraud, and abuse. Congress should require IGs to report not just on “waste, fraud, and abuse” but also on how many eligible Americans are estimated to be missing out on benefits they are owed and the barriers in their way—including regular public reporting of data.
Make IT funding flexible: Current budget structures favor procurement over personnel, even where it’s inefficient. Congress should reduce pressures to outsource by giving agencies more flexibility to use their IT budgets for in-house personnel—creating more flexibility to build products and services in house and to ensure in-house personnel have the skills needed to meaningfully supervise contractor performance.
Create more flexibility in contracting: As discussed in Chapter 7, administrations should rescind or revise policies that bias decisions toward outsourcing—which hollows out government capacity and creates overreliance on private contractors, including in areas involving sensitive data and critical functions. When contracting is appropriate, agencies should have greater flexibility to weigh the quality and track record of firms, rather than being forced to privilege the lowest-cost bid at the expense of effective, high-quality performance.
Adequately resource customer service: Government must adequately resource its customer service functions so agencies can provide timely, reliable access to benefits and information. Underfunding leads directly to backlogs, errors, and public frustration, which undermine trust in government.
Scrutinize major contracts in advance: Before Inauguration Day, agency teams should examine every major contract of the agency (which are generally public) and assess whether the contractor is performing well—prioritizing contracts that touch key aspects of the agency’s mission and/or involve major touchpoints between the government and its citizens. Agencies should arrive on Day One knowing whether and which contracts are working well, so that they can immediately rebid contracts, insource key functions, or otherwise improve performance.
Create performance standards for state-administered federal programs: Congress should create better levers for ensuring states administer federal benefits programs in conformance with best practices around human-centered design. For example, Congress could provide authority for the federal government to step in—such as authority to appoint a federal “receiver” to take over administration of a federal benefit—when state administrators fail to achieve performance benchmarks.
Build open source: Agencies should build new technology products and services as open source by default, releasing source code, application programming interfaces, and development tools publicly wherever possible. Not only does this promote transparency, reuse, and innovation—it also invites real-world scrutiny that improves security, resilience, and public trust. For example, the CFPB’s Consumer Complaint Database and the IRS’s Direct File programs were open source—turning government infrastructure into a public digital good rather than a closed asset.

Chapter 7: Deploy Federal Funding Faster and More Efficiently

Interviewees pushed back on the notion that success should be measured purely by the number of infrastructure projects completed during a single term, explaining that the goal of the Biden-Harris administration’s “Investing in America” agenda was generational transformation, not “shovel ready” wins. That said, interviewees stressed that federal dollars alone do not transform systems, and that failing to obligate funds quickly leaves them vulnerable to rescission or repurposing. Interviewees offered many recommendations for making federal funding deployment faster and more efficient—including defining outcome-oriented objectives from the outset, building out project management capabilities, investing in external capacity, aligning overlapping funding streams, creating next-generation public funding transparency tools, and, where possible, cutting out intermediaries that can add costs and delays.

Interviewee Recommendations

Build prompt implementation into legislative design: Interviewees identified a number of practical options for better prioritizing implementation when creating funding programs:
- As recommended in Chapter 1, a Congressional Implementation Office should assess time-to-launch and operational complexity, helping lawmakers reduce implementation timelines from the start. And Congress should include deadlines in statute, including for all stages of implementation, from program announcement to funding obligation to project completion.
- Congress should avoid new program proliferation that strains bandwidth by building on existing delivery infrastructure where possible, rather than creating new programs entirely from scratch. That said, Congress should build only on existing programs or delivery mechanisms that have track records of success, and it should retire ones that don’t.
- When creating a new program, Congress should provide agencies with the flexible authorities and sufficient resources needed to stand it up at scale. This includes flexible hiring authorities, “Other Transactions Authority” for programs without traditional grant-grantee funding relationships, and sufficient administrative funding to build teams, infrastructure, and partnerships quickly.
- As noted in Chapter 3, when creating new programs, Congress should also consider including exemptions from other federal process requirements, such as APA notice and comment and/or judicial review, and the Paperwork Reduction Act.
- Congress should carefully assess whether using intermediaries—such as state governments or private for-profits—is necessary or desirable for the particular programmatic goal. State and local governments are sometimes valuable or necessary intermediaries to bring local expertise and/or to leverage existing delivery capacity, but they and other intermediaries can also introduce significant delays, increase costs, blur accountability, and introduce opportunities for fraud.
- When it’s necessary to use intermediaries, Congress should consider putting governmental skin in the game to incentivize project success. Interviewees noted a diversity of options:
  - Clearly defined project parameters can help ensure that federal funds flow to the intended types of projects.
  - Requirements for real-time project-level reporting can increase transparency and accountability in how funds are used.
  - “Golden share” provisions can give the government a say in corporate decisions, to protect the public’s investment and ensure the government stays engaged in critical decision-making.³⁹
  - Provisions that give the government an equity stake in the “upside” of a project can ensure taxpayers share in the benefits of profitable investments. Allowing such funds to revolve back into a successful program, rather than to the General Fund, could further incentivize agencies to push for project success.
  - An interviewee pointed to the DOE’s Grid Innovation Program as a successful example of aligning public and private incentives for prompt execution.⁴⁰ The program required a governmental entity (one or more states, tribes, local governments, and/or public utility commissions) to apply for funding in collaboration with an electric sector owner or operator. Although the private owner or operator would generally lead project delivery, the governmental entity’s buy-in from the outset incentivized it to help clear implementation bottlenecks—such as by expediting permitting.
  - Funding could be directly conditioned on states and/or localities streamlining or speeding their own processes, such as putting shot clocks on permitting.
Define desired outcomes up front: Congress and agencies should publicly define from the outset the concrete outcomes they aim to achieve on the ground, while recognizing that some outcomes matter more or less depending on the context and that clarity about which outcomes take precedence helps focus implementation. Publishing a clear strategic vision up front gives the agency a North Star map of what to prioritize—limiting relitigation of priorities—and helps potential funding recipients both understand and anticipate what is expected of them.
Align funding streams: Congress should grant agencies greater authority to braid, transfer, or reprogram related funding sources toward common goals. Overlapping programs divided across agencies often force agencies to spend scarce time coordinating with each other, while leaving the public to navigate a confusing maze of fragmented initiatives. Allowing agencies to align funding more seamlessly would reduce duplication, accelerate implementation, and make government easier to use. Even in the absence of new legislation, agencies can move in this direction by launching shared “front doors” (e.g., one website and one set of engagement personnel for broadband) and coordinating outreach so communities experience government as a single, coherent partner rather than a patchwork of disconnected programs.
Build a next-generation public funding transparency tool: Improve on USAspending.gov by creating a user-friendly platform that not only shows where federal dollars are going but also provides local texture and human-impact narratives that help the public understand what those investments mean for their communities. The Biden-Harris administration took a step in this direction with its “Investing in America” map,⁴¹ but a more ambitious, permanent tool could integrate geospatial data, plain-language descriptions, and stories from beneficiaries. By turning federal spending into something people can actually see and connect to their daily lives, such a tool would strengthen accountability and rebuild trust that the government is delivering tangible value in people’s lives.
Create in-house project manager capacity: Major federal funding programs should have dedicated project managers and modern dashboard tools to track projects from start to on-the-ground completion (not just funding obligation), ensuring real-time visibility into progress and bottlenecks. Project managers should ensure projects do not get stuck in grant agreement backlogs, as failing to obligate funds within a term jeopardizes the entire project. Project managers should be empowered with clear authority to fast-track decisions and cut through red tape so that priority projects can launch and deliver results on the ground within the term. Additionally or alternatively, a USDS-style centralized team of project managers could deploy to agencies to provide surge capacity to programs when needed. Interviewees noted that this is a highly competitive skill set in the private sector, so special pay authority would likely be needed.
Pilot direct delivery: More work is needed to better understand what types of projects and at what scale the federal government can directly deliver projects more effectively and/or efficiently than the private sector. Pilot projects at the state and local level could lay the groundwork for new federal approaches. And as one interviewee noted, federal pilot projects focused on cross-jurisdictional projects would be fertile ground for building federal capacity for Work Progress Administration–style delivery.
Reform permitting: Wholesale permitting reforms at all levels—federal, state, and local—are desperately needed, with interviewees flagging state and local permitting in particular as a serious time suck for project delivery and noting federal permitting requirements were sometimes duplicative of state and local ones. However, given the complexity of permitting laws, proposing specific legislative reforms was beyond the scope of this project.

Use human-centered design in grant applications: For discretionary grant programs, agencies should use user-centered approaches to minimize the burdens of applying for federal funds. As noted in Chapter 6, by focusing on administrative burden reduction, HHS substantially reduced certain grant application times, and DOT found that pre-populating grant applications with already known information and providing drop-down options made applications quicker and easier—a form of human-centered design for grantees. Publishing examples of successful applications can also help applicants see concretely what is expected of them.

Dramatically expand technical assistance: Congress should invest in expansions of technical assistance to boost external capacity. For example, federal programs should provide pooled technical assistance resources—such as in-house technical experts available to help funding applicants—instead of forcing each prospective applicant to separately procure their own consultant.⁴² Congress could also provide funding for private organizations to provide technical assistance and operational support—while recognizing that quality varies and vetting for only high-quality organizational partners is key.
Ensure adequate funding for operational expenditures—not just capital expenditures—where necessary for project sustainability: To improve project sustainability in under-resourced communities, such as rural areas, Congress should increase indirect cost rates, shift from short-term grants to multiyear funding structures that allow for planning and continuity, and consider ongoing operating expense funding streams for projects that are important to the public interest but unlikely to be viable in the long term without ongoing subsidy. That said, guardrails should ensure such funds are used only where truly necessary to keep good projects up and running, because funding operational expenditures can become a slippery slope that depletes funds for new projects.
Dive deeper on supply-side private-sector choke points: A deep dive is needed to map the sectors where private-sector concentration creates bottlenecks for building key infrastructure—such as the oligopolies of heavy highway contractors described above. A deep dive could propose sector-specific policy solutions.
Adequately fund cross-departmental agency personnel and permitting agencies: Departmental administration budgets typically fund shared professionals like general counsel offices and human resources offices that support implementation across multiple programs, but these unsexy budget lines are chronically underfunded, which slows execution. Congress should also adequately fund permitting agencies, whose capacity bottlenecks can delay delivery of major investments.
Create a new investment-ready corporate structure: Congress could use the tax code to create a new type of entity specifically designed to be an eligible, trustworthy recipient of public funds. Just as B Corps certify adherence to social responsibility standards, such entities could make a set of public-interest commitments—such as caps on excessive profit margins, prohibitions on stock buybacks and dividends, prevailing wage and labor neutrality requirements, and/or transparency requirements. In exchange, such firms could receive preferred access to federal funding streams and potentially favorable tax treatment, creating a class of private-sector intermediaries capable of receiving federal funds quickly, without sacrificing the public purpose of federal investment.⁴³
Procurement fixes: While interviewees largely focused on federal funding programs, they also surfaced the need to reform federal procurement:
- Reduce inefficient outsourcing and reliance on poor contractors: The federal government should rescind or revise OMB Circular A-76, which imposes burdensome process requirements to determine which activities must be outsourced.⁴⁴ Rescinding A-76 would provide agencies flexibility to build and retain in-house expertise, instead of putting a thumb on the scale for outsourcing—which can hollow out core operational capacity. And as noted in Chapter 6, agencies should have more flexibility to consider contractor quality—not just the lowest-cost bid.
Dive deeper on federal procurement: More work is needed to scrutinize federal procurement rules, with a focus on reforms to speed up the process, expand and diversify the supply base, and improve contractor performance. A deep dive effort should map out how to streamline the 2,000+ page Federal Acquisition Regulations, so that federal government procurement isn’t a byzantine, slow process in which sophisticated, well-resourced players have an edge. A deep dive should also propose changes to lowest-price bidding to prevent poor performers from winning bids and examine how sole-source contracting can deepen dependence on single vendors—which can ultimately raise costs and lower quality over time.

Chapter 8: Quickly Build Modern, Nimble Teams Post-DOGE

The federal personnel system was hardly perfect even before the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) decimated the federal workforce. Interviewees cited slow hiring processes, uncompetitive pay, rigid institutional boundaries, and underutilized performance management tools as impediments to nimble, effective problem-solving. Now, Trump and DOGE have shattered the former social compact with federal workers, in which public service promised stability and a chance to do meaningful, respected work. Interviewees offered options for building a modern, nimble model going forward, including using more “tour-of-duty” models to inject mission-driven talent into government, rewarding performance rather than seniority, using flexible hiring authorities and/or creative contracting approaches to quickly rebuild the federal workforce, deploying agile, cross-disciplinary teams, and restoring collective bargaining rights while making bargaining more meaningful. They also stressed that proving democracy can deliver will require choosing political appointees based on their operational execution skills—not political box-checking.

Interviewee Recommendations

Prepare a highly choreographed Day One hiring surge: Rebuilding after DOGE’s removal of hundreds of thousands of civil servants will require the capacity to hire at speed and scale, supported by detailed advance planning to:
- launch a public call to service, inviting dedicated Americans to help rebuild government;
- collaborate with public-sector unions to inform and socialize the plan;
- build recruiting pipelines;
- deploy Day One hiring and onboarding SWAT teams—composed of experienced, nimble recruiters—with clear authority and guidance to move quickly;
- embrace the use of flexible hiring authorities;
- draft new agency org charts that harness multidisciplinary teams and new position descriptions;
- ready a user-friendly version of USAJobs.gov (or a successor platform) to recruit the next generation of public servants; and
- map and plan for all hiring process pain points and bottlenecks—including a plan to speed up suitability and security checks.
Remove personnel who lack professionalism and integrity: To safeguard institutional integrity and restore public trust, future administrations should promptly remove any incumbent personnel who are not committed to the Constitution, the rule of law, and serving all American people—not just their friends or political partisans.
Restore collective bargaining rights: A future administration should restore collective bargaining rights for federal employees. More work is needed to determine how to make bargaining rights more meaningful—ensuring workers have a real voice in the workplace conditions that matter, not just procedural add-ons that don’t improve job quality or workforce effectiveness.
Build a workforce with a wider range of skills, experiences, and expertise in modern markets: A modern federal workforce must bring diverse skills and lived experiences to deliver results with the speed and effectiveness the public deserves. Beyond lawyers and policy staff, agencies need technologists, data scientists, industry experts, user experience designers, product and project managers, social media specialists, community organizers, impact litigators, and more. Building a modern workforce requires mapping the expertise needed for today’s challenges—not just recreating what existed before DOGE—and prioritizing skills over credentials or connections. As noted in Chapter 2, expanding regional offices outside DC would also broaden the talent pool for those unable or unwilling to relocate, especially post-DOGE.

Hire agency heads based on their plans for the agency, not politics: Future administrations should prioritize hiring agency heads based on their vision for the agency and their aptitude for organizational and operational management, not to check political boxes.
Reduce positions subject to Senate confirmation: Congress should further reduce the number of Senate-confirmed positions.⁴⁵ Even absent legislative reform, future administrations should have non-confirmed appointees ready to move on priorities from Day One, instead of letting protracted confirmation processes delay policy execution.
Modernize civil service positions: Interviewees offered many recommendations for ensuring the federal government can efficiently recruit and retain top-flight talent, and for ensuring poor performance isn’t allowed to fester:
- Modernize federal pay: Many talented workers are deterred from federal service because government salaries are uncompetitive with the private sector. Congress should raise federal pay to compete more effectively for talent and should enact less rigid pay scales, so that compensation and promotion reflect performance, not just seniority.
- Speed up civil service hiring: The slow speed of the civil service competitive hiring process is ill-suited to a post-DOGE environment in which new administrations must rebuild. While retaining the merit system principles, the number of steps and actors involved in hiring should be maximally streamlined.
- Prioritize meaningful, active performance management: Real-time, active performance management should be a priority, not an annual check-the-box afterthought. Agency heads should set a clear expectation that supervisors should make meaningful distinctions when it comes to performance—not everyone should automatically get an “outstanding” rating. HR departments should be significantly upskilled and better resourced, to become active partners in ensuring managers have the skills and support necessary to provide workers with timely, meaningful feedback—including positive feedback, constructive criticism, and mentorship. HR departments should also play an active role in the laborious process of transferring or firing a worker when necessary. Too often, HR departments lacked the capacity to support managers, leaving them on their own to juggle both substantive duties and personnel management responsibilities—shortchanging the latter.
- Recognize and reward high performers: Just like underperformance shouldn’t be ignored, high performers should be actively recognized, rewarded, and given opportunities for professional advancement. One option is to increase the use of incentive pay to reward and retain high performers, while providing objective, outcome-oriented standards for bonuses. Agencies and the White House should publicly recognize high performers, to motivate workers while also helping the public better understand the dedicated public servants in their government.⁴⁶
- Shorten time frames for removing underperformers: Civil service protections are a core part of ensuring a merit-based civil service, and employees accused of poor performance should certainly have fair notice and an opportunity to improve, but keeping poor performers in place for many months serves neither the public nor the many talented federal workers who must pick up their slack. Administrations should work with public-sector unions and other stakeholders to tackle a serious reform proposal—one that strikes the right balance between protecting a merit-based civil service and providing for efficient and straightforward removals when warranted.
Adopt new models of working together: Interviewees offered a range of options for changing how the federal workforce operates, with an eye toward adding capacity quickly while also breaking down the institutional borders between agencies to make the government less siloed and more agile:
- Expand “tour-of-duty” models, especially for year one: Several interviewees pointed to “tour-of-duty” models as the most promising way to bring dedicated, mission-oriented people into government post-DOGE. In addition to or in lieu of expanding the USDS model in which personnel are hired centrally and then deployed to agencies, agencies could use this model more widely—much like how some agencies already use direct hire, term hire, and Intergovernmental Personnel Act authorities to bring outside experts into government for shorter stints.⁴⁷ That said, while a “tour-of-duty” model holds significant promise for an early surge, as well as for bringing fresh expertise and experiences into government, it also increases the potential for conflicts of interest, requiring safeguards to ensure candidates make a robust commitment to putting the public interest first.
- Use contracting authority strategically to add capacity quickly: Individualized hiring processes will struggle to fill the capacity gap quickly. Agencies should prepare to enter into contracts to strategically add high-quality, mission-aligned teams quickly. Outside organizations—nonprofit, for-profit, academic, or otherwise—should prepare to serve as hubs to retain experienced staff and scale up as needed. Doing this well will require significant preparation, including working with federal sector and federal contractor labor unions to build in fair protections.
- Systematize institutional knowledge: As promising as the “tour-of-duty” model is for rebuilding, no organization can run efficiently and effectively if the entire workforce turns over every four years. Rebuilding the civil service is especially important when it comes to expertise unique to the federal government, such as how highly technical regulatory operations work. Post-DOGE, less institutional knowledge will be left, but using reemployed annuitant “dual compensation waivers” to bring back retirees temporarily could help. A new administration should improve institutional knowledge transfer and reduce single points of failure, so that key processes don’t depend on the institutional knowledge of a single individual—which creates bottlenecks. Open sourcing of information can help build public trust through transparency, while also making it harder for future administrations to decimate institutional knowledge.
- Create centralized SWAT teams of surge capacity: The federal government should establish a centralized “SWAT team” of both top-tier project managers and experts in unique-to-government processes, such as National Environmental Policy Act reviews and Administrative Procedure Act rulemaking—nimble positions that can surge support to agencies as needed. This cadre could also serve as trainers to build agencies’ capabilities.
- Make it easier for agencies to work together and to transfer personnel among agencies: Administrations should make it easier for agencies to work together and to move personnel among agencies to where they are most needed. Options for doing so identified by interviewees include:
  - hiring more personnel centrally and then deploying them to where they are most needed;
  - building into new position descriptions more flexibility to shift personnel around;
  - creating cross-agency teams organized around outcome-oriented objectives with a clear chain of command to an empowered decision-maker;
  - establishing a central fund that can reimburse an agency for sending its personnel to help another agency—instead of difficult interagency budget negotiations constraining such “details”; and/or
  - obtaining streamlined reorganization authority from Congress, or, in the absence of new authority, assessing whether some agencies should be functionally combined under shared leadership.
Create a safety net to protect personnel from harassment: Given the degree of division and violence in the country currently, future administrations should prepare a “safety net” for personnel who may be unfairly targeted by political opponents. These protections should ensure appointees have access to professional liability insurance, legal defense resources, rapid response communications support, and personal security in the face of credible threats to their safety. Otherwise, the risk of being personally harassed may deter personnel from serving the American people in publicly visible ways.
Prohibit federal workers from owning stock in companies they regulate. To increase trust that public servants are accountable to the public—not pursuing personal financial gain—agencies should prohibit all workers from owning stock in companies they are charged with regulating, going above and beyond the current statutory prohibitions set out in 18 USC § 208. For example, the CFPB Supplemental Standard of Ethical Conduct prohibits employees from owning or controlling securities in entities that the bureau regulates, a standard other agencies could adopt.⁴⁸

Supplemental Polling Data

New polling conducted by Groundwork Collaborative and Data for Progress (and released October 27, 2025) finds that voters don’t trust the government, but believe the influence of wealthy elites and corporations bears more blame than bureaucracy or red tape.

Since returning to office, President Trump has put federal government operations at the heart of his agenda, with his appointment of Elon Musk to create and lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), large-scale firings of federal workers, and broad cuts to funding for programs like Medicaid. There is strong consensus from voters that the government can be improved, however only a small minority believe these slash and burn tactics will succeed.

Read the full brief, which offers insights into current public sentiment on governmental reform.

Footnotes

Nell Abernathy, Darrick Hamilton, and Julie Margetta Morgan, New Rules for the 21st Century: Corporate Power, Public Power, and the Future of the American Economy (Roosevelt Institute, 2019), https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/new-rules-for-the-21st-century-corporate-power-public-power-future-american-economy. ↩︎
Merger Guidelines (US Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 2023), https://ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2023_merger_guidelines_final_12.18.2023.pdf. ↩︎
DOJ, “Justice Department and FTC Launch Listening Forums on Firsthand Effects of Mergers and Acquisitions,” Press release, March 17, 2022, https://justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-and-ftc-launch-listening-forums-firsthand-effects-mergers-and-acquisitions. ↩︎
Elizabeth Wilkins, “Winning a People-Powered Future,” Democracy Journal 78 (2025), https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/78/winning-a-people-powered-future. ↩︎
Abernathy, Hamilton, and Morgan, New Rules for the 21st Century. ↩︎
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” Radio Broadcast, The American Presidency Project, April 14, 1938, https://presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-15. ↩︎
Agencies represented in our interviews include the Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, Treasury Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Trade Commission, National Labor Relations Board, and Social Security Administration as well as many components of the White House, including the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, National Economic Council, Domestic Policy Council, Office of Personnel Management, Office of Legislative Affairs, US Digital Service, and more. ↩︎
Alison Randy Aussenberg, Jim Monke, and Megan Stubbs, Expiration of the 2018 Farm Bill and Extension for 2025 (Congressional Research Service, 2024), https://congress.gov/crs-product/R47659. ↩︎
5 CFR 575.306. ↩︎
The Domestic Policy Council and the National Economic Council (NEC) were originally a single entity, the Domestic Policy Staff. They were formally separated in 1993 when President Bill Clinton established the NEC by executive order (Executive Order No. 12835, “Establishment of the National Economic Council,” Federal Register 58, no. 16, January 1993, https://archives.gov/files/federal-register/executive-orders/pdf/12835.pdf). ↩︎
The original DARPA (formally, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is an agency within the Department of Defense established in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launch (Julian Dossett, “What Is DARPA?,” SPACE.com, January 7, 2025, https://space.com/29273-what-is-darpa.html). It is known for pursuing “high-risk, high-reward” research outside traditional bureaucratic constraints and for incubating transformative technologies like the internet and GPS. ↩︎
For example, an interviewee reported that hiring a public engagement advisor from the worker center community had paid dividends in DOL’s ability to connect with less-resourced, nonunion workers; “Worker Centers,” Advocate for Social and Economic Justice, American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), accessed September 14, 2025, https://aflcio.org/what-unions-do/social-economic-justice/worker-centers. ↩︎
Makena Kelly, “The Year Democrats Lost the Internet,” Wired, December 30, 2024, https://wired.com/story/the-year-democrats-lost-the-internet. ↩︎
Jordan Zakarin, “Exclusive: Young Union Organizers at White House for Meeting with Biden and Bernie Sanders,” More Perfect Union, July 17, 2023, https://perfectunion.us/biden-bernie-white-house-meeting-union-organizers; Emily Peck, “Biden’s Dealmaker: How Julie Su Helped Broker a Union Contract in Hostile South,” Axios, May 30, 2024, https://axios.com/2024/05/30/julie-su-blue-bird-labor-contract. ↩︎
Another interviewee similarly highlighted President Biden’s historic walking of a United Auto Workers’ picket line as a powerful example of how the bully pulpit can help level the playing field between working- and middle-class people and large corporations (Peter Nicholas, “Biden Makes History by Joining Striking Autoworkers on the Picket Line,” NBC News, September 26, 2023, https://nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-makes-history-striking-auto-workers-picket-line-rcna117348). ↩︎
A Profile of the 2023 Federal Workforce (Partnership for Public Service, 2023), https://ourpublicservice.org/fed-figures/a-profile-of-the-2023-federal-workforce. ↩︎
The FTC’s state-by-state fact sheets regarding the noncompete rule provide a potential model; Constituent Support for the FTC’s Noncompete Rule (FTC, 2024), https://ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/state_by_state_constituent_support_for_ftc_noncompete_rule.pdf. ↩︎
Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. Casa, Inc., et al., 24A884, 606 US ___ (2025), https://supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf. ↩︎
For one, CASA does not limit the availability of universal vacatur of administrative action under the APA, meaning activist district courts can still wipe regulations off the books, with nationwide effect (Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. Casa, Inc., et al.). For another, lax associational standing rules enable industry trade associations like the Chamber of Commerce to claim they are entitled to orders spanning millions of members across the country—enabling them to obtain orders effectively relieving entire industries from regulation, including on behalf of even unidentified members who may or may not have an actual interest in challenging an agency action; Seth Frotman and Brad Lipton, “The 100 Days That Put the Nail in the Coffin of Administrative Law,” Yale Journal on Reglation, May 21, 2025, https://yalejreg.com/nc/the-100-days-that-put-the-nail-in-the-coffin-of-administrative-law-by-seth-frotman-brad-lipton. ↩︎
47 USC § 1702. ↩︎
Christopher J. Walker, “A Congressional Review Act for the Major Questions Doctrine,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 45, no. 3 (2022): 773–94, https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3693&context=articles. ↩︎
Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. ↩︎
An example of this approach is the Dodd-Frank Act’s delegation of authority to CFPB to revise standards for the “qualified mortgage” safe harbor for mortgage lenders—a safe harbor to the statutory obligation to assess borrowers’ “ability to repay” the loan (15 USC § 1639c). ↩︎
This timeline could be shortened further by rescinding or amending Executive Order 12866—for example, instead providing for a 30-day comment period. As the Congressional Research Service has explained, the APA itself does not specify a required length for comment periods, instead requiring “an ‘adequate’ opportunity to comment—of which the length of the comment period represents only one factor for consideration” (Todd Garvey, A Brief Overview of Rulemaking and Judicial Review (Congressional Research Service, 2017), https://congress.gov/crs-product/R41546.) ↩︎
Incorporating litigators into the process earlier would be particularly beneficial if the DOJ Civil Division were repopulated with movement lawyers, as recommended in Chapter 5. ↩︎
President Biden issued an executive order doubling the threshold for economic impacts to trigger OIRA review; Executive Order No. 14094, “Modernizing Regulatory Review,” Federal Register 88, no. 69, April 2023, https://federalregister.gov/documents/2023/04/11/2023-07760/modernizing-regulatory-review. President Trump rescinded that order; Executive Order No. 14148, “Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions,” Federal Register 90, no. 17, January 2025, https://federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/28/2025-01901/initial-rescissions-of-harmful-executive-orders-and-actions. ↩︎
Broader critiques of the limits of cost-benefit analysis point to how a reliance on efficiency metrics can narrow policy choices and undervalue social goals, in addition to practical and methodological challenges in applying quantitative analysis to complex regulatory decisions; Elizabeth Popp Berman, “Elizabeth Popp Berman on the ‘Economic Style of Thinking’ That Consumed US Policy,” interviewed by David Roberts, Volts Podcast, April 15, 2022, 1:02:49, https://volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-elizabeth-popp-berman; John C. Coates IV, “Cost-Benefit Analysis of Financial Regulation: Case Studies and Implications,” Yale Law Journal 124, no. 4 (2015): 882–1345, https://yalelawjournal.org/article/cost-benefit-analysis-of-financial-regulation. ↩︎
That said, rule drafters should be thoughtful about whether and how they use cost-benefit analysis in the rule’s justification, as such statements could become subject to review under the APA; 2 USC § 1532. ↩︎
The CFPB’s system was built open source, meaning it could be expanded to other agencies (or states) relatively easily; “Consumer Complaint Database,” Consumer Education, CFPB, last modified September 12, 2025, https://consumerfinance.gov/data-research/consumer-complaints. ↩︎
A recent FTC report details efforts by the FTC and government agencies around the world to increase technology capacity in law enforcement agencies (Office of Technology Staff Report, Building Tech Capacity in Law Enforcement Agencies (FTC, March 2024), https://ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/ot.techcapacityreport.pdf). ↩︎
For example, DOL operates separate enforcement divisions with separate regional office structures that don’t directly map onto one another. At FTC, competition and consumer-protection lawyers have separate, parallel divisions, even though competition and consumer protection violations often go hand-in-hand. ↩︎
For an example of how to structure penalties in this manner, see the CFPB’s Unfair and Deceptive Acts or Practices authority, under which civil penalties may be levied per day of violation, with the highest tier allowing for $1 million per day. As a counterexample, the FTC’s lack of authority to recover financial damages for anticompetitive conduct is a major obstacle to efficient enforcement of the law. Note that structuring monetary relief as a penalty may trigger requirements to afford a jury trial right in federal court (12 USC § 5565; AMG Capital Management, LLC, et al. v. Federal Trade Commission, 19-508, 141 S. Ct. 1341, 209 L. Ed. 2d 361 (2021), https://supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-508_l6gn.pdf; Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy et al.). ↩︎
See, e.g., Erika M. Douglas, “Antitrust Abandonment,” Yale Journal on Regulation 42, no. 1 (2025): 1–94, https://yalejreg.com/print/antitrust-abandonment. ↩︎
Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2024, Pub. L. No. 118-42, 138 Stat. 25 (2024), https://congress.gov/118/plaws/publ42/PLAW-118publ42.pdf. ↩︎
CFPB, “Supervisory Highlights Junk Fees Update Special Edition,” Supervisory Highlights, no. 31 (2023): 1–18, https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_supervisory_highlights_junk_fees-update-special-ed_2023-09.pdf. ↩︎
“Civil Penalty Fund,” Enforcement, CFPB, last modified December 12, 2024, https://consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/payments-harmed-consumers/civil-penalty-fund. ↩︎
“About Policy Lab,” Policy Lab, accessed October 2, 2025, https://openpolicy.blog.gov.uk/about. ↩︎
Currently, the IRS knows an individual’s income only once it receives the worker’s W-2 or tax form. ↩︎
The Trump administration recently utilized a “golden share” provision in approving the US-Nippon Steel merger (Spencer Kimball, “Trump Now Wields Sweeping Veto Power over US Steel. Here’s How the ‘Golden Share’ Works,” CNBC, June 26, 2025, https://cnbc.com/2025/06/26/trump-golden-share-us-steel-nippon-merger.html). ↩︎
“Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program,” Federal Financing Tools, US Department of Energy (DOE), accessed September 14, 2025, https://energy.gov/gdo/grid-resilience-and-innovation-partnerships-grip-program. ↩︎
“President Joe Biden: Investing in America,” White House, last modified January 10, 2025, https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/invest. ↩︎
For example, the Biden-Harris administration launched the Thriving Communities Network, in which several federal agencies committed to coordinating and collaborating across a set of technical assistance programs; “Thriving Communities Network (TCN),” Smart Growth, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), last modified March 21, 2025, https://epa.gov/smartgrowth/thriving-communities-network-tcn. ↩︎
The Better Builder Program in Texas provides a model for this kind of approach. Contractors are certified for compliance with certain work protections, and only such certified contractors are eligible awardees for certain procurements; Results for America (RFA) and Trailhead Strategies, Making the Construction Industry a Better Place to Work (Travis County Purchasing Office, Contract Compliance, 2023), https://results4america.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Procurement-Case-Study-Travis-County-Texas-Better-Builder-FINAL.pdf. ↩︎
Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, “Performance of Commercial Activities,” Circular No. A-76 to the Heads of Executive Departments and Establishments, August 4, 1983, https://whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/legacy_drupal_files/omb/circulars/A76/a076.pdf. ↩︎
In 2011, Congress eliminated confirmation for 163 positions via the Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act, and a Senate resolution streamlined the confirmation process for another 272 (Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act of 2011, Pub. L. No. 112-166, 126 Stat. 1283 (2011), https://congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/679; Korin Davis, “Easy Solutions for a Still-Broken Political Appointments Process,” Brookings, February 20, 2014, https://brookings.edu/articles/easy-solutions-for-a-still-broken-political-appointments-process). ↩︎
5 CFR 575.306. ↩︎
“Intergovernmental Personnel Act Hiring and Placement,” Federal Hiring, Partnership for Public Service, accessed September 14, 2025, https://ourpublicservice.org/our-solutions/workforce/federal-hiring/intergovernmental-personnel-act-hiring-and-placement. ↩︎
“Supplemental Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection,” Final Rules, Rules & Policy, CFPB, last modified July 1, 2021, https://consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/final-rules/supplemental-standards-ethical-conduct-employees-bureau-consumer-financial-protection. ↩︎

Suggested Citation

Garden-Monheit, Hannah, and Tresa Joseph. 2025. Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration. New York: Roosevelt Institute.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all of our interviewees for their insights, feedback, and contributions to this paper. The authors would also like to thank Sabeel Rahman and Sam Berger of Reconstructing Democracy for their support of this project, as well as our colleagues at American Economic Liberties Project, AFSCME, the Center for Labor and a Just Economy, Democracy Forward, the Federation of American Scientists, Groundwork Collaborative, New America’s New Practice Lab, Niskanen, and Columbia Professor Alexander Hertel-Fernandez for their input and insights on this project. The authors also thank Suzanne Kahn, Bilal Baydoun, Matt Hughes, Katherine De Chant, Claire Greilich, and Aastha Uprety for their contributions to this project. Any errors, omissions, or other inaccuracies are the authors’ alone. The Roosevelt Institute is an independent organization, and the positions and analysis presented are those of the Roosevelt Institute alone.

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Authors

Hannah Garden-Monheit

Guest Author

Hannah Garden-Monheit formerly served as director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where she led development and implementation of competition and consumer protection policy initiatives and advocacy efforts. Prior to joining the FTC, Hannah served as special assistant to the president for economic policy and director for Competition Council policy. In that role, she helped lead the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts on competition policy, universal broadband, technology policy, nursing home reform, clean energy trade policy, and more.

Tresa Joseph

Guest Author

Tresa Joseph served as a senior policy advisor at the National Economic Council (NEC), where she focused on competition, consumer protection, small business, and housing policy. She helped advance the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to reduce hidden consumer fees, expand access to capital for underserved entrepreneurs, and launch the federal government’s first-ever free tax filing service. Before joining the NEC, she worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, focused on pretrial case processing and pre-arraignment diversion programs. She is a graduate of Yale University and is pursuing a JD at New York University School of Law.

Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration

Foreword

Executive Summary

Chapter 1: Relentlessly Prioritize Bold, Resonant, and Timely Policies

Interviewee Recommendations

Chapter 2: Fling Open the Doors and Proactively Engage with the Public

Interviewee Recommendations

Chapter 3: Recalibrate the Executive Branch Tool Kit for an Era of Hostile Courts and a Dysfunctional Congress

Interviewee Recommendations

Chapter 4: Remove Red Tape That Slows Regulatory Implementation

Interviewee Recommendations

Chapter 5: Speed and Scale Corporate Accountability Enforcement

Interviewee Recommendations

Chapter 6: Modernize Government and Abolish Needless Paperwork

Interviewee Recommendations

Chapter 7: Deploy Federal Funding Faster and More Efficiently

Interviewee Recommendations

Chapter 8: Quickly Build Modern, Nimble Teams Post-DOGE

Interviewee Recommendations

Supplemental Polling Data

Footnotes

Suggested Citation

Acknowledgments

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Authors

Hannah Garden-Monheit

Tresa Joseph

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