Reconstruct the Bureaucracy, Don’t Just Rebuild It

Introduction

In the late 2010s, grassroots calls for more transformative climate action steadily gained momentum. By the end of 2020, these calls for climate action combined with calls for urgently needed economic relief from the COVID-19 pandemic shock and broader movements for racial justice, prompting the newly elected Biden administration to commit to an ambitious approach to green industrial policy, using public investments to shift the technologies and the political economy of domestic energy production. These efforts led to significant investments and pushed the existing bureaucratic capacities of the federal government. But a range of institutional, ideological, and practical limitations also constrained the efficacy of more structurally transformative policies.¹ The climate challenges facing a future administration will be even greater. The second Trump administration has not only rolled back many previous efforts but also aggressively dismantled the capacity and vitality of the federal government, through the efforts of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Russell Vought’s weaponization of the Office of Management and Budget. This dismantling has been severe when it comes to government’s capacities to shape climate, energy, and markets through regulation and spending. This dismantling has not been just a generic “return” to market-friendly visions of deregulation; rather, it constitutes an explicit attempt to systematically stop and preclude future efforts at using the state to advance normative values of economic and social equality and climate resilience.²

The task of reimagining the bureaucracy will be central to any future climate policy and industrial policy agenda. This essay calls for a specific approach to the administrative capacities that a next pro-democracy administration will need to stand up in the future. The task ahead must be more than merely rebuilding in a marginally more optimized form the kinds of bureaucratic systems we had before. Rather, the task ahead is one of reconstruction—partly in the literal sense that the damage to the federal administrative state is so extensive that more thorough reconstruction will be needed. But the idea of reconstruction is also meant to evoke a level of scale, ambition, and moral orientation. Like prior reconstructive moments—from the post–Civil War Reconstruction to the New Deal to the Second Reconstruction of the Civil Rights Movement—the next administration will need new bureaucratic tools and systems that are capacious and ambitious enough to effectuate major social change. And like those past moments, the next administration will have to build and defend these new bureaucratic systems with a firm moral commitment to the kind of inclusive, egalitarian, and ultimately democratic governance that we aspire to make real. 

From Green New Deal to Dirty New Scam

In the face of a continued—if not accelerated—climate crisis, the Trump administration’s climate and energy policy has been one of aggressive rollback: undoing regulations on fossil fuel emissions, withdrawing from the Paris Accords, and clawing back and dismantling—arguably illegally³—many of funding streams that the Biden administration put in place to help spark a clean energy boom. More than a simple rollback, the aggressive dismantling of these programs, coupled with the administration’s attempt to eliminate civil service positions en masse, reflects an attempt to not just undo, but render impossible, a restoration of prior clean energy policy efforts. The world is closer than ever to exhausting its remaining carbon budget, blowing past several benchmarks for limiting projected warming.

But at the same time that it is dismantling clean energy and climate regulatory capacities, the Trump administration is weaponizing and personalizing administration in ways that are equally threatening: using regulatory powers over corporations (including antitrust oversight, as well as control over government funding streams as a threat) to pressure companies into adopting stances favorable to the current administration; deploying state investment and ownership (such as the taking of shares over Intel) while operating pay-to-play schemes—from the president’s ballroom to his memecoin—that make government activity in the marketplace highly suspect, if not outright corrupt. The irony is that in the attempt to wrest the country back toward fossil fuels and toward other corporate allies of the administration, this administration is engaging in industrial policy at a massive scale—but in a form that does little to serve public purpose, and instead taints the enterprise with the stench of corruption and autocratic state control. The dismantling agenda and the weaponizing agenda are two sides of the same coin, and are a hallmark of MAGA governance beyond the climate context.⁴ What unites these seemingly disparate approaches is a common substantive goal of attempting to remake our social and economic order: in this case, away from the emerging clean energy revolution, to triple down on serving fossil fuel interests.

How then should a next administration approach the redesign and rebooting of a bureaucracy, and in particular one capable of meeting the climate crisis with speed and scale? 

This is more than a policy design question; it is fundamentally an institutional design question about how to reconfigure institutions and power. First, a range of capacities need to be built, where government needs to be more capacious and empowered than it has previously been, such as new capacities for financing, new capacities for planning, new structures for federal agencies themselves—including potentially new forms of hybrid public-private governance that better insulate longer-term policymaking from bad-faith presidents. Second, a range of capacities in government need to be constrained, if not dismantled altogether: from the rise of the surveillance state to the outsized power of captured courts to interfere with public-serving governance. 

Building New Capacities

The first imperative is to build new governing capacities that are suited for the scale of the clean energy transition needed, and to alter the underlying political economy of the energy sector. This is where blue-sky, transformative ideas should be fleshed out now. If the United States actually intends to decarbonize quickly and at scale, perhaps it is finally time to charter a National Investment Authority to coordinate and catalyze industrial policy in ways that are both transformative and more insulated from the kinds of corrupt, partisan, or self-dealing practices we see in the current administration. Similarly, the reanimation of regional-level public utilities offers another potentially transformative form of energy infrastructure and governance. Both of these kinds of efforts—sketched out in this collection by Saule Omarova and Shelley Welton, respectively—combine an attention to the underlying political economy of the sector with a thoughtfulness about what governing institutions are best suited to advancing these goals over the long run. 

It is worth dwelling for a moment on what would make such newly empowered bodies effective in comparison to prior models. First, the centralization of functions in a dedicated mission-driven entity that is empowered to advance its goals effectively—whether a regional utility or a national investment authority—creates a more powerful center of gravity, greater capacity, and tighter mission alignment. This approach contrasts with what too often happens in context of big policy goals: the cobbling together of a myriad of authorities and policies from across a diffuse set of agencies and authorities in ways that, while potentially impactful, are clunky and—as we have seen—relatively easy to attack politically and dismantle institutionally. Second, this approach contrasts with, say, the model of the Federal Reserve, in that this approach envisions chartering a new body that has a dedicated and clear mandate, with the appropriate tools and internal culture to match. Instead of grafting a set of objectives onto a body that culturally and institutionally is lukewarm at best about these new missions, we should imagine new bodies that can attack these issues with vigor and commitment. The analogy would be closer to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the 2008 financial crisis, rather than the glomming of financial regulatory obligations onto a skeptical Federal Reserve. Third, this approach to centralization differs in other respects from, say, long-standing institutions like the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: the authority is not invested solely in the president to shape decisions, and—crucially—the centralization operates as a capacity-expander, not an additional layer of negative constraint or compliance review.

This blue-sky approach to building also applies to the rebooting of the hobbled federal bureaucracy. As we think about how to restore the gutted civil service, we should ask which offices and skill sets are most urgently needed, including those that were underrepresented in the pre-DOGE era, rather than simply reinstating offices to their status quo ante. Similarly, we should not be precious about prior intra–executive branch protocols and frameworks that are not built to engage the realities of the climate crisis with the alacrity needed. Methods of cost-benefit analysis, for example, have long been a central debate in climate policy, and while there are obvious fixes on technical matters like the discount rate and social cost of greenhouse gases, we should also consider wholly different frameworks like those discussed by Heather Boushey, Noah Kaufman, and Madison Condon in this collection to enable the kind of creativity and transformative scale that public policy will need beyond those fixes. Similarly, intra-agency processes for legal and policy review could be transformed. 

At a more structural level, we should also consider whether the agencies themselves need to be reorganized—through legislation or agency-specific reorganization authorities. The administrative state is a cacophony of different offices and agencies; new leadership (among agency heads or the White House) often counteracts this diffuseness to coordinate more effectively. But is that coordination effort itself a second-best? Does the configuration of offices and authorities within agencies like the Department of Energy (DOE) or Department of Commerce (DOC) make sense, or are there better ways to configure authority, policy leadership, and expertise? At a macro level, if there is legislative appetite for action on this front, would it make sense to reconfigure agencies themselves? Should climate response authorities be as diffused as they are across the Environmental Protection Agency, DOE, DOC, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or is there a better way to combine these structures? Or, as Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph have argued elsewhere, does the need for fast and traceable policy lend itself to favoring existing agencies? The climate movement and philanthropy need to be having this conversation now. 

As we think about how to restore the gutted civil service, we should ask which offices and skill sets are most urgently needed, including those that were underrepresented in the pre-DOGE era, rather than simply reinstating offices to their status quo ante.

Democratizing Administration 

Building these affirmative new administrative structures requires that policymakers also balance the need to build with the need to dismantle or rein in the autocratic excesses that we have seen in this current administration. Some of the tools that this administration has built and weaponized can and should be jettisoned: the expansive surveillance of Americans, for example, or the supercharged billions of dollars of funding for and unshackling of immigration enforcement to terrorize residents across the country. The task of dismantling these autocratic capacities cannot be treated as merely a matter of “border policy”; instead, the climate movement—like other social change and economic justice movements—should understand these infrastructures as direct threats to democracy itself, and to the ability of any organization or coalition to advocate for and realize a more just, equal, and resilient future. 

Second, when it comes to affirmative state powers that we need to build, we should consider how to democratize these efforts through participation and collaborative governance approaches. These models will be important, not only to build trust and legitimacy with stakeholders but also to build structures of power that contribute to the durability of the policy regime. Rather than conventional town hall or litigation-heavy forms of stakeholder engagement, we should consider models that engage and empower affected interests—including beneficiaries of the new regime—in more upstream governance, such as in co-governance models, tripartite models, and the like.⁵ In the climate context, this could involve a deeper integration of impacted stakeholders—from unions to employers to vulnerable and historically marginalized communities—in planning decisions as well as commitments to higher-road practices, while at the same time overriding more downstream paperwork, procedures, and veto points that older legal frameworks might impose. The trade would be for more empowered and meaningful power in shaping decisions at a system, sector, or regional level, rather than narrowing participation to the more suffocating and constrained channels of conventional approaches to permitting or zoning decisions.

And finally, a future pro-democracy administration will have to design policy in a way that addresses head-on the ways in which the Supreme Court has accumulated outsized power to selectively edit policies to its own liking. Indeed, the court’s administrative jurisprudence is not actually one of expanding executive power in ways that can serve different policy goals equally. Rather, the through line has been the validating of autocratic executive power when it advances conservative and corporate interests, while blocking executive and administrative powers when they advance a more equitable and sustainable vision of political economy.⁶ The extreme nature of this jurisprudence and the ongoing potential for bad-faith accumulation of judicial power means that any agenda of building affirmative climate capacities will have to also engage with the project of dismantling and democratizing the excess concentration of power in the court. This will have to involve both policy and political interventions. The Supreme Court will have to be reformed, with Congress reasserting its primacy as the first and most democratic branch of government. Legislation should explore court expansion, aggressive ethics requirements, and narrowing the jurisdictional reach of both the Supreme Court and its accountability-evading tactics like its abuse of the “shadow docket.” Politically, it means foregrounding explicitly the role the court has played—and the opprobrium it deserves—in doing the dirty work demanded by fossil fuel corporations, wealthy oligarchs, and reactionary white supremacist policymakers. This is a broader issue of structural reform but a critical one for the success of a climate agenda. Court reform should be table stakes for any future vision of the administrative state. And future policymakers should be prepared to respond to bad-faith judges not by trimming their policy ambitions but instead by making their case forcefully and compellingly to the public and to Congress. 

Conclusion

In the aftermath of the current crisis, whenever it comes, future policymakers will have to avoid different sets of dangers. Some will be tempted to focus just on specific policies that are visible and popular in a narrow sense. But as important as that effort is, success will require attending to these deeper questions of designing and transforming our governing institutions and the underlying balance of power that makes policy possible. These underlying structural questions are essential to achieving the goals of sustainability, social and economic equality, and well-being for our communities. A different danger will come from those who, in response to the very real autocratic threats of the moment, seek to ramp down the government’s capacity to do big things—in ways that undermine the more public-serving transformative aspirations that the country demands and needs. Yet another danger will come from those who propose to uncritically take on board the new powers claimed by this current imperial presidency, rather than seeking to forge alternative structures of public administration that are both capable and genuinely democratic. 

These dilemmas call for a level of institutional creativity and ambition in a next governing moment. Like in prior reconstructive moments following crisis, future policymakers will need to approach their work with clear moral vision and ambitious-yet-creative institutional innovation that works not just at the level of policy but at the level of institutional creation and transformation. Anything less will fail to meet the moment.