Don Moynihan is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy. Subscribe to his Substack, Can We Still Govern?
To simplify a bit (a lot): there are two parts to public administration. “Administration” means getting shit done. “Public” implies doing it in a way that is broadly legitimate and accountable to citizens.
Despite, or maybe because, of everything going with the Trump administration I’ve been trying to think about the future of governance reform. I’m not alone. Right now a lot of smart people are engaged in various conversations about what a post-Trump public administration would look like. And mostly they have been focused on either the administration part, or the public part, but not both at the same time.
My concern is that there are two broad constituencies for government reform that are largely not engaging with one another. By failing to do so, they not only miss a chance to push a legitimate and sustainable agenda for governance change – they also fail to correct for their blind spots.
Who’s in the Coalition for Change?
To simplify a bit (a lot, again): the two active parts of the post-Trump good governance coalition are a democratic backsliding group and a state capacity group.
The democratic backsliding group are mostly concerned about the damage Trump has done to governmental norms and rules. They see Trump’s abuses of power as an existential threat to American democracy. The naked corruption, the personal enrichment, the retributive use of public power. They broadly worry about the politicization of the civil service system, and attacks on civil society. Some worry about soaring inequality and its effects on our political system, including the risk of state capture by private interests.
The state capacity group is mostly concerned with what they see as the declining ability of U.S. government to do big things. Their primary concern is that the administrative state is not fit for purpose, lagging in its ability to perform basic tasks that make the lives of Americans better. Over time, the American state has become too procedural. Some might see Trump as a disruptor who opens the door for a more successful program of state modernization.
I’ve heard the democratic backsliding concerns most frequently raised by democracy advocates, administrative law and constitutional law professors, and political scientists who have studied or worked in the administrative state, plus those who have drawn parallels between democratic collapse in other countries and the U.S.
The state capacity group often includes former appointees frustrated at the slow pace of change and members of the abundance movement, which has fueled the renewed interest on state capacity has been enabled by this movement.
Labeling abundance is especially tricky because the success of the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book immediately sucked in a lot of support ranging from those who buy the original critique of progressive governance to those who see it as a useful label to advance their sometimes tangentially-related ideas. As Steve Teles and others have pointed out, there is no longer a single version of abundance. This makes the policy prescriptions of this group harder to determine. All that said there is, broadly, a sense that the administrative capacities of American government need to be modernized, and much of that modernization will necessarily consider the role of regulations, people, and technology.
The Wings Need to Talk to Each Other …
The democratic backsliding and state capacity people need each other. I don’t think there is broad enough support for a governance agenda that is just anti-democratic backsliding or for state capacity. But together there might be. And substantively, a synthesis between these perspectives would be healthy.
Why do the democratic backsliding types need state capacity? Things have objectively gotten worse in our democracy under Trump, but we are not seeing mass protests against the assault on our institutions. A successful coalition needs a positive vision: we are not just defending democracy, we are ensuring that it delivers.
The democratic backsliding group would benefit from objections raised by those who worry that constraints become proceduralism, that stopping bad action can easily morph into stopping any action. These are reasonable concerns.
Why do the state capacity types need to take democratic backsliding concerns seriously? The Trump administration’s executive aggrandizement has revealed and exploited existing weaknesses in our systems. It is not enough to assume there will not be another Trump. There is a queue of would-be Trumps waiting in line. And without governing stability, the rule of law, and constraints on corruption or abuses of power, no good government vision has a meaningful opportunity to sustain itself.
As I’ve argued before, a theory of power without a theory of accountability is not an approach to governing that is consistent with democracy. While it might be tempting to treat accountability and constraints as a barrier to making things work, they are essential features of governance. Trump is doing more to make the case for rigorously enforcing existing rules that he is currently flouting.
The state capacity side needs to engage with the threats to democracy. Big picture discussions of fixing American governance that ignore the biggest threat to American governance in our lifetime risk building a house on sand. If your theory of governing sounds a lot like “more DOGE” but you don’t acknowledge or explain the spectacular legal, moral, and practical failures of DOGE, why should people trust your theory of governing?
The mixture of incompetence and democratic backsliding did not stop with DOGE. A fresh example drops every week. Most recently, we learned that Trump cancelled billions in federal grants because the recipients lived in states that did not vote for Trump, or because a state jailed a Trump supporter who engaged in election interference.
It is no longer enough to say “the system is broken, so let’s try something different.” That argument might have held water in 2024, but Trump has been trying something different and it clearly is worse, not just because of its threats to democracy but because of its massive incompetence. If it is not addressed we are accepting that it will happen again. It will become a normal part of American governance for the President to train his agencies on his political enemies, or to purge talented and dedicated public servants, or to treat people in certain parts of the country as second-class citizens. (Of course, if you don’t think the Trump administration has been an incompetent mess, you are not going to be part of any real good government coalition).
Put another way, the democratic backsliding folks center their attention on Trump, viewing him as the test case of the authoritarian seeking to exploit, and therefore highlight, every weakness in the current system. The state capacity types don’t talk about Trump enough, failing to acknowledge that one man’s procedural flexibility is another man’s route to unchecked abuse of power.
DOGE and the Death of USAID
This is a summary of a longer open-access piece appearing in the journal Public Administration and Development co-authored with Rachael Zuppke.
The two sides can also check each other’s worst impulses (e.g. not having a romantic view of the quality of government prior to Trump, or assuming that the threat to democracy will disappear when Trump does).
I think both sides might explore a taste for radicalism. What I have heard from both sides is a desire not to go back to the status quo. Some have seen Trump’s attack as demanding a new reconstruction — an ambitious recommitment to American democracy. And delivering on tangible promises that improve people’s living situation has to be part of that promise.
… But not Past Each Other
A reference point and caution is the last major civil service legislation, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. I long ago wrote an oral history of the CSRA. One thing that jumped out is that while the Act was bipartisan and broadly popular, there were markedly different motivations among its supporters.
Some CSRA supporters, appalled by the personnel abuses of the Nixon administration (which Trump has rendered decidedly quaint) wanted to protect against a repeat. Others wanted legislation that allowed flexibility to fire poor performers. Many of the same tensions are in play today, underlining that these values — protection against politicization and corruption and flexibility to get things done — are foundational balancing acts when it comes to governing.
Both sides voted for what they thought was in the bill. The strategic ambiguity helped get the CSRA passed, but not to deliver a clear framework for governing. For a long time, it looked like the people who believed the CSRA worked mostly to protect public employees from abuses were right.
Until Trump. The CSRA sought to create a more flexible leadership corps with the Senior Executive Service. It struggled to achieve its goal, but Trump has inverted its original purpose, using flexibility for a form of politicization that is wholly different from the architects of the CRSA imagined. His administration has largely killed the aspects of the CSRA designed to protect employees, such as the promise of non-partisan treatment and fair hearings if that promise was violated. At the same time, Trump’s perversions of the CSRA have not delivered on a version of government that delivers better performance.
How to Build an Agenda
To me, democratic backsliding and state capacity events are closely connected. At the start of the second Trump term I warned about both proceduralism and politicization as the dual threats facing American governance. And so maybe my call for a good governance coalition just reflects my personal interests!
But I don’t think so. People want a democracy, and they want it to work. Discussions of political power, how it is distributed and used are necessary if there is going to be a legitimate moment of renewal for American governance. There is still time before the next presidential election to start dialogues between those who agree.
William Howell, Dean at Johns Hopkins new School of Government and Policy, recently made a similar point:
Eventually—perhaps in 2029, perhaps later—we may move past the daily struggle of blocking an elected strongman. We then will need to repair our Republic. A substantial amount of this work necessarily involves restoring the rule of law and building defenses against future strongmen—tasks that the Biden Administration, when it had the chance, refused to meet with adequate urgency.
More than that, though, we also will need to contend with the vested interests, excessive proceduralism, and organizational dysfunction that temporarily frustrate the ambitions of a strongman, but that also degrade the government’s capacity to act in ways that are timely, responsive, and effective. For unless we build institutions that are capable of actually solving public problems, our democracy will remain in a perpetual state of precarity.
I also realize all of this is a bit vague. I am not naming particular groups or thought leaders — that would add specificity, but it also ties possibilities to those actors, and probably lead to more reflexive contestation than consideration of my broader point. People who see themselves on one of the two sides I identify might nitpick parts of my assessments but my hope is they see instead the possibilities of the broader potential coalition.
This will not be easy. I very much agree with the objection that if one side constantly says “ah yes, but what about accountability?” and the other side responds with “indeed, but what about progress?” the dialogue does not really go anywhere. But we are at the point that the blind spots of one side not listening to the other is too great. This feels like an actual example of where real intellectual diversity might pay off.
My suggestion is that such dialogues can be organized to road-test specific proposals. Only by engaging on the specifics can we find actual solutions that minimize trade-offs. A couple of examples where I think these groups could genuinely inform each other:
State capacity types are deeply interested in permitting reform. This extends all the way from the right to Mamdani in NYC, who has been co-opting abundance themes. But this is not really on the agenda for people who care about democratic backsliding. Their instinctive reaction might be assume this is going to be a gift to powerful interests seeking to be deregulated. (And in some cases, it might be! The devil is in the details!)
Procurement is another area where reform is desperately needed, but could be a gateway to corruption. How do we get the balance right?
We have not had a substantive civil service legislation since 1978: what would a modern model look like?
It should be possible to engage in the sharing of administrative data that helps people and protects privacy, while punishing willful violations of privacy law.
The end of Loper Bright has changed the dynamics of policymaking in a way that needs to be better understood. The future will not look like the past – so what good government possibilities are created? What does Congress need to do to catch up?
Is there a way to reconstitute safety net programs to make them simpler, more effective and less vulnerable to the use of administrative tools to undermine them (as has been the case with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act).
And what about AI?
The AI Elephant in the Room
AI is the defining instrument of disruption of our era. Any discussion of the future of governance has to consider it, at least in some broad terms. Simply denying the possibilities would leave progressives open to the claim that they are tied to the past, and uncommitted to modernizing governance.
At the same time, AI is quite unpopular, especially among younger people, who are more exposed to its labor market risks. And its use raises sovereignty concerns. Simply taking a laissez faire approach, or a crony capitalist approach (which is where I think the Trump administration actually is — punishing some firms and rewarding others) is also not sustainable.
That should leave a lot of room to treat AI as a tool that makes government better serve the public, not as an instrument for the public and government to serve AI and its owners. For example, AI could modernize and significantly improve benefits administration — or to automate kicking eligible clients off the rolls. Getting it right means engaging with the people who understand the tech, as well as the government setting in which it will be implemented.
Why Trump’s 'Brutal Efficiency' Is a Myth: A Guide for Modern Governance
Don Moynihan is a University of Michigan professor. Subscribe to his Can We Still Govern? Substack.
Good article. I have my own simple statement of this mess: I want accountability and I want to see a plan to build makes things work for all. Geez, the words of Robert Burn's just popped into my head: "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry." Yep. And loopholes in plans need to be recognized.
Thank you for the wonderful article, hopefully Trump and MAGA will be gone. Big changes coming soon.