THE PROBLEM: When Government Fails to Deliver, Trust Frays
Every touchpoint with the government is an opportunity to build public trust — or break it. People often interact with different levels of government at critical moments in their lives, like approaching retirement or buying a home, and also rely on the government for everyday services that we realize are crucial only when the system breaks, like turning on the tap for water. In crises, governments can do great things: distribute emergency financial payments, keep critical industries from collapsing, house communities after natural disasters, and deliver vaccines against life-threatening viruses.
Yet even as the government rises to meet big crises, its everyday services are too often designed around the institutions, politics, and funding lines that created them — not the people they serve.
“Government” in the United States is the product of nearly three centuries of bureaucracy making, encompassing federal agencies, state, county, local entities, and even different IT offices, resulting in one of the most complex service delivery systems in the world. Too often, people must navigate a web of websites, call centers, and offices just to access services they depend on. The result is that a struggling new mother must piece together health coverage through Medicaid (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), cash assistance through TANF (Administration for Children and Families), and food assistance through SNAP (Department of Agriculture) — each delivered through a different corresponding state or local agency.
Even when leaders campaign on promises of change, the machinery of government often struggles to deliver it. If there’s one thing people across the political spectrum agree on, it’s that they are tired of government not working for them.
There is mounting evidence that direct interactions with the government shape people’s trust in it. Delivery failures erode that trust. One thing must be true for reform to take hold: the government must deliver — and people must feel it. This article proposes how. It offers a blueprint for anchoring delivery capacity in two places, both inside agencies and at the center of the Executive Office of the President. We propose a new Cabinet-level Department of Services, a Deputy Chief of Staff for Implementation with real authority over the government’s top priorities with a delivery unit, as well as delivery capacity within agencies. Delivery cannot be left to special teams working at the margins. It must be the work of the whole government.
THE GOAL: A Government That Delivers
Over the past twenty years, the United States has made significant progress adapting tools from the private sector to make public services work better, such as designing around the user, building software in more agile ways and in-house, and improving services through ongoing testing and feedback. At the state level, the best performing state scored higher on customer satisfaction than every private-sector industry but one.
Three decades of recent federal efforts to focus on delivery and add new capacities have modeled progress but not succeeded at moving the central orientation of government to delivery. In 2001, President Bush launched the President’s Management Agenda through OMB guidance aimed at five core initiatives including budget and performance integration and electronic government. In 2007 aspects of this work were codified through an Executive Order. President Obama started the Presidential Innovation Fellows in 2012, and, after the healthcare.gov crisis, he launched the U.S. Digital Service and 18F, a digital services team inside the General Services Administration, building the government’s capacity for modern service delivery. In 2018, the federal government issued its first government-wide guidance on “customer experience,” requiring the agencies that serve the most people (designated High Impact Service Providers) to measure feedback and identify concrete service-specific improvements. In 2021, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order: “Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government,” building on this concept and pushing agencies to simplify the everyday interactions that shape how people see the government. In 2021, U.S. Digital Corps was announced to embed early career tech talent within agencies. President Trump re-organized the U.S. Digital Service through an Executive Order in 2025.
While progress has been made, the fundamental workflows of the government have not changed. The next generation of this work must make delivery and outcomes the central charge of all senior leaders at the center and across government agencies.
The government must be capable at delivering at three levels:
- The government must execute its regular business dependably and efficiently: Government must have the foundational capacity to deliver basic services ranging from social security to airport security to financial security — existing programs must work. This includes sufficient staffing on the front lines, adequate capacity within agencies, shared technology and platforms so services are consistent across federal agencies, states, and locales – whether someone is renewing a passport or applying for a loan.
- The government must deliver on new efforts to be responsive to the mandate of the public and elected leaders: When a new law is passed, when a president is elected with a campaign promise that turns into an Executive Order, when a Secretary seeks to roll out a priority policy, the capacity must exist to deliver on new demands without undermining existing basic functions.
- The government must be agile and ready to effectively deliver in crisis: When defining moments come for the country or a community — floods, fires, economic crises — the government must swiftly execute and “show up” for people.
A government that truly serves its people must be hyper-oriented to being people-centered, best-in-class, and always learning. Agencies must have the capacity to continually listen to and engage the public — involving people in the design and ongoing improvement of services, regulatory processes, and other public offerings. This orientation is not the work of some people on some teams — this is the essential work of the government and must be rewarded at every level — from agency heads who spend time in contact centers to civil servants whose performance systems reward people-centered outcomes to appointees in charge. At the same time, the government must set a high standard that public management and customer experiences are comparable to or better than the private sector experiences people expect. And rather than trying to do everything, government must name a focused set of priorities and targets, with responsible owners.
It must work in a way that is accountable, adaptive, and properly resourced. Success should be measured by real outcomes for people — with progress visible, regularly updated, and tied to clear owners. Congressional and executive-branch staff must share constituent feedback data openly so pain points are understood and acted on collectively. Decisions must be grounded in how services actually perform, with continuous learning built into how programs are run.
Finally, effective delivery requires genuine investment in an interdisciplinary workforce spanning policy, design, technology, social science, legal, and budget expertise. A handful of technologists cannot drive this cultural and organizational transformation alone; oversight entities such as the U.S. Government Accountability Office and Inspectors General must build the capacity and metrics to understand service delivery and digital product development and to evaluate delivery and outcomes, not just compliance or risk mitigation. Public participation and community engagement are disciplines in their own right, and the government’s hiring and personnel systems must reflect that.
SOLUTION
Resources and Accountability: Anchoring Delivery Across Government
Delivering results for the public isn’t the job of a single White House team or any one agency working on its own.[1] It is the shared work of public servants, agency leaders, the Executive Office of the President, oversight bodies, and Congress. This paper proposes the establishment of a delivery capacity across the executive branch, anchored in two places: inside the agencies themselves and the Executive Office of the President. These new structures are meant to support — not replace — the core functions that already live within agencies and are marshaled by deputy secretaries and Cabinet secretaries.
Delivery Inside Agencies
Empowered deputy secretaries and investment in foundational delivery capacity and talent at agencies. Every federal entity designated a High Impact Service Provider[2] due to the scale and impact of their programs should have resources to build their own version of a “Delivery Unit.” These multi-disciplinary teams (others may call them “mission” or “service” teams) would do two things: drive the agency’s foundational-level delivery priorities, and build the agency’s own lasting capacity to sustain them, including by identifying where the agency needs to invest and incorporating that assessment into the agency’s budget.
A new Department of Services. To date, the Chief Operating Officer-like functions of the government sit in disconnected agencies: Office of Personnel Management (OPM) owns personnel, General Services Administration (GSA) owns procurement and real estate, and several management offices inside OMB run technology, financial management, and customer experience (USDS has also been housed within OMB).[3] As a result, no single place owns “making government work” as its job. A new Department of Services would consolidate these functions, led by a Cabinet-level Chief Operating Officer accountable for setting government-wide standards for core government functions and then providing the tools, shared platforms, and expertise to help agencies meet them. This new department would be an agency with fewer political staff and high-caliber civil servants in functions like technology, learning, design, procurement, and talent, which are more critical than ever for a government that will need management direction and capacity to support agencies quickly.
A delivery screener for all management positions. Too often, senior leaders in government are selected for their subject matter expertise or political clout — not their demonstrated experience as a leading executive. Critical roles like the heads of bureaus and administrations, general counsels, chiefs of staff, deputy secretaries, and even secretaries should have extensive experience or capacity to lead in large organizations, conduct organizational turnarounds, manage parallel private sector services, or have at-scale operational accountability — evidence of having delivered actual results. It is not enough to confine delivery expertise to chief information officers, chief technology officers, and senior advisors for delivery. The Deputy of the Presidential Personnel Office should have a delivery background and apply this delivery screener (a hiring standard that weighs a candidate’s track record of actually delivering results) when vetting agency leaders.
Delivery Inside the Executive Office of the President
A Deputy Chief of Staff (DCOS) for Implementation who owns delivery, with resources and a foothold in the policy process. There must be a high-ranking White House official anchored in the Chief of Staff’s office who has time with the president and chief of staff and has resources available to marshal — including teams, discretionary funding, leadership attention, the authority to clear roadblocks. This leader would carry the authority to resolve cross-government disagreements and hold clear accountability for the government’s top delivery priorities. This individual will set a regular rhythm of review across government, including public tracking on delivery progress for priority items at each level of delivery and managing accountability mechanisms for service providers.
A National Delivery Unit. Reporting to the DCOS for Implementation, the United States Digital Service must be redesigned to become a smaller cadre of interdisciplinary experts (including top technical talent) of no more than 30–50 that work together in teams with a limited, specific scope. The National Delivery Unit would provide added delivery capacity, coordination, and barrier-busting to two or three of the most critical and complex cross-agency efforts, and have spare capacity to absorb emergency management of technological crises or emergency response coordination across the government.
An Executive Office of the President (EOP) policy architecture that accounts for delivery in its workflow. Major government decisions typically move through a White House policy process prior to going to the president’s desk. The EOP should embed an explicit review for delivery considerations, including explicit data on what the public wants and current feedback data.[4] Director’s Reviews (the budget sessions OMB runs about each agency’s budget) in the budget formulation process have very little discussion on current delivery or data on what is and is not working. White House communications tend to announce new policy rather than deliver demonstrations and fixes to existing services — the EOP could instead use its megaphone to spotlight agency efforts to improve the services people rely on, rather than an over-focus on pitching new programs.
These proposals draw on the U.K. Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and its successors in other countries, Innovation and Behavioral Science teams around the world, on U.S. technology teams including USDS and DOGE, on private-sector customer experience, design, product, and transformation teams, as well as on leading state examples.
This proposal offers a shift from approaches that anchor growing new capacities and special teams to rewiring the central charge of the government to deliver outcomes. Instead of new processes or mandates from the center alone it builds delivery capacity in both agencies at the point of delivery and centrally through the National Delivery Unit. Finally, it creates coherence and accountability structures around functions that today sit dispersed across three federal agencies by building a Department of Services. The blueprint proposed here builds on the best of what has worked — but also asserts a fundamental shift: delivery isn’t the work of special teams, departments, and roles. It is the central charge of all of government.
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“We the People of the United States” — The Constitution
The United States’ founding document makes it clear: we, the people, created our government. Almost 80 years later, Abraham Lincoln underscored this idea: our government is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Now, more than 150 years after Gettysburg and 250 years since our founding, we must continue to uphold this ideal of a government shaped by and accountable to the people. A government that delivers builds trust. Trust is the foundation of democratic legitimacy. The case for getting this right has never been more urgent.
Footnotes:
- The “technology and delivery” capacity that existed in 2024 was the result of an arguably uncoordinated strategy across the Executive Office of the President, the General Services Administration, and within agencies. The 2018-established CX guidance cadence embedded capacity assessments and investment requests into the budget process, and helped to build a structured approach that made significant gains in building capacity for service delivery within agencies. The American Rescue Plan provided hundreds of millions of dollars overnight to the United States Digital Service (USDS) and Technology Transformation Service (TTS), which both grew significantly. It was often unclear how USDS, 18F (reimbursable), federal Citizen Services Funded-efforts (non-reimburseable TTS portfolios), the Office of the federal Chief Information Officer, the Deputy Director for Management, the Chief Technology Officer within the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and others could coordinate on priority selection, lanes of effort, and whom could direct whom to act. ↑
- “High Impact Service Providers” are those entities designated by the Office of Management and Budget due to either a) a high volume of annual transactions (e.g., Veterans Health Administration), b) a large percentage of the population served (e.g., IRS), and c) outsized impact on the lives of the people served (e.g., Bureau of Indian Affairs). ↑
- The “management side” policy functions of OMB (OPPM, OFFM, OFPP, OFCIO) would move into this new department, and could be restructured away from traditional functional offices into cross-functional teams organized around how government actually delivers—like lending and financing, direct-to-citizen services, and federally funded, state-administered benefits – that could own both policy decisions and capacity to support a few high priority delivery items, as well as provide meaningful technical support and central capabilities to support agencies in these efforts. At the same time, the new “Budget Director’s” portfolio would be clarified and streamlined around its core budget function, with considerably less staff required (especially if empowered with new cross-agency budgeting tools and platforms). ↑
- For longer discussion, the current EOP structure of a White House Office, the National Economic Council, the Office of the Domestic Policy Council, the Council of Economic Advisors, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and unique offices (such as the Office of American Innovation and the Gender Policy Council) for specific administration priorities creates competing camps and overlapping mandates that impede delivery – from lack of clarity of prioritization, to unhelpful at best and harmful at worst distractions to agencies, and orientation to siloed policy demands rather than attachment to actual outcomes for people. ↑
