Since coming into office, the second Trump administration has remade the federal government in dramatic ways. The administration is dismantling vital government programs and agencies, while weaponizing other parts of the state to scapegoat vulnerable communities and target political opponents.
But, if and when a moment to rebuild arrives, it will not be a matter of simply restoring the pre-2025 status quo. Not only is doing so impossible in the aftermath of mass civil servant firings and the destruction of trust between communities and the state, it is also the wrong goal. For far too long, administrative bodies were not sufficiently empowered, resourced, responsive, nimble, or creative to meet the most urgent public needs. At the same time, many of the coercive powers that have been so dangerously weaponized of late were already present — often ratified by policymakers of both parties.
Instead, policymakers will have to reimagine, redesign, and rapidly reboot the federal government. While legislation is central to public policy, the day-to-day work of implementing policies and enforcing them falls to administrative bodies. These are the organizations and individuals that develop rules for public safety; who monitor and enforce requirements to keep toxins out of our food, air, and water; and who administer safety net programs that millions of Americans rely on.
In other words, the United States will need to build new institutions that are purpose-built to restore trust — and that have the capacities and structures needed to actually deliver meaningful, tangible public impact. This is critical in the short term, as new governance machinery is necessary for any next pro-democracy administration to achieve its goals. But it is also key for the long-term durability of democracy, which will depend greatly on a government capable of delivering with speed and scale on urgent public needs coupled with new constraints and forms of accountability that limit the ability of future would-be autocrats to weaponize enforcement, surveillance, spending, and other governmental powers against the people.
This will not be an easy task, and future governance rebuilders will face significant headwinds. A next administration will walk into a government decimated by staffing and budget cuts, by rampant corruption, by wholesale gutting of governing machinery and even the data on which its functioning depends, while also grappling with massive structural changes from the disruptions caused by AI to worsening climate instability and more. At the same time, this destruction and corruption has created a massive deficit of trust and legitimacy in those same government bodies. Finally, even if new administrative capacities and personnel can be quickly stood up, a next administration will face a Supreme Court, Fifth Circuit, and a number of other partisan lower court judges ready to block and undo affirmative public policies as quickly as they have supported efforts to consolidate autocratic power in the current presidency.
But this effort needs to start now. Given the scale and scope of the ongoing damage to government we are witnessing on a daily basis, coupled with very real ongoing crises that any new administration will inherit, the next pro-democracy administration will need to act quickly to repair the machinery of governance. In the absence of new, detailed ideas, there will be a strong temptation to revert to the previous status quo, or to change it only at the margins. To avoid that mistake, it is critical to start the discussion now, so that concrete proposals, pressure tested through public debate, will be ready when the next governing moment is upon us.
Reinvention Blueprint Series
This essay kicks off an exciting series for Just Security called the “Reinvention Blueprints.” The goal of this series is to build out bold but practical ideas for how to rebuild and reimagine the federal government. Each of the authors in this series lends their deep expertise to identify specific challenges and set out concrete proposals for how to solve them. The aim is to create a repository of institutional designs that a future Congress and administration can reach for when a window for reimagining opens.
Principles for Reinvention
In this opening essay, we offer some principles for the reinvention that should inform the work of policymakers, advocates, and governance rebuilders. Too often, too many Americans find themselves at the whims of arbitrary, unaccountable power: the power of dominant firms and wealthy interests in the market; the power of an unaccountable Supreme Court to stand in the way of meaningful progress; and the power of political leaders more concerned with the interests of wealthy elites than the broader public. The United States needs a government that responds to people’s actual problems and empowers them to have meaningful control over their own lives.
First, democracy must deliver on the urgent and pressing concerns of the moment to show people that democracy can work: that will require a reimagining of how we govern to move more quickly and nimbly, at scale, and in ways that are responsive to the lived experiences and demands of communities.
Second, rebuilders will need to think through how to dismantle the institutional structures that made the authoritarian turn so rapid and virulent as well as create guardrails preventing a similar turn in the future.
Relatedly, a third objective will be to strengthen institutions that support democracy, both in government and in civil society, so that our democracy is more durable against future attempts at dismantling or weaponizing the state; part and parcel of this effort is democratizing our government itself.
What would these types of rebuilding principles mean concretely?
(1) A government that can deliver: a future administrative state should be rebuilt to be more nimble, act faster, and in more high-impact ways to address the urgent social and economic challenges facing the country.
It is hard to overstate how much the current crisis is fueled by a deep cynicism about the government’s ability to deliver meaningful change and tangible support for communities facing growing insecurity, precarity, and outright attacks on their health and safety. For democracy to survive and thrive — and to be durable — it has to be capable enough to address the public’s demands for basic services, and more broadly, for change. Within a future administrative state, that demand requires reimagining much of how the government ran before 2025.
The list of specific policy reforms needed to make good on this demand is long — and an area where policymakers and advocates will rightly need to spend significant time reimagining government between now and a potential future rebuild moment. The pre-Trump status quo took too long to develop and implement policies. Many of the biggest initiatives were moved through notice and comment rulemaking: but given the time to develop, propose, and finalize a rule, coupled with the inevitable judicial review, many regulations were not able to be fully implemented within a single presidential term.
New Tools and Processes
That means we need to consider tools beyond notice and comment rulemaking, including creative — but legal — uses of enforcement powers, licensure and approval authorities, and federal grants and contracts, among others. There will still be circumstances in which regulations are necessary, and there the process will need to move more quickly. That will require clearer lines of decision-making authority within the executive branch to quickly resolve issues, centralized coordination through the White House oriented toward facilitating rules rather than layering on compliance checks, and an approach to legal and litigation-risk review that takes seriously the reality of hostile, bad faith review by certain partisan actors in the judiciary.
New Mindset
Beyond these specific, technical changes, rebuilders will need a new mindset within government. Previous administrations have been very concerned about missteps, which has led to more internal process and delay. In the next governing moment, rebuilders will need to be more open to experimentation and action, to taking risks and big swings, and, therefore, to making mistakes and then working to quickly fix them. Taking big swings means seeking to address the social and economic challenges communities face at their structural root causes, in ways that directly address the deep imbalances of economic and social power that drive our unequal economy and society. It means putting in place basic rules of the road to make markets and systems work for ordinary Americans and not only for the most powerful and well-connected interests.
New Structures
In addition to rethinking how we approach existing tools to address urgent demands more effectively, we will also need to reimagine — on both near and long-term timescales — the structure of the federal government itself. In prior moments of crisis, Congress has chartered entire new agencies to address financial crises, to implement big new programs like Social Security, to keep toxins out of our air and water and our food and drugs. What kind of new agencies are fit-for-purpose today? How might existing agencies be recombined, dismantled, or reconstituted? What would be most effective at addressing real problems–and doing so in ways that build and sustain broader buy-in, legitimacy, and the day-to-day involvement of impacted communities?
(2) A government with structural limits to prevent capacity for autocratic abuse: While we look to expand some administrative state capacities, those capacities most central to authoritarian overreach need to be distinguished and dismantled altogether.
In redesigning the administrative state, we will have to build and expand some capacities. But it is possible and in fact necessary to pair those capacity-expanding reforms with a parallel project of anti-authoritarian structural reforms that prevent future would-be autocrats from engaging in the kind of state-sponsored violence, surveillance, and weaponized governance that we have seen in the last two years.
Debates about institutional design often treat state power as monolithic, something to either expand or restrict across the board. But the reality of current U.S. law and bureaucratic structure is highly imbalanced: the levers of state power most unrestrained are the ones most prone to abuse. Think, for example, about the many ways in which national security, immigration, and related powers are relatively unchecked. By contrast, many of the powers most needed to advance democratic equality and make things work better for ordinary Americans are highly constrained — whether by arbitrary and shifting standards of Supreme Court review or by significant procedural hurdles.
Moreover, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have sought to build out and expand authoritarian powers of the state. This reality means that we can (and must) advance on both affirmative capacity-building of some aspects of the state to make sure the government can act in the public interest, while dismantling other aspects of the state that are ripe for abuse.
Concretely, the exercise of the coercive powers of the administrative state should be subject to new constraints that are tailored for the excess and under-accountable power that has been built up over years and by members of both parties. The surveillance state apparatus that accelerated after 9/11 has provided untold capacities for dangerous weaponization of state power. The unchecked coercive powers of immigration enforcement and the racialized nature of state coercion in enforcing policies and implementing benefits have been long-standing failures of democratic accountability that created the foundations for the worst excesses of the current moment. Putting rule-of-law-abiding people focused on actually addressing urgent public problems in charge may lessen the damage, but it won’t obviate it; the bureaucratic imperative means that machinery built for coercion and control will be utilized for those purposes if not sufficiently constrained and, in some cases, dismantled.
What would it look like to develop new procedural restraints, to dismantle and defund overly-weaponized components of the federal bureaucracy, and institute new forms of oversight and accountability for these structures? How can we design those restraints without also undermining the kinds of affirmative powers that will be needed to address the public’s most urgent demands? How might we restrain and dial back the dangerous brew of state-led and privately-run surveillance, while also enabling affirmative uses of data to make the government better at delivering benefits and needed services? These questions will be critical to the rebuilding effort.
(3) A government that supports a more durable democracy: a central goal for democracy-rebuilders should be strengthening the institutions and civil society organizations most central to long-term, durable democratic governance that is both accountable and responsive on the one hand, and effective on the other.
A vibrant and durable democracy requires broader reforms to revive and strengthen fair and inclusive elections. But the task of rebuilding democracy is not just one of formal democracy reform. It also requires bureaucratic institutions that are themselves more responsive and accountable, while still being effective. And it also requires mass-member civil society organizations embedded in communities through which people can be organized to have more effective voice, influence, and the capacity to push back against future would-be autocrats.
Supporting Pro-Democracy Civil Society
One of the telling lessons of the current crisis is that many of our existing institutions were not very democratic or broadly popular in the first place. And very few of the policies and institutions that people depended on had the kind of organized constituencies behind them to protect them from being swept away or weaponized. The ease with which safety net programs were cut, for example, underscores how the many communities dependent on those public-serving programs were not in fact organized in the kind of civil society groups needed to protect and defend their interests. Such bottom-up organization is also essential to continuing to push governing systems to evolve in ways that the public demands going forward.
When thinking about the redesign of governing institutions, we should focus not only on conventional measures of government efficiency in providing goods and services, but also on how governing institutions can expand the capacity of communities to push government to act boldly and to hold it accountable, while reducing the power of vested interests to coopt, corrupt, or weaponize the state for their own ends.
Reimagining Public Participation
Another key route for reimagining a more effective and responsive democratic government is to rethink the role of public participation in designing and implementing public policy. It is perhaps surprising that even as there is a deep lack of trust in government, there are also a plethora of mechanisms for public engagement from notice-and-comment procedures to common practices of stakeholder consultation. But the reality is that too often these mechanisms are treated as check-the-box exercises or structured in ways that enable powerful and well-resourced players to dominate the process, while the most vulnerable and impacted communities still struggle to be heard.
We have the worst of both worlds when it comes to participation: our current structures are neither empowered nor inclusive enough to create meaningful voice and buy-in for impacted communities, nor are they designed to actually contribute to creative problem-solving and more effective implementation of policies. In a next reimagined government, we should rethink participation as a capacity- and legitimacy-multiplier. Done right, participation can bring impacted communities into policymaking in ways that build trust, empower those most vulnerable and likely to be overlooked, and help generate more effective policy designs and more impactful implementation. A growing number of policymakers are developing approaches to do just that; these types of ideas should be taken as starting points for the redesign of future agencies and institutions.
Recalibrating the Separation of Powers
Finally, rebuilders will need to reimagine the relationship between the branches of the U.S. federal government. Much of the current crisis stems from a deeper imbalance of U.S. federal institutions. For decades, the presidency has accumulated power as Congress ceded its own, while the Supreme Court has simultaneously expanded presidential control over the executive branch and narrowed agencies’ affirmative authority to address economic and social inequalities. A rebuilt administrative state will, for the near-term at least, sit inside this imbalance.
Moreover, the realities of campaign finance deregulation, gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and an electoral system accelerating a toxic and asymmetric form of polarization, mean that the existing U.S. Congress is itself not built to channel the sweep of democratic demands and voices. Addressing these deeper seated issues will require structural democracy reforms, as well as a new understanding of the separation of powers that better accounts for the risks of authoritarianism and autocracy that motivated the Founders when they were designing our constitutional system in the first place.
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While the three principles we have laid out will not lead to a single set of answers, they offer a way to approach the reimagining and redesigning of our government. Some of these principles can be advanced through executive branch actions: regulations, enforcement actions, executive branch reorganization. Some of them will require legislation. Some of these ideas will involve in-the-weeds reforms that may be technical but can be far-reaching. Others will require more headline transformations that channel broad-based public demands for change. Given the scale of the challenges ahead, democracy rebuilders should build designs and strategies that are flexible as to how they become reality. Wherever legislative opportunity exists to pursue these goals, it should be used. Where legislative runways do not exist, a pro-democracy coalition should be willing to leverage executive power — even as we dismantle and constrain the most dangerous forms of overreach noted above.
There are tensions between these principles. What to build versus what to dismantle, and how to do both at the same time. How to build a government that moves with speed and at scale to solve public problems, while engaging the public in ways that are meaningful and that build bottom-up power. What to move through executive actions and reforms versus through broader legislative transformation. These are real tensions, but they are workable ones.
Ultimately, democracy rebuilders should have a level of strategic flexibility across these different dimensions. But what should stay fixed is a deeper commitment to a shared North Star – that our goal is ultimately to create an inclusive, equitable, multiracial democracy. A democracy that rejects attempts to exclude or subordinate on the basis of race, gender, economic position, geography, or other dimensions of vulnerability. A democracy that secures for all of us the basic protections of civil rights, bodily integrity, safety, and economic and social inclusion. Such a North Star is sufficiently broad to command majoritarian support – but clear enough to guide us as to which powers need to be built, and which powers need to be dismantled; how to balance speed and scale with participation; to inform when we leverage executive power, and when we legislate it away. There is widespread agreement that we need to build a better government: to do that well, we need to be clear about what we want that government to help us achieve.
