Rebuilding the machinery of government can't be a partisan project

Voters can't reward what they never see delivered. That's everyone's problem.

Democrats may have been horrified by Project 2025, but when Trump won and his team got to work, what many of them felt most was envy. Who can forget that January night after the inauguration, when just as you thought you could go to sleep, another executive order would drop? The speed, the preparation, and the ambition were impressive, independent of your feelings about the content. Democrats of all stripes vowed that night not to be outdone next time they had the chance. I hope as they pursue this effort they will take on board a somewhat heterodox lesson:

Governing by executive order may look like a power grab (and of course sometimes is), but it’s also a symptom of a legislature that has lost the capacity to act. Repairing the balance of powers will require repairing the machinery of governance itself and that is a necessarily bipartisan act. If the lesson Democrats draw from 2025 is simply to run the same play harder, they’ll be preparing to fail the same way.

Project 2025 contained many policy proposals — What should the rules be around immigration, the environment, and safety net programs? What should our foreign policy be? — but its architects also understood that the machinery of government itself would determine whether those policies translated into anything meaningful, and they weren’t satisfied with the machinery they were being handed. The Project 2029s now underway among various Democratic party factions have absorbed that lesson too. Their binders will likely include some plans for the bureaucracy, even if the bulk is policy.

But a partisan project can contain only the machinery changes one party can make alone: the orders to sign, the offices to reorganize, the exemptions to be granted. Whatever one party can do alone, the next party can undo alone. The whiplash is brutal. Public servants can’t keep their footing when the rules of their work lurch with every election, and a reform undone teaches the workforce that nothing is worth investing in. The machinery reform that lasts — hiring that works for whoever governs, procurement that works for whoever’s buying, rulemaking fast enough for anyone’s promises to come true — can’t be sold to the other side after the fact. It has to be co-developed and negotiated across the aisle in good faith. Routing around broken machinery is a partisan project. Repairing it can’t be.

For those of us focused on state capacity, the overreliance on executive orders appears as less a power grab than a symptom: when Congress loses the ability to act with speed and specificity, governing flows to the branch that still can. Balance will be restored when Congress can actually legislate repairs to governance.

We’ve been living in an era of routing around broken machinery, and worse. When your opponents hold power, government’s sclerosis feels like a feature. Why sharpen a tool your adversaries will wield? Some go further than neglect. By each side’s own lights, this is rational. It’s also self-defeating. Whatever you break, or decline to fix, you will inherit. And you can’t start fixing it when you get power back: the timelines of reforms to civil service, procurement, and the like mean the party in power during the work will hand the benefits to its successor, especially when the White House keeps changing hands.

An incapable administrative state doesn’t just hobble whoever holds it; it breaks democracy at a fundamental level. As Brian Shearer recently laid out, a significant federal rule takes about five years from start to finish when everything goes right — and when was the last time everything went right? It is currently impossible for a president to campaign on a significant regulation and deliver it before facing re-election. If campaign promises have no hope of making people’s lives better during that president’s term, the basic feedback loop of democracy — candidates say what they’ll do, voters choose, results arrive, voters judge — no longer functions. The wild swings of the past two decades look like disappointment with one party, then the other. They may be better understood as disappointment with the whole system, because there is no way to make sense of the relationship between what leaders promise and what follows. Until we fix the machinery, it is very hard to get elected on substance, because voters don’t believe anything anyone says.

We have been destroying the capacity of the administrative state for a long time, but we are now entering an era of bipartisan repair. Enough leaders — not all, but enough — are realizing it. Last month, Senators James Lankford and Maggie Hassan held the first of four roundtables on government reform, part of an effort to develop an ambitious, bipartisan government plan to reform the machinery of government that could advance in a future Congress, and their counterparts in the House are engaged too. What struck me most from participating in the first roundtable wasn’t any particular proposal. It was that two senators, from opposite parties, are dead serious that reform can no longer tinker at the margins, and that nothing durable can be built by one side alone.

Both sides must stop waiting for a friendlier moment. Both need to be preparing for a disruptive one. Change in government tends to happen in crisis, when a failure becomes impossible to ignore and a window opens. But crisis rewards preparation, not improvisation. The counter-cyclical work is developing reform plans now, to a level of detail that makes them actionable, and socializing them with ideologically diverse stakeholders, so that when the window opens they can be enacted and implemented fast. What’s on the shelf when the thermostat swings is what gets used. We wasted the urgency that Covid brought. We must turn the next crises into durable, structural change.

Renovating democracy means making our institutions more representative and responsive, and much of this movement’s energy rightly goes there. But responsiveness has a delivery side. A government that hears its citizens and cannot act on what it hears in time for them to notice will lose their trust just as surely as one that never listens. The feedback loop between promise and result is as fundamental to self-government as the ballot itself. We can repair it. Let’s get to work.

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Jen Pahlka’s other fantastic writings on policy and state capacity can be found at EatingPolicy.com.