The Roosevelt Institute Report, October 28, 2025 – “We know the tragic effects of President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the federal government. But the truth is, Trump and Elon Musk alone didn’t break our governing institutions. Even prior to the current administration’s actions, both parties presided over decades of disinvestment in federal government capacity, too often abdicating power to private market forces where public institutions once shaped outcomes in the public interest—as Roosevelt has written much about. Conservative efforts to undermine the federal government and hamstring its very ability to function compounded the problem. Decades of underfunding and hollowing out agencies, outsourcing expertise, layering on procedural hurdles that slow action to a crawl, and stacking courts with ideological allies have weakened the government’s ability to deliver for working families, stand up to special interests on their behalf, and earn the public’s trust. And while the Biden-Harris administration had a fundamentally different vision of the government’s role in the economy—rejecting laissez-faire, hands-off approaches to markets—it often sought to restore the governmental institutions and norms that had existed prior to the first Trump administration, rather than dramatically reimagining them to create more progressive, action-oriented government institutions. The long-running undercutting of the government’s capacity to solve national problems is not just a bureaucratic problem. It is a democratic one, because democratic legitimacy requires a government capable of speedily and visibly responding to ordinary Americans’ aspirations and discontent. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned, “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations—not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government.”  To avoid that fate, American policymakers must prove that democracy can still deliver—that democratic institutions can operate with urgency to meaningfully improve the lives of ordinary people, and that the government is answerable to the people, not just the monied few. Doing so will require reimagining and building a new, more responsive, and more effective set of federal government institutions, rather than simply restoring what existed before Trump. Future administrations must flip the government’s risk profile away from status quo bias and toward delivering bold, timely, and resonant results for working people. To ground conversations about government institutional reform in practical experience, we interviewed more than 45 recent federal officials—senior political appointees from the Biden-Harris administration who worked on economic policymaking—to capture while still fresh their candid insights into the institutional obstacles to execution and innovation. To better understand the bureaucratic hurdles and gaps in capacity that undermine robust federal economic policymaking and delivery, we interviewed appointees from a wide range of agencies, roles, and modes of government administration—including specialists in regulatory policymaking, enforcement, service delivery, federal funding deployment, personnel processes, communications, and more.

In this report, we recount their lessons learned, and we provide 161 practical ideas they offered for institutional reforms to create a more effective, nimble, and responsive government. These ideas are not meant to be consensus recommendations—i.e., they were not each endorsed by every interviewee. Rather, they serve to provide an “options menu” of credible, actionable solutions offered by practitioners with a shared passion for building a democracy that more quickly and effectively delivers for working people. Of course, we could not speak with every appointee, and we recognize that there are different perspectives; this report offers a window into the experiences and ideas of those we interviewed. We organize the report around core principles for reform gleaned from these interviews, as follows…”