Thanks for this, Sam. I'm involved in some of these forward-looking efforts and I can't think of a significant discussion that hasn't started off by (explicitly) assuming we will not have the people, structures, and processes available to make things work, and that having a plan for that out of the gate is first priority. To that end, for example, there are numerous "institutional knowledge" projects underway to capture what has been and is being lost--knowledge yes, but also context for that knowledge like the laws, regs, bodies, institutions, unwritten actions--to inform reconstruction. I think / hope this does not lead to mere rebuilding of what existed before, because that would be wildly insufficient.
The biggest challenge that I see for this, though, is that in order to know which people to put where to do what task, we need to understand the desired outcome first. If we don't do that, I think there's a huge risk of gravitating back to the way things were on 19 Jan 2025. So I feel like it means both the conceptual desired policy outcome and the specifics of the money, actions, protections, etc. that government provides to people to make their lives better. We need that sketched out, and soon, because among other things, prepping for 2029 means getting things together for HR1 et seq. of the 120th Congress...can't be waiting around for the 121st Congress, which will mean resources and direction aren't available on day 1.
The last thing I'll note is going back to the "Thanks" at the beginning. A challenge I'm seeing and dealing with regularly--which everyone here probably recognizes--is that this administration and governance stuff is boring. We need support--moral / popular support, financial support, comms / marketing support--to do this boring stuff. So thanks for highlighting why it's important, hope it helps people understand and build that support.
Agree. I am so happy that you and others are on the task of pre-planning and organizing. As I see things here in the civilian world, y'all are trying to remodel and update the New Deal so it again undergirds the well-being of the citizenry. Unless our citizens are prospering and flourishing on a local level, this country will be just another impoverished and exploited populace propping up oligarchs and jerked around by demagogues.
As to the comms/marketing of the above, it will be a message best carried forward by talented, young, smart candidates aware of and conversant in the specific local disfunctioning of the American economy. This message must demand government support the dignity and economic freedom of citizens. It must broadly outline how it is possible for us to have a federal government which will deploy everyone's taxes and talents to that end, rather than to the profits of corporations. It was TR's message. It was FDR's message.
And these Democratic candidates must directly confront and refute the 30 years of Republican mischaracterization of government bureaucracy as a threat. When the reality is New Deal programs, War on Poverty programs, Civil Rights programs and the professionalization of the federal bureaucracy are the people-erected shields against tyranny and despotism.
I think that some of the communications planning should include ways to reach out to Americans on many levels; when I was a kid in the 1970s, schoolhouse rock and other public service type announcements were common on television and I can remember many of the messages and catchy slogans. Currently, the hateful Kristi Noem and her awful ICE advertisements are flooding my feed on my streaming channels as well as on the Internet. I think Project 2029 will need to identify messages and have promotions ready to go that highlight the importance of public service, the heroism of public service, the basics of democracy, community, the public good, both in general and in specific.
We will need to fight in every possible way to push back against the hate rhetoric, anti-democratic propaganda, and the nonsense that is currently being promoted by the Republicans as the "obvious truth." Actions could include immediately overturning Citizens United and establishing rules for elections that create a more level playing field to encourage a wider range of candidates (not just million-, or billionaires). Another important step would be reinstating some version of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine that the Reagan FCC eliminated in the 80s which had required broadcasters to devote time representing both sides of an issue or argument. This would need to be expanded to include warnings against lies or notices about when some assertion was hearsay or was actually backed by evidence. It is such an uphill climb, but I am so thankful that people are talking and thinking about these things already.
💯 🎯 I agree so much! I have also noted the mass of false premise, world-building ads from Republicans on streaming platforms. Republicans find these captive audiences and beat them down so much people begin to associate Democrats and government programs with the enemy. Which is of, course, the goal.
My new Texas Democratic Party chair recently said that messaging is meaningless unless our message is promulgated exactly where people are. I see hope in local Democrats in Red states and far-seeing, calm leaders like Gov. Pritzker of Illinois.
For myself, I intend to get off my butt and get to work in my local Democratic Party. For once, I see people here who are clear-eyed about the practical steps we need to take.
>> That means reversing the Trump firings. It also means going beyond them: Hiring more federal workers in areas where there were already significant shortages prior to Trump, such as air-traffic control and public health; deprivatizing functions that have become boondoggles for private entities, such as Medicare prescription-drug coverage; and taking on new government functions that require additional staff, such as regulation of artificial intelligence.
Sam, I mean this in perfectly good faith, but I feel like this is still not really breaking free of the very paradigm you criticize!
Trump got away with so much of this because, yes, the public does in fact hate government workers — or at least THINKS it does.
A big hiring binge will also be hard to get off the ground if we just reinstate the previous everything-bagel approach to hiring.
I think a more realistic plan means taking some of the tools Trump has created, and doing more to improve government by slashing crappy policies where they exist.
For instance, the self-evaluation based system that Pahlka wrote about… needs to GO. Likewise, let’s do our own “The DOGE You Actually Wanted And Expected From That Orange Thug”: An office tasked with radically improving efficiency, and highlighting to the executive branch which outdated regulations or some stupid misinterpreted EO (like the one that created Pahlka’s hideous hiring morass) needs to go. Make Mark Cuban the czar of it, and empower him to go on the shows and podcasts every week with a big roundup of regulations that annoyed him that week.
The point is, what you just wrote here in the section I quoted — and I want to be gentle — smacks of everything that normies HATE about us PMC types. So let’s not do that. Kudos for the effort, and I agreed with most of the rest of this, but just wanted to offer some constructive criticism.
State capacity was killed off by excessive bureaucracy. We kept trying to do more with more, but hit diminishing returns and were doing barely anything more with ever greater resource consumption.
It’s not sustainable.
The only way to have a government that can truly do more with more, is to have one that specializes in always doing more with less. If we can’t scale the most basic functions, we’ll NEVER scale the things we dream of scaling.
I don't know that if we have any fundamental disagreements. My experience is in NYC government and public higher education. I have overseen billion dollar operating budgets, procurement, design, and construction. Procurement, zoning, and land use rules get in the way of government efficiency/effectiveness. I 100% agree with you, and that is my lived experience (a no no expression now?). A lack of programmers, architects, engineers, and project managers also inhibits state capacity. I think we need both more (and different) staff (compared to the Trump status quo) AND fewer regs.
Yes, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics needs economists and statisticians, and the FAA needs air traffic controllers, and the Social Security Administration needs people in its field offices
That’s a good point. But again, I didn’t really contest that in the original comment.
My main criticism was just that after we restore the basic critical functions like ATC, we shouldn’t (ed: race to) go expanding the government in order to take on new regulatory roles like AI, especially if it means doing all that hiring and regulating in the exact same dysfunctional way that we WERE doing it. We’ll be barely halfway done with it in time for the next Trumpist incursion.
You missed on what the very first task of project 2029 should be!!! ACCOUNTABILITY!!! Trump and every one of his minions that illegally and unethically destroyed the US federal government need to be held responsible for that destruction. Accountability for breaking the law is not retribution which is all Trump has done. At the same time, current laws need to be strengthened, new laws put in place, and punishments need to be significant to assure such treasonous behavior is discouraged from ever occurring again. The next time the Democratic party wins power they actually must have the courage to use it!!!
Complete agree with your conclusion: if/when the D's are in power they have to be willing and able to use it. I think, though, that while the purpose is accountability the first task has to be (re)building a functioning civil government. That will require something similar to the DOGE-led 'purging' of competent career civil servants to remove from the federal government the MAGA-loyalists that have replaced them. The lesson of the DOGE experience is that this can and must be done quickly. A second challenge will be persuading competent civil servants to either return to or enter into government service. Which means taking steps to make public service a reliable and viable career choice. As Sam says: don't take your eyes of the ball of the principal task: rebuilding.
I think the name 'Project 2029' is terrible. If Project 2025 is seen as the Republicans plan to F everything up, Project 2029 will be seen, by many voters, as the Democrats plan to F everything up even worse. The similarity in naming would be hard to get past.
Instead, I suggest Project Phoenix, after the mythological bird. This would bring to mind the ashes that the Rs have left us with and emphasize the rebirth that the Ds plan to recover from it and build for the future.
I believe Project 2025 was largely the product of one extreme branch of the conservative/psuedo-libertarian movement via the Heritage Foundation that was passively enabled by a supine Republican Congress afraid of its own voters. It is hard for me to envision the Democrats producing a similar document or, depending on what was in it, showing such a near unanimous consent (or grudging complicity) for implementing it.
Who will actually write up such a "Project 2029" and what process will be used to make it widely endorsed? How will it not be "poll tested" into tepid irrelevancy? Should we not expect to have some kind of repeat of the Manchin-Sinema stubbornness to deny Biden passage of crucial parts of his program? Even if we get a new president committed to a "Project 2029," it doesn't mean we get it done unless here is an unusually massive turnover in the Democratic Congressional roster (and in the consultants and advisers that help them get there).
Can we really anticipate that? If not, I just have a hard time seeing the unified approach to rebuilding that we will undoubtedly need getting it done. Knowing clearly what we need to do is a necessary first step, but how to get there is a whole other mess. I wish I could feet differently about this, but there we are.
Maybe Brian can address this in his Thursday mailbag?!
Good luck trying to attract talented people to work for the federal government without 1st assuring them that the GOP cult will never return to power and repeat the destruction we are witnessing now.
Jacob is right. What do you/we want the outcome to be? Then build the structure to support that. I think we start with the Constitution and settle the age old issues ACROSS party lines. If we don’t answer the big issues like race, the role of press, women’s rights, we’re doomed. If we continue to live in a 50-50 world, we will collapse into autocracy from exhaustion. I’m an unenrolled voter with 50 plus years in politics and government. I was protesting in the 60s and we were all young. Yesterday at a protest we were all old(er). Step one is to engage the under 40 people and understand it will be their world. We need to stop thinking WE have the answers. These are uncharted waters. Right now we should be engaging younger people around the country…not sitting in offices creating strategies. The Democrats have been so far off mark, why would we think they can crack this nut without new ideas?
One take away is a huge problem will be that recreating government is a generation long project and a solid decade will be needed to get the foundation in place. We will need a trifecta for four years and another Democratic administration in 2033 or else it’s back to square one in 2037 (or 2041).
The only way we can change that is to root and branch destroy Trumpism by 2029. There will have to be real accountability (prison) for the top people. More fundamentally, SCOTUS and the awful jurisprudence going back to 2010 will have to be similarly destroyed. These are tall, tall orders.
Two of the things Brian has harped on is the big tent for the party and building an information environment. For the “We choose to these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard” crowd this is your moment.
Great essay, and I'll add that I think a Democratic priority needs to be proving to the American people that government can actually get good things done. Too often, government action is so agonizingly slow that by the time it happens the problems it was intended to fix have metatasized into something very different.
I'm not arguing in favor of mass obliteration of regulations; many of these were enacted to prevent the very corruption and cronyism that is the hallmark of the Trump administion. However, the collective weight of these regulations, no matter how well considered, can sometimes serve to make government ponderous and unresponsive. I understand that an oil tanker doesn't turn on a dime, but it had better at least carry oil to where it has to be, in a reasonable time frame.
Sam, there should be a plan to also woo the scientists back to the US who Trump discarded and for wealthy Dem donors to fund and establish university fellowships in areas that we'll need to make the civil service sector one to be really proud of. Terrific essay.
Both the article and the comments get at important elements of the situation, but matters could be stated more clearly.
We are in a revolutionary situation. The Trumpists have made themselves clear, through both their statements and their actions:
-- They believe that the only legitimate government is white Christian patriarchal nationalism.
-- They believe that government restrictions on the power of the wealthy and of corporations are illegitimate.
-- They share the characteristic fascist devotion to the incarnation of the national will in a masculine leader, to whom all elements of government should be subordinate, and who must have the authority to address all national problems as he sees fit.
For those reasons, they reject the founding principle of equality in the Declaration of Independence. They also reject both the legitimacy of the Union victory in the Civil War (along with the post-war settlement, at least as far as the Fourteenth Amendment is concerned) and the government arrangements coming out of the New Deal. Their intent is to re-found the country on a very different basis. Nor are they coy about this concept: one of Trump's lackeys in his recent three-hour Cabinet meeting praised him for doing just that.
The existing U.S. regime, with its many patches and compromises, is failing to meet this attack. The job facing those Prof. Bagenstos describes must therefore be "a new birth of freedom." That project must not address only the immediate Trumpist threat; it must at least recognize the necessity to undertake a much broader statutory and constitutional revision to deal with 250 years of accumulated hazards and failures. Examples include the presidential pardon power, the electoral college, the mass of executive emergency powers, the Supreme Court decision immunizing the President from the criminal law, the defective constitutional language summarily describing executive power that led to the "unitary executive" idea (a point recently set out by David French), and much more.
In doing all this, these reformers will have to confront the problem of rebuilding the constitutional order while also addressing ordinary governing issues. They will need determination, very thick skins, and a willingness to make great sacrifices in this cause. The Trumpists they face will consider them mortal enemies and will treat them accordingly.
Nor will this be a short contest. The United States did not get into its degraded condition in a few years or solely because of one or two elections. These conditions are the result of longstanding issues not only in government but also in civic culture, and a lasting refounding on a better basis must recognize that fact.
A great historic conflict is upon us. The only issue is whether we will do our part in that struggle.
I think maybe radical populism is the way here. Keep it simple "Build America" and start a national hiring program. Decentering government out of DC may help a lot too. Why not build a new HHS service in Cleveland? A new General Counsel in Kansas City? Social Security in Raleigh? Get Senators from Red states on board with jobs (but keep them in the cities!).
Thanks for this, Sam. I'm involved in some of these forward-looking efforts and I can't think of a significant discussion that hasn't started off by (explicitly) assuming we will not have the people, structures, and processes available to make things work, and that having a plan for that out of the gate is first priority. To that end, for example, there are numerous "institutional knowledge" projects underway to capture what has been and is being lost--knowledge yes, but also context for that knowledge like the laws, regs, bodies, institutions, unwritten actions--to inform reconstruction. I think / hope this does not lead to mere rebuilding of what existed before, because that would be wildly insufficient.
The biggest challenge that I see for this, though, is that in order to know which people to put where to do what task, we need to understand the desired outcome first. If we don't do that, I think there's a huge risk of gravitating back to the way things were on 19 Jan 2025. So I feel like it means both the conceptual desired policy outcome and the specifics of the money, actions, protections, etc. that government provides to people to make their lives better. We need that sketched out, and soon, because among other things, prepping for 2029 means getting things together for HR1 et seq. of the 120th Congress...can't be waiting around for the 121st Congress, which will mean resources and direction aren't available on day 1.
The last thing I'll note is going back to the "Thanks" at the beginning. A challenge I'm seeing and dealing with regularly--which everyone here probably recognizes--is that this administration and governance stuff is boring. We need support--moral / popular support, financial support, comms / marketing support--to do this boring stuff. So thanks for highlighting why it's important, hope it helps people understand and build that support.
Agree. I am so happy that you and others are on the task of pre-planning and organizing. As I see things here in the civilian world, y'all are trying to remodel and update the New Deal so it again undergirds the well-being of the citizenry. Unless our citizens are prospering and flourishing on a local level, this country will be just another impoverished and exploited populace propping up oligarchs and jerked around by demagogues.
As to the comms/marketing of the above, it will be a message best carried forward by talented, young, smart candidates aware of and conversant in the specific local disfunctioning of the American economy. This message must demand government support the dignity and economic freedom of citizens. It must broadly outline how it is possible for us to have a federal government which will deploy everyone's taxes and talents to that end, rather than to the profits of corporations. It was TR's message. It was FDR's message.
And these Democratic candidates must directly confront and refute the 30 years of Republican mischaracterization of government bureaucracy as a threat. When the reality is New Deal programs, War on Poverty programs, Civil Rights programs and the professionalization of the federal bureaucracy are the people-erected shields against tyranny and despotism.
I think that some of the communications planning should include ways to reach out to Americans on many levels; when I was a kid in the 1970s, schoolhouse rock and other public service type announcements were common on television and I can remember many of the messages and catchy slogans. Currently, the hateful Kristi Noem and her awful ICE advertisements are flooding my feed on my streaming channels as well as on the Internet. I think Project 2029 will need to identify messages and have promotions ready to go that highlight the importance of public service, the heroism of public service, the basics of democracy, community, the public good, both in general and in specific.
We will need to fight in every possible way to push back against the hate rhetoric, anti-democratic propaganda, and the nonsense that is currently being promoted by the Republicans as the "obvious truth." Actions could include immediately overturning Citizens United and establishing rules for elections that create a more level playing field to encourage a wider range of candidates (not just million-, or billionaires). Another important step would be reinstating some version of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine that the Reagan FCC eliminated in the 80s which had required broadcasters to devote time representing both sides of an issue or argument. This would need to be expanded to include warnings against lies or notices about when some assertion was hearsay or was actually backed by evidence. It is such an uphill climb, but I am so thankful that people are talking and thinking about these things already.
💯 🎯 I agree so much! I have also noted the mass of false premise, world-building ads from Republicans on streaming platforms. Republicans find these captive audiences and beat them down so much people begin to associate Democrats and government programs with the enemy. Which is of, course, the goal.
My new Texas Democratic Party chair recently said that messaging is meaningless unless our message is promulgated exactly where people are. I see hope in local Democrats in Red states and far-seeing, calm leaders like Gov. Pritzker of Illinois.
For myself, I intend to get off my butt and get to work in my local Democratic Party. For once, I see people here who are clear-eyed about the practical steps we need to take.
Thank you for your great reply! Let’s go.
>> That means reversing the Trump firings. It also means going beyond them: Hiring more federal workers in areas where there were already significant shortages prior to Trump, such as air-traffic control and public health; deprivatizing functions that have become boondoggles for private entities, such as Medicare prescription-drug coverage; and taking on new government functions that require additional staff, such as regulation of artificial intelligence.
Sam, I mean this in perfectly good faith, but I feel like this is still not really breaking free of the very paradigm you criticize!
Trump got away with so much of this because, yes, the public does in fact hate government workers — or at least THINKS it does.
A big hiring binge will also be hard to get off the ground if we just reinstate the previous everything-bagel approach to hiring.
I think a more realistic plan means taking some of the tools Trump has created, and doing more to improve government by slashing crappy policies where they exist.
For instance, the self-evaluation based system that Pahlka wrote about… needs to GO. Likewise, let’s do our own “The DOGE You Actually Wanted And Expected From That Orange Thug”: An office tasked with radically improving efficiency, and highlighting to the executive branch which outdated regulations or some stupid misinterpreted EO (like the one that created Pahlka’s hideous hiring morass) needs to go. Make Mark Cuban the czar of it, and empower him to go on the shows and podcasts every week with a big roundup of regulations that annoyed him that week.
The point is, what you just wrote here in the section I quoted — and I want to be gentle — smacks of everything that normies HATE about us PMC types. So let’s not do that. Kudos for the effort, and I agreed with most of the rest of this, but just wanted to offer some constructive criticism.
We don't need to replace in kind, but we do need to improve state capacity and that requires more and better staff.
Not necessarily.
State capacity was killed off by excessive bureaucracy. We kept trying to do more with more, but hit diminishing returns and were doing barely anything more with ever greater resource consumption.
It’s not sustainable.
The only way to have a government that can truly do more with more, is to have one that specializes in always doing more with less. If we can’t scale the most basic functions, we’ll NEVER scale the things we dream of scaling.
I don't know that if we have any fundamental disagreements. My experience is in NYC government and public higher education. I have overseen billion dollar operating budgets, procurement, design, and construction. Procurement, zoning, and land use rules get in the way of government efficiency/effectiveness. I 100% agree with you, and that is my lived experience (a no no expression now?). A lack of programmers, architects, engineers, and project managers also inhibits state capacity. I think we need both more (and different) staff (compared to the Trump status quo) AND fewer regs.
Well, IMO the regs are what obstruct the scaling.
Anyone can come up with a new government program, or hire engineers. But scaling is hard.
Yes, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics needs economists and statisticians, and the FAA needs air traffic controllers, and the Social Security Administration needs people in its field offices
That’s a good point. But again, I didn’t really contest that in the original comment.
My main criticism was just that after we restore the basic critical functions like ATC, we shouldn’t (ed: race to) go expanding the government in order to take on new regulatory roles like AI, especially if it means doing all that hiring and regulating in the exact same dysfunctional way that we WERE doing it. We’ll be barely halfway done with it in time for the next Trumpist incursion.
You missed on what the very first task of project 2029 should be!!! ACCOUNTABILITY!!! Trump and every one of his minions that illegally and unethically destroyed the US federal government need to be held responsible for that destruction. Accountability for breaking the law is not retribution which is all Trump has done. At the same time, current laws need to be strengthened, new laws put in place, and punishments need to be significant to assure such treasonous behavior is discouraged from ever occurring again. The next time the Democratic party wins power they actually must have the courage to use it!!!
Complete agree with your conclusion: if/when the D's are in power they have to be willing and able to use it. I think, though, that while the purpose is accountability the first task has to be (re)building a functioning civil government. That will require something similar to the DOGE-led 'purging' of competent career civil servants to remove from the federal government the MAGA-loyalists that have replaced them. The lesson of the DOGE experience is that this can and must be done quickly. A second challenge will be persuading competent civil servants to either return to or enter into government service. Which means taking steps to make public service a reliable and viable career choice. As Sam says: don't take your eyes of the ball of the principal task: rebuilding.
I think the name 'Project 2029' is terrible. If Project 2025 is seen as the Republicans plan to F everything up, Project 2029 will be seen, by many voters, as the Democrats plan to F everything up even worse. The similarity in naming would be hard to get past.
Instead, I suggest Project Phoenix, after the mythological bird. This would bring to mind the ashes that the Rs have left us with and emphasize the rebirth that the Ds plan to recover from it and build for the future.
I believe Project 2025 was largely the product of one extreme branch of the conservative/psuedo-libertarian movement via the Heritage Foundation that was passively enabled by a supine Republican Congress afraid of its own voters. It is hard for me to envision the Democrats producing a similar document or, depending on what was in it, showing such a near unanimous consent (or grudging complicity) for implementing it.
Who will actually write up such a "Project 2029" and what process will be used to make it widely endorsed? How will it not be "poll tested" into tepid irrelevancy? Should we not expect to have some kind of repeat of the Manchin-Sinema stubbornness to deny Biden passage of crucial parts of his program? Even if we get a new president committed to a "Project 2029," it doesn't mean we get it done unless here is an unusually massive turnover in the Democratic Congressional roster (and in the consultants and advisers that help them get there).
Can we really anticipate that? If not, I just have a hard time seeing the unified approach to rebuilding that we will undoubtedly need getting it done. Knowing clearly what we need to do is a necessary first step, but how to get there is a whole other mess. I wish I could feet differently about this, but there we are.
Maybe Brian can address this in his Thursday mailbag?!
Good luck trying to attract talented people to work for the federal government without 1st assuring them that the GOP cult will never return to power and repeat the destruction we are witnessing now.
Jacob is right. What do you/we want the outcome to be? Then build the structure to support that. I think we start with the Constitution and settle the age old issues ACROSS party lines. If we don’t answer the big issues like race, the role of press, women’s rights, we’re doomed. If we continue to live in a 50-50 world, we will collapse into autocracy from exhaustion. I’m an unenrolled voter with 50 plus years in politics and government. I was protesting in the 60s and we were all young. Yesterday at a protest we were all old(er). Step one is to engage the under 40 people and understand it will be their world. We need to stop thinking WE have the answers. These are uncharted waters. Right now we should be engaging younger people around the country…not sitting in offices creating strategies. The Democrats have been so far off mark, why would we think they can crack this nut without new ideas?
Thank you Brian. I felt a lift of hope reading this essay Correction... Thank you Sam!
except Brian didn’t write it!
OK Sam!
One take away is a huge problem will be that recreating government is a generation long project and a solid decade will be needed to get the foundation in place. We will need a trifecta for four years and another Democratic administration in 2033 or else it’s back to square one in 2037 (or 2041).
The only way we can change that is to root and branch destroy Trumpism by 2029. There will have to be real accountability (prison) for the top people. More fundamentally, SCOTUS and the awful jurisprudence going back to 2010 will have to be similarly destroyed. These are tall, tall orders.
Two of the things Brian has harped on is the big tent for the party and building an information environment. For the “We choose to these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard” crowd this is your moment.
Great essay, and I'll add that I think a Democratic priority needs to be proving to the American people that government can actually get good things done. Too often, government action is so agonizingly slow that by the time it happens the problems it was intended to fix have metatasized into something very different.
I'm not arguing in favor of mass obliteration of regulations; many of these were enacted to prevent the very corruption and cronyism that is the hallmark of the Trump administion. However, the collective weight of these regulations, no matter how well considered, can sometimes serve to make government ponderous and unresponsive. I understand that an oil tanker doesn't turn on a dime, but it had better at least carry oil to where it has to be, in a reasonable time frame.
Sam, there should be a plan to also woo the scientists back to the US who Trump discarded and for wealthy Dem donors to fund and establish university fellowships in areas that we'll need to make the civil service sector one to be really proud of. Terrific essay.
Both the article and the comments get at important elements of the situation, but matters could be stated more clearly.
We are in a revolutionary situation. The Trumpists have made themselves clear, through both their statements and their actions:
-- They believe that the only legitimate government is white Christian patriarchal nationalism.
-- They believe that government restrictions on the power of the wealthy and of corporations are illegitimate.
-- They share the characteristic fascist devotion to the incarnation of the national will in a masculine leader, to whom all elements of government should be subordinate, and who must have the authority to address all national problems as he sees fit.
For those reasons, they reject the founding principle of equality in the Declaration of Independence. They also reject both the legitimacy of the Union victory in the Civil War (along with the post-war settlement, at least as far as the Fourteenth Amendment is concerned) and the government arrangements coming out of the New Deal. Their intent is to re-found the country on a very different basis. Nor are they coy about this concept: one of Trump's lackeys in his recent three-hour Cabinet meeting praised him for doing just that.
The existing U.S. regime, with its many patches and compromises, is failing to meet this attack. The job facing those Prof. Bagenstos describes must therefore be "a new birth of freedom." That project must not address only the immediate Trumpist threat; it must at least recognize the necessity to undertake a much broader statutory and constitutional revision to deal with 250 years of accumulated hazards and failures. Examples include the presidential pardon power, the electoral college, the mass of executive emergency powers, the Supreme Court decision immunizing the President from the criminal law, the defective constitutional language summarily describing executive power that led to the "unitary executive" idea (a point recently set out by David French), and much more.
In doing all this, these reformers will have to confront the problem of rebuilding the constitutional order while also addressing ordinary governing issues. They will need determination, very thick skins, and a willingness to make great sacrifices in this cause. The Trumpists they face will consider them mortal enemies and will treat them accordingly.
Nor will this be a short contest. The United States did not get into its degraded condition in a few years or solely because of one or two elections. These conditions are the result of longstanding issues not only in government but also in civic culture, and a lasting refounding on a better basis must recognize that fact.
A great historic conflict is upon us. The only issue is whether we will do our part in that struggle.
I think maybe radical populism is the way here. Keep it simple "Build America" and start a national hiring program. Decentering government out of DC may help a lot too. Why not build a new HHS service in Cleveland? A new General Counsel in Kansas City? Social Security in Raleigh? Get Senators from Red states on board with jobs (but keep them in the cities!).
Yada yada. Would you believe a Project 2026?