By design, the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) work follows a predictable, seasonal rhythm: budget guidance to agencies in the spring, strategic management reviews in the late summer, passback in the fall, shutdown saber-rattling in late September, release of the president’s budget request in the winter, and so on. A giant novelty clock in the building counts down the days until the end of the fiscal year, each year, whether Congress has done its work to appropriate money for the next one or not. Presidents, Congresses, crises, political movements –  all of these come and go, but OMB’s work largely continues to cycle.

This week, OMB completed one such ritual: it released the President’s Management Agenda (PMA). The PMA–closely watched by federal employee groups, contractors, public administration academics, and the handful of general-public bureaucracy-enjoyers–is the vehicle with which each president  outlines  policy priorities on how the government manages itself. Each 21st-century president has had one, after George W. Bush’s Administration issued the very first one in August of 2001–and President Trump is the first to have issued two discrete ones.

Not familiar with this ritual? You’re not alone. Though not statutorily required, a PMA is meant to be a blueprint for improving how the federal government delivers policy, whether hiring, buying, designing services, listening to Americans, measuring performance, or delivering financial assistance. A PMA is also load-bearing, one of the few levers capable of coordinating action across the enormous machinery of government, aligning budgets, capacity, and accountability behind long-term modernization rather than the short-term crisis response that often drives management changes.

In a year when management issues like human capital, IT modernization, and improper payments have received greater attention from the public, examining this PMA tells us a lot about where the Administration’s policy is going to be focused through its last three years. As we did for a major policy release on hiring earlier this year, the Federation of American Scientists and the Niskanen Center are teaming up to break down and contextualize this year’s PMA.

The Structure of the PMA

As OMB noted in an accompanying memo to this PMA release, the core of the PMA has for many years, been a set of cross-cutting “priority goals” that OMB is required to establish under the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act (GPRAMA) of 2010, which codified much of what the Bush and Obama Administrations had done to focus on performance-based goal setting and reporting. Over the years, the PMA has grown to be the organizing principle for these priority goals, explaining how they relate to one another and are part of a broader coherent whole.

This current iteration of the PMA (reproduced below) is organized – like the Biden Administration’s was – as something of a nesting doll. It has three broad priorities, each with a few goals, and a series of objectives within each of those goals:

Shrink the Government & Eliminate Waste	Ensure Accountability for Americans	Deliver Results, Buy American
Eliminate Woke, Weaponization, and Waste Cut ineffective and radical programs and funding, and prioritize work that puts American citizens first. Eradicate woke and weaponized programs across government End discrimination by government Defund DEI, gender ideology, K-12 indoctrination, child mutilation, and open borders Cease payments to fraudsters and eliminate waste	Foster Merit-Based Federal Workforce Hire based on merit and skills, and hold employees accountable for results aligned with Presidential policies. Hire the best based on skills and merit Implement all employee performance and accountability Presidential directives Implement the President’s Executive Orders to address labor-management relations Recruit exceptional talent to defend the border	Efficiently Deploy the Buying Power of the Federal Government and Buy American Consolidate procurement and eliminate bureaucracy to maximize taxpayer value and enhance operational efficiency. Buy as one entity: smarter, faster, cheaper Build the most agile, effective, and efficient procurement system Rebuild American industry through prioritizing and enhancing Made in America execution
Downsize the Federal Workforce Reduce the federal workforce by eliminating unnecessary positions and removing poor performers. Eliminate jobs in non-essential, non-statutory functions Remove poor performers Strategically hire only for essential jobs	End Censorship and Over-Classification Promote transparency and eliminate government overreach that infringes on constitutional rights. Find and annihilate Government censorship of speech Reverse malicious schemes to hide truth and information from Americans Abolish abusive use of intelligence activity that improperly targets unwitting Americans or the exercise of constitutional rights	Leverage Technology to Deliver Faster, More Secure Services Eliminate bureaucratic barriers and build a government fit for the 21st century. Consolidate and standardize systems, while eliminating duplicative ones Reduce the number of confusing government websites Ensure secure, digital-first services that are built for real people, not bureaucracy Defend against and persistently combat cyber enemies Eliminate data silos and duplicative data collection Reduce wasteful processes through artificial intelligence
Optimize Federal Real Estate Shrink the Federal real estate portfolio to save American Taxpayers money. Offload unnecessary leases and buildings Utilize America’s vast natural resources to promote security and prosperity Prioritize cost-effective locations for agency buildings Restore beautiful, traditional, and classical architecture	Demand Partners Who Deliver Ensure contracts and grants go only to high-performing recipients to advance America First priorities. Contract with the best businesses Put political appointees in control of grant process to deliver results Hold contractors and grant recipients accountable

Unlike previous iterations of the PMA, it appears this new one won’t be accompanied by the type of long narratives and explanations typical of the Bush, Trump I, and Biden PMAs. It also differs somewhat from the Obama Administration’s approach, which focused on a series of detailed “Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals that largely cohered into a formal PMA after the fact as GPRAMA was passed during the term and codified the modern process mid-stream.

Regardless of how they start, however, previous administrations have largely committed to providing ongoing reporting on their progress towards achieving each objective or goal throughout the remainder of the term. It is not yet clear whether the second Trump Administration intends to do this–Congress should inquire about their GPRAMA obligations–but in general this practice has been valuable both to keep agencies accountable for making progress and so that interested third parties can get a window into how the government is changing over time.

In the meantime, this week’s release gives us enough insight into the contours of this term’s PMA to assess how it compares with previous efforts and with what we’ve learned from observing and managing past PMAs.

What’s Promising: A Renewed Focus on Some Hard Problems

Normally, the PMA contains two types of initiatives. The first are evergreen topics —such as the perennial need to hire federal employees more quickly and efficiently—which have appeared in every PMA to date.  The second category consists of more idiosyncratic or extremely timely “hard problems” that either haven’t received attention or where past reform has stalled. In the Biden PMA, for instance, this included integrating lessons from the pandemic’s disruption of work life. In the  first Trump Administration, it included an ambitious overhaul of personnel vetting transformation on the heels of the massive OPM security clearance data breach in 2015.

Occasionally, these hard problems “graduate” out of the PMA once sustained focus produces results. The PMA’s emphasis on personnel vetting, for example, has largely given way to a multi-year, bipartisan Trusted Workforce 2.0 strategy that has and is making progress despite its challenges.

This year’s PMA includes several such issues, offering the second Trump Administration an opportunity to spotlight underappreciated but consequential  aspects of federal management, including:

• Offloading unnecessary leases and buildings: Federal facilities and real estate have never truly been managed as a portfolio with all the transparency, tradeoffs, accountability and management that entails. Before the pandemic, many agencies had significant excess office space and struggled to offload unneeded square footage, even as the average age of federal facilities climbed north of 50 years old and many buildings are no longer suitable for modern work. Rationalizing and right-sizing this portfolio is a worthy and important initiative but it will be difficult: Congress has historically underfunded agencies that are aiming to reconfigure or move, and individual members of Congress frequently oppose specific office closures among their constituents. Any effort to responsibly modernize these real estate holdings will take a lot of patience and willingness to take on sacred cows, but has the potential to earn significant savings and efficiencies.
• Holding contractors and grantees accountable for performance: Most indirect federal spending flows through intermediaries and, too often, the outcomes agencies define for their work are unclear, don’t meet intent, cost more than they should, or aren’t set up for other stakeholders to learn from. Many agencies are captured technologically, intellectually, and psychologically by vendors, leading to a type of learned helplessness where their inability to technically manage contracts leads to an inability to hold them accountable for their performance. Fighting these entrenched forces and inertia is not easy, however, and will require arming agencies with the federal experts, tools and training necessary to change their approach to vendor and grantee management but also give them top-cover to push back on powerful, politically-connected awardees that fail to deliver again and again without consequence. 
• Eliminating data silos: While data protections necessarily inhibit privacy and security violations, too much federal data sits in silos built by habit, culture, or old technology. Driving responsible interoperability could have a meaningful impact on service delivery, including for two of the thorniest issues in public service delivery: identity regulation and eligibility verification. However, prior actions and whistleblower complaints about misuse of personal citizen data put an imperative on the Administration demonstrating its commitment to data security under this PMA initiative. It presents an opportunity to right the ship and build the type of trust that will be required from Congress and the public to make good on the transformative power of better data management.
• Removing poor performers: The federal government has long struggled to swiftly remove poor-performing employees. The system we have today was never intended to be permanent or perfect—it was meant to provide incremental improvements toward processing removals quickly but fairly. Nearly every former deputy secretary, in administrations of both parties, has wished they could establish a simple, actionable, repeatable framework for performance management that includes reasonable safeguards. This Administration has an opportunity to chart that path. But proceeding without those safeguards—particularly protections against arbitrary or partisan dismissals—risks undermining good-faith reforms that are crucial for cross-partisan credibility and for helping managers manage well.
• Building the most agile and efficient procurement system: The Revolutionary FAR overhaul underway at OMB and the General Services Administration (GSA) is a concrete opportunity to modernize federal buying at its foundations by paring back the FAR to just its “statutory” requirements and allowing agencies to buy more flexibly. But the regulation update is at best only half the battle: the administration will need to dedicate time, people, and championship to making them stick in training, norms, culture, and leadership. It also needs to resist the temptation to add back its own non-statutory clauses, an impulse that led to the FAR’s bloated and unwieldy state in the first place.

Ideally, success in these areas means they will eventually fade into the background of standard management practice. Agency leaders may not earn themselves splashy press coverage or public adulation by improving procurement or tackling data silos. No agency head wants to spend time grappling with underutilized buildings. Genuine progress here, however, would allow future leaders to remain focused on mission delivery.

What’s Returning: Places to Learn from the Past

This brings us to the evergreen PMA topics. To GPRA veterans, some of the things in here are expected and represent the evolution of years of work by Republicans, Democrats, and nonpartisan civil servants to make the government run better. Many of these reflect years–or even  decades–of work to address some of the core challenges of managing a large organization in any sector (how to hire the right people, how to buy effectively, how to build and secure systems, etc.)

But there’s a deeper reason these issues recur, beyond aspirations for bipartisan comity.  Adding an item to the management agenda is only a starting point. Meaningful progress requires far more than a talking point, executive order, or regulatory tweak. Leadership attention and cover, technical capacity to actually understand, teach, and monitor reform, oversight partnerships that orient their activities to the new model, administrative data that’s accurate, real-time, and actionable, and central funds to resource pilots too edgy to get agency support or toolkits that no one agency wants to own.

In this PMA, some of these evergreen topics include ones this Administration can learn from its predecessors and accelerate towards success, including:

• Tackling improper payments, fraud, waste, and abuse: The Trump Administration inherits a solid foundation in this area from its predecessor, which invested serious effort into tackling the surge in improper payments in the COVID-19 era. That work included investing in upfront controls, fraud prevention, and collaboration between agencies and their oversight communities. The Government Accountability Office, Agency Inspectors General, and others have also long offered suggestions about how to continue to reduce the government’s improper payments rate.  Groups like the Payment Integrity Alliance are developing new technology-powered tools to support this work from outside government. These are evidence-based solutions that are likely to work, as opposed to arbitrary, highly-partisan, and ultimately untrue declarations of fraud that marked the early days of this Administration, in addition to counterproductive efforts to cut or constrain the oversight community. As OMB looks towards 2026, it should take into account these models.
• Streamlining the federal workforce and eliminating duplicative programs: While this year’s efforts are the first in a couple decades to seek to dramatically reduce the size of the federal workforce, they are not without precedence in American history. Following both World Wars (and especially through the late 1940s), the federal government had to demobilize hundreds of thousands or millions of civilian employees in a way that both treated them with dignity and economized on taxpayer dollars. More recently, in the 1990s, the Clinton Administration also conducted large-scale downsizing, with decidedly mixed results because the cuts came before changes to agency to-do lists that never materialized. It will be important for this Administration to learn lessons from the past to avoid some of the long-term damage wrought by the Clinton years, for which agencies are still paying.
• Hiring exceptional talent for key presidential priorities based on skills and merit: All presidents have priorities and many of those involve some kind of hiring surge: following 9/11, the Bush Administration had to rapidly create and staff up the Department of Homeland Security for new mission sets–for example,  like airport security. More recently, the Biden Administration conducted several surges around topics like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and artificial intelligence. To make this work, previous efforts have succeeded by setting up dedicated teams that focused on specific, measurable goals and bought-in mission area leadership to champion the effort. As OMB and OPM consider their efforts this time, they should explore common data standards to ID bottlenecks, interagency approaches to share resources and talent, and investing in all the accoutrement to new and updated career paths and roles – and doing their best to embed these practices in the system, not just as part of a special effort. 

They might also consider reactivating networks and programs that were successful in previous eras, like Tech to Gov, which worked across sectors to hire technologists into government. On merit and skills based hiring, implementation appears to be under way with a variety of initiatives that have promising goals, but will require significant investment of resources and leadership attention to complete, as we’ve written about.

• Buy as one entity: smarter, faster, cheaper: Successive administrations, dating back several decades, have tried to strike the right balance between decentralized and centralized procurement. The Clinton team, for example, called for greater decentralization to agencies because it “allows strangers-often thousands of miles away-to make purchasing decisions.” More recently, however, administrations have gone in the other direction, including a discrete goal to drive category management in the first Trump PMA, though agencies often still complain about being forced to use government-wide vehicles that don’t meet their exact custom needs. 

To avoid the pendulum swinging back and forth between centralization and decentralization, efforts to implement this PMA should learn from efforts to achieve savings by transparent use of procurement data that were pioneered in the Biden Administration like the Procurement Co-pilot, Hi-Def initiative, and the strategic acquisition data framework. Rather than mandates from above, these initiatives help drive savings and get “spend under management” by solving information asymmetries and transparently helping agencies understand “what’s in it for them” when they use best-in-class contracts.

• Consolidate and standardize systems, while eliminating duplicative ones: The federal government has long operated on a system of both shared, government-wide, and also bespoke agency systems. The Bush, Obama, and first Trump administrations had OMB focusing on consolidating duplicative systems across government through shared services. This model, while promising in many cases, is difficult to pull off in practice – of those initiatives, the Bush Administration’s payroll consolidation is far and away the most successful, while efforts to adopt standard payment system (e.g., e- and g-invoicing) and innovative payroll solution have languished, as did GSA’s NewPay program.

This PMA should take to heart the lessons of its predecessors: agencies must be resourced up front to execute their part of any migration to shared systems, and OMB must ruthlessly prioritize and rigorously validate any requests for deviations from the standard product.  In most cases, it will be far easier—and considerably cheaper—to adjust policy to fit a modern, standard solution than to customize that solution to accommodate every agency’s unique requirements. 

Leaders should also address the internal politics of these transitions directly. Champions of bespoke systems often have deep attachment to their legacy tools, and their resistance can be stronger and more personal than expected. 

• Defend against and persistently combat cyber enemies: Reactive and proactive cybersecurity has been a central federal government focus as long as government systems have been connected to the internet.  Of all the discussed areas, continuity is perhaps most crucial to cybersecurity, with the need for sustained attention to legacy system replacement, identity management, continuous monitoring, secure architectures, and the significant talent demands that come with all of those. This Administration should heed the lessons of its predecessors, which lost valuable time to bureaucratic reshuffling and inconsistent “carrot vs. stick” approaches in its engagement with the private sector.

It’s never going to be possible to truly “solve” these issues that are core parts of ongoing management in any large enterprise. However, because progress  is incremental, this PMA can accelerate its own impact by learning from what has and hasn’t worked in the past.

What’s Missing: Outcomes for Americans 

There is, however, one “evergreen” PMA topic that we’re surprised to see missing from this iteration: Customer Experience (CX).

The previous two PMAs  featured big customer experience pushes to modernize and centralize how the government designs, delivers, and updates benefits based on customer needs. These delivered favorable results for veterans’ benefits, disaster survivors, new families, travelers and more, and fostered innovative approaches to benefits delivery like the cross-agency “life experience” program that reconceptualizes the way the government engages with people who need its support. In recent years, the bipartisan success of these initiatives has led to four straight years of improvements in the industry-standard American Consumer Satisfaction Index, with the government closing out last fiscal year at an impressive 19-year high.

While this PMA does mention “digital-first services” that are “built for real people, not bureaucracy,” that principle sits inside a technology-and-efficiency frame rather than a clear commitment to outcomes for the public. What’s missing is an explicit stance that service delivery, burden reduction, and trust-building are core measures of government performance and are not encompassed by a positive government IT experience or a more fetching website design. Plenty of core users of government services–seniors, for example–do not interface with the government in a “digital-first” way, further complicating this as a focus for customer experience. 

Hopefully this absence will still allow for the bipartisan CX agenda to continue in other spaces, such as the new National Design Studio. It’s not enough to declare that the government will deliver high-quality services to the people who rely on them. Agencies need the ability to collaborate and know that the White House will back them when they need to request incremental funding to conduct user research or A/B test a new form before rolling out.

A real test of any PMA isn’t how well it modernizes, it’s whether people notice government working better on their behalf. In that way, CX is what we might call the “love language of democracy” and it’s important that OMB is attentive to building that.

What’s Concerning: The Culture War is Coming for Management

The Biden Administration received criticism for attaching progressive goals from environmental standards to equity to labor onto every possible management tool (procurement, grantmaking) until the weight of implementation is slow, diffuse, or nearly impossible. Its PMA embodied that instinct: broad, values-aligned expansive goals that had great intentions but struggled to operationalize. 

The new PMA both reacts against and mirrors that instinct: it pairs standard management reforms with culture-war directives that seek single-minded discipline, accountability, and ideological alignment. 

At times, it reads like two agendas stitched together: one technocratic, aimed at federal administrators, and one ideological, aimed at unofficial commissars and social media. Alongside modernization goals you might find in any PMA sit directives to: 

• Eradicate woke and weaponized programs across government, which is a sweeping slogan with unclear scope at odds with the usual evidence- and performance-based mandates embedded in GPRAMA and past PMAs. 
• End discrimination by government, which is a superficially unobjectionable shibboleth, but incorrectly implies that the government has been discriminating in how it carries out its management functions, despite the fact that its equity programs largely only follow the rules Congress has set out in offering employment preference to veterans or procurement preference to certain categories of small businesses.
• Defund DEI, gender ideology, K-12 indoctrination, child mutilation, and open borders, which are culture war buzzwords with no obvious relation to government performance or management issues.

And scope creeps further into territory historically outside PMA (or OMB) control, such as a set of general goals with choose-your-own-adventure interpretation and murky implementation paths, written at a strange distance from the government the Administration oversees:

• Find and annihilate government censorship of speech, which is perhaps the first time annihilate has ended up in an OMB memo and implies that there are “hidden” examples of censorship while the administration pursues overt censorship in other areas. 
• Reverse malicious schemes to hide information from Americans, which gestures at a conspiratorial approach to government management that seems at odds with the Administration’s claim that it’s fully in control of the executive branch. It’s difficult to simultaneously claim that there are truths hidden from the public while also deprecating transparency, as in Federal data sets.
• Abolish abusive intelligence activity targeting unwitting Americans, which is certainly a laudable goal for any civil libertarian in a democracy but doesn’t necessarily have any resonance with normally much-duller management functions like HR and finance, which have struggled to accomplish even their overt functions in recent years, nevermind anything more nefarious.

As we’ve written before, hijacking these normally low-temperature operational processes to fight the culture war not only raises the partisan pressure on normally bipartisan issues, but it also “needlessly politicizes our institutions, snarls our civil servants in red tape, and usually fails to achieve even those unrelated objectives.”

Nowhere is this danger greater than in implementation of the PMA’s objective to “[p]ut political appointees in control of grant process to deliver results,” which supposes that political control and, by implication, alignment with the President’s partisan priorities is a main factor in how Congressionally-authorized grants are executed. The President certainly gets to set some overall parameters for grantmaking across the federal government, and politically-appointed agency heads are ultimately accountable for the money they spend. 

But this priority implicates a much more arbitrary and politically-motivated process for determining how public funds are spent that strikes at the heart of what makes government action legitimate: the fair application of rules that are defined ahead of time and apply equally to all. Like a similar requirement in the Merit Hiring Plan, this also creates an obvious bottleneck in agency processes as recommendations stack up for political review, reducing efficiency and elongating the path to “results.”

Perhaps including these initiatives–which largely fall outside of the normal OMB management purview–was the price OMB had to pay to get the rest of the PMA through the hyper-partisan (even in normal order) communications processes of the White House. If that’s the case, agencies should be able to largely proceed with the rest of the agenda unbothered by also having to separately organize around these initiatives. But if not, it will be critical to ensure that directing agencies into partisan goose chases does not pull time and attention away from the harder—and ultimately more rewarding—work of genuine management reform.

Declaration is not Implementation

Publicly releasing the PMA is the easy part. The real work goes into changing government. As the Bush Administration’s first PMA noted: “Government likes to begin things—to declare grand new programs and causes. But good beginnings are not the measure of success. What matters in the end is completion. Performance. Results. Not just making promises, but making good on promises.”

Many of the objectives outlined in the PMA are sound ideas with long track records across different administrations. We largely agree with many of them and they echo our policy priorities and those of partner organizations. But their appearances on multiple PMAs underscores how hard these problems are to solve. Category management,real property portfolio rationalization, and cybersecurity, were problems for many years because of the inherent difficulty of tackling them..  This is doubly true for the ideas that are fresh from the front lines of the culture war, which lack both a track record of successes and failures to learn from and the bipartisan support that more established issues—like improper payments or IT modernization—typically receive in Congress.

To actually impact the entire government – one of the largest and most complex enterprises in human history – it’s not enough to just declare that it’s the policy of the Administration that X or Y happens, or even convene regular gatherings of deputies. We’ve seen that approach fail repeatedly: agencies cannot and will not implement a PMA just because OMB issues it. 

Real success requires disciplined implementation. That means selecting strategies that genuinely move the needle; setting aggressive but achievable measures and timelines; incentivizing leaders to invest time, attention, and talent in relentless follow-through; maintaining up-to-date metrics and feedback loops to know what’s working and what isn’t; and sustaining clarity of focus all the way to the finish.Without that, it becomes all too easy for OMB and agencies to skate by on superficial changes that check boxes but result in no real systems change–a PMA of performance art, where everyone claps but nothing changes. Amid all the swirl of any White House, this work of sticking the landing is the hardest part.

That’s because the PMA – like any strategy – itself isn’t really valuable on its own. It can, however, cut through the noise, clarify what the priorities are, and provide a framework for holding agencies and leaders accountable as they do their work. Any PMA will rise and fall based on how well it manages to do this. The way this term’s PMA is structured at the outset makes this task supremely difficult because it’s pulling in several directions all at once: it’s trying to simultaneously pass as a  deeply partisan political document, a check-list for agencies of recent EOs, and a sober management policy agenda.

The real danger is that this lack of clarity and flurry of culture war buzzwords means nothing changes. That the same broken systems of human capital, procurement, IT modernization, security clearances, and user feedback, that have contributed to what OMB refers to as “accumulating perils” persist for yet another presidential term because OMB’s own management approach mistook a policy memo for progress and failed to chart a path forward. “Declare success and move on” is how these hard problems survive for decades.

This failure mode is easy to imagine: as humbling as it is to admit when you sit at OMB, reform requires changing the habits of work in agencies, sub-agencies, offices, and teams for whom policy memos about HR and procurement are the last thing on their mind (or even in their inbox). This is the hardest work of governance – rewiring workflows, seeding change in budgets, resetting culture – and demands management be treated as a core, can’t-fail function rather than a sideshow of dashboards and Powerpoint. 

As they should be, agency implementers are more focused on the day-to-day administration of their programs: achieving their particular program objectives, responding to requests from Congress, serving the public, tracking their own budgets, and managing their own chaotic work lives. If the PMA can’t provide them with clarity, a limited number of clearly articulated goals, and a simple on/off ramp for change, it will be hard to change the direction of travel – not because of some deep state conspiracy, but because they don’t know what to focus on or how they’re going to be measured. What gets implemented, and what people experience, is what counts; everything else is decoration. 

What We’re Watching

As with all broad, whole-of-government strategies like this, it will only be obvious in retrospect whether this administration is successful at achieving those goals. However, there are some things to watch out for that will clue close-watchers in about how things are going:

• First, will OMB continue the type of detailed, quarterly status reports that were the hallmarks of previous PMAs and allowed the public to see how things were progressing?
• Second, are there key metrics that OMB and its partner agencies will commit to tracking, reacting to, and publishing to measure their success?
• Third, are agencies resourced to actually accomplish many of these ambitious goals and what do they prioritize (and indeed, since agencies are not mentioned in the PMA itself, what ownership do agencies feel over it)?

Finally, and more abstractly, we’re also going to be looking out for how OMB and others engage with the rest of the PMA-interested community, including career federal employees, good government groups, congressional staffers, think tanks, academics, and others who have trod this same path. The permanent institutions of the federal government don’t serve any one president exclusively; instead, they represent a deep and important investment that the American people have made in themselves as a bedrock of our democracy. While reasonable disagreements about how to do so will certainly always exist, this community can, should, and will embrace a government asking for help. OMB would do well to welcome them in.

The U.S. once led the world in building railroads, highways, and the internet. Today, America lags in building the digital infrastructure foundation that underpins identity, payments, and data. Public Digital systems should be as essential to daily life as roads and bridges, yet America’s digital foundation is fractured and incomplete.

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) refers to a set of core and foundational digital systems like identity, payments, and data exchange that makes it easier for people, businesses, and governments to securely connect, transact, and access services. 

DPI consists of interoperable, open, and secure digital systems that enable identity verification, digital payments, and data exchange across sectors. Its foundational pillars are Digital Identity, Digital Payments, and Data Exchange, which together provide the building blocks for inclusive digital governance and service delivery. DPI acts as the digital backbone of an economy, allowing citizens, governments, and businesses to interact seamlessly and securely.

America’s current digital landscape is a patchwork of systems across states, agencies and private companies, and misses an interoperability layer. This means fragmented identity verification, uneven instant payment networks, and siloed data exchange rules and mechanisms. This fragmentation not only frustrates citizens but also costs taxpayers billions, leads to inefficiency and fraud. This memo makes the case that the United States needs sweeping legislation– a Digital Public Infrastructure Act— to ensure that the nation develops a coherent, secure, and interoperable foundation for digital governance. 

Challenges and Opportunities 

Around the world, governments are investing in digital public infrastructure to deliver trusted, inclusive, and efficient digital services. In contrast, the United States faces a fragmented ecosystem of systems and standards. This section examines each pillar of digital public infrastructure, digital identity, digital payments, and data exchange, highlighting leading international models and what institutional and policy challenges the U.S. must address to achieve a similarly integrated approach.

Fragmented and non-interoperable Digital Identities

Digital Identity. The U.S. has no universal digital identification system. Proving who you are online often relies on a jumble of methods like scanning driver’s licenses, giving your social security number, or one-off logins. Unlike many countries with national e-ID schemes, the U.S. relies on the REAL ID law which sets higher standards for physical driver’s licenses, but it provides no digital ID or consent mechanism for online use. Just under half of U.S. states have rolled out some form of mobile driver’s license (mDL) or digital ID, and each implementation is largely unique.

Federal agencies have tried to streamline login with services like Login.gov, yet many agencies still contract separate solutions (Experian, ID.me, LexisNexis, Okta, etc.), leading to duplication. The Government Accountability Office recently found that two dozen major agencies use a mix of at least five different identity-proofing providers. The result is an identity verification landscape that is inconsistent and costly, both for users and the government.

Fragmented Digital Payment Infrastructure

Digital Payments. The United States still lags in offering universal, real-time payments accessible to all. The payments landscape is highly fragmented, with multiple systems operated by both public and private entities, each governed by distinct rule sets. The Automated Clearing House (ACH) network is the batch-based system that processes routine bank-to-bank transfers such as salaries, bill payments, and account debits or credits. It is co-run by the Federal Reserve (FedACH) and The Clearing House (EPN) under Nacha rules and settles with delay. The Real-Time Payments (RTP) network is an instant 24/7 credit-push system that moves money within seconds through a prefunded joint account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It was launched by The Clearing House in 2017 and is governed by its private bank owners.

In 2023, the Federal Reserve launched FedNow, the first publicly operated real-time payment rail in the United States, offering instant settlement through banks’ Federal Reserve master accounts. Card networks such as Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discover continue to operate proprietary systems, while peer-to-peer platforms like Zelle, Venmo, and CashApp run closed-loop schemes that often rely on RTP for back-end settlement. Because these systems differ in ownership, governance, settlement models, and liability frameworks, they remain largely non-interoperable. A payment sent through RTP cannot be received on FedNow, and card or wallet systems do not seamlessly connect to ACH or instant payment rails. 

FedNow operates as a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) infrastructure, enabling participating banks and credit unions to send and receive instant payments around the clock. Its design is infrastructure-centric: the Federal Reserve provides the back-end rail, while banks must opt in, build their own consumer interfaces, and set transaction fees and rules. The system does not define standardized public APIs, merchant QR systems, or interoperable consumer applications. These layers are left to the market. Its policy intent centers on efficiency and resilience in interbank payments rather than universal inclusion or open access.

Examples of Complete Public Payment Ecosystems

By contrast, India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Brazil’s Pix were designed as full digital public infrastructures that combine settlement, switching, and retail layers within a single public framework. Both are centrally governed, with UPI managed by the National Payments Corporation of India under Reserve Bank of India oversight and Pix managed by the Central Bank of Brazil. They enforce mandatory interoperability across all banks, wallets, and payment apps through open API standards. Their architecture integrates digital identity, authentication, and consent layers, allowing individuals and merchants to transact instantly at zero or near-zero cost.

While FedNow provides the plumbing for real-time settlement among banks, UPI and Pix function as complete public payment ecosystems built on open standards, public governance, and inclusion by design. Real-time payment systems in India (UPI), Brazil (Pix), and the United Kingdom (Faster Payments) now process far higher transaction volumes than their U.S. counterparts, reflecting how deeply these infrastructures have become embedded in daily economic activity.

Credit: fxcintel.com

This fragmented payment ecosystem became painfully apparent during COVID-19: some people waited weeks or months for stimulus and unemployment checks, while fraudsters exploited the delays. Only in 2025 did the Treasury Department finally announce it will stop issuing paper checks for most federal payments, to reduce delays, fraud, and theft.

Clearly, the U.S. needs a more cohesive approach to instant, secure payments, from Government-to-Person (G2P) benefits to Person-to-Government (P2G) tax payments and everyday Person-to-Person (P2P) transactions.

Data Exchange. Americans routinely encounter data silos and repetitive paperwork when interacting with different sectors and agencies. Each domain follows its own regulatory and technical standards. Health records are governed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) established under the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016. Financial data are protected by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999 (GLBA) and will soon fall under the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed Personal Financial Data Rights Rule (Section 1033, Dodd–Frank Act). Tax and education data are separately governed by the Internal Revenue Code and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA).

There is no unified, citizen-centric protocol for individuals to consentingly share their data across sectors. For example, verifying income for a mortgage, student loan, or benefits application might require three separate data pulls from the IRS or employer, each with its own process. In healthcare, TEFCA is creating a nationwide data-sharing framework but remains voluntary and limited to medical providers. In finance, Europe’s PSD2 Open Banking Directive (2018) forced banks to open consumer data via APIs, while the United States is only beginning similar steps through the CFPB’s data portability rulemaking. Overall, data-sharing rules remain sector-specific rather than citizen-centric, making it difficult to “connect the dots” across domains.

Data Protection. The United States follows a fragmented, sectoral approach to data protection rather than a single, unified framework. Health information is covered by HIPAA (1996), financial data by GLBA (1999), student records by FERPA (1974), and children’s online data by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA, 1998).

States have layered on their own privacy laws, most notably the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA, 2018) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA, 2020). At the federal level, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fills gaps using its authority to regulate “unfair or deceptive practices” under Section 5 of the FTC Act (15 U.S.C. §45). However, there remains no nationwide baseline for consent, portability, or deletion rights that applies uniformly across all sectors.

An illustration from 2021 by the New York Times shows the picture very well.

Credit: Dana Davis

Recent efforts in Congress, including the proposed American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA, 2022) and the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA, 2024), sought to create a comprehensive federal framework for data privacy and user rights. APRA built on ADPPA’s foundations by refining provisions related to state preemption, enforcement, and individual rights, proposing national standards for access, correction, deletion, and portability, and stronger obligations for large data holders and brokers. It also envisioned expanded enforcement powers for the FTC and state attorneys general, along with a limited private right of action.

Despite initial bipartisan attention, APRA has not secured sustained bipartisan support and remains stalled in Congress. The bill was jointly introduced in 2024 by the Republican Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Democratic Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, reflecting early cross-party interest. However, Democratic support weakened after language addressing civil-rights protections and algorithmic discrimination was removed, prompting several members to withdraw backing (Wired, 2024). As a result, the legislation has not advanced beyond committee referral, leaving the United States reliant on a patchwork of sector-specific and state-based privacy laws.

The outcome is a system where Americans face both fragmented data exchange and fragmented data protection, undermining trust in digital public services and complicating any transition toward a citizen-centric digital infrastructure.

The High Cost of Fragmentation

This patchwork system isn’t just inconvenient; it also bleeds billions of dollars. When agencies can’t reliably identify people, deliver payments quickly, or cross-check data, waste and fraud increase. Here are just a few examples:

Improper Payments. In FY2023 the federal government reported an estimated $236 billion in improper payments. That astronomical sum (almost a quarter-trillion dollars) stemmed from issues like payments to deceased or ineligible individuals and clerical errors. In fact, over 74% of the improper payments were overpayments The largest drivers included Medicare/Medicaid billing mistakes and identity-verification failures in pandemic relief programs. For example, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program alone saw an increase of $44 billion in erroneous payments, as identity thieves and imposter claims slipped through weak verification checks. While not all improper payments can be eliminated, a significant portion, GAO notes, can be eliminated. The biggest share of improper payments results from documentation and eligibility verification weaknesses, not intentional fraud. All errors could be reduced with better digital identity and data sharing systems.

Identity Theft and Fraud. American consumers are suffering a wave of identity-related fraud. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission received over 1 million reports of identity theft such as credit cards opened in another person’s  name or fraudsters hijacking unemployment benefits. Identity theft now accounts for about 17% of all consumer fraud reports. The surge during the pandemic (when government aid became a target) showed how criminals exploit weak ID verification. State unemployment systems, for instance, paid out a significant sum to fraudsters who used stolen identities. Strengthening the digital ID infrastructure in U.S. could curb these losses by catching imposters before payments go out.

Administrative Overhead. Fragmentation forces each agency and company to reinvent the wheel, at great expense. Consider identity proofing: federal agencies spent over $240 million from 2020–2023 on contracts for login and ID verification solutions, much of it to third-party vendors, despite overlapping functionality. States and private institutions likewise pour resources into redundant systems for onboarding and verifying users. Processing paper documents and manual checks adds further costs and an indirect cost of time and frustration for citizens. A GAO report noted that agencies have widely varying systems and that a coordinated digital identity approach could improve security and save money. In short, the lack of shared public digital infrastructure means higher costs and slower service across the board.

Plan of Action 

What would a Digital Public Infrastructure Act do?

It’s clear that the status quo isn’t working. The U.S. needs a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) Act, a comprehensive federal law that would build the rails and rules for secure, efficient digital interactions nationwide. Just as past Congresses invested in highways and the internet itself, Congress today should invest in core digital systems to serve as public goods. A DPI Act could establish three pillars in particular:

Federated, Privacy-preserving Digital Identity

A secure digital ID that Americans can use (voluntarily) to prove who they are online, without creating a centralized “Big Brother” database. This would be a federated system, meaning you could choose from multiple trusted identity providers. For example, you could share your identification with your state DMV, the U.S. Postal Service, or a certified private entity, all adhering to common standards. The federated system must follow the latest NIST digital identity guidelines for security and privacy (e.g. NIST SP 800-63) to ensure high Identity Assurance Levels.

Crucially, it should be privacy-preserving by design: using techniques like encrypted credentials and pairwise pseudonymous identifiers so that each service you log into only sees a unique code, not your entire identity profile. A federated approach would leverage existing ID infrastructures (state IDs, passports, social security records) without replacing them. Instead, it links and elevates them to a digital plane.

Under a DPI Act, an American citizen might verify their identity once through a trusted provider and then use that digital credential to access any federal or state service, open a bank account, or consent to a background check, with one login. This approach can dramatically reduce fraud (no more 5 different logins for 5 agencies) while protecting civil liberties by avoiding any single centralized ID database. The Act could establish a national trust framework (operating under agreed standards and audits) so that a digital ID issued in, say, Colorado is trusted by a bank in New York or a federal portal, just as state driver’s licenses are mutually recognized today. Done right, a digital ID saves time and protects privacy: imagine applying for benefits or a loan online by simply confirming a verified ID attribute (e.g. “I am Alice, over 18 and a U.S. citizen”) rather than scanning and emailing your driver’s license to unknown clerks.

Universal, Real-time Payments (G2P, P2G, P2P)

The DPI Act should ensure that instant payment capability becomes as ubiquitous as email. This likely means leveraging FedNow, the Federal Reserve’s new instant payment rail, and expanding its use. For Government-to-Person (G2P) payments, Congress could mandate that federal disbursements (tax refunds, Social Security, veterans’ benefits, emergency relief, etc.) use a real-time option by default, with an ACH or card fallback only if a recipient opts out.

No citizen should wait days or weeks for funds that could be sent in seconds. The same goes for Person-to-Government (P2G) payments: taxes, fees, and fines should be payable instantly online, with immediate confirmation. This reduces float and uncertainty for both citizens and agencies. Finally, Person-to-Person (P2P): while the government doesn’t run private payment apps, a robust public instant payments infrastructure can connect banks of all sizes, enabling truly universal P2P transfers. This way, someone at Bank A can instantly pay someone at Credit Union B without needing both to join the same private app.

FedNow, as a public utility, is an important player, but the Act could incentivize or require banks to join so no institution is left behind. The result would be a seamless national payments system where money moves as fast as email, enabling things like on-demand wage payments, rapid disaster aid, and easier commerce.

Cross-sector, Consent-based Data Exchange

The third pillar is perhaps the most forward-looking: creating standard protocols for data sharing that put individuals in control. Imagine a secure digital pipeline that lets you, the citizen, pull or push your personal data from one place to another with a click – for instance, authorizing the IRS to share your income info directly with a state college financial aid office, or allowing your bank to verify your identity by querying a DMV record (with your consent) instead of asking you to upload photos or scans.

A DPI Act can establish an open-data exchange framework inspired by efforts like open banking and TEFCA, but broader. This framework would include technical standards (APIs, encryption, logging of data requests) and legal rules (what consents are needed, liability for misuse, etc.) to enable “tell us once” convenience for the public. 

Importantly, it must be consent-based: your data doesn’t move unless you approve and authorize it.It can let you carry digital attestations i.e. driver’s license, vaccination, veteran status, etc. on an e-wallet and share just the necessary bits with whoever needs to know. Some building blocks already exist: the federal Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is working on health data interoperability through TEFCA (so hospitals can query each other’s records), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has begun rulemaking to give bank customers the right to share their financial data with third-party apps.

A DPI Act could unify these efforts under one umbrella, extend them to other domains, and fill in the gaps (for instance, enabling portable eligibility, if you qualify for one program, easily prove it for another). It could establish a governance entity or standards board to oversee the trust frameworks needed. Crucially, this must be accompanied by strong privacy and security measures like audit trails, encryption, and an emphasis that individuals can see and control who accesses their data. An example of this is how the EU wallet provides a dashboard for users to review and revoke data sharing.

The Digital Public Infrastructure Act would not necessarily build each piece from scratch but set national standards and provide funding to knit them together. It could, for example, direct NIST and a multi-agency task force to implement a federated ID by a certain date (building on Login.gov’s lessons), require the Treasury and Federal Reserve to ensure every American has a route to instant payments across platforms (leveraging FedNow), and authorize pilot programs for cross-sector data exchange in key areas like social services.

Precedent for such an approach already exists in bipartisan efforts:

Navigating Roadblocks: Federalism, Privacy, and Tech Contractors

Enacting a U.S. Digital Public Infrastructure Act will face several real challenges. It’s important to acknowledge these roadblocks and consider strategies to overcome them:

Federalism and Decentralized Authority

Unlike many countries where a central government can launch a national ID or payments platform by decree, the U.S. must coordinate federal, state, and local authorities. Identity in the U.S. is traditionally a state domain (driver’s licenses, birth certificates), while federal agencies also issue identifiers (Social Security numbers, passports). A DPI solution must respect these layers. States may fear a federal takeover of their DMV role, and agencies might guard their IT turf. Solution: design the system as a federation of trust. The Act could explicitly empower states by providing grants for states to upgrade to digital driver’s licenses (the Improving Digital Identity Act proposed in 2022 did exactly this, offering grants for state DMV mobile IDs). It could also create a governance council with state CIOs and federal officials to jointly set standards.

Civil Liberties and Privacy Concerns

Any mention of a “digital ID” in America raises eyebrows about Big Brother. Civil liberties advocates will rightly question how to prevent government overreach or mass surveillance. The Act should incorporate privacy by design provisions e.g., require minimal data collection, mandate independent audits for security, and give users legal rights over their data. One promising approach is using decentralized identity technologies, where your personal data (like credentials) stay mostly on your device under your control, and only verification proofs are shared. Also, the law can explicitly forbid certain uses, for instance, prohibit law enforcement from fishing through the digital ID system without a warrant, or forbid using the digital ID for profiling citizens. Including groups like the ACLU and EFF in the drafting process could help address concerns early. It’s worth noting that privacy and security can actually be enhanced by a good digital ID: today, Americans hand over copious personal details to random companies for ID checks (e.g. scan of your driver’s license to rent an apartment, which might sit in a landlord’s email forever). A federated ID could reduce exposure by only transmitting a yes/no verification or a single attribute, rather than a photocopy of your entire ID. Conveying that narrative, that this can protect people from identity theft and data breaches, will be key to overcoming knee-jerk opposition. Still, robust safeguards and perhaps a pilot phase to prove the concept will be needed to convince skeptics that a U.S. digital identity won’t become a surveillance tool.

Incumbent Resistance (Big tech and Contractors)

There are vested interests in the current disjointed system. Large federal IT contractors and identity verification vendors profit from selling agencies one-off solutions; big tech companies dominate payments and data silos in the status quo. A unified public infrastructure could be seen as competition or a threat to some business models. For example, if a free government-backed digital ID becomes widely accepted, companies like credit bureaus (which sell ID verification services) or ID.me might lose market share. If open-data sharing is mandated, banks that monetize data might push back. The solution is to engage industry so they can find new opportunities within the ecosystem. Many banks, for instance, actually support digital ID because it would cut fraud costs for them. The banking industry has been calling for better ID verification to fight account takeover and synthetic identities. In fact, a coalition of financial institutions endorsed the earlier Improving Digital Identity legislation.

Fintechs will favor Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) because it transforms customer acquisition from a slow, expensive manual process into an instant, low-cost digital utility. By plugging into standardized government layers for identity (e-KYC) and data sharing (Account Aggregators), fintechs can instantly verify and underwrite users who lack traditional credit histories. This allows them to scale rapidly and profitably serve millions of previously “unbanked” customers by making lending decisions based on real-time data rather than rigid credit scores.. The Act can create a public-private task force (as earlier bills proposed) to hash out implementation. For government contractors, the reality is that building DPI will still require significant IT work, just more standardized. Contractors who adapt can win contracts to build the new infrastructure.

Political Will and Public Perception

DPI can be a bipartisan win if framed correctly.

For conservatives and fiscal hawks: emphasize the anti-fraud, waste-cutting angle. Stopping improper payments (recall that $236B figure!) and preventing identity theft aligns with the goal of efficient government. The Act  essentially plugs leaky buckets, something everyone can get behind.

For liberals and tech-progressives: emphasize equity and empowerment. How digital infrastructure can help the unbanked access financial services, ensure eligible people aren’t left out of benefits, and give individuals control of their own data (a pro-consumer, anti-monopoly stance). Indeed, digital public goods are often framed as a way to ensure big tech doesn’t exclusively control our digital lives.

The key will be avoiding hot button mis-framings: this is not a surveillance program, not a national social credit system, etc. It’s an upgrade to basic government digital infrastructure. One strategy is to start with pilot programs and voluntary adoption to build trust. For example, the Act could fund a pilot in a few states to link a state’s digital driver’s license with federal Login.gov accounts, showing a working federated ID in action. Or pilot using FedNow for a chunk of tax refunds in one region. Early successes will create momentum and help refine the approach. Champions in the Congress will need to communicate that this is infrastructure in the truest sense: just as U.S. needed electrification and interstate highways, it now needs the digital equivalent to keep America competitive and secure.

Conclusion

A Digital Public Infrastructure Act represents more than a technical upgrade; it is an investment in America’s institutional capacity. The challenges the U.S. faces today like identity theft, improper payments, slow benefit delivery, and fragmented data governance are the predictable consequences of an outdated public digital foundation that has never been treated as national infrastructure. Just as the interstate highway system knit together the physical economy, and just as the early internet created the backbone for the digital economy, the United States now needs a unified, secure, and interoperable set of digital rails to support the next era of public service delivery and economic growth.

Unlike centralized systems elsewhere in the world, the American version of DPI would be federated, privacy-preserving, and deeply respectful of federalism. States would remain primary issuers of identity credentials. Private innovators would continue to build consumer-facing services. Federal agencies would govern standards rather than run monolithic platforms. This hybrid model plays to America’s institutional strengths such as distributed authority, competitive innovation, and strong civil liberties protections.

Congress must enact a Digital Public Infrastructure Act, a recognition that the government’s most fundamental responsibility in the digital era is to provide a solid, trustworthy foundation upon which people, businesses, and communities can build. America has done this before when it built the railroads, electrified the nation, and invested in the early internet. The next great public works project must be digital.

American investment in science is incredibly productive. Yet, it is losing trust with the public, being seen as misaligned with American priorities and very expensive. To increase the real and perceived benefit of research funding, funding agencies should develop challenge goals for their extramural research programs focused on the impact portion of their mission. For example, the NIH could adopt one goal per institute or center “to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability”; NSF could adopt one goal per directorate “to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; [or] to secure the national defense”. Asking research agencies to consider person-level or economic impacts in advance helps the American people see the value of federal research funding, and encourages funders to approach the problem holistically, from basic to applied research. For almost every problem there are different scientific questions that will yield benefit over multiple time scales and insight from multiple disciplines. 

This plan has three elements: 

1. Focus some agency funding on measurable mission impacts 
2. Fund multiple timescales as part of a single plan
3. Institutionalize the impact funding process across science funders

For example, if NIH wanted to reduce the burden of Major Depression, it could invest in a shorter time frame to learn how to better deliver evidence-based care to everyone who needs it. At the same time, it can invest in midrange work to develop and test new models and medications, and in the decades-long work required to understand how the exosome influences mood disorders. A simple way to implement this approach would be to build on the processes developed by the Government Performance Results Act (GPRA), which already requires goal setting and reporting, though proposals could be worked into any strategic planning process through a variety of administrative mechanisms.

Challenge and Opportunity

In 1945, Vannevar Bush called science the ‘endless frontier’, and argued funding scientific research is fundamental to the obligations of American government. He wrote “without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world”. The legacy of this report is that health, prosperity, and security feature prominently in the missions of most federal research agencies (see Table 1). However, in this century we have begun to drift from his focus on the impacts of science. We have the strange situation where our enterprise is both incredibly productive, and losing trust with the public, viewed as out of touch or misaligned with American priorities. This memo  proposes a simple solution to address this issue for federal funding agencies like NIH and NSF that largely focus on extramural investigator-initiated research. These are research programs where the funding agency signals interest in specific topics and teams of scientists submit their research plans addressing those topics. The agency then funds a subset of those plans with input from external scientific reviewers.

Sample Mission Statements of Federal Research Funders as of November 2025

Research Agency or Division	Current Mission, with Impact Emphasized
NIH	Seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to *enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.*
NHLBI	Provides global leadership for a research, training, and education program to *promote the prevention and treatment of heart, lung, and blood disorders and enhance the health of all individuals* so that they can live longer and more fulfilling lives.
NINDS	Seek fundamental knowledge about the brain and nervous system and to use that knowledge to *reduce the burden of neurological disease* for all people.
NSF	To promote the progress of science; to *advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; and to secure the national defense.*
Directorate for Mathematical & Physical Sciences (MPS)	*Enhances our nation’s economic growth, security and quality of life* by advancing human understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe at all scales.
USDA The National Institute of Food and Agriculture	Provides leadership and funding for programs that advance agriculture-related sciences. We invest in and support initiatives that *ensure the long-term viability of agriculture.*

This funding approach is incredibly productive. For example, NIH funds most of the pipeline for the emerging bioeconomy, which accounts for 5.1% of our GDP. From 2010 to 2016, every one of the 210 new entities approved by the FDA had some NIH funding. And yet, there appears to be a disconnect between our funding strategy and the public interest focus of the Endless Frontier operationalized through our federal science agency missions for investigator initiated research. 

A fundamental driver of this disconnect might be a slight misalignment of the incentives of academic scientists, who are rewarded for novelty and scientific impact, with the broader public interest. Our federal agencies are highly attuned to scientific leaders, and place equal or even greater weight on innovation (novelty plus scientific impact) than real world impact. For example, NSF review criteria place equal weight on intellectual merit (‘advance knowledge’) and broader impacts (‘benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes’). NIH’s impact score of new applications is an ‘assessment of the likelihood for the project to exert a sustained, powerful influence on the research field(s) involved’ [emphasis mine], which is only part of the agency’s mission. The practical implications of this sustained focus away from the impact portion of agencies missions become apparent in figure 1, showing tremendous spending in health research unrelated to a key public interest measure like lifespan, especially when compared to other nations’ health research spending. 

Perhaps the realization that the federal research investment is not strongly linked to their mission impact is one reason why American science has been slowly losing public trust over time. Among the people of 68 nations ranking the integrity of scientists, Americans ranked scientists 7^th highest, whereas we ranked scientists 16^th highest in our estimation of them acting in the public interest. And this is despite the fact that the American investment in science is many times higher than the 15 nations who rated scientists more highly on public interest. A more accurate description of our 21^st century federal science enterprise might be the ‘timeless frontier’, where our science agencies pursue cycles of funding year in and year out, with their functional goal being scientific changes and their primary measure of success being projects funded. Advancing the economy, health, national defense, etc., are almost incidental benefits to our process measures. 

We can do better. In 2024, the National Academy of Medicine called out the lack of high level coordination in research funding. In 2025, the administration has been making drastic cuts and dramatic changes to goals and processes of federal research funding, and the ultimate outcome of these changes is unclear. In the face of this change, Drs. Victor Dzau and Keith Yamamoto, staunch champions of our federal science programs, are calling for “a coherent strategy […] to sustain and coordinate the unrivaled strengths of government-funded research and ensure that its benefits reach all Americans”.

We can build on the incredible success of the federal science enterprise – inarguably the most productive science enterprise in all history. The primary source of American scientific strength is scale. American funding agencies are usually the largest funders in their space. I will highlight some challenges of the current approach and suggest improvements to yield even more impactful approaches more closely aligned with the public interest.

The primary federal funding strategy is broad diversification, where our agencies fund every high scoring application in a topic space (see FAQs). Further, federal science agencies pay little attention to when they expect to see a fundamental impact arising from their research portfolio. For example, a centrally directed program like the Human Genome Project can lead to breakthrough treatments decades later, but in the meantime, other research that generates improvements on faster timescales could have been coordinated, such as developing conventional drug treatments, or research to optimize quality and delivery of existing treatment. 

And yet, the breadth and complexity of broad diversification makes it easy to cherry pick successes. This is a strategic issue, and is bigger than the project selection issues highlighted in the earlier discussion about review criteria. When research funding agencies make their pitch for federal dollars they highlight a handful of successes over tens of thousands of projects funded over many years. They ignore failures, the time when investments were made, and time to benefit. With the goals and metrics we have in place, it is simply too hard to summarize progress in any other way. 

Overly diversified science funding supports both good Congressional testimony and bad strategy. If your problem happens to fall into a unicorn space of success, there is a lot to celebrate. But most problems do not, and we experience inconsistent returns. We need to define the success of research funding more precisely, in advance, and in ways that more obviously align with the public interest. 

Plan of Action 

If we tweak our funding strategy to focus on societal impacts, we can move to a more impactful science enterprise, and help regain public support for science funding. We can focus federal research funding on effective answers to difficult problems demanding both urgency and short term improvements, and fundamental discoveries that may take decades to realize. My solution and implementation actions for agencies, and potentially Congress, are described below. 

Recommendation 1. Focus some agency funding on measurable mission impacts. 

We should empower our science agencies to step away from broad diversification as the predominant funding strategy, and pursue measurable mission impacts with specific time horizons. It can be a challenge for funders to step away from process measures (e.g. projects or consortia funded) and focus on actual changes in mission impact.

Ideally, these specific impacts would be broken into measurable goals that would be selected through a participatory process that includes scientific experts, people with lived experience of the issue, and potential partner agencies. I recommend each agency division (e.g. an NSF Directorate) allocate a percentage of their budget to these mission impact strategies. Further, to avoid strategic errors that can arise from overwhelming power of federal funding to shape the direction of scientific fields, these high level funding plans should be as impact focused as possible, and avoid steering funding to one scientific theory or discipline over another. 

Recommendation 2. Fund multiple timescales as part of a single plan. 

Research funders need to balance their investment portfolios not only across problem areas, but over time. Complex challenges will often require funding different aspects of the solution on different timelines in parallel as part of a larger plan. Balancing time as well as spending allows for a more robust portfolio of funding that draws from a broader array of scientific disciplines and institutions. 

Note, this approach means starting lines of research that may not lead to ultimate impact for decades. This approach might seem strange given our relatively short budget cycles, but is very common in science, where projects like the Human Genome initiative, the Brain Initiative, or the National Nanotechnology Initiative, have all exceeded a single budget cycle and will take years to realize their full impact. These kinds of efforts require milestones to ensure they stay on track over time. 

Recommendation 3. Institutionalize the impact funding process across science funders.

Our research enterprise has become oriented around investigator-initiated, project-based awards. Alternative funding strategies, such as the DARPA model, are viewed as anomalies that must require completely different governance and procedures. These differences in goals are unnecessary. A consistent focus on impacts and strategy in funding across agencies will help the scientific community become more aware of the time to benefit of research, help underscore the value of research investment to the American public, and help research agencies collaborate among themselves and with their partner agencies (e.g. NIH collaborates more closely with CMS, FDA, etc.). 

In short, institutionalizing this process can lead to greater accountability and recognition for our science enterprise. This structure allows our funders to report to the public progress on specific goals on predetermined and preannounced timelines, rather than having to comb through tens of thousands of independent funding decisions and competing strategies to find case studies to highlight. In this way, expected and unexpected scientific results, and even operational challenges, can be discussed within an impact framework that clearly ties to the agency mission and public interest.

Example of Planning using  an Impact Focus

Here is an example of a mission impact goal Reducing the Burden of Major Depressive Disorder that could be put forth by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and the process to develop it.

Commence Inclusive Planning: NIMH brings together experts from academia, clinical care, industry, people impacted by depression, and FDA and CMS to develop measures, timelines and funding strategies. 

Develop Specific Impact Measures: These should  reflect the agency’s impact portion of their mission. For example, NIH’s mission impact of “enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability” requires measuring impact on human beings. Example measurement targets could include:

• Reduced incidence of Major Depressive Disorder 
• Increased productivity (e.g. days worked) of people living with Major Depressive Disorder
• Reduced suicide rates

Fund Multiple Time Scales: Designate time scales in parallel as part of a comprehensive strategy. These different plans would involve different disciplines, funding mechanisms, and private sector and government partners. Examples of plans working at different timescales to support the same goal and measures could include:

• 10 year plan: Increase utilization of evidence based care
• 15 year plan: Develop and implement new treatments
• 30 year plan: Determine how the exposome causes and prevents depression, and how can be changed
• It is likely that NIMH has already obligated funds to projects that support one of these plans, though they may need additional work to ensure that those projects can directly tie to the specific plan measures. 

Implementation Strategies for Impact Goals

Each federal funding agency could allocate a percentage of their budget to these and other  impact goals. The exact amount would depend on the current funding approach of each agency. As this proposal calls for more direct focus on agency mission, and not a change in mission, it is likely that a significant percentage of the agency’s current budget already supports an impact goal on one or more of its time scales. 

For an agency heavily weighted towards project based funding of small investigator teams, like NIH, I would recommend starting with a goal of 20% of their budgets set towards impact spending and consider increases over time. Other agencies with different funding models may want to start in a different place. Further, I would recommend different goals and targeted funds for each major administrative unit, such as an institute or directorate. 

All federal funders already engage in some form of strategic and budget planning, and most also have formal structures for engaging stakeholders into those planning decisions. Therefore, each agency already has sufficient authorities and structures to implement this proposal. However, it is likely that these impact goals will require collaboration across agencies, and that could be difficult for agencies to efficiently conduct by themselves. 

Additional support to make this change could come from Congressional Report language as part of the budget process, through interagency leadership from the White House Office of Science and Technology, or through the Office of Management and Budget. For example, the Government Performance Results Act (GPRA) already requires agency goal setting, reporting and supports cross agency priority goals. That planning process could easily be adapted to this more specific impact focus for research funding agencies, and reporting on those goals could be incorporated into routine reporting of agency activities. 

Conclusion 

We are living through a massive disruption in federal research funding, and as of the fall of 2025, it is not clear what future federal research funding will look like. We have an opportunity to focus the incredibly productive federal research enterprise around the central reasons why Americans invest in it. We can meet Bush’s challenge of the Endless Frontier simply by clearly defining the benefits the American people want to see, and explicitly setting plans, timing and money to make that happen. 

We can call our shots and focus our science funding around impacts, not spending. And we can set our goals with enough emotional resonance and depth to capture both the interests of the average American, and the needs of scientists from different disciplines and types of institutions. We already have the legal authorities in place to adopt these techniques, we just need the will.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the risks to the direction of science that can arise from being a very large funder like NIH?

Inadvertently, the huge scale of federal funding could lead to a monopsonistic effect. In other words, NIH’s buying power is so large, if NIH does not fund a specific type of research, people may stop studying it. This risk is highest within a narrow scientific field if there is a bias in grant selection. A well publicized example being NIH’s strong funding preference to one theory of Alzheimer’s Disease to the diminishment of competing theories, which in turn influenced careers and publication patterns to contribute to that bias.

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Americans trade stocks instantly, but spend 13 hours on tax forms. They send cash by text, but wait weeks for IRS responses. The nation’s revenue collector ranks dead last in citizen satisfaction. The problem isn’t just paperwork — it’s how the government builds.

The fix: build for users, not compliance. Ship daily, not yearly. Cultivate talent, don’t rent it. Apple doesn’t outsource the creation of its products; the IRS shouldn’t outsource taxpayer experience. Why?

The goal: make taxes as easy as mobile banking.

The IRS, backed by a Congress and an administration that truly wants real improvements and efficiencies, must invest in building its tax products in house. Start with establishing a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) at the IRS directly reporting to the Commissioner. This CDO must have the authority to oversee digital and business transformation across the organization. This requires hiring hundreds of senior engineers, product managers, and designers—all deeply embedded with IRS accountants, lawyers, and customer service agents to rebuild taxpayer services. This represents true government efficiency: redirecting contractor spending to fund internal teams that build what American taxpayers should own rather than rent. 

This is about more than broken technology. This is a roadmap for building modern, user-centric government organizations. The IRS touches every American, making it the perfect lab for proving the government can work.

Transform the IRS first, then apply these principles across every agency where citizens expect digital experiences that actually work.

Challenge & Opportunity

It’s April 15th. For the first time, you’re not fretting.

You finished filing your taxes on a free app. It took 15 minutes. Your income? Already there. Your credits? Pre-calculated and ready to claim. Your refund? Hitting your bank account tomorrow.

For millions around the world, swift, painless tax filing isn’t a dream. It’s the norm. It should be for Americans, too.

But in the U.S., the IRS experience is still slow, opaque, process-heavy, and frustrating. Tax filing is one of the few universal interactions Americans have with their government—and it’s not one that earns much trust.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We were on the path to delivering that with IRS Direct File and needed to recommit.  To deliver wildly easier taxes for Americans, we can, and must, build an IRS that meets high modern expectations: fast, transparent, digital-first, and relentlessly taxpayer-focused.

The Diagnosis

Each year, the IRS collects more than 96% of the revenue that funds the federal government—$5.1 trillion supporting everything from Social Security, defense, infrastructure, veterans’ services, and investing in America’s future. 

The quote from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, carved into the limestone face of the IRS headquarters in D.C., captures the spirit well:

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

It is not only essential to the functioning of government—it is also a major way most Americans interact with it. And that experience? Frustrating, costly, and confusing. According to a recent Pew survey, Americans rate the IRS less favorably than any other federal agency. The average taxpayer spends 13 hours and $270 out of pocket just to file their return.

The core problem: The IRS needs to be user-focused.

Despite the stakes, the IRS operates far behind what Americans expect. We live in a world where people can tap to pay, split bills by text, or trade stocks in slick apps.  But that world does not include the IRS. 

A staggering 63% of the 10.4 billion hours Americans spend dealing with the federal government are consumed by IRS paperwork. But much of the source of that pain isn’t the IRS, but Congress with the crushing complexity of decades long tax code changes, sedimented on top of each other.  This year was no different. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” runs 331 pages, with large swaths devoted to new, intricate tax changes.  

Dealing with the IRS still often involves paper forms, long phone waits, chasing down documents, and confusing processes. 

If you’ve dealt with the IRS for anything beyond filing, it feels impossible to get a task finished. Will someone pick up the phone? Can I get an answer to my questions and resolve my situation? Would I expect the same answer if I talked to someone else? Last year the IRS answered just 49% of the 100 million calls it received, including automated answering. 

This underperformance is beyond outdated technology—it’s structural and institutional. The IRS’s core systems are brittle and fragmented. Ancient procurement rules and funding constraints have made sustained modernization nearly impossible. Siloed organizations sit within siloes. In place of long-term investment, the agency leans heavily on short-term contractor fixes, band-aids applied to legacy wounds.  

This complexity has stymied scaled change. 

The root cause: The IRS has never treated world-class technology and product development as mission-critical capabilities core to its identity, to be hired, owned, and continually improved by internal teams focused on user outcomes.

A modern service agency builds end-to-end experiences for users—from pre-populating data through to filing and refunds. Empowered teams building these features have a holistic viewpoint and control over their service to ensure taxpayers are able to repeatedly and reliably complete their task.

Today’s reality is different: federal agencies like the IRS treat technical and product expertise as afterthoughts—all nice-to-haves that serve bureaucratic processes rather than core capabilities essential to their mission. Strategy and execution get outsourced by default. This creates a growing divide between “business” and “IT” teams, each lacking a deep understanding of the other’s work, despite both being critical to delivering services that actually function for taxpayers.

This outsourcing has hollowed out the agency’s internal technical capacity. Rather than building technical competency in-house, and paying that talent a salary approaching private companies, the IRS grows more dependent on vendors. It no longer knows what it needs technically, what questions to ask or which paths to pursue. Instead they must trust the vendors–companies financially incentivised towards ballooning scopes, lock-in, and complexity. 

The result: a siloed experience that mirrors a siloed organization, one that is risk-averse, paper-heavy IRS, too slow to meet modern expectations.

The agency approaches service delivery as a compliance and bureaucratic process to digitize, rather than a product to design. “Never ship your org-chart” is a common refrain you’ll hear at tech companies, to explain how products tend to take on the communication style of their builders. Yet IRS product faultlines visibly follow its org structure and thus fail to deliver a holistic experience. 

There were bright spots. Direct File showed what’s possible when empowered teams build for users. A dead simple idea: let Americans file taxes directly on the IRS site was a reality. It worked. It was well regarded. In surveys, users beamed about Direct File: 9 out of 10 gave it an “excellent” or “above average” rating, 74% said they preferred it over what they used before, and 86% said it increased their trust in the IRS. 

The government actually delivered for its citizens, and they felt it.

But it didn’t last. The project was abruptly dismantled due to political ideology, not taxpayer experience or feedback. 

Many of the people with the technical skills and vision to modernize the IRS have left, often without a choice. The agency will likely slide further backward—into deeper dependence on systems built by the lowest bidder or those currying political favor, with poorer service and diminished public trust in return.

We’ve seen this up close. 

Both of us worked at The White House’s technology arm; the U.S. Digital Service. One of us helped lead Direct File into existence and built the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s digital team. The other previously led Google’s first large language model products and prototyped AI tools at the IRS to streamline internal knowledge work. 

In our work at the IRS, we witnessed how far the agency must go. Inside the IRS Commissioner’s office, with leaders across the agency, we built a collaborative digital strategic plan. This memo details those proposals since left by the wayside after seven different IRS commissioners rotated in the seat, just this year.

The IRS needs more than modernization. It will need a systemic rebuild from:

• compliance, to user-centered design and product thinking
• vendor dependence to empowered internal product teams
• once-a-year panic to real-time, year-round services
• fragile mainframes to composable platforms and APIs
• waterfall contracting to iterative, continuous delivery

We’re sharing these recommendations for a future Day One—when there’s a refocus on rebuilding the government. When that day comes, the blueprint will be here: drawn from inside experience, built on hard lessons, and focused on what it will take to deliver a digital IRS that truly works for the American people.

What we need is the mandate to build a tax system that makes Americans think: “That was it? That was easy.”

Plan of Action

The IRS must rebuild taxpayer services around citizen needs rather than compliance and bureaucratic processes. This requires in-housing the talent to strategically build it. We propose establishing a Chief Digital Officer directly reporting to the Commissioner, with the authority to oversee digital and business transformation across the organization, hire hundreds of senior engineers, product managers, and designers. The goal, a team empowered to deliver a tax-filling product experience that meets modern expectations.

The Products

Build for Users, Not Internal Compliance

We’ve become accustomed to a user-focused fit-and-finish in the app era. Let’s deliver that same level for taxpayers.

It all starts around building a digital platform that empowers taxpayers, businesses, and preparers with the information, tools and services to handle taxes accurately and confidently. A fully-featured online account becomes the one-stop, self-service hub for all tasks. Taxpayers access their complete tax profile, updated in real-time, with current data across income sources, financial institutions, and full tax history. The system proactively recommends tax breaks, credits, and withholding adjustments they’re eligible for.

Critically, this can’t be built in a vacuum. It requires rapid iteration with users as part of a constant feedback loop. This digital platform runs on robust APIs that power internal tools, IRS public sites, and third-party software. Building this way ensures alignment across IRS teams, eliminates duplicate efforts, and lifts the entire tax software ecosystem. 

This is what we need to build for Americans:

Online tax filing: From annual panic to year-round readiness

Reboot Direct File. Stop forcing everything into tax season. Let taxpayers update information year-round—add a child, change addresses, adjust withholdings, upload documents. When April arrives, their return is already 90% complete. 

This is a natural evolution of Direct File and the existing non-editable online account dashboard into a living, breathing system taxpayers optimize throughout the year. And not just for individuals—this should be extended to businesses—reducing this burden for as many filer types as possible.

Pre-populated returns: Stop making people provide what the IRS already knows

The IRS already has W-2s, 1099s, and financial data. Use it. Pre-populate returns to cut filing time from hours to minutes. Deliver secure APIs so any tax software can access IRS data (with taxpayer permission), and use machine learning to flag issues including fraud before submission. This increases accuracy, reduces errors, and spurs competition by making it easy to switch between tax-filing programs.

Income verification as a service: Turn tax data into financial opportunity

The IRS sits on verified income data that could help Americans access government services, credit, mortgages, and benefits like student aid. Instead of weeks-long transcript requests, offer instant verification through secure APIs. This creates a government-backed source alongside credit bureaus, increases financial access, and reduces paperwork across all government services.

Tax calculator as a platform: One source of truth

Every tax software company recreates the same calculations, each slightly different. Across the organization, the IRS itself uses multiple third-party tax calculators in audits. This should be a core, integral service the IRS offers—build a definitive tax calculator as an API, the single source of truth that internal audits and checks use, and external software can access or run on their own. Make it transparent, auditable, and open source. Put up cash “bounties” to encourage the public to find bugs and errors and invite taxation-critics to review the code. Use generative AI to aid IRS accountants, lawyers and engineers translate tax law changes into code–speeding the roll out of Congressional tax changes.

When everyone calculates taxes the same way the IRS does, errors vanish. When everyone can see how the IRS does it, trust grows.

Modern MeF: From submission pipe to intelligent platform

Today’s Modernized e-File (MeF) is barely modern—it’s a dumb pipe that accepts tax returns and hopes for the best. Transform it into intelligent infrastructure that validates in real-time, catches errors immediately (not weeks later in confusing notices), and stops fraud before refunds are deposited. Build it like a real API, not XML dumps. Enable multi-part submissions so taxpayers can fix mistakes without starting over. This isn’t just a technical upgrade—it’s the foundation that makes every other improvement possible.

The Process

Ship Daily, Not Yearly

Taxpayer-first product development

The IRS is the single largest interaction point between Americans and their government. Every improvement saves millions of hours and builds trust. This requires abandoning bureaucratic processes for product thinking.

Build with taxpayers from day one through constant user testing and feedback loops. Organize around taxpayer journeys—”I need to update my withholdings” or “I’m checking my refund”—not org charts. 

Measure what matters: time-to-file, satisfaction scores, error rates, not only compliance metrics. Internal Objectives and Key Results planning makes priorities clear and syncs the organization towards focused goals. Publish Service Level Objectives on external products to ensure we target creating systems that others can confidently rely and build on.

Give full-stack product teams the authority to make integrated technical, design, policy and legal decisions together. Staff these teams with internal technologists embedded alongside accountants and lawyers in functional organizations, building IRS competency while reducing contractor dependence. Today’s IRS is highly siloed across functions with authority so fragmented it’s unclear who “owns” what. Yet go to any top tech organization and you’ll see what we’re pushing for: aligned and cross-functional teams whose job is delivering with clear ownership. Inherently we’re pushing for more than a new team, we’re factoring out unclear ownership in general away from IT and Business Divisions.

When teams own outcomes, we can better ensure taxpayer experience transforms from painful to painless.

API-first architecture

The IRS is fundamentally a data organization, yet information flows through siloed systems that can’t talk to each other. Amazon solved this with a simple mandate: all teams must expose their data and communicate through APIs. (This mindset set in motion the seeds of Amazon Web Services, the company’s most profitable division). 

The IRS needs the same revolution.

Every team exposes data and functionality through standardized REST APIs—no direct database access, no per-department clones of the data, no exceptions. Design every API to be externalizable (with strong access controls) from day one, unlocking government APIs to become platforms for innovation. When systems communicate through versioned APIs instead of tangled dependencies, teams can ship improvements daily without compromising everything else. This isn’t just technical architecture—it’s how modern organizations move fast without breaking things.

The People

Cultivate it, Don’t Outsource It; Build a Delivery Culture

A digital IRS that delivers for Americans cannot be built by the lowest bidder. Its core capability isn’t digitized forms–it’s people who can understand taxpayers’ needs, imagine solutions, design thoughtfully, ship them fast, listen to users, and keep improving based on feedback.

Silicon Valley understands this instinctively on two fronts. The fight for great engineers is the fight to build teams that can deliver great products. And two, no leading tech company outsources its own R&D. Delivering well-functioning and beloved products requires tight ownership of the product iteration loop. 

Businesses long learned to never outsource a core competency. OpenAI would never outsource the training of its models, Apple its industrial design, Google its search algorithm, or Facebook its social graph. The same should be true for the IRS. 

Yet, despite accepting 93% of its tax returns digitally, it still does not consider itself to be a digital-first agency. Building great teams is inseparable from building great taxpayer experiences. For decades, the agency has outsourced its technical mission and vision.

What we witnessed at the IRS was often vendor theater. Consultants transformed routine meetings into sales presentations that should have been dedicated to improving the products. Solutions specialists added layers of proprietary middleware, despite readily available enterprise-grade open source solutions running on commodity servers could easily meet the objectives. All of this unfolded within an organizational culture where securing contracts took precedence over delivering meaningful outcomes. Contracts that, of course, cost multiples more than the price of a competent internal team.

Commodities like cloud infrastructure or off-the-shelf software that serve broad, generic needs should absolutely be acquired externally. But the IRS’s critical, taxpayer-facing products—the systems at the heart of filing, payments, and taxpayer accounts—must be built and owned internally. There is only one agency that collects taxes for the United States of America. 

When everything is handed to vendors, the IRS sends more than money out the door; it loses institutional memory, technical craft, quality systems, and the ability to move quickly. A modern IRS cannot be built on rented skills.

Talent: Build a Permanent Product Core

This transformation starts with the people: build and keep an in-house corps of top-tier technologists—engineers, product managers, designers, user experience researchers—working in small, empowered, cross-functional teams hand in hand with fellow IRS accountants, auditors, customer service representatives and lawyers. Not a handful of digital specialists scattered in a bureaucracy as it was, but several hundred people whose full-time job is delivering and evolving the IRS’s core taxpayer experiences and services. 

• Create a dedicated Digital Profession inside the IRS, led by a Chief Digital Officer with the authority to hire, fire, and shape teams and technology stacks.
  
• Break the straitjacket of outdated civil service rules by creating specialist pay bands to compete for top talent like the CFPB has done.
  
• Empower cross-functional teams to ship without endless escalation. Start small, test early, iterate quickly, and make product decisions by those close to the work.

Funding: Invest in Teams, Not Projects

Current funding locks the IRS into one-off projects that end when the money runs out, leaving no path for iteration. A product-centered IRS needs enduring funding for enduring teams. Long-lived services, not short-lived milestones. This should be no surprise for a tax organization. There are two certainties in life; death and taxes. We should properly set ourselves up to manage the latter.

• Fund continuous development rather than one-and-done “delivery.”
  
• Tie funding to taxpayer outcomes like faster filing, fewer errors, higher satisfaction, instead of compliance checklists.
  
• Secure multi-year budgets for core product teams so they can improve services year-round, not scramble for appropriations each cycle.

This shift will reduce long-term capital costs and ensure that every dollar invested keeps improving the taxpayer experience. 

Quality & Standards: Build Once, Build Right

Owning our products means owning their quality. That requires clear, enforceable service standards, like performance, usability, scalability, and accessibility, that every IRS product must meet.

• Establish service performance benchmarks and hold teams accountable to them. These should be highly taxpayer centric; time to file, support response time, ease of use.
  
• Create communities of practice inside the organization to share patterns, tooling, and lessons learned across the agency.
  
• Apply spend controls that tie contract renewals to measurable outcomes and prevent redundant vendor builds.

Culture Eats Strategy: Time to Invest in a Delivery Culture

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” as Peter Drucker famously said. Yet government agencies too often treat culture-building as off-limits or irrelevant. This is backwards. Creating a shared, collaborative culture centered on delivery isn’t just important; it’s the foundation that makes everything else possible. The hardest and most critical step is investing in people. Give employees space to collaborate meaningfully, contribute their expertise, and take ownership of outcomes. Leadership must empower teams with real authority, establish clear performance standards, and hold everyone accountable for meeting—or exceeding—those benchmarks. Without this cultural shift, even the best strategy becomes just another plan gathering dust.

When every product meets the same high standard, trust in the IRS will grow—because taxpayers will feel it in every interaction.

A template for all agencies

The IRS touches more Americans than any other federal agency–making it the perfect proof point that the government can deliver digital products that work seamlessly. The principles–build for users, not compliance, shipping daily, not yearly, and keeping the talent in house is not unique to the IRS. 

We believe these goals and strategies apply to nearly every agency and level of government. Imagine Social Security retirement planning tools that lead to easy withholding adjustments, a Medicare/Medicaid that is easy to enroll in, or a FEMA with easy to file disaster relief disbursement.

Transform the IRS this towards this path, and then use these lessons to reset and lift up expectations between Americans and their government. One so easy citizens say: “That was it? That was easy.”

American trust in government institutions is at historic lows. Throw a stick at a workshop, op-ed, or white paper on state of governance today and you’ll run into a worrying statistic about trust in public institutions.  The pervasiveness of this worry makes sense: the legitimacy of democracies relies on trust. Lower trust means every program, every public benefit, every crisis, every investment is just that much more difficult, if not impossible; the flywheels of low trust weakens government capacity for everyone. 

But here’s the thing: what if low trust was not a given? Or, said another way: what if we had the power to improve trust in government – what would that world look like?

After studying trust in government for years, one of my top concerns is that we have simply accepted lower trust as a fact of life and, worse than that, irreparable. That declining trust in government is simply seen as an acceptable cost for Americans – a notoriously skeptical bunch when it comes to government – and perhaps we’re a little proud of it. This is concerning for all kinds of reasons but at the top of my list: it lets government (and everyone else!) off the hook.

Trust is complex and there is no one simple fix to permanently reset the relationship or shift the trendline between government and people. But that does not mean it’s off limits. I believe it is possible, but more importantly, I believe it is worthwhile to improve trust and trustworthiness in government

What could high trust (and trustworthiness) in government institutions yield? Better public health outcomes (higher trust leading to greater willingness to follow public health directives, like vaccines). Greater flexibility to navigate complex public challenges (greater trust leading to willingness to accept risk and endorse innovative approaches). Wider participation in public programs (and public program design), leading to more effective and representative services that achieve their intended impacts. Better ability to manage crises (public willingness to turn to central point of information for direction). Potential for fewer transaction costs or compliance barriers (put in place to mitigate low trust levels). Greater civic participation. 

At the recent workshop on the future of trust in government hosted by the Federal of American Scientists, we explored the nature of trust in specific government functions and what the worse case scenarios of trust might be, but we also specifically addressed what good might look like. 

Approach and Methods

The “Future of Trust” workshop brought together government capacity experts to examine how trust operates within specific government functions, the risks and consequences of its erosion, and what it would take to rebuild. Recognizing that trust in government is not generic, participants explored how Americans’ varied encounters with federal systems (such as hiring and talent management, data collection and reliability, procurement, and customer service) shape their perceptions and engagement. The group considered potential first- and second-order impacts of changing trust, early indicators that key thresholds may be at risk, and strategies for either restoring trust or adapting to a new reality. The discussion was grounded in the context of significant federal changes in management functions and larger trends imparting them.

While catastrophic breaking of trust can serve as both a cautionary tale and context for reform, genuine improvements can demonstrate why caring about trust and trustworthiness should be a north star for public sector organizations. To keep ourselves from falling into the depths of despair (and to recall why this work matters), we asked key functional areas in government would look like if they engendered high trust? Or, in other words: is building trust in the federal workforce, federal procurement systems, public sector customer experience, and federal data systems worthwhile?

Below are the four best case scenarios generated at the workshop, summarizing the best case scenarios for trust each of these functional areas. 

Great Public Service is the Defining Image of American Governance

Imagine a future United States where public service is a dream opportunity and a top destination for talent at all levels. College students and young professionals aspire to join, knowing they’ll find meaningful work, fair treatment, and opportunities to build diverse lifelong careers based on the experiences they gain. Mid-career professionals move easily between government, academia, and the private sector, enriching federal expertise without stigma or political baggage, and impacting other sectors with their public-benefit mindset. Public servants are celebrated as heroes: not just astronauts or diplomats, but patent examiners, social security field officer workers, and climate analysts. Pop cultures elevates the everyday work of government as essential, positive, and valued, and audiences are exposed to a wide range of public service missions in film, TV, literature and more. People are motivated to better understand the diverse roles of government, and the public sees and feels the government’s responsiveness in their daily lives through their engagement with civil servants of all kinds.

Congress treats workforce issues as foundational to national strength, supporting reforms that sustain a professional, accountable, and diverse civil service. Systems of accountability ensure power is used responsibly, building confidence in government safety and fairness. Flexible hiring and a reliable stream of talent allow agencies to focus on long-term excellence rather than constant reinvention. 

As a result, the federal government becomes one of the most competitive sectors (federal internships are career launchers; federal experience is a resume enhancement). The U.S. sets a global standard for how a trusted, high-performing workforce  can underpin democracy. Pride in government work spreads outward, creating a virtuous cycle in which esteem, talent, and outcomes reinforce one another: people want to be on the winning and admired team. Great people doing great work, visibly and with integrity, become the defining image of American governance.

Federal Procurement is a Driver of Public Trust

In a world where trust in federal procurement is high, it’s widely recognized as one of government’s most powerful levers for delivering public value. Agencies consistently prioritize best value, ensuring that contracts translate into real improvements for people’s lives.

Procurement choices reflect thoughtful strategy and agencies clearly distinguish what must remain core government work from what can be outsourced. Institutional and technical expertise is fully integrated into the acquisitions workforce, making government a smart, discerning buyer that understands both the risks and the opportunities of each decision.

Transparency and clear communication are the norm, with citizens and Congress able to see how contracts are awarded, what outcomes are promised, and whether those outcomes are delivered. Confidence grows that procurement serves the public. Over time, procurement becomes a driver of trust: government dollars are seen to consistently buy not just goods and services, but fairness, innovation, and better outcomes for the American people.

Trustworthy Customer Experience is a Core Democratic Value

A world with high trust in federal customer experience has services are so effective, intuitive, and respectful that they become a source of national pride. Citizens never stand in long lines, wrestle with redundant forms, struggle with translations, wonder if their information is secure. Eligibility, verification, and delivery are proactive, straightforward, and seamless. Co-design is a given and people feel they have a role in shaping the services they receive. Every interaction feels human-centered, affirming dignity rather than imposing burdens. 

This transformation is backed by strong political interest and political will. Recognizing their duty and role, Congress passes outcomes-based legislation, trusting agencies to determine the best delivery methods and iteratively measuring success by results, not process. Bipartisan support sustains investments in modern service delivery, while spending is transparently tied to clear and easy to understand metrics that are tracked, shaped by, and shared with the public.

Trust grows as effective services demonstrate government’s capacity to deliver on promises. Civic participation expands as people see their input reflected in co-designed services. Authentic, two-way communication reinforces this trust, showing that government not only serves but also listens. Over time, customer experience becomes a core democratic value: a system where outcomes are clear, accountability is real, and government simply works beautifully for the people it serves.

The Federal Data System is the Backbone of Democracy

Data underpins a government that is responsive, accountable, and anticipatory. Citizens no longer repeat the same information across agencies, with an “ask once” environment ensuring seamless, user-centric service. Secure and interoperable systems give government real-time insight, enabling proactive responses to emerging needs and building trust through visible speed and accuracy.

Data careers thrive inside government. Staff are recruited for their analytical and stewardship expertise, with robust pathways for career development. A diffuse community of data talent across academia, private industry, and civic tech reinforces data literacy and feeds a pipeline of skilled professionals into federal service. Government becomes a best place to work for data experts who want their skills to have national impact.

The public data ecosystem itself is diversified, reducing risks of manipulation by spreading data sourcing across suppliers. Public participation in data generation strengthens trust and relevance. Shared factual foundations guide decisions, ensuring policy debates are grounded in evidence rather than misinformation, and science agencies, service providers, and policy offices all benefit. 

Conclusion

Feeling inspired? Take another deep breath – this workshop wasn’t about painting a utopia, but about imagining what’s possible when trust in government is built and sustained. What should stay with you is that trust isn’t an abstract ideal; it’s the foundation that enables strong workforces, smarter procurement, seamless services, and data ecosystems that keep government responsive and accountable. And while no single reform flips a switch to “high trust,” together they can create a virtuous cycle of legitimacy, performance, and pride. What we can do is this: as the government capacity community designs reforms and innovations, they can embed trust as both a principle and an outcome (how? Part three of this series will dig into concrete strategies!). These scenarios aren’t predictions but tools to chart the upside of reform, helping us see how investment in people, processes, services, and data can make government stronger.

American trust in government institutions is at historic lows. That’s a known known and a long term trend. But while experts are right to worry about the trajectory of such trust in public life, this diagnosis is broad and hard to rectify given the broad spectrum of roles the federal government plays in American life. Trust in government is not generic–the way Americans encounter and engage government systems can vary significantly. At a period where the federal government is undergoing significant changes in how it hires, buys, collects and organizes data, and delivers, deeper exploration of trust in these facets as worthwhile.  

At a recent workshop hosted by the Federation of American Scientists, we explored the nature of trust in specific government functions, the risk and implications of breaking trust in those systems, and how we’d known we were getting close to specific trust breaking points. The scenarios we developed were not only meant as cautionary tales, but to serve as reference foundations to plan against for any future reform efforts, should trust continue to decline generally or specifically. Experts considering reforms and improvements to key government functions may additionally need to take into consideration whether and how stakeholders will re-engage with low-trust systems, or how to grapple with second and third order effects of trust declines like growing non-governmental alternatives. For example, reforms to the federal talent management system could need to adapt to a world where Americans do not trust that civil service is a durable career path, or do not trust that hiring is nonpartisan. 

What do we know about trust in government and why does trust matter

Trust in government has been on a downward trend in not only the United States but many democracies worldwide. Citizens bring good reasons for their decreasing trust–government response to disasters, approaches to transparency and accountability, profound historic inequities, disparate beliefs on the role of government, and much more–and many government leaders take these trends seriously. Scholars have considered the consequences of low trust through many lenses, but the short version is the legitimacy of democracies relies on trust. Lower trust means less engagement with functions that government performs uniquely or drives, whether disaster response, weather warnings, federal benefits, security functions, public health, or independent data collection and analysis–and that lesser engagement means those functions work less well for everyone else. This has a cascading impact as democratic institutions weaken when government cannot, does not, or is not believed to deliver on expectations of its citizens.

Approach and Methods

The “Future of Trust” workshop at the Federation of American Scientists brought together government capacity experts to examine how trust operates within specific government functions, the risks and consequences of its erosion, and what it would take to rebuild. Recognizing that trust in government is not generic, participants explored how Americans’ varied encounters with federal systems (such as hiring and talent management, data collection and reliability, procurement, and customer service) shape their perceptions and engagement. The group considered potential first- and second-order impacts of declining trust, early indicators that key thresholds may be at risk, and strategies for either restoring trust or adapting to a new reality. The discussion was grounded in the context of significant federal changes in management functions and larger trends imparting them.

Despite breakouts into the four different functional areas, there were several common and intersecting attributes of possible broken trust worst case scenarios, including:

• Greater citizen disinterest in engaging government, more “opting out” which lowers quality of public services and goods
• Increased cynicism about government
• Disconnect between commitments or public statements and reality
• Erosion of expertise and capacity in government
• Increase in seeking non-government alternatives that do not serve all
• Failure to deliver intended services
• Increased partisanship
• Increased bias or corruption, or perceptions thereof

Overall, participants anticipated a cycle of declining trust, leading to a hollowing out of government capacity and expertise, which in turn would result in a failure to deliver essential services effectively, further eroding public trust and fostering widespread cynicism and disengagement. Sounds like something we should take a look at!

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Workforce

What do we know about trust in the civil service?

The limited research available American’s understanding of and feelings about the federal civil service is complex. In 2024 surveys by the Partnership for Public Service, Americans demonstrate overwhelmingly strong beliefs in the importance of nonpartisan civil service our democracy, and that politicization of the civil service does harm to government effectiveness (even among those who support cuts to the Federal government). But feelings on federal workers themselves are split: just over half of of Americans belief their civil servants are competent and committed to helping “people like me.” In similar 2022 research, other positive qualities have a comparable breakdown (such as “hard-working” or “committed to public service” in research by the Partnership, and “great deal or a fair amount of confidence” in research by Pew). As a rule, however, views on federal workers are more positive than on the federal government itself. As for why federal workers choose to serve, the majority of Americans surveyed believed serving their communities was a key factor (57%)–but far more believed it was job security (77%). 

Based on recent and significant changes to policies around federal hiring and civil service protections, trends around politicization of the federal workforce, and the significant cuts made via reductions in force and other workforce shaping initiatives, we wanted to better understand things like:

• If Americans’ trust in the federal civil service as a promising career path changes, how might that impact the United States ability to recruit the government workforce it needs?
• If Americans trust that federal workers are hired and retained based on merit and performance change, how might that impact American’s engagement with government?

Participants considered scenarios where trust in the civil service as an institution and employer improves significantly and where trust breaks down, and outlined specific attributes they would anticipate in both best and worst cases. For the worst case, participants were concerned about cascading effects on recruitment, performance, public perception, and the ability of government to function effectively.

• An American public that does not believe the civil service has an important government function therefore does not want to use, or participate in it
• Lack of interest by outstanding candidates in federal jobs, resulting in no experts available for relevant policy issues. 
• At the same time, the “covenant is broken” around stability versus pay, meaning no one wants to work in the government for what it pays if stability dissolves. 
• A lower esteem for service careers would mean a large group of Americans held in contempt and poorly treated by communities. The government would become “an employer of last resort”. 
• People are convinced that the federal workforce is hyperpartisan. There would be widespread pervasive cynicism about corruption.
• Civil servants themselves would lose grip on whether their work can even be done in a non-partisan way. The federal workforce would be perceived as “full of partisan hacks”. 
• Expansion of the political staffing system and a widespread use of “Schedule F” would allow a majority of staff to be hired and fired with each administration. Turnover creates huge, unmeetable burden and perpetual gaps: work simply cannot get done. 
• Cycle of increasing distrust would increase because the link between the workforce and results for citizens breaks down. There is widespread decline in effectiveness, leading to a less safe, lower quality of life, and less prosperous nation. Major scandals on accountability, due to people not knowing their jobs and/or a failure to deliver services, builds on the negative stereotypes and stigmas about government work would become true. This leads to mistreatment of current public employees.
• Congress would “never decide to care about the fed workforce,” with negative polarization against reform making it impossible for the civil service to recover. 

What falling trust in the federal workforce may look like in practice

Trust is obviously a fungible and flexible concept, changing both based on context and individual experience–participants did not imagine a bright line between overarching trust and distrust. With that in mind, we considered key signals that might indicate that breakdowns in trust, or negative consequences from such, are growing more likely. These signals range from shifts in hiring patterns and workforce composition, to declines in service quality, to more visible public and political hostility toward civil servants. Together, they provide early warning signs that the relationship between the public and its professional government workforce is fraying. For example:

• Decreased numbers of applications to civil service roles, fewer applicants for mission-critical jobs, and fewer young people accepting and starting federal jobs
• Increasing applications / interest in government support contractor roles
• A shift in the ratio of first-time applicants versus repeat applicants for federal jobs
• Negative results from Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys (FEVs)
• Unusual staff promotions or inappropriate leadership appointments
• Increased number of Schedule F appointments
• First and major second rounds of firings of Schedule F employees for questionable charges
• Major second rounds of voluntary departures
• Repeated extensions of hiring freezes
• Increased threats against or attacks on public servants
• Increased diversion of money or resources to contractors for previously governmental functions
• Less diversity in the federal workforce
• Noticeable changes in service quality, particularly related to workforce-heavy fields on front lines and measurable decreases in customer trust or service experiences
• Negative profiles of public servants in press or media
• Negative mentions of public servants in congressional record
• Decrease interest in pipeline programs (PMF, Marshall Scholarship)
• Decrease in applications to Master of Public Policy (MPP) and related educational programs
• Decrease in outreach to contact centers (as trust in civil servants to respond appropriately declines)
• Increase in private service providers who concierge government services (as trust in civil servants to deliver declines)
• Corruption scandals and higher incidence of corruption or crime by federal employees;
• Scandals related to accountability of staff due to loss of expertise (e.g., FEMA issues or misuse of funds)

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Procurement

What do we know about trust in government procurement?

There’s little explicit research on American views on the U.S. government as a trustworthy business partner, or its ability to effectively procure goods or services. One can take signals from things like participation in the federal market (generally competitive but with declines in both prime contractors and small businesses, and greater concentration in vendors) and attempts to shape its policies and procedures (active), but that only addresses specific trust audiences. Similarly, bid protest trends may be an indicator of views on the system; these have declined by 32% in the last decade. With close to three-quarters of a trillion dollars are spent on contracts annually–more than double federal worker compensation–American views on waste may be relevant. Partnership research says 85% of Americans believed the government to be “wasteful” in 2024, up 15 points from 2022, with 74% believing it is corrupt. These signals are concerning but not necessarily a clear critique of federal procurement. While these are weak signals, what is clear is that procurement can be a significant vehicle for trust building: transparency, integrity, fair decision-making, and effective public outcomes from procurements are public mechanisms with the capacity to demonstrate accountability and trustworthiness. 

Procurement processes, outcomes, and participants are always evolving, but recent trends (growth in AI) and events (contract cancellations and overall greater scrutiny early in the Administration, alongside the well-received streamlining Revolutionary FAR overhaul) made us want to better understand the implications of changes to procurement trust landscape. What if, for example, American businesses’ trust in the reliability of government contract agreements shifts? What impacts does that have on the federal government’s ability to buy and outsource?  

Participants considered scenarios where trust in the federal procurement improves significantly and where trust breaks down, and outlined specific attributes they would anticipate in both best and worst cases. In more negative scenarios, participants projected the risk that procurement systems would be hollowed out, captured by private interests, or stripped of the government expertise, fairness, and accountability needed to serve the public interest. Some imagined outcomes:

• The market would become so consolidated that only one or two businesses could deliver anything. 
• Everything is privatized and contracts are not managed, with nobody in-house to buy or manage complex contracts, and a complete lack of technical expertise within the government (“Who still knows how to build ships?”). 
• The business community would define what services are needed, not the government, and these services would not be tied to strategy or mission. 
• The government would be completely overshadowed by consultants, lacking the capacity or skill to be a good partner with contractors. 
• The contracting process would devolve into a spoils system, becoming more and more unfair, with insidious corruption. 
• There would be a major diffusion of accountability or responsibility, leading to no trust in public service provision, and political leadership could allow contractors to take the blame. This would manifest as a “procurement version of nepotism”.

What falling trust in federal procurement may look like in practice

We also considered key signals that might indicate that breakdowns in trust, or negative consequences from such, are growing more likely. Participants suggested monitoring things like:

• Changes in the number of bids/proposals received
• The share of awards going to non-incumbents, new entrants, small business enterprises, or disadvantaged business enterprises (DBEs), as well as the time it takes to get the first award
• A lack of variety in who is getting subs or supplier contracts
• An increase in contracts for things that are inherently governmental
• Decreasing technical capacity within the government
• Scores on vendor performance evaluations
• More “sign-and-forget” contracting
• An increase in contracts awarded to donors
• A decrease in the degree to which the government acts as the integrator
• Contracts that do not provide what they are supposed to

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Customer Experience (CX)

What do we know about trust in government services?

Successive administrations have sought to increase and rebuild trust in the federal government through improvements in federal services. These efforts have born out: several measures have shown positive public views of federal services (e.g., the Partnership’s research finds around 75% or more are satisfied with individual services), and in 2024, the American Customer Satisfaction Index showed citizen satisfaction with U.S. federal government services reaches the highest level since 2017, with recent growth surpassing private counterparts. One example: the IRS’s Direct File free tax filing service. 

Federal service providers with the greater number of customer interactions are required to collect and monitor post-transaction customer feedback, including views on trust and drivers of trust, and for a period these were shared in a public dashboard. Overall, about half of services reported that a significant majority of customers (75% or more) trusted the relevant agency, with primary drivers of such trust being service effectiveness and ease. Such data is used by agencies to evaluate and improve services, and across services to identify trends, risks and opportunities across common services. The Office of Management and Budget Customer Experience Team makes the strongest case why this work on trust matters in their explainer: 

When individuals feel high levels of trust, they are more likely to seek out information from the government, access services, and use benefits they are eligible for. To support the goal of increasing trust in service providers, and the government overall, HISPs (high impact service providers) are required to collect and report trust data, and use customer feedback to continuously improve services.

The current administration has not pursued the same emphasis on customer service yet, but has recognized it as a critical factor for agencies to prioritize in their reform initiatives and committed to eliminating waste and fraud from such programs. At the same time, they have cut or curtailed initiatives once aimed at improving trust, such as field office and contact center availability at the Social Security Administration, or free and streamlined tax filing services. With the clear link between trust and impact, we wanted to better understand implications of changes in trust to federal services, exploring questions like: what if Americans change their views on whether applications for benefits and services are adjudicated fairly? What if Americans believe that services will be sustainably and reliably available for themselves, but not for their communities?

Participants considered scenarios where trust in the federal services improves significantly and where trust breaks down, and outlined specific attributes they would anticipate in both best and worst cases. In more negative outcomes, participants projected that federal services would become fragmented, inequitable, and alienating—eroding participation, driving people toward alternative providers, and deepening the gap between public expectations and the government’s ability to deliver, with attributes like:

• Rhetoric and public perception would not match the actual quality of service
• A developing trust divide would emerge among different users of federal programs, with people living in different realities regarding the quality of government CX based on the services they use
• A worsening government CX experience would also drive down other forms of political participation. 
• People would withdraw from government participation (e.g., not providing info, lower uptake of services, stop paying taxes). 
• People would shift their reliance to nonprofits, community-based organizations (CBOs), and intermediaries, further straining the system. This would undermine support for investment in government services. 
• There would be confusing changes to services (e.g., changes to phone service at Social Security). 
• Customers would be more prone to fraud or scams from external parties amidst confusing changes. 
• There would be uncertainty about the status or future of programs.
• Structural barriers to access and opportunity would remain unaddressed. 
• It would become easier for the government to collect unnecessary data, which would violate privacy and undermine trust. 
• Trust would be exploited without real power-sharing, leading to “participation fatigue”. 
• Digital-first or digital-only transitions would worsen access gaps. 
• Speed and efficiency (perhaps through AI) would undermine due process and human review. “Efficiency” would lead to diminished capacity to deliver services. 
• Mass departure of civil servants with decreasing faith in their own ability to be effective, crashing many programs

What falling trust in federal service delivery may look like in practice

We also considered key signals that might indicate that breakdowns in trust, or negative consequences from such, are growing more likely. Participants suggested monitoring things like:

These are indicators irrespective of performance, though may be linked to performance

• Sharply reduced uptake of government services (e.g., drop-offs in SNAP, Medicaid)
• Walmart quarterly earnings (indicating SNAP use is down)
• Reduced tax compliance
• Increased college drop-out rates (FAFSA utilization)
• Surges in negative media coverage and inaccurate narratives
• Increased traffic in Reddit forums for federal programs/agencies
• Spikes in constituent complaints to Congress regarding government services
• Increases in congressional casework data and application volumes
• A dearth of knowledge regarding the collection, usage, and reporting of data
• Weaponized customer data
• Violence perpetrated against and/or by public servants
• Staff loss at critical service delivery entities
• Reduced employee engagement and an increase in whistleblower complaints
• Increased charitable giving (as people turn to non-governmental support)
• Increased demand for non-government support services
• New private businesses concierging or replacing government services
• Decreased funding for government services (unrelated to delegation to states)
• Increases in shelter censuses

These indicate lower performance 

• Long waits, overwhelmed call centers, and longer appeals processes
• Increases in error rate data for programs like SNAP or SBA loans
• Higher denial or error rates based on zip code, geography, race, income, etc.
• Institutional regression, a return to compliance over outcomes (focusing on KPIs only related to speed/volume)
• Increases in Social Security Administration and other backlog measures

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Data

What do we know about trust in federal data?

One of the hallmarks of the extensive federal data and statistical apparatus is credibility. Government and economic institutions rely on data the federal government collects, analyzes, and publishes for decisionmaking from spanning interest rates to hurricane evacuations; public health institutions provide and rely on insights from the federal government for basic care to pandemic preparedness. The more than 300,000 data sets in the federal data ecosystem generally have few substitutes and underwrite, in some form, every sector in the country. With that mandate–and pressure–major federal statistical program have historically taken pains to both showcase and increase transparency in their methods, though not without criticism. 

Despite its import, trust in federal data systems are hard to measure–many Americans do not access them, or realize their ubiquity and relevance. Still, a recent NORC-Amerispeak survey found that 57% of Americans tend to trust federal statistics, with majorities also believing that policymakers and businesses rely on federal statistics to make decisions, stable with 2024 findings. Despite these results, half also have no view on whether federal statistics are biased. The Partnership’s research shows that in 2024 only 15% of Americans believe the federal government is transparent (a measure that has been on the decline since they began their research in 2022). When asked specifically about agencies known to have major data missions (Census, CDC), majorities have favorable opinions. That said, some studies found significant declines in confidence in public health institutions during the pandemic (though still with small majorities) and partisan splits on the role of science in policymaking. 

The Trump administration clearly recognizes the power and influence of the federal statistical ecosystem, having highlighted the need for high quality data and a strong data infrastructure in the recent AI Action Plan release. But it also applies that understanding to removing or changing datasets that do not align with their perspectives and priorities. These moves have generated significant criticism from data customers and champions, who have banded together to preserve key components outside government. While there is indication that published federal data and statistics are less trustworthy, the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner based on jobs reporting raised significant alarm, as have stated plans to review and make changes to the federal jobs report process. With these major disruptions, we wanted to better understand the potential implications to changes in trust in federal data, and explore questions like:

• What might the impact be of changes to American trust in public health data accuracy, or or ability to warn of public health concerns?
• If American trust in science data is divisive across partisan or other lines, what are the potential impacts? 
• What if Americans are distrustful of the Census in disparate ways? 

Participants considered scenarios where trust in the federal data ecosystems improves significantly and where trust breaks down, and outlined specific attributes they would anticipate in both best and worst cases. In the most negative scenarios, participants projected that, the federal data ecosystem would lose its integrity, accessibility, and public purpose, becoming politicized, biased, and unevenly available. Possible outcomes include:

• Data integrity is politically compromised or punished. 
• Policy that relies on statistical ecosystem is or seems untethered from reality
• Private actors would be able to enter the market and stratify who can afford access to high-quality data
• Increased purposeful and inadvertent bias in federal data sets and products.
• AI that draw from government data would be built on biased data. 
• The government would no longer produce data as a public good. 
• Skewed analysis reinforced by changing underlying data, making it impossible to challenge outcomes. 
• Continued partisan split about purposes and outcomes of data.
• Destabilization in sectors where the federal government typically fills a market gap. 
• Weaponization of data to undermine civil society and human rights.
• Government develops an “information panopticon”. 

What falling trust in the federal data may look like in practice

We also considered key signals that might indicate that breakdowns in trust, or negative consequences from such, are growing more likely. Participants suggested monitoring things like:

• Changes in updates to data repositories and clearinghouses
• Delays in provision of govt-provided data
• Reduction of access to archives
• Skinnier and federal data based publications
• Government releases data that is flawed 
• Government gets caught abusing/misusing data; 
• Clear or tacit service quality decline
• Government relies on AI for reporting typically based on federal statistical systems
• Participation rate going down in federal data collection
• Data on government performance and oversight disappearing, such as accountability data, Office of Personnel Management data, usaspending.gov, and social security performance data
• More private sector entrants into data brokering market
• Private alternatives of typical federal data systems are launched
• Breaches of privacy laws (Title 13, 26, Privacy Act)
• Increased political oversight or pre-publication review of science and data publications
• Budgetary changes to federal statistical systems and data / evidence work
• Staff departures in federal statistical and evidence roles
• People feel like their lived experience is really different from what government shares
• Divergent results from private and public sources
• Backsliding on Evidence Act Implementation
• Backsliding on data modernization efforts
• “Sharpie scenario” redux across datasets (political interference in data-driven predictions and reports)
• Incidents where good-government groups are calling out government integrity, credibility, transparency
• Declining FOIA response times regarding federal data ecosystem

Worried yet?  Take a deep breath–this workshop was meant to help experts like you plan and prepare, not predict the future (ok, maybe worry a little). What should stay with you is that trust is the bedrock of many vital functions in government, and while such trust can weather variability, trust breakdowns have consequences. And, critically there’s no bright line that will suggest when that shift starts or cascades. What we can do is this: As the government capacity community dreams up reforms and improvements to key management and operating systems, they can bake in considerations of trust to their proposals (how? Part two of this series will offer some ideas!). The scenarios and signals are tools for anticipating and navigating the complex realities of governing in an era where trust cannot be taken for granted. They highlight the need for reform strategies that are resilient not only to technical and operational challenges, but also to shifts in public perception, political dynamics, and the broader ecosystem of service and data providers. By grounding reforms in an understanding of how trust is built, eroded, and rebuilt, and by preparing for the downstream consequences of its loss, leaders can design systems that remain effective, legitimate, and connected to the people they serve.

And the Direct File product model approach shouldn’t just be for product teams, but all teams

Once a year Code for America brings together 1000+ of the most curious, forward thinking public sector minds at their annual Summit. Teams from across the country, from the federal, state, and local governments come together to discuss tangible ways to have a greater impact on their communities and constituents. 

I was asked to give a talk on what lessons organizations can learn from my experience working on Direct File – the IRS’s beloved, free, online tax filing service – and how governments at any level can embark on greater digital transformation. You can check it out.

Merici @ Code For America

As you can tell, I’m proud of what our team accomplished with Direct File – but going forward, services similar to Direct File should be the bare minimum that government agencies offer. We proved that excellent digital experiences are possible in the federal government and the Direct File playbook can be adapted for not just new services, but the approach is applicable to wider agency transformation. The key plays – prototyping from day one, relentless user focus, empowering teams and holding them accountable for mission-level outcomes – are transferable not just from a product launch, but also to support agency modernization.   

What can we learn from Direct File? 

From my vantage point, Direct File success story offers both inspiration and frustration. First, the inspiration:

With satisfaction rates higher than Apple or Netflix and an 86% increase in trust for the IRS (PDF), Direct File proved that government can deliver excellent digital services by following this playbook:

• Prototype, even when you don’t think you’ve got a shot
• Appoint a single service owner
• Obsessively put the product in front of users with all different abilities – every day
• Build an in-house team that is both technically savvy, and in this example, tax savvy
• Build a service team – join up product and customer support so you have a continuous, real time feedback loop
• Use product data to inform product updates and reduce errors  (in this example, the number of rejected returns submitted)
• Skip flashy launches in favor of actually helping people and their experience with government services. 

This wasn’t a playbook that was handed to us. The Direct File team empowered itself without waiting for permission and ultimately demonstrated when you have when you bust through siloes, anything can be possible in government. 

Now, the frustration:

This success – a successful, high stakes launch of a complex tax product that people loved – highlighted a painful truth: excellent products alone don’t transform institutions. 

Despite Direct File’s achievements, it remained largely isolated within the broader IRS ecosystem. It was bolted onto existing systems rather than fundamentally changing how government operates. The public interest / civic technology sector has spent a decade of launching brilliant services and building strong teams and yet, the pattern remains the same – we create adjacent solutions without addressing the underlying institutional problems. With only 22% of Americans trusting the federal government to do the right thing, this incremental approach is no longer sufficient.

The path forward requires thinking bigger and going beyond the margins. Direct File should be the floor, not the ceiling – the bare minimum standard for government services. We need leaders who understand that government is fundamentally a software organization operating within bureaucracy built before telephones existed, and who are curious to explore how to run an entire agency with the same user-centric, technology-strategic approach that made Direct File successful. Technology and excellent user outcomes must be viewed as a strategic imperative at the highest levels, not an afterthought left to a silo within a large organization. 

Building the future, today 

While the chaotic ransacking of federal programs and firing hundreds of thousands of employees is no longer making headlines and seemingly slowed down come to an end, the principles of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will likely persist. Budget cuts will further constrain already constrained organizations.

Now, as a traumatized federal workforce is left to pick up the pieces of a government that was already in a precarious position pre-DOGE, the question is how can the government deliver for users in the future? Not just replace the capacity we’ve lost, but build a new infrastructure for federal employees to deliver real improvements for Americans that is relevant and resilient in the modern era?

Starting immediately where feasible, and with a vision for what’s possible, we should focus on building better institutions rooted in service to contemporary constituents. To do this we must start thinking of our institutions as places where, to use a software term, there is continuous improvement built in from the get-go.

Right now, I’m connecting with people who believe this is possible and necessary. We come from a diverse range of perspectives but we are all excited about exploring new operating models, theories of change, and building effective government services. We are all focused on providing tangible and ambitious new structures and services that can be implemented given current constraints, and hopefully built upon in the future. 

Direct File showed that government can deliver in a new way that increases trust and raises expectations. Giving up on this momentum and progress is not an option – people rely on their government and will continue to do so in spite of whatever disdain elected officials may have for those who design and deliver those services. 

As I said in my Code for America talk “The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.” 

We cannot afford to lose the progress we’ve gained, the lessons that have been learned over decades – and we can’t wait to take action. Connect with us to share your ideas where we can use technology and modern product led approaches to improve not just government service delivery, but also how we can reimagine how government works, now.

On the left is the Bankside Power Station in 1953. That vast relic of the fossil era once towered over London, oily smoke pouring from its towering chimney. These days, Bankside looks like the right:

Bankside Power Station in 1953 via A London Inheritance; Bankside today via the Telegraph.

The old power plant’s vast turbine hall is now at the heart of the airy Tate Modern Art Museum; sculptures rest where the boilers once churned.

Bankside’s evolution into the Tate illustrates that transformations, both literal and figurative, are possible for our energy and economic systems. Some degree of demolition – if paired with a plan – can open up space for something innovative and durable.

Today, the entire energy sector is undergoing a massive transformation. After years of flat energy demand served by aging fossil power plants, solar energy and battery storage are increasingly dominating energy additions to meet rising load. Global investment in clean energy will be twice as big as investment in fossil fuels this year. But in the United States, the energy sector is also undergoing substantial regulatory demolition, courtesy of a wave of executive and Congressional attacks and sweeping potential cuts to tax credits for clean energy. 

What’s missing is a compelling plan for the future. The plan certainly shouldn’t be to cede leadership on modern energy technologies to China, as President Trump seems to be suggesting; that approach is geopolitically unwise and, frankly, economically idiotic. But neither should the plan be to just re-erect the systems that are being torn down. Those systems, in many ways, weren’t working. We need a new plan – a new paradigm – for the next era of climate and clean energy progress in the United States.

Asking Good Questions About Climate Policy Designs

How do we turn demolition into a superior remodel? First, we have to agree on what we’re trying to build. Let’s start with what should be three unobjectionable principles.

Principle 1. Climate change is a problem worth fixing – fast. Climate change is staggeringly expensive. Climate change also wrecks entire cities, takes lives, and generally makes people more miserable. Climate change, in short, is a problem we must fix. Ignoring and defunding climate science is not going to make it go away.

Principle 2. What we do should work. Tackling the climate crisis isn’t just about cleaning up smokestacks or sewer outflows; it’s about shifting a national economic system and physical infrastructure that has been rooted in fossil fuels for more than a century. Our responses must reflect this reality. To the extent possible, we will be much better served by developing fit-for-purpose solutions rather than just press-ganging old institutions, statutes, and technologies into climate service. 

Principle 3. What we do should last. The half-life of many climate strategies in the United States has been woefully short. The Clean Power Plan, much touted by President Obama, never went into force. The Trump administration has now turned off California’s clean vehicle programs multiple times. Much of this hyperpolarized back-and-forth is driven by a combination of far-right opposition to regulation as a matter of principle and the fossil fuel industry pushing mass de-regulation for self-enrichment – a frustrating reality, but one that can only be altered by new strategies that are potent enough to displace vocal political constituencies and entrenched legacy corporate interests.

With these principles in mind, the path forward becomes clearer. We can agree that ambitious climate policy is necessary; protecting Americans from climate threats and destabilization (Principle 1) directly aligns with the founding Constitutional objectives of ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, and promoting general welfare. We can also agree that the problem in front of us is figuring out which tools we need, not how to retain the tools we had, regardless of their demonstrated efficacy (Principle 2). And we can recognize that achieving progress in the long run requires solutions that are both politically and economically durable (Principle 3).

Below, we consider how these principles might guide our responses to this summer’s crop of regulatory reversals and proposed shifts in federal investment.

Honing Regulatory Approaches

The Trump Administration recently announced that it plans to dismantle the “endangerment finding” – the legal predicate for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and transportation; meanwhile, the Senate revoked permission for California to enforce key car and truck emission standards. It has also proposed to roll back key power plant toxic and greenhouse gas standards. We agree with those who think that these actions are scientifically baseless and likely illegal, and therefore support efforts to counter them. But we should also reckon honestly with how the regulatory tools we are defending have played out so far.

Federal and state pollution rules have indisputably been a giant public-health victory. EPA standards under the Clean Air Act led directly to dramatic reductions in harmful particulate matter and other air pollutants, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and avoiding millions of cases of asthma and other respiratory diseases. Federal regulations similarly caused mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants to drop by 90% in just over a decade. Pending federal rollbacks of mercury rules thus warrant vocal opposition. In the transportation sector, tailpipe emissions standards for traditional combustion vehicles have been impressively effective. These and other rules have indeed delivered some climate benefits by forcing the fossil fuel industry to face pollution clean-up costs and driving development of clean technologies.

But if our primary goal is motivating a broad energy transition (i.e., what needs to happen per Principle 1), then we should think beyond pollution rules as our only tools – and allocate resources beyond immediate defensive fights. Why? The first reason is that, as we have previously written, these rules are poorly equipped to drive that transition. Federal and state environmental agencies can do many things well, but running national economic strategy and industrial policy primarily through pollution statutes is hardly the obvious choice (Principle 2). 

Consider the power sector. The most promising path to decarbonize the grid is actually speeding up replacement of old coal and gas plants with renewables by easing unduly complex interconnection processes that would speed adding clean energy to address rising demand, and allow the old plants to retire and be replaced – not bolting pollution-control devices on ancient smokestacks. That’s an economic and grid policy puzzle, not a pollution regulatory challenge, at heart. Most new power plants are renewable- or battery-powered anyway. Some new gas plants might be built in response to growing demand, but the gas turbine pipeline is backed up, limiting the scope of new fossil power, and cheaper clean power is coming online much more quickly wherever grid regulators have their act together. Certainly regulations could help accelerate this shift, but the evidence suggests that they may be complementary, not primary, tools.

The upshot is that economics and subnational policies, not federal greenhouse gas regulation, have largely driven power plant decarbonization to date and therefore warrant our central focus. Indeed, states that have made adding renewable infrastructure easy, like Texas, have often been ahead of states, like California, where regulatory targets are stronger but infrastructure is harder to build. (It’s also worth noting that these same economics mean that the Trump Administration’s efforts to revert back to a wholly fossil fuel economy by repealing federal pollution standards will largely fail – again, wrong tool to substantially change energy trajectories.)

The second reason is that applying pollution rules to climate challenges has hardly been a lasting strategy (Principle 3). Despite nearly two decades of trying, no regulations for carbon emissions from existing power plants have ever been implemented. It turns out to be very hard, especially with the rise of conservative judiciaries, to write legal regulations for power plants under the Clean Air Act that both stand up in Court and actually yield substantial emissions reductions. 

In transportation, pioneering electric vehicle (EV) standards from California – helped along by top-down economic leverage applied by the Obama administration – did indeed begin a significant shift and start winning market share for new electric car and truck companies; under the Biden administration, California doubled down with a new set of standards intended to ultimately phase out all sales of gas-powered cars while the EPA issued tailpipe emissions standards that put the industry on course to achieve at least 50% EV sales by 2030. But California’s EV standards have now been rolled back by the Trump administration and a GOP-controlled Congress multiple times; the same is true for the EPA rules. Lest we think that the Republican party is the sole obstacle to a climate-focused regulatory regime that lasts in the auto sector, it is worth noting that Democratic states led the way on rollbacks. Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Vermont all paused, delayed, or otherwise fuzzed up their plans to deploy some of their EV rules before Congress acted against California. The upshot is that environmental standards, on their own, cannot politically sustain an economic transition at this scale without significant complementary policies.

Now, we certainly shouldn’t abandon pollution rules – they deliver massive health and environmental benefits, while forcing the market to more accurately account for the costs of polluting technologies, But environmental statutes built primarily to reduce smokestack and tailpipe emissions remain important but are simply not designed to be the primary driver of wholesale economic and industrial change. Unsurprisingly, efforts to make them do that anyway have not gone particularly well – so much so that, today, greenhouse gas pollution standards for most economic sectors either do not exist, or have run into implementation barriers. These observations should guide us to double down on the policies that improve the economics of clean energy and clean technology — from financial incentives to reforms that make it easier to build — while developing new regulatory frameworks that avoid the pitfalls of the existing Clean Air Act playbook. For example, we might learn from state regulations like clean electricity standards that have driven deployment and largely withstood political swings.

To mildly belabor the point – pollution standards form part of the scaffolding needed to make climate progress, but they don’t look like the load-bearing center of it.

Refocusing Industrial Policy

Our plan for the future demands fresh thinking on industrial policy as well as regulatory design. Years ago, Nobel laureate Dr. Elinor Ostrom pointed out that economic systems shift not as a result of centralized fiat, from the White House or elsewhere, but from a “polycentric” set of decisions rippling out from every level of government and firm. That proposition has been amply borne out in the clean energy space by waves of technology innovation, often anchored by state and local procurement, regional technology clusters, and pioneering financial institutions like green banks.

The Biden Administration responded to these emerging understandings with the  CHIPS and Science Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – a package of legislation intended to shore up U.S. leadership in clean technology through investments that cut across sectors and geographies. These bills included many provisions and programs with top-down designs, but the package as a whole but did engage with, and encourage, polycentric and deep change.

Here again, taking a serious look at how this package played out can help us understand what industrial policies are most likely to work (Principle 2) and to last (Principle 3) moving forward.

We might begin by asking which domestic clean-technology industries need long-term support and which do not in light of (i) the multi-layered and polycentric structure of our economy, and (ii) the state of play in individual economic sectors and firms at the subnational level. IRA revisions that appropriately phase down support for mature technologies in a given sector or region where deployment is sufficient to cut emissions at an adequate pace could be worth exploring in this light – but only if market-distorting supports for fossil-fuel incumbents are also removed. We appreciate thoughtful reform proposals that have been put forward by those on the left and right.

More directly: If the United States wants to phase down, say, clean power tax credits, such changes should properly be phased with removals of support for fossil power plants and interconnection barriers, shifting the entire energy market towards a fair competition to meet increasing load, as well as new durable regulatory structures that ensure a transition to a low-carbon economy at a sufficient pace. Subsidies and other incentives could appropriately be retained for technologies (e.g., advanced battery storage and nuclear) that are still in relatively early stages and/or for which there is a particularly compelling argument for strengthening U.S. leadership. One could similarly imagine a gradual shift away from EV tax credits – if other transportation system spending was also reallocated to properly balance support among highways, EV charging stations, transit, and other types of transportation infrastructure. In short, economic tools have tremendous power to drive climate progress, but must be paired with the systemic reforms needed to ensure that clean energy technologies have a fair pathway to achieving long-term economic durability.

Our analysis can also touch on geopolitical strategy. It is true that U.S. competitors are ahead in many clean technology fields; it is simultaneously true that the United States has a massive industrial and research base that can pivot ably with support. A pure on-shoring approach is likely to be unwise – and we have just seen courts enjoin the administration’s fiat tariff policy that sought that result. That’s a good opportunity to have a more thoughtful conversation (in which many are already engaging) on areas where tariffs, public subsidies, and other on-shoring planning can actually position our nation for long-term economic competition on clean technology. Opportunities that rise to the top include advanced manufacturing, such as for batteries, and critical industries, like the auto sector. There is also a surprising but potent national security imperative to center clean energy infrastructure in U.S. industrial policy, given the growing threat of foreign cyberattacks that are exploiting “seams” in fragile legacy energy systems.

Finally, our analysis suggests that states, which are primarily responsible for economic policy in their jurisdictions, have a role to play in this polycentric strategy that extends beyond simply replicating repealed federal regulations. States have a real opportunity in this moment to wed regulatory initiatives with creative whole-of-the-economy approaches that can actually deliver change and clean economic diversification, positioning them well to outlast this period of churn and prosper in a global clean energy transition.

A successful and “sticky” modern industrial policy must weave together all of the above considerations – it must be intentionally engineered to achieve economic and political durability through polycentric change, rather than relying solely or predominantly on large public subsidies. 

Conclusion

The Trump Administration has moved with alarming speed to demolish programs, regulations, and institutions that were intended to make our communities and planet more liveable. Such wholesale demolition is unwarranted, unwise, and should not proceed unchecked. At the same time, it is, as ever, crucial to plan for the future. There is broad agreement that achieving an effective, equitable, and ethical energy transition requires us to do something different. Yet there are few transpartisan efforts to boldly reimagine regulatory and economic paradigms. Of course, we are not naive: political gridlock, entrenched special interests, and institutional inertia are formidable obstacles to overcome. But there is still room, and need, to try – and effort bears better fruit when aimed at the right problems. We can begin by seriously debating which past approaches work, which need to be improved, which ultimately need imaginative recasting to succeed in our ever-more complex world. Answers may be unexpected. After all, who would have thought that the ultimate best future of the vast oil-fired power station south of the Thames with which we began this essay would, a few decades later, be a serene and silent hall full of light and reflection?

On May 28, we hosted 40 leaders from across government, civic tech, and advocacy at the Federation of American Scientists’ office in D.C. to reflect and chart the future of public interest tax filing. The backdrop was a wildly successful product beloved by users, which the AP reported DOGE and the Trump administration intend on sunsetting, while the public is calling for easy, free tax filing. This meeting was a coalition of experts unwilling to let this momentum go to waste.

Participants, ranging from former IRS staff and state tax teams to advocates, engineers, and policy veterans, brainstormed how to carry forward the most valuable parts of Direct File. What surfaced was clear: the tool was just the start. The ideas, tech, and values behind it can, and should, be applied far beyond a single product.

The good news: since this convening the IRS released Direct File software and made it open source. 

Key findings

• Build the playbook. Show others, especially states, how Direct File was built, shipped, and maintained at high quality. Own the story, share the code, and make it replicable.
• Scale smart customer support. Direct File redefined what IRS service could look like, with real-time help and data-driven improvements. Let’s apply that bar elsewhere.
• Modernize the bureaucracy. From reforming the Paper Work Reduction Act to common-sense data sharing, participants named concrete ways to untangle red tape and better serve people.
• Unlock better benefits access. Direct File proved tax filing can be an on-ramp to other public benefits. Now let’s make that vision real—with smarter data use and simplified experiences.
• Support the states. Multiple attendees are already collaborating to help states stand up free filing tools or expand access to benefits using the Direct File codebase.

The outcome was shared clarity that the work continues. Direct File wasn’t just a product. It was a proof point that the government can deliver simple, elegant services that work. And the people who made that possible are already thinking about what comes next. The following outlines some of the key ideas, opportunities, and takeaways from the day – note, these are not comprehensive, nor are they commitments set in stone.

Specific Opportunities for Leadership

Theme	Idea / Opportunity	Description / Next Step
Narrative + Legacy for change	Direct File Playbook & Roadshow	Document how Direct File was built and share lessons with agencies and states via a “roadshow” and comms package.
	Build the Narrative	Proactively tell the story of Direct File’s success, especially user satisfaction and cost-effectiveness, to combat misinformation.
Service Delivery	Modernized Customer Support	Promote Direct File’s Live Chat model as a new gold standard for federal digital customer service.
Ecosystem Gaps	DOGE Recovery	What will it take to rebuild capacity and trust after the dismantling of Direct File and cuts to digital services?
	Benefits Integration	Use tax data to help connect people to benefits automatically or semi-automatically.
	Data Flows	Identify and improve key data-sharing bottlenecks
	Industry / Lobby Strategy	How can we anticipate and plan for the work needed for Direct File to survive private interests? How can we build interesting alliances?
	Funding the Progress	Identifying and connecting the disparate parts of this movement who want to fund this work, and who need funding to continue this work.
State + Local Momentum	State Direct File Support	Help states build or extend their own free filing tools (building on NJ/Code for America model).
	State-Federal Integration	Continue building tools that help people file state taxes after using federal Direct File.
Product + Engineering	Open Source Use + Growth	Encourage use of Direct File’s now-public codebase for other benefits or gov services.
	Componentization	Explore how to break various parts of the product into reusable components (e.g., logic, eligibility, assertion model) with documentation that can be used by other agencies.
Institutional + Regulatory	PRA Reform	Tackle burdensome Paperwork Reduction Act process bottlenecks and rules that can hinder fast, responsive service design.
	6103 Modernization	Revisit dated interpretations of tax confidentiality law to allow limited, secure data sharing.
	User Research Mandate	Push for usability testing to be required for all government digital services.
	Language Access	Start work now on high-impact translations beyond Spanish.
	Identity + Access Innovation	Prototype more flexible identity requirements for low-risk returns or refunds.
Movement + Equity	IRS Democratization	Create formal channels for taxpayer voices, especially low-income and underserved, in IRS design and policy.
	Credit Uptake Strategy	Use tax data and eligibility engines to help people get all the credits they qualify for.
	Cross-Gov Benefits Alignment	Align eligibility logic and interfaces across IRS, SSA, CMS, etc., using Direct File-style tech.

Key Resources

IRS Direct File Filing Season 2025 Report
Obtained by Center for Taxpayer Rights through a FOIA request, this report highlights the incredible results of Direct File in the 2025 filing season.

Direct File Source Code on GitHub: The source code for Direct File, currently being actively maintained by the IRS. As a work of the United States Government, this project is in the public domain within the United States of America.

Thank you

I want to thank all the participants who contributed to this important conversation. The event followed the Chatham House framework to create a free and open dialogue; the following organizations agreed to be named:

• American Economic Liberties Project
• Economic Security Project
• Groundwork Collaborative
• New Practice Lab
• Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator

Thank you to our incredible facilitators, former Direct File teammates Allison Abbott, Sam Powers, and Andrea Schneider; and civic tech leader and friend of Direct File, Erie Meyer.

And thank you to the Federation of American Scientists for hosting.

On May 29, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) published two memoranda that could substantially reshape federal hiring. The first–“Merit Hiring Plan”–issued with the White House Domestic Policy Council—implements Executive Order 14170.  The second provides guidance on “Hiring and Talent Development for the Senior Executive Service”. Spanning 53 pages, the documents are written in dense HR jargon that can overwhelm even seasoned practitioners. To clarify their meaning and impact, the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists have teamed up to translate both memos for journalists, researchers, and the general public.

The Memos Generally: Lots To Like, Dangerous Partisanship, & A Long Road Ahead

The memos, at their core, attempt to address well-documented and long-existing challenges: federal hiring is too sluggish, procedural, and opaque. Both of our organizations have long argued for the need to move faster, hire better, and hold poor performing employees accountable while still adhering to the merit system principles.  A high-performing, agile, and engaged federal workforce is essential if Americans are to trust if Americans are to trust that laws passed by Congress will be executed quickly, competently and efficiently. 

These memos are the latest in a long line of efforts by Presidents of both parties to bring common sense to federal hiring and performance – speed up the hiring process, focus on the skills to do the job, evaluate those skills objectively, and share resources across agencies to economize on effort and investment. These memos push that agenda further than earlier efforts, delivering several long‑sought wins such as streamlined applications and résumés more in line with private‑sector norms. 

They also venture further than any recent initiative in politicizing the civil service. Mandatory training and essay questions tied to the current Administration’s executive orders—and explicit political sign‑off on certain hiring actions—risk blurring the firewall between career professionals and partisan appointees. We have discussed the dangers associated with this type of partisan drift in other places, including in response to the recent OPM rulemaking on “Schedule Policy/Career”.

Implementing even the non-controversial portions will be daunting. Reforming the federal government–the largest employer in the country–requires sustained, years-long effort from OPM and OMB. 

The memos themselves are only the starting gun. Notably absent is a realistic plan to resource this work: for example, OPM has fired or lost nearly all of its enterprise data analytics team, limiting its ability to supply the metrics needed for oversight and accountability. Additionally, the inclusion of extremely ideological and partisan goals politicizes the entire agenda and risks overshadowing the rest of the positive reform agenda, threatening its ability to succeed anywhere. 

In evaluating these documents, we have to weigh each part of the Administration’s strategy separately and objectively – there is a lot to like in these documents, there are things that are deeply troubling, and there are things that desperately need leadership attention in implementation.

What We Like: Skills-Based Hiring, Resume Reform, Assessments, Sharing Across Agencies

The bulk of both memos represents a bold next step in long‑running federal hiring reforms—initiatives that agencies have piloted for years but often struggled to scale. We commend OPM for learning from past efforts and, in several critical areas, pushing further than any of its predecessors by:

• Recognizing the role of recruiting and sourcing talent – The plan highlights the importance of active recruiting in the hiring process.Agencies have long relied on USAJobs alone as a crutch, hoping the right kinds of talent will be scouring the job board every day and happen upon job postings – this works okay for some roles that are highly-specialized to government, but particularly as agencies have need for emerging talent it they cannot assume critical talent pools are even aware that the federal government wants to hire them.
• Focusing on skills and evaluating for those skills – The memo limits the use of self-assessments to minimum qualifications only and requires agencies to use some form of technical or alternative assessment for all postings, implementing 2024’s bipartisan Chance to Compete Act. This is a critical move forward from the reliance on applicant’s self-assessment,a status quo that disadvantages honesty and self-awareness.
• Implementing ‘Rule of Many’ ranking procedures – OPM will finalize its proposed ‘Rule of Many’ regulation from the last Administration, which empowers agencies to choose the various ways to “cut off” applicants after they are assessed. Finalizing ‘Rule of Many’ will enable agencies to set clear, objective criteria for which applicants it will consider based on test scores (e.g., considering the top 10% of scorers), a numerical approach (e.g., considering the top 50 applicants), and other mechanisms (e.g., clear pass/fail standards) that give hiring managers and HR specialists the flexibility they need to tailor hiring procedures to specific needs.
• Sharing resources and certifications of eligibles across agencies – This expands requirements for agencies to share candidates, position descriptions, and talent pools across agencies, including conducting pooled hiring actions where one candidate can apply once to many similar jobs across government. It builds on recent tremendous success agencies have with recruiting high-quality applicants across government through shared hiring actions, which enables agencies to surge talent in a specific field and advertise as one enterprise to potential applicants.
• Reducing size of referral resumes to two pages – OPM is finally attempting to move away from a “federal resume” format that needlessly burdens members of the public with overly-specific requirements. Previously, applicants that didn’t know to include things like the “average number of hours worked per week” or their complete salary history were unknowingly disqualifying themselves from federal employment and even those that knew better had to maintain two separate resumes, making it harder to jump between sectors.
• Simplifying Senior Executive applications – Applicants for Senior Executive Service roles will no longer be required to write multiple pages of essays describing their experience – a process so unique it has spawned a cottage industry of professional writers – and will be evaluated via resumes and structured interviews like their peers across the economy. This builds on a long history of successful pilots of new selection procedures focusing on resumes and structured interviews rather than the traditional essays.
• Removing unnecessary degree requirements – While efforts have been underway since the first Trump Administration to remove unnecessary degree requirements. The new memos solidify that trajectory, embracing a skills‑first hiring model that prizes demonstrated ability over paper credentials—a trend mirrored in state governments and the private sector. Yet dropping degree rules is only half the battle. To truly broaden the talent pool, agencies must replace résumé shortcuts (like “years of experience”) with rigorous, job‑relevant assessments that let candidates prove what they can actually do. 
• Focusing on speed and responsiveness – The memo doesn’t ignore the aspect of the applicant experience that differs most from the private sector: speed and responsiveness, setting a government-wide target of 80 days for hiring actions and requiring timely updates to applicants on their status. This builds on years of work to wrestle down timelines for security clearances and recognizes that one of the biggest reasons the federal government loses amazing applicants is the length of the process, not the pay.

Finally, the memos contain a compendium of useful resources in Appendices that agencies that can use to improve their approach to hiring.

Potential Red Flags: Politicization, Red Tape, & Extra, Unfunded Mandates

While OPM is advancing important nonpartisan reforms, we are concerned that several explicitly ideological provisions could erode the civil service’s neutrality and jeopardize the very hiring‑efficiency agenda OPM seeks to champion:

• Requiring essay questions on political views–Despite reducing applicant burden in other areas, OPM also introduces a requirement for all applicants for jobs above GS-05 (98%+ of jobs) to draft responses to free-response essay questions that describe their views on the present administration, including identifying which of the current president’s Executive Orders are “significant” to them. At best, this is an additional requirement that will be irrelevant for most jobs – there shouldn’t be any impact of EOs on a seasonal wildland firefighter’s strategy for fighting fires, for instance.  More realistically, this constitutes a partisan loyalty test for federal employees to evaluate their views on the current President. Federal employees swear their allegiance to the Constitution, not the current President and there are legitimate open questions about the constitutionality of many Executive Orders.
• Introducing extra layers of political approval in the hiring process–While the memo emphasizes time to hire, it also emphasizes that “agency leadership” must either personally approve or designate an official to approve all positions before they are posted and all selections prior to extension of an offer. It also requires that they do an “executive interview” with candidates and opens the door to obvious partisan abuse of the merit hiring process when paired with the free response essay questions. Even without that risk, however, this requirement adds tremendous amounts of friction into a process that is already too full of approvals and pulls the decision-making authority in the wrong direction: to leadership instead of to the line management that knows the needs of a given program best. We are already seeing the problems with this approach play out with a similar requirement for agency leadership to personally approve payments or contracts, leading to extreme slowdowns. Additionally, just as with OPM’s recent rulemaking on Schedule Policy/Career, the opportunity for abuse is extremely obvious: highly partisan agency leaders may see it as their right to disapprove of candidates for purely political reasons–like, for example, donations to opposing candidates.
• Prioritizes political training for the SES corps–While the Administration has closed down training programs like the Federal Executive Institute that were designed to train new generations of federal leaders, it is also adding ideological training to the SES that lacks a clear purpose or evidence that it will improve governing outcomes. Requiring Senior Executives to watch an “80-hour video-based program that provides training regarding President Trump’s Executive Orders” is both offensive to the principle of a nonpartisan civil service and a waste of time for the busiest, most senior leaders across the entire enterprise. While America’s most productive tech companies are trying to reduce the meeting load to free staff to get things done, torching 4% of our senior executives’ working years for ideological training is the opposite of efficient. 
• No mention of resources to carry out these changes – As with past legislation, EOs, and memos requiring skills-based talent practices, no apparent financial or other resources come with these memos. This has hampered adoption for more than a decade. The Talent Teams at OPM and the agencies, the communications and education support, the changes to OPM and agency systems all need people, money, and IT support. The lack of committed resources will delay, and perhaps scuttle, implementation. We know this because it has happened before. In the Clinton Administration, for example, a major push to de-proceduralize federal hiring fell down because they underresourced agency HR offices to stick the landing. This will happen again on skills-based hiring without commensurate investment, a problem discussed at length in a recent paper from the Niskanen Center.

What’s Missing: A Scalable Implementation Strategy

Executing these reforms will be no small feat, and the toughest tasks are also the most crucial: getting good technical assessments in the hands of managers, conducting strategic workforce planning, changing the culture around hiring to empower managers and not HR, and letting line managers be managers. OPM’s memos are light on details about how they intend to resource and manage implementation, an omission that they have plenty of time to correct but one that needs some serious consideration if they are going to be successful:

• Changing entrenched oversight, HR, and hiring manager policies, practices, and culture – OPM and the agencies will need to focus on how to move decades-learned compliance and risk aversion behaviors embedded in the current hiring and performance management practices into a skills-based future. The change management and consistent leadership required here is a substantial undertaking. Because OPM has conditioned the federal HR profession to be incredibly risk-averse, it won’t immediately embrace these new mandates without coaching, training, and professional development. To facilitate this, OPM should re-submit its uncontroversial legislative proposal from last year to help professionalize and develop the federal HR workforce, and Congress should expeditiously pass it.
• Hiring is just one piece of the effective federal employee puzzle – Though the SES Memo addresses some aspects of performance management, the focus on hiring diminishes other parts of the management system that impact effectiveness and performance. Onboarding, the early job experience, consistent feedback, professional development, challenging assignments, and career paths all help to ensure employees are helping meet agency missions. Implementation needs to take the whole system into account if OPM and the agencies are going to impact effectiveness and accountability.
• An all-of-the-above approach for getting assessments into the hands of agencies – The memo focuses on USAHire but, as we’ve discussed, there are many third-party assessment vendors that offer validated assessments and tools to help lower the unit and marginal cost of using objective assessments. Emerging companies offer things like AI-proctored video interviews that could quickly surface the most promising candidates and are already in use by the private sector for high-volume roles. At the federal level, parts of the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have already experimented with some of these platforms. We want to see OPM think bigger about how to quickly bring assessments online and recognize that the private sector can play a role in accelerating this transformation.
• Focus on the candidate experience – Job candidates – users of the federal hiring system – complain that the experience of applying for a federal job is neither easy nor seamless, as it can be in the private sector. While the memos make some progress in reducing the burden on candidates (e.g., reducing resume and SES application requirements), the system is still rife with bureaucratic bloat. High-performing candidates have many options; they will go elsewhere if we do not reduce the friction. 
• Public accountability & data – According to the hiring plan memo, agencies need to develop a data-driven plan for implementation and report frequently to OPM and OMB on their progress. With the practical dissolution of OPM’s human capital data team and a years-long problem with lagging human capital data releases via Fedscope, OPM should commit to releasing data publicly on their progress: how many people are hired, where they are hired, how many apply, how many pass technical assessments, etc. that will hold agencies accountable for getting this work done, give Congress the insight it needs to trust OPM, and provide the public with a window into progress.
• A plan to staff for success – In the best of times, OPM struggles with capacity for human capital policy work, and it will need every federal human capital expert it can get to pull off implementation of these memos. However, at the same time, OMB’s FY2026 budget proposal outlines a significant reduction in total headcount for OPM that locks in a 25%+ reduction in headcount across all parts of the agency, from policy to direct support for agencies. Given the technical complexity involved in many of these efforts–delivering validated assessments, for example, will likely require bringing in new expertise from outside government–OPM will need a plan to staff itself for success that is missing in these memos today.

In urgent circumstances, agencies have experimented with some of these practices and policies (e.g., cybersecurity hiring and intelligence community hiring, infrastructure and energy development). However, action on skills-based talent practices is far from pervasive. Together with outside experts, we continue to map the obstacles that keep skills‑first hiring from taking root: limited resources, hesitant leadership, and a pervasive fear of downside risk. Many of the opportunities and chokepoints highlighted in the memos came from this work, and we will keep collaborating with all stakeholders to craft practical fixes.

Most of the reforms in these memoranda set federal hiring on a promising trajectory, but their impact will hinge on disciplined execution. Some of them are deeply troubling attacks on the basis of the merit system. We will track OPM’s progress closely—amplifying best practices and calling out any drift from merit‑based, nonpartisan norms.  These challenges are not new, yet  they have become increasingly existential to building a government that works; OPM must keep that urgency front and center as implementation moves forward.

For more than twenty years, the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has served as a guiding light for U.S. education research. Its work has pushed the field forward, supporting high-quality, rigorous research in a field known for its reliance on word-of-mouth over science. The studies it funded have answered critical questions about “what works” in key areas like improving reading achievement and increasing associate’s degree attainment. It has served as a centralized, objective repository of data and research to inform educator practice, school district procurement, and state legislation. Even with these achievements, IES has room to grow to ensure that cutting edge research makes it into the hands of those who need it, when they need it.

As part of IES’s ongoing leadership, it has been moving to adopt an approach called “living evidence.” Use of this emerging approach would keep decision-makers up-to-date about the solutions that have been rigorously tested and hold potential to address core challenges facing American schools: How do we respond to astonishingly low scores on NAEP tests? Are there evidence-based approaches we can employ in schools that will help end the national “epidemic” of social isolation? How do we ensure that both our college graduates and those who do not wish to attend college can obtain high-paying jobs?

Harnessing Innovation

This week, FAS and its partners at the Future Evidence Foundation (FEF) released a new report: Harnessing Innovation: Options for Implementing Living Evidence at the Institute of Education Sciences (which you can download using the button on the left-hand side of this page). It describes in great depth how IES could build on existing processes to produce living reviews as part of their What Works Clearinghouse. 

Over time, many have come to believe that the agency moves too slowly to be responsive to practitioner needs, that its approach to sharing research findings does not make clear enough for users whether an intervention is backed by strong evidence, and that it needs to better support innovation. Living evidence is not the silver bullet that can address all of these issues in full. And yet, its proposed adoption could be the foundation for a sea change, allowing IES to more responsively share when new best practices and innovative approaches are identified in the academic literature through the What Works Clearinghouse. However, recent seismic shifts have severely damaged IES’s capability to move forward with using this innovative model: the Trump Administration’s cancellation of nearly all active contracts, including those that made the What Works Clearinghouse’s work possible, and a reduction-in-force (RIF) that led to the firing of nearly all of IES’s staff. 

Report Insights and Key Takeaways

The report was produced as the product of a year-long partnership, where FAS and FEF were granted the opportunity to engage deeply with leadership and staff from IES. Our team learned about their day-to-day processes and potential roadblocks on the path to change. The final ‘options memo’ was carefully constructed to give the IES team a set of realistic approaches they could take to addressing some of their greatest challenges: discerning the topics where knowing ‘what works’ could be most beneficial to the more than 100 million people that the U.S. education system touches, finding the highest-quality academic research from the thousands of studies produced each year on education, and doing this work within a limited set of resources (IES funding made up less than 1% of the Department of Education’s overall spending in 2024). These recommendations were informed by conversations with many of those that knew IES’s work best, from its contractors to the readers of the What Works Clearinghouse’s reports. They offer feasible ways for IES to craft more efficient processes for developing their resources.

From this process, our team had two key takeaways: 

1. While the What Works Clearinghouse faces challenges in achieving its goal to make rigorous research accessible to policymakers and practitioners, the staff and contractors that led its work were steadfast in their dedication to improving its resources. 
2. Living evidence is not just the way of the future in academic circles beyond the U.S., but is a model that is feasible to implement in large federal agencies.

However, canceling contracts and firing experienced, dedicated staff has kneecapped IES’s ability to make the changes necessary to begin creating and deploying living reviews. An opportunity may now be missed to better align IES’s work not just to what their constituents need, but also to how a global community is moving forward in thinking about how to better connect evidence to policy and practice. While the administration has signaled its intent to rebuild IES in the future, it will take time to enact a new vision, and to fix what will inevitably break in the absence of staff to support key resources including the Regional Education Laboratories, the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), and the What Works Clearinghouse. In that time, peer government R&D agencies such as UK Research and Innovation and major philanthropic organizations such as the Wellcome Trust will step up to lead the way on developing infrastructure that supports the use of emerging technology to build living reviews, moving the rest of the world forward while U.S. government agencies remain in the past.

Living Evidence Global Community of Practice

Living evidence still has a path forward in the U.S, and opportunities to continue to grow along with the growing global movement. Innovation outside of government for living evidence holds promise for U.S. education stakeholders, led by work through the HEDCO Institute at the University of Oregon and the clearinghouse Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development. The recommendations in the report will offer value for such organizations as they work to shift toward living systematic reviews, setting the tone for best practice in evidence synthesis while IES is in transition. FAS and FEF will continue to help support this work through our convening of a Living Evidence Community of Practice.

Further, it is our hope that the learnings shared in the report will be considered in re-imagining future iterations of IES. In its short 23 years of existence, IES has raised the rigor of evidence that influences education and made strides in both generating and summarizing evidence that has the potential to inform practice. Even if the administration moves forward in its stated aim of “returning education back to the states”, state and local leaders will still need IES’s resources to understand how best to disburse their budgets. Employing a living approach to evidence synthesis, disseminated at a national level, is a streamlined way to enable evidence-based decision-making nationwide. If the administration genuinely prioritizes government efficiency, the report’s recommendations warrant serious consideration.

The Clean Air Act. The Clean Water Act. The National Environmental Policy Act. These and most of our nation’s other foundational environmental laws were passed decades ago – and they have started to show their age. The Clean Air Act, for instance, was written to cut air pollution, not to drive the whole-of-economy response that the climate crisis now warrants. The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 was designed to make cars more efficient in a pre-electric vehicle era, and now puts the Department of Transportation in the awkward position of setting fuel economy standards in an era when more and more cars don’t burn gas.

Trying to manage today’s problems with yesterday’s laws results in government by kludge. Legacy regulatory architecture has foundered under a patchwork of legislative amendments and administrative procedures designed to bridge the gap between past needs and present realities. Meanwhile, Congressional dysfunction has made purpose-built updates exceptionally difficult to land. The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, was mostly designed to move money rather than rethink foundational statutes or regulatory processes – because those rethinks couldn’t make it past the filibuster.

As the efficacy of environmental laws has waned, so has their durability. What was once a broadly shared goal – protecting Americans from environmental harm – is now a political football, with rules that whipsaw back and forth depending on who’s in charge. 

The second Trump Administration launched the biggest environmental deregulatory campaign in history against this backdrop. But that campaign, coupled with massive reductions in the federal civil service and a suite of landmark court decisions (including Loper Bright) about how federal agencies regulate, risks pushing U.S. regulatory architecture past the point of sensible and much-needed reform and into a state of complete disrepair.

Dismantling old systems has proven surprisingly easy. Building what comes next will be harder. And the work must begin now. 

It is time to articulate a long-term vision for a government that can actually deliver in an ever-more complex society. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) is meeting this moment by launching an ambitious new project to reimagine the U.S. environmental regulatory state, drawing ideas from across ideological lines.

The Beginning of a New Era

Fear of the risks of systemic change often prevent people from entertaining change in earnest. Think of the years of U.S. squabbles over how or whether to reform permitting and environmental review, while other countries simply raced ahead to build clean energy projects and establish dominance in the new world economy. Systemic stagnation, however, comes with its own consequences. 

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) are a case in point when it comes to climate and the environment. Together, these two pieces of legislation represented the largest global investment in the promise of a healthier, more sustainable, and, yes, cheaper future. Unfortunately, as proponents of the “abundance” paradigm and others have observed, rollout was hampered by inefficient processes and outdated laws. Implementing the IRA and the IIJA via old systems, in short, was like trying to funnel an ocean through a garden hose – and as a result, most Americans experienced only a trickle of real-world impact.

Similar barriers are constraining state progress. For example, the way we govern and pay for electricity has not kept pace with a rapidly changing energy landscape – meaning that the United States risks ceding leadership on energy technologies critical to national security, economic competitiveness, and combating climate change.

But we are perhaps now entering a new era. The United States appears to be on the edge of real political realignments, with transpartisan stakes around the core role of government in economic development that do not match up neatly to current coalitions. This realignment presents a crucial opportunity to catalyze a new era of climate, environmental, and democratic progress.

FAS will leverage this opportunity by providing a forum for debate and engagement on different facets of climate and environmental governance, a platform to amplify insights, and the capacity to drive forward solutions. Examples of topics ripe for exploration include:

• Balancing agility and accountability. As observed, regulatory approaches of the past have struggled to address the interconnected, quickly evolving nature of climate and environmental challenges. At the same time, mechanisms for ensuring accountability have been disrupted by an evolving legal landscape and increasingly muscular executive. There is a need to imagine and test new systems designed to move quickly but responsibly on climate and environmental issues. 
• Complementing traditional regulation through novel strategies. There is growing interest in using novel financial, contractual, and other strategies as a complement to regulation for driving climate and environmental progress. There is considerable room to go deeper in this space, identifying both the power of these strategies and their limits. 
• Rethinking stakeholder engagement. The effectiveness of regulation depends on its ability to serve diverse stakeholder needs while advancing environmental goals. Public comment and other pipelines for engaging stakeholders and integrating external perspectives and expertise into regulations have been disrupted by technologies such as AI, while the relationship between regulated entities and their regulators has become increasingly adversarial. There is a need to examine synergies and tradeoffs between centering stakeholders and centering outcomes in regulatory processes, as well as examine how stakeholder engagement could be improved to better ensure regulations that are informed, feasible, durable, and distributively fair. 

In working through topics like these, FAS seeks to lay out a positive vision of regulatory reconstruction that is substantively superior to either haphazard destruction or incremental change. Our vision is nothing less than to usher in a new paradigm of climate and environmental governance: one that secures a livable world while reinforcing democratic stability, through systems that truly deliver for America. 

We will center our focus on the federal government given its important role in climate and environmental issues. However, states and localities do a lot of the work of a federated government day-to-day. We recognize that federal cures are unlikely to fully alleviate the symptoms that Americans are experiencing every day, from decaying infrastructure to housing shortages. We are committed to ensuring that solutions are appropriately matched to the root cause of state capacity problems and that federal climate and environmental regulatory regimes are designed to support successful cooperation with local governments and implementation partners. 

FAS is no stranger to ambitious endeavors like these. Since our founding in 1945, we have been committed to tackling the major science policy issues that reverberate through American life. This new FAS workstream will be embedded across our Climate and Environment, Clean Energy, and Government Capacity portfolios. We have already begun engaging and activating the diverse community of scholars, experts, and leaders laying the intellectual groundwork to develop compelling answers to urgent questions surrounding the climate regulatory state, against the backdrop of a broader state capacity movement. True to our nonpartisan commitment, we will build this work on a foundation of cross-ideological curiosity and play on the tension points in existing coalitions that strike us all as most productive.

We invite you to join us in conversation and collaboration. If you want to get involved, contact Zoë Brouns (zbrouns@fas.org).