A s we move deeper into the second Trump era, it is becoming increasingly clear just how much the current regime’s policy agenda is also a project that seeks a radical transformation of our governing institutions. Mass firings and wholesale defunding of programs will effectively dismantle everything from economic regulatory agencies to vital safety net programs. At the same time, the supercharging of coercive entities like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the aggressive centralization and politicization of decision-making within the executive branch create new forms of state power for the bureaucracy as well as for the presidency.

Americans are rightly pushing back against these transformations. But even as the lawlessness of the current regime is being contested in the public arena and the courtroom, our alternative vision should not be simply to restore the status quo ante. Many of our administrative institutions were failing to meet urgent needs even before January 2025. We should instead imagine a path to reconstructing the administrative state in ways that address these deeper failures and make possible the kinds of policies needed to protect and empower Americans in the modern era.

Prior to the current Administration’s barrage of law- and norm-breaking executive actions, there was something of a consensus framework for American governance, at least on paper. Congress, as the seat of democracy and the “first branch” of government, would pass broad legislation that tasked administrative agencies with mandates to develop more granular rules and carry out the enforcement actions needed to, say, ensure clean air and water, basic standards for worker safety, and the like. The executive branch, under the management of the President and appointed (and Senate-confirmed) agency heads, would then implement these policies, leaning heavily on nonpartisan civil servants with deep expertise in a myriad of topics. These executive actions would be subject to statutes spelling out common procedural rules—such as transparency demands, requirements for public comment on proposed rules, and limits on government collection and use of personal data. The courts—the judicial branch—would then review agencies’ actions for compliance with their statutory mandates and existing procedures. This judicial review would require agencies to act non-arbitrarily: to show relative consistency and provide rationales for their policy based in fact and agency expertise. In theory, this framework allows for agencies to have the authority and expertise to develop new policies with each new presidential administration, while still being subject to a host of checks and balances to help protect against overreach.

But that textbook model is increasingly untethered from reality. As the barrage of lawsuits and district court losses underscores, the current Administration has made a pattern of lawlessness, breaking not just norms but the plain letter of the law on multiple fronts. But even if that were not the case, the realities of power and politics mean that more often than not, checks on executive power have operated unequally, suffocating the policies most in service of regular Americans while leaving mostly unrestrained powers over national security, surveillance, and incarceration. The result, paradoxically, is a system whose ability to address public needs is hobbled, but whose autocratic tendencies are far more entrenched than they should be. This situation has developed from a combination of factors: poor or outdated institutions, the power of dominant interests to push courts and presidents into quietly remaking administrative institutions, and ideologies often hostile to efforts to combat economic and social inequities. Developing the kind of progressive governance we ought to aspire to will require understanding these realities—and working to undo them in whatever model of democratic government might come next.

A cohort of thinkers has recently been emphasizing the need to clear away overly burdensome procedures to enable state, local, and federal governments to build housing and infrastructure more quickly and at scale. Many of these critiques are important—a host of internal governmental processes are out of date and can be streamlined. In particular, a progressive government needs to have a bolder approach to policy and experimentation. But the root causes of governmental sluggishness encompass more than inertia or hidebound policy thinking—and so must the reimagining of our administrative state. Even before the current Administration, our safety net programs were encrusted with red tape and excessive and punitive enrollment systems (“administrative burdens”) that restricted people’s access to vital supports. Similarly, we have long needed new and more expansive state capacity to rein in extractive and coercive economic practices in the workplace and marketplace, including rapidly proliferating forms of digital surveillance and discrimination. These efforts will require expanded enforcement capacities and energy, as well as renewed attention to direct public provision of key infrastructural services. At the same time, we must address the distressing lack of checks and balances on the often violent coercive powers of immigration and carceral institutions that has been a long-standing feature of the administrative state. Counterintuitively, a progressive state needs both more power and less.

A forward-looking, progressive reimagining of the administrative state must focus on four key needs. First, we need to build new administrative institutions responsible for protecting Americans from harm—ensuring that workers are safe in their workplaces, that communities are not harmed by fraudulent or tainted products ranging from finance to consumer goods, and that every individual is protected from discrimination and attack. Second, we need more effective, universal systems for providing essential services and public goods to all, from disaster relief to safety net programs. Third, we need to redesign our bureaucracies so that they empower Americans, rebuilding trust and improving the impact of public policy by putting impacted and often ignored communities in the driver’s seat of policy design and implementation. And fourth, we need to fundamentally restrain the increasingly terrifying and autocratic forms of governing. This will require dismantling the emerging surveillance state, restoring basic due process protections against federal enforcement, stepping away from our obsession with presidential power itself, and more. Tackling these four institutional design challenges is vital to creating the governing institutions we need to actually make good on our collective aspirations: to be free from the tyrannies of concentrated state power and from dangerous forms of private power.

The Incapacitated State

The first challenge to a more effective form of progressive administration stems from the ways in which our pre-2025 administrative bodies were often underpowered, incapacitated, or captured, to the detriment of vital public objectives. This is particularly the case for those parts of the administrative state most dedicated to remedying economic or social inequalities. These limitations were not just products of outdated institutions or bureaucratic inertia; they were more often the result of deliberate efforts to incapacitate administrative functions that might challenge preexisting hierarchies or power relations. These dynamics are now exacerbated by the current Administration’s mass firings and its systematic defunding of many of these same administrative bodies.

The policy fights early in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic offer a stark illustration of the many constraints—bureaucratic and political—that hobble the government’s ability to advance the well-being of Americans. One of the out-of-the-gate policy priorities for the Biden Administration in 2021 was the protection of workers from the dangers of the pandemic. The Department of Labor, invoking its longstanding statutory authority to establish emergency economy-wide rules to shield workers from grave dangers, deployed a fast-track process to issue regulations instituting a mandatory vaccine-or-test standard. This would have required many bigger workplaces, where risks of exposure were especially great, to either run a daily masking and testing program or provide support for and access to vaccination as the first COVID-19 vaccines began to roll out. Such a policy affected 84 million workers and could have protected a number of them from disease and danger.

Yet those benefits did not materialize fast enough. There was, to be sure, an internal bureaucratic aspect to this: Even a fast-track authority took several months owing to the complex nature of the policy debate and the layers of intra-executive branch review and discussion involved even in this faster process. But more importantly, the policy was quickly blocked by a hostile judiciary—in particular, a Supreme Court just starting to flex its new “major questions doctrine,” which seems to materialize mainly to block regulations defending Americans against dangers imposed by corporate America. Indeed, a very similar story played out around major environmental regulations seeking to mitigate the worst risks of climate change, and efforts to protect Americans from excessive debt or exploitative employment contracts.

These acute battles are indicative of a more chronic problem—a deeply embedded hostility to, and weakening of, the agencies most well suited to addressing disparities of economic power or social position. Economic, social, and environmental regulatory agencies seeking to issue rules have to navigate a web of requirements, from ex ante internal executive branch review to public comment to ex post judicial review. There is a role for such checks and balances, but in practice many of these processes are quite strict, in large part because agencies have internalized the high likelihood of attack from hostile courts and skeptical legislators. That skepticism and those processes are themselves downstream of a deeper power imbalance: Corporations and wealthy interests are skilled at leveraging sympathetic courts and policymakers, which in turn puts agencies in a tentative posture of risk-mitigation.

The safety net offers another example of this dynamic. There are deep and chronic challenges with the administration of safety net programs. The process to access disability benefits, for example, can take months if not years. That policy failure stems from many sources: impossibly time-consuming documentation and enrollment processes; inadequate staffing; and vastly outdated data systems that slow things down. Some of this can be chalked up to inertia and out-of-date cultures and processes within agencies. But a bigger driver is the deeper political power struggle over benefits and membership. Racialized and gendered opposition to equal economic treatment in part drove the decentralized and fragmented nature of the modern safety net, in particular its implementation through the states. Meanwhile, the modern obsession with “waste, fraud, and abuse” has in practice served as a justification for introducing excessive documentation requirements that demand not just personal paperwork but often extremely difficult quests to obtain documents from third parties like managers and doctors. This imposes an array of barriers on people seeking support, who may lack the time, money, social standing, and help they need to jump these hurdles.

Scholars have long pointed to these “administrative burdens” as an especially effective tactic for hobbling the modern safety net—one that makes the experience of it mostly punitive and demeaning and, in so doing, perpetuates racial and gender disparities in access to these measures of basic economic security. Many of these burdens have their modern origin in the racialized Reagan-era condemnations of “welfare queens” and the move by liberals to accommodate conservative attacks on welfare and safety net programs. Indeed, despite the recent focus on the failures of liberal proceduralism—critiques that are well taken—the deeper driver of bureaucratic ineffectiveness is in fact intentional sabotage by political opponents who seek to undermine the potential of safety net programs to upend economic, racial, and gender hierarchies.

The pandemic response offers another stark example of just how radically different our safety net programs could be—and the ways in which bureaucratic inertia combines with (and is produced by) political efforts to undermine effective governance. At the height of the pandemic, as the economy was in free fall, Congress authorized massive expansions of the safety net in 2020 and then made even bigger investments with the American Rescue Plan of 2021. These legislative efforts taken together provided direct cash to households, businesses, communities, schools, and states; enacted a historic expanded child tax credit that nearly halved child poverty; and, crucially, streamlined enrollment in vital programs like Medicaid. In addition, the Biden Administration started to reduce administrative burdens and redesign safety net programs to deliver urgent benefits to Americans more rapidly and equitably. But under pressure from conservative opponents of an expanded safety net, Congress later let pandemic-era programs lapse, and many of these more generous supports and new efficiencies evaporated as the Administration pulled back from its declaration of a public health emergency. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that many states have moved to unfairly disqualify Medicaid applicants on the basis of procedural and documentation errors, and that the GOP’s massive budget bill went out of its way to impose a whole new set of suffocating process requirements on food benefits.

The Subordinating State

A second key challenge for a more progressive vision of administration stems from the ways in which current administrative bodies institutionalize deeply problematic forms of domination, subordination, and violence. Even as domestic economic and social policy functions remain constrained, as noted above, what we see in the national security, immigration enforcement, surveillance, and carceral state is radically different. This “second face” of the administrative state is one marked by increasing capacity, resources, power, and discretion. Just look at the growing power and discretion of immigration enforcement, especially through the massive increase in funding in the so-called “big, beautiful bill” President Trump signed into law in July. But even before the current regime’s campaign to transform immigration enforcement into the most well-funded and lawless military apparatus in the country, it is important to remember that the preexisting legal and policy consensus had for many years built an administrative state with too much unfettered capacity when it comes to the policing and surveillance of people of color and other out-groups. Think, for example, of the dramatic expansion of the surveillance state after 9/11.

The irony, of course, is that conservative critics have for decades been declaring the rise of an overpowered administrative state in response to the regulations that seek to modestly mitigate some of our worst economic and social inequalities—a tradition dating back to the opponents of the New Deal and civil rights revolutions. Yet here we have administrative authorities that more readily fit that billing, or at least raise the specter of arbitrary, dominating power. Over several decades, legal doctrine has by and large insulated immigration enforcement, national security bureaucracies, and state-sponsored surveillance from the kind of skeptical (if not hostile) scrutiny reserved for labor, climate, and inclusionary regulations. These reservoirs of unchecked administrative authority are now being supercharged.

Reconstructing the Administrative State

The reality of our administrative state, then, is that we have a host of constraints on executive power—but they most severely limit those forms of power most needed to remedy the excesses of our stratified economy and inequitable society. Those constraints are weakest, if they exist at all, on the forms of executive power that are most threatening, particularly in this moment of increasing autocratic control of the executive branch. A progressive vision of administration will therefore have to imagine both new forms of capacity—particularly to enable more effective approaches to addressing social and economic inequalities and instabilities in the modern era—and new forms of constraint to rein in excesses of state power.

Building this new administrative state will require more than a new suite of policies or internal protocols ushered in by a future administration. It demands instead a thorough rethinking of the foundational goals, structures, and capacities of administrative agencies. Simply seeking to restore “regular order” and the status quo ante will not be enough to address the urgent needs of the public, or to protect against future authoritarian resurgence. Indeed, the experience of the Biden Administration—in which I served for a time leading the regulatory affairs office for the White House—offers an important lesson about the limits of such a restorationist approach absent a deeper shift in our institutions.

Four areas in particular rise to the forefront of this redesign challenge.

First, we need updated institutions for protection. A central purpose of progressive regulation is to protect Americans from dangerous concentrations of private power and from structural vulnerabilities beyond individual control. Think disaster relief after a flood, fire, or hurricane—crises that are only increasing in severity due to climate change. Or how regulations protect us against toxic pollutants in air, water, food, and consumer products. Or how regulators are needed to weed out fraud, unfair competitive practices, exploitative labor practices, or risky speculation that could cause another financial crisis.

The current Administration is systematically defunding the agencies, firing the career civil servants, and dismantling the legal frameworks that agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Environmental Protection Agency, and others use to secure these protections. Rebuilding government’s protective role will require a few things that go beyond just putting these systems back. We need new kinds of expertise, information, legal authority, and enforcement strategies that can actually track and respond to the new forms of exploitation, harm, and discrimination. For example, in a world where data collection, AI, and increased corporate power are creating new threats to communities, agencies will need a lot more technologists to monitor and respond to these shifts. And we need policies that get at not just individual malfeasants, but the root of the harms. For example, in 2023-24, the CFPB and FTC began to assert greater data privacy protections in a series of enforcement actions. The agencies went after individual bad actors, but they also began to tackle the broader economy around data brokering that incentivizes data mining and surveillance of consumers and powers problematic new forms of discrimination and fraud.

Second, we will need an updated and reimagined set of institutions for the provision of basic needs and guarantees, from Social Security and Medicaid to unemployment, disability, and disaster relief. This challenge is rendered all the more urgent as many of these programs are being defunded and dismantled in real time. These guarantees are critical to realizing genuine freedom for individuals by providing a floor of economic security that prevents people from falling into deeply harmful situations.

This effort will require rebooting and redesigning safety net programs from disaster relief to Medicaid. Rather than putting the onus on individuals to navigate a complex bureaucracy, we need systems that can automatically enroll Americans in the benefits they are eligible for (without subjecting them to state-sponsored surveillance through their sensitive data). But we might go further still and imagine a more direct role for government in providing key goods and services. The child tax credit of 2021 halved child poverty. What might a universal, expanded, permanent version of that policy look like as a form of guaranteed income that would support not only children but also workers facing AI-fueled job loss and precarity? Or how might we imagine direct public investments in critical infrastructure that are truly democratic and public-serving, and not subject to the personal whims of the President?

Third, we will need a commitment to empowerment and bottom-up, participatory approaches to regulatory policymaking. In an era when trust in government has collapsed—and when so many programs are being suffocated in ways that will make for even more frustrating and ineffectual experiences—it will be vital that a future progressive administrative state take a deeply community-based approach to its work. If conservative attacks on a seemingly hostile and foreign government hit home, that is partly because the day-to-day operation of government is so removed from most Americans’ reach and experience. And in our progressive ambition to make a new government that is even more effective and can move with speed and at scale, we might, if we’re not careful, bypass critical modes of public engagement and collaborative, participatory governance.

But there are ways to fuse meaningful, trust-building, and empowered forms of participation with effective and scaled policymaking. Much of the best work on reimagining the safety net, for example, is rooted in practices of participatory co-design, engaging the Americans most in need of those programs to help reimagine how the programs ought to work. Enforcement and protection, too, have a community component. Workers are often the people best positioned to spot harms in the workplace, and if empowered to partner with agencies, they can help protect their colleagues. There is a deep tradition of participatory-yet-effective governance that we would do well to revisit and learn from, from early twentieth-century wage boards, to the efforts at building bottom-up participation in the war on poverty, to global models of participatory budgeting and collaborative urban planning.

Fourth, even as we look to empower more ordinary Americans in shaping administrative policy, we also need to create new restraints on executive power—particularly those institutions and practices most central to the autocratic turn. This may seem in tension with the other three imperatives, but it is rather a deeper design question. For example, we have seen DOGE unlawfully seize Americans’ private data and the Trump Administration contract with tech companies to create a dangerous surveillance apparatus that could further supercharge its repressive inclinations. Ultimately, we will need to dismantle these databases, and this dismantling can go hand in hand with reviving safe federal datasets that serve the public. Similarly, the legal authorities used to build a repressive and unaccountable immigration enforcement apparatus must be undone, but such an effort can function alongside the building of affirmative capacities to protect, provide, and empower, as noted above.

From the Imperial Presidency to Democratic Freedom

These four design imperatives for reimagining the administrative state—to better protect, provide for, and empower Americans while restraining dangerous forms of state power—is not just an agenda for new executive actions and regulatory policy. We should also be building toward legislation that charters new agency authorities and sunsets old or problematic ones. And we should be looking to experiment with and pilot these alternative models in states and cities, just as our forerunners did with the New Deal’s precursors in the early twentieth century.

These efforts are part of a larger generational project of reimagining democratic freedom itself. The rapidity with which the current Administration has converted the presidency into an engine of repression and rule by fiat reflects the longer-running trend toward the imperial presidency—and the ways in which our prevailing democratic practices and institutions have long been impoverished.

For decades, presidents of both parties have embraced increasing presidential control over the administrative state. We should move away from this model. For example, presidential staff play a critical role in advancing a vision, setting priorities, and coordinating the cacophony of the administrative state. But ultimately, these staff may need to exercise less power vis-à-vis agencies—particularly when Congress has set a statutory mandate that a given agency must fulfill regardless of the leanings of the current occupant of the White House.

The centralization of power in the executive branch—and within that, in the singular person of the President—is also a construct of law. As many legal scholars have noted, the current Supreme Court’s ahistorical embrace of so-called “unitary executive theory” has underwritten this increasing power of the President, right up to and including the deeply anti-democratic rulings that have expanded presidential immunity, ratified the brazen deportation of immigrants without process, and attempted to undo the constitutional foundations of birthright citizenship. The result is precisely the kind of monarchical, arbitrary power that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution themselves were intended to preclude. Similarly, congressional mandates—to assure clean air and water, ensure worker safety, or spend monies appropriated by legislation—should likely not be so readily couched in, or manipulated by, broad executive discretion (or for that matter, a hyper-politicized Supreme Court) in the first place. Such legislative mandates to fulfill public needs will have to be housed in institutions less subject to the seesaw of diametrically opposed policy regimes implemented by executive fiat with each election. More radically, some functions nominally allocated to the executive branch, like the disbursal of appropriated funds, should be more closely tethered to congressional control.

This legislative need reflects a deeper challenge for our democracy. Democracies cannot survive long with a crippled and defunct legislature; the result is precisely the kind of imperial presidency and imperial judiciary that now dominate our politics. Our Constitution places democratic sovereignty in the legislature first and foremost, in the very first Article. The current crisis has been enabled in part by the ongoing decay of a sclerotic, unresponsive, and unrepresentative Congress, thanks to counter-majoritarian institutions like the Senate and an increasingly unrepresentative electoral system skewed by money in politics, voter suppression, gerrymandering, and what political scientist Lee Drutman calls the “two-party doom loop.” Any agenda for reimagining the administrative state in a post-autocratic moment, and in the face of the profound economic and social inequities facing Americans, will have to come alongside a parallel effort to make our legislature more proportional and responsive, and once again central to the exercise of democratic politics.

These will not be quick or easy tasks. And moving forward will require creativity at both a wonky technical level and a deeper political and constitutional level. At stake is not just the question of governmental effectiveness; this is fundamentally about a deeper progressive moral vision of freedom. At a moment when millions of Americans are mobilizing from the bottom up to protest not only the current Administration’s actions but the broader and deeper failures of our existing institutions, it is incumbent on any pro-democracy coalition to begin to imagine what new institutional forms best fulfill all of our aspirations to freedom. We need effective, capacious administrative agencies to secure our freedom from private power and domination in an unequal economy and society through safety net programs, worker protections, anti-monopoly provisions, anti-discrimination protections, and the like. At the same time, we need constraints that protect us from the unfreedoms of state overreach—most glaring today in the form of arbitrary, unilateral presidential blocking of funds and weaponized enforcement actions against disfavored individuals and vulnerable communities.

This vision of democratic freedom has been the catalyst for prior struggles of democratization, from Reconstruction to the New Deal, the “Second Reconstruction” of the civil rights movement, and the more contemporary fights over oligarchy, racial and gender equity, and ecological resiliency. In each of these prior moments, our country came closer to its highest ideals as a result of both mass movements of ordinary Americans and smart reimagining of legal and governmental institutions. If we are to get out of our current crisis, we will need the same kind of effort in the years ahead. If we do this right, we can not only respond to a crisis; we can help create the kind of democracy we all deserve.