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President Donald Trump’s unrelenting assault on the federal workforce has prompted many progressives to leap reflexively to government’s defense.
Some progressives, however, are acknowledging the need for reform. “The truth is, Trump and Elon Musk alone didn’t break our governing institutions,” write Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph in a new report for the Roosevelt Institute. Rather, government was already failing the American public with its incrementalist approach, disengagement with the public, and the lack of tangible results. “Unfortunately, for most Americans, the federal government is distant, abstract, labyrinthine,” they write.
Garden-Monheit and Joseph interviewed 45 former officials from President Joe Biden’s administration, many of whom conveyed the frustration of ambitions thwarted by risk aversion, red tape and a cumbersome civil service system. Their report offers more than 160 fixes to make government more efficient and responsive.
Most importantly, Garden-Monheit and Joseph argue, government must deliver concrete benefits to Americans’ lives in order to rebuild public trust. For instance, says Garden-Monheit, agencies could pursue tougher, higher-profile enforcement of corporate accountability in areas like consumer protection and antitrust. Agencies could also do a better job of engaging the public in their work.
Garden-Monheit was the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and chief of staff to former FTC Chair Lina Khan.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes.
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Anne Kim: You and your co-author, Tresa Joseph, have written a progressive version of “Project 2029,” except it’s focused on fixing government, not wrecking it. It’s what DOGE was supposed to have accomplished, which is to build an efficient government that regains public trust. What prompted this project, and what frustrations did you experience as an agency official that led to this report?
Hannah Garden-Monheit: The basic impetus was that for a lot of folks like myself and a lot of the officials we talked to, people came into government with really good intentions but found that even with the best of intentions, even working incredibly hard many hours a day around the clock, it was incredibly challenging to get things done.
When you compare our promises and what we set out to do with what we were able to accomplish within a four-year term—our electoral mandate—we came up short. So folks really wanted to interrogate why that was and what would it take for the government to be effective and nimble and responsive to the needs of working people.
It is a hopeful project that we can rebuild a government that earns people’s trust and is worthy of the people it’s supposed to serve.
Anne Kim: The overall takeaway of the report is that government has to be able to act more quickly to deliver tangible wins on the priorities people care about. I’d love to ask why government doesn’t do that now. If I could quote from your report, you say, “the default mode of operating is risk averse, incremental, and wed to process at the expense of outcomes.” What do you mean by that?
Hannah Garden-Monheit: A lot of governmental structures are structured around risk mitigation and compliance. Risks that you might have an embarrassing failure that creates a bad political narrative. Risks that you’re going to get sued, which happens with almost anything an administration that believes in regulation of the economy is going to face.
When you’re optimizing for risk aversion, there’s a tendency to layer on additional processes to try to eliminate those risks. But that comes with the risk of under-delivering. You can spend a lot of time and process trying to come up with the perfect policy, but if you spend all of your time with that, you’re not putting your attention on outcomes and delivery.
We really need to reorient our mindset. What are the goals that you’re trying to achieve? What is the thing that you want to happen on the ground in working people’s lives to help make their lives better? The process should support getting to that outcome.
Anne Kim: Your report is pretty exhaustive about the problems with government, including problems with the civil service system. I’m wondering if that means DOGE may have actually had a point in this regard. Can you talk a little bit about the problems you see with the civil service system as it is now?
Hannah Garden-Monheit: There are a couple of buckets of problems, but I want to say at the outset that the way that DOGE went about solving them is not a solution at all.
Blanket firings without any regard to the important governmental functions people perform or to their individual performance is deeply counterproductive. Likewise, just wiping away people’s collective bargaining rights is not at all the way to go about this.
[But one problem] I think you would be hard pressed to find somebody who disagrees with is the speed of hiring.
The civil service process for hiring can take six months to a year. It means that you get applicant attrition because it takes so long to make an offer to somebody that they go and take another job.
That is not at all a match for standing up a government that needs to have the expertise to address modern problems in the economy. Imagine if you decide that AI is an issue we need to tackle, but it’s going to take the better part of a year to hire anybody with expertise. That’s a real problem for your ability to respond.
Another issue is dealing with non-performance, which I want to say is something that was the exception rather than the rule. But it was notable that when you did have a non-performer, our systems were not oriented around giving them feedback on how to improve.
Performance management was very often treated as an annual “fill out a form” thing. But anybody who’s been a strong manager of workers knows you need to be engaged in real time giving people feedback about what’s working, what’s not working, and how to improve.
And then the processes when you had somebody who truly was a non-performer are so time consuming and lengthy that people just don’t have the resources or bandwidth to manage through that process. Workers absolutely should have due process rights. It’s absolutely critical that people can’t be arbitrarily fired based on partisan political machinations.
But for example, one person we interviewed told us about somebody who literally was not showing up for work anymore, and it was still a nine-month process to dismiss them. That’s a problem that is costly for the people who are doing the work. It’s not good for morale if you are a really strong performer who’s burning the midnight oil to deliver for the American people and you see somebody else on your team who isn’t contributing and yet they get the same recognition.
Anne Kim: You were a senior official at the FTC, and that is one of the agencies whose job is to act as a counterweight to industry. And there are quite a few agencies whose function is to regulate industry or to be a counterweight in some way. But you write about ways in which regulatory capture contributes to inefficiency and perceptions about the poor performance of government. Can you speak to that?
Hannah Garden-Monheit: I was director of the Office of Policy Planning at FTC, and I was also at the White House before that. Our agencies are very accessible to moneyed interests in large part because you have to have money and time and resources in order to know what is going on in the federal government and to engage with it.
For example, the primary public input tool that the federal government uses is the notice and comment process under the Administrative Procedure Act. Right. But that is a framework that’s built around watching the Federal Register and seeing if there’s a 300- page proposed regulation that maybe affects you.
If you’re so lucky as to spot that, then you’re supposed to write up a letter to the agency and submit it through the website. And you’re supposed to talk in pretty formalist, legalistic terms about what your interests are and how you think the regulation should be changed. That’s something that every large corporation can afford to hire a large law firm and a lobbyist to handle for them.
But working people are busy working. They are not combing the Federal Register to understand the alphabet soup of agencies and regulations that might affect them. So one of our key takeaways from the report is that we really need to restructure our federal capacities and tool set so that we’re proactively engaging working people, finding them where they are to get their input, and learning about the issues they think are important for the government to address.
This is something that we did a fair bit of at the Federal Trade Commission. But otherwise, the government is a pretty passive recipient of who comes to engage with agencies. And because of how hard it is to do that, it’s much more accessible to moneyed interests than normal people.
Anne Kim: You’ve begun to edge around solutions, so let’s just go all in. A huge takeaway is that you focus on the need to deliver what you call “bold, swift” action and highly visible wins. Why is that important? And what are a couple of concrete examples of the kinds of things that you would like to see in short order?
Hannah Garden-Monheit: The basic connection here is to the functioning of our democratic system. When we have a government that isn’t capable of responding to people’s needs and their frustrations, it really erodes trust in democracy itself. We see people saying, “What’s the point of voting? Nothing ever changes.” Or they say, “I don’t love this candidate, but we’ve got to blow everything up because nothing is working.”
If you live in a country where some people are struggling to put food on the table but Elon Musk is getting a trillion dollar package of compensation, that can be deeply disillusioning for people.
This is where fascism can creep in—when people lose faith that participating in elections will actually lead to improvements in their lives.
That’s why it is so pressing to prove to people that government can make their lives better. But to do that, you have to deal with some of the unsexy, wonky, underlying plumbing fixes around why government is so slow and unresponsive.
Public engagement, for example, isn’t rocket science. At the FTC, we did open commission meetings where anybody who wanted to could show up—virtually, by the way—and say whatever they wanted, completely unfiltered and unscreened.
Other pieces are harder. We very much need to have a conversation about the courts in this country because a huge portion of what the Biden administration tried to do to deliver economic relief for people was stymied by the courts in the Fifth Circuit. We have a court that is very much stacked with ideological partisans who are very hostile to regulation of the economy. We also have a Supreme Court that has been part of a conservative project for decades from folks who don’t want to see government have the capacity to rein in corporate power and to regulate powerful industries.
Folks who believe that the government should be capable of shaping markets in the public interest really need to grapple with reforms to the courts.
Anne Kim: On the question of corporate power, some of what you call for seems to overlap with the so-called “Abundance” agenda, based on the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book of the same name, which calls for cutting red tape and reforming permitting processes, among other things. The idea is that government being so sclerotic gets in the way of development and progress. But where there’s a departure from so-called “abundance liberalism” is in your call for more enforcement of corporate accountability, which I’m presuming is the result of your time with the FTC. You would like to see more action on consumer protection, competition policy, and worker protection. How do you see your framework and recommendations fitting into this larger debate within progressives and within the Democratic party at large about corporate power and the right ways to rein it in, while also unleashing the capacity of corporations to do their thing and promote growth?
Hannah Garden-Monheit: I think you’re right that there is a lot of overlap with the abundance movement—there’s very much a shared desire to clear out the procedural sludge and really focus on outcomes.
There’s a lot of shared ground in terms of rightsizing our processes. Let’s get the best expertise in the private sector brought to bear on the challenges we face. Let’s really speed up execution.
Abundance has become a little bit of a Rorschach test, and it doesn’t necessarily seem to be a monolith. But there does seem to be this undercurrent that it’s not just about clearing out and rightsizing the procedural sludge, but also saying that government should get out of the way. Just let the private sector do its thing without regulation or oversight.
If that’s what it’s about, then yes, that is where we part ways because we have tried for 40 years an approach that said, “Let’s be laissez faire, let’s get out of the way, let’s let the private sector do its thing,” and here we are.
If what they’re saying is that corporations are going to solve all challenges, that hasn’t worked. Our markets are supposed to serve us, not the other way around. Some folks like to caricature what folks on the left are calling for and claim it’s some crazy communist thing. No, it’s enforcement of antitrust law so that giant dominant corporations aren’t able to crush not only consumers and workers, but small businesses and entrepreneurs too. We can have a pro-business, pro-growth economy while also reining in the big guys.
