Former Biden administration officials are contending with a new reality: Future administrations won’t have a choice but to confront the way the Trump administration has disrupted how the government works.
That’s the premise of a new set of proposals published Tuesday in the law and policy journal Just Security, authored by several former Biden officials and experts at think tanks.
“We have a lot of rebuilding to do,” K. Sabeel Rahman, one of the authors of the plan, told NOTUS. “Our ambition shouldn’t be just limited to gluing the broken pieces of the vase back together.”
Rahman, a law professor at Cornell Law School, previously worked for the Biden administration as the acting head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
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The papers propose a complete reorientation of the government so that it’s more responsive to presidential orders, emergencies and everyday work. To do this, the authors are calling for a new Cabinet-level agency that brings together all federal administrative work under one roof, from HR to technology to financial management.
Other ideas include overhauling the pay structure for federal employees to better compete with the private sector and a campaign to rewrite the federal workforce’s collective bargaining rights.
The new project, dubbed the “Reinvention Blueprints,” is technically viewpoint neutral, platforming ideas from experts. Its authors say their intended audience is the next “rule of law administration,” said Dani Schulkin, director of democracy initiatives at Just Security who previously worked on national security issues for the Biden administration.
Abuses of power can seem like more obvious threats, but the proposals to enable the government to do things like deliver safety-net benefits or protect people from exploitative consumer products are just as important, Rahman said, noting that “democracy can fail in many ways.”
Tara Dawson McGuinness and Amira Boland, from the liberal think tank New America, are behind the proposal for a new agency — a “Department of Services” — to be charged with making the government work.
They’re also pitching the establishment of “delivery units” in federal agencies and, within the White House, a deputy chief of staff for implementation charged with making sure the government is delivering. They’d have a “National Delivery Unit” in the White House to help solve complex problems across multiple agencies.
Loren DeJonge Schulman and Rob Shriver — both former Biden appointees now working at Federation of American Scientists and Democracy Forward, respectively — published a paper Tuesday on the civil service, arguing that it’s not set up to deliver, either. They want Congress to reset collective bargaining rights for government workers, modernize government hiring and more.
The focus on delivery isn’t totally new. Then-President Barack Obama, for example, created the White House tech team that Trump remade into DOGE last year. That initiative was developed in 2014 in the wake of the high-profile HealthCare.gov crash, a failure that threatened the success of one of Obama’s signature policies.
But McGuinness and Boland say their proposal is meant to fundamentally reorient the government instead of offering an ad hoc solution.
“This is a roadmap for people who want the government to work,” McGuinness said.
McGuinness also helped author a child-care proposal for “Project 2029,” another playbook of policy proposals for future Democratic presidential candidates.
Democrats have become laser-focused on good governance in the aftermath of Trump’s DOGE initiative — a campaign that proved to be deeply controversial with the American public.
Chad Maisel, the executive director of Project 2029, told NOTUS that making sure its proposals are actually implementable is a core priority. Focusing on the “nuts and bolts of government” hasn’t always been a priority for Democratic presidential candidates, but now, “the idea of a government that works … is so core to the political discourse.”
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