The Good Government Agenda for 2025 and beyond

Every new presidential administration since 1993 has come into office by launching a new management agenda. The new administration in 2025 should not do so.  Brand-new research shows that the public wants instead a good government agenda.

This is a critically important distinction. Good management is an inside-looking approach focused on the government’s gears and levers. It’s important, for sure, especially to improve the way those gears and levers work. But more fundamentally we need an outside-looking approach, one that takes the essential steps to improve the public’s trust in government, which has imploded. That’s a Good Government Agenda. 

A survey and focus groups conducted by analyst Frank Luntz in June found that distrust in government increased from 46% to 63%, in just the last two years. The people don’t much like government in general and truly despise the Congress. Most people have  an unshakable belief that the people who work for government can never seem to get it right.

This is a crisis that demands the focused attention of the new administration. It’s even more important because distrust is highest among the youngest Americans. The biggest threat to our democracy is losing the next generation before it has a chance to lead.

The sources of distrust

Among those surveyed, 42% thought that the government does an inadequate or terrible job of serving the people. Among 16% of the survey, it’s even worse: they believe that the government is simply incapable of doing anything at all. The people tend to believe that the government is wasteful (85%), corrupt (74%), and incompetent (66%)—and all those numbers are worse than they were just two years ago. 

Most taxpayers don’t see value in the taxes they pay—61% believe that they pay more in taxes than they get back in government services. 

This is why we need a fundamentally new approach. The management agendas that every president since 1993 has launched have produced some good effects, but they obviously haven’t solved the key problem of connecting people with their government. In fact, that’s why, after working tirelessly on government reform for eight years while vice president, Al Gore got virtually no traction from reinventing government when he ran for president. 

It’s not hopeless

There are great examples of good government. People hold Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in high esteem. Keeping the people safe and secure is at the top of the list of what they most want, followed by supporting struggling Americans and their families. They want a government that is as efficient and effective with their tax dollars as possible. They want a government that serves the people of the nation and delivers commonsense solutions—and real results. 

In fact, the research showed an important distinction. People like the idea of strengthening communities, but they rate helping struggling families far more. The people connect with government best when government connects with people. 

It’s not that the people don’t want an effective federal government: 80% believed that the federal government is an important part of a strong American democracy. That belief was strong across Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. 

They just don’t think that’s what they’re now getting. 

The essential principles

To build the government that Americans do want and can trust, the Good Government Agenda needs to have the following elements, the research shows. 

• There’s a big gap between the people’s hopes for government and what they perceive that they’re getting. The focus of government action needs to be on the people, not on agencies or programs or communities.

• The people don’t think government is accountable. The focus of government action needs to be on transparency. 

• The people don’t feel respected and appreciated. The focus of government action needs to be on the quality of each and every interaction with the people. 

• The people don’t believe that the government is fair. The focus of government action needs to build on the principle of no excuses and no exceptions. 

• The people can’t cut through reformspeak to understand what government is doing. The language of “outcomes,” “performance,” and other inside-baseball jargon doesn’t work in connecting with the people. They want to focus on results and they want to see results that they are measurable and meaningful—to them, not to some reporting agency. 

• The people don’t think that government connects with them. They want a government that is in touch with the people. 

Assessing the Left and the Right 

So how close are the current proposals from the left and the right in meeting these essential principles?

First, there is no Next Big Thing that could serve as a game plan for a Good Government Agenda. There have been big ideas in previous agendas, including Osborne and Gaebler’s "reinventing government” as well as the Bush Texas reforms that he brought to the White House. 

The left has the ongoing work of the Biden management agenda, which focuses on the government workforce, the customer experience, and the business of government. The initiative’s website, Performance.gov, displays sophisticated data tracking, anecdotes, and topline analysis. 

The closest that the Biden agenda comes to the big principles is in its commitment to strengthening the customer experience, especially in improving services that directly affect the people, creating better links among key life experiences (like births, marriages, and deaths), and developing shared products. There is substantial data that tracks the work, but the Office of Management and Budget has frankly admitted that the federal government’s customer service lags far behind every major private sector industry. It’s no wonder that the people feel that the federal government does a poor job of serving the people when they see better service everywhere else.

If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the White House, she will have this work to build on, but there’s a big distance between the points in the Biden presidential management agenda and the essential principles that flow from the survey work. In particular, most of the Biden management agenda is under-the-hood improvements in the administration of federal programs. These are very important, of course. But the next step is ensuring that these inward-looking steps provide a stronger outward looking connection to the people. 

The right has Project 2025. There has been substantial conflict, of course, over whether—and how much—the strategy in its 920-page game plan is (and should be) at the core of a Donald Trump administration. Much of the news stories amounts to public posturing. Project 2025 is essentially a “greatest hits” album of the ideas generated on the right in recent years. It’s an effort to get the old band back together. Regardless of any protests to the contrary, this is the album from which the songs of a Trump administration will emerge.

Two parts of the Project 2025 most deserve attention. One is that the large volume, and the strategies contained within it, are organized by government department and agency. The table of contents matches the federal government’s organization chart.  But this is a  very1950s way of thinking about a 2030s-era challenge. There is no problem that matters in the years ahead that could possibly fit inside a single agency, and an agency-based approach would doom Project 2025 to failure before it ever launches. 

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump makes that point. The failures that led to Trump’s wounding were a cascade of failures that stretched across a host of federal, state, and local agencies; they are not the product of any single agency, and no change in any one of those agencies would have prevented the attempt on the former president’s life. There is nothing in Project 2025 that would lay out a game plan to fix the ills that plagued the Secret Service before the shooting—and there is nothing in it that would produce the kind of Good Government Agenda that the people clearly want.

The other part of the Project 2025 initiative that bears most on management is the proposal to bring back Schedule F, the policy announced at the end of the Trump administration that would give the president and political leaders the power to move career officials in policy-related positions into a new excepted service, where they could be removed at will. Positions in Schedule F could be filled at the discretion of these leaders, without going through the merit process. The change would make these officials directly accountable to the policy goals of the president. 

The American people unquestionably want more accountability, but this is not the kind of accountability they want. They want accountability for results, not for partisanship. Six out of ten of those surveyed in June want an independent, nonpartisan civil service, as opposed to one that does the bidding of the president—and that finding is the same for Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. 

When asked whether they thought having a nonpartisan civil service was important for having a strong democracy, 87% agreed—87% of Republicans, 79% of Independents, and 88% of Democrats. Should civil servants be hired and promoted based on their merit rather than on their political beliefs? Overall, 95% agreed. What about whether civil servants should serve the people more than any individual president? That’s 90%. Is the federal government less effective when decisions are driven by politics? There was agreement from 89% of the respondents. 

So, in short: several elements of the work from the left would contribute to what a Good Government Agenda would look like, but it has a long way to go; most elements of the work from the right would undermine government’s effectiveness and create political influence on the bureaucracy with which most Americans disagree. 

The steps to the Good Government Agenda

So how could we build a Good Government Agenda in the next administration? Several steps would lay the foundation:

• Understanding that delivering results that focus on the people is far more important than improving public management practices. 

• Recognizing that results are far more important than process. 

• Focusing on the people as the center of government’s work, not an incidental shadow to the partisan wrangling that characterizes so much public policy. 

• Remembering that the people want accountability, but the accountability they want is transparency.

• Reducing the hassle factor—the administrative burdens that Americans must carry in dealing with the government—is a fundamental first step toward these goals. 

• Recognizing that neither the right nor the left has a clear plan for getting there—but a clear plan is plain to see.

• Beginning by asking people whether they want a government in general—and a civil service in particular—that’s based on partisan politics or proven performance. The answer would guide the steps we must take. 

Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He is the author, with William D. Eggers, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023).