The crisis
underneath the crises
Government's inability to deliver is the thread connecting failures across American life — from healthcare to housing, defense to childcare, infrastructure to immigration. Most people wouldn't use the term “state capacity.” But they know what the lack of it feels like.
There's no area of American life
the failure to deliver doesn't touch
One problem,
hiding in plain sight
These failures touch healthcare and housing, defense and childcare, infrastructure and immigration. Neither party nor any recent administration emerges unscathed. Behind all of them is a single, structural problem: America's government has lost the basic operational capacity to deliver on its promises. Hiring systems that take months to fill critical roles. Procurement rules that lock agencies into failing vendors for years. Technology so outdated that government employees can't fix or even understand their own systems. Procedures designed to prevent criticism rather than produce results.
This operational breakdown undermines every policy priority — no matter your politics or what issues you care about. The best-designed legislation in the world can't produce results when the machinery of government can't execute. And when government consistently fails to deliver, public trust erodes, citizens disengage, and government becomes even less effective. It's a vicious cycle.
A problem everyone sees
but no one owns
Parts of this problem have attracted serious attention and real talent, across many different communities. Good government and accountability groups push for transparency and oversight. Regulatory reformers work to update or eliminate outdated rules. Legislative modernization advocates push Congress and state legislatures to be more outcomes-driven. Civic technologists build better digital tools for government. Others push for government efficiency, workforce modernization, budget reform, evidence-based policymaking, or abundance. While there's some collaboration and cross-pollination across these communities, the connective tissue between them is limited.
The collective power to address government's broken operating model exists. But it remains fragmented and underresourced, falling far short of what the problem demands.
A once-in-a-generation
window for reform
For the first time in decades, the conditions exist for ambitious structural reform. Political disruption from multiple fronts has changed what's possible: from the right, DOGE has moved the Overton window for the speed and scale of bureaucratic change, forcing leaders across the ideological spectrum to ask whether they could have been bolder. From the left, governors and policymakers are pursuing operational reform agendas of their own, recognizing that effective government is essential to delivering on their priorities. The result is something rare: real demand for structural reform to the government operating model from across the political spectrum.
At the same time, rapid advances in AI are raising the stakes. AI will demand a government capable of responding to massive societal disruptions at a speed the current operating model cannot achieve. But AI is also part of the solution, with the potential to transform what government can do if our governing institutions develop the capability to adopt it responsibly.
These forces create openings for reform that seemed impossible just years ago. But the window won't stay open indefinitely.