A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform

We keep propping up a system that’s run out of time to adapt

I got into government reform sixteen years ago, though I didn’t think of it as reform at the time. I thought of it as just trying to make a few specific things work better. Since then I’ve worked at the local, state, and federal levels, on benefit delivery, on national defense, on a handful of things in between. I’ve worked alongside a lot of people whose own paths in this work have run the gamut. Collectively we’ve seen a lot. I think we’ve learned a lot about what we often call the operating model of government.

But the government we have — the operating model it runs on, the rules and structures and assumptions that shape how it hires, procures, and delivers — was built for a world that no longer exists, and the distance between that world and this one is growing. We are approaching the kind of moment when that gap stops being a management problem and becomes a true legitimacy crisis. (Many will say that moment has already come.) It’s time to start asking whether the theory of change most of us have been operating under — incremental improvements off a pretty poor baseline — was ever going to get us to a government capable of meeting fast-changing needs. It hasn’t yet, and if we don’t do something differently, it won’t.

Kelly Born at the Packard Foundation recently shared with me a framework called the Three Horizons, originally developed by Anthony Hodgson and adapted widely in systems-change work. In it, Horizon 1 is the currently dominant system.¹ It’s functional enough to persist but failing in critical ways, especially for people with less power. Horizon 3 is the future system you’re working toward, already visible in patches of practice that embody different values and different ways of working, but far from the norm.² Horizon 2 is the turbulent middle where change agents work.

But the key insight is that not all Horizon 2 work is the same. Some H2 innovations genuinely create the conditions for the new system to emerge. Call those transforming H2, or H2+. Others, however inadvertently, extend the lifespan of the failing system by relieving the pressure that might otherwise force structural change.³ Call those sustaining H2, or H2-. Both feel like reform, but they have very different long-term implications.

H2- work is attractive because it usually produces real value in the short run. H2+ work can take a long time to pay off, and the path is rarely clear. In a stable environment, you can get away with a lot of H2-. In an environment where the underlying system has become truly untenable, the difference between the two starts to matter a great deal. I think that’s where we are now.

A lot of what the government reform field has built over the past fifteen years, including a lot of my own work, is probably H2-. Not because the people doing it were wrong, and not because the work didn’t matter, but because the structure of the work, no matter how well executed, had a systematic tendency to solve the immediate problem in a way that made the structural problem easier to tolerate. If that sounds like an indictment, the first place I’d point the finger is at myself. And I don’t regret any of it. Nor am I saying that there’s not a valuable place for H2- work. There is. I’d just like us to see it for what it has been so we can be more deliberate about what we do next.

There are a few patterns that play out over and over in the category of H2-, the work that sustains the status quo.

The pressure valve

The dynamic of unintentionally propping up the status quo is easiest to see in what you might call vertical interventions. An agency lacks the talent to do important work, so philanthropy pays for some detailees, often through an Intergovernmental Personnel Agreement. (I was an IPA during my year in the White House.) An agency can’t hire the people it needs under standard civil service rules, so Congress grants a particular team a special hiring authority, as it did for the CHIPS implementation team. The procurement rules will take too long, so an agency gets an Other Transaction Authority exemption. The number of carve-outs Congress has granted to the Paperwork Reduction Act in recent years is its own story.⁴ The Abundance world is drowning in examples of exemptions to laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality that have been necessary to get anything built, but have then left core barriers to the larger agenda intact. The answer to “the system doesn’t work” has been to hack it in the vertical domains that get attention, not fix it horizontally.⁵

Each of these carve-outs delivers genuine value. Most of them are the right call in the moment. But each one also functions as a pressure valve on a system that, absent the relief, might generate the political and institutional pressure needed to fix the underlying problem. The legislative carveout that makes Paperwork Reduction Act compliance unnecessary for a particular program means the people and organizations with the most standing to demand PRA reform never do. They just move on to the next challenge. The rescue team that fixes a broken system well enough to make it functional returns it to “good enough,” which is exactly the condition in which structural change is hardest to achieve.

The problem isn’t the mechanisms themselves. IPAs and OTAs exist for good reasons and serve legitimate purposes. The problem is when they get deployed as substitutes for fixing the underlying dysfunction rather than as complements to work the system was never designed to do. There’s a difference between an IPA who brings in genuinely rare expertise that even a fit-for-purpose civil service would struggle to hire, and five IPAs filling roles the agency should be able to hire for itself if the system worked. Even the same tools can sometimes have opposite relationship to the structural problem.

The same dynamic shows up in the capacity conversation. When an agency lacks the staff to administer complex grants, the instinct (philanthropy’s instinct, as much as anyone’s) is to supplement that capacity with more staff, more technical assistance, more handholding through the process. But that instinct accepts the complexity as fixed. Louisiana’s Department of Education has been showing a different lesson in their education reform work: a cleaner, simpler grant framework needs fewer people to administer, produces better outcomes, and distributes resources more fairly because it’s actually navigable by grantees who don’t have grant compliance staff. The H2+ move is not to staff up to survive it, but to simplify the system,, and to strengthen the capability of that system.⁶ The instinct to reach for “government needs more resources” is understandable. It is also, at this point, a way of not asking the harder question.

The cost of the workaround or the staffing plus up isn’t just lost pressure. These short-term fixes have become enormously costly in their own right. Every special authority, every exemption, every vertical fix makes the overall system more complex, more fragmented, and more navigable by sophisticated actors — large contractors, well-resourced agencies, organizations with the staff to learn which door to knock on. (The way I put this in my book was “paperwork favors the powerful.”) The organizations least able to navigate that complexity are typically the ones serving the populations with the worst outcomes. Vertical interventions don’t just leave the underlying dysfunction in place. They tend to entrench it.

The demonstration that doesn’t scale

A close cousin is the successful pilot, a project that shows that SNAP enrollment can be simplified, agencies can build digital services in-house, or test-and-learn mechanisms can improve program outcomes, for example. The pilot works. But because the structural conditions for scaling don’t exist, it stays a demonstration, or it gets scaled in a form that loses the properties that made it work, because the procurement rules, the civil service rules, or the oversight structures were designed for a different kind of work. I suspect most readers who’ve worked in this space have a few of their own examples ready at hand, and I’d love to hear about those in the comments.

By scaling here, I don’t mean that a pilot program grows. Government operates at a very large scale, so a pilot program growing from, say, ten uses of a new hiring pathway to hundreds or even thousands is just a bigger workaround. The point isn’t that there’s now an alternative that some people can use with great effort. If the current system is broken, the point of the demonstration is to learn what could work to replace it, and then do just that. Scale means proof points turn into system reform.

In the Three Horizons frame, the existence of these pockets of better practice is real Horizon 3 evidence. They are signs of the future system we are looking for and trying to grow. It becomes H2- when the political system treats those pockets as proof that the problem is solved rather than as proof that the problem is structural, even as the people doing the work know how far from solved it is.⁷ Demonstrations that show something is possible but don’t change the conditions that make it the exception (especially in the four competencies I’ve talked about before) can end up providing the illusion of progress.

The philanthropic funding model tends to reinforce this pattern. Demonstrations are fundable because they produce legible, attributable, near-term outcomes — a number of people helped, a process improved, a tool deployed. Horizontal structural reform — changing the civil service rules, repealing the PRA, restructuring how digital projects get budgeted — produces outcomes that are diffuse, slow, and hard to attribute to any single funder or grantee. Philanthropy systematically underinvests in it because the incentive structures of grantmaking reward the visible and near-term. The result is a field well-resourced to demonstrate what’s possible and under resourced to change the conditions that keep the possible from becoming normal.

The co-optation trap

The third pattern may be the most pernicious, and it’s the one I find personally most frustrating. The field promotes concepts that carry genuine Horizon 3 values. (Think user-centered design, evidence-based policy, feedback loops, etc.) And then the H1 system absorbs the vocabulary, where it does the work of legitimizing the status quo rather than challenging it.

“Agile” is now a procurement category that large contractors have learned to perform while delivering waterfall outcomes on agile timelines. “Human-centered design” is a workshop format and a contract deliverable. “Evidence-based” has become a requirement that agencies must demonstrate compliance with, which changes the relationship between agencies and evidence in ways that matter. When evidence production is mandated as a compliance activity, for example, it can crowd out evidence as a genuine decision-making tool. An agency that goes looking for the best possible data because it wants to know something is in a very different relationship with that data than an agency that produces a required report because OMB or Congress needed the box checked. From the outside the two can look almost identical. They produce very different organizational behavior.

The deepest version of co-optation is when the system doesn’t just absorb the vocabulary of reform, it learns to perform it. An agency can run user research, adopt agile ceremonies, and publish evidence reports while leaving the governance structures, vendor relationships, and incentive systems that produce bad outcomes entirely intact. The performance is often sincere. The people doing it believe in what the words mean. But copying the visible practices of a different way of working, without changing who has power, how decisions get made, and what anyone is accountable for, produces a somewhat nicer version of the same thing rather than a different thing. Reform becomes a ritual that signals values but doesn’t deliver on them. The system learns to speak the language, but it doesn’t actually change.

A different moment

The H2- work I’m describing has been done in good faith by people. I am one of those people. Code for America, which I founded and where I spent more than a decade, is in important respects capacity substitution. USDR, which I also helped start, is as well. The healthcare.gov rescue (which I didn’t actually work on but tried to provide moral support for) was the rescue-and-rebuild cycle. For much of the past fifteen years, the H2- path was arguably the right call. When there was no political space for structural change, demonstrations were a good way to build the evidence base and develop the field.

I think we are in a different moment now. This moment is defined by disruption. I count three kinds.

Contingent disruption — pandemics, climate events, geopolitical shocks, financial crises — is unpredictable in its specifics but very predictable in its category: large, fast-moving, high-stakes demands that fall disproportionately on government. COVID was not an anomaly. The next version won’t look the same.

The most recent disruption to federal government, however, was political. Whatever the cost of its methods, DOGE made the brittleness of the current operating model impossible to ignore and created political openings for structural arguments that previously had no traction. The reform field did not create this moment. But it can shape what comes out of it.

AI brings structural disruption. This is a transformation already underway in the material conditions of work, economy, and administration. AI creates dramatic change in both the needs and conditions government must respond to and the ways in which it can respond at the same time. Yes, I certainly mean a social safety net not nearly fit to handle the levels of unemployment that are likely coming our way, and yes, I mean possible upsets in the balance of power between agencies and the vendors they rely on, but that’s barely scratching the surface.

AI is not only an exogenous shock that government will have to absorb. It is also moving the bar on what counts as acceptable service in the first place. People are already using AI to understand their medical bills, navigate insurance denials, and draft appeals for benefits they were wrongly denied. Soon they will expect to apply for SNAP or file their taxes by uploading a paystub and answering a few plain-language questions, not by filling out even the best-designed web form. The forty-page PDF used to feel intolerable. The well-designed web form will start to feel that way too, and faster than the last transition did.⁸

And service delivery is only the most visible piece. The same expectation shift is going to hit regulation, permitting, enforcement, how quickly an agency can respond to a new problem, how a legislature decides whether a law is working. If a small team with the right tools can map a regulatory regime in a week, the timelines we have now, in which rulemaking takes several years--or even multiple presidential terms--become indefensible. If an advocate can stress-test a policy against thousands of edge cases before it gets enacted, the standard for what counts as due diligence in lawmaking starts to move. The bar is rising on the whole surface of what government does, not just on the forms people fill out.

Not everyone wants this shift to happen. Public sector unions have secured laws in several states forbidding the use of AI in service delivery, won contracts requiring union consent before autonomous vehicles can operate, and pushed legislation mandating staffing levels that the work no longer requires — as my colleagues Robert Gordon and Nick Bagley have documented. The concern for workers caught in this transition is legitimate. But blocking government’s transformation while the world around it moves on is not a strategy for protecting those workers. It exacerbates public frustration with government, weakens the case for investing in it⁹, and leaves the people who most depend on public services with a system increasingly unfit to serve them.

So the gap we have been measuring, between what government delivers and what the public considers a basic level of competence, is widening from both ends at once. The system is straining to clear the old bar at the same moment the bar is rising.

In this environment, the benefits systems that struggled to scale during COVID will be asked to scale again. The regulatory processes that can’t move quickly will be asked to respond to developments they weren’t designed to anticipate. The civil service system that can’t attract the people it needs now will need to attract people with skills that didn’t exist a decade ago.

If I had to pick, it’s AI that drives this disruptive moment. But I don’t have to pick. You could just as easily imagine climate shocks, or the next pandemic, or an escalation of the current war. Truly, some combination of all the above is not that unlikely. Reasonable people may disagree about the size and shape of the disruption AI will bring, but betting against disruption generally seems deeply unwise at the moment.¹⁰

If you buy that argument, then we must acknowledge that a reform field largely dedicated to H2- work is not what the moment calls for. In a stable environment, H2- work that buys time for a failing system might be much-needed, and might be a missed opportunity for transformation. In an environment where disruptions of all kinds are accelerating, it becomes a compounding liability. Extending the lifespan of a brittle system just means the system eventually fails more spectacularly. More people get hurt. More people look for alternatives to democracy.

That doesn’t mean we need to throw everything out and start over. For the reform ecosystem, it means existing actors need incentives to align their work toward structural transformation, new actors with adjacent expertise need to be welcomed into the fold (especially advocates and lobbyists, given how little influence muscle the field has today), and connections need to be made both upstream and downstream of where we’ve been focused. It means articulating competing H3 visions from a wide range of ideological and practical perspectives and debating them among, including the project that sparked this line of thinking, which Kelly funded and FAI and New America are currently working on. It means designing funding and partnership structures that reward structural ambition while staying grounded in meaningful near-term progress. Funders and grantees share responsibility for creating the conditions under which a diverse set of actors can aim higher by working together, and connecting the dots upstream.

For this to work, it can’t be a zero sum game. Government capacity is wildly neglected in philanthropy despite its high leverage. (Good luck naming an issue philanthropists care about that doesn’t benefit from increased government capacity.) Could the field stop doing some H2- work? Sure. That would free up some existing resources for more H2+ work, which has been too little of the field’s mindshare and resources to date. But that is not the path forward — it wouldn’t get us where we need to be. We need more resources, full stop. We need to make the case to philanthropy for greater investment in the entire field (that’s part of what Recoding America Fund is trying to do) and make the case to government leaders, including electeds, to invest in better plumbing, so that the investment in H2+ work isn’t coming at the expense of the essential life support.

Sketching H2+

So what does H2+ look like? There certainly won’t be one definition everyone agrees on, but there are a few principles I’ll throw out in the hopes of sparking much more discussion.

Move upstream. The most important marker of H2+ work is that it targets the conditions that produce the problem rather than the symptoms they generate. Getting a specific agency better digital services, for example, is H2- if it leaves untouched how digital projects are staffed, funded, and overseen across government. The upstream target is an operating model in which funding mechanisms, team structure, decision-making authority, roadmapping practices, and success metrics are all aligned around outcomes rather than outputs — what Ann Lewis and I have called the product operating model. This requires changes in both the executive and legislative branches. An agency can do everything right internally and still fail if its appropriations are structured around meaningless requirements rather than continuous improvement, or if oversight bodies evaluate it on spending compliance rather than user outcomes. Getting digital right, at scale, means changing the legislative and administrative structures that govern what that’s even allowed to look like. (For a bright spot, look to the FAFSA team, which has successfully parlayed a rescue effort into meaningful structural change, including shaping its own oversight environment. More on that here and here.)

Funders need to ask not just whether an investment does good but whether it changes the conditions under which good can be done at scale. A fellowship that places talented technologists in one agency and a civil service reform effort that changes how every agency can hire are both valuable. But they are not equivalent bets on the future of government capacity, and a portfolio that’s weighted heavily toward the former at the expense of the latter reflects a preference for the legible over the structural. H2+ philanthropy means being willing to fund work whose outcomes are diffuse, slow, and hard to attribute — because that’s often what structural change looks like from the outside.

Connect legislative and executive branch reform. The people working on congressional modernization and those working on executive branch reform have largely been operating in parallel, each with a partial picture. Legislative modernizers understand how the structure of congressional incentives shapes what agencies are asked to do and how they are overseen; executive branch reformers understand what those asks produce when they land in agencies. Together, that knowledge is considerably more powerful than either is alone. California’s Outcomes Review experiment — in which legislators are building structured feedback loops between the laws they pass and what those laws actually produce (and getting rewarded for it with good press, the currency of elected officials!) — is an early model of what it looks like when the legislative branch takes seriously its role not just in passing law but in learning whether law works. The H2+ version of this is a field that actively bridges these two worlds, helping each understand what the other sees, and building reform strategies that are legible and actionable to both.

Advocate, influence, build power. I remember when a hill staffer called me years ago for advice on an issue. I gave her my take, and suggested a few others she could also talk to, and as we were wrapping up she said “You know, it’s a lot of work for me to tap the civic tech folks. The industry groups…they’re organized. They have a point of view. They’re here on the hill talking to us all the time. You folks….I have to figure out the ten people to call and track them down. And then figure out what you’re saying and how to translate it. You’re ceding the conversation to vested interests.”

The reason we weren’t educating lawmakers and policymakers then is that we were busy -– busy helping agencies navigate broken systems, building capacity to survive dysfunction, demonstrating that things could work better. That work was and is enormously valuable. And it remains underfunded. There could be far more of it and needs would remain unmet. But those needs will continue to grow (especially as AI widens the gap between the public and private sectors) as long as we put off structural reform. Ironically it’s people busy plugging holes in the system who most need to be in the reform conversations. They get what really needs to happen. It’s not about sidelining them. It’s about putting the pieces of the puzzle together and building a field that advocates effectively, and advocates for the right things.

Above I’m talking about my past work in civic tech. The good government ecosystem has been more advocacy-oriented, for sure. Folks like Jenny Mattingly at the Partnership for Public Service have been a consistent voice on the hill for the public interest for years now. But who is the Jenny Mattingley of any given state? And even in Washington, Jenny and the few others like her are fighting mightily but outgunned by more organized interests with deeper pockets. There’s a real opportunity to define an agenda and resource a diverse coalition of groups to whose messages can harmonize. That diversity needs to include hard-hitting campaigners willing to play the game, not technocratic analytical types. That’s how we really win.

Ground the work in the actual politics. Building off my previous point, structural reform happens when there are political actors, in governors’ offices and agency leadership, but equally in legislative chambers and committee assignments, who have the standing, the incentive, and the capacity to move it. H2+ work is attentive to where those actors are and what they need. In the current federal environment, that means understanding which officials have genuine reform mandates and what constraints they’re operating under, which committee chairs have oversight interests that align with structural change, and where executive action is available and durable versus where statutory change is actually required. In states, it means working with the specific dynamics of a given governor’s office or legislative leadership. The field has too often treated politics as noise to be ignored rather than a medium to be worked. H2+ work takes the politics seriously, including the politics of the legislature, which shapes not just what agencies are authorized to do but what they are incentivized to attempt.

Build coalitions that make previously niche issues salient. For most of the past two decades civil service reform was something occasionally gestured at by good government groups and researched by a small number of policy scholars. Today, you can at least declare it a priority without getting laughed out of the room. What’s changing is not the substance of the analysis but the coalition around it. There is finally a convergence of people across the ideological spectrum who recognize, for different reasons, that the public sector workforce system is producing outcomes no one wants. That convergence is making civil service reform a live political issue. Same with Paperwork Reduction Act reform. And the same dynamics can work for other issues. H2+ investment identifies the structural reforms that are ripe for similar coalition-building and builds the political infrastructure to make them move.

Use federalism as a flywheel. States are laboratories of democracy,¹¹ but H2+ work doesn’t just wait for state and local governments to experiment and hope the results diffuse upward. It actively designs for the spread of proof points, using early-adopter states to generate evidence, building the connective tissue that carries lessons from those states to others and to the federal level and back down again. Progress up and down the federalism stack reinforces itself, if the field is organized to make that happen rather than leaving it to chance.

Doing different things differently

I realized early last year that while I’d spent the bulk of my career trying to drag government into the Internet Era, that work has to change now. We are entering a new era, and if those of us who fought the last fight don’t adapt to the conditions and expectations of this one, we’ll make exactly the mistake the people who resisted internet-era ways of working made. We’ll become the blockers — the ones holding on to old ways of working because that is what we are used to and that is what we are good at.

None of which means rescue work should stop, or that demonstrations are worthless, or that capacity substitution isn’t helpful and needed. Some H2- work, done deliberately and named honestly, is best understood as experimentation: we’re running it inside the failing system precisely because that’s where we’ll learn what a new operating model has to do. That’s a different kind of work from rescue that produces learning incidentally, but both can be valuable.

But the field needs a shared frame clear-eyed enough to ask, with each investment: does this move the system toward H3, or does it prolong H1? That question should be driving how resources, talent, and attention get allocated now, not because the prior work was mistaken but because the moment is different and the cost of extending the status quo is too high. There will have to be work that sustains the status quo, but what tradeoffs are we willing to make?

But insisting we ask the question does not mean that answering it is easy: there is no objective set of criteria that distinguishes one from the other. What may look like H2+ to some may seem like H2- to others, and part of that depends on your particular vision of that third horizon (more on that in the coming weeks.) Some may see work as contributing to a transformation, and therefore H2+, but towards an undesired H3 state. Grappling with how to answer this question is work we all need to be doing. (You’ll hear more in the months to come about how the Recoding America Fund, the organization I co-founded and chair, is going to be using this framework to guide its work.)

If this framework is sparking thoughts for you, and you want to contribute, a good place to start might be thinking and writing about your third horizon: What is a desired future state for American government? How would it need to work to meet the needs of the public in the world we are hurtling into? The point in the future you choose is up to you, and somewhat arbitrary. A third horizon will always be a moving target, in that the ability to continually adapt to changing circumstances without causing political collapse is part of the change we seek. But tell a story about an operating model that’s fit for purpose, and let’s start comparing notes.

Some things haven’t changed. The community is still full of good, smart people with enormous insight into a very difficult problem. We’ve just run out of time to do it the way we’ve been doing it. A brittle system that gets propped up through manageable shocks will eventually meet a shock it can’t survive, and we are moving into a period where the shocks are neither manageable nor hypothetical. Every H2- intervention that returns the system to “good enough” is now a bet that good enough will hold. It’s a bet I no longer think we can afford to make.

The window for H2+ work has not been open like this before. It will not stay open indefinitely.

1. “Horizon” is an imperfect metaphor. H1 is not distant, it’s the system you’re working inside today. A political theorist might call it a hegemony: dominant less because it functions well than because it shapes what seems possible, and therefore what gets attempted. I’ll use the horizon framework’s language throughout this post, but that’s what I mean by it. Anyone who wants to start talking about Hegemony 1 and Hegemony 3 instead is welcome to. It would also be correct, if a bit of a mouthful.

2. To state the obvious, there will be many Horizon 3s. They will not all be compatible. But articulating a variety of them would be incredibly valuable right now.

3. This is akin to why Google explicitly discourages heroism. See: https://sre.google/resources/practices-and-processes/no-heroes/
Thank you to Nick Bagley (whose upcoming book you should pre-order) for pointing this out.

4. The pattern extends beyond PRA. The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) includes a “good cause” exemption from public notice and comment intended for exceptional circumstances. Connor Raso found that, at one point, roughly half of federal rulemakings relied on that or another exception to bypass standard notice-and-comment requirements, including many major rulemakings. (h/t Reeve Bull)

5. It’s tempting to read this list and conclude that the root problem is congressional dysfunction, that agencies hack the system because Congress won’t fix it and they have no other choice. Sometimes that’s true. But it’s true less often than people assume. In many cases the binding constraint isn’t statutory at all. Agencies develop unhelpfully narrow interpretations of existing authorities, treat those interpretations as immovable, and then seek explicit legislative permission to do something the law already allows. (When I served on the Defense Innovation Board, when Department staff would ask for an exception or new authority, Congressional staff would invariably reply “but you don’t use the ones we already gave you!”) Blaming Congress can function as its own kind of pressure valve, a way of externalizing the problem instead ofso that no one has to doing the harder work of changing internal practice, culture, and interpretation.

6. Mariana Mazzucato and others at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose distinguish between “capacity” (“how much” – the “resources, structures and conditions that make it possible for a [government] to act”) and “capability” (“the can we and how well: the routines, processes, and coordination that convert capacity into reliable, equitable outcomes. They are the ways you deploy your resources — the ability to innovate, adapt, and achieve results.”) (h/t Loren DeJonge Schulman at the Federation of American Scientists for pointing out this important distinction).

7. It is much more appealing to politicians and political appointees with loyalties to status quo actors to use demonstrations as an excuse to declare victory within the current broken structures than to tackle the underlying structural issues in the face of opposition from supporters who benefit from the status quo, or at least think they do. Even when politicals aren’t coopted by the interests of status quo actors, there’s just the practical issue of timeframe: Politicals are thinking about what they can accomplish – in a visible way – within very compressed electoral cycles. Their incentives are not aligned to the hard, long, time-consuming slog of systems change that will probably only visibly benefit the next leader (or the leader after that).

8. I am bullish about how AI can radically improve the delivery of public benefits, but only if we take seriously the upstream structural changes needed to enable effective, responsible use of AI. The organization I co-founded and chair, the Recoding America Fund, has teamed up with the Center for Civic Futures on its current open call for its Public Benefits Innovation Fund to focus on precisely that.

9. People already think that government costs far more than it should. Matt Yglesias has a recent post on that: https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-a-new-teacher-better-off-in-mississippi

10. No, I’m not an accelerationist. There is a difference between welcoming catastrophic change and thinking we should prepare for it. What I share with accelerationists is the view that the status quo is pretty broken.

11. If you don’t already follow Daniel Stid’s Substack – The Art of Association – you should. His writing on pluralism, civic engagement, and state capacity in America and the role of philanthropy in it has shaped my own thinking.