Rebuilding state capacity for inclusive economic transformation

Harvard Kennedy School’s Reimagining the Economy initiative, which is run by the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and the Center for International Development, recently hosted its fourth event in this year’s “Economics and Beyond” series. The series invites experts across disciplines to engage with our biggest economic challenges. The conversations grapple with state capacity—a government’s ability to implement policies effectively—and how to ensure the economy works for everyone.  

The initiative recently invited two experts on making sure government works for its people. Don Moynihan (professor at the University of Michigan Ford School) and Jennifer Pahlka (senior fellow at Niskanen Center, and author of “Recoding America”) spoke with Elizabeth Linos (Emma Bloomberg Professor of Public Policy and Management and the faculty director of The People Lab). Dani Rodrik, co-director of the initiative and Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, introduced the talk. 

In their discussion, “Rebuilding State Capacity for Inclusive Economic Transformation,” Linos, Moynihan, and Pahlka focused on making sure the state serves its citizens–that the government works efficiently and effectively.  
 

Streamlining services: Designing policy with people in mind   

Moynihan discussed the concept of administrative burdens—the complicated paperwork, bureaucracy, and regulations that people navigate when interacting with their government. These “administrative burdens,” a term Moynihan coined with sociologist Pamela Herd, takes up people’s valuable time and effort. It can also keep them accessing key services and resources from their government.  

For Moynihan and Herd, who are married, the concept is personal; Moynihan described the daunting stack of paperwork he filled out to immigrate from Ireland to the United States.  

“I remember at one point looking at a stack of immigration forms and saying, I have a PhD in public administration, and I don’t know how to do this,” he explained.  

“We have a child with a disability,” he continued. “Negotiating the interactions with government to access resources was a sort of overwhelming challenge for us.”  

Together, Moynihan and Herd published a book on the topic, “Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means,” in 2018. To write it, they connected with people about the “cost” of the learning, documentation, administrative, and emotional work required to interact with government and access resources. They found the concept resonated.  

As Moynihan put it, “People were like, ‘oh, yes, that makes sense.’”  
 

Cutting bureaucracy and building efficient governments  

Pahlka, like Moynihan, expressed a belief in the power of government to support its constituents—and an awareness of the ways in which it’s falling short.  

Just as constituents wade through complex regulations in accessing government services, government workers are often moving through complicated processes and procedures, too. 

“We’re still an over-proceduralized bureaucracy at the state, local, and federal level,” she explains.  

Moynihan, too, discussed “the increase in rules and procedures that limit our ability to get things done.” In a talk before the last presidential election, he named proceduralism alongside politicization as the two main challenges the government faced.  

Pahlka offered the example of one state with over 7,000 pages of active regulations covering unemployment insurance, which made that insurance difficult for people to access.

“Until we do something about that, we will not have an unemployment insurance system that is scalable, and flexible, and robust,” she explained.  

She shared a framework for governments to avoid challenges and get work done: they can use an iterative “product model” instead of the traditional, siloed “project model” for developing government technology and delivering services.  

In the traditional project model, government focuses more on the process of a task and completing it on a particular timeline. In the product model, government considers their ability to “continue to deliver services in a dynamic environment.” They focus on the desired outcomes of a technology, which might require ongoing adjustment, change, and innovation.          

Pahlka wrote a Niskanen Center blog post on the topic with Ann Lewis, former director of Technology Transformation Services for the General Services Administration.  

“I’ve seen it [the concept of a product or project model] be very useful in conversation about what needs to change if we’re going to build durable products that aren’t just static things that you get from a vendor,” she explains.  
 

Democratic backsliding  

Amidst these concerns about the way government works in our country, Moynihan and Pahlka expressed concerns about the state of government itself. Linos asked both panelists about their worries when it comes to the state capacity in the United States over the next decade, and Moynihan suggested that even productive critique of bureaucracy will be conflated with a total overhaul of democracy as we know it.  

“My concern is we’re sliding toward a version of authoritarianism, where controlling bureaucracy is a central part of that plan,” Moynihan explained. “It’s deeply uncomfortable to say this in public, because it challenges so many of our assumptions about what America is. On the other hand, if you look at comparative political science literature on democratic backsliding, you can just check one box after the other about which direction we’re going…it’s happening to an extraordinary degree. It’s also happening incredibly quickly.”  

He fears that as the traditional public sector is under attack, “our problems that genuinely need to be solved are going to be conflated with this broader attack on bureaucracy.”  

“I feel like we are jumping very quickly to the notion that things need to be rebuilt,” Pahlka said. “I do subscribe to what Don said about norms being broken, and concern there.” But she’s observed an appetite for at times drastic change among government employees. Many civil servants she spoke to were eager for at least some of the shifts the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, had promised.  

“A lot of civil servants were like, ‘Actually, okay, you’re going to take a sledgehammer, or chainsaw, or scalpel...to the things that constrain me from being able to serve the public? I actually will take a little bit of that, please.’ And we didn’t get it.”  

She explained that even with this reality, there’s a great deal of nuance required in talking about it, and certainly much that needs to be rebuilt.  

“I think we really need to think about—if I could be provocative about it—further dismantling the administrative state in service of state capacity before we rush to the metaphor of rebuilding,” she said.  
 

Increasing trust in government  

Linos asked the panelists how we can increase trust in government in this complex moment.  

Moynihan suggested that while people’s trust in government is often simply partisan—they trust the government they voted for—the public is drawn to transparency. By his account, we need both a theory of power and a theory of accountability.  

Pahlka added that a decline in trust in government is shaped by people’s interactions with that government—be it at a local, state, or federal level. She says the way to fix that distrust is to get governance right.  

“That is frustration with the system that’s only solved by delivering.” 

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Photo credit: Banner photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images. Portrait of Jen Pahlka by Fisher Studios; Portrait of Don Moynihan courtesy of the Ford School of Public Policy.