Why the United States Can’t Govern Anymore

In 2019, journalist David Kleon described the United States as “the sick man of the 21st century,” a country suffering from elite stagnation and institutional exhaustion. Six years later, the diagnosis remains accurate. The problem is less ideological than infrastructure, a form of technical debt. In software, “technical debt” is the cost of deferred maintenance: every quick fix or deferred upgrade makes the system more fragile.

The same obligations accrue to governments when they postpone investment in staff, modernization, and oversight. As the bill comes due, capacity is eroding more quickly than legitimacy. This erosion now shapes not only domestic performance, but also affects how the United States projects its authority abroad.

State capacity is the ability of a government to reliably design, implement and sustain policies. For half a century, the United States has treated productive capacity as expendable. Since the late 1970s, a pattern of austerity and outsourcing has hollowed out the administrative core of American power. What was once a solid bureaucracy capable of planning, coordinating and implementing a national strategy has turned into a patchwork of contractors, temporary offices, and legacy systems that are often unable to implement the ambitions set for them.

Beginning in the late twentieth century, presidents and reform commissions urged government to operate, as they saw it, like business, emphasizing efficiency and cost control over reliability. President Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign promised to bring “tight, direct management” to Washington. President Ronald Reagan declared in his inaugural address in 1981 that “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

A decade later, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pledged in the National Performance Review Initiative to make government “work better and with less,” importing private sector metrics and performance targets into the bureaucracy. Each iteration deepened expectations that agencies should behave like corporations rather than public institutions—a trajectory that historian Gary Gerstle analyzed in his book The rise and fall of the neoliberal orderwhich traces how the administration became a bipartisan belief in the logic of the market within the state itself.

The result was a case that maintained its shape but lost its depth. Tax expenditures, vouchers, and indirect subsidies replaced visible public programs. As citizens experienced politics through private intermediaries such as banks, insurance companies, and employers, the federal government became both omnipresent and invisible. Political scientist Susan Mettler called this a “government that works through the market rather than alongside it.” The more invisible he became, the easier it was to attack. Austerity policies have survived because their consequences have been hidden.

The lack of visibility of state actions also weakens democratic accountability. When government acts through private agents, citizens experience the outcomes of policies but not the institutions that produce them. This disconnect erodes the feedback loop between performance and trust. A public frustrated by delays or denials often blames “bureaucracy” in the abstract rather than responsible structures or appropriations.

Over time, this ambiguity blurs the lines of responsibility and undermines civic knowledge about what the government does and why. Reversing this situation requires not only technical modernization, but also cultural modernization: making the machinery of governance visible enough so that citizens can recognize its value.

Technology was supposed to compensate. Performance management systems have multiplied, but they produce data without insight. Budget measures, such as Circular A-11 issued by the Office of Management and Budget, formalized compliance rituals that replaced reporting rather than reflection. By the 2000s, federal agencies spent most of their IT budgets maintaining legacy systems written in outdated languages. Update contracts often reproduced the same dependencies, locking agencies into vendor ecosystems that they were unable to oversee. Every reform promised efficiency but instead led to weakness.

Outsourcing has deepened the problem. Contracting has been promoted as flexibility, but it has hollowed out institutional memory. The Department of Defense reports more than half a million full-time contractor equivalents alongside its civilian workforce. The Department of Energy and the Department of Veterans Affairs followed similar ratios. Analysts have pulled out before seeing the results of their own programs. The number of oversight staffs dwindled, and the FOIA backlog grew. The loops of oversight that once helped the state correct itself have become intermittent and reactive.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed what decades of deferred maintenance has created. Agencies charged with disbursing relief funds or processing benefits worked with systems designed for much smaller volumes. Some programs succeeded only because interagency task forces made improvised reforms that went beyond normal procedures. The same flexibility that kept the government functioning obscures its fragility.

By mid-2025, this fragility was impossible to hide. President Donald Trump’s February executive order on local government efficiency imposed rapid staffing cuts at civilian agencies. Nearly 150,000 federal employees have left through layoffs, buyouts, or early retirement, and another nearly 150,000 workers have been placed on paid leave pending reorganization.

The intention was to modernize. The effect was paralyzing. Grant disbursements have slowed, audits have been suspended, and the backlog of permit applications has doubled. Trump’s so-called administration of government efficiency did not break a working machine; You have already revealed a deficit.

These failures have international consequences. The allies now face a United States that can finance commitments more easily than it can implement them. NATO coordination meetings continue without US representation at working levels. Defense cooperation agreements expire as law firms miss renewal deadlines. In a global system that depends on trustworthy execution by the United States, administrative fragility becomes a strategic risk. State capacity is credibility.

Administrative fragility also undermines the country’s credibility abroad. Foreign ministries and international organizations depend on predictable American follow-up. When agencies fail to deliver, commitments are broken, and allies resort to hedging. The gap between US funding promises and implementation timelines shapes how other governments plan their defense and economic policies. In this sense, bureaucratic capacity is not only a local concern, but also an essential instrument of power. The ability to fulfill obligations abroad begins with efficiency at home.

Other powers have recognized this dynamic. The EU’s regulatory apparatus and China’s sprawling development bureaucracy transform administrative cohesion into geopolitical influence. When the United States struggles to coordinate its own agencies, it loses influence in places where procedural reliability is a strength. Competence, not just ability, has become a measure of global standing. Thus, rebuilding state capacity does not constitute nostalgia for mid-century bureaucracy; It is a strategic necessity in an era in which governance itself has become a struggle between regimes.

Reform cannot begin everywhere at once, but reform begins where consensus still exists. Congress can act on clear service failures that intersect with ideology. The IRS shows that targeted funding, frequent updates, and transparent performance metrics can restore trust while improving efficiency. Similar pilot programs could stabilize agencies whose collapse is most noticeable to the public, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Social Security Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. When competence is demonstrated, legitimacy comes.

Investing in cybersecurity presents another near-term opportunity. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency already coordinates state and local partnerships, but at a scale disproportionate to the risks it manages. Treating cybersecurity as national security would justify predictable, multi-year funding, standardized cyber hygiene protocols, and exchange programs between federal and private sector professionals. These measures are technocratic, not ideological, but they generate political returns through reliability.

The deeper challenge is human infrastructure. Pay pressure and limited advancement have pushed talent toward the private sector for decades. Rebuilding the career ladder within the civil service would reverse this trend. Tying wages to market equivalents, creating pipelines for vocational training, and restoring mid-career training would once again make government a place where experience accumulates rather than evaporates. The Office of Personnel Management could publish open data on retirement risks and skills shortages, aligning incentives for long-term planning.

In the same spirit, the balance between in-house expertise and contract labor must change. Outsourcing should complement institutional knowledge, not replace it. Government audits show that insourcing core technical, procurement, IT, and analytics functions leads to higher quality and lower cost over time. Maintenance should be understood as a strategic function, not a discretionary function.

Reform also depends on management. Expanding collective bargaining within the federal workforce would stabilize the employee retention process and create feedback channels between management and employees. The decline of organized labor deprived the government of interlocutors and institutional conscience. Restoring Inspector General budgets would enhance accountability.

Enforcement of the law would prevent presidents from withholding funds appropriated by Congress, protecting administrative continuity from partisan interference. Designed after the Watergate scandal to maintain the separation of powers, this law ensures that presidents carry out the will of Congress rather than suspending it. Enforcing it today would reaffirm that bureaucratic discipline is constitutional discipline, that is, the habit of implementing commitments once undertaken.

Administrative reform at home would also enhance the credibility of democracy abroad. Allies and adversaries alike judge the strength of American leadership by its ability to govern itself. Rebuilding this capacity therefore constitutes not only an act of internal reform, but also a reaffirmation of constitutional democracy as a system capable of self-correction. When Congress acts as an equal authority and the civil service operates reliably, it strengthens the foundations of American diplomacy. Renewing state capacity ultimately constitutes a renewal of US legitimacy.

Restoring capabilities is therefore as much a civil project as it is a bureaucratic project. Citizens cannot maintain their trust in institutions they rarely encounter or do not understand. Demonstrated efficiency, timely delivery of benefit, smooth operation of a public website, and consistent enforcement of the rule are the most persuasive arguments for democratic government. Every successful administrative act becomes an act of persuasion, reminding citizens that the state is neither distant nor hostile, but capable and just. Legitimacy is not gained from rhetoric but from reliability.

Rebuilding legitimacy will require more than just competence. Policy advocate Heather McGhee has shown how racist, zero-sum thinking erodes public support for common goods. Credible renewal of administrative capacity must make equality a matter of design. Reliability must be equal across constituencies so that citizens can see the state as consistent rather than conditional. In this sense, fairness is an engineering principle: systems that perform unevenly fail under pressure.

Governance, like infrastructure, deteriorates when maintenance is postponed. The metaphor of technical debt makes clear what austerity has obscured: neglect imposes obligations, and these obligations are exacerbated. The United States cannot devise a way out of decline; He must regain the ability to maintain.

History shows that such renewal is possible. Civil service reforms in the 1940s, the construction of the Great Society in the 1960s, and digital transformation in the 1990s all expanded administrative capacity when legitimacy went hand in hand with investment. Whether the United States pays this debt will determine not only the health of its government but also the credibility of its leadership abroad.