We categorically reject Project 2025’s authoritarian vision of the U.S. administrative state — as something that can be weaponized by an autocratic president, exploited by the wealthy few to maintain a fundamentally unequal and unjust economy, and corrupted by far-right extremists to establish a rigid social and cultural hierarchy that denies rights and opportunities to individuals based upon their race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or disability status.
Our alternative vision instead conceives of the U.S. administrative state as:
- A legitimate part of our constitutional governing framework;
- A custodian and agent of the rule of law;
- A platform for sustained and meaningful public engagement in our democracy that is available to all members of the public;
- A vehicle for public empowerment, particularly for communities that experience historical and structural marginalization in our society;
- A steward for an economy that is fair, inclusive, and productive;
- A guardian against excessive concentrations of private political and economic power that threaten to destabilize our economy and democracy;
- A forum in which all Americans are invited to respectfully deliberate and renegotiate the basic parameters that define our multicultural, pluralist society; and
- A shield against unacceptable risks of harm to public health, safety, financial security, and the environment.
Our Constitution not only permits this vision of the U.S. administrative state, it affirmatively requires it.
We recognize that the U.S. administrative state, in its current form, largely aligns with this vision but falls short of achieving it in practice. Accordingly, we call on federal policymakers to embrace this vision and take all appropriate steps toward bringing the administrative state closer to its full potential.
More specifically, policymakers should pursue reforms that:
- Provide agencies with the financial and legal resources needed to fulfill their respective missions;
- Permit agencies to operate with sufficient flexibility to meet emerging or unforeseen challenges — particularly in the face of incomplete information about potential harms to the public interest — in a reasonable and expeditious manner;
- Underscore agencies’ affirmative obligation to address threats to the public interest that offend the goals and objectives of our constitutional system of government;
- Expand meaningful opportunities for public engagement in all aspects of the administrative process, including underlying research and new data generation, priority setting, policy development, implementation, enforcement, and program evaluation;
- Eliminate unnecessary procedural requirements that prevent federal agencies from fulfilling their statutory missions in a timely and effective manner and that waste scarce agency resources;
- Limit improper corporate dominance over agency decision-making processes, which might unduly influence the outcome and prevent meaningful engagement by members of the public who traditionally have not participated in agency decision-making processes, including those from structurally marginalized communities;
- Make decision-making more attentive to considerations of social justice and equity, to the extent permissible by law;
- Insulate career agency experts against improper political interference in the discharge of their duties;
- Uphold and affirm the essential role career public servants play in our constitutional system of government;
- Increase transparency, when appropriate and consistent with other valid policy objectives, to promote greater accountability; and
- Ensure businesses and individuals are held accountable for violations of regulatory requirements, including through penalties that are sufficient to offset any financial gains a business or individual might realize through noncompliance, to compensate those who have been harmed by the noncompliance, and to deter future acts of noncompliance.
As the Founders envisioned in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, our collective pursuit of “a more perfect union” was always going to be an ongoing and unfinished project. The development of what we now recognize as the modern administrative state has been one of the most important innovations of democratic governance for bringing us closer to the Founders’ vision.
We the American people now stand at a crossroads, however. That innovation can lead us to authoritarianism and social and economic decay, or it can lead us to the kind of inclusive and responsive democracy we need for achieving a more just American future. By honoring the reform principles outlined above, we commit ourselves to the latter path.
