As President Trump’s consolidation of autocratic power gains steam, it’s often been argued that the failures of liberal governance meaningfully helped to bring us to this moment. In this reading, the Biden administration—and other Democratic leaders in recent years—allowed well-intentioned caution and respect for parliamentary safeguards and procedures to hobble ambition, frustrating voters and making them easier prey for demagogues peddling authoritarian governance as our civic cure-all.
This reading has now picked up the endorsement of a surprising group: A large bloc of former high-level members of the Biden administration.
The left-leaning Roosevelt Institute is releasing a major new report Tuesday—with input from nearly four dozen former senior Biden officials across many agencies—that seeks to diagnose the administration’s governing mistakes and failures. The report, provided in advance to The New Republic, may be the most ambitious effort involving Biden officials to determine what went wrong and why.
In the report, Biden officials extensively identify big failings in governing and in the execution of the politics around big decisions—but with an eye toward creating the beginnings of a Project 2029 agenda. The result is a kind of proto-blueprint for Democratic governance to show that it can work the next time the party has power.
“We must reckon honestly with how we got here and why the American public has been so frustrated with these institutions for so long,” Roosevelt Institute president Elizabeth Wilkins writes in the report’s introduction. “The rising authoritarianism we see today shows us the stakes.”
One of its most compelling conclusions is that the Biden administration seemed reluctant to engage in “picking the fights worth having” and sometimes took refuge in incremental policy gains due to a self-limiting “risk aversion.” One senior official is quoted suggesting the White House didn’t give adequate support to agency leaders who thought they had a policy stance providing an opening to “have a fight and show who you’re for.”
Julie Su, the Labor secretary under Biden, suggests this is a big reason Democrats lost working people to Trump. “We were facing 40 or 50 years of backsliding for working people,” Su told me. “What we needed was to meet that moment with boldness. There was too much hesitation.”
Su notes, for instance, that the Labor Department didn’t exercise its powers to the fullest extent possible to hold corporations responsible for things like wage theft and weak worker safety protections. She noted more could have been done to facilitate job and retirement insecurity and boost union power.
“The moment demanded that we unleash the full powers of our investigative resources to go after companies for exploitation of workers in every way,” Su told me. “It didn’t happen to the extent that it could and should have.”
Fear of losing in court was one factor, Su says. And in a striking passage, former officials criticize the White House for being skittish about publicizing the corporate enforcement actions the Labor Department did undertake, out of fear of “politicizing” them or reluctance to publicly mention targeted corporations by name.
The report argues that future Democratic administrations must “flip the risk profile and prioritize fights worth having,” including “leaning into controversy” to facilitate “breaking through” and demonstrating that government is “on the side of regular people.” As one official is quoted saying, when voters don’t know who’s on their side, it risks “fascists stepping in” to fill the void.
That’s something Democrats have been slow to entertain: Picking big arguments designed to stoke conflict and controversy can jar low-information voters out of their algorithmic torpor and get them to take sides themselves. The alternative is giving right-wing propaganda more leeway to determine the prevailing political “weather,” as Brian Beutler puts it.
In another good example, the report notes that officials were hampered by fear of “high profile funding flops,” like the scandal that erupted around green energy company Solyndra during Barack Obama’s presidency. That led officials to build safeguards into clean energy investments that slowed them down. As one noted, that allowed “fear of a mistake” to overshadow discussion of whether it’s “more important to have this happen quickly.”
“There’s almost been a great forgetting that’s happened across agencies,” Lina Khan, former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, told me. A half century of right-wing attacks on government, she said, has led to “insufficient attention to all the things that can go wrong when you’re not doing enough.”
Khan noted a deep perversity here: Trump officials exhibit no such hesitancies. “They have no qualms about assertive federal government, in ways that have a lot of downsides,” Khan said, noting that this should lead Democrats to look toward “opportunities to be more assertive while still abiding by the rule of law.”
In a critical diagnosis, the report also faults the Biden administration for being too naive about the bad-faith hostility of large swaths of the courts—and the true intentions of the conservative judicial revolution that remade them—to progressive governance. But the report refrains from a blame-the-courts-for-our-failures posture.
Instead, it urges concrete future action. It says future Democratic administrations and Congresses should overhaul the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) notice-and-comment rulemaking process to make it less vulnerable to bad-faith judicial interventions. And it floats the creation of a new court to oversee APA matters and suggests expansion of the Supreme Court. In short, the need for a judicial reform agenda can’t be disentangled from the mission of demonstrating that future Democratic governance can be effective.
The report also concludes the Biden administration was hampered by its attachment to sclerotic federal regulatory processes. This encouraged overreliance on cost-benefit analyses and a culture of “bureaucratic make work.” This slowed regulations that could have demonstrated government concretely working for people, such as a Food and Drug Administration rule requiring hearing aids be made available over the counter that took over two years to even begin bearing fruit in stores. The report details proposals for far-reaching overhaul of the federal regulatory structure.
In addition to Khan and Su, Biden officials who contributed to the report also include many well-known senior staffers from agencies like the Commerce, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services departments—making the range of contributors very ideologically diverse within the Democratic coalition.
All this is a partial list of the proposed reforms. The report will not please everyone: It doesn’t discuss Biden’s age or enfeeblement, or the internal failure to take it seriously enough, and perhaps due to the Roosevelt Institute’s economic focus, the report says nothing about immigration or cultural liberalism. That will irritate those who want Democrats to moderate on immigration and cultural issues to avoid inflaming right-wing reaction and those who want Democrats to engage on both forcefully to activate low-info voters’ broad small-L liberal sympathies.
All this will also stir up the debate between “abundance” liberals, who want to reform government to facilitate production of essential social goods, and those who are skeptical of them, fearing that this could sideline egalitarian and redistributive goals in favor of growth.
Those factions will inevitably come into conflict in certain situations. But as Jerusalem Demsas notes at The Argument, the ideal liberal governing agenda could theoretically draw on both as mutually reinforcing. The report seems intended in that spirit: In a sense, it throws sops to both sides of that divide. Some abundance types might like its call for a hard-headed assessment of sclerotic agency processes. Meanwhile, abundance skeptics might like the report’s central mission of reimagining a truly progressive administrative state with New Deal-scale ambitions.
And the report’s call for a bolder approach to communicating government successes will appeal to those who see our problem as partly informational—those who discern a massive imbalance between authoritarians who communicate via flood-the-zone propaganda and liberals who approach our biggest arguments as if they’re Brookings Institution seminars.
The report tries to show, in other words, that future Democratic administrations can’t be afraid to use power to the fullest. That this is not at odds with—indeed, it requires—a serious review of liberal administrative, oversight, and procedural failures. That when liberal governance does work, voters need to know about it. That there are thoughtful ways to fully deploy liberal governing power in keeping with the rule of law. And above all, that failure on all this, as the official quoted above put it, will inevitably lead to the “fascists stepping in” to fill the resulting void.
