Right. I get that. But is it that people don't think the system can be fixed, or that they just don't have the bandwidth to take that on? Or that this would take a long time to do, but they're focused on putting out fires? Also, which people? The public or the insiders? Do you envision this as something grassroots activists can promote to their own legislators, or what? Can you identify actionable steps?
For what it's worth, I believe the system CAN be fixed, but there may not be the political will to fix it. What's the incentive? Are those with the power to help fix it willing to give up what they have in order to do it? Isn't that usually the problem? Another issue is that the system we've had historically is being torn down right now. It WILL be replaced. The intention is to replace it with something not very many people want. This era could present opportunities to do something different and better, but the window is closing. My guess is it would be easier to implement what you're describing at the state level. When a state creates a new department, they have a process they go through to do that, which includes people who are already state officials as well as some who are not. I don't know how the establishment of new agencies or departments dovetails with existing ones.
Political will: You're right—those with power to fix it benefit from not fixing it. That's the bootstrap problem. Congress won't vote to reduce its own members' fundraising burden because the party apparatus depends on that fundraising. They won't close the revolving door because K Street is their retirement plan. The incentives are structurally misaligned. That's why outside pressure is the only lever. The political will has to come from citizens making it more costly to maintain dysfunction than to fix it.
The current moment: You're absolutely right that the system is being torn down right now, and not by people with good design in mind. This is actually what keeps me up at night. There's a window where "the old system is broken" could lead to "let's build something better"—or it could lead to "let's just let the strongman handle it." The 250th anniversary in 2026 feels like a potential inflection point. Either we use that moment for serious reflection on governance architecture, or we sleepwalk into something much worse.
State level: Yes. This is probably the realistic path. States are laboratories of democracy for a reason. A state-level Governance Design Office that actually professionalizes institutional design—even in one state—creates a proof of concept. Other states see it working, they adopt it, and eventually the federal conversation shifts from "that's impossible" to "why don't we have that?" Utah, where I live, actually has some interesting reform energy. It's not a crazy place to start.
The majority of people I talk to say "that's just how government is." Like that tweet from Musk a week or so ago about how the big problem with government is the feedback loops are broken. He's not wrong—they are broken. But the framing lands as "government dysfunction is fundamental, we just need to accept that."
I don't accept that.
And when I do start to engage with people, the next response is "it's all too complicated, there's no way to fix it." Once again, they're not wrong that it's complicated. But "complicated" doesn't mean "fundamental law of the universe impossible." We build systems that manage insane complexity all the time. Your cellular network, for example. You're sitting in a stadium with 50,000 people, all streaming video and sending texts, and you just expect your phone to work. That system is monumentally complex—and yet it functions because professionals designed it to function. Government could work the same way. We're just choosing not to apply that expertise.
The other thing is: reform is never going to happen from within. The incentives are all wrong. Remember the Stop Act I mentioned—the bill to ban legislators from directly soliciting donations? Bipartisan introduction, common-sense reform, would free members to actually legislate. It got about 10 co-sponsors and died. The players won't change the rules of a game they're winning.
So this needs to be public pressure from outside the system saying "we want a functional government."
There's a range of solutions. The three reforms I outline in this essay wouldn't even require a constitutional amendment. Congress mostly just needs to pass them. The mechanism is political pressure.
But here's the catch: as long as the general population is either disengaged or wrapped up in the latest outrage, it keeps the pressure off the politicians. Almost like maybe that works for them...? 🤔
And I'll be honest about why traditional activism doesn't work here: the system is designed to absorb it. You write your legislator, a staffer logs your comment, sends a form letter, and nothing changes. You call during a crisis, they wait for attention to move on. Individual contacts don't create sustained pressure—they create data points that get filed away. The system weathers temporary outrage the way a rock weathers waves.
What changes things is when the conversation itself shifts. When "why don't we have professional governance design?" becomes a question people ask out loud. When politicians start hearing it at town halls. When it's not one letter but a visible cultural signal that says "we're done accepting dysfunction as normal."
That's why I created the government loading symbol. For people with busy lives who can't dive into policy details—just post it. Share it. Signal "I want a functional government." It's not a petition that gets filed. It's a visible marker that the Overton window is moving.
Who has oversight of independent agencies, or do they by definition not have oversight? I see how you're trying to incentivize truth based on source of income. Freeing members of Congress to deliberate privately and giving them internal research support sound like great ideas that should have been happening a long time ago.
This reminds me vividly of a psychology study I read about (unfortunately, I have no memory of where) showing that jurors were more likely to base their deliberations on facts and evidence when they were allowed to review a case alone. The dynamics of having to discuss a case with other jurors influenced the outcome. I'm not surprised, because we've all seen how people behave in groups. There's always a guy who's the loudest person in the room, for example. Long story short: social influence is huge, especially in a closed system. If studies haven't been done by, I dunno, marketing companies, about the dynamics of differently sized groups, they should be done by the agency you're proposing for the purpose of improving operations.
Another study of interest was about packaging design. I mention this because again, the physical environment impacts our behavior. People sense this intuitively, but in our suck-it-up culture, brush it off as insignificant. It matters in: schools, prisons, hospitals, public parks & streets, libraries, our homes. It's already well known that circles and ovals on packaged food items attract us. But this particular case involved testing alternative design for a deodorant. Different color options were presented to people who were willing to try the product for free. Blue, Orange, and some other color. Same product, different container. The people who used the product when it came out of an orange container reported the deodorant gave them a rash. The ones who got theirs from a blue container said it worked well and they like it. For the third color, the response was that the product was not effective. The general concept was that for most practical purposes, the packaging is the product, and in a visceral way.
I feel like way too little is known by the right people for the right reasons about how human beings fundamentally work. This is an important area of study, but "the market" only incentivizes inquiry when profit is on the horizon. What a waste of human intelligence.
On oversight of independent agencies: they're not un-overseen, just insulated from direct political control. The Federal Reserve, for example, has Congressional oversight (the Chair testifies regularly, GAO can audit), but the Fed Chair can't be fired for making politically unpopular decisions. That's the model—accountability through transparency of reasoning and outcomes, not through moment-to-moment political control. The CRS expansion I'm proposing would actually remain under Congressional authority, just with professional staff who can't be purged for giving inconvenient answers.
And here's the sad part about private deliberation and research support: it was happening. Congress had more deliberative space and stronger internal research capacity before the 1970s transparency reforms. We broke it. The sunshine-era reforms were well-intentioned, but they handed lobbyists and party leadership a compliance enforcement mechanism they've been using ever since. We're not asking for something radical and new—we're asking to restore what we stripped away 50 years ago.
Your jury study is exactly the research that supports private deliberation. The Constitutional Convention operated the same way—delegates could float ideas, change positions, and reach compromises precisely because they weren't performing for an audience. The social dynamics you're describing (loudest voice wins, group conformity pressure) are amplified a thousandfold when every position is broadcast in real-time to donors, party leadership, and opposition researchers.
And you've landed on something important with the packaging insight: the environment shapes the behavior, often more than the "content" does. That's the core of governance architecture. We keep arguing about the content (which policies, which politicians) while ignoring that the container—the rules, the incentives, the physical and procedural environment—is shaping outcomes more than any individual decision.
Your closing point is the mission of The Statecraft Blueprint: applying what we know about how humans actually work to the design of the systems we all live under. Not for profit. For function.
Who would work in the department you envision? What types of experience & credentials? I could see the value of having psychologists & cultural anthropologists & interior designers around. How large would it need to be to function well (both in terms of staffing and budget)? To and with whom are you presenting these ideas?
Great questions. This is the Governance Design Agency (GDA) concept I've been developing.
Who would work there: Systems engineers, organizational psychologists, institutional economists, public administration experts, data scientists—and yes, people who understand how physical and procedural environments shape behavior (so your instinct about anthropologists and designers is right). Honestly? It would be a home for neurodivergents like me—people who see patterns others miss, who can't stop asking "why is it designed this way?" and "what would happen if we changed this variable?"
The key is professionalizing governance design the way we've professionalized monetary policy at the Fed or disease response at the CDC. Right now, the people designing Congressional rules are... Congress. That's like asking the players to design the game while they're playing it. And I doubt any of them have spent a single afternoon seriously analyzing how to design functional governance systems. They're not incompetent—it's just not their job, not their training, and not what the system rewards them for.
Size and budget: The detailed implementation specs I've worked through suggest it could function with a few hundred staff and a budget in the low hundreds of millions—trivial by federal standards. The Congressional Research Service currently runs on $118 million with 600 staff, and the GDA would be similar in scale but focused on institutional architecture rather than policy research.
Who I'm presenting to: Right now? You. Everyone reading this. The strategy is building citizen demand from the ground up, because this kind of reform will never come from inside Congress—the incentives are wrong. I'm betting on the "exhausted majority"—people who see the dysfunction, know it's not about electing the right savior, and are ready to demand structural change. Once enough people are asking "why don't we have professional governance design?"—the way we now ask "why don't we have a Fed Chair?"—the political window opens.
As someone' who is more of an associative than linear thinker, I feel your ideas could make a huge difference if it were possible to get people to support them.
Honestly, my ideas are more for illustrative purposes. The core goal is to have a functional government. The problem is getting people to believe the system can be fixed. So I’m taking the “homebuyers have no imagination so we need to stage the house” approach. Initially I showed up saying “hey! Look everyone, I figured it out, the reason we have a dysfunctional government is because of X and Y and Z (and a million other reasons I haven’t identified)! If we just make some adjustments, it could work a lot better!” And it went nowhere. My working hypothesis is these ideas run so counter to everything people know, they can’t imagine a solution. So the GDA is really how I would approach government as a software system—separation of concerns. You have DevOps teams who keep systems healthy, separate from developers building features. You have architects designing structure, separate from coders working within it. You don’t let developers QA their own code. Congress is trying to be the application, the operating system, AND its own quality assurance—all while running for reelection. No wonder it crashes.
Right. I get that. But is it that people don't think the system can be fixed, or that they just don't have the bandwidth to take that on? Or that this would take a long time to do, but they're focused on putting out fires? Also, which people? The public or the insiders? Do you envision this as something grassroots activists can promote to their own legislators, or what? Can you identify actionable steps?
For what it's worth, I believe the system CAN be fixed, but there may not be the political will to fix it. What's the incentive? Are those with the power to help fix it willing to give up what they have in order to do it? Isn't that usually the problem? Another issue is that the system we've had historically is being torn down right now. It WILL be replaced. The intention is to replace it with something not very many people want. This era could present opportunities to do something different and better, but the window is closing. My guess is it would be easier to implement what you're describing at the state level. When a state creates a new department, they have a process they go through to do that, which includes people who are already state officials as well as some who are not. I don't know how the establishment of new agencies or departments dovetails with existing ones.
You've hit on exactly the right questions.
Political will: You're right—those with power to fix it benefit from not fixing it. That's the bootstrap problem. Congress won't vote to reduce its own members' fundraising burden because the party apparatus depends on that fundraising. They won't close the revolving door because K Street is their retirement plan. The incentives are structurally misaligned. That's why outside pressure is the only lever. The political will has to come from citizens making it more costly to maintain dysfunction than to fix it.
The current moment: You're absolutely right that the system is being torn down right now, and not by people with good design in mind. This is actually what keeps me up at night. There's a window where "the old system is broken" could lead to "let's build something better"—or it could lead to "let's just let the strongman handle it." The 250th anniversary in 2026 feels like a potential inflection point. Either we use that moment for serious reflection on governance architecture, or we sleepwalk into something much worse.
State level: Yes. This is probably the realistic path. States are laboratories of democracy for a reason. A state-level Governance Design Office that actually professionalizes institutional design—even in one state—creates a proof of concept. Other states see it working, they adopt it, and eventually the federal conversation shifts from "that's impossible" to "why don't we have that?" Utah, where I live, actually has some interesting reform energy. It's not a crazy place to start.
The window is closing. But it's not closed yet.
The majority of people I talk to say "that's just how government is." Like that tweet from Musk a week or so ago about how the big problem with government is the feedback loops are broken. He's not wrong—they are broken. But the framing lands as "government dysfunction is fundamental, we just need to accept that."
I don't accept that.
And when I do start to engage with people, the next response is "it's all too complicated, there's no way to fix it." Once again, they're not wrong that it's complicated. But "complicated" doesn't mean "fundamental law of the universe impossible." We build systems that manage insane complexity all the time. Your cellular network, for example. You're sitting in a stadium with 50,000 people, all streaming video and sending texts, and you just expect your phone to work. That system is monumentally complex—and yet it functions because professionals designed it to function. Government could work the same way. We're just choosing not to apply that expertise.
The other thing is: reform is never going to happen from within. The incentives are all wrong. Remember the Stop Act I mentioned—the bill to ban legislators from directly soliciting donations? Bipartisan introduction, common-sense reform, would free members to actually legislate. It got about 10 co-sponsors and died. The players won't change the rules of a game they're winning.
So this needs to be public pressure from outside the system saying "we want a functional government."
There's a range of solutions. The three reforms I outline in this essay wouldn't even require a constitutional amendment. Congress mostly just needs to pass them. The mechanism is political pressure.
But here's the catch: as long as the general population is either disengaged or wrapped up in the latest outrage, it keeps the pressure off the politicians. Almost like maybe that works for them...? 🤔
And I'll be honest about why traditional activism doesn't work here: the system is designed to absorb it. You write your legislator, a staffer logs your comment, sends a form letter, and nothing changes. You call during a crisis, they wait for attention to move on. Individual contacts don't create sustained pressure—they create data points that get filed away. The system weathers temporary outrage the way a rock weathers waves.
What changes things is when the conversation itself shifts. When "why don't we have professional governance design?" becomes a question people ask out loud. When politicians start hearing it at town halls. When it's not one letter but a visible cultural signal that says "we're done accepting dysfunction as normal."
That's why I created the government loading symbol. For people with busy lives who can't dive into policy details—just post it. Share it. Signal "I want a functional government." It's not a petition that gets filed. It's a visible marker that the Overton window is moving.
Several thoughts come to mind.
Who has oversight of independent agencies, or do they by definition not have oversight? I see how you're trying to incentivize truth based on source of income. Freeing members of Congress to deliberate privately and giving them internal research support sound like great ideas that should have been happening a long time ago.
This reminds me vividly of a psychology study I read about (unfortunately, I have no memory of where) showing that jurors were more likely to base their deliberations on facts and evidence when they were allowed to review a case alone. The dynamics of having to discuss a case with other jurors influenced the outcome. I'm not surprised, because we've all seen how people behave in groups. There's always a guy who's the loudest person in the room, for example. Long story short: social influence is huge, especially in a closed system. If studies haven't been done by, I dunno, marketing companies, about the dynamics of differently sized groups, they should be done by the agency you're proposing for the purpose of improving operations.
Another study of interest was about packaging design. I mention this because again, the physical environment impacts our behavior. People sense this intuitively, but in our suck-it-up culture, brush it off as insignificant. It matters in: schools, prisons, hospitals, public parks & streets, libraries, our homes. It's already well known that circles and ovals on packaged food items attract us. But this particular case involved testing alternative design for a deodorant. Different color options were presented to people who were willing to try the product for free. Blue, Orange, and some other color. Same product, different container. The people who used the product when it came out of an orange container reported the deodorant gave them a rash. The ones who got theirs from a blue container said it worked well and they like it. For the third color, the response was that the product was not effective. The general concept was that for most practical purposes, the packaging is the product, and in a visceral way.
I feel like way too little is known by the right people for the right reasons about how human beings fundamentally work. This is an important area of study, but "the market" only incentivizes inquiry when profit is on the horizon. What a waste of human intelligence.
Great questions and connections.
On oversight of independent agencies: they're not un-overseen, just insulated from direct political control. The Federal Reserve, for example, has Congressional oversight (the Chair testifies regularly, GAO can audit), but the Fed Chair can't be fired for making politically unpopular decisions. That's the model—accountability through transparency of reasoning and outcomes, not through moment-to-moment political control. The CRS expansion I'm proposing would actually remain under Congressional authority, just with professional staff who can't be purged for giving inconvenient answers.
And here's the sad part about private deliberation and research support: it was happening. Congress had more deliberative space and stronger internal research capacity before the 1970s transparency reforms. We broke it. The sunshine-era reforms were well-intentioned, but they handed lobbyists and party leadership a compliance enforcement mechanism they've been using ever since. We're not asking for something radical and new—we're asking to restore what we stripped away 50 years ago.
Your jury study is exactly the research that supports private deliberation. The Constitutional Convention operated the same way—delegates could float ideas, change positions, and reach compromises precisely because they weren't performing for an audience. The social dynamics you're describing (loudest voice wins, group conformity pressure) are amplified a thousandfold when every position is broadcast in real-time to donors, party leadership, and opposition researchers.
And you've landed on something important with the packaging insight: the environment shapes the behavior, often more than the "content" does. That's the core of governance architecture. We keep arguing about the content (which policies, which politicians) while ignoring that the container—the rules, the incentives, the physical and procedural environment—is shaping outcomes more than any individual decision.
Your closing point is the mission of The Statecraft Blueprint: applying what we know about how humans actually work to the design of the systems we all live under. Not for profit. For function.
Who would work in the department you envision? What types of experience & credentials? I could see the value of having psychologists & cultural anthropologists & interior designers around. How large would it need to be to function well (both in terms of staffing and budget)? To and with whom are you presenting these ideas?
Great questions. This is the Governance Design Agency (GDA) concept I've been developing.
Who would work there: Systems engineers, organizational psychologists, institutional economists, public administration experts, data scientists—and yes, people who understand how physical and procedural environments shape behavior (so your instinct about anthropologists and designers is right). Honestly? It would be a home for neurodivergents like me—people who see patterns others miss, who can't stop asking "why is it designed this way?" and "what would happen if we changed this variable?"
The key is professionalizing governance design the way we've professionalized monetary policy at the Fed or disease response at the CDC. Right now, the people designing Congressional rules are... Congress. That's like asking the players to design the game while they're playing it. And I doubt any of them have spent a single afternoon seriously analyzing how to design functional governance systems. They're not incompetent—it's just not their job, not their training, and not what the system rewards them for.
Size and budget: The detailed implementation specs I've worked through suggest it could function with a few hundred staff and a budget in the low hundreds of millions—trivial by federal standards. The Congressional Research Service currently runs on $118 million with 600 staff, and the GDA would be similar in scale but focused on institutional architecture rather than policy research.
Who I'm presenting to: Right now? You. Everyone reading this. The strategy is building citizen demand from the ground up, because this kind of reform will never come from inside Congress—the incentives are wrong. I'm betting on the "exhausted majority"—people who see the dysfunction, know it's not about electing the right savior, and are ready to demand structural change. Once enough people are asking "why don't we have professional governance design?"—the way we now ask "why don't we have a Fed Chair?"—the political window opens.
That's the long game. Cathedral work.
As someone' who is more of an associative than linear thinker, I feel your ideas could make a huge difference if it were possible to get people to support them.
Honestly, my ideas are more for illustrative purposes. The core goal is to have a functional government. The problem is getting people to believe the system can be fixed. So I’m taking the “homebuyers have no imagination so we need to stage the house” approach. Initially I showed up saying “hey! Look everyone, I figured it out, the reason we have a dysfunctional government is because of X and Y and Z (and a million other reasons I haven’t identified)! If we just make some adjustments, it could work a lot better!” And it went nowhere. My working hypothesis is these ideas run so counter to everything people know, they can’t imagine a solution. So the GDA is really how I would approach government as a software system—separation of concerns. You have DevOps teams who keep systems healthy, separate from developers building features. You have architects designing structure, separate from coders working within it. You don’t let developers QA their own code. Congress is trying to be the application, the operating system, AND its own quality assurance—all while running for reelection. No wonder it crashes.