The Pursuit of Abundance in a Bureaucratic System

Lessons learned in government about power, caution, and why change so often stalls from the inside.

I’ve been thinking a lot about power — the kind that moves institutions and creates change — as the “abundance” conversation has picked up and pieces like Marc Dunkelman’s new New York Times essay argue that liberals should study the brutal efficiency of Trump’s governing style. It’s an uncomfortable comparison, but it resonates with something I learned inside government long before this discourse had a name.

During my time in the Pentagon, I was tasked with building a policy team for the Army and helping stand up the civilian harm mitigation and response infrastructure. On paper, most senior political appointees within the administration supported these efforts and were on the same page.

However, they were the kind of initiatives that demanded follow through, top cover, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. What I encountered instead was deep anxiety about upsetting the military, about disrupting the balance with career public servants, and about being seen as too aggressive or political. Even as I was told to drive reform, the support necessary to withstand resistance wasn’t always there. I ended up in countless meetings revisiting the same questions, trying to find a path forward that wouldn’t trigger too much internal friction. As a result, I found myself responsible for initiatives that required real authority but were rarely backed by the decisiveness to match.

Meanwhile, the bureaucracy resisted any type of change every step along the way anyway. Many leaders, teams, and individuals were unhappy whether we bent over backwards to include them or pushed ahead more assertively. They didn’t reward the careful process, the deference, or the endless coordination meant to secure their buy-in. And our caution came with real costs including timelines that slowed to a crawl and reforms that became harder to entrench. The longer we spent gathering buy-in, the easier it became for the next administration to unravel the work entirely.

The Trump administration, on the other hand, walked in on day one and began issuing directives that touched many of the same areas we had agonized over for years. Their priorities were often the opposite of mine, and the consequences are now playing out in ways that concern me deeply. But they were unafraid to use political authority and they didn’t hide their goals under layers of process. They didn’t put on airs of technocratic neutrality, and they weren’t deterred by internal pushback. For better or worse, they acted.

That decisiveness forces an uncomfortable question: what exactly do Democrats believe about governing within the bureaucracy? We often behave as if power should be disguised — wrapped in interagency reviews and deliberative processes that give us the comfort of neutrality. We want the outcomes of political leadership but cling to a self-image rooted in technocratic caution. And because we’re so anxious about upsetting people inside the system, we sometimes forget that bureaucratic resistance isn’t a sign of failure — it is the baseline condition of governing.

This isn’t an argument that Democrats should emulate Trump’s abuses of authority. Their decisiveness has been channeled toward deeply harmful ends. But the contrast exposes a truth I learned firsthand, which is government cannot produce meaningful change if its leaders are afraid to lead. Caution does not win legitimacy and endless process does not generate loyalty. Ultimately, a bureaucracy that resists your goals will resist them whether you move slowly or quickly — but if you move slowly, you only make it easier to undo what little you managed to build.

Progressives have spent decades designing guardrails to prevent government from doing bad things, and many of those protections are important. But those same instincts now make it extremely hard for government to do good things. And when our own internal anxieties compound those structural barriers, we end up governing with one hand tied behind our back.

I don’t have a neat solution to this, but I do know that the next Democratic administration will have to grapple with this more honestly than we did in the Biden administration. If we want government to be capable of solving big problems and not just talking about them, we need a clearer theory of how public authority should be exercised, and a political leadership willing to withstand discomfort in service of outcomes. Otherwise we will keep repeating the same cycle of creating bold plans, exercising cautious execution, and losing battles to a bureaucracy that outlasts all of us.