An audacious challenge: restoring the relationship between people and government
This summer, the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing had many people thinking about governments’ ability to tackle big challenges. My kids and I stopped to watch parts of the terrific PBS documentary, Chasing the Moon, and it was amazing how the Apollo story still captured our imagination. The Moon Landing was an inspiring demonstration of what government can achieve when leaders set our collective sights on a big mission and put the resources behind it to harness and unleash the greatest parts of human energy and ingenuity.
More recently, I had the good fortune to witness another noble and audacious achievement: the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. I started at the White House six months before President Bush announced PEPFAR. Traveling with HHS Secretary Thompson to Africa and then living in Rwanda, there was a palpable sense that America was taking on something big and meaningful — and it was working. As Mike Gerson explained on PEPFAR’s 10th anniversary, this massive, improbable effort was instrumental in turning the tide on a disease that was raging out of control, literally saving millions of lives[1].
Why are such big missions not possible today?
Contrast the Moon Landing and PEPFAR with the dysfunction that we see in the Federal government today. The tragic, inhumane images from our Southern border. An annual budget deficit approaching $1 trillion. A recent report assessing the health of Congress noting that, “six months into the 116th Congress, most of the indicators of the quality of the legislative process are negative.” For those of us who believe in the positive potential of government, it’s a depressing picture.
We all want a government that says, “we will put a man on the moon” — and then delivers. And yet as recent data released by the Pew Research Center shows, Americans lack the faith that government can tackle the most basic things, let alone big challenges. The results are striking:
- Only 17% of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (3%) or “most of the time” (14%). As one respondent noted, “Many people no longer think the government can actually be a force for good or change in their lives.”
- Nearly 2/3 find it hard to tell what’s true when elected officials speak
- And it’s getting worse — 75% believe Americans’ trust in the Federal government has been shrinking.
Public trust and government effectiveness go hand in hand. Clearly, this trust deficit, which follows a decades-long trend, is an outcome of government’s inability to deliver on the things that matter to people. But it’s also a contributing factor that further limits our potential to tackle big, audacious missions. In fact, 2/3 of those surveyed by Pew believe that low trust in government makes it harder to solve many of the country’s problems.
So if we are serious about restoring people’s faith and trust in government — what we at the Centre for Public Impact call legitimacy — what will it take to turn the tide on this generational challenge?
I posed that question recently to two leaders who are influential with organizations working to strengthen our democracy. Their answer was sobering. “Honestly, people feel stuck. Is it political polarization and the degradation of our public discourse? Fake news and social media? The corrupting influence of money in our politics? Lack of civic education and engagement? Persistent shortcomings in government service delivery? Waste, fraud, and abuse? There’s a sense that the problem is so big and complex, that it’s just too overwhelming — and that leads to inaction.”
My hunch is that all of these things matter to some degree — but fundamentally, restoring faith in our institutions will require a major disruption in how our governments function and how our leaders lead. We’ve seen one model of disruption over the past two years: a chaotic, toxic, destructive one. By contrast, what would a unifying, restorative, inspiring form of disruptive governance look like in practice?
While we don’t have clear answers to this big question, we do have some hypotheses based on our work with 50+ cities over the past two years. Not surprisingly, local governments are consistently the most trusted units of government. They often do a better job of understanding resident needs, engaging people in the process of governing, and solving the problems that matter most to them. Some are beginning to foster cultures of learning and experimentation that lead to more innovative approaches and better outcomes. We are exploring these models further and assessing whether elements of the “localist revolution” can spread elsewhere.
Relatedly, we see promise in the potential to shift power structures. The principle of subsidiarity would lead us away from technocratic, centralized solutions and toward distributed approaches that empower the private sector and civil society, push authority down to information, and purposely seek to build social capital. Understanding that humans are complex, an approach to public problem solving that respects that complexity and values relationships will yield better results. As we launch an ambitious research and engagement effort to uncover deeper insights about the root causes of our Legitimacy crisis and surface new solutions, we are excited to probe these and other themes further.
Restoring government legitimacy is a big, audacious, generational challenge. Kind of like a Moon landing. Who wants to join us on this journey?
[1] For the curious: the Bush Center has a great oral history that captures how this played out in practice, including the internal decision-making process and effort to build unique bipartisan support for such an expensive, audacious goal.
