Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration

October 28, 2025
By Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph

Foreword
“[The men and women of the Republic] . . . will insist that every agency of popular government use effective instruments to carry out their will. Government is competent when all who compose it work as trustees for the whole people.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1937 Inaugural Address

At the Roosevelt Institute, we’ve written often about the untapped potential of public power.

“When public power is used to serve ordinary Americans, it can counter skewed power dynamics in markets, provide universal access to goods and services, and harness our national potential toward broadly shared economic growth,” our 2019 report New Rules for the 21st Century said. “Alternatively, concentrated power in the private sector can stunt public power, turning it into a tool to enrich those at the top.”1

For five discontented decades, our leaders chose the latter path. They failed to use public power with the urgency and ambition Americans demanded. They allowed immense concentrations of wealth and power for the few, and an ever-decreasing sense of security for the many. That path paved the way for a dark alternative: Rather than curbing corporate influence, the second Trump administration has allowed corporations and billionaires to write their own rules and rig the economy with increasing brazenness. With breakneck speed, Trump 2.0 has deployed every tool and agency it can to enrich friends and punish and silence enemies. Meanwhile, the administration’s relentless slashing of agency staff and budgets—driven initially by the world’s richest man and his cronies—has hollowed out our government’s ability to meet people’s needs, provide basic services, and respond to emergencies

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That’s what this report does. In Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration, former Biden-Harris senior officials Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph draw from the insights, recommendations, and candor of more than 45 former public servants and tell a broader story we can’t forget: The problems with these institutions did not start with Donald Trump or Elon Musk, worse as they now are. These problems are, in part, what results from decades of bipartisan neglect, disinvestment, and deference to markets. But just as importantly, they are the product of institutional cultures, norms, and practices that—even when well-intentioned, even when originated for good reasons—no longer serve the public.

As these interviews show us in new detail, in agencies across the federal government, the default mode of operating is risk-averse, incremental, and wed to process at the expense of outcomes. It’s no accident that people feel disengaged with and unseen by their government when “federal institutions are designed to passively receive inputs from well-resourced corporate lobbyists and insiders, rather than being optimized for connectivity with ordinary Americans with busy lives,” as Garden-Monheit and Joseph write.
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/building-a-more-effective-responsive-government/

Fair and essential.