Thoughtful policy experts on a range of issues are currently preparing plans to rebuild the federal government in the event that a pro-democracy president is elected in 2028. That planning is essential. But it will also be wholly insufficient if it does not reckon with the need to rebalance political and economic power: to build the collective power of workers, consumers, tenants, students, and ordinary people, and to reduce the power of the interests that undermine democracy—unscrupulous economic actors seeking to cheat people, oligarchs exercising undue influence in our elections, or groups threatening political violence.
Over the past year, we have been working with former government officials, academics, and other policy experts to develop a more systematic framework for this task through the Empowering Democracy Initiative. Our work has aimed to make the case for power-shifting as a central perspective on the work of rebuilding, to offer a framework and language for how policy practitioners can think more rigorously about power-shifting in the policy design process, and to surface key lessons from experts about what works—and what doesn't—for shifting power to support democracy.
Our focus on power-shifting comes from our reading of political history in the United States and in other countries that have experienced periods of democratic advancement and retrenchment. Across the globe—from the Southern Cone of Latin America to Eastern Europe to the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War—moments of democratic progress that are not accompanied by an effort to durably shift economic and political power risk further retrenchment and upheaval. After the Civil War, Southern states made progress towards multiracial democracy—but only when the federal government was willing to fully commit its legal, financial, and military might to shifting power. When that commitment ended, so too did the prospects for an integrated Southern democracy in the ensuing decades. A future federal rebuilding risks repeated backsliding if the government does not durably shift power in contemporary civil society.
The core proposition to federal rebuilders from our project is this: every major policy and institutional design choice should be evaluated not just on what it delivers, but on whose power it builds and whose power it diminishes.
Why We Started This Project: Decades of Missed Opportunities for Power-Shifting
For many decades, smart progressive policy wonks have designed new policies and programs, thinking carefully about their economic costs and benefits. But—with a few telling exceptions—these discussions have focused far less on how policies foster collective people power, to the detriment of our democracy.
Take discussions over health care, an area in which we have arguably seen some of the most important domestic policy achievements of the past twenty years. In considering health care policies, advocates and lawmakers have largely focused their back-and-forth on the implications for health insurance coverage and costs (Bagenstos 2026). Left largely unaddressed is how changes to the system might foster new collective organizations, such as of patients and their families, that could durably represent those members' interests.
Imagine if we took a page from union law and created a framework for a national patients' union with the right to enroll Americans as dues-paying members and to bargain with the government, health insurers, and health providers alike. That union might provide a stronger foundation to protect our health care system against efforts to reduce coverage and increase costs, push more states to adopt policies covering low-income families, and bring stronger clout against predatory insurance and provider practices. It might also create more on-ramps for Americans into the everyday practice of democratic life.
This is not the only such opportunity. Consider the failure to update labor law to make it easier for workers to organize and bargain collectively, which would build more durable worker organizations. Or consider the failure to grapple with the concentrated power of billionaires (and now even a trillionaire), some of whom are using their amassed wealth to threaten democracy.
If we are fortunate enough to have a future rebuilding moment with a pro-democracy administration, we cannot make the same mistakes again. Rebuilders need to think about their work through the lens of power-shifting. They need to consider how they can design policy structures that build durable people power and deconstruct the power of the organized interests opposed to a multiracial, egalitarian democracy.
The Power of a Common Language and Framework for Collective Power-Shifting
When we started this project a year ago, we heard general interest from practitioners and advocates in the idea of shifting power to support democracy. But we also heard concerns about how practitioners would actually go about doing so if they were serving in government.
A parallel to economic benefit-cost analysis is instructive here. For better or worse, the language of benefit-cost analysis has become the lingua franca of government. Across agencies and programs, government officials instinctively reach for benefits and costs when evaluating a new proposal, even if they have never taken a seminar on the method. Objections to new policy ideas are often leveled on benefit or cost grounds.
Similarly, our goal with EDI is to give practitioners a framework for designing and evaluating policies on their power-shifting outcomes that is rigorous, intuitive, empirically grounded, and able to be embedded into government processes, building on academic research from political science, sociology, economics, and law (Linden 2026).
In a more detailed memorandum, we lay out how government practitioners can systematically map the key political actors in a policy space (companies, worker organizations, tenant unions), identify the economic and political power resources each possesses (mass membership, market clout, narrative advantages), and then craft policy designs that build the resources of pro-democracy organized groups while diminishing the standing of actors who undermine democracy.
One important move we make in our work is to urge practitioners to focus on collective power in support of democracy. Our focus on people's collective power reflects research showing that durable changes in power generally require changes in organizations and institutions, not just changes for individuals. It also reflects the fact that meaningfully engaging individuals in politics—especially in marginalized communities—generally requires strong intermediary civil society organizations and institutions that can amplify those communities' capacity, access, and clout.
Collective Power-Shifting Is Not the Same as Deliverism
Just as our focus is on collective rather than individual power, it is worth distinguishing our power-shifting approach from "deliverism," the term coined to describe the theory that policies delivering tangible benefits will lead individual voters to credit the policymakers who enacted them. Deliverist approaches to policymaking can build collective power, but they do not necessarily do so.
For example, some deliverist approaches in the Biden-Harris Administration assumed that efficiently delivering tangible policy "wins" to individual voters—like the expanded Child Tax Credit or new infrastructure investments for construction workers—would make those voters more favorable toward the administration and more likely to turn out in subsequent elections. But these approaches did not always shift collective power, and their failure to register in the mass public is arguably due to the absence of more systematic power-building.
This perspective does not mean that substantially expanded cash transfers to American families could not be power-shifting. But it does mean that cash benefits need additional policy infrastructure to build power among recipients (Jacobson 2026). To return to the Child Tax Credit, an improved credit could be more than just a cash transfer; it could build lasting political power and foster a collective identity among Americans with children. With sufficient federal funding, access to eligible families, opportunities for meaningful political engagement, and training, a group of civil society navigators—trusted local organizations enlisted to educate communities about the credit, assist with enrollment, and connect beneficiaries to political opportunities that amplify their influence (Nayak 2026)—could organize parents to view the credit as something worth fighting to keep and connect the benefit to larger fights over democratic responsiveness. Many options exist for such an approach, from subsidizing existing groups to conduct outreach and enrollment alongside their community organizing efforts to establishing a formal "parents' union" with bargaining rights with the federal government. Biden-Harris industrial policy approaches to building community power through community benefit agreements and funding incentives tied to place-based spending also offer important lessons for designing power-shifting policy (Fazili 2026).
The bottom line is that policy design matters, and policies that focus on collective and organizational sources of power are likely to be more successful at durably shifting power relations than those that focus only on individuals (SoRelle 2026).
We Cannot Ignore Power Deconstruction
It can often seem easier—and more comfortable—to talk about building people power than to plan for deconstructing the power of actors who undermine our democracy. This is an understandable but ultimately misguided impulse. Federal rebuilding must include both sides of power-shifting: building and deconstructing (Bains 2026).
Without a sustained effort to diminish the political and economic power of business models built on corrupt practices, oligarchs trying to buy elections and reshape the government without any democratic accountability, and powerful economic actors working to stop Americans from organizing collectively to advance their interests, our democracy is at risk of further backsliding.
Power deconstruction has also been at the heart of strategies to undermine our democratic norms and institutions. Consider the Trump Administration's ongoing campaign against universities. Whatever you think of higher education's flaws, the campaign has had little to do with actual civil rights protection. It is a sophisticated strategy for deconstructing the power of a major pillar of civil society. Look at the toolkit: freezing and clawing back federal grants to force concessions on internal governance. Detaining international students and choking off future international enrollment, which strike directly at universities' business models. Weaponizing accreditation, civil rights law, and the tax code. Most important, making high-profile examples of Columbia University and Harvard University so that hundreds of other institutions comply in advance. The administration negotiates bilateral deals with individual universities precisely so that the sector cannot respond collectively, and each target folds alone. The administration ran the same play against major law firms, using executive orders stripping security clearances and threatening clients' federal contracts to extract roughly a billion dollars in pledged pro bono work from firms that chose to settle rather than fight.
None of this should surprise us. The anti-democracy movement has spent five decades deliberately attacking the organizational pillars that give power and voice to ordinary people: right-to-work laws and collective bargaining rollbacks to weaken unions; tort reform to weaken the trial bar that enforces consumer, workplace, and environmental laws when government cannot; and now the assault on universities, law firms, and the nonprofit sector. In short, opponents of a multiracial, egalitarian democracy have long understood that policy is a tool for durably restructuring politics.
To be clear, the lesson we should take from the Trump Administration's assault on civil society is not that we need to adopt the authoritarian playbook. De-powering authoritarian power centers has to be done through general, publicly defensible standards rather than enemy lists; through transparent legal processes that can survive public scrutiny; through criteria focused on protecting the social and institutional foundations of inclusive democracy rather than punishing political opponents; and through consistent rules that apply to allied as well as adversarial actors. This is a stringent test, but democratic rebuilders have to be stringent, because the alternative would be to legitimize, by example, the very tactics used to undermine democracy.
If the deconstruction side of this agenda sounds exotic, remember that every major democratic advance in American history has paired power-building with power deconstruction. Reconstruction paired the extension of rights to freedpeople with federal troops, the Freedmen's Bureau, and military governance aimed at breaking the political power of slaveowners. The New Deal paired economic relief with an assault on concentrated corporate power: financial regulation, the breakup of utility holding companies, and a labor law that ended employers' unilateral control of the workplace. The Great Society's Civil Rights Act created levers to withhold federal funds from segregating institutions, defunding the organized infrastructure of Jim Crow. In each case, the durability of the democratic gains tracked the thoroughness of the deconstruction (Michener and Hall 2026).
What We've Been Learning About Power-Shifting
In eight published or soon-to-be-published white papers, we asked academics, former government officials, and policy experts to write up key lessons for designing and implementing power-shifting policies. Together, these papers draw on academic research and firsthand experience in government to spell out how policymakers should approach building pro-democracy power and deconstructing anti-democratic power in a future administration:
- Sam Bagenstos, Frank G. Millard Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and former General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, assessed how the failure to consider power-shifting in health policy ultimately hampered the administration's agenda on Medicare.
- Chiraag Bains, a former Biden-Harris White House Domestic Policy Council official, explored how federal enforcement can be a tool for building and deconstructing power, drawing from case studies from past enforcement efforts and detailing what a more robust federal enforcement agenda might look like.
- Sameera Fazili, a former Biden-Harris White House National Economic Council official, took stock of the administration's efforts at building worker and community power through its industrial and clean energy policy agenda.
- Sophie Jacobson, Research Fellow at Columbia, examined the history of the War on Poverty and surfaced lessons about how to build durable community power through Community Action Agencies.
- Michael Linden, a former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official, wrote about how the federal budget planning process coordinated through OMB could be a site for embedding a focus on power-shifting in a future pro-democracy administration.
- Jamila Michener, Professor of Government at Cornell University, and Aubrey Hall, PhD Student at Cornell University, wrote about what we can learn from efforts to tackle the concentrated power of the tobacco industry and predatory landlords.
- Raj Nayak, former Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Labor, examined how the government can bolster its capacity through partnerships with community-based organizations involving enforcement, rights education and awareness, and program delivery.
- Mallory SoRelle, Tony and Teddie Brown Associate Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, examined what policy design features are most likely to spur new organizing by studying consumers and tenants.
Together, these eight essays, along with our framing memorandum, form a foundation for the planning that future policymakers need to begin today. In the coming months, we will commission more research and engage in more discussions on how to put these ideas into action. If you are interested in joining this community of practice, please contact us.
The Bottom Line
Every policy fight is also a fight over the future distribution of power, whether we acknowledge it or not. Authoritarians are executing on this insight now with discipline against universities, law firms, unions, and the other civic infrastructure of American democracy. A future pro-democracy government that responds by restoring the status quo ante, putting back the old programs and restoring the old approaches, will simply be setting the table for the next, more competent authoritarian.
The alternative is to treat policy as an opportunity to build organized civil society constituencies whose power makes democratic backsliding harder to attempt and easier to resist, and to dismantle, lawfully and through general standards, the concentrations of power that undermine our democracy. Rebuilding the federal government is inseparable from rebuilding the political and economic landscape on which it stands.