People are starting to lose faith in democracy. And honestly, it’s hard to blame them. We’re watching rising authoritarianism, a deepening public divide, and widespread distrust in government. But what caused this lack of faith wasn’t the failure of democracy itself, but the government’s ability to deliver on it.
Democracy and government aren’t synonyms. One is about representation; the other is about implementation. And conflating them is especially dangerous right now. Bureaucracy is the scaffolding of democracy; it’s what makes it real. And we’re gutting it.
Under no circumstances should we be questioning "for the people, by the people." No matter how bad or harmful a given regime is, maintaining the sanctity of democratic elections is critical. Democracy is a system of input. Bureaucracy is a system of output.
Take the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) or the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Implementation has been slow, rigid, and plagued with barriers, and in the public mind, that has become evidence that democracy doesn’t deliver. When there isn’t a clear reason for that breakdown, it creates space for extremists to offer simpler, more dangerous answers.
And herein lies the danger: collapse of function ultimately leads to collapse of legitimacy—or the belief that a rule, institution, or leader has the right to govern. When people can’t see visible results from a system, they stop trusting it. And into that vacuum steps the fringe.
These aren’t abstract concerns. A recent Marist poll found that 76% of Americans believe the issues that divide us pose a serious threat to democracy, and 73% consider politically motivated violence a major national problem. People can feel that something is broken. And they’re right.
In order for legislators to keep their promises, the machinery of governance has to work.
It’s easy to put all our emphasis on one layer of government. Elected officials—the representative layer—are the most visible and familiar part of government, so they’ve become a catch-all for our hope and our blame.
But laws and policy are not self-manifesting. They require translation into action through rules, programs, enforcement, and service delivery. Work that is the responsibility of the machinery we’ve spent decades hollowing out. And it’s important to remember that machinery is made up of real people—civil servants, frontline workers, program staff—all trying to do their jobs inside structures that often set them up to fail.
So if you care about democracy, you have to care about that machinery.
I’ve written before about some of the ways government practice calcifies—how layers of caution and compliance accrete until they stall the very work they were built to advance. Repair requires rethinking how we build implementation systems that are flexible, resilient, and worthy of public trust with the same urgency that built the interstate highway system or sent a man to the moon. But transformative, impactful redesign requires admitting the machine is broken, and that’s something our political discourse has worked hard to avoid.
The machinery was already rusting before DOGE showed up with a sledgehammer. But instead of reckoning with that decay, much of the focus has been on how Democrats should message the current situation. The logic goes: policy doesn’t matter if your team isn’t in power to pass it. So the conversation becomes how do we win? Not how do we govern?
But if government keeps failing to deliver, it won’t matter who wins. Without a functioning structure, the vision collapses too.
This is why both parties need to stop treating bureaucracy as the problem itself, or like an alien, unknowable force. The “inefficiency” narrative has gone unchecked for decades, with elected officials using their own institutions as punching bags when things go wrong, barriers to bypass when they’re inconvenient, or obstacles to bulldoze in the name of reform.
But we won’t move forward until we get serious about designing implementation systems that actually work. That means feedback-rich structures that learn from the people inside them—drawing on principles from agile design, like rapid iteration, embedded testing, and user-centered reform.
And with the Supreme Court opening the door for presidents to gut entire departments, that work has never been more urgent.
Political extremism didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It took root in the cracks of a system already falling apart. For years, our public institutions have been ground down by underinvestment, overburdened, and stripped of flexibility. Trust eroded slowly, then suddenly, creating the space for false narratives.
We don’t need perfect government. But we do need a working government.