Government Reform Needs a Field

I spent twenty years helping build a field without realizing that's what I was doing. This one, we're building on purpose.

J.H. Miller, “We Can Do It!” 1942, National Archives via Wikimedia Commons.

I continue to be grateful for friends and partners stepping in with guest posts to keep things going here while I am on leave.

Today’s post is from Anne Healy, CEO of Recoding America, “a six-year, $120 million philanthropic initiative aimed at reforming governments at both the federal and state levels.” Full disclosure: I serve on Recoding America’s Advisory Council. Their mission strikes me as one of the country’s most important and challenging endeavors.

Readers of this newsletter will recognize a familiar theme in Anne’s essay: enduring change rarely comes from a single organization acting alone, but from strengthening civic ecosystems that enable many organizations to learn from one another and work together more effectively. That is precisely the role Anne hopes Recoding America can play as a catalyst in the emerging state capacity field. In what follows, she explains both what Recoding America is trying to accomplish and why building up the broader field is essential to its long-term success.

If they succeed, the United States will stand a far better chance of reaching its Tricentennial. That makes this an essay worth reading not only for those interested in the challenges of government reform and field-building, but for anyone who cares about the future of democracy in America.

—Daniel Stid

In late 2024, a career pivot wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card; it felt more like the high-water mark of two decades advancing evidence in global development. After an early stint working in rural Kenya for some development economists, I spent the years that followed working with the field’s key organizations. I led one of its biggest funds and helped other funders replicate it, mentored people who became leaders in it, and forged partnerships that overcame the siloing scarce resources entrench. The white whale I chased was USAID, the opportunity to make the world’s largest bilateral aid agency more cost-effective. After years growing a constituency for that work inside and outside the agency, we seemed, maybe, to be closing in. I was cautiously optimistic the coalition could carry the work through shifting political winds.

Of course, Elon Musk had other plans for USAID, and 2025 handed me a sabbatical.

It is hard to see what you’re doing while in the thick of it, especially when it feels so intuitive to you and your fellow travelers that nobody thinks to name it. The time to reflect helped me name what I’d been doing all those years: field-building. I had not just grown up professionally in that field. I helped build it. And yet I’d never had the vocabulary to describe that work.

As I considered the next stage of my career, I stumbled onto a job description to lead a new state capacity organization, co-founded by Jen Pahlka. I’d read her book, Recoding America, when it came out in 2023, deep in my own long days trying to fix government. The obvious draw was the chance to keep working on government effectiveness. But what pulled harder was the undercurrent, a commitment to field-building beneath everything, even before the organization had language for it.

Hard to fund what you can’t see

That I did field-building for years without the vocabulary for it illustrates the core field-builder challenge: the work isn’t seen, even (often) by those doing it, partly because it goes unnamed. And work nobody names is hard to develop a discipline around: hard to learn, teach, and get better at. Small wonder donors underfund it. Bridgespan has called field-building one of the most valuable, yet least funded, investments donors can make, despite philanthropy’s history of accelerating young fields.

Recoding America carries a double dose of invisibility: field-building (itself hard to see) around an issue (state capacity) that is also hard to see. The symptoms of broken government are visible, like unemployment systems that collapse just when they’re needed most. But the failures live in the plumbing underneath (how government hires, buys, builds, and learns), which is legible only to those who’ve waded through it. Daniel Stid has shown what that does to funding: historically, of every dollar philanthropy spends on democracy, just three cents goes to improving the capacity of government itself.

Though the investment has been far too small, good work on government’s operating model has been happening for decades, by good-government reformers, civic technologists, legislative modernization advocates, think tanks, and public servants agitating from inside. But it hasn’t added up to structural change, because that work has often been in separate lanes: no shared agenda, ambition capped by what any one organization can do alone. That’s a field problem. It’s why Recoding America, the organization I lead, works as a field catalyst, tending the whole so the parts add up. What follows is our current thinking, some of it surely wrong; we’re thinking out loud so others can tell us which parts, faster.

What’s a field, and who’s in it?

I’m often asked what we mean by “the state capacity field,” and who is in it. Bridgespan, in some of its earliest work, defined a field as a community of organizations and individuals working toward a common goal, using a set of common approaches. I’d construe both loosely: getting clearer on the goal and the approaches is an output of field-building, not a precondition for it.

Today, we define the state capacity field through a shared goal: building a new operating model for government that can deliver policy outcomes in a fast-changing world, joined to a conviction that getting there requires structural transformation and cross-ideological engagement. Sharpening that goal, and the agenda underneath it, with the field is part of the work. There’s no list of who’s in and who’s out;¹ the boundaries are deliberately porous.² Those who share the goal, and those convictions, belong, whatever existing identity they already carry: legislative modernization, regulatory reform, civic tech, evidence-based policymaking, plain old good government, change agents inside government itself.³ Fields overlap and nest,⁴ and state capacity sits at the higher altitude. The point is a truly big tent, even as we set smaller tables where the work gets done.

The cross-ideological part is by design. At the federal level, America usually has divided government, so any reform strategy that depends on one party’s dominance will spend most of its life under unfriendly management. The states flip the condition without changing the implication: reforms now spread readily among red states or among blue ones, but rarely cross from one to the other, partly because most states are one-party trifectas, so an idea born in one arrives elsewhere pre-labeled as red or blue before it’s judged on the merits. And unlike, say, a tax cut, reforms to the plumbing of government typically depend on years of sustained implementation, making them uniquely vulnerable to neglect when power changes hands. We don’t expect consensus; we seek actors who believe that engaging constructively across difference matters and are willing to keep getting the reps in.

What a strong field looks like

If a field is defined that loosely, how do you know whether it’s any good? Bridgespan’s two decades of work identifies six characteristics of a strong field: the actors, the field-level agenda, the connective infrastructure, the knowledge base, the field’s influence on public sector systems, and the resources fueling it all.⁵ The list matters less than the system. A strong field is one where these function together: insights actually change how reforms are designed, organizations across the spectrum coordinate complementary approaches, and no single funder’s exit could stall the whole.

What it will take

By that standard, the state capacity field has a way to go. But a shared agenda is forming around four competencies every government needs, the right people in the right roles, right-sized procedure, purpose-fit digital systems, and incentives for outcomes, and the shared frames are visibly taking: we now hear Jen’s three horizons framework invoked by donors and partners unprompted. Here’s what else a strong field requires, and what we’re doing at Recoding America to help build it.

Actors across the spectrum, and ties between them. A field’s strength starts with who’s in it, and this one skews technocratic and centrist. Durable reform needs credible voices in each faction, doing their own intellectual work. So we’re funding the Foundation for American Innovation to build a community of practice for conservative public servants and policy leaders who believe a limited government must also be a capable one, and the Roosevelt Institute to expand its state capacity work with ties to the progressive policymakers and public sector unions that workforce reform requires. Just as important are the ties between actors. Readers of this newsletter will recognize the pattern: ties among organizations do for a field what associational ties do for democracy, and they form the same way, as byproducts of working concrete problems together.

Knowledge that guides action. The public administration literature is rich on the problems and barriers, thin on what works, for whom, and how effective approaches spread, especially against entrenched interests. Some of the field’s most valuable knowledge is locked in practitioners: public servants who can’t speak freely inside, and whose tacit knowledge dissipates when they leave. We’ve dipped a toe in, supporting the Institute for Progress to codify CHIPS implementation lessons and the Niskanen Center and the National Academy of Public Administration to benchmark 40 states’ civil service systems. Much more is needed, like more practitioner-oriented research aimed at the field’s highest-leverage open questions and better metrics, because it’s “hard to improve at something unless you measure it.”

Narrative that makes reform feel possible. The profound unsexiness of this work belies how much it shapes the things Americans care about. Storytelling makes that connection visible, and builds a constituency for reform. Stories do political work: they create permission structures, because a leader is far likelier to attempt hard reform after watching another leader survive it. We’re trying to build a narrative machinery for the field, anchored by a Head of Strategic Communications whose mandate is the field’s narrative, not our brand: developing a pipeline of untold stories worth telling and enlisting journalists, creators, and others to tell them to the people who need to hear them.

Advocacy muscle, and an embrace of political realities. In the year after Jen’s book came out, the response she kept hearing, from members of Congress, governors’ offices, and philanthropists, was essentially this: you’re diagnosing the dysfunction correctly, but these are ideas without a constituency. Well-organized defenders of the status quo face almost no countervailing pressure, and well-designed reforms stall at the technical-advice stage, where the absence of wins becomes a self-fulfilling signal that ambitious reform is impossible. She’s described what closing that gap takes. This field has too often treated politics as “noise to be ignored rather than a medium to be worked.” We’re nonpartisan but not allergic to politics: state capacity is inherently political. The field needs advocates and issue campaigners alongside its analysts. That’s why the muscle-building runs from message testing and lawmaker education to coalition-building against organized opposition, and yes, lobbying through our 501(c)(4).

A talent pipeline with its sights on structural reform. As Daniel’s essay on the Federalist Society shows, the conservative legal movement’s most consequential investments weren’t individual cases but the pipeline that carried its ideas across decades: networks, clinics, clerkships, and training that built a shared identity, funded early by patient donors who demanded no deliverables. Our field has nothing equivalent, and it won’t emerge on its own. Placing talented people into government matters, but placement without reform tends to produce failure or heroics: exceptional people delivering results by working around the dysfunction. I count myself among the proud bureaucracy-busters, but not everyone who excels at navigating around broken systems is cut out for, or even wants, the longer game of fixing them. The field needs a pipeline aligned to structural reform: people trained to know what systems need replacing and positioned where they can do it. Pipelines pay off slowly, doubly so for structural reformers, so the work has to start now.

And resources, which come first. Everyone in this ecosystem arrives at the same conclusion: funding is the binding constraint. Not that money alone makes a field strong; relieve that constraint and others will bind. But the gap is acute, and philanthropy keeps walking past it: dollars flow to working around government’s broken systems far more readily than to fixing them.

The strange thing about field-building is not that it’s hard, though it is. It’s that you can spend years doing it and not see it until you stop. I can hardly blame philanthropists for missing what I overlooked myself. The state capacity field is young and underbuilt, but it now has a shared goal, a framework for judging its own strength, and people across the ideological spectrum showing up for problems none can solve alone. None of this is guaranteed to work. Fields have failed before, quietly, the same way they go unfunded. But this time, we have something I didn’t have for many years: a name for the work, and the deliberateness that comes with it. We’re building this field on purpose.

1. Actual or perceived. As ecosystem maps and lists inevitably start to circulate, and we're glad to see that energy, none of them, ours included, should be read as a membership roster. Especially at this stage, we'd rather enable a wide set of actors to raise their hands and claim membership than referee who's in.

2. See Bridgespan on why a field’s boundaries should stay porous: “Whether the field is broad or specific, its boundaries should always be porous; it must be able to adapt to changing priorities, funding, and other external factors” (pg. 8). Renaissance Philanthropy makes the same point for emerging fields in its playbook on scientific field creation: young fields “benefit from ‘porous boundaries’ that allow entry into the field from adjacent sectors and disciplines.”

3. Governments, and the public servants who power them (elected leaders, political appointees, career civil servants), are part of this field, not merely objects of it. Public servants who share the field's goals are change agents in it, and treating them as participants is how promising reform ideas survive contact with implementation. There's a practical point too: many of us cycle in and out of government across our careers, and it would be strange to be "in" the field one day and out the next depending on which side of the door you stand on. Government is, admittedly, different from every other actor: public servants hold power the rest of the field doesn't, and they are the vehicle by which the state builds, or doesn't build, its own capacity. If any other group vanished, there would still be a state capacity ecosystem. Without public servants, it would be a debating society.

4. “Fields fall into two categories: those that are focused on a specific problem (e.g., achieving universal access to high-quality prekindergarten) and those focused on broad issue areas (e.g., early childhood)” (Bridgespan, pg. 7).

5. Here are meatier definitions of each of the characteristics that we’ve started to adapt but that still largely draw on the excellent starting point from Bridgespan: (1) The actors in the field: Diverse and complementary actors that share a common vision, are committed to working effectively together, and are able to individually build and maintain strong organizational health. (2) The field-level agenda guiding collective action: Alignment around a clear and dynamic field-level agenda that is co-created by diverse stakeholders within the field. (3) The infrastructure connecting and enabling actors: Adaptive field infrastructure – the connective tissue to make the field more connected, coordinated, and effective. (4) The knowledge base informing the work: A credible, robust, and evolving academic and practical knowledge base that informs and acts as a credible reference point for the field’s strategy. (5) The field’s engagement with and influence on public sector systems: Field actors leverage their understanding of and relationships in government to exert significant influence over government (policies, funding flow, etc.), reflecting government leaders’ and their constituents’ acceptance of the field-level agenda. (6) The resources fueling the work: Sufficient and sustainable resources critical to supporting field actors and enabling them to build and maintain strong organizational health. Adapted from Bridgespan’s Six Observable Field Characteristics, Strong Field Framework (2009), Field-Building for Population-Level Change (2020), Field Diagnostic Tool: Assessing a Field’s Progression (2020), and adapted use of this framework by Daniel Stid for Lyceum Labs (2025).