Two scenarios for the years ahead
What if America Doesn’t Meet This Moment?
Thanks to many of you for your warm reactions to my election post-mortem last week and welcome to the several hundred new subscribers who have joined me. I hope you will find this newsletter a useful guide as we begin together navigating the uncharted waters of this moment and the years to come. If you’re new here, please sign up here:
I spend a lot of time in my reporting talking to people in the intelligence community — people who make a career about trying to look around the corner and imagine what’s to come.
In the spring of 2020, just weeks after the pandemic hit — a threat that experts had been warning about for years — I went out and wrote a POLITICO Magazine article about what else the experts were worried about. Many of the threats were predictable: Nuclear war, climate change, and a massive US earthquake. Some of the threats have come true already: The continued rise and globalization of white supremacy and sustained attacks on trust and truth. But there was one threat that stopped me in my tracks when I was reporting and it’s the one that I’ve highlighted in every political talk or presentation I’ve done since.
Sue Gordon, who served as the principal deputy director of national intelligence — the nation’s top career intelligence post — shared her big concern: What if America just doesn’t meet the moment? What if, coming out of the pandemic, America just fails to step up as great powers, adversary nations, partisan polarization, and rising income inequality upends the global system that has kept watch for 80 years? “Our institutions are not keeping up with the turn of the Earth, and they’re being devalued in the moment,” she told me. “Society requires government, yet we’re running out of the structures that make it work.”
As I wrote then, “There are massive economic, societal and security benefits that come from being the world’s leading superpower. What happens if we’re not anymore? Imagine a U.S. that doesn’t attract top talent. What if the next great innovations happen in Europe or Asia instead of Silicon Valley? What if Chinese venture capitalists get first crack at the hottest deals in the world?”
I can’t help but think of Gordon’s conversation this week as I watch the first round of appointments come out of the new Trump administration. They are manifestly unserious — proposed nominees who are not just unqualified but aren’t even a standard deviation or two away from people would be minimally qualified. It’s telling that when John Ratcliffe was announced as the choice for CIA director — Ratcliffe who I called in 2019 Trump’s “most alarming personnel decision yet” and later said was the “least qualified” nominee to be director of national intelligence ever — he was actually the most qualified nominee announced yesterday amid choices like a Fox News host for Defense Secretary.
Given the early signs of what this next Trump administration will do, I wanted to sketch out two visions for how the next decade of the United States unfolds. The sooner we start thinking about Donald Trump’s impending danger as not just four years but a decade or more — or even a generation — of instability, the better. The nation’s guardrails and institutions held in the first term, but we shouldn’t expect that now. The damage he appears set to do in the months and years ahead to our national fabric will no longer be a simple fix of changing presidents and reappointing competent administrators. In a best case scenario, we’re looking at a 10-15-year rebuilding effort — and it’s quite possible that Sue Gordon was more right in 2020 than she could have imagined. We might well be entering an era that the United States does not bounce back from.
To me, there are two different scenarios worth considering about how the next decade unfolds for the US. They don’t necessarily represent opposite extremes—nor do I think either represents the “worst case” scenario.
In fact, both scenarios could come true at the same time.
Let’s start here:
What if the US federal government effectively ceases to function? The darkest vision for the years ahead is that America sees its federalized national government essentially cease to exist. The day-to-day functions and momentum of the US government can seem as steady and unending as the tides, the truth is it relies on a certain collective desire among citizens and bureaucrats to make government work. There is no federal government autopilot, at least not one that can sustain a years-long assault on its foundations.
The disruption planned and outlined in Project 2025 and other Trump campaign promises targets everything from privatizing the National Weather Service to ending the Department of Education to remaking the FBI to rolling back civil rights and gutting civil service protections for thousands and even tens of thousands of federal employees. It would undo, end, or spin off many of the most basic research programs and data-collection efforts the government currently undertakes. The Transportation Department, which has had such a literal renaissance of imagination, innovation, and investment under Mayor Pete and the flood of infrastructure money from the Inflation Reduction Act, would be cut back extensively. Trump’s made clear he wants to harness the independence of the Federal Reserve and weaponize regulators like the FCC and FTC, turning them from consumer watchdogs to partisan attack dogs. Climate change will be ignored at effectively every level. And, in the words of the Washington Post, Project 2025 hopes to “infus[e] Christian nationalism into every facet of government policy.” Add to all of that a layer of basic corruption and grifting — where bureaucrats who put the American people first and replaced with con artists, conspiracy theorists, and fraudsters who ignore basic ethics guidelines and try first to line their pockets, do favors for friends, or hold foreign policy for ransom.
Couple those plans with the impact of the Chevron decision on government regulators, which has profound implications for everything from clean water and air pollution to the health and safety of medicines and the food supply, and it’s entirely possible we watch many of the things we’ve come to expect the federal government do simply disappear or fade into dysfunction and paralysis. And/or we watch the world simply move beyond the United States, seeing it as just another adversary out for itself on the world stage. (Read Dan Drezner here, for instance.)
This is a recipe for a federal government that utterly fails to meet the moment in the 21st century. And a recipe for a world that turns away from the United States.
Nor does the Trump administration need to succeed with everything above to seize up the organs of the federal government. This isn’t just about the Trump administration’s actual actions, either. People enter the federal government because they believe in public service and want to make the country and world a better place. A pervasive anti-government and anti-workforce philosophy — one that’s suspicious of the “Deep State” and one that sees federal employees and even senior military leaders punished and persecuted for doing their jobs — will stop good people from wanting to do those jobs that do still exist.
Cuts to such basic functions discourage idealistic, smart, caring, and ambitious people from staying in government or going to work there in the first place. The federal government is old—and getting older. Here’s a startling statistic for you to think about: One-third of the federal workforce will be eligible to retire next year. (Really.) Why should they stay if their work is going to be disrespected or ignored? Why would young people consider it a wise place to build a career? The perniciousness of Project 2025 and the incoming administration’s basic hostility toward truth, facts, and science might encourage entire tiers of federal bureaucrats to beat feet for the private sector or civil society. The brain drain itself could paralyze even more work—and encourage even more talent to leave. Such spirals are hard to address and shift once they start.
Michael Lewis outlined some of this in “The Fifth Risk” and then led a wonderful project this summer and fall for the Washington Post Opinion section about “Who is government?” Writers like one of my favorites Casey Cep profiled seven ordinary federal employees who do vital jobs that no one thinks about on a daily basis — people who collect statistics, catch child predators, take care of our nation’s dead, and preserve our history. It’s jobs like this and people like that who are most at risk inside the next Trump administration.
Maybe we end up with a federal government slashed to the bone by intended cuts and a vast flood of talent leaving for the private sector, a government that offers a national military but little else.
Which leads me to think about my second scenario:
Does the US become Europe? Linguistically, the idea of the United States as a singular entity only dates to about the Civil War. For the first 75 or so years of our country’s life, language used a plural to refer to the United States — e.g., the United States “are” located in North America — implying the US first and foremost was an amalgamation of the individual states. Then as our national identity shifted, language also shifted to make the United States singular — e.g., the United States “is” the world’s leading economy. But what if over the next decade we watch our country slide back to being a state-first system?
At one end of the spectrum, the US over the next ten years could end up looking a lot more like Europe — a free trade and travel zone where citizens’ rights, equality, and freedoms vary widely state to state. Blue state governors and legislatures chart one course for themselves while red states chart a very different one, and in a sort of turbocharged Jim Crow-style splintering the federal government largely gives up trying to host a unified experience for American life. After all, we’re already seeing some of this drift apart: Much of the state-level work post-Dobbs has been about enshrining abortion protections at the state level in constitutions.
Depending precisely on how you define it Europe has between 27 and 50 countries — you can travel across the 27 borders of the EU or the 29 borders of the Schengen region easily (though not the UK anymore!) but the experience of government, freedom, economic opportunities, and the lived experience of democracy varies pretty widely as you move from Germany to Hungary to Italy to Finland to Greece to Bulgaria and beyond.
The impact of this trend unfolding the US alone could be huge — as we continue to see in nearly every election, what we think of as “red states” and “blue states” is really a story of rural vs. urban. After 2020, there was not a single urban GOP member of congress left in the country. In many of those “red states,” urban cities have continued to thrive, the so-called “blue dot in a red state” phenomenon like Austin, Texas, where people have been largely able to live their progressive values even amid a hostile state government. And yet we’ve already begun to see that model be stressed, as areas like education and health care are increasingly polarized and directed by hostile governors and legislatures.
Presumably we’re just glimpsing the start of this trend—one that will accelerate and be directly empowered by the actions of the Trump administration in the years ahead. America has been sorting itself demographically and values-wise for years already and the opportunity — slash need — to do so in the years ahead seems only likely to increase. As we watch the federal government atrophy, shrink, and unravel in the years ahead, states may step up and fill more of that void, increasing the disparities and differences in the social safety net, worker protections, environmental regulations, and more. One scenario that’s entirely plausible is that the federal government shifts more toward block-grants for education, health care, and infrastructure. As the feds do less, states do more.
If individual rights are increasingly determined by what state you live in, there are profound implications for economic development. There’s a certain interchangeability to modern large cities — you can get your same expensive Third-wave coffee en route to work, overpriced fast casual salad for lunch, and then work out at trendy SoulCycle on the way home anywhere in Chicago, Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Philadelphia, or Denver. At least before Dobbs, the selection of products and pharmaceuticals available at a local drugstore or hospital in any major city is effectively the same across the country and access to modern high-quality health care was largely the same. You can drink from the tap, get the same books from a major library, know that your apartment building or office was built to modern safety codes, and that you were protected by similar rights at your workplace. But all of that may shift radically. Some of it is already shifting now.
What if suddenly living in Denver versus Austin or Charlotte versus Tampa start to come with very different sets of rights as an individual in terms of your family’s access to basic health care, what books your child gets to read in school, whether you can walk the streets without carrying your “papers,” whether your kid’s school requires basic vaccines, or even whether the public water supply is considered safe? Yes, to be sure all of this happens at a certain level in the US already—look at open carry laws across the country, right-to-work laws, textbooks in Texas, the drinking water in Flint or Jackson, Mississippi, or even the state-level disparate approach to legalizing marijuana and cannabis, sure—but what if such case studies become the norm rather than the exception in American life? Companies will start to think differently about where they’re locating offices, building facilities, and even holding conferences.
Think too about higher education; universities remain enormous economic development engines. Think Stanford and Silicon Valley or Boston and bioscience. Until recently, at a high level, most large state universities were pretty similar. (Some exceptions obviously apply.) But what if faculty start refusing to go to certain states? What if in order to even study certain subjects you have to choose a blue state?
If anything, we’re probably under-imagining how wide-ranging the affected individual and collective rights might be and how states might splinter and diverge on their own paths in the years ahead. At effectively every turn since 2016, we have suffered a collective failure of imagination about how the years ahead will unfold. My friend Nicco Mele’s mantra for years now has been simple: “It will only get crazier.”
We need to be thinking more about just how crazy these years ahead will be.
GMG
PS: I hope to use this newsletter more to share history and context (and lots of book recommendations) about the time and challenge ahead. I hope you’ll consider sharing it with a couple people in your life who you think might find value in it: