Not More. Not Less. Better.
The Government We Demand
Last week, four astronauts launched a mission that will carry them farther from Earth than any human has ever traveled.
A rocket built by thousands of engineers and public servants. Launched from a government facility. Funded by the American taxpayer.
Maybe you watched the countdown live.
Maybe you felt that familiar sense of awe at liftoff.
Maybe, like me, you felt a recognition that this is what government looks like when it works. When it does the thing that it was built to do, at the scale only it can do, in service of something larger than any one of us can achieve.
Sixty-four years ago, a young president stood in a Houston stadium and answered the skeptics who asked why government should do this.
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
JFK wasn’t making an argument for space exploration. He was making an argument for what free people organized around a worthy mission are capable of achieving.
Hard things.
Decades later we seem to have lost faith in that.
For most of my life, nearly every political argument in America has collapsed into the same tired fight. More government or less. Bigger or smaller. Spend more or cut more. But it has always been the wrong argument.
Government isn’t broken because there is too much or too little of it. It’s broken because nobody is demanding better results from it.
Better government is the governing philosophy Democrats should embrace and the people deserve.
Not more. Not less. Better.
Lost Faith
If you’ve lost faith in government, if you believe it is broken, captured by special interests, unaccountable, and unable to deliver on even the basic, let alone the hard—you’re right. And you’re not alone.
Public trust in government is at an all-time low. Just 17% of Americans trust that the government will do what is right. That’s not just a polling result. It is a verdict, rendered across generations and party lines by people paying close attention to their own lives.
Flat wages and rising costs.
Unaffordable housing.
Small businesses squeezed by volatile tariffs and complex regulations.
Infrastructure with near failing grades.
A broken healthcare system that risks financial ruin for some seeking basic survival.
A generation on track to be worse off than their parents for the first time in American history.
The promise of the American Dream has been broken.
Some of this happened through neglect and mismanagement. Some through genuine disagreement. But some of it was deliberate.
A forty-five-year project built on the premise that “government is the problem.” A strategy of intentionally making government worse and then pointing to the wreckage as proof that government can’t work.
That is not a governing philosophy. It is sabotage disguised as one.
Our frustrations are real. But it’s important to realize that we were handed some of that frustration on purpose by people who want us to despair about government because they have nothing to gain from our faith in it.
But this failure is not inevitable. It is a choice. And we can make a different one.
Indispensable Force
Government gets the hardest problems. The ones too large, too slow, too unprofitable for any market to solve. But government is not merely the solution of last resort.
Government is the most powerful tool free people ever built to do together what none of us can do alone.
It built the interstate highway system that connected a nation and made a modern economy possible.
It sent a generation of veterans to college, put them in homes, and built the middle class.
It eliminated polio because our country decided that children shouldn’t be paralyzed every summer.
It sent firefighters and police into burning towers to save lives on the worst morning NYC has ever seen.
It put a pacemaker in my 73-year-old father’s heart.
It launched men and women to the stars.
Government at its best is how free people keep the promises they’ve made to each other. Not just to the people who can afford alternatives if it doesn’t. To everyone.
I am a Democrat because I believe that.
And because I believe in government, I refuse to pretend it is working.
Broken Government
Our institutions are failing ordinary people. Our legitimate frustrations gave rise to a conman and a Republican Party that promised to fix it. Instead, they arrived with a chainsaw and a Twitter feed. Their goals were spectacle, destruction, and self-enrichment.
They did not reform government. They amputated it.
But Democrats have to be honest about our role in this catastrophe too.
We gave them the opening.
We have spent so much time arguing about what government should do that we forgot to focus on how government should work.
The party that believes in government stopped demanding enough from it. We defended failing institutions when we should have fixed them. We confused activity with progress. We protected the party’s priorities instead of producing the people’s results.
We declared values, but failed to deliver value.
Too often, we have let the debate collapse into how much money to spend, who to tax, what program to add without demanding a clear and measurable return for the people paying the bill.
In New York City, the mayor and the city council are fighting over a $127 billion budget. Both sides are arguing about where the money comes from and whose taxes to raise. But nobody is showing what material improvement $127 billion delivers. I doubt you’ll find a single New Yorker who feels like they are getting $127 billion in value from their city.
Citizens have a right to ask what they are getting in return for what they invest. That is not anti-government. It is the minimum standard of democratic accountability.
The answer to broken government is neither to defund it nor to blindly demand more money for it. It is to stop managing inputs and start owning outputs. To treat every tax dollar as an investment and demand a return worthy of the people who earned it.
The cost of failing that standard is compounding.
Rising debt and structural deficits don’t threaten the powerful. They threaten the programs built to serve everyone else. The safety net. The school. The clinic. Every dollar that disappears into unaccountable government makes the next argument for investment harder to win.
Demanding better government is the only way to protect what progressive governance was built to deliver. Because the people who pay the highest price for broken government are never the people with resources to escape it. They are the people government was built to serve.
Fixing broken government is not a management problem. It is a moral one.
Better Government
So what does better mean?
Better government is accountable, effective, and worthy of investment. Austerity walks away from people. Accountability stays answerable to them. One abandons the mission. The other demands excellence in pursuit of it.
Right now, too much of government is rewarded for spending everything in its budget and punished for efficiency. The incentive is not results. It is consumption. We have to shift the system from “use it or lose it” to “prove it or lose it.”
Better government starts with three questions for every agency, program, and dollar: What outcome are you trying to produce? How will you measure it? Who is accountable if you fall short?
Better government requires discipline to do fewer things. Not because we care less, but because a government that tries to do everything usually ends up doing too much poorly.
Better government stops treating business as an adversary and starts treating it as a co-investor in results. Government without private innovation stagnates. Markets without functioning government fail. Government sets the mission. Business helps deliver it. Both are held accountable for outcomes. That partnership is the story of Artemis II and that is how some of the hardest things get done.
Better government competes on returns, not cost. New York’s problem is not that it asks people to invest. It is that it has too often failed to produce a return worthy of that investment.
Better Government Starts Local
If we are serious about rebuilding faith in government, we should start where performance is most visible and excuses are hardest to hide.
Start local.
The county executive. The town supervisor. The mayor. The person whose job is to own the result, not protect the budget or survive the term. Local executive government is where people feel whether government works in their daily lives: if streets are safe, permits move, housing gets built, infrastructure holds, and public dollars produce tangible value.
And yet local executive government remains one of the most neglected places in Democratic politics. The renewal of Democratic governance will not begin in Washington. It will not begin in Albany. It begins with local leaders willing to own the outcome.
That is why New Democrats of New York is recruiting and investing in a new generation of local Democratic executives committed to better government across the state.
The renewal
The challenge before us is not abstract. It is in our schools, our streets, our neighborhoods, and in the lives of people who did everything right and are still falling behind.
They deserve the highest standards. They deserve public servants held to them.
Our challenges do not lack solutions. They lack the political will to measure, prioritize, and be accountable for delivering them.
If we can show that government can be held to this standard in New York—the most complex, most scrutinized, most consequential state in America—we will have proven something the country desperately needs to believe: that better government is possible.
We choose to build better government, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because it is a challenge we are willing to accept, unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.
Not more. Not less. Better.
Say it more concisely.