At a moment when the Niskanen Center’s mission feels especially urgent, we are guided by the conviction that America’s greatest challenges can be met not by abandoning our institutions but by renewing them. At a time when some of our most fundamental institutions are under attack, we believe that the most effective defense lies in recognizing their real and serious flaws while offering specific, constructive reforms. Across our work, we seek to make liberal democracy more resilient, government more capable, and prosperity more widely shared to improve everyday life.
Our focus on renewing liberal democratic institutions includes not only Congress, the courts, and government agencies, but also the broader ecosystem of institutions that form the “constitution of knowledge”: the universities, the press, the legal system, and even commercial and civic enterprises that sustain an open society, in which we seek truth and attempt to make collective decisions for the public good.
When these institutions falter and lose public trust, they leave a vacuum filled by populism and authoritarian impulses. As described by my colleague Brink Lindsey, when people lose confidence in government, they don’t give up on power altogether — they instead look for cruder, simpler forms of authority rooted in the politics of charisma and resentment. Decision-making becomes guided less by reason and persuasion and more by demagoguery and raw power. That undermines not only our freedom, but also our prosperity.
Meeting the perils head-on
These are not abstract dangers. Early in Niskanen’s existence, in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 election, we launched the Open Society Project, both to counter the administration’s abuses of power and to recognize that the left–right political spectrum was giving way to a new ideological divide of “open” vs. “closed.” This project’s work centered on defending the norms and institutions of liberal democracy. One of its noted successes was helping organize a network of conservatives and moderates who rejected authoritarian politics and sought to preserve the rule of law. That defensive effort was necessary and right.
As Trump’s brand of populism grew, we increasingly recognized that the failures of governance that fueled populist anger could not be met by resistance alone. The 2018 Niskanen paper “The Center Can Hold” presciently argued that “there is only one sure way to quiet our populist distempers and restore faith in democratic institutions, and that is for those democratic institutions to deliver effective governance.” In the years that followed, as public mistrust deepened, our work evolved to focus more directly on improving the performance of government itself. Improving the quality of governance is essential not only to meet the pressing economic and social challenges of the 21st century, but also to rebuild public trust in our governing institutions and reverse the trend toward illiberalism.
At Niskanen, we are committed to strengthening liberal democracy by renewing the institutions that sustain it. We do so by diagnosing where institutions fall short and defending against efforts to dismantle them, all in service of advancing an affirmative vision of well-functioning governance. That vision is grounded in the conviction that capable, adaptive institutions are the surest path to liberty, opportunity, and prosperity.
A 3-part strategy
Niskanen’s strategy rests on three parts: theory, policy, and practice:
- Theory is how we frame and articulate our vision of society, markets, and government. It’s our big-picture thinking — the essays and analyses we write for people who shape and drive public policy.
- Policy translates that vision into specific ideas for government action — ideas grounded in research and technocratic expertise.
- Practice constitutes our efforts to build coalitions to enact these policies and ensure their effective implementation.
We’ve found that this integration of theory, policy, and practice is a powerful formula. It’s a way of linking ideas to impact: developing a clear vision, grounding it in expertise and evidence, and then doing the real-world work of making it happen.
The pillars of a prosperous society
Another distinctive aspect of our strategy is that we lean into engaging with people across the ideological and political spectrums. Niskanen has an unusual history. We were founded a decade ago by reform-minded libertarians who had grown skeptical of strict antigovernment thinking and recognized that free markets require a framework of effective public institutions.
Over time, we attracted Republicans alarmed at the rise of MAGA populism, the erosion of constitutional norms, and their party’s drift toward grievance over governance. We also attracted Democrats concerned that their party’s activist groups had grown more focused on ideological purity than on governing, leaving them complacent about government’s inability to deliver results.
As these voices came together at Niskanen, they helped shape a broader synthesis. We came to see that a stable liberal society requires more than free markets and limited government. It requires a capable state that delivers essential public goods, sustains social insurance, provides public safety, and earns the trust of its citizens. In this view, markets, social insurance, and effective government are not competing visions but interdependent pillars of an open and prosperous society. When any one of them weakens, the entire liberal order becomes vulnerable to populism and authoritarianism.
Addressing the issues of our time
Niskanen’s independence from any partisan bloc — and our intentionality in engaging people from across the political spectrum — makes us more effective. It allows us to maintain a culture of intellectual openness, so that we can draw on and synthesize ideas from across the ideological spectrum. In our communications, it means we aim to persuade those who need convincing, rather than signaling allegiance to any one political side. And in our advocacy work, it means we try to build credibility and relationships with lawmakers in both parties, allowing us to form the coalitions needed to get policies enacted.
This openness to ideas has shaped our policy agenda. We advocate for a government that provides social insurance and essential public goods, fosters market competition and innovation, invests in state capacity, and attracts talented and hard-working people to come to our country and contribute to its dynamism. Our policy departments translate these principles into concrete, research-supported policy proposals.
Our Social Policy department’s work is premised on the idea that free markets and robust social policies are complementary and together provide the foundation for a free and just society. In housing and healthcare, the team focuses on reducing the barriers that raise costs, stifle innovation, and constrain access to these essential goods and services. Their work on family economic security and employment policy focuses on reforming and expanding traditional cash support for workers and families. This includes tax credits, paid family leave, and childcare in family economic security and unemployment insurance, disability benefits, and workforce development.
Our Climate and Energy department advances innovation and energy resilience, and addresses climate change through pragmatic, market-driven solutions. The team focuses on eliminating bureaucratic and rent-seeking barriers that hinder the deployment of clean energy infrastructure. They devise and promote policies that accelerate the clean-energy transition, reform permitting and grid infrastructure, and harness market innovation to decarbonize while maintaining affordable and reliable energy.
Our Immigration department works to build a reliable and competitive immigration system to meet the needs of a dynamic economy. This group focuses on expanding legal pathways for workers and families, improving border management, and ensuring that immigrants can contribute fully to national prosperity. The department’s work addresses long-standing challenges, including fixing the asylum process, preparing for a shift toward merit-based immigration, and developing reformed legal pathways that prioritize economic growth while strengthening domestic security and competitiveness.
Our Criminal Justice department advances an evidence-based agenda to reduce the social costs of crime and punishment. The group’s work aims to deter crime, reduce violence, and combat substance abuse — and thereby reduce levels of incarceration — through policies that prevent crime and deliver proportional punishment swiftly and predictably.
One cross-cutting theme of Niskanen’s policy work is addressing the insufficient supply of goods and services needed to improve everyday life, such as housing, energy, healthcare, and childcare. This supply-side focus now frequently goes under the name of “abundance.”
Redefining the debate: The abundance agenda
Niskanen’s work on abundance — before it was even called “abundance” — was described in Niskanen’s 2021 paper “Cost Disease Socialism.” Up to that point, the political debate had mostly centered on who should pay for rising costs rather than on how to lower those costs. Democrats often responded by expanding subsidies to make goods more affordable. But when supply is constrained, those subsidies can simply drive prices higher, which then requires even more subsidies — a cycle that can lead to unsustainable public debt.
Republicans, on the other hand, tended to focus on cutting the public debt by shifting costs off the government’s books to household balance sheets — an approach that’s politically unsustainable. Both approaches miss the larger issue. When supply is artificially constrained, government spends more but gets less, households pay more but receive less, and frustration with both the market and the government continues to grow.
This focus on supply offers a compelling — if somewhat simplified — story about why U.S. economic growth began to slow in the early 1970s. The decades after World War II were a period of extraordinary economic growth. That growth came with unaccounted costs, since projects that remade cities and landscapes often paid too little attention to property rights and environmental damages.
By the early ’70s, a broad political reaction had set in. Across both parties, Americans concluded that it should be harder to build. We made transportation infrastructure scarce through onerous permitting and proceduralism, so the cost of transportation infrastructure tripled between the 1960s and the 1980s. We made housing scarce through restrictive building and zoning codes, so that home prices in our most productive cities have risen seven- to nine-fold since 1980. We made it so that people can’t move to where they can work in the most productive jobs, making them and their would-be colleagues less productive, and limiting the opportunities for social mobility.
This trend didn’t just limit productivity and economic growth, it also slowed our ability to meet new challenges. We’ve struggled to transition to clean energy, for instance. While there is public and private financing and we have the technology, we risk failing to deploy at reasonable cost and speed due to policy constraints.
Supply constraints don’t only apply to physical goods like housing, transportation, and energy infrastructure. The scarcity mindset also affects critical service sectors like healthcare. As described in a 2024 Niskanen paper, many policies raise medical costs and limit accessibility:
- We cap the number of federally funded medical residency slots, which reduces the supply of physicians.
- We make it nearly impossible for qualified doctors trained abroad to practice here without having to repeat their residencies in the U.S.
- We impose “certificate of need” laws in many states that require government approval before anyone can open a new clinic or expand a facility.
- We restrict nurse practitioners and physician assistants from practicing independently.
Each of these policies is a choice to constrain supply in ways that make healthcare more expensive and less accessible. And the same story plays out elsewhere. Whether it’s childcare, education, or eldercare, we have too few providers, too much red tape, and too little competition — making it harder and more expensive to provide the services people rely on. And an important way to ease constraints on providers is by creating more flexible immigration pathways for scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and other talented and hardworking people, so the U.S. can remain the most attractive place in the world to invent, build, and scale new ideas.
Making government work
While removing costly government obstacles is one aspect of our focus on renewing government institutions, the broader goal is to ensure an effective, capable government. A focus on excessive regulation often overlooks the opposite problem: a state too weak to perform its core functions effectively. We need a competent, well-resourced government, because a strong state is essential to sustaining a dynamic market economy. The insight is that markets and government are not adversaries but complements.
At Niskanen, we embrace state capacity, which is simply the ability of our government to achieve its goals, whether it’s building energy infrastructure, preventing pandemics, collecting taxes, or providing income support. A capable state is essential for broad prosperity and for improving everyday life. Through our State Capacity Initiative, we advance reforms to make the federal government more capable, responsive, and effective at implementing policy.
The initiative promotes policies to modernize the civil service so agencies can recruit top talent and remove poor performers; streamline administrative procedures so decisions are faster, clearer, and less burdensome; strengthen the government’s delivery of digital services; and improve feedback loops that enable government to learn and improve continuously from policy design through implementation and impact.
Nurturing the habits of democracy
We hope to offer a healthy political response to our politically troubling times. The principles of pluralism and liberalism are currently under threat, even to the point where we’re seeing a dangerous rise in political violence. Responding to these times with despair or outrage may be understandable, but despair and outrage are neither good for one’s soul nor politically persuasive.
Sustaining pluralism begins with recognizing that every person carries their own story, formed by different experiences, values, and circumstances. Understanding those stories, and listening with respect and curiosity, helps us find common ground even when we disagree. We try to nurture that habit internally at Niskaken, reminding ourselves that we are both an institution and a community: as a community, we listen to and learn from one another; as an institution, we channel those insights into our shared mission.
Our broader commitment to the principles of liberalism — principles of agency, constructive engagement, learning, and hope in progress — offers a way to channel our energy into repairing our nation’s institutions so they can improve people’s lives. We aim to promote an agenda that can sustain and model the habits of pluralism, good governance, and liberal democracy at a time when these habits are under threat, reminding us that the answer to our challenges isn’t to abandon our institutions but to renew them, to make them work for the common good.
