The Way to Atlantis

How Democrats counter “Drain the Swamp,” DOGE, and disdain for government.

Since the Reagan years, Republicans have fostered a metastasizing antipathy toward government. In a culmination of that work, much of the American public has made clear their apparent distaste for Washington, having twice elected someone who loathes government more than they do. Democrats would be foolish to try to just combat President Trump’s calls to drain the swamp or gut the government because these efforts are symptomatic of a deep-seated problem: Americans hate government because they don’t know what government does for them.

We’ve known about this for decades, but we’ve let it fester. Long before President Trump, Suzanne Mettler detailed it in her 2011 book The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy, building on Christopher Howard’s The Hidden Welfare State from 1997. Americans don’t realize when they benefit from federal programs like the Mortgage-Interest Deduction, the Earned Income Tax Credit, or even Medicare. But they do hear a lot about things like “Obama Phones” and their tax dollars going to Ukraine.

Source: New York Times¹

If we want to build support for good governance that will last across administrations, we have to do the extremely hard work of bucking this trend. But we can do it. Democrats know where to find the submerged state; after all, we built it.

It’s the expanded Child Tax Credit slashing child poverty, Obamacare insuring millions of Americans through subsidies and Medicaid expansion, and so much more. But, for millions of our neighbors, it’s hidden where even Nicholas Cage can’t find it. We need to show them the way to Atlantis instead of hoping they’ll find it themselves.

Today in Wicked Good Policy, we’re going to talk about how we got in this situation and how we can get out of it. Let’s dive in.

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How We Drowned

There are two immediate, interconnected challenges to getting Americans to recognize, appreciate, and support the programs they benefit from.

The first is around policy design: too many of the things government do for people are “invisible” to their beneficiaries. Part of this is because of how Congress passes legislation now—largely through budget reconciliation, a complicated process that enables Congress to pass spending policies with only 50 votes. Congress has defaulted to using this legislative process because our politics are intractably partisan and broken. It’s nearly impossible to get 60 votes in the Senate, which means as Susannah Tahk, eloquently puts it: “Everything is Tax.”

In practice, this means that signature pieces of legislation have not been about building or transforming—like we saw during the New Deal—instead, they’ve been about financing and funding. Just look at Democrats’ two biggest initiatives this century: healthcare reform and clean energy investment. Both were heralded as generational reforms, and both were tax bills. While many Americans may know about the Affordable Care Act or the Inflation Reduction Act because of their significance, smaller—albeit meaningful—social programs, passed through reconciliation can get lost in the abyss of the Internal Revenue Code.

Here, the classic example is President Obama’s tax cuts. You, like most taxpayers at the time, might be asking, “What tax cuts?” (just kidding, I know you’re all nerds.) About one-third of the 2009 stimulus bill in the aftermath of the financial crisis came in the form of tax cuts. According to one estimate, 97 percent of households got a tax cut that averaged almost $1,200! But instead of cutting families a stimulus check like the government did during the pandemic, the Obama Administration designed many tax cuts to be included in each paycheck. The hope—and prevailing economic theory—was that giving families a little extra money every month instead of one big check would provide more effective stimulus for the sputtering U.S. economy. The political problem was that no one realized they got a tax cut when their paycheck was just marginally bigger every other week.

Relatedly, Democrats can be their own worst enemies and hesitate to tout some programs, whether out of some sense of humility, intentional image cultivation, or believing that such bragging is unbecoming of the Presidency. Take the stimulus checks. President Trump stuck his names on the stimulus checks that were sent out in 2020, eager to take credit ahead of the election: “I’m sure people will be very happy to get a big, fat, beautiful check and my name is on it.”

Come 2021, President Biden did not put his name on the next round of checks. His press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters: “The president will not appear on the line of the check. It will be signed by the career official. This is not about him. This is about the American people getting relief.” Fast forward to December 2024 and, in reflecting on his election loss, President Biden called his decision not to sign the checks “stupid.”

The second challenge is that when government does good things, it’s hard to break through today’s media ecosystem to let the public know about them. Fewer Americans trust legacy media and local news is disappearing. People are increasingly retreating to echo chambers. Today, 54% of Americans say they get news from social media: A third of U.S. adults regularly get news from Facebook, 32% from YouTube, 20% from Instagram, and 17% from TikTok. And, despite the right’s accusations of censorship, increasingly, the most popular people and channels on these platform represent conservative views, who probably are not touting how long-existing government programs have supported their community!

This diffuse and changing media landscape makes it harder than ever to do the work of convincing people to care about long-running programs and policies. As someone who worked as a speechwriter at Treasury, I appreciate how hard it was to get a headline even for splashy new announcements, let alone the day-to-day work Treasury does to keep our economy going. That’s why, I think, we have to be more focused on new ways of directly reaching people.

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The Way Back Up

What stands in the way of building broad-based support for good governance in America is both policy design and how people get news about policy. I’ll revisit the question of policy design in the future. It’s a topic that deserves its own post to discuss the trade-offs in policy design under the constraints of our political system.

Today, I’ll offer three ideas that focus on directly reaching people on the ground. They are ideas the next Democratic president can run with on Day 1 without needing new legislation.

1. A Letter from the President

When Senator Ed Markey faced a primary opponent in then-Congressman Joe Kennedy, his campaign became incredibly creative, behaving as underdog insurgents against a political dynasty. One of its initiatives was to release a (now seemingly defunct) map, showing all the federal investments that came into Massachusetts. The not-so-subtle implication was that Markey himself was responsible for each of those investments (sorry, Elizabeth Warren). Despite the clear overstatement, I found the map to be a compelling visual, and I was eager myself to see what federal investments were going to my hometown.

The Biden Administration did something similar to depict all of the investments stemming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (example below). It was an impressive feat of data collection and it helped equip local reporters to write about these investments.

Unfortunately, I don’t think many people frequented invest.gov or, frankly, even knew such websites existed. That’s why, instead, I think it’s worth having the President directly send an annual letter to every American quantifying how they benefit from different social programs and federal investments.

For example, right now, Social Security beneficiaries receive a form called SSA-1099, which details how much they received in Social Security benefits. Imagine if that idea were expanded so that every American got a letter detailing how much their family received from the Mortgage-Interest Deduction, Affordable Care Act subsidies, education credits, and more. In addition, the letter could include details on how much federal funding went to their community to support schools, infrastructure, and investment.

No longer would policies be invisible. Instead, taxpayers would have a clear picture of how they—and their communities—benefit directly from federal policy. You could know what opaque tax expenditures benefit you, rather than just getting a final number from your accountant. You could see which projects, roads, and schools in your town are boosted by federal investment. And you could see how often-stigmatized policies like Food Stamps are supporting your neighbors, not just some faraway communities.

2. The Road Show

If Democrats want people to support our policies, Democratic politicians should go make the case for them directly and widely. I admire Bernie Sanders and AOC for doing their “Fight Oligarchy Tour” across cities in western America. They are attracting tens of thousands of people, spreading their message, and getting local coverage. Democratic politicians should be doing this across every state, and not just in election years when it’s disingenuous and transactional. Of course, in Trump country, Democrats will face pushback and sometimes hostility. As elected Senators, they should be prepared for it and welcome the debate.

Honestly, I don’t know why this isn’t more common already. Perhaps there’s a norm not to encroach on their colleagues’ states. But right now, I think those kinds of norms are of a bygone era and we need to be willing to break the mold to protect democratic governance.

Perhaps Senators are worried that voters back home will find them absentee and inattentive to local issues. But if my Senators were spending a couple days a month in other states to build national political support to pass a worthwhile agenda, I’d say more power to them. I’m sure we could get someone else to do the ribbon cuttings and school visits.

(Side note — for all the Senators reading this: I promise that traveling to Arkansas or Kansas and skipping a couple of fundraising meals in years 1 through 4 (or even 5!) of your 6-year term will not make or break your re-election! Hell, you might even meet some new donors, inspire folks to volunteer for you, and build local political support for a future presidential campaign!)

3. High School Competition

But the best messenger won’t be politicians; it’ll be members of each local community. That’s why the White House should create a challenge for high school students to research a federal government initiative—from a big project to a niche tax policy—that has improved their community. Each high school will then pick a winner based on which student has the most creative idea and, crucially, how effective that student is in sharing their work with their community.

To judge, communities can pick local leaders from Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, unions, the PTA, etc. Each high school’s winner will then compete at the state-level, where you can imagine the governor, state representatives, or the Congressional delegation involved in judging if they want. Finally, the winners from each state will get to present their projects at a White House fair hosted by the President.

There are a few reasons I think this could work. To start, I trust there’ll be kids who sign up for this (and parents who volunteer them). Visiting the White House is a really cool experience for a teenager, and this just builds on existing types of competitions that start at individual schools and become national— like spelling bees, science fairs, Quiz Bowl, and U.S. Senate Youth Program. I think this would be an effective start to un-submerging some policies because, let’s face it, The Youth are always the most creative with communications in the digital age. The Democratic Political Class is simply not cool, but the kids are alright.

Will there be communities who mock and stonewall this initiative? Yes. But also, who cares? There are 25,000 public high schools in America. If even a fraction participate, that’s still a welcome opportunity to engage skeptical communities at the ground-level about how the federal government works for them.

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This Has to be a Priority

Developing an agenda to resurface the state is just as important as writing the inevitable binders full of policy white papers. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to then-Senator Obama discussing, in the midst of brutal primary, his focus:

“The most important thing that we can do right now is to reengage the American people in the process of governance. To get them interested in what works and what can work in our government. To make politics cool again. And important again. And relevant again…If we cannot inspire the country to believe again, then it doesn’t matter how many policies and plans we have.”²

Because the next time Democrats get power, even with a comprehensive policy agenda and a foolproof implementation strategy, it is no sure bet that able governance will necessarily beget support for further investing in and empowering state capacity. That was the failed theory of the Biden Administration. That a one-year expanded Child Tax Credit would build overwhelming popular demand for Congress to make the policy permanent. That four years of sound economic stewardship would earn reelection.

If the state remains submerged, no one will ever discover it. It’s up to Democrats to lead the way to Atlantis.

1. The year Mettler’s book came out 44% of Social Security recipients and 40% of Medicare recipients believed they didn’t benefit from any government social program.

2. As a Massachusetts-inspired blog, I’d be remiss not to mention that Obama copied (with permission) much of this speech from Governor Deval Patrick.