Reimagining Government, Part 1: Toward Alternative Futures

Public service leaders and innovators from across the country gathered in Washington, D.C. in November 2025 at the National Academy of Public Administration’s 2025 National Conference to look beyond today to the futures of government.

Not to a future of government, singular.

This diverse group of leaders aligned in recognizing two things: that no single vision can reflect what millions of American want the future of government to be. And that no government at any level, Federal or state or county or local, can serve its purpose effectively if those millions don’t see themselves as its co-creators.

A portion of the conference was dedicated to “reimagining government” with a panel of experts and interactive discussions in groups. Some provocative questions set the stage:

• If we stand in the future, what are some truly new and different things about government that we see there?

• If we stand in the future, what has government done to become more anticipatory?

• What conditions must we create for the emergence of a government that is proactively responsive to future generations?

Reimagining government through the lenses of questions like these revealed key themes. We can see them as attributes of potential alternative futures for government.

Imagine a future where the “fifth estate” is a collaborative partner in governing

Research from Harris Poll in October 2025 indicates that two-thirds of Americans, and more than 80% of both Gen Z and Millennials, look to social media for news. Pew Research reports more than 20% of adults in the United States, and nearly twice that many under the age of 30, regularly get their news from “creators or influencers.” They see these sources as helping them “better understand current events and civic issues,” even as they acknowledge their perceptions of some influencers’ biases.

This so-called “fifth estate” of non-mainstream viewpoint platforms are more than just news sources for their followers. They increasingly are the sources of civics education. Bloggers, online networks, Hollywood, and independent journalists are where many Americans gain their understanding of government structures, processes, and purpose. Digital communities provide the foundation of our knowledge and our experience of what it looks like to participate in democratic and civil society.

The fifth estate’s relationship to government is to editorialize about it from outside. Today, government acts, or deliberates on actions to take, and the role of influencers and social media is to react, spin, critique, amplify. It is an important and valuable relationship and role.

What if it was also deliberately, meaningfully made a part of the dialogue of governing?

The glimmers of this are already visible. Government‐led campaigns in collaboration with influencers for Covid‐19 awareness are well-known. In 2022, staff from the National Security Council briefed a group of TikTok creators on U.S. goals and strategies in the Ukraine war to facilitate their conveying accurate information to their audiences. New Mexico’s and New York City’s governments have partnered with social media influencers to explain changes in SNAP benefit eligibility requirements and a new childcare assistance program respectively (the latter in ten languages).

In an alternative future, we could see this evolving to new levels, with new kinds of impacts. Imagine the fifth estate as a collective of resources that government systematically leverages to help surface problems, to co-design options with citizens, to gain insight into unintended consequences of policy options before they’re implemented. Platforms, creators, and independent journalists as a multidimensional real time civic radar, with their users and followers shaping legislation in livestream citizens’ assemblies. Agencies and legislators working in structured, transparent ways with social influencers, Hollywood screenwriters, and members of Facebook groups to debate complex policy options, articulate them in plain language, and stress-test how they could play out for different communities of interest. Structured and privacy-protected access to implementation and performance data for fifth estate actors to sit alongside watchdog agencies as recognized official oversight partners.

Two organizations, Democracy 2076 and Harmony Labs, spent a year studying how entertainment media is shaping people’s understanding of government, and how it could shape it in constructive ways in the future. What would it look like for entertainment sector leaders to work in new ways with government leaders from every level, issue activists from across the spectrum of views, and everyday citizens? Imagine them mapping out stories together about a democracy that inspire optimism and reflect the cross-partisan values that a whole mosaic of different audiences hold.

Social media influencers have detailed, nuanced understanding of their audiences, and their followers often feel a sense of proximity and intimacy with them, enabling deep connection in ways that build trust. The erosion of trust in government is well documented. Imagine a future where influencers not only become trusted sources for credible civic information, but also work with public servants to help them learn new ways of rebuilding trusting relationships, including with those often left out or pushed out of political engagement.

Integration of the fifth estate into governing, in these or other future ways, presents the influencers and public servants alike with challenges to navigate. What are the ethics of transparency in sponsorships or funding or fair representation? What are the obligations and the guardrails for both sides around disinformation or instrumentalizing influencers for political opportunism? What kinds of multi-stakeholder agreements between governments, creators, journalistic organizations, and civil society groups will regulate data sharing, privacy protections, and the ways individuals will participate in social media platform-hosted civil assemblies without favoring particular parties?

The decline in civics education, civic engagement, and trust in government are pressing concerns not only for public service leaders. They are trends that also concern many Americans who are the audiences of the fifth estate. New ways of bringing those worlds together are futures that countervail those trends.

Tomorrow: Imagine a future with "frictionless" collaboration across levels of government