Reimagining Government, Part 2: Frictionless Participation

More than 400 agencies comprise the U.S. Federal government. Add fifty-five state and territory governments. More than 3,000 county governments. More than 25,000 municipal and township governments. There are few issues that reside exclusively at any one of these levels of government. The need for collaboration across levels is great, and growing. By the sheer numbers of entities alone, the conditions for that collaboration are challenging. And the lived experience of public servants at every level of government bears that out.

What if it was easier? What if new forms and new mindsets of cross-agency partnering and teamwork reduced the frictions to boost the speed and ease to new kinds of results?

Data is the lifeblood of much of what government does at every level, and its centrality will soar further in an AI era. Cross-level shared data is one thing; what could new advances in shared data infrastructure offer? In different futures we can imagine bespoke data management practices and siloed databases giving way to intergovernmental data trusts and multi-level common cloud environments, with participation by agencies at multiple levels and shared governance over access, usage rules, and privacy. Examples are already emerging that agencies throughout the U.S. can explore, like the data trust pilot in the greater London area bringing city, borough, and regional entities together for common access to datasets, and Estonia’s X-Road data exchange platform.

We can imagine regulatory sandboxes, becoming more common in the U.S. at the state level and in Europe at national levels, evolving to intergovernmental variants. Multiple regulators from different jurisdiction levels agreeing to form common sandbox frameworks to coordinate oversight and avoid conflicting mandates, with harmonized application processes and joint monitoring and oversight. Look at South Korea, where the national-level Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport is creating sandbox conditions for smart city pilots to be implemented in designated cities. Regulatory sandboxes are most common today for fintech products, and increasingly for AI innovations. When and where might we anticipate intergovernmental sandboxes to emerge in the U.S. to make new innovations possible in healthcare, grid modernization, transportation, and other areas?

What if this kind of idea were mirrored at a policy development level, rather than just the more technical regulatory level? Imagine multi-level “policy studios,” run like a design lab. Policymakers from each level of government working together, with problem-framing sessions and rapid prototyping of policy ideas for cross-jurisdictional management of issues that cut across levels of government in different ways at each level. Government innovation design labs at the national level, like the UK’s Policy Lab and Chile’s LabGob, work across multiple levels, but often on innovations that are then implemented at one level or another. What could an intergovernmental-from-birth policy lab in the U.S. look like? What role can we imagine AI playing, like agentic systems that identify and suggest cross-level policy alignment opportunities that produce “1 + 1 = 3” kinds of outcomes?

What about new regional investment strategies, where state and local governments co-invest with federal resources, and returns are reinvested regionally to build out resources like EV charging networks or broadband fiber networks or smart grid upgrades that benefit the public good across jurisdictions? A framework has been in place across the OECD for more than a decade that encourages integrated investment strategies tailored to diverse territorial needs, with coordination across subnational governments and policy areas. When and where might we anticipate such strategies emerging in the U.S.?

What are some of the ways to move ideas like these forward, some steps that could reduce the frictions that make collaboration across levels of government so challenging?

One might be to make it easy and seamless for public servants to move between levels. It’s an idea that’s seen considerable attention for people to flow into government from the private sector and back out (and vice versa). A mechanism exists in the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program, but the norm is more for one-time temporary assignments than making the “borders” between levels more porous for steady stream movements back and forth. What might it look like to prioritize the latter, creating mechanisms for new cyclical internships for youth, or shared talent pools, or a “Rotational Civil Service Corps,” or a talent clearinghouse that matches people at one level to emerging needs at other levels?

Public servants working together across levels naturally requires things like some form of structure, codification of operating practices and roles, definitions of authorities. We see these when we establish task forces and interagency working groups, MOUs and MOAs, “czars” with statutory authority (or not) to direct and coordinate interagency activities and operations. Mechanisms like these are essential – and at the same time, they can also be part of the cross-level friction. In different futures we can also imagine more ad-hoc, micro-initiated collaborations that form, unform, and reform in different configurations, without permanence or an abundance of structure or process. Variants perhaps of the idea popularized by General Stanley McChrystal (a speaker at the NAPA conference) where small, empowered, interconnected, adaptable “teams of teams" tackle complex multi-level issues, leveraging trust, transparency, and decentralized decision-making over traditional command-and-control structures.

Tomorrow: Imagine a future where diverse forms of citizen engagement are multiplying