Equitable Growth in Conversation is a recurring series where we talk with economists and other academics to help us better understand whether and how economic inequality affects economic growth and stability. In this in-stallment, Shayna Strom, president and CEO of Equitable Growth, speaks to Sabeel Rahman, a professor of law at Cornell Law School. Rahman’s research focuses on issues of democracy, governance, economic power, politi-cal-economy paradigms, racial equity, and inequality. From 2021 to 2023, Rahman was one of the leaders of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Biden administration. At OIRA, he oversaw the policy review and approval of significant federal regulations and played a lead role in the administration’s efforts on equity, data and information policy, and reforming regulatory analyses. From 2018 to 2021, Rahman was the president of Demos, a national racial justice think tank and advocacy organization that works with a lot of grass-roots organizations. In their conversation, Strom and Rahman discuss:

• Working in academia, in think tanks, and in grassroots organizations to enact good government policies
• Joining the Biden administration and the role of administrative agencies and government investments
• Facing the challenges to good government posed by the Trump administration and how to rebuild for the future
• The abundance agenda and its implications for future policy actions
• Unpacking the abiding differences in populism on the left and on the right today
• Organizing to rebuild democracy and administrative agencies

 
Shayna Strom: Hello, Sabeel. Thanks for sitting down to talk today.

Sabeel Rahman: Great to be here.

Strom: You and I have known each other for a long time, and I’ve always been an admirer of your work, so I’m excited for this conversation. Recently, you’ve been writing a lot about how to re-imagine the federal government in a way that embeds democracy and positions the government to both better serve and better protect the American people. So, to get us started, I would love to hear about how your experiences in academia, at a think tank, connecting with so many grassroots groups in the ecosystem, and as a public servant all inform how you are approaching these questions.

Rahman: First, thanks for having me. It has been so tremendous to work with you over many years and watching the great work you are doing at Equitable Growth now. I’m glad we’re having this conversation in this moment, too, with so much happening, both in terms of what is impacting people on the ground in increasingly terrifying ways, but also in terms of how our government is being remade.

I have been lucky to get to do this work in my own career, wearing these different hats, working with social movement colleagues, with think tank colleagues, getting to be in government, and as a scholar and researcher and writer. For me, the bottom line in all of this is the wonky thing we think of as the administrative state, or the institutions of government. To me, this is where the brass tacks of what kind of society we want to live in actually get worked through. For example, do we even have the right institutions to protect workers from getting hurt or dying on the job, or to protect us against different kinds of discrimination, poor treatment, or against the vicissitudes of the market, and of all the insecurities out there, without a social safety net?

All of that turns on whether there are dedicated public servants who are doing the work, day in and day out, to cut Social Security checks, inspect waterways for lead poisoning, and all the other things they do. And those very tangible things that we care about, at some point, have to result in policies—and those policies, at some point, have to result in people doing things for their fellow Americans and their fellow humans on the planet. To me, that’s what this policy work is really all about. And it is at the heart of a lot of what we care about from different angles.

Strom: That makes a lot of sense. I know you were aware of how much government was really about delivering for people even before you worked in government. To what extent did your time in the Biden administration actually change the way you think about administrative agencies?

Rahman: I learned a ton from just the chance to be in the work with so many great and talented and dedicated people. I will say a couple things. One is that, however hard you think it might be to solve these thorny policy problems—such as getting relief dollars into the hands of those who need it most or actually protecting workers on the job or reining in extractive corporate practices in markets—it is a lot harder in the actual day to day. There are so many things that are very hard to see from afar, even as a scholar or as a longtime advocate, that when you’re in the work with people who are doing it day in, day out, just surfaces all these thorny things to work through. That is just part of the job: As simple as the goal might be, it is that much harder to execute.

And then, the second thing is that so much of what we most value about government when it shows up for people is often the result of public servants and public policymakers working under enormous burdens themselves. Laws that are not sufficient and institutions that are undermanned, underpowered, and underresourced. There is so much human effort that goes into getting some of the protections and benefits out to people that it was a real eye-opener for me of just how much work we need to do to actually have the kind of government we want to deliver the things we deserve.

So, I came away with both a greater appreciation for the work of public service and greater urgency about how we need to remake those institutions going forward.

Strom: You referenced a lot of ways that you were deeply involved in the Biden administration’s efforts to promote Bidenomics. I’m curious to hear you talk about that and reflect on the administration’s successes and failures in its economic agenda. Are there learnings there for scholars of policy feedback loops or for practitioners trying to take advantage of policy feedback loops?

Rahman: So much is changing so fast that it is really important to not lose sight of the really important work and learnings. I actually don’t love the Bidenomics nomenclature, in part because I think the best policies of the Biden administration were responding themselves to many years of activism and advocacy by ordinary people. Those grassroots efforts led to some policy initiatives that were important, which I’ll talk about in a second.

But first, I really see the Biden administration’s policy agenda as being responsive to demands for climate policy from all corners of the country, demands to do something about economic inequality, and about the increasing disparity of power and control, where you have dominant corporations controlling huge swaths of the economy. All of those things led to a series of policies that, for me, really boiled down to three things.

One was a much more aggressive approach by government to try to address economic inequality and macroeconomic growth and opportunities, such as the massive investments through the American Rescue Plan, through the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as proposed government investments that did not materialize in Congress, such as in housing and the care economy. These were massive investments and proposed investments on the part of government to actually create an inclusive economy. That’s number one.

Number two, there were a bunch of efforts to try to rein in concentrated power at the top of the economy. The revived agenda on anti-monopoly policy, on junk fees, on protecting workers in the workplace—all of these moves in different forms were trying to control corporate power.

And then three, there was a really concerted and explicit attempt at creating a society that actually is meaningfully inclusive and does something to address systemic inequities of race, gender, geography, disability—a range of things that keep people from accessing the benefits of being part of society.

Those three principles were very core to a lot of our policies, as imperfect as some of them might have been. So, what do we take away from all of that? One is just that we need a lot more public investment, period. Two, we also need a lot more regulatory capacity to actually protect people against those types of discriminatory actions and extractive monopolistic practices. That takes real muscle on the part of government, and commitment and political support, to move.

And then the last thing is that within the administration, there was a lot of work to try to evolve the day-to-day culture and even the way that we think about public policy to bring equity more into the center of policy design, create new forms of public participation, and adjust the calculus we use to assess the benefits and impacts of regulation to bring distributional considerations and systemic considerations and problems of monopoly power. So, going forward, it would be good for all of us to really just re-ground in those big-picture goals of massive public investment, new forms of regulatory power to protect people, and a deep commitment to equity.

Strom: I would like to move to the present moment and talk about the current Trump administration. Can you talk us through some of the ways that the federal government is being transformed in this current political environment, and why those changes matter for people who are interested in addressing inequality and driving shared prosperity?

Rahman: Sure. I teach first- and upper-level law students both constitutional law and administrative law. And we spend a lot of time in a standard law school curriculum. We spend a lot of time talking about how President Franklin D. Roosevelt remade the constitutional order to create a more inclusive society and safety net. I think, in a lot of ways, we are living through a similarly transformative period but running in the exact opposite direction.

This administration is increasingly offering what might be called a vision of reactionary administration. Reactionary in the sense that so much of the policy agenda is directed explicitly against the very idea that we should have an inclusive economy or that we should have an inclusive society. The explicit attacks on equity and inclusion. The almost-gleeful desire to gut social programs. The decisions not to enforce worker protections or restrictions on monopolies and corporate power. This real vision of society is normatively a bad one.

The other thing that is key is that this vision is being baked into a very different structure of government itself. And that is what makes this especially dangerous because that has the possibility of lasting a long time if we do not build a very different governing structure after this moment passes. And right now, there are three different transformations happening to our governing institutions at the same time.

One is an explicit dismantling agenda. The Trump administration is very aggressively undoing many of the administrative agencies that are most-needed to protect Americans against economic exploitation or social discrimination—alongside, in some cases, the mass firing of those civil servants and the deleting of data that agencies have collected, such as emissions from coal plants. In a lot of cases, they are unwinding the legal authorities and the regulatory tools that agencies have. This wholesale dismantling agenda is familiar to past debates between left and right but way more aggressive and potentially transformative today.

The second is a weaponizing agenda. So, here, the Trump administration is taking already-existing administrative power and supercharging it in ways that are really dangerous. Consider all the pressure that the U.S. Department of Education is bringing to bear against universities and colleges to try to get them to follow the administration’s line on equity and inclusion. That is a doubling down on regulatory oversight but in a way that is especially problematic.

And the third is the personalization of administrative power. A kind of classic requirement of administrative law is that the government is not just the whims of the singular president. There is process, there are stakeholders to consult, there are steps to go through. There is evidence that agencies have to collect and then present. And they have to be able to defend the policies on their own terms, not just because the president said so.

So much of this administration’s work is actually trying to centralize more and more control of individual policymaking or enforcement decisions in the whims of the president. And, at a certain point, that ceases to be democratic governance and administration, and it really becomes monarchy. Which is what we are not supposed to have. If there is one thing the Constitution stands for, it is the idea that we do not have a king and we do not live in a monarchy. I think these transformations are especially troubling when you layer them all together.

Strom: If we try to think about what comes next after this, why would it not be enough to return to the status quo that existed before all these transformations of government came about?

Rahman: This is a really important question for progressives to grapple with, and it goes to your question about learnings. Even before 2025—or, let’s say, even before 2016—the administrative machinery that we had was still not actually what was needed to have the kind of inclusive, dynamic economy and society that we want. So much of it was dependent on, frankly, out-of-date statutes, administrative agencies that were super underresourced for a long time, working on legacy, old-school systems, and with a lot of layers of process and procedure and steps to jump through. This is not the way progressives would draw it up if we were to build it from scratch today.

So, I do think it is not enough to say, “Well, everything was great in the before times,” whenever that was, whatever date you choose. It is really important instead for us to ask, as a matter of first principle, what do we want our society to look like? We want Americans to be protected from precarity, from insecurity, from exploitation. We want a robust provision of shared infrastructure and social programs, and the kinds of things people need to thrive. We want an inclusive, equitable society.

Only then can we figure out what we actually need to make that vision real. And that is what should inform progressives’ vision of what kind of administrative state should come next. It is not what the current administration is building, that’s for sure. But however good the policies were of previous administrations, it is also not the machinery that those previous administrations, those of us who served, had at our fingertips.

So, we need to solve both of those problems, and I think that is a challenge, But it is part of what this moment of crisis maybe opens up for policymakers and scholars to think through.

Strom: That is a big endeavor. Have there been examples in the past where people have done this kind of thing? Or what do you think people should look to for guidance when they are working on those kinds of efforts?

Rahman: One thing I am finding in my recent work, looking at the histories of policymakers and advocates before those big foundational moments, is what it was like before the New Deal became the New Deal. And what it was like before the Civil Rights Act became the Civil Rights Act. What is so interesting to me is that you see this really rich ferment among advocates, activists, scholars, state and local policymakers, federal policymakers—all of them trying to figure that out in much the same way that we are having to figure it out now.

I do think there are some common lessons. One is that no matter where we land on what the substantive policy should look like on the economy, we are going to need bureaucratic institutions to enforce, implement, and execute. And that is going to require cadres of committed, independent civil servants to make that work. So, we are going to need to build or rebuild our civil service machinery, for sure.

We are also going to need to create new authorities that give the next generation of agencies the actual powers they need to address modern-day forms of discrimination or exploitation. Some of the old authorities are still really good. The Federal Trade Commission Act, for example, was written very broadly in the early 20th century, because those folks were very well-aware of how dangerous monopoly power was and how many different forms it could take. So, in some cases, such as the FTC Act, we have the language right there and we just have to act on it. But in a lot of cases, we are going to need to update the authorities.

And a third thing is that we are going to need a much bigger set of institutional creativity on making these agencies work well. One example of how this might work is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which essentially says that recipients of federal funding cannot discriminate in violation of the policies of the Civil Rights Act. That obviously is a very big tool to help advance a vision of an inclusive society, but it was not really clear what that would look like when the new law was enacted. And there is all this great history about the first wave of bureaucrats and Civil Rights Movement activists who really pressured, for example, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare [now the Department of Health and Human Services] to look at giving all this federal funding to hospitals that were still segregated. That seemed to violate Title VI of the Civil Right Act.

So, with some pressure and some creativity, the then-secretary of Health, Education and Welfare created an Office of Civil Rights to start to actually go check on hospitals receiving federal funding to see whether they actually were desegregating their wards. And that is how the desegregation of our hospitals happened. I love this story because it is a good example of a statute and an authority. But it still took a lot more pressure from social movements and a lot more creativity from bureaucrats, from civil servants and political appointees, to actually create a situation that helped drive the desegregation of our health system.

Now, our health system today is still super segregated in other ways, but Title VI is a good lesson, I think, of the kind of policy and activism and creativity that is still going to be needed in the future.

Strom: That is a great lesson indeed. You spoke about how government is failing to deliver for the American people right now. And that idea is also strongly promoted by commentator and journalist Ezra Klein and other proponents of the abundance agenda, who have been focused on how various government administrations around the country are trying to deliver for people but often cannot do so quickly enough or in ways that end up leading to real changes in the lives of Americans. To what extent do you agree or disagree with their arguments, and why?

Rahman: This is a really important debate for all of us. I will say a couple of things. First, we do have an inherited administrative apparatus that is clunky, that is not fit for the purposes needed in the modern era. We need to be able to move much faster, at much bigger scale, to deliver the kind of urgent relief that people need on their child care bills and on the cost of housing, for example. I think that is 100 percent true and that should force us to not just triple down on the way the institutions were before. That I totally agree with.

I also agree that one contributing factor to that clunkiness is what [University of Michigan administrative law professor] Nick Bagley calls the “procedure fetish.” This is a sort of agreement for a long time among conservatives who are skeptical of government and among left liberals who are especially worried about the corporate capture of government. So, both sides layer on lots of procedural requirements, forcing agencies to go through lots of hoops to ensure they serve the public good. But ultimately, those policies, a lot of times, just enervated and made slower the administrative process.

So, where I part ways from at least some of the abundance folks is that I do not see the reinvention of government as being just about removing clunky procedures. That is part of it, but it is at best a relatively small part, I would say. The bigger driver, to my mind, of administrative clunkiness is actually an incapacity problem. We need a lot more spending and a lot more investments in administrative agencies. Our administrative agencies are vastly outgunned when you think about what they are up against when trying to rein in corporate power, for example, and do not have the resources because Congress controlled by either party never bothered to give them the resources they need to modernize.

Consequently, we have not invested in a long time in public infrastructure because of right-wing attacks and because, in the neoliberal era, Democrats themselves sort of absorbed a kind of default skepticism of government. So, it is not enough to just delete clunky procedures. That is one piece of it. But if we are not also massively investing in public state capacity, we are not going to solve the kinds of problems that I think the abundance folks are rightly highlighting.

Strom: Very helpful, and obviously, as you mentioned, there are the abundance folks and there are also the state capacity folks, as well as many other segments of this community who have slightly different takes on all of this. I think that is an important clarification.

Strom: Moving onto a related topic, we are experiencing a rise in affinity for populism, both on the right and the left, in our country and indeed abroad, too. I’m curious how you think governments should respond. Should governments be trying to insulate themselves from these impulses, channel them, or do something else?

Rahman: That is such a great question because this is something that folks are now trying to navigate. I struggle a little bit with this, honestly, in part because the moniker “populism” as a descriptor has stuck over the past decade or so, but I struggle with that because even though I think right-wing populism and left-wing populism are similar, they are such different visions of society that it is worth unpacking it a little bit.

The thing about populism that I think is absolutely correct and absolutely needs to be taken on board in any future progressive vision of government or public policymaking is that we live in a highly unequal society, in which a very small number of people have hoarded wealth, have hoarded power, and are using that wealth and power to triple down on their ability to extract and exploit. To me, that describes our tech oligarchs, it describes dominant monopoly firms across the country. It also describes the hoarding of privilege and opportunity and wealth on the basis of race, of gender, of geography. So, that is absolutely the kind of thing that government should be full-throatedly going after in service of the larger public.

Right-wing populism, I would argue, is a convenient cloak for policies that are, in fact, accentuating that hoarding and control. So, I would ask whether right-wing populists are, in fact, populists. I think a lot of the centralizing of power and control in the presidency and in the singular president today is often clothed in a kind of populist appeal. The country voted for this person. Therefore, this person should have singular authority to remove anyone who works in the executive branch at will, to decide as a singular president who should be investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice or should face a fine from the U.S. Department of Education, or what have you.

That personalizing of power has been justified on the notion that the president is a populist figure, is elected by the mass public, and therefore, no checks and balances apply because the president is the embodiment of the popular will. To me, that version of populism is deeply anti-democratic. Because in a democracy, we expect our government to be accountable, be responsive to the public, and we expect our government to act nonarbitrarily, to give good reasons for why it operates the way it does.

So, to your specific question, the design challenge for progressives is how to ensure we build a future administrative state that really takes head-on the actual inequalities and disparities of power in society that need to be remedied. That is the populism. But how do we do it in a way that does not subject all of us to basically the arbitrary monarchical whims of a singular individual? That is the right-wing version that I think progressivism ought to reject. That is going to take some balancing. If there are too many checks and balances, then you recreate the procedure fetish that Bagley and others are warning about.

So, there is a real design problem here. But I think at the end of the day, if we are clear about the problems in society that we are trying to solve, those design problems are much more tractable.

Strom: So, to pick up on the design-problems question, I am curious how different actors in the field are beginning to organize around the rebuilding of democracy and administrative agencies. What efforts are taking shape that we need to be paying attention to, and how can or should academics play a role in such projects?

Rahman: This is so important because that is where there is a lot of work to do, on all of these fronts. And I think it is going to take all of us, collectively, to do that work.

Without naming too many names, I think there are a lot of organizations that are doing great work, including Equitable Growth. There is a set of progressive think tanks that are starting to develop really important policy ideas about what a new rebuilding, reimagining, reconstruction of our administrative state ought to look like, owning these core values and goals of contesting unequal power, advancing equity, and so on. That is really important.

There is a lot of research happening on the scholarly side, too. I sit in a law school. There has been lots of great ferment in the legal academy, as well as in political science and economics and history, offering raw material, lessons, and insights for a reimagining. But a lot of this also has to be done in very close dialogue with civil society and social movements. None of this happens without actual bottom-up grassroots pressure and demand for not just a resistance to the authoritarian turn in our government and society, but also an affirmative demand for the kind of government we actually want to see come out of this.

Whatever policies we cook up, if they are nonresponsive to what people actually want and demand and need in their day-to-day lives, then it is not going to work. So, I see really these three constituencies—the think tank policy world, academia, and the social movement world—as needing to be in close dialogue together to come up with the kinds of ideas needed and the energy behind them to get then implemented.

Strom: That is very helpful. And maybe just to put a finer point on the legal academy point you were talking about, what do you see as the role of other disciplines—including, potentially, economists—in this kind of effort?

Rahman: It is hugely important on multiple levels. One piece is that there is just the need for an ongoing understanding of how our economy is, in fact, evolving in real time. Whenever there is a next opportunity to build the kind of government we are talking about, and it may well be some years in the future, we are going to need a very solid real-time understanding how our technologized, financialized, highly concentrated economy even works. And that is going to have to inform the designs of these new institutions we have been discussing.

Then, I think there is a bunch of very specific research as well. You asked earlier about lessons learned. There are so many programs that have succeeded and failed, or failed despite best efforts, that need to be retrospectively diagnosed and assessed in some kind of a forensic account. For instance, did our approach to disaster relief post-Hurricane Katrina actually remedy at all any of the systemic inequities that were surfaced then? If not, then why not? Was it because the policies were not good, or was it because they were good but poorly implemented? Or because of some other external conditions? There are so many questions looking back that are needed to inform what comes next.

And then, for folks who do more political economy work, we have been talking a lot about how it is not just about policy. It is also interwoven with social movements and politics. And I think there is a lot of deeper political economy questions about who has power and influence, what is the ecology of interest groups and stakeholders in these different issue spaces, what might be, to your earlier question, some of the institutional designs that insulate enough from special interest capture and influence and lobbying? How should we do all this without then replicating a kind of distant, black-box government that is alien to the people it is actually trying to serve? Those are also very deep and rich research questions that economists, sociologists, political scientists, all kinds of folks, will be needed to answer.

Strom: That is great. Well, I think we are close to the end of time. Thank you so much, Sabeel, for being willing to have such a thoughtful conversation with us. And I should say I am really looking forward to continuing this conversation with you at our event in December.

Rahman: I am really excited to be doing this work with you all, and thanks for all the things that Equitable Growth is doing to build toward a better kind of future.