Written by Board Member, Ryan Heimer

America’s 250th anniversary is both a commemoration and a governing test. The official America250 initiative describes the semiquincentennial as an opportunity to reflect on the nation’s past, honor the contributions of Americans, and consider the future the country wants to create. The current White House has framed the anniversary around patriotism, national strength, technological leadership, economic abundance, and the preservation of liberty. A durable America250 agenda should be broad enough to encompass those aspirations while also confronting the persistent gap between the Declaration’s universal principles and Americans’ unequal experiences of public institutions. 

What we discuss today is with a primary focus on federal and state policy, with local governments treated as essential implementation partners. After reviewing our Chapter’s 2026 essay submissions, many core ideas were presented to have the United States reach its tricentennial in 2076 in stronger condition only if it improves not merely the size or speed of government, but its capacity, legitimacy, fairness, adaptability, and accountability.. The themes raised in the 2026 ASPA essays—social equity, institutional capacity, representative bureaucracy, public trust, ethics, artificial intelligence, climate resilience, housing, and democratic governance—are not separate challenges. They describe a common problem: public institutions are being asked to manage twenty-first-century risks with uneven resources, outdated systems, fragmented authority, and historically low public confidence. 

The encouraging finding is that bipartisan agreement remains possible. Republicans and Democrats have recently cooperated on housing supply, artificial-intelligence research, cybersecurity standards, election auditing technology, infrastructure permitting, drug-interdiction technology, rural development, and some forms of government oversight. The deepest divisions concern the scale of federal authority, climate mandates, voting access, immigration enforcement and legalization, social-benefit eligibility, health-coverage subsidies, and whether equity goals should be explicitly embedded in federal funding formulas. 

A politically plausible agenda should therefore begin where interests overlap: risk-based AI governance rather than a single sweeping code; workforce transition rather than promises that technology will create only winners; faster infrastructure permitting paired with enforceable public participation; housing-supply reform paired with targeted affordability protections; secure, auditable elections paired with accessible administration; stronger border and asylum capacity paired with lawful workforce pathways; health-cost reforms paired with continuity of coverage; and independent oversight paired with management improvement. These are not complete ideological victories for either party. They are the kinds of institutional bargains through which a pluralistic republic renews itself.

The national test before 2076

When the United States celebrates its 300th anniversary on July 4, 2076, the technologies of 2026 will appear dated. The more consequential question will be whether the institutions governing those technologies became more capable and trusted. Public confidence is already a warning sign: in September 2025, only 17 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right always or most of the time, one of the lowest results in nearly seven decades of polling. Trust also shifts with partisan control; Democrats’ confidence fell sharply under a Republican administration, just as Republican confidence was lower under Democratic administrations. This suggests that distrust is not simply a judgment about performance. It has become entangled with partisan identity and whether one’s preferred coalition controls the state. 

Low trust does not mean that Americans want public institutions to disappear. They continue to expect secure elections, affordable health care, safe infrastructure, effective disaster response, controlled borders, cybersecurity, housing opportunity, and protection against fraud. The conflict is frequently over how government should achieve those outcomes, which level of government should lead, and how costs and benefits should be distributed. The challenge for public administration is therefore to demonstrate that authority can be exercised competently, ethically, transparently, and within constitutional limits. 

Institutional capacity is the connecting thread. Congress made approximately $711.8 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act grants available to tribes, states, territories, and localities through more than 100 programs. By December 31, 2024, agencies had obligated almost half of the funding that was then available but had expended only about 20 percent. Some delay is normal for complex capital projects, but the gap also reflects planning, procurement, permitting, staffing, and grant-management constraints. A community may have a failing water system or an urgent flood risk yet lack the engineers, financial officers, legal expertise, or matching funds required to turn a federal award into a completed project. 

This is also where social equity and representative bureaucracy become practical rather than rhetorical concerns. Public programs are not neutral delivery mechanisms. Application rules, cost-sharing requirements, benefit formulas, office locations, language access, digital portals, and discretionary judgments shape who can participate. Research on representative bureaucracy has long examined whether the backgrounds and experiences of public employees influence institutional responsiveness. Representation alone does not guarantee responsiveness, but agencies that lack geographic, socioeconomic, professional, and demographic breadth may be less able to recognize how apparently uniform rules affect different communities. 

The goal for 2076 should consequently be a government that is both representative and capable: professionally staffed, open to people from different regions and socioeconomic backgrounds, skilled in technology and program management, and governed by clear ethical duties. Diversity without competence cannot deliver services, but competence defined too narrowly can produce institutions technically proficient in processes that citizens experience as inaccessible or unfair.

The bipartisan policy landscape

Artificial intelligence offers the clearest example of simultaneous consensus and division. Bipartisan Senate and House groups have agreed that the United States should preserve its technological leadership, expand research access, develop an AI-ready workforce, protect consumers and civil rights, and establish safeguards for high-risk uses. The Senate working group led by Democrats Martin Heinrich and Chuck Schumer and Republicans Mike Rounds and Todd Young called for innovation, safety, accountability, research investment, workforce preparation, election protections, and sector-specific action. A bipartisan House task force likewise recommended relying substantially on existing regulators while addressing privacy, bias, health, education, intellectual property, and national-security risks. 

The emerging center of gravity is risk-based governance. NIST’s voluntary AI Risk Management Framework organizes institutional responsibility around governing, mapping, measuring, and managing risks; its generative-AI profile applies those principles to newer systems, and NIST began developing a critical-infrastructure profile in 2026. Republicans generally place greater emphasis on regulatory flexibility, national competitiveness, energy supply, and avoiding rules that entrench incumbent firms. Democrats generally emphasize enforceable protections, privacy, discrimination, labor displacement, and public accountability. A plausible compromise is not a single federal license for all AI. It is common testing and documentation standards for consequential applications, sector-specific enforcement, regulatory sandboxes, research infrastructure, and portable workforce training. 

Climate and infrastructure policy contain a similar mixture. Democrats typically support explicit emissions targets, environmental-justice criteria, and sustained federal clean-energy investment. Republicans typically emphasize energy abundance, reliability, state authority, domestic production, cost control, and streamlined permitting. Yet both sides increasingly acknowledge that the country takes too long to build transmission, generation, transportation, water, housing, and industrial facilities. Bipartisan permitting proposals have sought clearer deadlines and narrower review while maintaining environmental safeguards and public participation. Wildfire and forest-resilience legislation has also attracted cross-party support because the immediate risks to communities, watersheds, utilities, and public lands are difficult to fit into conventional ideological categories. 

The partisan divide is more persistent over whether federal climate funding should explicitly prioritize disadvantaged communities. GAO found that agencies had difficulty measuring the community-level benefits of the former Justice40 initiative; the initiative was terminated in January 2025, leaving its overall results uncertain. That experience supports two conclusions that can coexist: equity goals require better metrics and administrative discipline, and abandoning measurement does not make unequal exposure to floods, fires, pollution, heat, or infrastructure failure disappear. A bipartisan resilience model could focus on measurable vulnerability—loss history, infrastructure condition, fiscal capacity, insurance withdrawal, population exposure, and emergency-response capability—without requiring every jurisdiction to accept one political vocabulary. 

Housing demonstrates that broad coalitions can move from diagnosis to legislation. In July 2026, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law after passing both chambers by overwhelming margins. Republican sponsors stressed supply, deregulation, local decision-making, manufactured housing, and community-bank financing. Democratic sponsors stressed affordability, rental assistance, homelessness, rural preservation, first-time buyers, and protections concerning institutional ownership. The coalition’s achievement was not resolving every zoning or subsidy dispute; it was combining supply expansion, program modernization, financing, preservation, and administrative streamlining. 

The need remains severe. Harvard’s 2026 housing assessment reported that 22.7 million renter households were cost-burdened in 2024, including 12.1 million spending more than half their income on housing. It also estimated that 11 million extremely low-income renters competed for only 3.8 million affordable and available units. Market-rate construction can relieve pressure in supply-constrained areas, but it does not by itself create housing affordable to the poorest households. Conversely, demand subsidies offered without additional supply can be absorbed partly into prices. A balanced strategy therefore needs zoning and permitting reform, manufactured and modular construction, preservation, vouchers, tax credits, infrastructure for growth, and protections against displacement. 

Social safety nets produce sharper philosophical conflict. Progressives view unconditional cash or broad refundable credits as ways to reduce poverty, administrative burden, insecurity, and arbitrary eligibility barriers. Conservatives tend to stress work, reciprocity, fiscal cost, family formation, and the risk that unconditional support reduces labor-force participation. Recent U.S. guaranteed-income experiments do not settle the debate. One major experiment found that a $1,000 monthly payment reduced labor-force participation by 4.1 percentage points and work by roughly one to two hours weekly, while another study found short-term employment reductions that later dissipated as recipients addressed health needs. Research also found temporary improvements in stress and food security. The evidence supports continued experimentation but not a confident claim that a nationwide UBI would have either no behavioral effects or catastrophic ones. 

The more politically feasible bridge is to improve benefits tied to work and children while reducing administrative complexity. A bipartisan proposal from the Bipartisan Policy Center recommended expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit for workers without qualifying children. Republicans can support its work incentive; Democrats can support its distributional impact. UBI pilots may continue at state and local levels, but a national transition is far less plausible than targeted tax credits, wage subsidies, automatic enrollment, benefit portability, and simplified eligibility.

Oversight is another potential area of agreement, although it becomes contentious when investigations affect the party in power. Inspectors General exist to detect fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement while recommending improvements in economy and effectiveness. Their value depends on independence, access to records, professional methods, credible leadership, and communication with both agency management and Congress. Bipartisan governance experts have argued that independence need not mean isolation: IGs should retain investigative autonomy while participating early enough in management discussions to identify systemic risks before they become scandals. GAO has similarly recommended formal removal procedures, advance congressional notice, and direct congressional communication as protections for IG independence. 

Election administration combines intense distrust with identifiable common ground. In 2025, the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission unanimously endorsed paper-based, auditable, software-independent voting systems; more than 98 percent of jurisdictions already used systems producing a paper record. The EAC also promotes post-election audits, physical and cyber controls, testing, canvassing, reconciliation, certification, and transparent communication. These are practical integrity measures capable of strengthening confidence without predetermining broader debates over voter identification, registration, mail voting, or federal authority. 

The partisan dispute remains substantial. In April 2026, 81 percent of Democrats but only 34 percent of Republicans supported allowing any voter to vote early or absentee without documenting a reason. Republicans place greater weight on preventing ineligible voting and requiring verification; Democrats place greater weight on reducing barriers for eligible voters. A durable bargain would treat security and accessibility as complementary administrative obligations: reliable identity and list-maintenance systems, paper records, audits, accessible voting, timely adjudication, and public explanations of how unofficial results become certified outcomes. 

Immigration illustrates why capacity must precede slogans. Republicans prioritize control of unlawful entry, detention and removal capacity, border barriers, and enforcement credibility. Democrats emphasize lawful pathways, humanitarian obligations, due process, family unity, and integration. Bipartisan action has been more achievable around inspection technology, port staffing, fentanyl detection, procurement oversight, asylum adjudication resources, and selected visa reforms. CBO estimated that the recent immigration surge would raise total GDP and federal revenues while also increasing some public costs and producing modest near-term wage pressure for less-educated workers. Immigration is therefore neither cost-free nor simply an economic burden; its effects vary across governments, industries, workers, and time. 

Health care presents a parallel tension between access and fiscal sustainability. CBO projects federal health-insurance subsidies of $33.6 trillion from 2026 through 2036 and an increase in the uninsured population from 30 million to 37 million under current law and policy assumptions. Voters across party lines remain concerned about affordability, although they disagree over Medicaid conditions, Affordable Care Act subsidies, federal spending, and regulation. Plausible bipartisan measures include site-neutral payments, price transparency, fraud prevention, rural workforce programs, telehealth, competition policy, and better coordination for chronic disease—while the larger coverage and financing disputes continue. 

Cybersecurity may be the least ideological of these challenges because governments, hospitals, utilities, schools, businesses, and elections all face common threats. NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 broadened its scope to organizations of every size and added governance as a core function alongside identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery. The bipartisan Cyberspace Solarium Commission similarly emphasized national resilience, public-private collaboration, governmental organization, and layered deterrence. The principal dispute is not whether cybersecurity matters, but how to distribute mandates and costs among federal agencies, states, localities, infrastructure operators, software producers, and consumers.

A practical governing agenda

Near-term action over the next one to five years should concentrate on standards, implementation capacity, and demonstrable results.** The federal government should require inventories of consequential AI systems used in benefits, employment, law enforcement, health, housing, and regulatory decisions. Agencies should document intended uses, data limitations, human-review arrangements, performance testing, appeal mechanisms, and responsible officials, using NIST’s framework as a common foundation. Congress should simultaneously fund shared AI research infrastructure, regulatory sandboxes, and workforce partnerships so that safety rules do not become barriers only the largest firms can afford. 

Every major competitive grant program should include predevelopment assistance, standardized applications, shared engineering and procurement support, and a capacity set-aside for tribal, rural, territorial, and fiscally distressed jurisdictions. Matching requirements should vary with fiscal capacity rather than treating all applicants as administratively equal. Agencies should publish comparable data on obligations, expenditures, project milestones, outcomes, and open audit recommendations. This approach appeals to equity advocates because it improves access and to fiscal conservatives because it makes appropriations more likely to produce completed assets. 

Congress and the states should implement the ROAD to Housing Act aggressively while evaluating which reforms actually increase completions rather than merely issuing plans. Federal incentives should reward preapproved building designs, accessory dwelling units, conversions, manufactured housing, infrastructure-ready sites, and faster approvals. Those incentives should be paired with preservation of low-cost units, rental assistance for the poorest households, and relocation or anti-displacement protections where redevelopment pressures are intense.

A bipartisan resilience compact should prioritize floods, wildfire, extreme heat, water reliability, grid failure, and insurance-market instability using transparent risk and capacity metrics. It should preserve state flexibility while requiring credible maintenance plans and measurable risk reduction. Permitting reforms should establish lead agencies, coordinated schedules, early community engagement, accessible project data, and clear limits on repetitive review without eliminating consideration of local impacts. 

Congress should strengthen Inspectors General through predictable budgets, documented removal procedures, timely access to records, public tracking of unresolved recommendations, and regular bipartisan oversight hearings focused on corrective action rather than partisan spectacle. OIGs should also expand data analytics and cross-agency work on procurement, grants, health programs, disaster funds, and AI-enabled fraud. 

Election policy should begin with the unanimous EAC position: paper-based, auditable systems. Federal support should help remaining jurisdictions replace obsolete equipment, conduct routine post-election audits, secure voter-registration databases, protect election workers, and explain canvassing and certification. States would retain constitutional responsibility for election administration while operating within clearer technical and transparency standards. 

Immigration legislation should separate operational reforms from the comprehensive package that has repeatedly failed. Near-term measures can improve staffing and inspection technology at ports, accelerate asylum decisions with due process, strengthen procurement oversight, target smugglers and fentanyl networks, and align selected employment visas with verified workforce needs. The larger disagreements over legalization, deportation, parole, family migration, and asylum standards will remain, but capacity reforms can reduce disorder while Congress debates those questions. 

Health policy should focus on areas where cost, competition, and access intersect: site-neutral payments where clinically appropriate, prescription and hospital price transparency, rural and behavioral-health workforce expansion, telehealth standards, chronic-disease prevention, and program-integrity analytics. Coverage changes should include transition protections so that administrative churn does not leave eligible people uninsured simply because they could not complete paperwork. The political parties will continue to disagree over the ACA and Medicaid, but neither can credibly ignore rising costs or the large share of uninsured people who remain eligible for some form of assistance. 

Medium-term action over five to twenty-five years should build permanent adaptive capacity. The United States should create a national public-service talent compact linking federal agencies, states, localities, tribal governments, universities, community colleges, military-transition programs, and professional associations. Fellowships, apprenticeships, loan repayment, midcareer entry, and rotational assignments should recruit public servants from a broader range of regions and socioeconomic backgrounds while developing expertise in procurement, digital systems, engineering, public finance, emergency management, health, and community engagement.

The country should gradually replace fragmented digital systems with interoperable public infrastructure that allows people to verify identity, update information, apply for benefits, obtain permits, and appeal decisions without repeatedly submitting the same records. Such systems must include privacy protections, non-digital alternatives, accessibility, cybersecurity, and human review. Administrative simplicity should not mean compulsory surveillance. 

Over this period, social policy should favor evidence-based incrementalism. Congress can strengthen the EITC, child-related credits, unemployment insurance, wage insurance, retraining support, and portable benefits while continuing rigorous cash-transfer pilots. A national UBI should not be adopted or rejected on slogans; it should be assessed against labor effects, poverty reduction, health outcomes, financing, interaction with existing programs, and regional cost differences. 

By the 2040s and 2050s, climate resilience, housing, health, immigration, artificial intelligence, and cyber policy will be inseparable from fiscal policy. Aging infrastructure and population, Medicare growth, disaster losses, workforce shortages, and technological transitions will compete for public resources. A sustainable government will require long-range budgeting, automatic program evaluation, maintenance funding, and a willingness to end ineffective programs as well as launch new ones. CBO’s projected growth in health subsidies alone illustrates why the republic cannot treat every commitment as financially independent of every other commitment. 

America’s third century should not be defined by the fantasy that political conflict will disappear. The Constitution was designed for disagreement, divided authority, ambition, and competing interests. The standard should instead be whether institutions convert those conflicts into legitimate decisions and tangible results. 

The strongest bipartisan lesson across current debates is that national goals fail when implementation is treated as an afterthought. AI safeguards require technically capable regulators. Housing reform requires planners, infrastructure, trades, and financing. Border order requires officers, judges, technology, facilities, and lawful pathways. Climate resilience requires engineering, maintenance, land-use decisions, and insurance reform. Secure elections require trained local officials, auditable systems, and public communication. Health reform requires data, workforce, and administrative continuity. Oversight requires independent professionals and follow-through. 

The republic Americans inherit in 2076 will therefore depend on choices that appear procedural today: who can apply for a grant, whether an algorithm can be appealed, whether an audit recommendation is implemented, whether a rural county can hire an engineer, whether an election office can explain a delay, whether a displaced worker can obtain training, and whether a family can find an affordable home near opportunity.

Those choices constitute the everyday architecture of self-government. America at 250 should celebrate the endurance of the constitutional experiment. Preparing for America at 300 requires renewing the institutions through which that experiment becomes real.