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Remaking the State
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Available on Nov 10, 2026 | 5 Hours
American democracy is in trouble—but not only for the reasons we think.
Beyond polarization, money in politics, or the distortions of electoral democracy lies a quieter, more dangerous failure: Government itself has stopped working. Even before the current attacks on government, the old administrative state was built as a technocratic, expert-driven black box: distant, unaccountable, and ultimately unable to deliver. Policies stall, unravel, or never arrive. Others deepen the very inequalities they are meant to solve. American democracy will survive only if the government can function and serve genuinely democratic ends.
K. Sabeel Rahman, who helped lead the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Joe Biden as one of the administration’s top regulatory officials, offers a bold new blueprint: a moral vision of the administrative state as a vehicle for democratic freedom. Government, he argues, must protect against harm, secure basic needs, confront deeper structures of inequality, and build firmer checks on autocratic power.
Urgent and clarifying, Remaking the State is a bracing case for transforming the American government before it is remade against us.
Beyond polarization, money in politics, or the distortions of electoral democracy lies a quieter, more dangerous failure: Government itself has stopped working. Even before the current attacks on government, the old administrative state was built as a technocratic, expert-driven black box: distant, unaccountable, and ultimately unable to deliver. Policies stall, unravel, or never arrive. Others deepen the very inequalities they are meant to solve. American democracy will survive only if the government can function and serve genuinely democratic ends.
K. Sabeel Rahman, who helped lead the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Joe Biden as one of the administration’s top regulatory officials, offers a bold new blueprint: a moral vision of the administrative state as a vehicle for democratic freedom. Government, he argues, must protect against harm, secure basic needs, confront deeper structures of inequality, and build firmer checks on autocratic power.
Urgent and clarifying, Remaking the State is a bracing case for transforming the American government before it is remade against us.
Author
K. Sabeel Rahman
K. Sabeel Rahman is a professor of law at Cornell Law School, and served in the Biden administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2021 to 2023, including as the head of the office from 2022 to 23. He previously led the public policy think tank Demos, and co-founded the Law and Political Economy Project. He is the author or co-author of numerous works, including Democracy Against Domination (2016) and Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis (2019).
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