Making Government Work Again: Hannah Garden-Monheit on Practical Lessons for Future Administrations
November 7, 2025
By Reynaldo Fuentes
Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about progressive politics, policy, and economics. We write on the latest with an eye toward the long game. We’re focused on building a new economy that centers economic security, shared prosperity, and rebalanced power.
In a moment when Americans expect their government to act decisively—and too often see only gridlock or procedural drag—a new Roosevelt Institute report offers a rare thing: an insider’s manual for how to make government work again. Building a More Effective, Responsive Government distills interviews with more than 45 former senior officials into a clear-eyed blueprint for rebuilding public capacity.
Its lead author, Hannah Garden-Monheit, is a seasoned policymaker who treats the subject not as an abstract institutional problem but as a democratic one. If the government can’t deliver quickly and visibly for ordinary people, its legitimacy erodes.
Learn more about the report in Fireside Stacks’s inaugural video conversation.
Author
Reynaldo Fuentes
Director, Strategic InitiativesAs the director of special initiatives, Reynaldo Fuentes works across the program areas of the think tank to strategically drive Roosevelt’s research and policy agenda.