How social scientists could help to rebuild the federal government
Lessons from my time in the Biden administration
Day after day, the Trump-Vance Administration continues to eviscerate our country’s capacity to produce and use high-quality, rigorous research and data, among its many other horrors. Watching the real-time demolition of our statistical, research, and policy development infrastructure can feel paralyzing for social scientists who have committed careers to bring evidence to policymakers.
But there is important work that social scientists can do now: tracking the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll back scientific capacity, explaining what changes mean in ways accessible to the public and civic leaders, helping to organize their colleagues, and joining litigation. And beyond the immediate response, social scientists should also begin thinking about what comes after the Trump Administration and the role that social science has played–and could help play–in making better federal policy.
As University of Michigan law professor and former Department of Health and Human Services General Counsel Sam Bagenstos put it powerfully, when “the forces of good return to power…[w]e will need to be truly ready on day one…to implement a domestic Marshall Plan for the U.S. government.”
Bagenstos persuasively argues that transition efforts cannot simply focus on replacing laid-off civil servants and re-funding federal agencies. Instead, rebuilders need to think much more ambitiously: changing structures of government to reflect the profoundly altered terrain we will encounter.
That planning for the day after the Trump regime should consider the opportunities for federal agencies to engage social scientists in rebuilding federal capacity and crafting public policy. Although we shouldn’t simply replicate the models of the past, we can learn from what has–and hasn’t–worked before in terms of engaging academic researchers in government.
In a recent article for Perspectives on Politics I reflected on my time serving in the Biden-Harris Administration and how we drew from social science, including political science and public administration research, in efforts to improve access to safety net programs and expand participation in the regulatory process.
I originally wrote the article in early 2024, before the presidential election, and many of the forward-looking policy prescriptions now feel woefully inadequate. Nevertheless, the case studies I present of how the federal government has engaged social science–and social scientists–in the past provide a guide to more ambitious reconstruction efforts for the federal government.
As I describe in the article, beyond the ways that the federal government has historically funded social science work, it can be enormously valuable for social scientists to themselves serve in government–on a short term basis as fellows, as political appointees, and as civil servants. Such regular opportunities for embedding social scientists within government can bring social science research to policy development and implementation and help engage external social scientists on a timely basis to inform decisions. There is simply no substitute for rolling up your sleeves and being engaged directly in the actual work of policy change.
When I served in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the presence of legal academics and social scientists helped to identify relevant scholarship and use it to inform our efforts to expand public participation in the regulatory process.
For example, longstanding research has documented the importance of intermediary civic organizations in helping individual Americans, especially those with fewer economic and political resources, connect with the government (including from Hollie Gilman, as well as Sabeel Rahman, who initially led our team). Building on that research, we encouraged federal agencies to map such organizations and the different constituencies they could reach, and then proactively partner with those groups to solicit community input on regulations. And recognizing the real work that such bridging functions entailed for smaller grassroots organizations, we encouraged federal agencies to identify ways of compensating groups (through contracts and grants) for their efforts.
Beyond these broader inputs, having academics serving in the office also helped us to quickly gather advice from a broader set of university-based researchers, for instance to connect with agency career staff to inform their work and pressure-test ideas. Pam Herd and Don Moynihan, for example, helped to serve as conduits for reaching other scholars working on administrative burden to connect with our career colleagues, including those who had contributed to a special issue of the Russell Sage Foundation Journal.
The benefits of embedding social scientists in government–including for temporary “tours of duty"–accrue to academics as well. Spending time in government can help academics better understand the research questions and topics that are especially relevant for policymaking; identify government data sources not otherwise visible to external academics; and design courses and teaching that can better cover how government works in practice. Speaking for myself, my time in government has helped me with all of these things, and has deeply shaped my research agenda and teaching.
Even before the Trump Administration, as my article argues, there were a number of ways that the federal government could have improved its engagement with social scientists. For instance, there are historically much stronger institutional platforms to pull economists into government–through bodies such as the White House Council of Economic Advisers or agency Chief Economist Offices–relative to other disciplines, such as sociology, political science, or anthropology, despite these other disciplines’ relevance to federal policymaking. There were important exceptions: as head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, esteemed sociologist Alondra Nelson helped to recruit a diverse array of social scientists to her team. We should think about how to embed such diversity through institutional design.
Related but separately, the government tends to be much better at formally soliciting and engaging with quantitative work to inform policy compared to qualitative or conceptual research. This matters because qualitative and conceptual work can be very helpful for federal policymakers and program administrators. When I was at OMB, for example, we relied heavily on ethnographic work documenting the barriers that individuals experienced interacting with government services to describe burdens not easily quantified. Building on the administrative burden framework, qualitative scholarship from researchers such as Carolyn Barnes was incredibly helpful in helping food assistance program staff to better understand concepts such as psychological burden through the ethnographies she conducted.
Now, as part of the rebuilding that we will need to launch to prepare for the post-Trump world, we have an opportunity to think about even more ambitious reforms that could facilitate deeper engagement between social scientists and the federal government.
Below, I sketch out three ideas for potential reforms to expand opportunities for social scientists to work in and with federal agencies, recognizing that these proposals are only one small part of any rebuilding effort. These proposals ultimately need to be nested with much broader changes to the structure of federal agencies and workforce staffing. The ideas span short-run needs on “day one” following the Trump Administration, as well as long-run and more fundamental changes to government, and build on terrific proposals that other social scientists and former Administration colleagues, such as Christina Ciocca Eller are developing on this topic.
Capture departing expertise through academic partnerships
Every day, the federal government is losing specialized expertise as civil servants are fired, pushed out, or retire. Much of this expertise combines deep domain or issue-specific knowledge with hard-earned insights about how government processes work (or not). We will need to capture and learn from this knowledge as part of rebuilding.
Some organizations–such as Democracy Forward–have already launched fellowships to former civil servants to help them distill their experiences and knowledge into a format that can be shared with other practitioners working on rebuilding. Similarly, Workshop has been helping to collect lessons from career and political government leaders about labor policy. The Better Government Lab and the Beeck Center are interviewing the civic tech community pushed out of government by DOGE. This is much-needed “knowledge capture” and we will need much more given the scale of the damage to the civil service. University-based academics could find opportunities to collaborate with former civil servants, including research partnerships or illustrate case studies that could help draw insights for reform.
Deploy rapid-response academic teams to rebuild agencies
On day one following the Trump Administration, an incoming presidential administration will inherit agencies with decimated expertise and staffing–and some agencies that have been shuttered all together. A future, post-Trump regime administration will need to restore that specialized expertise. In areas where based on their own work they possess such domain-specific knowledge, university-based academics could be part of the rebuilding process. The Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) permits university-based academics to take short-term leaves of absence from their institutions to serve in government. University-based academics are in a good position to support such short-term service and rebuilding both because of their expertise and because of their ability to move between their home institution and government.
Congress could support these efforts through several changes to the IPA law. These include providing a pool of funds that agencies could use to support recruiting short-term academic service, as well as by expanding eligibility for the IPA program to graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, who are not currently covered by the law. Even without Congress, however, state governments could help too, especially by appropriating funds for public universities to send academics to help rebuild the federal government.
Create permanent structures for ongoing academic-government collaboration
Looking over the longer run, reforms to the federal government should create structures to more systematically pull more social scientists to federal agencies. Before the Trump administration, these academic engagements were mainly ad-hoc, resting on pre-existing relationships that academics might have with career or political staff and dependent on universities or external philanthropies being willing to pay for academics’ salaries while on government leave.
To create a more routinized structure for academic engagements at scale, the federal government could create a new agency specifically tasked with helping agencies to quickly recruit and pull in academic experts for specific projects or problems. These are models for this kind of structure, such as the successful (but smaller scale) work of the pre-DOGE U.S. Digital Service, 18F, and the Office of Evaluation Sciences that recruit highly skilled experts from civil society for brief “tours of duty” in federal agencies. This new agency should focus on recruiting social scientists from a broader set of disciplines and methods, not just economics and quantitative data. And the agency should be sufficiently funded to be able to pay for academics’ tours of duty in government so that it is not just academics from well-resourced institutions that can take leaves to join government.
Federal agencies could place requests for teams of academics working on long-term topics based on their regulatory agendas, strategic plans, and evidence-building plans, as well as shorter-term political priorities. These teams would ideally include both junior and senior academics working together to create longer-term pipelines for more junior researchers into engaging with the government. Both OMB–perhaps through the existing Evidence Team, tasked with implementing the Evidence Act–or GSA could be good potential homes for this platform.
To be sure, many will be skeptical of the value of bringing more academics into government. We are living at a time of suspicion of expertise. And even those more friendly to academics might question their ability to do the heavy lifting of rebuilding. But my experience has shown that social scientists have much to offer to policymakers, and when done thoughtfully, such exchanges can produce virtuous cycles.
Social scientists can bring expertise to help shape program design and implementation, and in turn, policymakers can help social scientists better understand what questions or issues are most relevant for the government, in turn spurring more policy-relevant work. Over the longer run, helping the government work better–and better deliver for the public–may help rebuild the public’s trust in the value of expertise and universities.
Sketching out these blue-sky proposals for greater involvement of social scientists in federal policymaking at the current moment of destruction can feel jarring. But now is the time when we need to be thinking ambitiously about what comes next for the federal government. And as we think about what that rebuilt federal government should look like, there is much more that the government could do to engage the expertise that social scientists hold to make better policy. Social scientists should join the planning around what comes after the Trump regime: it is all hands on deck time.
Alex Hertel-Fernandez is an associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a visiting fellow with the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
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