Project 2029 (is currently underway)
Are you on board with Project 2029? Note: It's in the works!
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A new Biden administration autopsy, based on internal assessments from many government insiders, has crystal clear lessons for the future.
As President Trump’s consolidation of autocratic power gains steam, it’s often been argued that the failures of liberal governance meaningfully helped to bring us to this moment. In this reading, the Biden administration—and other Democratic leaders in recent years—allowed well-intentioned caution and respect for parliamentary safeguards and procedures to hobble ambition, frustrating voters and making them easier prey for demagogues peddling authoritarian governance as our civic cure-all.
The left-leaning Roosevelt Institute is releasing a major new report Tuesday—with input from nearly four dozen former senior Biden officials across many agencies—that seeks to diagnose the administration’s governing mistakes and failures. The report, provided in advance to The New Republic, may be the most ambitious effort involving Biden officials to determine what went wrong and why.
In the report, Biden officials extensively identify big failings in governing and in the execution of the politics around big decisions—but with an eye toward creating the beginnings of a Project 2029 agenda. The result is a kind of proto-blueprint for Democratic governance to show that it can work the next time the party has power.
“We must reckon honestly with how we got here and why the American public has been so frustrated with these institutions for so long,” Roosevelt Institute president Elizabeth Wilkins writes in the report’s introduction. “The rising authoritarianism we see today shows us the stakes.”
One of its most compelling conclusions is that the Biden administration seemed reluctant to engage in “picking the fights worth having” and sometimes took refuge in incremental policy gains due to a self-limiting “risk aversion.” One senior official is quoted suggesting the White House didn’t give adequate support to agency leaders who thought they had a policy stance providing an opening to “have a fight and show who you’re for.”
Julie Su, the labor secretary under Biden, suggests this is a big reason Democrats lost working people to Trump. “We were facing 40 or 50 years of backsliding for working people,” Su told me. “What we needed was to meet that moment with boldness. There was too much hesitation.”
Su notes, for instance, that the Labor Department didn’t exercise its powers to the fullest extent possible to hold corporations responsible for things like wage theft and weak worker safety protections. She noted more could have been done to facilitate job and retirement insecurity and boost union power.
“The moment demanded that we unleash the full powers of our investigative resources to go after companies for exploitation of workers in every way,” Su told me. “It didn’t happen to the extent that it could and should have.”
Fear of losing in court was one factor, Su says. And in a striking passage, former officials criticize the White House for being skittish about publicizing the corporate enforcement actions the Labor Department did undertake, out of fear of “politicizing” them or reluctance to publicly mention targeted corporations by name.
The report argues that future Democratic administrations must “flip the risk profile and prioritize fights worth having,” including “leaning into controversy” to facilitate “breaking through” and demonstrating that government is “on the side of regular people.” As one official is quoted saying, when voters don’t know who’s on their side, it risks “fascists stepping in” to fill the void.
That’s something Democrats have been slow to entertain: Picking big arguments designed to stoke conflict and controversy can jar low-information voters out of their algorithmic torpor and get them to take sides themselves. The alternative is giving right-wing propaganda more leeway to determine the prevailing political “weather,” as Brian Beutler puts it.
In another good example, the report notes that officials were hampered by fear of “high profile funding flops,” like the scandal that erupted around green energy company Solyndra during Barack Obama’s presidency. That led officials to build safeguards into clean energy investments that slowed them down. As one noted, that allowed “fear of a mistake” to overshadow discussion of whether it’s “more important to have this happen quickly.”
“There’s almost been a great forgetting that’s happened across agencies,” Lina Khan, former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, told me. A half-century of right-wing attacks on government, she said, has led to “insufficient attention to all the things that can go wrong when you’re not doing enough.”
Khan noted a deep perversity here: Trump officials exhibit no such hesitancies. “They have no qualms about assertive federal government, in ways that have a lot of downsides,” Khan said, noting that this should lead Democrats to look toward “opportunities to be more assertive while still abiding by the rule of law.”
In a critical diagnosis, the report also faults the Biden administration for being too naïve about the bad-faith hostility of large swaths of the courts—and the true intentions of the conservative judicial revolution that remade them—to progressive governance. But the report refrains from a “blame the courts for our failures” posture.
Instead, it urges concrete future action. It says future Democratic administrations and Congresses should overhaul the “notice and comment” rulemaking process of the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, to make it less vulnerable to bad-faith judicial interventions. And it floats the creation of a new court to oversee APA matters and suggests expansion of the Supreme Court. In short, the need for a judicial reform agenda can’t be disentangled from the mission of demonstrating that future Democratic governance can be effective.
Posted Oct 28, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC