Blue Sky Agenda
"It always seems impossible until it is done." —Mandela
Harry Secombe in Pickwick — "If I Ruled the World" at 2:00
Agendas for Better Government
This is not an economic or ideological platform. It does not prescribe positions on taxes, health care, immigration, energy, or other policy questions. It addresses how government should select leaders, establish priorities, manage public work, measure results, and correct failure.
The agenda follows the GSG operating structure:
SELECT. Choose capable, ethical people through better screening, disclosure, and competition.
FOCUS. Convert citizen priorities into a limited set of defined, affordable, measurable assignments.
DELIVER. Publish results, reward success, correct failure, and impose consequences when necessary.
Within each section, the proposals are listed in rough order of importance.
Foundations Affecting Every Level of Government
Publish a real job description for every major elected office. Describe the powers, duties, required knowledge, ethical obligations, emergency responsibilities, and performance expectations before candidates apply for the job.
Establish nonpartisan candidate-readiness standards. Assess constitutional knowledge, budgeting, management, oversight, ethics, crisis leadership, conflicts of interest, and performance measurement. Candidates would receive a public readiness profile—not a government endorsement.
Require serious, transparent candidate vetting. Parties should disclose what background checking, conflict review, reference checking, training, and fitness assessment they performed. A refusal to participate should be reported alongside completion or results.
Use a graduated candidate-conduct standard. Unverified allegations, formal charges, minor convictions, serious convictions, rehabilitation, and concealment should not be treated identically. Charges should trigger disclosure and independent review; serious proven misconduct or lying during vetting should produce stronger consequences.
Make political parties accountable for selection quality. Parties should publish their recruiting standards, enlarge their candidate pools, create apprenticeship pathways, and report how candidates were screened. Parties repeatedly presenting unfit candidates should suffer reputational, financial, and electoral consequences.
Give voters standardized candidate-comparison tools. Every candidate should appear in the same public format covering experience, qualifications, financial interests, conflicts, conduct history, stated priorities, readiness assessment, and participation in debates or screening.
Broaden and strengthen electoral competition. States should reduce safe-seat manipulation through redistricting commissions and test primary systems that give more voters a meaningful choice. Open, top-two, top-four, runoff, and ranked-choice systems should be evaluated by evidence rather than adopted as articles of faith. NCSL documents the existing variety of primary systems, redistricting commissions, and limited current use of ranked-choice voting.
Professionalize election administration. Establish training and certification standards, paper audit trails, transparent canvassing, secure systems, public observation, and routine risk-limiting or comparable post-election audits. Election audits provide evidence-based verification rather than partisan assertion. NCSL election-audit overview.
Expose political influence in usable form. Require prompt, searchable disclosure of major donors, beneficial funding sources, lobbying contacts, gifts, sponsored travel, outside income, and financial conflicts.
Create recurring citizen-priority processes. Representative public polling, deliberative citizen panels, petitions, and participatory budgeting should help identify a manageable number of public priorities—not produce an unlimited demand list. Research collected by the OECD finds that well-designed representative deliberation can improve decision quality, participation, and trust. OECD citizen-participation findings.
Important legal boundary: readiness standards for federal candidates ordinarily would be informational or party-based, not additional legal qualifications for office. The Constitution’s qualifications for Congress cannot be supplemented by ordinary federal or state law, and presidential qualifications are likewise constitutionally specified. Congressional qualifications and presidential qualifications.
Guardrails for the Entire Agenda
Performance governance can become harmful if measures are crude or politically manipulated. Every scorecard and consequence system should therefore include:
Independent data verification.
A small balanced set of cost, quality, timeliness, integrity, and outcome measures.
Protection against gaming a single target.
Public explanations for changed goals or missed targets.
Opportunity to contest inaccurate findings.
Distinction between policy disagreement, poor performance, incapacity, and misconduct.
Proportionate consequences and due process.
Periodic review of whether the measurement system itself is useful.
The central GSG contribution is not that every individual reform is new. Most have been tried somewhere. The larger gain comes from connecting them into a dependable operating system:
👉 Select capable people.
👉 Focus them on clearly defined public priorities.
👉 Measure delivery.
👉 Correct failure.
👉 Apply consequences.
👉 Repeat.
Pickwick for Prez!
Changes Most Needed Across City Governments
Give citizens a formal role in setting city priorities. Use scientifically sound resident surveys, neighborhood deliberation, participatory budgeting, and a recurring citywide priority vote. Traditional hearings held after decisions are nearly complete are insufficient. GFOA recommends engaging residents in service priorities and tradeoffs early in the budget process. GFOA public-budget guidance.
Use professional city management. Where appropriate, employ the council-manager model: elected officials establish policy and a professionally qualified manager administers operations. Strong-mayor cities should still employ a credentialed chief administrative or operating officer with defined authority and measurable expectations. ICMA council-manager resources.
Publish a compact city performance scorecard. Track the small number of outcomes residents care about most, along with service quality, cost, timeliness, geographic differences, and responsible departments. Use red/yellow/green status with explanatory notes rather than hundreds of context-free measures.
Connect the scorecard to the budget. Show what each priority costs, which department owns it, what progress was promised, and whether additional funding produced better results. GFOA recommends linking performance measures and financial outcomes during budget monitoring. GFOA budget monitoring.
Establish trackable service standards. A 311 or comparable system should give every request a case number, responsible department, expected completion date, status updates, and escalation path. Aggregate information should reveal recurring problems and uneven service.
Appoint an independent city auditor or inspector general. The office should conduct financial, compliance, performance, procurement, and fraud reviews under recognized government auditing standards. GAO Government Auditing Standards.
Create a city ethics and integrity system with teeth. Require conflicts and gifts disclosure, lobbying registration, recusal rules, campaign-finance transparency, protected reporting, independent investigation, and proportionate penalties.
Open the contracting and capital-project process. Publish bidders, selection criteria, contract values, change orders, schedules, milestones, responsible managers, contractor performance, and final project evaluations.
Professionalize hiring, promotion, and succession. Maintain merit-based hiring, management development, continuing education, leadership succession plans, regular evaluations, recognition for exceptional work, and timely correction of documented failure.
Evaluate the city manager against public goals. The mayor and council should agree on measurable annual expectations and conduct a documented evaluation tied to the city’s priority agenda. ICMA treats manager evaluation as both an accountability mechanism and a structured communication process. ICMA manager evaluation.
Modernize local elections and representation. Cities should periodically review district design, at-large seats, election timing, nonpartisan ballots, runoff requirements, and ranked or approval voting. Reforms should be piloted and measured for competition, participation, representation, understanding, and cost.
Require recurring charter and governance review. Every ten years—or following a major governance failure—an independent charter commission should examine authority, ethics, elections, succession, emergency powers, accountability, and citizen participation.
Make correction visible and graduated. City systems should distinguish ordinary underperformance from negligence, misconduct, incapacity, and criminal behavior. Consequences might progress from improvement plans and closer supervision to reassignment, loss of authority, suspension, recall, or removal with due process.
State and Local Governments
Changes Most Needed Across State Governments
Candidate transparency. Apply GSG candidate job descriptions, readiness assessments, public profiles, party-vetting disclosures, and tiered conduct rules to governors, legislators, attorneys general, and other statewide offices.
Transfer redistricting from direct partisan control to balanced or independent commissions operating under public criteria, open meetings, and judicially reviewable rules.
Professionalize election administration statewide. Establish consistent training, secure paper records, audits, transparent certification, continuity plans, and protection from partisan interference.
Make primary elections more representative. Permit states to test open, all-candidate, top-four, runoff, or ranked systems—but require transparent evaluations of turnout, competition, voter understanding, administrative cost, and representativeness before statewide expansion.
Create annual citizen-priority agendas. Use representative polling and randomly selected citizen panels to identify a limited number of statewide priorities. Require legislative hearings and public responses.
Attach outcomes to state budgets. Every major appropriation should identify intended results, responsible officials, costs, measures, and reporting dates. Governors’ dashboards are most useful when they contain a manageable number of outcome and leading indicators and are used for midcourse correction. National Governors Association dashboard guidance.
Create independent legislative evaluation capacity. Every state should have a professional performance-audit or program-evaluation office with access to records, protection from political retaliation, and mandatory agency responses. NCSL supports a national network of state legislative performance-audit professionals. NCSL program evaluation resources.
Require scheduled program and agency reviews. Sunset review should not mean automatic termination; it should force evidence-based decisions to continue, improve, consolidate, or discontinue government activity.
Establish independent ethics commissions with enforcement power. Cover legislators, executive officials, lobbyists, campaign finance where appropriate, gifts, conflicts, financial disclosure, and revolving-door employment. Authority varies widely among existing state commissions. NCSL state ethics commissions.
Improve state legislative capacity and transparency. Strengthen nonpartisan research staffs, public committee processes, bill-reading periods, fiscal notes, implementation plans, and digital records.
Reduce the influence of money in state judicial selection. States using judicial elections should strengthen donor disclosure, recusal rules, contribution limits, and independent performance evaluations. States should consider merit-selection and retention systems where judicial campaigns create persistent conflicts.
Create practical correction and removal procedures. States should clarify recall, impeachment, suspension, incapacity, succession, and removal rules so that serious misconduct or inability can be addressed without improvisation.
Protect responsible local self-government. States should disclose the fiscal and operational effects of mandates and preemption laws, avoid unfunded assignments, and allow cities reasonable authority to test well-designed governance reforms.
The Judicial Branch:
Supreme Court and Federal Courts
Adopt merit-based, publicly explained judicial screening. Bipartisan or nonpartisan commissions should assess nominees for legal ability, temperament, integrity, conflicts, management capacity, and commitment to impartial administration. The president would retain nomination authority and the Senate confirmation authority.
Create a predictable confirmation timetable. Nominees should receive a hearing and disposition within a reasonable period, with public explanations for delay or rejection.
Make the Supreme Court ethics code enforceable. Apply clear gift, travel, disclosure, outside-activity, and conduct rules to every justice, with an independent procedure for complaints, investigation, findings, and proportionate consequences. The Court adopted a written code in 2023, but proposals for an independent enforcement mechanism remain unresolved. Supreme Court code and ABA discussion of enforcement models.
Remove recusal decisions from exclusive self-policing. Require written reasons in significant recusal disputes and create a review process involving uninvolved judges or an ethics panel. Courts should use comprehensive, continuously updated conflict-checking systems.
Modernize financial-conflict rules. Require timely, searchable disclosures; stronger reporting of gifts and sponsored travel; and use of diversified investments, qualified trusts, or comparable conflict-reduction measures.
Regularize Supreme Court appointments. Consider 18-year staggered periods of active Supreme Court service, followed by senior judicial service, so that appointments occur at predictable intervals. Because Article III provides tenure during good behavior, the cleanest route may be a constitutional amendment; statutory senior-status approaches remain legally contested. Constitution Annotated on judicial tenure.
Make judicial decision-making more transparent. Publish written explanations for significant emergency orders, disclose recorded votes, provide timely opinions, expand live audio and carefully designed camera access, and make federal court records freely accessible.
Prevent judge shopping. Require genuinely random assignment for cases seeking broad statewide or national relief, with public assignment procedures and limited venue manipulation. The Judicial Conference has already strengthened its random-assignment policy. Judicial Conference action.
Match judicial capacity to workload. Add judgeships and support where objective caseload data demonstrate need; modernize case management; and publish measures of delay, vacancies, access, and administrative performance. These measures must never reward judges for particular legal outcomes. In 2025, the Judicial Conference requested 71 additional Article III judgeships. Federal judiciary judgeship request.
Strengthen misconduct and disability procedures. Provide accessible complaint channels, independent review where internal conflicts exist, aggregate public reporting, and clear consequences while protecting judicial decisional independence.
The Legislative Branch:
Congress
Create a National Citizen Priority Docket. Each year, a credible national process would identify approximately ten major citizen priorities. Representative citizen panels would help translate them into understandable desired outcomes and tradeoffs.
Require congressional consideration—not automatic adoption. Relevant committees should hold hearings on each certified priority within a fixed period, such as 90 days. Congress could approve, modify, postpone, or reject it—but would have to explain its decision publicly.
Write laws as executable assignments. Major legislation should identify:
The intended result
Baseline conditions
Responsible agencies and officials
Cost and funding
Milestones and completion dates
Outcome and service measures
Data needed for evaluation
Review and correction procedures
Sunset, renewal, or expansion criteria
Restore congressional capacity and committee government. Strengthen professional committee staffs, legislative drafting, technology, institutional memory, and the use of GAO, CBO, CRS, inspectors general, and outside expertise. Committee chairs should be chosen partly for competence, integrity, and subject knowledge—not only seniority, loyalty, or fundraising. The House’s bipartisan modernization effort produced 202 recommendations addressing capacity, technology, transparency, staffing, and institutional performance. House modernization work.
Restore regular order and transparent lawmaking. Publish bill text, major amendments, fiscal estimates, earmarks, and implementation responsibilities before final votes. Provide sufficient public review time except in genuine emergencies. Require recorded committee and floor votes.
Fix the budget and appropriations process. Establish enforceable schedules, earlier decisions, multi-year planning, and an automatic short-term funding mechanism that prevents shutdowns without rewarding failure to complete appropriations. Continuing resolutions have been needed in all but three of the 48 fiscal years ending with FY2024 and can restrict hiring, travel, planning, and other management decisions. GAO federal-budget findings.
Turn oversight findings into tracked work. Every major GAO or inspector-general recommendation should receive an agency response, responsible official, target date, status, and congressional disposition. Unresolved priority recommendations should automatically return for oversight hearings. GAO already maintains searchable open and priority recommendations, creating a foundation for this system. GAO recommendations.
Establish a congressional governance scorecard. Measure institutional performance rather than partisan voting positions: appropriations timeliness, committee work, attendance, disclosure compliance, oversight follow-through, legislative clarity, constituent service, and implementation review.
Strengthen congressional ethics and conflict controls. Prohibit individual-stock trading by members and senior staff or require qualified blind trusts or diversified funds. Strengthen gift, travel, lobbying, disclosure, and revolving-door rules, backed by independent investigation and meaningful penalties. Existing STOCK Act rules principally require disclosure and apply insider-trading law; they do not eliminate the underlying appearance of conflict. House STOCK Act requirements.
Make correction consequences predictable. Depending on seriousness and due process, consequences could include public warning, repayment, loss of leadership or committee positions, censure, party withdrawal of support, or expulsion. Persistent institutional nonperformance should affect leadership assignments and future nominations—not merely generate another report.
The Executive Branch:
The Presidency and Federal Agencies
Publish readiness profiles for presidential candidates and senior nominees. These should address executive experience, constitutional understanding, emergency leadership, financial conflicts, management record, and demonstrated ability to work with Congress and state governments.
Use independent fitness-to-serve certification where appropriate. For the president, vice president, and especially demanding senior positions, an independent professional panel could certify functional ability to perform the office without publishing private medical details. This would inform voters rather than create a new statutory qualification.
Require competency-based appointments. Every senior appointment should have a public job description and role-specific criteria. Political alignment may legitimately matter, but it should not substitute for relevant knowledge, management ability, integrity, and conflict clearance. OGE already reviews nominee financial disclosures and negotiates ethics agreements; that process could become more accessible and comprehensive. OGE nominee review.
Protect a capable, politically neutral civil service. Modernize slow hiring and disciplinary systems while preserving merit selection, political neutrality, whistleblower protection, and due process. Reward exceptional work and permit timely correction or removal for documented failure. Mission-critical federal skills gaps have remained on GAO’s High-Risk List since 2001. GAO federal-workforce findings.
Limit government to a visible set of priority goals. Each department should identify a small number of measurable, near-term goals, name the responsible official, and conduct quarterly public reviews. The federal framework already uses approximately four or five Agency Priority Goals per major agency; GSG would make these much more visible and consequential. Federal Performance Framework.
Link budgets to programs and results. Citizens should be able to see what each major program costs, what it is supposed to accomplish, who manages it, whether it is on schedule, and what evidence supports continuation.
Institutionalize test–evaluate–correct decisions. Programs should be piloted where practical, evaluated independently, expanded when effective, redesigned when weak, and ended when persistently ineffective. Federal learning agendas and evaluation plans already provide a statutory foundation through the Evidence Act. Evaluation.gov.
Strengthen inspectors general and whistleblowers. Protect IG independence, limit politically motivated removal, fill vacancies promptly, ensure access to agency records, authorize needed testimonial subpoenas, and protect employees who report wrongdoing. These have been recurring priorities of the federal inspector-general community. CIGIE oversight priorities.
Create an automatic correction system for GAO High-Risk problems. Each high-risk area should have a lead official, milestones, public status, and escalating intervention when progress stalls. GAO reports that attention to its High-Risk List has produced substantial financial and operational benefits. GAO High-Risk List.
Attack fraud and improper payments as a permanent management responsibility. Use reliable shared data, modern analytics, strong internal controls, accountable program managers, and recovery procedures—with human review and privacy safeguards. Agencies reported approximately $186 billion in improper payments for FY2025. GAO fraud and improper-payment overview.
Make contracts and major projects publicly manageable. Publish cost, schedule, deliverables, responsible executives, contractor performance, change orders, and stop-or-recompete triggers. Do not wait until a failed project is too expensive to cancel.
Create government-wide service standards. Establish a 311-like federal front door for benefits, permits, complaints, and case status. Publish response and completion standards, allow citizens to track cases, and identify recurring service failures.
Control acting appointments and leadership vacancies. Require prompt nominations, transparent vacancy reporting, enforceable acting-service limits, and succession plans. Long-term acting leadership can evade normal scrutiny and weaken responsibility. GAO explanation of Vacancies Act limits.