Toward Democracy-Deepening Public Participation and Engagement in Federal Policymaking

Around the world, democracies are under attack from authoritarian leaders who seize power by capitalizing on public grievances with the government. In many countries, including the United States, these authoritarian leaders have mobilized support from people who feel let down by governments seen as unresponsive to their needs.¹ Rebuilding American democracy after our current crises of backsliding will require building stronger channels between the government and the public to restore trust in our institutions.

This type of participation, we suggest, is not merely a nice-to-have element in a policy process. Rather, meaningful participation in federal agency decision-making and policy development processes—when structured strategically—can be a critical source of restored trust and legitimacy, as agencies are better able to respond to the actual needs of the people. Equally importantly, participation that is treated as a true partnership, grounded in real dialogue between government and civil society, can also help strengthen democracy itself by helping build up the civil society infrastructure democracy needs to thrive. 

The next administration should pursue this “democracy-deepening” approach to participation and community engagement in policymaking, specifically to (1) ensure communities see themselves in, and feel heard by, a government tangibly responsive to their needs; and (2) leverage policymaking tools to catalyze greater civil society organization and build their durable power.

Participation encompasses a wide range of activities undertaken by citizens and residents in a democratic system. While this spectrum includes important but episodic forms of engagement—such as voting in elections—a vibrant democracy also relies on more direct and continuous participation with government institutions. Public administration experts Tina Nabatchi and Matt Leighninger define these activities as those where individuals “are personally involved and actively engaged in providing input, making decisions, and solving problems.”²

Below, we lay out in more detail what we mean by public participation and associated key terms, building on important prior work undertaken by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to support federal agencies in broadening public participation and community engagement. These definitions closely track those put forward by OMB’s 2025 memorandum.³

To date, federal agencies as a whole have not been particularly successful in engaging with the broader public or allowing for meaningful participation in their decision-making, especially in ways that meet the deeper definitions we have laid out above. Often, public participation mechanisms are either ineffective, with limited impact on policy, or captured by more sophisticated and powerful organized interests, perpetuating the systematic exclusion of many communities’ voices from the policymaking process. As Shaibya Dalal and Loren DeJonge Schulman have persuasively argued, the failures of existing models of public participation are structural, reflecting the fact that these models of participation were “designed for transparency, judicial review, and weighting technical and legal expertise over lived experience” and neglect building deeper, two-way relationships between communities and government.⁵ This has led to misplaced priorities and solutions that do not necessarily respond to the needs and aspirations of impacted communities. This gap leads to declining trust and confidence in the government’s ability to deliver for its people. Last, the gap means that the government fails to use engagement to build durable civil society capacity and civic power. 

Even as the federal government has lagged in its engagement practices, there are a number of efforts pointing to best practices for a more effective, civic power- and legitimacy-building approach to participation. A future pro-democracy governing moment will require learning from these successes to build an even more transformative orientation to civic engagement. 

At the federal level, some agencies in the Biden-Harris administration were starting to make meaningful improvements in public participation in government programs and processes. ⁶ For one, they moved participation earlier in the process of policy design and implementation. They also became more proactive and intentional in engagement efforts—for example, shifting away from a passive, open-door approach to deliberate outreach to ensure meaningful engagement from all communities potentially affected by government policies. Agencies also worked with trusted intermediary groups at the local level to reach people where they already were; made opportunities for engagement more accessible, including describing choices in plain language; and communicated clearly to participants about how their input directly contributed to agency decision-making. The agencies also supported the training of existing civil servants as well as hiring new staff—recognizing engagement of the public as a distinct skillset and capability that the workforce was lacking in. (In an important parallel track, the Office of Management and Budget also worked with agencies to ensure more human-centered design research and customer feedback mechanisms for high-use public services and benefits.⁷ Given that these mechanisms represent a different approach to public engagement, we generally set them aside for the purposes of this report, but recognize their essential value in designing and implementing public programs.)

In addition to these promising steps, there have also been significant innovations in participation at the state and local level that involve much deeper levels of civic engagement. These new efforts include creating offices dedicated to sustained community engagement; embedding staff in existing departments skilled in best practices to gather public input and facilitate co-design efforts; using lived-experience committees or councils to inform policy design; and establishing formal partnerships with community groups. Yet these innovations have been largely unconnected to federal approaches. A future pro-democracy federal administration should consider how to learn from and scale up these state and local efforts.

More broadly, we need a new understanding of the purpose of public participation. The federal government has tended to structure public participation as a box-checking exercise conducted after policy priorities have already been established, instead of leveraging public participation at the outset to design policy agendas that will mobilize robust public support. Similarly, federal participation efforts have largely focused on improving information flow into the federal government, and less on how public participation can strengthen civil society and build civic power more broadly. But if we view participation as central to strengthening our democracy, then efforts to prioritize it must do more than just gather input for policymakers—they must work to build the capacity and power of civic organizations. 

When civic organizations partnering with the federal government can show their members they can deliver real results for them—while also building their own collective power—it encourages deeper, more sustained engagement at the federal level over time, creating a virtuous cycle. For example, when groups provide information to agencies about violations of worker protections or health and safety rules, agencies should take more seriously the importance of information sharing with those groups around the resulting investigations, helping these groups to demonstrate their efficacy to their members, reach and organize new members, and be better able to encourage information sharing in the future. In turn, federal officials are better able to hear from constituents who otherwise may not be able to participate in agency processes.⁸ The result is a genuinely two-way relationship: Organizations build durable power with their members, while federal officials can better incorporate the lived experiences of affected communities into decision-making. This democracy-deepening participation is a form of what Mary Beth Maxwell has dubbed “people-centered policymaking.”⁹

From this perspective, democracy-deepening participation is not a check-the-box exercise or participation solely for the purpose of information gathering. It is also not episodic individual engagement, such as critical user-testing work to determine how best to implement a digital application form. While this work is vital to effective implementation, democracy-deepening participation requires officials to remain focused on collective rather than individual civil society engagement. It is through durable civic organizations that people—particularly those who have historically been marginalized or struggled the most to have their voice heard in the political process—are able to truly see their interests represented. The system of American government is riddled with many veto points, and the obstacles to real policy change are high. To succeed under these conditions, people need durable organizations that can stay involved in policy discussions year after year, move between different venues for policy change (e.g., across levels of government, or between strategies), and can count on a sustained base of members.¹⁰ Without durable collective representation in civil society organizations, everyday people, and especially marginalized communities, are unlikely to be able to meaningfully participate in the political process.¹¹ This vision of public participation is consistent with the diagnosis offered by James Goodwin of why past efforts at broadening public participation in federal policymaking have failed: Put simply, they neglect power imbalances inherent in our society. Democracy-deepening participation must be power-conscious and seek to build the collective power of communities, especially those that have lacked power to meaningfully participate in government in the past.¹²

Below, we summarize key lessons learned to engage in this work of deepening public participation and spark meaningful, impactful community engagement with government.  

The next pro-democracy administration will need to act quickly and effectively to both repair the significant damage caused by the current administration and address people’s pressing needs. This need to move quickly, however, can lead to concerns¹⁵ that encouraging public participation will slow down or derail broadly popular government action.¹⁶ And many point to the risks posed by embedding participatory requirements in government processes—that it could open the door to powerful actors or interests who might abuse the process to oppose popular, and necessary, changes. 

While we share the goal of a government that can be responsive to public needs, we believe that these concerns with broadening engagement are largely misplaced: Efforts to improve participation do not necessarily mean that agencies need to be mired in endless debates, unable to accomplish anything in a reasonable timeframe. We agree that public participation should not create more veto points to stop action. Instead, democracy-deepening participation should foster more opportunities for continuous dialogue with affected communities to inform policy design and implementation. 

Perhaps counterintuitively, engagement is more likely to be used as a veto point when there are more limited opportunities for participation, rather than too many. When participation is limited in scope, ad hoc, or at a late stage of the policy process when the big decisions have already been made, the result is that affected communities see only one opportunity to effect change, and are often in the position of having to accept an all-or-nothing proposal. This approach to engagement also exacerbates, rather than solves, the problem of distrust, as communities will (understandably) be skeptical that such a process will be responsive to their needs. Indeed, when participation is limited in nature, another real risk is that concentrated and sophisticated interests are likely to dominate the public engagement process–or to exercise disproportionate influence outside of that engagement process. 

As policy researchers Loren DeJonge Schulman and Shaibya Dalal have argued, the regulatory notice-and-comment procedures provide opportunities for public input far too late in the policymaking process.¹⁷ As James Goodwin has pointed out, these procedures also offer a passive, one-size-fits-all design that does not take different stakeholders’ needs into account. As a result, they reinforce underlying power disparities and benefit well-resourced interests.¹⁸ By contrast, shifting to more continuous forms of engagement between the government and the public—which lowers the stakes of any one exchange and increases the sense that a genuine dialogue is the goal—are likely to minimize the risk that affected communities seek to stymie change. By providing meaningful opportunities to shape policy, and to do so at an “upstream” and continuous stage where no one decision is decisive,¹⁹ an engagement process can facilitate more constructive, trust-building, and capacity-expanding forms of engagement. The lesson here is that the examples that participation critics often point to involve too little public engagement, rather than too much. 

In addition, the history of public engagement mandates in the federal government suggests that, from the perspective of encouraging democracy-deepening participation, it is challenging and even unproductive to seek to force a recalcitrant government to meaningfully engage with the public. Mandated engagement can result in some transparency, agency explanations for their actions, and at least nominal consideration of certain issues, but these legal requirements cannot force an unwilling government to engage in democracy-deepening participation. Participation requirements should not be seen as merely tools for accountability. While well-intentioned, efforts to push the government to engage with the public, rather than nurturing a culture of meaningful, two-way participation, can fail to realize their goals at best and at worst become tools to stymie government action. As we will explain below, this suggests that democracy-deepening participation will require building stronger support within government for the affirmative use of engagement. 

Far from slowing down policy implementation, meaningful public engagement can make policy more effective and actually more time-efficient than processes that avoid it. Studies of the National Environmental Policy Act bear this out: Processes that incorporate early public engagement were statistically shorter than those that did not.²⁰ Failing to engage the public in policy development and implementation can also result in the government pursuing policies that do not meet the problems and needs of the public. Moreover, failing to consult affected communities in the design of programs risks errors or mistakes in implementation, as policymakers neglect on-the-ground realities about how policies will be carried out in practice. In addition, in the absence of meaningful engagement, civil society has little ability to plan for and around actions the government takes, which can slow or even stymie their efforts to support implementation. And lastly, by curbing participatory processes altogether, the government risks taking actions that are seen as illegitimate in the eyes of individuals and communities. 

Implementing a democracy-deepening approach to participation will require changes in how the federal government engages in this work. (It will also require changes in how civil society organizations are structured as well, but that is not the focus of this publication.)

First, and most important, there will need to be a change to the federal agency mindset that is also reflected in agency structure. Too frequently, participation is treated as an afterthought that occurs at the end of the policy development process when a new idea is being rolled out to the public, with limited transparency around how input may or may not have shaped decision-making. But that makes engagement merely a subset of the public and press communications effort, as Roosevelt Institute analysts Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph have laid out based on extensive interviews with former government officials.²¹ Instead, agencies need to think about engagement as a key input into the policy development and implementation processes and empower staff with the right experience and skills to facilitate public participation and community engagement from the start of the policy process.²² That means recognizing it as a function that requires staff capability and capacity. Moreover, agencies need to consider that participation as part of an effort to deepen democracy by thinking about it as a process intended to benefit both the government and civil society.

To that end, agencies should create offices charged with ensuring meaningful engagement across all agency activities. The office should provide trainings²³ and hire staff who have an understanding of, and experience with, this type of engagement, such as people with experience organizing in local communities. Ideally, some of those people will be from the very communities the agency is seeking to engage, so that they can bring a technical skillset and in-depth understanding of those communities to their work. The office would be responsible for creating the kind of vibrant two-way dialogues that are the backbone of democracy-deepening participation, including explaining to those in civil society how their input was considered.²⁴ And this office will need to be empowered to participate in policy-planning conversations from the start, not just at the end, so that engagement can have a meaningful impact on policy decisions at the agency. It is also worth underscoring the importance of good implementation and enforcement of public programs for fostering durable two-way engagement. Poor implementation of a program or policy can quickly break down community trust and make engagement harder in the future.  

To improve public participation, the federal government can look to innovative models at the state and local level, where governments have been experimenting with deeper engagement processes, involving collaborative or co-governance. Also, the federal government should consider how best to utilize input that states and localities obtain through such processes.

This style of participation includes approaches such as citizens’ assemblies, which bring together a representative group of community members to engage in structured deliberation about public issues to generate recommendations and exercise real influence on policy decisions. In the last few years, civic assemblies have been gaining momentum across the country. Fort Collins, Colorado, created a civic assembly to tackle land use policies, while Washington state used this model to address economic opportunity, stability, and mobility.²⁵ They help bring people into participation processes who otherwise would not participate, and can also encourage further participation going forward as individuals who join assemblies build their civic skills and interests.²⁶

Another effective model is participatory budgeting, through which residents can pitch ideas and vote on how to use a portion of public funds. The City of New York introduced this process in 2011 and has regularly used participatory budgeting in the years since to improve transparency and accountability in the budgeting process and make sure that communities’ preferences were reflected in funding decisions.²⁷

Similarly, the Maine Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future tackles public challenges by coordinating collaborations between state agencies, civil society groups, and community members. To address food insecurity, for example, the state engaged more than 200 Mainers to inform a roadmap for designing a new policy plan. Implementation is guided by an advisory committee that includes people with lived experiences of hunger and poverty.²⁸

Federal policymakers could consider where there might be opportunities to incorporate versions of these more robust forms of engagement into federal programs and processes, and give particular care to how they can do so in a manner that builds civil society strength at the same time.  

The federal government should also look to utilize and expand regional hubs that can help bridge the divide between federal agencies and on-the-ground groups.

In 2022, the Biden Administration created the Rural Partners Network (RPN), an initiative that sought to connect rural and tribal communities with public and private-sector resources. Housed in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, RPN staff worked with civic organizations to identify local challenges and coordinated experts across dozens of federal agencies to make a plan for solving those problems with existing federal programs. Moving forward, models such as RPN could be codified into law, provided with flexible, dedicated funding, and connected to broader state and place-based regional models, such as the East Alabama Regional Planning & Development Commission—a public agency created through state legislation that serves 10 counties between Alabama and Georgia. This helps build the social and civic infrastructure for ongoing touch points between residents and public agencies and more sustainable and transparent institutional structures. 

Public commissions like these can act as connective hubs between federal, state, and local levels of government while also deepening civic life and civic infrastructure. Other federal agencies and offices with deep, cross-sector networks of partners—such as the Census Bureau—could build on their relationships, expertise providing local funding, and knowledge of communities to expand participatory processes.²⁹ In addition to supporting partnerships across federal agencies, a future administration might also do more to partner with Congressional offices on public engagement, since Members of Congress already organize many constituent outreach activities around defined place-based communities. As one example, during the Obama Administration, the Women’s Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor held numerous regional summits that culminated in a national White House Summit on Working Families. Many of the regional summits were co-hosted by the Women’s Bureau and Congressional offices, building on the reach that those offices had within communities.

In shifting towards a democracy-deepening approach to participation, it is important for policymakers to recognize the limitations of the federal government. Even the most well-intentioned agency will not be embedded in the day-to-day life of local communities because, by their very nature, they focus on broad, nationwide issues. In addition, agencies will have to grapple with the deep distrust³⁰ that many Americans now have towards the federal government, particularly following a period when federal agencies are being weaponized to stifle freedom of speech, target historically marginalized communities, and corruptly benefit the President, his family, and his allies.³¹ To bridge this gap, it is critical that agencies engage with communities through trusted intermediaries who are already in those communities doing work every day. These civil society leaders build key relationships (inside and outside of government), and have a hyper-local sense of what works, under what conditions, and why.

But given the chronic underresourcing of such entities, the federal government must also identify ways to better support them. Part of that support can come through providing opportunities for them to learn from and collaborate with other local leaders across the country, which could help build a stronger community of practice, while also encouraging further experimentation with new models of participation. 

Another critical means of support for local intermediaries is through federal funding. That includes providing grants and contracts to partner with groups to deliver federal services or training, although doing so effectively will require reforms to these processes to reduce the burden on smaller groups to apply for these grants and then meet subsequent compliance requirements. It also should take the form of putting meaningful participation requirements into broader federal programs administered at the state or local level to ensure that civil society organizations that undertake participatory efforts are brought into the process. Given the ways that federal funding has been politicized and weaponized during the Trump Administration, any funding for local intermediaries and related information collections should be, to the greatest extent possible, designed in ways that do not give future bad-faith actors an opportunity to abuse these levers.

As part of introducing more federal funding for local civic intermediaries, the federal government might also consider generating new organizational distinctions to recognize certain intermediaries as democratic representatives of their local communities. This designation could make civic intermediaries eligible for specific categories of federal funds and expedite grant, contract, or cooperative agreement arrangements. To receive this designation, groups would need to document that they have a membership to which they are accountable, possess internal democratic structures, and can represent their members in engagement with the federal government. The federal government could even create incentives or preferences for groups falling in this category, which could encourage more groups to organize in this way. Of course, any such proposal would need to include a thoughtful definition paired with effective enforcement to ensure that groups could not evade the intent of the definition.

The federal government could also foster a greater sharing of skills and knowledge between federal agencies and local and state experts. For example, federal agencies could utilize Intergovernmental Personnel Agreements or other means to detail local leaders into the federal government for periods of time, to encourage further collaboration and learning at both the federal and local levels. Likewise, federal staff could be detailed to local groups. These investments could nurture future leaders within civic organizations as well as future government civil servants. 

The City of Boston, for example, developed a liaison model where people who had grown up in specific communities acted as trusted messengers between their neighborhoods and the government. As a result, officials built stronger, more effective communication channels with their constituents.³² Similarly, through the Love Your Block initiative—created and funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies—city governments use small grants to support the development and sustainability of local organizations, including nonprofits and resident-led associations, which can help strengthen a local civic ecosystem. These groups carry out essential beautification and community-building projects, while also strengthening a network of partners and advisors that city officials can call upon.³³ In a convening, one official said he puts a high priority on investing in block associations because he finds these collaborations to be an especially productive form of civic engagement—particularly in contrast to town hall meetings that are dominated by loud voices and posturing for social media.³⁴

Well before the alarming attack on democratic institutions in the Trump-Vance Administration, many Americans felt that the government was failing to respond to their needs and preferences. From the late 1950s to present day, the share of Americans saying that they trusted the federal government “to do what is right” just about always or most of the time fell from nearly 80 percent to below 20 percent in recent years.³⁵ As pro-democracy advocates seek to rebuild U.S. political institutions, they must grapple not just with the short-term damage from the Trump-Vance Administration’s assault on government and the rule of law, but also the longer-running fraying of the relationship of the public with their government. We see a revived approach to public engagement with the federal government as being an integral piece to rebuilding American democracy. Done right, our vision of democracy-deepening participation can make the government more responsive to the needs of its residents and also strengthen the civic organizations that are a key part of a healthy, resilient democracy.

This publication would not have been possible without the support and insights of the practitioners, government officials, and civil society leaders who continually engaged with us. Please see below for the full list of names. 

• Jen Hughes, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Loeb Fellow
• Ryan M. Eller, Appalachia Funders Network, Executive Director
• Savannah Barrett, Art of the Rural & The Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange, Exchange Director
• Ash Hanson, Department of Public Transformation, Creative Executive Officer
• Liz Joyner, The Village Square
• Kevin Simowitz, HouseUS, Director
• Devin Morton, Thread, Managing Director
• Darryl Holliday, Commoner Company, News Futures, Co-Founder
• Eric King, City of Bend, City Manager
• Dee Davis, Center for Rural Strategies, President
• Evan Weissman, Warm Cookies of the Revolution, Executive Director
• Emma Petty Addams, Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG), Co-Executive Director
• Michael Baskin, Montgomery County, Chief Innovation Officer
• Toby Cain, Civil Service Strong, Organizing Director
• Farrah Buff, Democracy Forward
• Oswaldo Mestre Jr., City of Buffalo, Executive Director of Citizen Services
• Sarah Sayeed, New York City Civic Engagement Commission (NYC CEC), Chair & Executive Director
• Lindsay Morgan Tracy, Economic Justice Alliance Washington State, Director ofInnovation & Accountability
• Taquan Williams, City of Newark, Office of Affordability and Sustainable Housing, Manager
• Shawn Ellis, Montgomery County Government, Office of Community Partnerships, Director
• Benjamin Solotaire, NYC CEC, Senior Advisor
• Peggy Flynn, City of Petaluma, City Manager
• Mike Squire, City of Dayton, Division of Community Engagement
• Nathalia Benitez Perez, City of Boston, Chief of Staff to the Commissioner of City Records
• Jennifer Thomas, MWEG, Co-Executive Director
• Julia Gitis, Good Neighbor Lab, Founder and Executive Director
• Cole Speidel, FIDE North America, Program Manager
• Shamichael Hallman, Urban Libraries Council, Civic Health and Economic Opportunity, Senior Director
• Zachary Markovits, Fifteenth and Field, Principal and Co-Founder
• Morgan Lasher, Unify America, U.S. Democracy Leagues, Chief
• Richard Young, CivicLex, Founder & Executive Director
• Josh Burgess, Central Oregon Civic Action Project, Executive Director
• Marjan Ehsassi, FIDE North America, Executive Director
• Jenn Park, Results for America, Senior Advisor, Strategy and Business Model
• Sasha Beder-Schenker, What Works Plus, Director
• Wendy Trull, NYC CEC, Chief Programs Officer
• Heejin Hahn, We Build Progress
• Emily Simonson, PolicyLink, Project Redesign, Director
• Kahlia Roberts, Research Institute for Structural Change
• Thomas Asher, Columbia World Projects, Director, Research & Engagement
• Ben Beachy, The Global Fund For a New Economy, Senior Fellow
• Angelo Ancheta, Demos, Senior Research and Policy Counsel
• Kat Welbeck, Roosevelt Institute
• Katherine Eyster, We Build Progress
• Mary Beth Maxwell, Workshop, Executive Director
• Lauren Manning, Brennan Center for Justice, Innovation Fellow

Thanks also to Jodi Narde, Kelley Gardner, Sarah Jacob, and the New America Communications team for editorial and organizational support. Elena Souris provided research and drafting support.

Editorial disclosure: The views expressed in this report are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views of New America, its staff, fellows, funders, or board of directors.