Can We Still Govern?

Professor of Public Policy, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan. Immigrant. Researches and teaches about government, administrative burdens, and politicization.

Professor of Public Policy, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

Pamela Herd is the Carol Kakalec Kohn Professor of Social Policy and faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is a Columbia University professor who studies the political economy of the United States, with an emphasis on labor and workers, the politics of organized interests, and social policy.

Alix Gould-Werth is Chief of Program and Strategy at Demos, the people's think tank. She has a love-hate relationship with Unemployment Insurance.

Ashley Splawinski is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She examines how administrative burdens and stakeholder competition shape policymaking. Her work has appeared in Policy Options and CBC Radio.

Political scientist. Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of Pittsburgh. Writing on administrative burden and inequality in health care. Bylines at NYT, WaPo, and The Guardian. Coverage Denied (CUP 2026).

Christian is a postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School's Centre for International Security in Berlin, and an incoming Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin. His research examines how authoritarian regimes work and why they fail.

Anna O. Law holds the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the political science department at the CUNY, Brooklyn College. She is an interdisciplinary scholar teaching and researching at the intersection of politics, law, and history.

Adam is an Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Copenhagen. His research explores autocracies, dictatorships, and the dark side of political power.

Isaac Sederbaum is a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. His research examines how trans and gender-diverse people navigate administrative burdens and citizen-state interactions. @isaacsederbaum.bsky.social

Paisley Currah teaches at the City University of New York. He is the author of Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity. Pieces in the Boston Review, n+1, Nature, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Yale Review.

Don Kettl is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy