“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.”
–Abraham Lincoln, 1854
Refounding America is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) working to reform the structure and function of the federal government. Our premise is that the government described by the Constitution and the rule of law requires substantial change to meet the challenges of this century. Voters have called for that change repeatedly and have not yet gotten the response they deserve.
So we plan to refound our government: to build new structures, reimagine or retire those that have failed their purpose, and give each the function the moment demands. Some structures must be brought back into alignment with the wisdom of the Founders, while others must be built for circumstances the Founders never foresaw.
Our chosen method rests on the conviction that an organization succeeds only when its purpose and its structure align. State intention and capacity can rarely be separated. Too much of today’s policy work assigns new ambitions to old structures, or looks solely to the structure as a fix for “capacity”– begging the question, capacity to do what? This doesn’t mean change for its own sake. Plenty of worthwhile reforms need no structural change at all, and some improve state capacity in its thin definition. But idea and implementation are inseparable, and that is why structure is our chosen theme. We use it to ask two things of people that seem to pull in opposite directions. To the visionaries: think more practically; ask what structures would create the incentives to make your idea endure. To the reformers: think bigger– see your initiative not in isolation, but as one part of reimagining how our government works. (For more on what we mean by structural reform, see our second letter here.)
In this time of ferment and dysfunction, when approval ratings for our governmental bodies sit at record lows, we believe the moment calls for something bolder. New, renovated, and shuttered structures –from FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority to the post-WWII restructuring of the defense and security apparatus– generate their own momentum, mandates, and constituents, and permanently reshape how Americans meet their federal government. When we look around, we see movements from the Recoding America Fund to Abundance, think tanks from Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution to the Niskanen Center, and nonprofits from the Government Renewal Project to our own, who are crossing ideological and partisan lines to ask what government could be. Like them, we do not seek incremental change. We seek a wholesale reimagining of government.
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By 2029, we will publish a compendium of structural reforms that together describe the institutions of a new government. Each proposal will come with draft text –legislation or executive order– that would pass it into law. We are looking for partners across the ideological spectrum, and partners who do not fall on it at all, who can bring their own wisdom and experience to the work. Our work proceeds along three related tracks.
The first is community engagement. We are convening Americans across ideological, geographic, and demographic lines to deliberate about the government they want– to surface assumptions, hear from a cross-section of citizens, and learn how the structures of government shape their lives. We are building a secure platform to host those conversations and synthesize what emerges at scale.
The second is the academy. Many law, political science, and public policy curricula were built for a settled constitutional order, but current events have unsettled it. We begin teaching “Refounding America” at Stanford in fall 2026, with each student’s work feeding directly into the compendium, and we intend to replicate the course at other universities. In this way, we hope to harness the creative energy in our universities to solve this problem.
The third is public debate. The annual Soifer Lectures, beginning with Ellen P. Goodman of Rutgers Law School (2025), continuing with Risa Goluboff of Virginia School of Law (2026), and followed by Martha Minow of Harvard Law School in January 2027, put structural reform before an audience for debate. Each is livestreamed, transcribed, and distributed nationally.
Our first conference meets at Stanford on November 13, 2026. We will take up what the midterm results tell us, and invite scholars and practitioners to lay out the structural problems and the fresh blueprints that will occupy the next two years of our work.
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Lincoln wrote that the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people what they cannot do, or cannot do as well, for themselves. That standard has not changed. What has changed in this century, however, is nearly everything else: what a community is, what it needs done, and what the government is capable of doing. Answering Lincoln’s question now takes more than new policy; it takes new structures built for new purposes.
This letter is the first of many. We will use them to think out loud, to announce our weekly podcast, and to publish proposals as they take shape. If you are working on a piece of this –a bill, a paper, a court challenge, an agency you know well and have ideas about how to rebuild– we want to hear from you. Subscribe, forward this to someone we should be talking to, and write to us at newsletter@refoundingamerica.org.