Government For 2030+ Not 1790.

Why 1790

In 1790, the United States counted its people for the first time. There were about four million of us.

Most people farmed. News moved as fast as a horse or a sailing ship. There was no electricity. Doctors didn't know germs caused disease, and they still bled patients to cure them.

That's the country our system of government was designed for. The people who designed it did remarkable work. They built something that has lasted longer than almost any government on Earth.

Now look at what's happened since.

• FarmingIn 1790, almost everyone farmed just to eat. Today fewer than 2 in 100 Americans work on farms, and they feed the rest of us.
• MedicineWe went from bloodletting to vaccines, antibiotics, and heart transplants.
• TransportationBoston to New York took days by stagecoach. Now it's about an hour in the air, and flying is one of the safest ways to travel ever invented.

None of that happened by accident. People studied what went wrong, figured out why, and redesigned. Then they did it again. Every airliner flying today carries lessons from the ones that crashed.

Government has changed since 1790, but not like that. Nobody investigates its failures the way we investigate a crash, and nobody redesigns it on purpose.

That's what The Statecraft Blueprint is for. We study government the way engineers study airliners, so it can be designed to get better.

Here's what the current design looks like up close, right here in Utah.

A Utah story

The 100% ID law

You may have heard about H.B. 437, the "100% ID law." Starting January 1, 2026, every alcohol purchase in Utah required an ID, scanned electronically. Every customer, every age.

You probably heard about the backlash too. Restaurants turned away whole tables because one person left their ID at the hotel. Visitors from overseas couldn't order a beer without a passport. Retirees were getting carded for the first time in decades.

When people asked why, the bill's sponsor said:

"This was never the intent of the bill."Rep. Steve Eliason, Newsweek, March 2026

So what was the intent?

The bill's name is a clue: Interdicted Person Amendments. When a court bars someone from buying alcohol after certain DUI convictions, Utah prints a red NO ALCOHOL SALE banner on their license. The goal was to catch those people.

But the scanners the law required check your age. They aren't built to catch that banner. The state's own guidance says staff still have to look at the card, which is the same check that existed before the law.

And that goal, catching people barred from buying alcohol, isn't written anywhere in the law. So there was nothing to measure the law against. Nobody could tell whether it worked, because nobody wrote down what "worked" would mean.

By spring, the legislature had scaled it back.

There are no villains in this story. The sponsor had a real goal. Businesses followed the rules. What was missing was a piece of the design. Every law is really three things:

The execution was fine. The architecture didn't fit the mandate. And because the mandate was never written into the law, nobody could see the mismatch until it showed up at the dinner table.

Utah isn't unusual. This is how American laws are ordinarily written, in every state and in Congress.

"Isn't that just political science?"

No. They're looking at different things.

Imagine the government is a building. Nearly all our attention goes to what happens inside it: who gets which office, how the rooms are decorated, who won the argument about the paint. That's politics, and it's mostly what political science studies. How people vote, how parties behave, how power moves from room to room.

Governance science looks at the building itself. Where the walls are. Which doors lead where. What's load-bearing. The floor plan decides how everyone inside moves, no matter who lives there.

Almost nobody looks at the building. Meanwhile the foundation is cracking and the roof leaks, and we keep repainting the rooms and wondering why the water keeps coming in.

You don't fix a cracked foundation by picking new curtains. And you don't fix it by burning the building down. You get an engineer to look at it.

That's the separation this project exists to make. How to decorate is a question of values, and people will always disagree about it. How the building works is something we can study, redesign, and check.

Start here

If that story left you asking "wait, why do we write laws like that?", I wrote the whole thing up, including what I think should be built to fix it.

Want to go deeper?

My book, The Rules that Shape the Rules, walks you through finding the source of Congress's dysfunction yourself, one observation at a time.

It's going to take all of us

No one person redesigns a government. Here's how you can help, whatever you have to give.