Understanding the Current Crisis in Public Administration: Part 8 – Rebuilding a House Divided at the Foundation

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Erik Devereux
December 12, 2025

This is the eight and final column in a series on the current crisis in American public administration that is rewriting much of what we think about American government (first column, second column, third column, fourth column, fifth column, sixth column, seventh column). The series invokes plate tectonics as a metaphor for thinking about what has transpired with the federal government since January 20. What matters most are the subterranean forces slowly building up immense pressures which ultimately are expressed in seemingly rapid shifts in the public landscape. Among these pressures are the racialized politics of the United States which originated in the very founding of the Republic and persist as a force to this day.

The photograph accompanying this column is of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates Museum in Charleston, Illinois. During those 1858 debates (the subject of my MIT Bachelor’s thesis), Lincoln made one of his most famous statements about the growing political stress over the future of slavery: that a house divided against itself could not stand. Lincoln hoped that ending slavery by the end of the Civil War (and, after his death, by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments) would be enough to unite the house. He was wrong.

As I wrote this column, PBS broadcast the Ken Burns documentary “The American Revolution,” which discussed how proposals to mend divisions over slavery and race were forced aside by political and military expediency. One summary is that Virginia had the strongest militia in the British Colonies (note: that is where George Washington had his slave plantation). For the political elites seeking independence from the Crown, there was no path forward without Virginia and that meant no path forward without slavery. Thus, racialized politics became embedded from the beginning as a feature of the United States.

Today, racialized politics has contributed to one of the most significant challenges to the fabric of public administration since the New Deal. America is a highly segregated country in many respects including where people reside, work, worship and go to school. One of the most impactful consequences of Brown v. Board of Education was not school desegregation but the rapid resegregation of the country that ultimately yielded highly polarized congressional districts. The two political parties in Congress, reflecting that polarization, increasingly cannot negotiate public policies that embody realistic compromises.

In 1959, Charles Lindblom’s seminal PAR article “The Science of Muddling Through” (among the few articles in our field that are familiar to nearly 100 percent of PA Times readers) includes this aside you may have overlooked: “[Political] Party behavior is rooted in public attitudes, and political theorists cannot conceive of democracy surviving in the United States in the absence of fundamental agreement on potentially disruptive issues…”

So, here we are in 2025 pondering whether democracy will survive against what seem to be growing odds.

The American regime may have the capacity to overcome a long series of military and economic blunders including a broken federal budgeting system, an accumulated federal debt of $38 trillion and a diminished hollowed-out state confronting an increasingly complex world full of candidates seeking to replace the United States as the leading country on Earth. But the current regime seems unlikely to overcome the stresses accumulating from the racialized politics of its foundation. We must find a path forward that rebuilds, not patches over, the deep fracture. We should be aware that many other societies have opted for terrible options like apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide instead of elevating public leadership that could bind disparate communities into a consensually constructed single nation.

To be clear, I believe prior attempts to patch the foundation have failed including the diversity, equity and inclusion proposals that found support within public administration in this century. I also doubt whether proposed reparations for slavery address the underlying problems. If the United States and its approach to democratically based merit-driven public service are to persevere, then our leaders will need to launch a deliberate and substantive process (one Archon Fung would approve) to go back to the root of the problem and start from there to envision a constitutional regime free from racialized politics.

Is this just a fantasy?

All I know is that the future can only be what we strive to make it. There are no guarantees but also fewer actual constraints than commonly perceived. As recent events have shown, there are far more opportunities for change than were recognized in the past. Out of the current turmoil could emerge a new version of the United States that strives to achieve the mission and vision of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all.” Public administration can contribute to that emergence by bringing to bear its intellectual resources and practical experiences on the task. Our field has been waiting for its moment since the creation of ASPA. Well, the moment has arrived. Let us not miss this Kingdon-esque window of opportunity to make a difference.

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Author: Erik Devereux is Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy, Management, and Analytics at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He has a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Political Science, 1985) and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (Government, 1993). He is the author of Methods of Policy Analysis: Creating, Deploying, and Assessing Theories of Change (available for free here). Email: [email protected]. More content is available here.

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