How Big Government Bureaucracy Impedes Democratic Messaging

The IRS is nearing an agreement to disclose suspected undocumented immigrants’ addresses to the Department of Homeland Security, and tech bros are continuing their march of infiltrating the federal government and accessing all kinds of private tax information. So I was surprised to learn that an obscure provision of the IRS code, which is meant to keep taxpayers’ information secure, turned out to be a major roadblock to the Democrats’ ability to communicate their policy successes heading into the 2024 election. 

The larger story sheds important light about what Democrats need to do if they want to start winning national elections again, building on the recent victory in Wisconsin. But to win consistently in the future, especially on a pro-government platform, Democrats will have to figure out how to address the obstacles that big government bureaucracies often create. 

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Last summer, I worked in the speechwriting room of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. My job was to support the team of talented speechwriters, in addition to handling a few of the speeches myself. The small team worked at a frenetic pace, tasked with writing and revising more than 200 speeches and guiding them from the page to the stage. I enjoyed every sleep-deprived moment of the convention. But listening to all the speakers, I found myself thinking about what was missing. 

Why did so few speeches cite the impact of the $1 trillion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)? After all, the IRA climate bill is widely considered to be President Biden’s greatest legislative accomplishment. It should have been easy to tout the law’s total impact while filling the stage with clean energy workers whose jobs came from IRA tax incentives. Turns out, I was wrong. 

And the reason explains why it’s so much harder to defend government programs than it is to tear them apart.

Kristina Costa, who served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Clean Energy Innovation and Implementation in the Biden Administration, told me about an obscure provision of the IRS code that stood in the way of effectively telling the IRA’s story.

IRS Code 7213 prohibits federal employees from releasing most tax-return information, even to another federal agency. Violating it is a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. Because the IRA consists largely of tax credits, conveying the law’s impact while abiding by this code was tough. Costa and her team could not access utilization data of IRA tax credits until the IRS considered it sufficiently aggregated and anonymized. Because of filing and processing times, that caused big delays, in some cases past Election Day. 

Costa also explained that aggregate data is not “quite the same as being able to say this is Bob Jones” and he “is saving $500 a year on his electricity bills because he installed rooftop solar, using this tax credit.” Overall, she said, “the reluctance to release data made everything harder.”

The irony is clear to see: Biden officials faced pushback from the IRS in their attempt to persuade voters to elect Kamala Harris. Yet President Trump’s win has unleashed a wave of tech bros from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ransacking federal agencies with wanton disregard for privacy protections. 

The DOGE antics are yet another reminder that it’s far easier to tear things down than build something new. 

Obviously, this one IRS provision is not the reason the Democrats lost the election. Time was another major barrier to conveying the IRA’s impact. The complex law passed in 2022, giving Democrats just two years to roll it out and demonstrate its benefits to the public. 

Only now, months after the election, is there delayed recognition of the law’s impact, even in places that voted for Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported in January that one Indiana county, which Trump won by 18 points, is now seeing its best growth numbers in decades. That’s thanks largely to the federal spending Biden pushed through.

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Though it may seem too little too late to rethink the IRA communication strategy, these bureaucratic obstacles offer three important lessons for Democrats to consider ahead of 2028.

1. The Democrats need to reconsider their “Boy Scout” mentality. One party is careful to follow every regulation while the other party creates constitutional crises a few weeks into its tenure. 

I’m not suggesting outright lawlessness. But when faced with rules that don’t make sense, Democrats might have to adopt an “ask for forgiveness and not permission” mentality. Otherwise, they’re stuck in asymmetrical warfare, using conventional weapons to fight nuclear missiles.

2. Democrats should change these counterproductive laws next time they have power. Even if many are shocked at DOGE’s recklessness, it’s clear that the American public has an appetite for more efficient government.

That doesn’t mean gutting entire departments that do vital work. But it does mean vigorously challenging rules that make government less nimble or logical. Costa explained that the Paperwork Reduction Act, a law that complicates the process of how the government can request information from individuals and businesses, also slowed down the IRA’s implementation. Focusing on common-sense changes to bureaucratic laws like this one could position Democrats as the party actually addressing government efficiency without dismantling the entire government.  

3. Democrats need to think more about how they structure their big legislative packages to ensure that Americans immediately feel some of their benefits. 

With its infamous website fiasco, the Affordable Care Act is hardly an example of a successful rollout. Still, Democratic leaders at the time understood that, to gain support for giving health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans, they needed to sell the benefits to many more Americans who already had insurance. So they included an almost-immediate provision that allowed children to remain on their parents’ health plans until age 26.

The IRA needed something like that—the equivalent of a “shovel-ready” project in a stimulus bill. Compared to Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Costa joked “had a bridge a week,” the benefits of the tax-break-heavy IRA were far more opaque—and delayed. “Every three months, I had a weird tax credit guidance that was going to be massively transformative of the economy,” she said, adding that the White House “knew how to try to sell a bridge a week, and not how to sell my weird thing.”

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The Trump administration’s reckless and indiscriminate slashing of government has already caused so much chaos and introduced so much unnecessary risk to the nation that many Americans who have told pollsters they think government is too big may begin to have second thoughts. But Democrats must realize that if this overreach by the Trump administration gives them a window for Americans to reconsider big government, it will almost surely be a small one. Defending large-scale government programs is never easy, especially when bureaucratic rules needlessly complicate the efforts. But if Democrats want to win again and pass more of the ambitious packages needed to confront the nation’s enormous long-term problems, they first need to figure out how to sell them.