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To Create Shared Prosperity, Rebuild Trust in Government
Government needs to deliver for everyone, not just the wealthy. Local government can lead the way.
Aug 31, 2025
We all want to live in healthy, safe, and thriving communities. We expect our tax dollars to serve the common good, and we want to trust that government represents our interests. But today, the federal government falls far short of this goal; only 22% of Americans trust it.
Local governments, in many places but not all, continue to deliver for their residents. They are leading the fight against climate change without federal support. They took charge in their immediate and ongoing responses to Covid-19. And they continue to resist, creating sanctuary cities to protect immigrant communities threatened during the first Trump administration. Today, local governments prepare for a difficult future shaped by the policies of the current Trump administration, including the unnecessary deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles and Washington, DC.
Yet the work of local governments has never been more difficult. Americans continue to lose trust in government, and as conditions worsen, faith in government erodes further. This decline is not accidental—it stems from decades of funding cuts, deregulation, misinformation, voter suppression, and government missteps. It feels like the biggest beneficiaries of government today are the wealthy and large corporations, which continue to make record profits despite recessions, pandemics, and climate change.
The lack of trust in government and the concentration of wealth and power in a small elite are connected. A deliberate effort to undermine the government’s ability to deliver for all feeds a downward spiral of distrust. Consider how US President Donald Trump empowered Elon Musk to lead mass layoffs and weaken or shut down critical agencies, undermining services people depend on. This move fuels privatization, deregulation, wealth concentration, and further distrust in government.
So, where do we go from here? For government to ensure shared prosperity, we must first rebuild trust. That requires government to deliver for everyone, not just the wealthy.
The long road to rebuilding trust must start with rejecting the fearmongering and scarcity mentality that has left us isolated and unhappy. We must demand better results from both government and our economic system. We need a system rooted in mutual care and shared prosperity.
This transformation begins from the ground up; it depends on each of us cultivating a culture of belonging and connection in our daily lives. I see this willingness in the empathy and care people show for neighbors, the environment, and future generations. Government can correct course only if we engage with it and demand more—because we are committed to doing better ourselves. Over time, civic participation can rebuild trust in government—though not as it is, but as a transformed institution committed to nurturing relationships.
Local governments can create opportunities for residents to relate to each other better and forge stronger relationships. Because local government is closer to its constituents than state or federal agencies, it can offer more immediate opportunities for civic engagement and connection. I believe assigning local government the role of cultivating a sense of belonging is key to achieving shared economic prosperity and to overcoming the polarization that currently grips our communities.
Local governments can evolve by partnering with local leaders and civil society groups that—in many communities—are fulfilling key roles once held by local governments. By building true, trusting collaborations, governments can expand their capacity and impact, reshape how communities relate to public institutions, and restore trust and faith in their work.
When we share responsibility for our communities—when neighbors connect, participate, and help shape our governance—we push government to serve all of us better.
To be clear, local governments cannot create a culture of belonging alone. Many governments need to commit to a sustained process of reconciliation, especially with communities of color, to overcome their checkered past. As I write this essay, immigrant communities in Los Angeles and throughout the country are being terrorized by federal law enforcement agencies, often with the support of local law enforcement, separating families, traumatizing neighbors and neighborhoods, and severely eroding trust between the government and communities. There is no way around the fact that governments at each scale have inflicted harm on communities. Nor can we ignore the fact that government is how we organize how we live. What government looks like, and how it interacts with us, remains our choice—that is the essence of democracy.
Some might view the suggestion that governments should cultivate residents’ sense of connection and belonging as an example of “mandate creep.” But if not local government, then who is responsible for nurturing connections between neighbors and fostering the culture of our communities?
Consider the processes involved in governance—updating general plans, budgeting, making and implementing new laws. These processes have a tremendous impact on our lives, yet few people participate. What difference would it make if more people were involved? If local governments had more resources and expertise to increase participation, could we achieve better governance? If local governments prioritized participation and equipped public servants to engage more residents directly, perhaps we would feel more satisfied—or at least better understand the decisions shaping our lives.
Local governments can also foster a culture of belonging by creating and maintaining spaces for people to meet and build community. Sidewalks, streets, parks, libraries, transit, community centers, and gardens—spaces that local governments oversee—constitute the public realm. While we often view these places as hard infrastructure, their potential to foster “soft infrastructure” such as civic relationships and human capital remains underdeveloped. What if governments designed public spaces to maximize connection? During the pandemic, they temporarily used infrastructure this way—through slow streets, free transit, health services in community centers, and redesigned parks. If it worked then, why not all the time?
Local governments can further strengthen communities through local culture and civic pride. Where we come from shapes our sense of belonging. Even in a transient, digital world, most people spend much of their lives in one place. Local culture—its history, art, celebrations, customs, and people—plays a big role in how we feel about our communities and can bind us together. I saw this in Berlin during the 48 Stunden Neukölln festival, where streets, shops, and homes displayed art for the public, turning the entire neighborhood into a vibrant gallery. People mingled, explored, and took pride in their community. We can use cultural programming to deepen civic pride and participation, tying culture more closely to governance.
Ultimately, rebuilding faith in government begins with rebuilding faith in each other. When we share responsibility for our communities—when neighbors connect, participate, and help shape our governance—we push government to serve all of us better. The journey to restore faith in government and the process of restoring our social bonds are inseparable. Only by working together can we create the thriving, healthy communities we all desire.
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How Biden Can De-Reaganify Contracting Standards
We should’ve gotten rid of these Reagan-era restrictions long ago, but doing so now is more important than ever, with massive new federal funds in the pipeline for infrastructure and climate projects.
Dec 10, 2023
Ronald Reagan left highly visible marks on our capital city. The president who believed trees cause pollution now has his name carved into an edifice housing Environmental Protection Aagency offices. The infamous buster of the air traffic controllers union has an eponymous airport.
Even more disturbing? Vestiges of the Reagan era that are nearly invisible but continue to undermine progress towards a more equitable and sustainable economy.
Case in point: an obscure Office of Management and Budget (OMB) policy dubbed the “Uniform Guidance” that sets out rules for state and local governments when they use federal funds to pay private contractors. Republican officials in the Reagan administration seized on this policy as a weapon for blocking sub-federal actions they didn’t like.
Despite zero empirical evidence that an “efficiency above all” approach would improve contracting outcomes, the Reaganites succeeded in making it difficult for states and cities to attach labor and equity standards to contracts, for fear they would lose federal funding.
What, in particular, had the Reaganites so rankled? This was the 1980s, the era of a growing global movement to divest from Apartheid South Africa. Some U.S. cities and states wanted to join universities, churches, and other investors in refusing to do business with corporations that were profiting off the racist regime.
A report by Jobs to Move America and the Center for Media and Democracy delves into this history in depth, documenting the Reagan administration’s crusade to elevate contracting “efficiency” and “fair and open competition” above other interests, from fighting Apartheid to creating family-supporting jobs for those who need them most.
Reagan-Era Rules Reinforced Historic Racial and Economic Inequities
That Reagan officials lumped these issues together should come as no surprise. The Apartheid system itself was both racist and anti-union, designed to protect the privileges of a white elite class. And while the Republicans couched their arguments in free market rhetoric, the impact of their changes to OMB regulations reinforced our own country’s deeply embedded racial and economic inequities.
Despite zero empirical evidence that an “efficiency above all” approach would improve contracting outcomes, the Reaganites succeeded in making it difficult for states and cities to attach labor and equity standards to contracts, for fear they would lose federal funding.
The revisions also explicitly banned local hire programs, despite significant research dispelling the myth that such programs are anti-competitive and demonstrating positive benefits for disadvantaged workers and local economies. The Reagan-imposed ban meant, for example, that a largely Black city with high unemployment rooted in historic racism would have little power to prevent a contractor from bringing in an all-white, non-local engineering crew for an infrastructure project in their municipality.
We should’ve gotten rid of these Reagan-era restrictions long ago, but doing so now is more important than ever, with massive new federal funds in the pipeline for infrastructure and climate projects. Public funds are precious, and we all have an interest in ensuring that the benefits of these investments are equitably shared.
Biden Administration Proposals for Undoing These 1980s Holdovers
Fortunately, Biden’s OMB is moving in this direction with recently issued proposals for updating the Uniform Guidance. In a detailed public comment letter, nearly 150 unions and other members of the Local Opportunities Coalition commend the administration for positive improvements in 11 areas. Top on their list: the welcome removal of the ban on local hire policies.
The coalition also highlights changes to allow the use of scoring mechanisms to give companies a leg up in bidding competitions if they commit to creating specific numbers and types of jobs, with minimum levels of compensation and benefits. They also note positive steps to explicitly allow hiring preferences for disadvantaged communities, the use of project labor agreements between employers and workers and other pre-hire collective bargaining agreements, bans on the use of contract funds for union-busting, and protections against employers misclassifying workers as “independent contractors” to skirt labor laws.
How the Administration Could Go Further to Ensure Public Investments Benefit Workers and Communities
The Local Opportunities Coalition also recommends a few key ways the Biden administration could strengthen their proposals. For instance, they could explicitly allow states and cities to require that contractors (and their subcontractors) pay living wages and clarify that local hire policies can apply to both infrastructure and service contracts.
In a separate comment letter, several pro-worker and Wall Street accountability groups also applauded the Biden administration’s progress while suggesting that OMB officials also make explicit that state and local officials have the flexibility to consider additional equity factors to ensure public funds actually help workers instead of lining the pockets of wealthy executives and shareholders.
Specifically, they urge support for procurement policies that give preference to companies that refrain from wasteful spending on stock buybacks, excessive CEO pay, and private equity-driven leveraged buyouts and drastic cost-cutting.
“Discouraging these practices will help ensure that corporate recipients of public funds provide high-quality services with broadly shared benefits,” notes the letter, signed by Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, the Institute for Policy Studies, Communications Workers of America, Jobs to Move America, Take on Wall Street, and United for Respect.
The OMB is expected to finalized changes to the Uniform Guidance in early 2024.
Back in the 1980s, Reagan’s efforts to crush the anti-Apartheid divestment movement ultimately failed. With demands for sanctions mounting, Congress passed a law in 1986 that gave cover to this effective means of solidarity with the South African trade unionists and others who successfully brought down the racist regime.
By scrapping the remnants of Reagan’s ideologically driven contracting standards, the Biden administration can build on this proud history of using the public purse for the greater good.
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'Save the News' Campaign Urges Immediate Covid-19 Relief Funds to Sustain Local Journalism in Time of Crisis
"Americans need access to information about their local communities more than ever, and yet layoffs and furloughs are only increasing as this pandemic continues."
May 18, 2020
In response to the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the news industry--forcing tens of thousands of layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts in recent months--the nation's largest labor union for media workers launched a new "Save the News" campaign on Monday and urged Congress to provide relief to an industry that should be considered an essential service in a democracy.
"Americans need access to information about their local communities more than ever, and yet layoffs and furloughs are only increasing as this pandemic continues. Congress needs to act to save the news before it's too late."
--Jon Schleuss, The NewsGuild
The NewsGuild, a sector of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), represents over 24,000 workers in North America. In a statement announcing its new campaign, the union noted that "local news outlets have been damaged for years by tech giants siphoning away advertising revenue and private equity ownership groups hollowing out the industry with extreme cost-cutting measures."
"The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the devastation of the local news industry," the statement continues, acknowledging advertising revenue declines as well as job and wage losses. "At the same time, readers are turning to local news outlets in record numbers in search of accurate, up-to-the-minute information about how the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting their communities. Those journalists who remain have been hard at work providing life-saving public health information to readers, with many outlets offering their Covid-19 coverage for free as a public service despite financial strains."
The union's new campaign "will involve a six-figure digital ad campaign, direct lobbying on Capitol Hill, and a new website where--among other things--laid off and furloughed journalists will chronicle the industry's plights," according to the Daily Beast. The new website also details a three-part plan for federal lawmakers to provide relief to local news outlets, calling on Congress to:
- Providing direct grants to workers to subsidize the incomes of employees at local print and online news outlets;
- Expanding access to the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for local news outlets that currently may be ineligible because they are owned by larger companies; and
- Directing federal spending on community outreach advertising to local newspapers to replace lost revenue.
"I am humbled to see so many members of our industry unite under one cause: protecting local journalism," NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss said in a statement. "Americans need access to information about their local communities more than ever, and yet layoffs and furloughs are only increasing as this pandemic continues. Congress needs to act to save the news before it's too late."
\u201cSince 2004, the U.S. has lost ~1,800 newspapers, many of them small papers outside major cities. That's why, today, we're launching #SaveTheNews, a historic advocacy campaign making the case for why news must be included in future recovery efforts. https://t.co/puWmWUAYem\u201d— NewsGuild-CWA (@NewsGuild-CWA) 1589807942
"The window isn't closed," Schleuss told the Daily Beast. "But it has gotten worse [in just the last month] and it is going to get worse every day."
As the Daily Beast reported:
The campaign, bluntly titled "Save the News," is unlike anything that NewsGuild-CWA has done in decades, officials say. And it puts the union in delicate territory: asking for direct assistance from the very political entities and officials that it covers. Schleuss acknowledged the discomfort that can come when an industry premised on telling other people's stories of suffering now is being forced to chronicle and promote its own. But with newspapers hit hard by slash-and-cut-minded ownership and ad revenues being lost because of the economic downturn caused by the spread of the coronavirus, there are, simply put, few remaining options.
"It has been a challenge for our industry in marketing ourselves that we aren't telling the stories that what we have done has positively impacted communities," Schleuss said.
Journalist John Nichols wrote for The Nation last week that "the federal government has a long history of providing support for diverse and independent local media, going back to the founding days of the republic--a subject Robert W. McChesney and I explored at length in our 2010 book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again."
"But the current crisis is so extreme and coming on so rapidly," he added, "that it requires immediate attention that draws on existing proposals for sustaining journalism, as well as new ones."
Nichols acknowledged efforts by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the New York Times to track the impacts that the pandemic has had on the news media industry as well as calls from advocacy groups and congressional lawmakers (pdf) for using federal coronavirus relief funds to support local journalism.
"Journalism cannot survive, and certainly not thrive, without resources. And those resources are not coming from a 'free market' that has stalled out," Nichols warned. "There has to be a federal fix, and that means that Congress must include muscular support for journalism in stimulus measures." Among the calls Nichols highlighted was a proposal from Free Press Action, a media reform group with which he and McChesney have long been associated.
\u201cPrint, broadcast and digital newsrooms are hollowing out as journalists are laid off, furloughed and abandoned. News deserts are developing amid the #COVID19 meltdown. The future of journalism is on the line, and with it the future of democracy.\n https://t.co/ZqP9sX7r8O\u201d— John Nichols (@John Nichols) 1589370229
As Common Dreams reported last week, Free Press Action's proposal, What a Journalism-Recovery Package Should Look Like During the Covid-19 Crisis (pdf), encourages both immediate relief to protect local reporting jobs and longer-term policies that "could create a bridge from this emergency period to a future of sustainable journalism that serves and represents local communities, especially Black and Latinx communities that have been disproportionately harmed by the current crisis and poorly served by dominant media."
According to Nichols: "Two things distinguish Free Press Action's recommendations. First, they focus on sustaining journalism, rather than bailouts for the big media companies--and hedge-fund investors--that were making a mess of things even before the pandemic hit. Second, they bring realism and precision to a discussion that to this point has lacked clarity."
Specifically, the advocacy group's proposal says that "Free Press Action does not support measures to treat large newspaper or broadcasting chains as small businesses under recovery efforts such as the Paycheck Protection Program. Such policies put deeper-pocketed interests in competition with smaller businesses that have much less access to legal and banking resources."
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