How do America’s founding principles apply to democracy today?

Since his inauguration, many of President Trump’s assertive actions have prompted legal and congressional scholars to question the scope of expanded executive authority. In the first episode Democracy in Question season two, host Katie Dunn Tenpas unpacks what’s happened to our system of checks and balances and how the founding principles of American democracy apply today with Senior Fellows Molly Reynolds and Sarah Binder.

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TENPAS: Hi, I’m Katie Dunn Tenpas, a visiting fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and director of the Katzmann Initiative on Improving Interbranch Relations and Government. And this is season two of Democracy in Question, a podcast where we examine current events through the lens of America’s political foundations, thinking about how recent events fit into the broader stream of democracy that runs throughout our history. You can find episodes of this podcast at Brookings dot edu slash Democracy in Question, all one word.

I’m kicking off season two with the question, how do America’s founding principles apply to democracy today? What has happened to our system of checks and balances? It’s an issue on the minds of many people and not just domestically, but globally as well. Since the inauguration, the Trump administration has relied heavily on executive orders, emergency declarations, and agency-level rules changes to push policies quickly, bypassing Congress—a trend that started in his first term but has accelerated in his second. Within the first few weeks of his second term, President Donald Trump has issued a record-breaking number of executive orders targeting immigration, government agencies like USAID, and social policies like DEI programs. He has created the new so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by private citizen Elon Musk, the richest person in the world. And many of his cabinet nominees have been approved, though narrowly, despite the fact that some of them raised significant concerns about their qualifications.

Many of President Trump’s assertive actions have prompted legal and congressional scholars to call into question the jurisdiction of executive authority and to consider whether we’re bearing witness to the erosion of American democracy.

To explore answers to this vital question, how do America’s founding principles apply to democracy today, I’m talking with two of my wonderful colleagues who have devoted a lot of their time to examining Congress and American government more broadly. I’m eager to unpack this question with my colleagues Molly Reynolds, our expert on the House of Representatives. Hi, Molly. Thank you for joining us.

REYNOLDS: Hi, Katie. It’s great to be here.

TENPAS: And Sarah Binder, our expert on the Senate. Welcome, Sarah.

BINDER: Great to be here. Thanks, Katie and Molly.

TENPAS: Yeah. And why don’t we start with Sarah, maybe just a general reaction to the question, how do America’s founding principles apply to democracy today? And then we’ll go from there.

[2:55]

BINDER: Sure. I just want to say before we get going that Molly and I are bicameral aficionados, so we love to dip into each institutional chamber. So founding principles here, there are many of them. I’ll just boil down the ones that are top of mind of late. One, certainly in the realm of making constitutions, is separation of powers and its corollary in our U.S. Constitution, the sharing of powers a little bit, consequentially, across institutions.

So first and foremost, just keeping in mind the framers were quite aware that each of these branches, judicial, the executive branch, and legislative branch, that there were purposes for each of them. And, you know, as a student of Congress, Article I, can’t help but think it’s the most important branch, and the framers likely thought that, too, right? Not least because of the historical origins of a revolution against being governed by a king.

Also, just to keep in mind that the Brits had a parliament and still have a parliament as well. And they had their own tussles with the King historically reaching back hundreds of years. So when the framers met, they weren’t just trying to rein in executives, cabin off their authority. They’re really about empowering the Congress to be the representative of the people, right? Certainly on the House side with direct election.

So that’s how I think the most important thing here is separation of powers. Everybody had a role, a mission, and I’m sure we’ll come back to that the interests of the folks who are populating these institutions were to be connected to the rights of the place, and I’m sure we’ll come to unpack some of that later. But first and foremost, that’s just where I’d keep my eyesight these days.

[4:51]

REYNOLDS: I would add that it’s not just that when the framers were coming up with the Constitution that they were really concerned about cabining executive power. It’s that they were concerned about it in the spending space. That one of the sets of things that had given rise to an interest in having a more limited executive power were things that had happened in England around exercises of spending power.

And so when we think about what we are seeing now in terms of the specific abuses on the part of the executive branch of its authority intruding into Congress’s power of the purse powers, there’s a there’s a really clear line that goes back in history to the time of the founding that suggests that it’s not just that, again, the founders were generally concerned about a too powerful executive. They were specifically concerned about an executive who was trying to spend money in ways that Congress had not authorized.

TENPAS: Right. And to get back to your comment, Sarah, about Article I and Congress being the dominant favored institution, if you just look at the Constitution itself, you can see textually that Article I has far more powers delegated to it than the executive in Article II and then the courts in Article III. And so just from looking at the text itself, it’s clear that there was dominance given to that branch of government. And can you talk a little bit about how that panned out for the first century of American government? And then we can take it through historically to see how we got to where we are today?

[6:25]

BINDER: Sure. So first to keep in mind that there were no organized mass-based political parties that we have today. So when we think about how Congress evolved in its first hundred years under the Constitution, we’re also looking at it as parties developed first inside Congress, then as mass-based electoral parties, and then ultimately, obviously, parties in government and more generally as organizations built.

So I think if we have one takeaway from that first hundred years is Congress dominated, right? We didn’t have an executive branch that was nearly as large as we had certainly first in the wake of World War I. It wasn’t called World War I at the time, but in the wake of the Great World War, but then certainly after World War II’s expansion and as we’ll come to, obviously, the Great Society’s expansion in the 20th century.

So Congress dominated. There was no nonpartisan civil service for most of the 19th century. The courts hadn’t nearly reached the degree of authority and influence and impact that they have today because Congress, we think, was legislating. They weren’t simply bucking cases through inaction. So … and the interest group environment takes a little while to get to develop, and certainly parties come and to basically reorganize Congress. So we get more emphasis on who controls which chamber and which branch, and we begin to see sort of really—obviously, putting aside the Civil War—parties begin to organize these conflicts, so we get partisan conflicts, not just institutional conflicts between Congress and the president.

TENPAS: And you would say that sort of started to emerge pre-Civil War a little bit?

[8:13]

BINDER: You certainly get the first formations of those parties. Got a party breakdown during the Civil War, but the parties that come out of it are the same parties we have today, the Democrats and the Republicans. So they’re very long rooted. They’re—remember, a federal system—they get rooted in the states. The state parties are pretty strong. Who’s going to run? You’re going to come up through the party system. So that’s going to be quite a bit different than the way we think about lawmakers today as kind of single-minded candidates who are not nearly as dependent on the party as they would have been in the 19th century.

TENPAS: Right. And Molly, as kind of like a corollary that goes along with the separation of powers, it’s that of checks and balances. And so Sarah just explained that in the early part of our country’s history, Congress was really the dominant branch. It was Article I. It was sort of in command. Can you talk about it over the course of history? How did the checks and balances seem to work out? Were they a good check on the executive? Did the executive check the Congress? How did they work together?

[9:10]

REYNOLDS: Yeah, so I think this has sort of ebbed and flowed in different ways over the course of American history. And I think, again, as Sarah was saying, in the 19th century, we sort of had this this powerful Congress in part because, again, the scope of the executive branch was a lot smaller. The executive branch simply did fewer things. We didn’t have the same vision for an expansive administrative state that started to emerge in the early 20th century. And then, again, as a result, the courts were not expected to do nearly as much.

And we’ve certainly had breakdowns in the checks and balances system over over the course of American history. We have the very 19th century moment where President Jackson says that the Supreme Court has made their decision, now let them enforce it. So certainly moments of that.

But I do think that it’s really in the 20th century that we, as the federal government, and sort of what we expect of the federal government, what we expect of a national government to be delivering in terms of services and that sort of thing to citizens across the country, we start to we just start to get a much more robust executive branch. And then that has downstream consequences in interaction with all kinds of other things like the changing nature of our politics and a rising sense of partisan politics and partisan polarization. So that’s part of how we end up where we are today.

TENPAS: And Sarah, is the turning point to you FDR’s multiple terms and the New Deal and all of those programs that created the expansion of the executive that then really created the conditions for where we are today?

[10:45]

BINDER: I would think of it this way, that the nature of the demands on government and the crises that the government encounters first in the run-up and the prosecution of World War I, but then World War II, certainly World War II, right? that the things that Congress does well, think about the 19th century, they spent a lot of, well relative to the time, right? a lot of money: roads, rivers, harbors, railroads, ports—

REYNOLDS: —the Post Office—

BINDER: —the Post Office. Every single rural delivery line. Right? So there’s an awful lot that Congress is doing to build the government, which makes sense given the conditions of the of the 19th century. But those aren’t the crises, those aren’t really crises, those are opportunities, but the crises of certainly the Great Depression with the concurrent and following on of World War II and the turning to America to be the one who’s got the Army and the Navy and so forth and the Air Force to combat that war.

So what does Congress do in that type of crisis? That’s not what they’re made for. Right? Moving quickly, reaching consensus. Think about it—it becomes very presidential driven, right? and largely because of the deference of lawmakers. Because who wants to be blamed? Right? Think FDR’s first day in office when he was inaugurated in March, there was a 1933 emergency banking bill to deal with the fact that the banks had been shut down, the Great Depression. It was introduced at 8 a.m. and it was signed, sealed, and delivered by 5 p.m. that day, more or less take a couple hours. Right? That only happens when lawmakers are willing to give that power. And that’s the beginning of sometimes purposefully handing over power to the executive because you didn’t want to make those political choices about tariffs, you know, people always pleading for exceptions like, hey, you take this executive. Crisis, response, all those powers given to the president and the president just builds on them in ways that I’m sure will come forward too.

TENPAS: Yeah. Do you want to add to that, Molly?

[12:58]

REYNOLDS: Yeah. So, I think that we can continue to see those same trends continue through the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century. And I think this notion of purposeful delegation by Congress to the executive branch when it serves Congress’s political partisan policy needs, then once the executive branch has that power, it is very difficult for Congress to get it back even if it wants to. The ratchet doesn’t only go one way, but it mostly only goes one way.

TENPAS: It’s hard to reclaim.

REYNOLDS: It’s hard to reclaim. And then again, when you start to interact the changing political dynamics, you get to a point where also parties in Congress are often willing to cede authority to the executive branch because they care about the outcomes and not necessarily the process that leads to those outcomes. And so you will see, and we can talk about this in the context of the current moment,  we’ve sort of escalated it in the current moment, but it’s not a brand new phenomenon. We’ve seen for several decades members of Congress from both parties being willing to say, oh, we can’t do this. It’s too hard to figure this out legislatively. We can’t come to agreement. So I’m okay with an executive of my own party just doing it unilaterally, doing it using executive power, even if that means that then in the future, when the presidency is controlled by the other party or we get to a point where Congress actually does want to try and do something and the executive is standing in the way, then it’s much harder kind of to get that power back to reassert itself.

TENPAS: Yeah. And we haven’t talked about the courts yet, Sarah, but what have the courts done to facilitate this?

[14:39]

BINDER: Well, I guess the benign view of the courts is that as litigants and as groups have lost in Congress or Congress has failed to resolve questions for good or for ill—abortion questions, immigration, certainly foremost immigration questions today, some degree healthcare, right?—the whole range of these issues that don’t get resolved in Congress, somebody sues eventually, like the education, the loan forgiveness under Biden. So, the courts have become the major policy player. Right? They were deciding cases, and this is probably a decade ago, there was a pro golf case about who could be involved and who wasn’t. If you’re doing golf decisions, you’ve like reached your arms around America. I don’t play golf. I don’t know, but it seems to me you’ve got a pretty broad swath. Right?

And so some of this, I would say, is a consequence of sort of deadlocked Congress, again, for for good or for worse, not able to resolve these questions. But some of it is a litigious movement in America that’s been underway for decades. And it’s ambitious groups organized, newly organized, I think, after the ‘80s on the right, where the left have been quite more dominant. Congress writes into the laws the opportunity to sue. Right? So certainly on environmental laws, it’s right there in the statute. You can come back to what the current Trump administration thinks about that type of litigation. So there are lots of avenues that lead to the courts. I think that’s probably the benign view. The less benign view is is that the court’s decisions are putting themselves into arbiters. Right? Certainly, a recent case on deference to bureaucrats and agencies on ambiguous matters, right? Saying there may be some deference—

TENPAS:  —Loper Bright—

BINDER: —Exactly. But on many of these issues, there will be no deference. It’s the it’s the judges who decide. So all sorts of currents here turning toward the court. And of course the court’s got discretion over its docket. They don’t have to take these cases. They don’t take very many cases these days. So a lot of these issues aren’t being aren’t being resolved.

[16:55]

REYNOLDS: I’d also say that, and this I think falls in maybe Sarah’s less benign view of the courts, but in addition to courts working to structure their own power, we’ve also had a several-decade project on the part of the federal courts to bolster executive power. So as Congress, for the reasons we’ve already talked about, has been willing to cede more of its power to the executive branch, the courts have been doing their part in reading a much more expansive view of executive power and just granting executive agencies, granting the president much more much more authority under things like the unitary executive theory, in some ways culminating in the Supreme Court’s decision in the immunity case, just a notion that the president has a lot of unilateral authority. And so it’s coming from both directions to the executive branch in terms of expanding its power. And then I think what we’re seeing now is some of the consequences of that.

TENPAS: Is it fair to say that you could sort of think about the interaction between the courts, Congress, and the presidency as there is a certain quantum of power. And so if one branch starts to cede some of its power, the other two, one of the other two will take it up such that the level of power remains the same, but the distribution among the branches depends on like a certain branch’s willingness to kind of cede that it will be picked up by someone else?

[18:16]

BINDER: Yeah, I used to think that for a while it was zero-sum, right? Congress weakens because it’s not able to reach decision, the president jumps in, grabs that power. And that feels very zero-sum to me. Of late, and even pre-January 20th, 2025, I wonder whether it’s negative sum, that both sides are made worse off, right? Think about any of these issues where Congress hasn’t acted, the president has done something, courts step in, or courts don’t step in, but the next administration comes in and undoes it. So certainly DACA, right? Done, Congress stalemate, immigration, Obama administration uses its discretion under the law to expand in a ways. The court more or less leaves the current one in place, but it’s subject to changes and a president revoking it, right?

Or the education. Congress isn’t clear on student loan. Biden takes the law, stretches it to use it for loan deferment or loan cancel loans. And then Republicans come in and get rid of it, and the courts as well.

So who’s better off here, right? You need statute. Back to Article I, right? You need Congress to find ways to resolve these questions, or at least try to resolve them, in a way that provides a statutory basis for the president, which gives the president more legitimacy when he tries to make decisions or to use or implement those laws.

TENPAS: Right.

[19:39]

REYNOLDS: I think another way to think about this is sort of the current arrangement is uncertainty increasing in that, as Sarah sketched out, sort of a heavy reliance on executive power, an expanse of executive power, and then individuals trying to take the executive branch to court just creates a lot of uncertainty. And the notion that, you know, if you have an executive branch of one party doing something and then there’s a change in power, they can sort of reverse it more easily if it’s done via executive order or some other executive action. It just it creates a lot of oscillations in policy.

And it also generates this sort of situation that we have right now where the executive branch will do something that may be in violation of the law. Someone takes them to court, but sort of the courts have all of these doctrines and approaches to like issuing restraining orders and putting injunctions in place.

And so there’s this question of the executive branch might be doing something bad or might be doing something that exceeds its power. But until sort of the stars align to challenge that in court, we don’t have a mechanism for doing anything about that. So this notion of sort of governing by lawsuit and getting to this sort of getting point where it’s harder to stop an aggressive executive branch because of the ways the other branches are arranged to try to check that power.

TENPAS: Right, right. So presumably by this point, our listeners have sort of a really good historical context and framework of where we are. So talk about today in light of these constitutional principles and what you’re thinking about.

BINDER: Well, every day is yet another mind blowing—

TENPAS: —it’s February 20th—

BINDER: Thank you. And it’s in early afternoon, so things may yet happen that we don’t know about.

[21:26]

Where where should we start? Certainly, well, there are two things at the top of my mind. I’ll just grab the grab the impoundment one to start us off, and then I’d like maybe to come back to the notion of independent agencies, which was of late in the news.

On the impoundment, the, I guess, most shocking, well, let me say, before I say it’s shocking, we were warned in 2020, certainly when Russ Voigt went to OMB, we were warned about all these things that have now we’ve been seeing the last four or five weeks. And one of them we saw certainly in a form in the impeachment, the first impeachment of Donald Trump over withholding funding that was supposed to be given to Ukraine. So it it shouldn’t be shocking, but the scope and the brazenness with which our administration has acted is the shocking part. And in essence, we could sum it up, not to do justice, but to sum it up to say one day in one memo, the OMB tried to stop 3,000 federal programs, which seem to be, numbers vary, but maybe $3 trillion worth, right? that Congress had appropriated, and the president had signed into law.

REYNOLDS: So they just tried to turn off the government.

BINDER: Turn it off. Goodbye. We’re done.

TENPAS: Did they find the switch?

BINDER: Yes, they seem to be … have their hands on the tiller. So that is certainly first and foremost when we’re thinking about, as Molly said, one of those early, early really important clashes and thinking about the framers was about impoundments, right? And and yes, there are going to be some programs with some discretion built into the law. And there will be this debate, eventually the Supreme Court, about when Congress has said, you can spend $500 billion, here’s $500 billion. Is that a ceiling? We’ll be at debates about that as well.

So first and foremost, that’s just like drives home this question of the the separation of powers and the importance that the framers placed on putting power of the purse so the government couldn’t make spending decisions, right? without consent from Congress. That’s just undermining this seemingly inviolable constitutional principle.

[23:46]

REYNOLDS: And I think one of the things that’s been sort of especially surprising to me about it, and maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, is that for a long time, we’ve sort of joked to the extent that congressional scholars make jokes about things that in the—

BINDER: —they’re ___ jokes, they’re just not always funny—

REYNOLDS: —that’s true. That’s true. Not everyone not everyone finds them funny. Sarah and I find each other’s jokes funny. But we’ve joked that in Congress, there are really three parties. There are the Democrats, the Republicans, and the appropriators. And by and large—

BINDER: —See, that’s funny. That’s funny.

REYNOLDS: By and large, over the past several weeks, and maybe, I don’t know, maybe there’s things we’re not seeing, maybe as the the period between now and when the current measure of funding the government runs out in mid-March, things will change. But the degree to which sort of even congressional appropriators have not tried to exercise their institutional power and come out and say, no, it is not acceptable for another branch of government to be flouting so openly the choices that we, the Congress, made in accordance with our constitutional power.

And again, they may yet surprise me again in the other direction. I don’t know. But that that, again, even amidst all of the other changes, this was a place where I think many folks still thought there was some amount of like institutional interest and institutional investment. And it just has not played out in the way that I think many folks would have expected over these first couple of weeks.

TENPAS: So there is no single member of the House or the Senate who’s sort of taking this institutional view of, we have to stop this to preserve our power as an institution?

[25:26]

BINDER: Well, I think that Democrats, hard to say, certainly not been effective in the way we can judge yet. Democrats have been quite vocal in trying to refine their message to figure out how to get this across to the public, why they should care about it, why they are or will be impacted by it. And you will occasionally see some concerns from Senate Republicans now and then. I suspect that it sounds from the reporting there’s back-channeling of Republican concern. But I doubt its phrased in terms of this is our role. It’s like, hmm, the University of Alabama is going to get cut in their NIH funding. So please, Senator Britt says to whomever she’s talking to in the administration, you can’t treat us that way. Right? Which, of course, is the bigger danger is that the pressure valve gets gets loosened, so steam lets off by selectively deciding on their public decisions.

TENPAS: Sort of parochial decisions.

BINDER: Obviously, obviously there’s parochialism in the appropriations process, but it is at least the elected branch making those decisions.

TENPAS: Right. Right. What will be the turning point or will there be a turning point where there will be less allegiance to Trump?

[26:41]

REYNOLDS: I don’t know. In particular, I don’t know how it happens without something in sort of what we think of as the tail risk happening. So like one consequence of kind of expansive reach of, as you described it accurately, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is not in fact a department.

TENPAS: It’s an office in OMB.

REYNOLDS: Exactly. Into the sort of reaches of federal agencies and really their attempt to get control of a whole set of kind of data streams in the federal government is that I think there runs a real risk that something breaks, and it breaks in a way that they can’t immediately fix. The sort of thing like Social Security checks don’t go on. I don’t want to say that’s going to be the thing, but something like that—

TENPAS: —right, a major failure—

REYNOLDS: —that really sort of elevates for the broader public the consequences of this particular flavor of executive aggrandizement. Because I think one of the things that, again, I think both Sarah and I are trying to get across, is that where we are now is different in kind than what we’ve seen in the past but is also kind of the next step in a long transfer of authority from, in different ways, the legislative branch and the judicial branch into the executive branch.

[27:58]

BINDER: I always mangle the phrase, so you’d think I get it down at this point in life, but from Madison, from Federalist 51, right? the idea that talking about Congress and the other institutions, right? that the interests of the man will be or shall be connected to the interests of the place, the constitutional interests of the place, right? Meaning that lawmakers should stand up and their interests as lawmakers should be connected to what those powers are to be a lawmaker.

But as Molly and I are wont to say, the congressional rules can’t enforce themselves, they can’t protect themselves.

REYNOLDS: They’re not magic.

BINDER: They’re not magic. So, but neither is the Constitution. It’s not self-enforcing. And you think about it, there’s no mechanism in the Constitution to force lawmakers’ interests to align with being lawmakers. And you might even, I don’t know what Madison thought, right? the interests of the man. Well, in today’s party system, yeah, the interests of Republican lawmakers largely it seems, at least sufficiently it seems, they like the policies coming out from the White House. And so the interests of the man are connected in some way. So, but I think that’s part of what we’re like grasping with.

TENPAS: Right. It also seems clear that they may like these policies now, and they may have liked the whole shock and awe approach to how the administration did this, but it seems to me there’s going to be a lag time before the rubber meets the road and people in their districts are suffering because some of these decisions, which could then possibly lead to changes in behavior.

[29:25]

REYNOLDS: Yeah, I mean, it’s certainly interesting to have this conversation about a really sort of expansive and aggressive and unchecked use of executive power. And while at the same time, to the degree that Congress is actually trying to legislate, Republicans in Congress, who hold majorities in both chambers, a very narrow one in the House, are themselves running up against this notion that there are things that some of them want to do that are opposed by the constituents of other members of the party. So things around cutting Medicaid, cutting SNAP, nutrition assistance, particular provisions of the tax code. And so, you know, you can see that dynamic in the space where Congress itself is trying to act. And then there’s just this question about kind of when does that dynamic intersect with the one that we’re seeing in the executive branch?

TENPAS: Yeah. I think we need to meet again and talk about this. In maybe just a month because so much happens in the course of a month.

BINDER: And we’ll bring some good Congress jokes.

TENPAS: Yeah, better, better jokes So I want to end this session with a question that I’ll be asking all of my guests this season two. And it’s the idea that you’re teaching, I know you teach college university students, but if you were teaching high school students, right? because that seems to be the point at which you start to really sort of appreciate what’s happening outside your world. What’s one lesson you’d want them to leave your classroom with? Yeah, it’s a tough one.

[30:51]

BINDER: We could come up with 10 lessons, and I may yet come to believe this isn’t true anymore, but it is really hard to in the U.S. system, in our political system, to move the ship of state in any radical, quick way. And that changes off course find their way back to the middle. And there are downsides to being in the middle, right? and downsides of this sort of conservative status quo bias. However, it would protect from these sort of aggressive moves from a very personalistic, hard-right populist Trump. So I think that would be my, hopefully, takeaway lesson for them is don’t don’t give up, and don’t give up pursuing what you believe in and what you want, because you think inevitably, quote unquote, crisis and the system’s over, or things will never be the same. And they may be different, but it’s hard to move the ship of state, and what they can do to get it back in the place that seems more amenable and equal and democratic is is still valuable.

TENPAS: So kind of a lesson in resiliency to some extent.

BINDER: I think that would sum it up quite nicely.

TENPAS: Good. Molly, what about you?

[31:56]

REYNOLDS: Yeah, I think that in some ways we’ve already touched on what I would say, which is this notion that none of the things that are part of our system are self-enforcing—not the Constitution, not the rules of the House and the Senate, not various regulations put in place by agencies, none of it. And so all of it comes down to the interaction between what’s on paper and who is actually exercising power to kind of implement what’s on paper again, whether that’s what’s in the Constitution, what’s in the rules of the House and the Senate, what’s written in law, all of it.

[music]

TENPAS: Really interesting. And special thanks to you both. That was a really fascinating conversation, and you’ll definitely be back, I hope. Thank you.

REYNOLDS: Thanks for having me, Katie.

BINDER: Thanks, Katie. That was great.

[music]

TENPAS: Democracy in Question is a production of the Brookings Podcast Network. Thank you for listening. And thank you to my guests for sharing their time and expertise on this podcast.

Also, thanks to the team at Brookings that makes this podcast possible, including Fred Dews, producer; Daniel Morales, audio engineer and video manager; the team in Governance Studies including associate producer Adelle Patten, plus Antonio Saadipour, and Tara Moulson; and our government affairs and promotion colleagues in the Office of Communications at Brookings. Shavanthi Mendis designed the beautiful logo and show art.

You can find episodes of Democracy in Question wherever you like to get your podcasts and learn more about the show on our website at Brookings dot edu slash Democracy in Question, all one word.

I’m Katie Dunn Tenpas. Thank you for listening.