America’s Biggest Problems Keep Getting Worse. But There’s a Path Forward.

Welcome to Wednesday Insight, where we examine the evidence and historical data to help explain the structural realities of our government.

Have you noticed that America’s biggest problems keep getting worse, not better? Immigration. Healthcare costs. The national debt. The cost of a college education. These are not new problems. Politicians have been talking about them for decades. And yet here we are, still talking.

That is not an accident.

So, let’s explore something about our American political system today that most Americans have no real understanding of, and why the government institutions and systems that are there to support us have been degrading over time. Not because the problems are too hard to solve. Not because good ideas don’t exist. But because the way our political parties operate today makes solving them virtually impossible, even for leaders who want to.

What Policy Actually Means

Let’s start with a word you hear all the time but that almost nobody ever defines: policy.

Politicians talk about their “energy policy” and their “environment policy” and their “infrastructure policy.” But what does that word actually mean? Because if it just means an opinion, or a promise, or a talking point, then it means nothing at all. And that is exactly how both parties prefer it.

So, let’s be clear about the true definition of policy, because everything that follows depends on it.

A real policy is a specific government action, such as a law, a regulation, a budget decision, or an executive order, that is designed to solve a clearly defined problem. It is carried out by a specific government agency. It is funded with real, identified dollars. It is measured against real, defined results. And it gets revisited and adjusted when it is not working.ⁱ

That is it. That is the true definition. Not a position. Not a campaign promise. Not a soundbite on the evening news. An actual plan, with an actual owner, actual funding, and an actual way to measure whether it worked.

When you hold that definition up against what most politicians call policy, something uncomfortable becomes very clear: most of what gets called policy in America today never gets anywhere close to that standard. And until we demand that it does, nothing is going to change.

How Real Policy Is Supposed to Get Made

Now that we know what policy actually means, let’s talk about how it is supposed to get made. Because there is a process, and it matters. When that process gets skipped or shortcut, which happens constantly in American politics today, the result is not policy. It is theater.

The formal discipline of public policy defines a structured, six-stage process that any serious policy effort must move through. Every single stage is necessary.ⁱⁱ

Stage 1: Problem Identification. Defining the problem with specificity, using data, not ideology. What is broken? Who is affected? How did we get here? What are the real structural causes? You cannot design a solution to a problem you have not actually defined.

Stage 2: Agenda Setting. This is the process by which an identified problem gets elevated to active government consideration. Think tanks, media, interest groups, and elected officials all play roles in determining what gets prioritized.ⁱⁱⁱ It sounds straightforward. It is not. This is where special interests, donor pressure, and political calculations do most of their damage, elevating problems that are useful for fundraising rather than problems that are urgent for the country.

Stage 3: Policy Formulation. The design phase. Experts, stakeholders, and policymakers develop specific proposals, analyze feasibility, model costs and benefits, and evaluate tradeoffs. This is the engineering work of governance. It is painstaking, it requires genuine expertise, and it is almost entirely absent from what passes for political debate today.

Stage 4: Policy Adoption. When a proposed solution is enacted through legislation, executive order, or regulatory action. This requires debate, negotiation, and coalition-building across competing interests. It is supposed to be difficult, because solutions that last require broad agreement to survive changes in political leadership.

Stage 5: Policy Implementation. Where most policies quietly fail. Agencies must allocate funding, hire qualified staff, write rules, and build the organizational structures needed to actually deliver results. A law on paper is not a solution. It only becomes one when the right agency has the right resources and the right structure to carry it out.^iv

Stage 6: Policy Evaluation. Measuring whether the policy achieved its intended outcomes, identifying unintended consequences, and making adjustments when it is not working. This stage is almost completely absent from American political discourse, because admitting that something is not working requires a willingness to be held accountable that neither party currently demonstrates.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of what passes for policy work in American politics today operates almost entirely at Stage 2. Both parties use identified problems not to advance serious solutions but to keep issues visible enough to motivate fundraising and partisan turnout. Stages 3 through 6, where the real work of governance actually lives, rarely receive the structural rigor that actual problem-solving requires. That pattern has held across both parties, across decades, and across every combination of who controlled Washington.

Why the System Keeps Failing Us

So why doesn’t any of this happen the way it is supposed to?

The answer is not incompetence, although some of that exists too. The answer is incentives. Both parties have been quietly shaped, over decades, into organizations that are primarily focused on winning elections than truly governing. And those two things, it turns out, require very different skills and very different motivations.

Think about it from a purely practical standpoint. If your party solves immigration, you lose one of your most powerful fundraising issues. If your party solves the healthcare cost crisis, you lose the donations that flow from the industries that benefit from the current broken system. An unsolved problem that makes voters angry is, politically speaking, an asset. A solved problem is yesterday’s news.

This is not a cynical theory. It is a pattern that shows up in the data. A landmark study by Princeton’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page, examining 1,779 policy issues over three decades, found that the preferences of the average American have “only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” What matters instead are the preferences of economic elites and organized special interests.^v Congress has gone from passing roughly 900 laws per session in the early 1950s to just 64 in 2025. That is a 93% collapse in legislative output over seventy years, across both parties, across every combination of who controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House.^vi

And the American people feel it. A record 45% of Americans now identify as independent, the highest level since modern tracking began.^vii More than six in ten Americans say they believe a third major party is needed.^viii That is not a protest. That is a majority of the country telling us the current system is not working for them.

The question is: what do we do about it?

The Three Disciplines of Serious Governance

The six-stage policy cycle is the process. But knowing the process is not enough. What separates serious governance from political theater is the discipline to apply that process honestly, even when the results are inconvenient. Three disciplines make the difference.

Discipline 1: Start with root causes, not surface symptoms.

Every major national problem has a visible surface and a structural foundation. The surface is what politicians argue about. The foundation is where the problem actually lives. Energy costs are not just a supply problem. They reflect decades of inconsistent policy, competing regulatory frameworks, and infrastructure that was never designed for the demands we are placing on it today. Environmental degradation is not just a corporate behavior problem. It is the product of incentive structures, enforcement gaps, and political deals that allowed short-term economic interests to override long-term public ones. Infrastructure failures are not just a funding problem. They are the result of decades of deferred maintenance, project prioritization driven by political convenience rather than structural need, and procurement systems that reward low bids over durable outcomes. Until you understand the foundation, every proposed solution is just patching the surface.

Discipline 2: Let evidence lead, not ideology.

Both parties have positions they hold regardless of what the evidence shows. That is not governing. That is loyalty to a donor base. Serious problem-solving means asking a simple question about every proposal: does the evidence support this? Has it worked somewhere else? What do the actual costs and benefits look like? What would we need to see to know it is working, and what would we need to see to know it is not? Those are not partisan questions. They are the basic questions that any responsible decision-maker in any field asks before committing to a course of action. The moment a political leader stops asking those questions, they have stopped governing and started performing.

Discipline 3: Prioritize by impact, not by political convenience.

Not every problem can be solved at once, and not every proposed solution deserves equal attention. Real prioritization means asking: how broad and severe is the impact, across people, the economy, the environment, and national security? How much ongoing harm is being caused right now by our failure to act? And are structural solutions actually available, being blocked only by political dysfunction rather than genuine disagreement about the facts? When those criteria drive the agenda instead of what generates the most campaign donations or the most social media engagement, the list of national priorities looks very different from what either major party currently offers.

What Comes Next

So where do we go from here?

This document does not end with a list of answers. It ends with a commitment from the Centercratic Party. The detailed work of addressing our nation’s top issues requires detailed work. Each of these issues will be addressed in its own dedicated proposal, built on the six-stage policy cycle and the three disciplines described above. Not talking points. Not position papers. Actual structural recommendations with actual mechanisms, possible funding sources where applicable, and clear ways to measure whether they would work.

What this document has tried to do is give every American the foundation to engage with that work intelligently. To know the difference between a real policy and a political promise. To recognize when a leader is governing and when they are performing. To understand why problems that have existed for decades keep getting worse instead of better, and to stop accepting that as inevitable.

America’s problems are serious. They are not hopeless. But they will only get solved when enough of us understand them clearly enough to demand that they be taken seriously.

That starts here.

About the Author

Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party to read the party’s governing principles and policy analyses. Subscribe to The Center Voter at centervoter.com for daily news and weekly policy analysis..

Thank you for reading this edition of Wednesday Insight. Each week, we deliver research and insights by getting underneath American politics to look at it from a completely different angle. We dive into historical data to uncover hidden trends and step back to observe the predictable patterns of wrongness that everyone else accepts as normal. Instead of looking for villains or assuming malicious intent, we act as investigators who ask the quiet questions and follow the evidence to understand exactly how the machinery of our political system actually operates.