Understanding Every Principle | #7: Govern with a Balanced Approach
Why Neither “Slash Everything” nor “Spend Everything” Is a Governing Philosophy
This is the seventh article in a nine-part series examining the governing principles of the Centercratic Party and the conditions that make American self-government possible. Each article is part of Foundations, the Centercratic Party’s publication. The previous article examined Principle 6: Seek Unity through Broad Support. Today, the series turns to the first principle in the Principled Leadership cluster: Principle 7, which addresses what effective government actually looks like once the structural guardrails and the collaborative culture are in place.
Principle 7: Reject both government overreach and government absence. Provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.1
In the spring of 2025, the federal agency that administers the nation’s 1.8 trillion in student loan debt lost hundreds of expert staff members in a matter of weeks. The Office of Federal Student Aid, which is responsible for managing repayments for 42 million borrowers, saw its operational capacity deteriorate sharply. Loan servicers began reporting communication failures. Borrowers trying to navigate repayment options found the agency unable to respond. By late 2025, nearly 58 percent of federal student loan borrowers reported they had little trust that the government would help keep their loans affordable, up from lower levels the year before.2 The problem was not that the agency had too much money or too many employees. The problem was that the capacity to deliver an essential service had been dismantled faster than any alternative could be built to replace it. That is what government absence looks like in practice.
Why This Principle Comes Seventh
Principle 7 states: reject both government overreach and government absence; provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.1 It is the first of three principles in the Principled Leadership cluster, and it marks a deliberate shift in the series. The first four principles established the structural guardrails: democratic institutions, term limits, election integrity, and equal justice. Principles 5 and 6 established how a democracy should deliberate and what it should try to build through that deliberation. Principle 7 asks what the government that emerges from all of that should actually do, and how it should be held accountable for doing it.
The two pillars this principle serves are Pillar 3, Effective Impartial State Institutions, and Pillar 7, Broad-Based Economic Participation.3 Linz and Stepan, in their study of democratic consolidation, identified a “usable state bureaucracy” as one of the five essential arenas of functioning democracy. Their insight is precise: without a state that can actually implement what its legislature decides, democratic governance becomes an exercise in performance. A congress can pass any law it likes, but if the agency responsible for enforcing it has been hollowed out, the law is theater. Acemoglu and Robinson, approaching the same problem from a different angle, argued that democracy is sustained over time when large segments of the population have a genuine economic stake in the system’s stability. When essential services fail the people who need them most, that stake erodes.3
Two Failure Modes, Equal in Danger
American governance in the current era faces both failure modes simultaneously, and it is important to say so plainly, because most political commentary frames the problem as a choice between them.
The first failure mode is overreach: government that expands without accountability, that creates programs it cannot fund, that borrows against the future to avoid difficult decisions in the present. This failure is real, documented, and serious. The Congressional Budget Office reported a 1.8 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2025, a figure that, while 57 billion lower than the prior year, is projected to grow substantially over the next decade. The CBO forecasts cumulative deficits of 24.4 trillion through 2036, driven primarily by entitlement spending on autopilot. Medicaid is projected to grow 47 percent over the next decade. Medicare is projected to grow 105 percent. Social Security, 74 percent. Revenue is projected to grow far more slowly. The gap between what the government has promised and what it is prepared to pay for represents a genuine threat to the country’s fiscal stability, and both parties have contributed to it for decades.4
The second failure mode is absence: government that abandons essential functions, that eliminates services before any replacement exists, that treats dismantlement as an accomplishment rather than a transition. The student loan example is one instance of this. The record low legislative output of the 2025 Congress is another: fewer than 40 bills were signed into law in the first year of the Trump administration’s second term, the fewest in the modern era.5 Congress held 659 roll-call votes in the Senate in 2025, but nearly 60 percent of them were focused on advancing executive and judicial nominations rather than legislating. The House cast 362 votes, barely half of 2017’s total. Health care subsidy legislation that needed to pass was left unaddressed all year. As Rep. David Joyce of Ohio, a 13-year veteran of the House, put it at the end of the session: “Other than that, I really can’t point to much that we got accomplished.”5
Both parties have inhabited both failure modes. Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act without a plan to control the structural cost drivers that made health insurance unaffordable in the first place. Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill while simultaneously allowing government to shut down for 43 days over a spending impasse, a record.5 Neither the expansion without discipline nor the disruption without transition is a governing philosophy. They are both failures to govern.
What Independent Voters Are Telling Us
The 45 percent of Americans who identify as political independents have watched both failure modes play out for long enough to have strong opinions about them, even if those opinions do not map neatly onto either party’s narrative.6
A 2025 Gallup survey found that 63 percent of Americans believed the federal government was doing too many things that should be left to individuals or businesses, while simultaneously, 61 percent said they were worried the government was cutting services too fast without adequate replacements.7 These numbers are not contradictory. They reflect the same underlying demand: a government that does fewer things but does those things well, that is accountable for results, and that does not cut services that real people depend on before anything exists to take their place.
The same Gallup data showed that independent voters were the most likely to hold both views simultaneously. They were more likely than either Democrats or Republicans to say they wanted results over ideology, competence over scale, and fiscal discipline combined with basic service delivery. The student loan data reinforces this. Nearly 42 million Americans carry federal student loan debt.2 For most of them, the government’s capacity to administer that debt fairly and competently is not an abstract policy preference. It is a direct, daily economic reality.
The Centercratic Position
The Centercratic Party’s seventh principle draws a clear line between two things that American political debate has often blurred: the question of what government should do and the question of how government should do it.1
On the first question, the principle is not ideological. It does not presuppose that government should be large or small, activist or restrained. It presupposes that government should provide essential services, meaning those that markets cannot or will not provide to all citizens equitably, and that it should stop providing services that have demonstrably failed or that the private sector can deliver more effectively. This is an evidence standard, not an ideological one. Whether a particular program clears that bar is an empirical question, answerable by data, not a matter of party affiliation.
On the second question, the principle is precise: measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline. These three commitments work together. Measuring results means building into every significant federal program a mechanism for tracking whether it is actually achieving its stated purpose. The student loan program, as documented by researchers at the Institute for College Access and Success, has been expanded and contracted repeatedly by both parties without any systemic mechanism for assessing whether it was helping borrowers build sustainable financial lives.2 Ending what fails means that when the evidence shows a program is not working, the response should not be political protection but redesign or termination. Enforcing fiscal discipline means that commitments made in the present must be funded in the present, not deferred to a future Congress that did not make them.
The CBO’s 10-year forecast makes the cost of failing to apply this standard unmistakable. Spending is projected to rise to 24.4 percent of GDP by 2036, well above the pre-pandemic historical average of 20.1 percent, while revenue is expected to average roughly 17.7 percent of GDP over the same period.4 Net interest payments are projected to double by 2036. The gap between those two lines is not a partisan talking point. It is an arithmetic reality that neither party has been willing to address squarely.
What Happens When This Fails
Linz and Stepan’s analysis of democratic consolidation was explicit about what happens when a state loses the capacity to perform its essential functions. Their conclusion was that a state without effective institutions does not simply deliver services poorly. It loses legitimacy. Citizens who cannot rely on government to enforce contracts, deliver services they have paid for, or manage resources entrusted to it begin to look for alternatives, whether those are private arrangements that serve only the wealthy, local strongmen who fill the vacuum, or demagogues who promise to burn the whole system down.3
The United States is not at that point. But the indicators are worth watching. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s April 2026 report put the federal debt at 36.2 trillion, equivalent to 106,900 per person.4 Acemoglu and Robinson’s framework of inclusive versus extractive institutions offers a precise warning: when a state’s fiscal commitments outrun its capacity to fund them, the adjustment is almost never orderly. It is almost always borne disproportionately by those with the least political power to resist it.3 The students who find their loans in disarray, the veterans whose benefits are the fastest-growing entitlement in the CBO’s forecast, the seniors dependent on Medicare’s long-term solvency: these are the people who pay the price when governing is replaced by performance.
The Stakes
The principle is not about the size of government. It is about the quality and accountability of government. A small government that cannot perform its essential functions is not efficient. It is just broken. A large government that spends without measuring whether its programs work is not compassionate. It is irresponsible. The Centercratic position is that the American people deserve neither variety of failure.
The 2026 midterms offer a test of whether this framing has a political constituency. The evidence suggests it does. The voters who are most frustrated with the current political environment are not primarily asking for more government or less government. They are asking for government that works, that is honest about what it can afford, that stops programs that have failed, and that does not cut essential services faster than alternatives can be built to replace them. That is Principle 7 in plain language.
Tomorrow, this series turns to Principle 8: Defend Our Freedom, and the question of what it means to protect American security in a world of military, cyber, and economic threats.
Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.
Notes
1 Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/
2 Chapman, Paul J. “America’s Student Loan Crisis: How We Got Here and How We Can Fix It Together.” Centercratic Party, January 16, 2026. https://centercratic.party/ [Space file: Student-Loan-Crisis.pdf]
3 Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, Chapter 1, pp. 7-15; Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Crown Publishers, 2012, Chapters 1-3. [Thread attachment: The-Nine-Pillars-of-a-Working-Democratic-Republic.docx]
4 Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. “What Washington Won’t Talk About.” The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2026. [Space file: What-Washington-Wont-Talk-About-WSJ.pdf] See also: Peter G. Peterson Foundation. “The National Debt.” https://www.pgpf.org/national-debt-clock (accessed April 2026).
5 Kane, Paul. “Congress Set Records in 2025, Some More Dubious Than Others.” The Washington Post, 2025. [Space file: Congress-set-records-in-2025-some-more…ious-than-others-The-Washington-Post.pdf]
6 Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean
7 Gallup. “Government.” Gallup Poll Social Series, 2025. https://news.gallup.com/poll/27286/government.aspx