Remaking the State

“America's governing crisis undermines our capacity to address our most urgent challenges. Sabeel Rahman offers a critical diagnosis and illuminates the pathway out. Drawing on scholarly brilliance and top government experience, Remaking the State uncovers the origins of the modern administrative state and outlines how to remake it to reflect and advance democratic values. Urgent, clear-eyed, and persuasive, this is an extraordinarily timely read.” —Lina Khan, former chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission

“Every social movement achievement eventually depends on a government that can actually deliver it. In this essential new book, Sabeel Rahman argues that American democracy’s deepest crisis isn’t elections or money in politics—it’s a bureaucracy hollowed out, weaponized against vulnerable groups, and designed to strengthen the power of elites. Drawing on his time as a government insider, Rahman offers advocates and organizers something precious: not just a critique, but a blueprint for building a state that can protect our freedoms, provide essential services, and strengthen democratic participation.” —Deepak Bhargava, president, Freedom Together Foundation

“In the spirit of FDR’s refounding moment, Rahman offers a crystal-clear vision for the administrative state we need now—one that dismantles the long-concentrated power that’s brought us oligarchy, delivers results for working people instead, and values democracy as an everyday muscle. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants the words ‘by the people’ to truly mean something.” —Elizabeth Wilkins, president and CEO, Roosevelt Institute

“Sabeel Rahman’s timely and compelling book Remaking the State is a citizen’s guide to repairing democracy in the aftermath of Trump. The cure for the autocratic abuse of executive power requires more than technocratic expertise, he shows. It requires rethinking governance to resist capture by powerful interests, give citizens a voice, and deliver for the public good.” —Michael J. Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, author of Democracy’s Discontent: A New Edition for Our Perilous Times

“The First Reconstruction gave us the Freedmen’s Bureau; its destruction gave us a century of unfreedom. Sabeel Rahman understands what too many democracy advocates forget: the fight for multiracial democracy is won or lost in the machinery of government itself. Remaking the State demolishes the tired ‘big versus small government’ debate and names what’s actually at stake: who the state serves, and who it dominates. This is the institutional blueprint the Third Reconstruction requires: rigorous, unsentimental, and clear that delivering for the most vulnerable is how democracy defends itself. Essential reading for everyone building what comes next.” —Dorian Warren, co-president, Community Change

“In Remaking the State, K. Sabeel Rahman offers a compelling alternative to both technocratic nostalgia and anti-government sentiment: a moral vision of the administrative state rooted not in expertise alone, but in democratic purpose. He reimagines government as a vehicle for democratic freedom—one capable of protecting people from harm, securing basic needs, and confronting the deeper structures of inequality. Urgent and clarifying, Rahman makes the case that American democracy can survive only if public institutions [or the administrative state] can once again deliver, through stronger protections, broader provision, deeper participation, and firmer checks on autocratic power. This is a bold and bracing case for seizing the current crisis to remake the machinery of government grounded by moral vision.” —Vanita Gupta, former Associate Attorney General, Director of NYU’s Center for Law and Public Trust