## Notes from 12 December 2025 [[2025-12-11|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2025-12-13|Next note →]] Read [[Daniel Stid]]'s piece on [why state capacity builders need to shift focus away from Washington toward state and local governments](https://substack.com/home/post/p-181224110?selection=a45697ae-5e7f-465c-9372-35dfa7d3869a). I recently discovered Stid's newsletter _[The Art of Association](https://artofassociation.substack.com/)_ and I'm finding everything he writes sharp and worth reading. His core argument: the federal government (in the US, sure) won't lead the next wave of reform... states and localities will. Most domestic policy (education, policing, housing, health, transportation) happens at these levels, where 85% of public employees work. Americans also trust state and local governments far more than the federal one. Yet almost all the energy, talent, and funding in the government-reform space concentrates on Washington. At the launch event for the [[Recoding America Fund (RAF)]] - a new $120 million philanthropic initiative for government reform - Stid noticed that virtually everyone in the room was focused on federal issues. He contrasts this with a workshop he attended at a large state governor's mansion, where the governor was eager for reform but had zero local civil society infrastructure to support him. Stid calls for new civic infrastructure: a 50-state network focused on nonpartisan governance improvements, better clearinghouses to spread promising approaches across jurisdictions, and more philanthropic investment in state and local capacity. **Partial disagreement:** My sense doesn't fully align with his framing. I've encountered several state-level institutions in the US focused on government effectiveness - though perhaps concentrated in larger states and often more focused on fiscal discipline than capacity-building per se. Maybe the gap isn't the complete absence of such organizations but their uneven distribution and narrow mandates. That said, I'm an outsider looking in... Stid has decades of experience in this space.