On September 17, 2025—Constitution Day—the Johns Hopkins School of Government and Policy hosted its inaugural event in the Reimagining Government for a New Era speaker series. Dean William Howell opened the evening by introducing the school’s mission: to build, from the ground up, a new kind of policy school designed for a moment of profound institutional distrust, technological disruption, and political upheaval. U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) delivered keynote remarks calling for transformational, bipartisan government reform. Drawing on her experience on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee—where she is now the lead Democrat—Senator Hassan argued that the federal government is still using 20th-century methods to address 21st-century challenges and urged the audience to help develop a reform agenda she intends to turn into legislation. 

“Right now, in our politics, we are too often presented with a false choice between defending a status quo that certainly hasn’t worked for many Americans for some time and engaging in a zero-sum politics that spends most of its time tearing things down rather than building things anew.”

Sen. Maggie Hassan

A moderated panel discussion followed, led by Danny Werfel, the school’s first Executive in Residence and former IRS Commissioner. Panelists included Max Stier, founding President and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service; Wally Adeyemo, former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and Carnegie Distinguished Fellow at Columbia University; and Ken Spain, CEO of Narrative Strategies and a veteran of Republican political communications. The conversation explored the tension between presidential authority and the independence of the civil service, with panelists debating whether the administrative state should be made more responsive to elected leaders or whether the constitutional oath to serve the public—rather than any individual president—must remain an inviolable principle. Stier argued forcefully that this “North Star” is non-negotiable, while Spain offered the perspective that many voters see a sluggish bureaucracy as the problem and elected Trump to disrupt it. 

“Is it really so bad that we have an opportunity to push the bureaucracy, to nudge it, to streamline it, to move it quicker, to make it more responsive to the people who sent them there? I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing conceptually. But obviously there’s a balance, because we could find ourselves in a return to the spoils system as well.”

Ken Spain, Republican strategist

The discussion then turned to artificial intelligence, where panelists weighed the promise of AI-augmented government services—such as leveling the playing field for IRS auditors facing well-resourced taxpayers—against the risks of ceding discretionary judgment to technology and deploying systems before adequate safeguards are in place. Audience questions pushed the conversation further, raising the importance of listening to communities outside Washington, celebrating what government does well rather than focusing exclusively on failure, investing in civic and financial literacy, and learning from experimentation at the state and local level. The evening closed with a shared sense of urgency: that the path forward requires not just technical reform but a renewed public understanding of what democratic governance is for and what is at stake if it fails.