In a year when the United States seemed more split than ever, Americans united in one way: We demanded results and we wanted them now. From ICE raids designed as a theater of terror and GLP-1 shortcuts for weight loss, to A.I.-generated term papers, rampaging DOGE bros and summary Alien Enemies Act deportations, America raged against the journey and clamored for the destination, no matter what the lawyers and the chatbot therapists said. Outcomes seemed to be all that mattered. Winners win. Losers follow rules and talk it over.
The pattern was most conspicuous in a Washington that swept aside norms, starting with President Trump’s Inauguration Day assembly of billionaires and followed by a Project 2025-led smashing of the traditional rituals of administration. Regular order in Congress gave way to federal shutdown, ad hoc continuing resolutions and forced votes on bills like the Epstein Files Transparency Act. With impoundments, the White House upended the Constitution’s carefully choreographed system for enacting spending bills. “Detain first, think later” became the angry spirit of immigration enforcement, even as the “Department of War” (renamed without the required congressional process) launched “kinetic strikes” that summarily executed dozens of alleged drug couriers.
But liberals in exile bristled at process, too. The autopsies of the 2024 election results bemoaned Biden-era failures to deliver infrastructure like electric vehicle charging stations and affordable rural broadband. Thanks to a best-selling book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, “abundance” became a governing philosophy committed to clearing away decades of accumulated government processes. No longer would subway tunnels, highway miles, housing starts and high-speed rail hang in the balance of endless NIMBY delays. Even the libs said build, baby, build.
The collapse of tried-and-true processes spread beyond politics. In sports, fans moved from trusting the process in yearslong team rebuilds (sorry Sixers fans) to the split-second gambling pleasures of betting parlays. Social media content producers competed for instant dopamine hits as our attention spans hit new lows. At work, the journey of the job application process devolved into an A.I. arms race of robo applications and chatbot screeners. In finance, the S&P 500 reached record heights, long-term earnings ratios be damned. Even the process of thinking itself, scientists found, started to weaken with the use of A.I.
The 2025 revolt against process signaled the final collapse of a powerful idea that once promised to hold the country together. At the height of America’s 20th-century power, belief in process served as a guiding concept among the legal and political elites of both parties who sought to manage our most difficult national disagreements.
The value of process is deeply rooted in American law and politics. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified by the states in 1791, protects all persons from being deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. The 14th Amendment in 1868 established that the same due process protections applied to state governments. As far back as Magna Carta in 1215, rival camps in Anglo American government resolved their differences through procedures such as the lawful judgment of a jury of one’s peers.
But the idea took on new and special meaning in the middle of the 20th century. Process became the centerpiece of America’s powerful commitment to democracy during the struggle with totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. A generation of social scientists, lawyers and statesmen came to see the genius of American government not as any one set of values, but rather as the collection of institutions, methods and techniques by which the United States articulated its principles and resolved its controversies.
Values might change. Elections, for example, might sweep a Franklin Roosevelt into the White House to replace a Herbert Hoover. Republican control of Congress in the 1920s might give way to Democratic control in the 1930s and ’40s. But process offered a deeper continuity. Elections, legislative hearings and administrative agencies turned the gears of politics, while juries, judges and the bar managed the levers of the law.
Influential political science scholars such as Yale’s Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom contended that social science should study what they called “politico-economic systems.” The enlightened manager-statesman might not always be able to identify ultimate truths. There might be no such thing as perfect solutions for all time. But leaders could be social engineers, designing the institutional arrangements most likely to produce good outcomes for companies, nonprofits and government agencies.
Consider the New Deal’s labor law, the National Labor Relations Act, signed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935. The law did not establish one best rule for wages, hours or working conditions; it did not insist on any particular way of managing companies. Instead, it created a collective bargaining process by which labor and management — the parties that knew best how to operate the business — could come to mutually satisfactory arrangements, supervised along the way by a new expert agency, the National Labor Relations Board.
The labor law example was especially vivid, but the point was more general. Administrative agencies of any number of different kinds — the Social Security Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority and a dizzying flurry of others — would be staffed by subject-matter experts capable of making and updating the basic rules of American social life.
Nowhere did the politics of process have more influence than in elite circles of American law. The so-called legal process approach to law took root at Harvard Law School, which stood at the peak of its establishment power. Beginning in the early 1950s, two Harvard faculty members with experience in the New Deal state, Henry Hart and Albert Sacks, set out to craft teaching materials that would capture the core logic of modern American law.
Eventually titled “The Legal Process,” the Hart and Sacks manuscript aimed to show students that carefully attending to the capacities of institutions helped yield sound judgments. The text grew rapidly. Like the legal process it described, it was unfinished and constantly evolving. Hart and Sacks never managed to publish it in their lifetimes. But provisionality seemed to extend the manuscript’s reach. Teachers at law schools around the country added case studies with each passing year, teaching a generation of law students that having good processes in place was the best way to produce laws worthy of trust.
The Hart and Sacks text captured the spirit of an age in which Ivy League-trained leaders relied on managerial institutions to resolve the most vital and controversial questions of the age. If the National Labor Relations Act could establish basic mechanisms for labor, and if the Securities Exchange Act could set the rules for modern capital markets, then process might be capable of mending the great fissures of midcentury American life.
Congressional hearings seemed to contain the excesses of McCarthyism. Government processes and bureaucratic politics seemed to offer an explanation of the Cuban missile crisis — and also to supply the subtle mechanisms for its resolution. A parallel set of international legal institutions like the United Nations, NATO and the International Monetary Fund, and nongovernmental organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross promised a transnational legal process to keep the peace on the global stage.
The legal process even offered an institutional strategy for undoing Jim Crow’s system of racial apartheid in the American South. The Democratic Party, which dominated the midcentury Congress, was frozen by its white Southern wing. The Supreme Court, by contrast, stood outside the short-term pressures of electoral politics. Brown v. Board of Education thus offered itself as a quintessential legal process decision, striking down Jim Crow segregation in schooling as a prudent exercise of moral clarity and good judgment in the nation’s interest.
For a decade and a half after Brown, the Supreme Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren bid to make fair processes the watchword of the American Constitution. The basic idea of due process underwrote the exclusionary rule barring use of illegally obtained evidence in trials, the right to counsel in felony cases and the right to remain silent. Leading constitutional lawyers, in turn, championed the Supreme Court as the guardian of the processes of democratic politics.
In Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, the court wagered that process could do much more. It was the Constitution’s guarantee of due process, wrote Justice Harry Blackmun, that guaranteed a pregnant woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. People have a fundamental right to privacy, Blackmun reasoned, founded in the due process clause of the 14th Amendment — a right that included the power to terminate a pregnancy.
A series of cultural flashpoint cases followed, extending Roe’s core idea that process secures certain fundamental values. The court recognized due process rights to refuse medical treatment, to make certain decisions concerning children and, most recently, to enter into same-sex marriage.
Process’s main selling point was also its greatest shortcoming. As a science of technique and method, process was an empty vessel. One of the leading legal process scholars of the era famously opposed the Brown v. Board decision. And as legal historians have observed, the process school offered no obvious path to distinguish good judgments from bad ones. It lacked a way of identifying which rights (if any) were necessarily implied by such an open-ended phrase as “due process.” It was one thing to say that the Constitution guaranteed the freedom of speech, an idea explicitly referenced in the First Amendment. It was far more controversial to assert that process required a right to privacy, which had less secure footing in the Constitution’s text.
Critics chafed at the tyranny of process even at the moment of its triumph. The conservative justice William Rehnquist dissented in Roe, accusing the majority of disguising its own political views in the cloak of process. Other conservative critics went so far as to craft a new theory of constitutional interpretation, originalism. The originalism preached by today’s Supreme Court began an effort to strike back against the evolutionary process of a living constitutional law.
In politics, the process school was soon in a pell-mell retreat, too. Erstwhile enthusiasts for the process school discovered that powerful business groups had captured America’s ostensibly independent and process-based institutions. Regulatory agencies like the Civil Aeronautics Board turned out to serve the interests of the industries they regulated; airlines got sweet deals and their customers got higher prices.
On the left, a rising cadre of public interest lawyers gathered around the consumer safety advocate Ralph Nader to co-opt the New Deal state’s processes to their own ends. Nader’s Raiders, as they were known, pushed for environmental reviews and cumbersome rule-making requirements that threatened to grind the government to a halt. By the 1990s, political scientists were observing that a distinctively American culture of adversarial legalism had clogged the channels of even the most basic government action.
In some sense, it is a testament to the enduring strength of the process idea that it took the Supreme Court nearly 50 years to overturn Roe. But in the 2020s a surging antiproceduralism has produced a revolt against two generations of process thinking. In 2025, Congress seemed to lose control of its quintessential power over the appropriations process. Administrative agencies dispensed with the usual pathways of giving notice and inviting public comment. The Justice Department sneered at due process in its early Alien Enemies Act deportations. The Federal Reserve’s once-orderly mechanisms for interest rate decisions have broken down into dissenting decisions unlike any seen in decades.
In July, the Department of Homeland Security drastically expanded a program of expedited removal that could subject millions of people to deportation without even a summary hearing before an immigration judge.
Two presidents abandoned the ordinary pardon procedure in 2025. Joe Biden did so in literal last-minute pre-emptive pardons for members of his family and a pardon on behalf of his son. Mr. Trump has turned zero-process pardons into an orgy of absolution indifferent to the stench of corruption. Mr. Trump has pardoned over 1,600 people in his second term to date, including Changpeng Zhao, the crypto oligarch who had brazenly enriched the Trump family by nearly $2 billion. According to a ProPublica report, merely 10 of the second-term Trump pardons have gone through the ordinary process of filing petitions with the Office of the Pardon Attorney.
The Supreme Court, too, has veered away from its ordinary processes, relying increasingly on the “shadow” or “interim” docket to manage its work outside the usual mechanisms of case selection, briefing and oral argument. The result has been nearly three dozen hard-to-decipher orders in favor of the Trump administration — orders that at least one lower federal court judge labeled “mystical.”
The staccato drumbeat of political violence was perhaps the ultimate shortcut around process. From the arson at the Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s mansion in April and the murders of the Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, to the assassination of the prominent political firebrand Charlie Kirk in September, observers of the American scene came away with the palpable sense that standard operating procedures were fast disappearing.
Yet for all this, the end of 2025 has brought signs that a more modest, right-size conception of process may not be entirely dead. Immigration enforcement by ICE polls badly, with a majority of Americans saying that the agency’s aggressive posture is too tough. The DOGE experiment in slashing government operations has been shuttered and some hastily fired employees have been asked to return to work.
Meanwhile, a federal judge threw out procedurally irregular indictments of James Comey and Letitia James — two political adversaries of Mr. Trump. This week, another judge ordered the federal government to facilitate hearings for the Venezuelan men summarily removed from the country under the Alien Enemies Act.
What about the infamous electric charging stations that stood as exemplars of the Biden administration’s bureaucratic inertia? They turn out to have been quietly growing in number — thanks, apparently, to behind-the-scenes bureaucratic processes designed to create effective standardization in a national network of chargers.
The point of 2026 should not be to unduly bemoan the collapse of confidence in process. In its most ambitious form, proceduralism had become impossibly compromised: a termite-ridden artifact of a Cold War era when the American elite organized law and politics around a now-shattered sense of collective purpose.
What the University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley calls “the procedure fetish” became in the past half-century an obstacle to important collective projects like green energy and public transportation. If process means self-destructive obstructionism or maddening efforts to steer clear of important value judgments, well, then the best attitude toward its exuberant destruction may be good riddance. We should be grateful if the Trump administration’s year of smashing the idols of process makes it impossible to go back.
Yet there’s opportunity in destruction. Democrats on both the political center and the Mamdani-movement left are drawing lessons from the failures of the Biden era and groping toward a vision of government that prizes results without steamrolling community interests. Just this month, Republican House and Senate committee chairs ushered through a defense spending reauthorization bill that reasserted congressional oversight of military policy in the Caribbean.
At the apex of their midcentury authority, the processes of American government rested on a sense of shared purpose and mutual trust. Regaining some of that ephemeral collective sensibility will be America’s struggle in 2026 and the years to come. A persistent, if battered, attachment to the value of basic procedural fairness suggests that there may be some common ground yet.
John Fabian Witt is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.”
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