Governments accumulate the same liabilities when they defer investments in personnel, modernization, and oversight. The bill comes due, and capability erodes faster than legitimacy. That erosion now shapes not only domestic performance but also how the United States projects authority abroad.

In 2019, journalist David Klion described the United States as “the sick man of the 21st century,” a country suffering from elite stagnation and institutional fatigue. Six years later, the diagnosis remains accurate. The problem is less ideological than infrastructural—a form of technical debt. In software, “technical debt” is the cost of deferred maintenance: Each quick fix or postponed upgrade leaves a system more fragile.

In 2019, journalist David Klion described the United States as “the sick man of the 21st century,” a country suffering from elite stagnation and institutional fatigue. Six years later, the diagnosis remains accurate. The problem is less ideological than infrastructural—a form of technical debt. In software, “technical debt” is the cost of deferred maintenance: Each quick fix or postponed upgrade leaves a system more fragile.

Governments accumulate the same liabilities when they defer investments in personnel, modernization, and oversight. The bill comes due, and capability erodes faster than legitimacy. That erosion now shapes not only domestic performance but also how the United States projects authority abroad.

State capacity is the government’s ability to reliably design, implement, and sustain policy. For half a century, the United States has treated capacity as expendable. Since the late 1970s, a pattern of austerity and outsourcing has hollowed the administrative core of U.S. power. What was once a durable bureaucracy capable of planning, coordinating, and enforcing national strategy has become a patchwork of contractors, temporary offices, and aging systems that often cannot execute the ambitions set for them.

Beginning in the late 20th cen