Post-Extinction Event Project No. 1: A Voluntary National Service/Baby Bond Program
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 18
As indicated in TRP this past Friday, June 27—when we finally made the leap from the Abyss not into the chasm but over to the Garden—a post-constitutional extinction event here in the United States, likely to coalesce around the 2026 midterms, sometime between early November 2026 and early January 2027, is not a new kind or any kind of end of history, whether merely temporal or otherwise. It is better imagined as a hinge-point, on one side of which may lay a built-back-better democratic America in which we as a people flourish as never before; or on the other side of which may lay a huge feast for the Lord of the Flies. Whatever happens, it will, as always, be of our own doing, which is why, in my view, we need to ponder it now and begin to develop our thinking in some practical directions.
In this past Friday’s essay—“The Garden: A Second of Two Hypothetical American Post-Constitutional Futures”[1]—we broke down the work ahead into a triad of phases: generating visions; distilling core principles; and deriving generative projects aligned with both.Just to briefly review that structure:
My vision, my dream, is constructed around the metaphor of a Garden.
My distilled working principles are these five:
(1) staunch the hemorrhaging of social trust in our society;
(2) assure maximum equality of opportunity, not of station or material outcomes, it hopefully being understood that, contrary to common lazy assumptions, the former is actually much harder to achieve than the latter;
(3) promote honest work as necessary and enabling of human flourishing, for we are built by and through our work as much as we build it;
(4) bolster America’s weakened intermediate institutions that bridge the gap between individuals and the state; and
(5) recreate a limited and self-limiting rule-of-law government that shields the liberty and autonomy of individuals, families, and communities rather than inadvertently diminish that shield by substituting the state for a healthy civil society.
And my projects, for now and to start, are four:
(1) we must institute a voluntary national service/baby bond program;
(2) we must build a media temperance movement;
(3) we must create New Pioneer Zones, managed at the state level, to seed and model the transformation of our dead-end hyper-consumption economic habits into sustainable forms of human flourishing; and
(4) we must expand significantly the House of Representatives but not continue to site it mainly Washington, DC, and we must integrate state congressional delegations with State houses in new and creative ways.
Today’s TRP lays out Project No. 1; we will lay out the other three, one by one, as July moves along. After that, hopefully, we will continue on discussing specific domestic policy shortfallings and solutions to them so that, if a revived democratic America should rise again out of the ashes of the current nadir, a new generation of leaders will not need to start totally from scratch in their thinking. We will want to leave a monument for them to show that we were here, that we cared, that we were thinking, and that we were trying to do something of use to progeny.
So we have one vision or dream—the most beautiful ensemble of gardens in the history of the planet; two ideal type post-extinction event choice, Abyss or Garden; a three-part progression of thinking and planning, from vision to principles to projects; four first-phase projects, and five core principles. That’s what your page of music looks like if perhaps you are into this challenge—easy to remember: one, two, three, four, five, and no partridges in pear trees or other distractions to confuse or confound.
Before getting down to it, let me only add that these four project ideas are not new. I have thought about them, developed them, written and published about them, discussed them with colleagues, and so thought about them some more. The National Volunteer Service/Baby Bond idea I published on a full dozen years ago.[2]
I have enjoyed all the reading and thinking and writing I’ve invested in these policy ideas, at least for the most part, so no regrets. But that said, in case you have not noticed, the political atmosphere in the United States in recent years, at least as defined by the tenured political class, has not been particularly interested in ideas, let alone bold ideas, because precious few of its members have grasped how poorly we have been doing as a polis and so did not seek or recognize much need for bold ideas to advance the nation’s health and wellbeing. Even before the Legislative Branch became as polarized as it has become the Congress, with but few exceptions—and frustrated exceptions at that—had pretty much stopped being a place for ambitious public-spirited souls. The glowering, and increasingly towering, money-go-round of America’s increasingly nationalized politics put paid to that, and I do mean put paid.[3] My writing and publishing on these four project ideas, as with others who devised similarly bold and thoughtful proposals to share, got barely a twitch of response from anyone in the political class.
That did not surprise me. All of us who have trafficked with ideas as part of our day-job eventually learned that coming up with ideas is easy compared to getting so much as a single one of them to root in reality. That has always been true to one degree or another, but the barriers to infusing political reality with good ideas are higher than before. As the Age of Spectacle manuscript attests, our political class today reads less and less serious stuff than did their predecessors—certainly much less than when I worked briefly in the late 1970s as a Senate staffer—and that, like most Americans, has instead been mesmerized by screens and their images into professional postures far more performative than substantive. This is partly why a former boss of mine used to often say, privately of course, that both major parties were brain-dead. “That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it,” he sometimes added. He had his story dead to rights, and I do miss him now that he is no longer with us.
So why bother repeating these four (and more) policy ideas now? Because when I wrote them up we were not so close to a constitutional extinction event. I shaped my proposals to avoid such a theoretical event, not to maximize their potential policy seeding after such an event. So I am now reshaping them, a little or a lot depending on the case to hand, for the context has changed. And thus, here we go; take a seat and perhaps a patience pill.
Project No. 1: NVS/Baby Bond
We must enact a Voluntary National Service/Baby Bond program for America. A crisis of civic participation plagues America today, a plague that marches in step with the erosion in social trust over the past several decades. We’ve become increasingly a nation of mostly (and increasingly cynical) spectators, not participants, in our own governance. No democracy can be healthy with the levels of mistrust and alienation that exist today in America (although it is certainly possible to overdo democratic participation, as California’s catastrophic referendum politics illustrates).[4] We need therefore to recreate a culture of national service that will have long-lasting benefits for civic participation, that will front-load some equity for those younger Americans who don’t really experience equality of opportunity, that will build human capital, and that, above all, will refurbish our country’s depleted stock of social capital. Here’s how we can do it.[5]
When an American citizen is born, the U.S. government in close coordination with the states—and the states will manage these programs, not some new mammoth Federal bureaucracy—should create, along with a Social Security number, a savings account for that child into which, say, $7,500 is placed—called a Baby Bond or, as some prefer to call it, a Service Bond. That child’s parents, family, and friends may contribute to that fund until the child is 18 years of age, and those contributions would be treated for tax purposes (assuming the continuation of the current Federal tax structure or something like it) like charitable deductions: money put aside for a good purpose that can be subtracted from taxable income. Through the miracle of compound interest, every child will have a considerable nest egg upon reaching the age of consent—upwards of $30,000 in current dollars, and perhaps more if the markets cooperate.
While the Federal government via the Congress must design and authorize the NVS/Baby Bond program, these state-managed programs will not only help our young people, they will also help the states be all they can be. It will up to individual states as to how they wish to organize themselves to manage an NVS/Baby Bond program. It probably would make best sense for states to create an interagency group consisting of representation from state departments of labor, education, and public health, along, of course, with state comptroller offices.
Having to organize to manage an NVS/Baby Bond program would help state government quality to improve. State government is not important to most people these days because what it does seems mundane and unimportant. The functional profile of state and local government must be raised as part of an effort to build a new subsidiarity, and the professional competence of those governments must be significantly improved in many cases, as well. We might learn something from other nations—even France!—about how to create more professionalized local government management cadres, perhaps through a national academy of public service with fifty state affiliates. Only when state and local government becomes more salient in people’s lives will they pay more attention to it, care about it, and want to participate in it. That’s the font of true self-government, government aligned as closely as possible with face-to-face social relations. A Voluntary National Service/Baby Bond program can help bring this about.
Even if the Baby Bond or Service Bond idea stopped short of a national voluntary service component, it would be useful as a way to get equity spread around to more young people who can put it to productive use. But in my plan, it does not and must not stop there: To get their Baby Bond money, every citizen would have to perform national service in one of eight categories or, if we like “service pillars”: military, Peace Corps, Educore (like Teach for America), forestry and environmental remediation, urban “broken windows” brigades, hospice and eldercare, hospital ship duty[6], and a “habitat for humanity”-style program. Volunteers would indicate their first, second, and third choices of service pillars to join, but state governments would make the choices to match new annual volunteer cadres to a given state’s needs and capacities. Note that military service, entrusted in the main to state National Guard organizations, should be designed to attract only a tiny percentage of Baby Bonders, because the last thing our flag officers want or need is a huge number of untrained short-timers to put up with. This idea, therefore, is definitely not a smokescreen for a new military draft.
One 12- or 18-month stint of service, complete with training—probably six months of training and one year of service—would have to be performed between ages 18 and 25, and that first stint completed would entitle a person to three-fourths of his or her Bond. What about the other quarter of the Baby Bond?
Another minimally 9-12 month stint at any time past age 30, including particularly after age 65 or whatever a national retirement age (if there is one anymore) comes to be in the future, entitles the person to the rest. The money stays in the same insured account earning interest until its more elderly owner chooses to collect it. We’d be crazy (we are crazy) not to encourage and incentivize our older citizens to share their experience with others. The third third of a person’s Bond could constitute, in essence, a personal IRA. If for some reason an individual cannot perform an additional stint of service in later years or does not wish to do so, the residual Bond money would not be forfeit: It could be spent, if necessary, on medical needs, and it would be heritable as with any other retirement account resource.
Our 18–25 year olds can use the money to pay for college or vocational training, to put a down payment on a home or to start a business. They may not use it as a conventional savings account, withdrawing small sums for small purposes. This is how to create a real shareholder mass democracy. And think of the touch skills and executive function skills our young people will learn in their service; that alone would in the long run be worth the price of the program.
Nearly everyone, some MAGA fanatics excepted, seems to understand the rationale for Social Security: We hold ourselves as a society morally responsible for providing a basic minimum for our elderly out of respect for their humanity and an abiding sense of basic fairness toward them. If we care about our elderly enough to pool social resources on their behalf, why do we not take a similar attitude toward our young people? Young people not only deserve a fair start, but their accomplishments in the constructive lives ahead of them benefit us all. The Baby Bond idea is not charity or welfare; it is socially selfish, and it would benefit everyone.
Because it will benefit everyone, businesses and local governments will have good reason to offer partial or full matching funds to encourage Baby Bonders to spend their money at colleges or in areas they wish to encourage. So, for example, if the City of Pittsburgh wanted Pennsylvania Baby Bonders to invest in real estate or businesses in certain parts of the city, the municipal government could offer special incentives to attract Baby Bond resources. If General Electric wanted to encourage more students to go into electrical engineering, it could offer to match any Baby Bonder funds used to pay toward an academic major in that field. The possibilities, if not literally endless, are extensive.
In my version of the National Service/Baby Bond concept, the first 12–18 month stint of service, in whichever of the eight categories or pillars is chosen, must be done away from a person’s home area, but still within the same state most of the time. State governments would provide enough of a stipend and perhaps a bit more, as conditions may require, for basic subsistence housing and board (financed in part out of the interest-earning money it holds in maturing Baby Bond accounts), just as “City Year” and AmeriCorps programs have done for many years.
A key reason for geographically circulating our 18–25 year olds is to break the downward spiral of poverty, drug addiction, and hopelessness that afflicts a still far too large percentage of inner-city residents, and a significant number of rural “white” poor, as well. The only practical way to really solve this problem is to literally remove young people from harmful environments and have them come face to face with people of their own age from different places and different social strata.
Similarly, the only way to generate real understanding for people in such straits from the rest of our population is to have them actually meet and get to know one another in a neutral environment. The military draft used to help fulfill this function in the past; American society needs that function again to drive up our reserves of social trust, now by dint of another method. Yet another reason for circulating national voluntary service volunteers is to be able to clarify and enforce performance standards so that the slacker factor, which is usually abetted by the wrong kind of peer dynamics, is kept to a reasonable minimum.
The NVS/Baby Bond proposal amounts to integrating the many private volunteer and public service programs already in existence in the United States, and perhaps adding a few more. It amounts really to scaling up and incentivizing in a new way what we already do as a society in a very fragmented and inadequate way.
A national service program of the magnitude postulated here would not be cheap, and that would be the case no matter the eventual agreed split between what resources the Federal government would provide and what the states would provide. Sticker shock makes selling the program a challenge, clearly. Even if we use existing non-profit infrastructures to their maximum, some combination of state and Federal government funds would have to put aside (but not initially spent) for Baby Bonds, pay-out money when service is rendered, and for the operational costs of the program, as well. Initial costs might run about $35 billion per year, according to some estimates.
But then the GI Bill, which serves as a basic model for this idea, wasn’t cheap either as far as upfront costs went. No serious investment in building social capital on a national scale will be cheap. Neither was the Civilian Conservation Corps cheap, but that worked, too, in economic as well as in social terms.
Just like the GI Bill and the CCC, the benefits of a Voluntary National Service/Baby Bond program would more than offset its investment costs over time. Just think of the costs we as a society already pay for prison and drug-related debilities on account of poisonous inner-city environments that trample the hopes of so many young people. We do not have to tolerate those costs, which go way beyond the merely monetary. If we look at all the cost factors involved over the long term, a NVS/Baby Bond program would beyond doubt be an overall economic winner for the nation. As it is, every dollar spent on AmeriCorps volunteers pays back roughly $2 worth in services rendered.
Moreover, since the states would run these programs, not the Federal government, the accrual of economic benefits would align with local merit and performance. That would constitute a healthy competition among the states, essentially a results-based race to the top.
Besides, costs are relative. We know how many Americans will turn 18 in any given year (around 4.2 million), so we can estimate program costs within reason. If we do that math, two things become clear. First, that the United States of America, the wealthiest mass society in history, can well afford a National Voluntary Service/ Baby Bond program; and second, that its costs are almost trivial compared, say, to the wars of choice the United States fought after September 11, 2001, not to speak of the initial costs of the financial bailout of the post-Lehman Brothers era in 2008-9.
Note that service is not compulsory, and that there is no penalty for demurral. Government would therefore incur no costs in tracking down truants and dodgers, for by definition there cannot be truants or dodgers. If a person does not wish to do national service, his or her Baby Bond is merely forfeit and the money goes back into the general pool to earn interest, pay for program operations, and help others. But once a culture of service is created, and once it sets roots as a kind of gap year everyone gets to experience, not just kids from wealthier families, the opt-out rate would probably be relatively small—hopefully less than 35 percent once the program sets its institutional roots. If it should happen that the children of wealthier families are mainly the ones who refuse voluntary service and forfeit their Baby Bond, it would be unfortunate but not tragic, since lower social echelon individuals probably have more to gain from the volunteer service experience than more fortunate others.
Obviously, much more could be said specifically about how this program might work—how volunteers would be housed, how medical services would be provided, and so on—and what its main challenges and many benefits would be. Clearly, intervening into the negative social patterns in our inner cities should not wait until the newly born reach 18 years of age. We’re already deeply delinquent in that regard, in my view. In that regard too, note that sending Baby Bonders in to help rescue the mere 15 percent of U.S. high schools nationwide (about 2,000 schools, most but not all in densely populated urban areas) that produce the majority of high school drop-outs can make a tremendous difference.
And we cannot wait 18 years from the passage of a bill to create an NVS/Baby Bond program to graduate our first Baby Bond class. We would need to devise ways to accelerate the program between now and then. Based perhaps on the already existing incubus of AmeriCorps, we can find ways to scale up over time and to do that, as well, on a state-by-state basis.
Patterns of undergraduate university life, too, would be temporarily thrown off their normal rhythms as significant numbers of high school graduates do service instead of becoming college freshmen at age 18. But does anyone seriously think it would be a tragedy for our young people to go to college a year or two more mature than most do now? We know from a host of studies that our kids are maturing more slowly, and are developing mature theories of mind later than used to be the case, because of the isolating experiences of the internet and social media and the relative lack of deep reading they do. So very much to the contrary: It would be a huge improvement for the vast majority of our kids and our colleges alike for the typical freshman to be 19 or 20 than to be 17 or 18 years old.
The Education Pillar Elaborated
Let us conclude this week’s post by elaborating a bit the educational pillar of the NVS/Baby Bond concept. Of the eight categories or pillars of voluntary national service listed above, education is perhaps the most important in terms of building human capital and social trust. Both would be built by the experience volunteers gain through their service and by the benefits their youthful charges receive from them. We already have a program, as many are aware, called Teach for America. We also have a voluntary service program called City Year, which also focuses to a considerable degree on education. But American education at the K-12 level, as well as the university level, is a mess, and the relatively few national service aides we have now are not nearly enough to clean the mess up.
We still have a 19th-century industrial era mindset that we are trying without much success to apply to a 21st century reality. At the upper end of the educational system, the post-secondary school level, we have curricula that are clearly misaligned with the changing national labor profile. We need to wean ourselves away from the “college or bust” mentality. The reason is because that is the reality: Maybe 25 percent of young Americans manage to graduate from quality four-year institutions; for everybody else it’s bust, and that is wildly less than fair given the way the labor market rewards higher education achievement and in essence punishes those without it. We need to striate our post-secondary education/training system to align with employment realities. We need to boost vocational training and apprenticeship methodologies, giving tradecraft jobs the status and earning capability they deserve.
This can only be done effectively at local levels. The American nation is much too diverse to trust a once-size-fits-all Federal approach to this problem. Only local protagonists have the metis required to get this right, and to adjust it as need requires without written permission from someone in Washington.
At the same time, the solution to the preK-12 level problems we have also involves the much-needed elevation of status and reward. Specifically, teachers must be accorded proper professional status, and they must be rewarded accordingly. We really do get what we pay for, so it is scandalous that many American communities pay their teachers less than they pay their sanitation engineers (a.k.a., garbage men[7]).
There is a subsidiarity-related problem here, to be sure. A program of subsidiarity reform is disinclined to advocate new Federal mandates, even a Federal mandate concerning teacher status and pay. Now that the Trump 2.0 Administration has essentially defenestrated the Department of Education any national mandate concerning teacher pay scales has become highly theoretical. But that is not such a bad thing for, ideally, these revisions to our institutions should come up from the people at local and state levels. But if they don’t, if state and county subsets of We the People demonstrate that they don’t really care to have quality education for their children, this may be a rare exception where Federal government activism becomes necessary—assuming we ever again have a Federal government with the sense to understand this.
There is much to say about the ways and means of reforming PreK-12 education, but the beginning of wisdom is that we must stop the incessant over-the-top bureaucratized testing obsession we have saddled ourselves with. It distorts the educational process, does not really achieve significant accountability, and, worst of all, it virtually prevents talented teachers as professionals from doing what they know how to do best. We have to learn again how to trust people—in this case our teachers—and not bureaucrats and salesmen from the testing industry who festoon the “no child left behind” boondoggle.
Finally, while there is no simple solution to managing the costs of education, the beginning of wisdom at the university level is never again to create a guaranteed loan program—guaranteed for banks, that is—that, everybody knows, led to wildly inflated undergraduate tuitions over the course of the Stafford loan program.
Maybe this legislation was initially well intentioned, and maybe it was a made-in-heaven bankers’ “fix” all along. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s got to stay stopped, and here is why. Many university leaders used the giant cascade of borrowed money, which translated often enough into crippling personal debt for students whether they graduated or not, not to improve undergraduate education but to turn universities into de facto real estate corporations and multi-pronged businesses. Do a thought experiment: Start from scratch and design a university able to do basic educational things well. What would that university look like? Would it really need its own sprawling in-house psychological services? Would it need to be an institutional source of health care insurance? Would it really need to build and manage on-campus housing units that resemble luxury hotels or condominiums? Should it have very expensive athletic facilities designed to propel only a tiny fraction of students into professional sports? No, no, no, and no, of course.
We soon see, if we care to look, that the sprawling functionality of our major universities facilitated by the guaranteed loan phenomenon, among other causes, has had little to do with actual education and has served to distort universities’ missions. Part of the outrageous acceleration of costs has been caused by the need to manage these out-of-control pseudo-corporate—but usually tax-exempt!—enterprises. Alas, part of the problem with spiraling educational costs is the same problem we confront with an overbalanced Federal system: gigantism. Certain principles of subsidiarity need to be applied to university education as well as to government, simply because whenever institutions grow too large for human scale they inevitably spawn accountability problems.
Finally on this point, when major (and some not so major) American universities expanded functionally, they not only reduced the relative status of undergraduate education in many cases, they also saddled themselves with an array of new fixed costs that over time destabilized their business models. Many universities have become more vulnerable to demographic shifts, to a changed mix of international and out-of-state students they admit, and, most of all, as can be seen vividly in recent months, greater reliance on Federal money for many of these expanded functions has increased universities’ vulnerability to politicized Federal government interference in their affairs. That is not a healthy place for critical civil society institutions like universities to be in.
As we will see when we discuss the New Pioneer Zone program idea in a few weeks time, our universities and collages have a critically important new role to play that will be good for them as institutions, good for the students they are educating, and good for the nation that hosts both.
[1] Several typographical errors and other minor crud were left unattended in last week’s post; sorry, I was in a rush so as not to miss my Friday posting pattern. These flaws are now repaired. So is my recent misnumbering of the “Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle” series; seems I can no longer reliably count to 16….. Since the Substack archival file is cleaner than the original, please use that version should you wish to share this past Friday’s essay. Let me add that just because I worked for many years as a magazine Editor does not mean I am a good proofreader; one skill set does not subsume the other. That’s why I was ever grateful for the work of my staff at both The National Interest and The American Interest, and I remain grateful to all of them to this very day, and I miss their help. Happy Fourth, folks!
[2] Parts of this essay are adapted from Broken: American Political Dysfunction How to Fix It (American Interest E-Books, March 2013), Chapter 14; and “The Quadrivium Fix,” American Purpose, March 19, 2021.
[3] Just a sideways observation, if I may. North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis recently announced that he would not seek another term, and the common interpretation of his decision was that, by opposing President Trump on his Big Beautiful Bill and other matters, he would face a primary challenge he couldn’t win. Possibly, as well, Tillis’s decision turned on his realization that he wouldn't be able to do in a new term what he came to Washington for anymore than he could in his current term. What is noteworthy is that in all the commentary on Tillis’s decision no one (I saw) mentioned the nationalization of American politics and the concentration of authority in both major parties in their respective leaderships. If Senator Tillis really had a critical mass of devoted supporters on the ground in North Carolina, more like Lisa Murkowski does in Alaska, he could run and win despite any effort directed from the White House and its RNC poodle in Washington to defeat him. But apparently, Senator Tillis thinks he doesn’t, and he probably should know. For the most part, state-level social and political dynamics no longer determine the members of the national political class, but more the other way round. There are several reasons for this, but the size and scale of the money-go-round has to count as the most important one in an age of media gigantism. Needless to say, I hope, that’s not what the Framers had in mind as a method of federal self-government.
[4] Pierre Rosanvallon has argued that democracies do not need institutional trust to function well, but can rather do better through the organization of mistrust. This is an intriguing thesis but I think it mistaken, at least in the American case. Democracy in bloodline nationalisms may differ in this regard from democracy in more abstract creedal nationalisms. See his Counter-democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
[5] This is not just my idea; several organizations in the United States are dedicated to reviving a culture of service. Some leaders of these organizations joined together to write “A Call to National Service,” The American Interest (January/February 2008). My proposal is similar to theirs in many but not all ways. There is also the idea of a “futures account” that lacks a service component in Richard J. Gelles, The Third Lie: Why Government Programs Don’t Work and a Blueprint for Change (Routledge, 2011). That concept fits the so-called Trump Accounts, which provide a Baby Bond of only $1,000, passed in the Big Beautiful Bill—not!!!—just a day ago. Compared to the NVS/Baby Bond idea, the Trump Accounts are less than half a concept, and are funded at such a very low level as to make them more political decorations than anything else.
[6] This reference to hospital ships segues to another idea that TRP will discuss in future: Scaling up the U.S. government’s hospital ship capacity as part of a reconstituted, post-USAID foreign aid effort in conjunction with the building of an expeditionary health corps—an excellent idea of former Tennessee Senator Bill Frist, which regrettably went nowhere. Right now, we have only two such ships operated by the U.S. Navy, the USS Mercy and the USS Comfort, and one other privately operating ship courtesy of the old Project Hope. This wasting capacity represents a wasted opportunity in many, many respects.
[7] Mark well: These essential services workers are also underpaid relative to the social value of their work. A future TRP essay will deal with this very complex issue, proposing a structural revision of sorts for David Huerta’s Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that will do two things simultaneously: raise wage levels; and restrict union membership to those with legal residency rights in the United States. At present, the SEIU allows illegal immigrants to join the union. Those who claim that the U.S. economy objectively needs illegal alien workers because Americans won’t take the jobs that need doing are ignoring or hiding behind the obvious fact that if wage levels are raised to reflect the actual social value of these jobs, American citizens and Green Card holders will take those jobs and, in consequence, create significant new disincentives for illegal immigration.