President Shapiro: Government Reform Before Ideological Reform

Hero photo: Josh Shapiro, December 2025 — Maryland GovPics, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

01 The record and the scenario

Josh Shapiro's governorship is a study in governance-first politics. Elected in November 2022, he passed his first budget in 2023 with votes from both parties in both chambers — a rarity in a legislature that had just impeached one of his predecessors' agency heads. In September 2023 he implemented automatic voter registration in Pennsylvania not by legislation but by executive action at PennDOT license centers, joining 23 states on National Voter Registration Day, with 58,000 registrations updated in the first months and materials in 31 languages. In 2024 he signed an executive order giving economic-development permit applications a decision deadline, and his Lightning Plan of January 2025 — more on that in our energy piece — proposed a state siting board to cut permitting red tape. His third budget, $50.1 billion, landed 135 days late in 2026 but passed with bipartisan support after he cut $1.4 billion from his own proposal.

The consistent thread is process: modernize the machinery, set deadlines, publish results, and only then fight over substance. As attorney general he ran the same playbook — a grand-jury report on clergy abuse that forced systemic reform, consumer-protection settlements — the office as a fixer of institutions rather than an ideological instrument.

This is scenario analysis, not a prediction or endorsement. As of September 18, 2026, most figures profiled in this series — Shapiro included — have not formally entered a presidential race; AP describes the 2028 field as speculative. The question is procedural, fitting the subject: if a Shapiro administration took office, what of this record would transfer to Washington, and where does the federal machinery refuse to be fixed the way Harrisburg was?

02 Day 1: executive orders

Shapiro's Day 1 package would be recognizably his: a government-operations executive order setting permit-decision deadlines across federal agencies (his Pennsylvania order is the template — agencies get a clock, and the clock gets published); a customer-service directive ordering agencies to publish processing times the way PennDOT publishes wait times; and an election-administration order directing federal agencies with citizenship-verification data to coordinate voter-roll accuracy with states — the AVR logic, which federally mostly means leveraging the REAL ID and SAVE databases under existing NVRA authority rather than any new national registration.

He could also sign an ethics-and-personnel order on Day 1: Shapiro has emphasized hiring speed and has criticized both parties for performative personnel fights. Expect a staffing directive — appointments cleared in weeks, not months — because the single fastest way a president changes government behavior is by filling the 4,000 appointments the last administration left vacant.

What Day 1 would not contain is the ideological marker bills other figures in this series would sign — no oil-leasing freeze, no DEI-order flurry, no tariff memo. The Shapiro record suggests the first orders would be about how decisions get made, not which decisions get made. Whether that satisfies a primary electorate is a political question; whether it works is a mechanical one.

03 Days 2-30: agency changes

The 30-day agenda is OMB-centric. A President Shapiro would likely task OMB with a government-wide review that reads like his Pennsylvania agency consolidation — he merged the departments of Health and Human Services into one, and proposed eliminating more — asking each federal department for duplicate programs and consolidation proposals, with results published. The permitting council established by the FAST-41 statute would get a director on Day 2; Shapiro would likely expand its use by directive, steering large energy and manufacturing projects into its review tracks.

Personnel: he would nominate moderators to run agencies — in Pennsylvania he kept Republican-turned-independent Al Schmidt as elections secretary precisely because Schmidt was a process Republican who had defied the 2020 result. The federal analogue is nominating people for election-administration, procurement, and permitting posts who are known for operations rather than ideology, betting that confirmability buys 60-vote headroom later.

Rulemaking starts here too: modernized cost-benefit guidance (Circular A-4 revision, revisable by executive action), procurement reform directives pushing fixed-price contracts, and a data-transparency mandate — the “results meter” logic of his Getting Stuff Done map, where every project's status is public. None requires Congress; all require agencies to actually comply, which is the 30-day management problem.

04 The first budget

Shapiro's Pennsylvania budgets show the federal analogue precisely. He proposed, got countered, and cut his own numbers: the 2026 budget came in $1.4 billion below his February proposal, with $785 million more for schools, a state EITC expansion worth $193 million in tax relief, cyber-charter reform to control costs, and an $8 billion rainy-day fund. A first federal budget request would likely look the same: modest headline growth, a visible efficiency package (program eliminations proposed but not exaggerated), an earned-income expansion, and infrastructure and permitting money front-loaded — plus a government-modernization account for technology procurement, an area where federal failure is bipartisan consensus.

The catch is that a president's budget is a document, not a law — Congress writes appropriations, and Shapiro's Pennsylvania budgets were passed by a legislature he shared power with, not one 60-vote chamber away. His 2023 budget passed because he could negotiate directly with legislative leaders who controlled their chambers. The Senate filibuster means the first Shapiro budget's fate depends on reconciliation instructions — which cannot include appropriations — and on the mundane reality that a shutdown deadline, not a deadline he sets, is the clock that actually moves Congress.

05 First legislation and what requires Congress

The must-have-Congress list for a government-reform presidency is long, and Shapiro's own record marks which items he treats as legislative: siting boards (the Lightning Plan's RESET board needs the General Assembly), agency mergers, permitting statutes, and election-administration funding. Federally, the first ask would plausibly be a permitting-reform bill — Shapiro has pitched himself as the Democrat who can deliver permitting reform that Republicans want and clean-energy buildout that Democrats want. Second, a government-efficiency package codifying procurement and improper-payments controls — the Pennsylvania Treasury's own 2026 report flagged $1.4 billion in improper state payments, $75 million saved by catching them, which is exactly the kind of statistic a President Shapiro would put in the Rose Garden.

The 60-vote problem is the whole story here. In Harrisburg, Shapiro passed things because the Pennsylvania House and Senate run on majority rule. His government-reform agenda — siting boards, agency mergers, even automatic voter registration's statutory cousin, the NVRA modernization bill Democrats periodically introduce — is ordinary legislation in the Senate's terms. The reconciliation path covers taxes, spending, and debt only: a Shapiro efficiency package can attach savings to reconciliation, but the structural reforms cannot ride it. His bet, demonstrated in Harrisburg, is that process credibility buys the votes ideology cannot — Washington has tested that bet less often than Harrisburg.

06 The reform model debate, both sides

The comparative question is whether “fix the machine first” is a governing strategy or an evasion. The case for: Shapiro's results are real — AVR implemented with no litigation loss, a budget with both parties, permit deadlines that survived a hostile legislature's scrutiny — and Washington's dysfunction is downstream of process failure more than policy disagreement. The case against, made from both flanks: the left argues process-first politics postpones the fights that matter (his party's progressives note he withdrew Pennsylvania from RGGI in the 2026 budget deal — process pragmatism with a policy cost); the right argues the reform label dresses ordinary Democratic policy in procedural clothing, and that AVR, whatever its security framing, changes the electorate.

For the first 100 days specifically, the debate is about sequencing. A Shapiro administration's window is the same 100 days every president gets, and the risk is that process reform — reviews, deadlines, published meters — consumes the political capital that other figures in this series would spend on executive action with immediate material effects. The counter-risk is the one Shapiro explicitly campaigns on: skip the machine, and every policy you sign gets ground up in it.

07 What courts could constrain

Process reform mostly does not threaten courts — that is its advantage. Permit deadlines and customer-service metrics are managerial. But three lines bind. First, election administration: AVR-style federal action would run into the Constitution's reservation of election administration to the states, and NVRA's own coverage limits; a federal order “coordinating” registration would face the same state-sovereignty litigation the SAVE-database proposals have always invited. Second, agency reorganization: the Reorganization Act's authority lapsed in 1984 — a president cannot merge departments without Congress, and OMB-led consolidation of functions has been enjoined when it trespassed on statutory structures. Third, the unitary-executive litigation of 2025-2026 has cut both ways: the Supreme Court's shrinking of independent-agency insulation gives a President Shapiro more control of agencies — and courts more willingness to review what that control produces.

The deepest constraint is the one his record already respects: much of what he did in Pennsylvania was done with authority that existed all along, waiting for an executive who used it. In Washington, that authority exists too — but the major-questions doctrine now requires clear congressional authorization for actions of vast economic or political significance. A Shapiro permitting deadline is safe; a Shapiro federal siting override would be a test case. His own method — do the clearly authorized thing, publish the result — is, fittingly, the strategy most likely to survive the Court as currently constituted.