There is a phrase that lands differently depending on where you sit in the American political conversation. Say “social engineering” to a conservative and you will see a familiar tightening around the eyes, the look of someone who has just caught a bureaucrat in an admission. Say it to a progressive and you will see something closer to embarrassment, as though the term itself is a trap. Say it to a libertarian and you will hear a lecture you did not ask for.
Yet here is what all three will do when they get home: claim a mortgage interest deduction. Enroll their children in public schools underwritten by property taxes. Drive on interstates built by federal funds. Perhaps check their retirement balance in an account shaped by rules and tax incentives they never read. The architecture is everywhere. The argument is about who built it and why.
This is the honest starting point for any serious conversation about government and behavior: not whether the state engineers outcomes, but whether it does so transparently, and in service of something wider than itself.
American history, read carefully, is largely a history of behavioral design disguised as common sense. The Progressive Era reformers who fought for meat inspection laws and child labor restrictions were not simply humanitarians; they were architects reshaping the incentive structures of industrial capitalism. The New Dealers who embedded social insurance into the payroll tax understood, at least intuitively, what behavioral economists would later demonstrate empirically: that making a behavior automatic is the most powerful way to normalize it. If you want workers to save for retirement, do not ask them to opt in. Make them opt out.
The decades that followed saw this logic refined across every policy domain. Public health offers the clearest laboratory. Cigarette taxes and the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement did not prohibit tobacco. They altered price signals, restricted marketing channels, and gradually shifted the social meaning of smoking from sophisticated to stigmatized. Adult smoking rates, which stood near 42 percent in 1965, fell below 12 percent by the mid-2020s. No outright ban was required. The architecture moved the needle.
Soda taxes operated on the same principle, more recently and with more contested results. Berkeley, California’s 2015 excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages produced a documented reduction in consumption among lower-income residents, the population most affected by diet-related illness and least able to absorb price increases. Critics called it paternalism. Defenders called it correcting a market that had externalized the health costs of its products onto the public. Both descriptions are accurate. The policy was a choice about whose costs the system would absorb.
Education reformers borrowed the same incentive logic, with more ambiguous results. The Obama administration’s Race to the Top program offered competitive federal grants to states willing to revise standards, expand charter schools, and tie teacher evaluations to student performance. The stated premise was that financial incentives could move education bureaucracies that direct regulation could not. The premise proved partially correct: governors in both parties retooled state education law for a shot at federal dollars. Whether student outcomes improved proportionally remains genuinely disputed. What is clear is that the method worked on its intended target, which was the behavior of state officials rather than students.
The lesson that serious progressives should extract is not that Race to the Top succeeded or failed on the merits. The lesson is that conditional grants and competitive funding mechanisms are among the most powerful tools available to a federal government constitutionally constrained from simply commanding state action. You cannot order a governor to reform a school system. You can make it economically compelling for him to try.
Which brings us to the current moment, where behavioral architecture is being deployed with unusual directness on two fronts that deserve examination in tandem, because they illuminate the same underlying principle from opposite directions.
The first involves higher education accreditation. Accreditors are the obscure gatekeepers that determine whether a college or university can access federal student aid. They are not widely understood by the public, but their authority is profound: no accreditor approval, no Pell Grants, no federal student loans. The entire financial model of American higher education runs through this chokepoint.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has spent years campaigning to break up the existing accreditor system, which he and President Trump have characterized as captured by diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. The initiative received a million dollars from Trump’s Education Department in early 2026. University systems in Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee are working to establish a new accrediting body aligned with conservative educational priorities. Lawmakers in Iowa, West Virginia, and North Carolina have introduced or passed legislation directing public universities to consider or adopt the new accreditor. The organization, called the Commission for Public Higher Education, is backed by four million dollars in seed funding from Florida’s Board of Governors.
No statute orders professors to assign different readings. No decree rewrites course syllabi. The mechanism operates at the level of institutional incentives. Alter the body that controls access to federal student aid, and you alter the standards administrators must meet to keep the lights on. Administrators respond to accreditors the way firms respond to regulators. They anticipate requirements. They adjust hiring criteria. They reshape institutional culture in advance of formal demands. This is not crude authoritarianism. It is institutional engineering of a high order.
Progressives who find this alarming should pause to acknowledge its elegance. It is precisely the kind of long-cycle incentive design that the left has deployed in other domains. The mortgage interest deduction created a homeowning middle class. The GI Bill built a college-educated workforce. Title IX transformed the gender composition of American universities without ever commanding a single coaching hire. The mechanism is the same. The values encoded in the mechanism differ.
The second front involves tariffs, and it is where the current administration’s use of behavioral architecture has been most dramatically constrained. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling against the emergency tariff framework was, as Politico’s Ankush Khardori argued, a seminal moment in Trump’s second term. The president accepted the ruling, describing it as disappointing rather than defying it outright. Whatever one thinks of the tariffs themselves, the acquiescence confirmed something essential: that presidential power to reshape markets through trade policy, while real, operates within boundaries that the judiciary will enforce.
The more interesting question is one the ruling does not answer: what would well-designed tariff policy actually look like as a tool of social engineering? The history of American trade policy suggests the answer involves more precision than the current approach has managed. The CHIPS and Science Act, with its requirements for domestic semiconductor manufacturing and its apprenticeship and prevailing-wage conditions attached to tax credits, points toward a model. It does not simply impose costs on foreign competition. It makes domestic production economically rational while embedding workforce development requirements in the investment calculus. Industries adjust. Supply chains reorganize. A training ecosystem gradually builds.
This is the version of industrial policy that progressives should be arguing for, whether or not they use the word tariff. The alternative, protective tariffs with no strings attached to workforce investment, no measurable domestic capacity benchmarks, no accountability for whether the protection actually builds durable economic capacity, is not social engineering in any serious sense. It is a transfer to incumbents.
Against this backdrop, Rahm Emanuel’s February 2026 proposal for a ten-thousand-dollar tax-free sign-on bonus for veterans enrolling in registered skilled-trades apprenticeships is worth taking seriously, both on its merits and as an illustration of behavioral architecture at its most legible.
The case for the proposal begins with the problem it addresses. The skilled trades labor shortage is not a rhetorical device. Ford CEO Jim Farley reported more than five thousand unfilled mechanic positions paying six-figure salaries. The construction industry requires an estimated 349,000 net new workers in 2026 alone, driven by infrastructure law investments, data center expansion, and renewable energy projects. Over half of current tradespeople will retire within a decade, with experienced workers exiting at roughly two and a half times the rate of new entrants. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects growth rates of four to sixty percent for various skilled trades occupations through 2033, far above the overall job market.
Veterans represent a logical talent pool. They possess technical aptitude, discipline, and tolerance for physical demand. The problem is a friction point that Emanuel identifies with some precision: the moment of separation. Military personnel leaving service face simultaneous relocation costs, credential translation difficulties, income gaps during early training periods, and the psychological adjustment of moving from a high-structure environment to one that offers little navigational guidance. The existing transition programs, Veterans in Piping, Helmets to Hardhats, DOD SkillBridge, are well-designed and demonstrably effective. They capture a small fraction of the two hundred thousand service members who separate annually.
The ten-thousand-dollar bonus does not invent a new pathway. It amplifies an existing one by reducing the cost of entry at the moment when that cost is highest. This is behavioral economics applied to a documented friction point. The money is not the destination; it is the nudge that makes the destination accessible.
Emanuel compares the bonus to a fifty-thousand-dollar sign-on incentive for ICE recruitment and proposes funding it by modifying a tax provision from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that benefits private college endowments. The comparison is politically shrewd. The funding mechanism is politically complicated, tying a broadly appealing workforce proposal to a reopening of recently enacted tax legislation. Whether that trade is worth making is a calculation that will depend on congressional arithmetic that does not yet exist.
What these three cases share, the accreditation overhaul, the tariff architecture, the veteran apprenticeship bonus, is that none of them work through direct command. They work through the calibration of incentives. They make some choices easier, some choices more expensive, and some choices more visible. Culture follows the price signals. Generations organize their lives within the architecture that policy builds.
This is not a revelation. It is a description of how governance actually functions, stripped of the rhetorical fog that surrounds the term “social engineering.” The fog serves a purpose: it allows each side to celebrate its own use of behavioral tools while condemning the other’s. Conservatives rail against DEI mandates while using accreditation to reshape university culture. Progressives champion clean energy tax credits while recoiling from the suggestion that they are engineering behavior. Everyone is building. The dispute is about the blueprints.
A coherent progressive position on this territory would begin with several acknowledgments. First, that markets are not natural phenomena but constructed arenas, governed by tax codes, regulatory structures, and institutional rules. Pretending otherwise does not make it true; it merely cedes interpretive authority to those who understand the rules well enough to manipulate them quietly. Second, that the use of behavioral architecture by government is not inherently authoritarian. The relevant question is whether it operates transparently, with democratic accountability, with evidence-based design, and with genuine distributional concern for who bears its costs and who receives its benefits.
The cautionary tale here is Opportunity Zones. The program was designed to channel capital into economically distressed communities by offering capital gains tax advantages to investors who committed funds to designated census tracts. In execution, much of the investment flowed to areas already positioned for growth, with luxury developments claiming incentives intended for neighborhoods that needed structural help. The incentive structure was real. The targeting was not. Behavioral architecture without rigorous design invites capture.
The phrase “social engineering” will not shed its ominous overtone, and perhaps it should not. The discomfort is appropriate. Power over incentive structures is power over lives, over the options available to a generation, over the values that institutional architecture encodes and transmits forward. A ten-thousand-dollar bonus that sends veterans into trades rather than dead-end service jobs is an exercise of that power in service of mobility. An accreditation system designed to suppress intellectual inquiry on campuses that depend on federal student aid is an exercise of the same power in service of ideological consolidation. They are not morally equivalent, even though they operate through the same mechanism.
What a democracy owes its citizens is not the absence of behavioral architecture, that is an impossibility, but the presence of architects who work in the open, who can be held accountable for the blueprints, and who design with the full range of citizens in mind rather than the narrow constituency of those already advantaged enough to shape the rules.
We are in a period when the tools of institutional design are being wielded with unusual intentionality across the political spectrum. The conservative project in higher education is sophisticated and long-horizon. The industrial policy embedded in clean-energy legislation is ambitious and structurally grounded. The veteran apprenticeship proposal is modest and well-targeted. The tariff framework, as the Supreme Court has now clarified, exceeded its legal authority.
What we are less good at, across the ideological spectrum, is honest public accounting of what we are building and for whom. The architecture is going up regardless. The debate we owe one another is about the design.