Is strategic foresight in the US government dead?

Five years ago, in the middle of the coronavirus crisis, an article in the Harvard Business Review questioned the future of strategic foresight, given the pandemic and the velocity of change buffeting world markets and geopolitics. While the world recovered from the pandemic, it never seemed to recover from a sense of short-termism in planning and thinking about the future.  The US government, in particular, seems to have given up looking over the horizon in any rigorous and sustained kind of way. Is this something to worry about?  In a word, yes.

Full disclosure: FSG and its predecessor organization The Futures Group have contributed to scenario planning and foresight projects over many years for US government entities, including NASA, the US Coast Guard, the State Department, FEMA, the Panama Canal Commission, the intelligence community, among many others. While not currently active in federal foresight work, we have continued to track developments in that space. In terms of the quality and ambition of federal foresight work, much can be inferred from publicly available studies and reports. 

The Erosion of the Strategic Foresight Imperative 

For the most part, foresight in the US government did not disappear overnight – either because of Covid or recent DOGE personnel cuts for that matter. But for more than a decade we have informally observed a general decline in the prevalence, depth and impact of federal foresight activities.

Nominally, foresight activities are still evident, but few of a sustained duration with agency leaders visibly out in front and staff assigned long-term. Instead, projects have tended to be one-off or short-duration affairs, staffed heavily with outside contractors, and with modest expectations that foresight insights would receive leadership’s serious consideration. 

And some federal foresight offices have been completely shut down. Earlier this year, the secretary of defense closed the Office of Net Assessment, a longstanding Pentagon think tank created by Andrew Marshall to look at emerging threats and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the US over the long term. Net Assessment has been described as “quietly but profoundly influential” for more than 50 years, from Nixon through the Biden administrations.  But now it’s gone, with no evident successor organization. 

The US Coast Guard, with Project Evergreen, is one US government organization that has sustained its foresight commitment, which began in in 1998 with Project Long View, under the commandant at the time, ADM James Loy. But today even Evergreen is less about looking over the horizon at long-term strategic challenges than it is about evaluating current operating plans in the context of known, currently observable trends and events in the maritime domain. 

The Futures Not Being Imagined Now

Admittedly, decrying the loss of foresight in government might sound off the mark, even insensitive. Since February, DOGE actions have led to the dismissal of thousands of federal workers, many serving in critical roles in health care, emergency management, food safety, entitlements administration, tax collection, weather forecasting, and more. Worrying about the long-term future can seem like a luxury when delivery of today’s essential services is precarious.   

And yet at some point, the federal agencies will be challenged to encounter the unknowns and uncertainties of the longer-term future.  To cite but an obvious few:

• What are the economic and security consequences of a fragmenting world?
• Where are the US’s greatest vulnerabilities to climate change? 
• What generational sacrifices and tradeoffs will be required to sustain entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare? 
• What does it mean for the US if the dollar loses its preeminence as the world’s reserve currency? 
• How might our long-term relationships with China play out?  
• How might AI evolve and what are the consequences for politics, economics, society – and just about anything we can think of? 

Outside of government, smart principled people in foundations and think tanks will continue to wrestle with these challenges and develop useful foresight thinking. One can hope that some important futures insights will seep into government policy discussions, reducing strategic risks, and leading to better, more robust decision making.

But that’s not guaranteed. And it’s hard not to conclude that we’re losing something extraordinarily important as we forsake the essential role of strategic foresight in government.  It will not be recovered soon or easily.