This makes the idea of FDR style reform somekind of mystical imaginary, instead of a concrete potential. Without this concept and some experience with it, I think you have a severely limited view of what can be done.
The long break between the last of Johnson's war on poverty within the Nixon administration and the Clinton administration virtually erased this institutional memory to a great depth. This was coupled with an internal breakdown via the rise of bureaucratic reporting and accountability requirements that co-opted the effectiveness of any reform effort. The whole machinery of public institutions has been crippled by these developments, enough so that doing anything is nearly impossible without in-depth internal reform in advance of a larger programmatic change.
Two monsterous examples come to mind. Dept of Education under NCLB and its mania for accountability of a badly conceived outcome, and the ACA healthcare `partnership' plan where the federal subsidy is hidden in fine print and goes to the insurance companies. These were programs designed by think tanks and lobby groups with the whole weight of their vested interest in business development rather than public good.
Funny story. My eighth grade math teacher buddy (AL) worked this summer on re-designing his curriculum according to a friendly superintendent's outline following the federal math guidelines. Before the Super's term of office expired, AL finished his project knowing that the new Super was going to be a cautious stick in the mud and might change the outline. So AL took his pick-up to work and emptied the entire math textbook storage of books he hated and took them to some state recycling plant. In September when the new Super took over there was a meeting to revise the math plan back to what it had been. AL noted that would be impossible at his school, since the school no longer had the old books. Now he gets to use his own textbook, composed of weekly sections that present the material the way he prefers.
[Note. AL was my tech partner at the long ago ex-OEO project where we met and developed the transportation and wheelchair maintenance component by inventing them from fed guidelines under a very heavy interpretation of `accessibility'. I mean guidelines are suggestions, right?]
CG