Council to Modernize Governance (CMG)

Background

The Council to Modernize Governance is a think tank founded to educate policy makers, thought leaders, and the public on the means to improve governmental outcomes, cut regulatory burdens, increase government accountability, simplify laws, and return power from the bureaucracy to the politically accountable legislative and executive branches. The group was founded in 2021 and produces policy primers, research papers, op-eds, and legislative testimony. ¹

Initiatives and Activities

The Council to Modernize Governance published “Permit by Rule” in 2023, a policy primer that promoted streamlining the permitting process. It proposed letting applicants certify compliance unless government objects and for changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to speed energy projects. ⁴

The CMG advocates for transparency and accountability of governance by advocating for the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to be replaced by proactive disclosure, a Judgement Fund that provides greater transparency on taxpayer-funded settlements, and the modernization of Inspector General offices drawing on Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-data driven approaches. ⁴

The CMG published “Progressive NGOs and the National Park Service” in June 2026. The paper calls for greater scrutiny into how the nation’s history is presented by the NPS, and the elimination of climate alarmism, historical revisionism, and anti-American rhetoric. The report criticizes educational groups, federal employee groups, and NGOs, including the National Association for Interpretation (NAI), Post Pigeon EDU, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), the Sunrise Movement, the left-of-center Wilderness Society, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), and the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE), also known as SEIU Local 5000. ^{2  3}

The CMG published “Restoring Online Free Speech and Shutting Down the Censorship Industrial Complex” in December 2023. The report states that definitional changes have allowed the use of censorship to defend “critical infrastructure,” which had been extended to what CMG characterized as the “Orwellian” concept of “cognitive infrastructure”. ⁵

“Vineyard Wind’s Disaster Could Be a Sign of Problems on the Horizon For The Renewable Energy Industry,” a September 28, 2024 article written by Curtis Schube, described an incident in which the blade of a wind turbine snapped off in a Martha’s Vineyard wind turbine. The article ended with a call for the creation of a better system to ensure that wind-power generation did not leave the environment worse off. ⁶

People

The founder and executive director of the Council to Modernize Governance is Curtis Schube, a former Assistant Attorney General in Missouri, and a Dhillon Law Group attorney for constitutional rights, election and defamation law. The Dhillon Group was founded by Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the second Trump administration Justice Department. ⁷

David Bernhardt is an advisory council member of the CMG and former secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) in the first Trump administration. He is also the chairman of the Center for American Freedom policy division within the right-of-center America First Policy Institute (AFPI) and sits on the advisory board of the right-of-center Advancing American Freedom Foundation. Other advisory board members include Curt Hebert, a visiting scholar with the Bipartisan Policy Center; Stephen Hollingshead, the founder of ChangeEx; and Gregg Renee’s, a co-chair of Alaska Rural Justice and the Law Enforcement Commission. ⁷