A Better Way Forward: An Interview with Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan was the 54th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. In office from October 2015 to January 2019, he was the youngest speaker in nearly 150 years. Prior to becoming Speaker of the House, Ryan served as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. From 2011 to 2015, he also served as Chairman of the House Budget Committee. In 2012, he was selected to serve as Governor Mitt Romney’s Vice-Presidential nominee. Paul was first elected to Congress at age 28 and represented Wisconsin’s First District for two decades. For Spring 2026, Ryan was named a Hauser Leader at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.

You were Speaker of the House from 2015 to 2019. What do you think were your biggest accomplishments or key moments during your speakership?

In my second term as speaker in the 2017 and 2018 session, it was the most productive session in Congress in a generation, passing 1,172 bills, and it’s because [House Republicans] ran out a very broad agenda that we promised to enact if we got elected, and we did almost every bit of it. Getting Congress to be a very productive Congress, from a legislative standpoint, to me, was a very important macro accomplishment, because I was worried that Congress just wasn't performing as well as it should have.

I’d say the biggest singular accomplishment was rewriting the tax code. I had been Chairman of [the House Committee on] Ways and Means and spent my career on this issue. Our tax code had become so uncompetitive from a global economy standpoint that we needed to redesign our tax code so that our businesses could be globally competitive, [since] we are at a massive disadvantage. We were able to accomplish that, and those reforms have persisted and been successful. That particular reform was probably the singular, best legislative achievement but getting Congress back into the business of drafting legislation, passing legislation, and getting that muscle memory retrained was really important to me.

What were the main issues that you sought to address with that bill? What did it specifically accomplish?

We were at a stage in the global economy that was going through a lot of transformation, and our economic policies were legacies of the 20th century that weren’t as well suited for the economy of the 21st Century. We needed to change our regulations and our tax policies to reflect that. The one big issue that we didn't accomplish was reforming our health care entitlements, which were written in the 20th century and that are proving to be unsustainable as they’re currently written in the 21st Century. That’s a bill we passed out of the house, but it failed to get through the Senate. Of all of our major agenda, which we called the Better Way agenda, it’s the one thing that didn’t pass. Everything else did. We were able to restructure a lot of institutions to get the US economy and the US military wired for the 21st Century. Part of the overhaul of our plans was to overhaul our military as well. We were able to accomplish that.

From your perspective, how have the major political challenges evolved since you left office?

We don’t pass as many bills anymore: It’s not that productive. Congress has relapsed into much less legislative production. That's just a result of the kind of political era and time we’re in and the way our politics are played these days.

What do you see as the turning point for the trend away from government productivity?

It’s the people. Generally, the type of person that runs Congress these days is not exactly the type of person that ran for Congress 20 [or] 30 years ago. The difference in between is the internet. It’s social media, [including] the way elections are run, the way campaigns work, and the way people interact with constituents.

When I first came to Congress in 1998 the majority, the vast majority, of members of Congress were legislators and people who went because they believed in a cause. They wanted to advocate as a legislator to do something. A minority of members of Congress were what I would call “be-ers.” They wanted to be a congressman, they wanted to become famous, and they wanted to build a brand for themselves and be sort of an entertainer. Now that that is flipped. The majority of people in Congress that are going to Congress, that are in Congress, are more “be-ers” and entertainers than doers and legislators. That’s just the way society has evolved with respect to how politics works. The primary, not only, reason for that is the way social media has evolved.

How has that changed the relationship between the legislative and the executive or are they still working together?

The legislative branch has ceded a lot of its power to the executive branch in a structural way, and for the left that’s kind of a natural progression ideologically. For conservatives, it’s against core principles. I would say my party right now is much more of a populist party led by a populist and therefore, the dominant faction of the Republican Party is more of a populist faction that is not tethered to constitutional conservatism and therefore a strict separation of powers. That’s just the era and the moment we are in right now.

What does it mean, then, to tackle populism? Does it fit into a global trend, or is the American case distinct?

It is part of a global trend. It is on both sides, for sure. It’s not just Trump and Republicans; It’s the left, it's progressivism, it’s AFD in Germany, and Nigel Farage ascending in Great Britain. There’s a populous populist wave running through democracies. The change that has happened in the late 20th century has dislocated a lot of people and left a lot of people frustrated, and democratic societies have not responded quickly enough to address their concerns. People have resorted to more populist tendencies. The question that matters most is: are the populist movements tethered to core principles that produce solutions, that produce policies, that solve problems or not? If they are, then it’s going to be successful and those democracies will thrive. If they’re not, you’re going to have more rounds of populism without delivering solutions and even more frustrated voters.

A good example of this is [President Javier] Milei in Argentina. In my opinion, he is a very principled populist who is applying his principles, which I share, to his country's problems, and doing it in a way where he's bringing his country along politically and selling liberty, freedom and free enterprise and property rights and limited government. He’s selling it in a very popular way and delivering quick results. There’s an example of populism that’s constructive and producing results. It’s going to make his country succeed. In my opinion, there’s a lot of left-wing [forms of] populism that don’t work because they move to the left. I’m not a fan of left-wing principles to begin with, but there are a lot of right-wing populist movements that scratch some kind of frustration but don’t end up solving underlying problems.

The question at the end of this populist wave that is moving through democracies is do we have the stuff that it takes in our systems to solve the big problems we have? I think the answer is yes: it’s going to happen. I think democracy is being stress tested from within and from without. We're being stress tested from within because of the things I just described, problems going unsolved, populations polarized, and politics getting uglier and more populistic. Part of that is social media has digitized moral relativism. Populist movements that have gravitated toward moral relativism, in that they subscribe to the notion that might makes right and the ends justify the means, is not going to produce good results. We're being stress tested on the outside by the tyrants, by the tyrannies of China [and] Russia and illiberal factions of government that are trying to undermine our democracies by using our freedoms from within us to more deeply polarize us.

Where do you see the possibilities for responding to powers like China and Russia and negotiating those relationships?

Agreements and allies. Free societies and friendly countries coming together to pull the resources and their power together to put up a front against illiberalism [and] against these dictatorships on behalf of freedom and democracy. I still think we win this fight at the end of the day, such that there is an end of the day, meaning there’s these things are continuously fought, state-driven capitalism on top of a surveillance state and zero liberty and freedom will never stand up and produce the kinds of results that private property rights, liquid capital markets, and innovation produce in free societies. For instance, in AI quantum computing [and] these tech races we have, I will bet on the American system of deep and liquid capital markets, private property rights, and freedom to produce better results than managed state capitalism in tyrannical societies like China. We’ll win this at the end of the day, but we’re going through these stress tests.

Looking forward, what policies or broader priorities should be given renewed attention?

Our national debt is getting out of control, and it is going to do great damage to our economy and to our dollar, our currency, [and] our living standards. Number two, we need to redesign the social safety net to reflect the 21st Century realities and to embrace 21st century technologies. Those things are basically an acknowledgement that the social contract in American society is something we have a great consensus on, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. This took a century of debate; we all believe that we should have healthy retirement security for all Americans and a social safety net for the poor to help them get on their feet. The problem is these programs were designed in the 20th century in ways that have proven to be unsustainable and ill-equipped to deal with those realities in the 21st Century.

If we can redesign our social safety net to deal with upward mobility and the dislocation that will come with new technologies like AI, and if we can redesign our social contract, our retirement programs, our health care programs, in a way that doesn’t bankrupt the country, then there is nothing stopping America. There’s nothing stopping our country from succeeding, and we have to overcome those challenges. Right now, our politics are not serious enough to deliver those kinds of reforms. But those reforms are in need.

Ryan spoke with Black on March 26, 2026. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The views expressed in this piece are the interviewee’s own and are not reflective of the views of the HIR.