I found myself looking for cinematic guidance as the chaos of the past few weeks played out.

I ultimately found it in one of the most compelling scenes in the first Godfather film. With guidance from Don Vito Corleone, Michael Corleone is plotting his audacious move to consolidate power among the warring Mafia families. One of the consequences of the anticipated bloodletting is the demotion of Tom Hagen from the Corleone family’s consigliere to its lawyer in Las Vegas. As Michael explains, “You’re not a wartime Consigliere, Tom. Things could get rough with the move we’re making.”

I’ve been thinking about this scene as I try to digest what is happening in our country and determine how to counsel cities and metropolitan areas, the places where the preponderance of our people live and the most critical elements of our economy come to ground, concentrate and co-locate.

The next four months, let alone four years, will require city and metropolitan leaders to go way outside their comfort zone and create collaborative mechanisms and make structural changes inconceivable just a short time ago.

We are witnessing an assault on federal institutions and local communities that is seemingly boundless in its scope and unprecedented in its contempt for the rule of law and economic and social stability. It is not coming from a foreign power, but from one branch of our national government.

The response from local and metropolitan networks of institutions and leaders, individually and collectively, must be equal in size and task. Cities and metropolitan areas drive our nation’s economy and operate on the global stage. Now they must organize themselves at a comparable scale, with skill, discipline, judgment and toughness.

Cities and metropolitan areas did not precipitate the chaos as in The Godfather, but they are the adults in the room, responsible at the end of the day for ensuring the prosperity of their places and the well-being of their people.

A “Wartime Consigliere” telegraphs the kind of organizing that is now essential, cleareyed in its focus and relentless in its ability to coalesce fragmented forces and galvanize collective energies. Unlike the Godfather films, where a Consigliere was an individual person, the times call for a high-profile Emergency Strike Team, a consortium of institutions and leaders that can play both defense and offense — mitigate negative impacts as they arise, amplify opportunities as they emerge and start the process, if necessary, of de-federalizing the design, finance and delivery of housing and other economy shaping projects.

A new type of New Localism

This is a hard-edged New Localism, intended to unlock and unleash the full resources and powers of our communities.

Things are getting rough, to put it mildly. Just consider a small portion of what has transpired in the past two weeks.

• • On January 20, an executive order terminated diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government. This will ultimately affect a plethora of programs around environmental justice, inclusive entrepreneurship, neighborhood regeneration and beyond.
  • On January 20 another executive order put a freeze on both leasing federal areas for new offshore wind projects and issuing federal permits for projects that are in progress.
  • On January 20, multiple executive orders set in motion a completely new immigration regime, including declaring a national emergency at the border, halting refugee admissions, expanding who is targeted for deportation and the process of expedited removals.
  • On January 27, a directive from the White House budget office froze the allocation of a vast swath of federal grants and loans; two days later, the freeze was rescinded.
  • On January 28, the administration offered roughly two million federal workers the option to resign but be paid through the end of September; on February 6, the Administration said that more than 40,000 federal workers had accepted the resignation offer.
  • On February 1, President Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and imposed sweeping tariffs on Canada and Mexico due to the “extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs”; on February 3rd, after the predictable tumult in the stock market, the imposition of tariffs on Canada and Mexico was delayed for a month.
  • On February 1, the President also imposed an additional 10 percent tariff on all imports from China and eliminated a duty-free exemption for packages valued at under $800.
  • On February 10, the President imposed 25 percent tariffs on all U.S. imports of steel and aluminum, industries dominated by China.

The breadth and depth of the actions taken and the speed with which they have been deployed (and, in some cases, pulled back) have ushered in a new era of presidential power and ambition.

In communities across the country, the federal funding freeze and tariff announcements in particular set off a cascade of fire drills across multiple institutions and intermediaries.

• • Ports, airports, freight rail carriers, global logistics firms, and even the U.S. Postal Service scrambled to ascertain how to deal with inbound shipments of an eclectic array of consumer products.
  • Mega industrial companies and their suppliers as well as large retail chains and small businesses likewise struggled to assess how to adjust to shifts in intricate and integrated supply chains across the North American economy.
  • A broad cross section of public, private and civic entities including municipal and county governments, housing and transportation providers, utilities, universities and large hospital systems and small nonprofit health centers furiously began to calculate how a cessation of federal aid would affect millions of payments.
  • Financial Institutions and capital providers, meanwhile, began to alter immediately their underwriting of housing and energy projects that depend on disparate federal grants, insured loans and tax advantaged capital.

The list goes on and on.

The stakes of these moves — for people’s lives and businesses, for local and metropolitan economies — are extraordinarily high. The first, second and third order effects in an economy and society as complex and multi-layered as ours are only beginning to become clear.

If places and local leaders feel like they are under siege, they are. This is not just a reversal of Biden era policies and practices. In some cases, investments and practices that have been stable for decades are being upheaved.

There is ample discussion of a constitutional crisis as federal officials openly talk about defying judicial orders. But there should also be talk of a federalist crisis, as well settled arrangements between layers and levels of government (i.e., who does what in our distributed federal republic) are being unmoored.

The actions of the new Administration are meant to provoke, distract and disrupt, and that’s what they are doing. These actions also signal where the Administration is headed; if anything, these moves are early indications of what is to come as budget, appropriations, tax and other legislative actions begin to take form.

Cities need Emergency Strike Teams

So, what should places do in the face of this assault?

In a phrase, get organized, as quickly and effectively as possible across anchor institutions, sectors, disciplines, jurisdictions, and, yes, even political parties and ideological divides. It is critical to remember that metropolitan areas cross urban, suburban, exurban and rural borders and encompass all partisan elements and factions. They represent a test of whether place can trump party (no pun intended), when federal actions undermine concrete projects, transfers and investments that are fundamental to economic prosperity and have wide-ranging support.

So, what would an Emergency Strike Team do? Here are some early thoughts, to be teased out in the coming weeks and months with a broad array of partners and practitioners.

First, an Emergency Strike Team would immediately conduct a Stress Test to assess the implications of what’s occurring and what’s coming.

Collaboration is an easy word but a hard act, particularly in periods of crisis when individual entities naturally focus on direct and specific threats to their own existence rather than threats to the metropolitan body as a whole.

Our financial institutions, from secondary market entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to large national and regional banks, are quite familiar with these tools. And cursory assessments of the impacts and implications of federal decisions are beginning to take form.

Just take housing as an example. Organized cities are assessing the potential impact on operating subsidies for public housing, rental payments to private landlords, and federal contributions to new projects in the pipeline. A funding freeze is quickly leading to a market freeze as financial institutions are reconsidering how to underwrite housing production and preservation deals that, inevitably, contain federal involvement. A housing crisis, which had already reached the boiling point, is now set to worsen as the federal government looks likely to scale back its involvement without any plans to contain the damage. And that’s just the impact of cutting direct housing incentives and subsidies; scaling back income transfers to low- and moderate-income households will just exacerbate the gap between rising rental prices and inadequate incomes.

Stress Tests, conducted both at the level of individual cities and counties and at the collective level of entire metropolitan areas, will be critical to mobilizing opposition to the coming battles over resources. But they also start the process, long overdue in many cases, to consider how states and localities, and their private and philanthropic allies, can fully maximize their power and capital.

Second, an Emergency Strike Team could drive customized Next Economy Playbooks to adapt to the mega forces that are reshaping the economic fortunes of cities and metropolitan areas. Federal disruption, incredibly, is not the only disruption that has been unleashed. As I have written before, a new economic order is emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic, powered by profound geo-political dynamics, energy shifts, technological acceleration, a renewed focus on advanced manufacturing and, in the aftermath of the pandemic, the changing nature of core downtowns.

Some of these forces are driven by federal policy choices and investment decisions; many are not.

As Goldman Sachs opined last year, artificial intelligence has rapidly shifted from an “excitement” phase to a “deployment” reality. This shift builds on radical innovation; as The Economist summarized last year, “While the first cohort of AI powered products was based on recognition [e.g., speech, facial], this second one is based on generation.” The application of artificial intelligence is now blowing across all sectors of the economy, including defense, energy, health care and financial services.

As painful as it is and will be, cities and metropolitan areas need to adapt to the current threats and work harder, much harder, for themselves.

At the same time, the post pandemic explosion of hybrid and remote work has triggered domino-like impacts on commercial real estate, small businesses, transit ridership, and municipal tax generation. In many sectors, working from home, either part time or full time, has become a structural feature of the post-pandemic economy, not a cyclical aberration. As a result, cities need to move fast to diversify their downtowns economically, shifting from office towers full of commuter, white-collar employees to a more balanced mix of office workers, residents, manufacturers, technologists, and amenities and entertainment to serve them all.

These macro forces have profound metro effects. In many respects, the hierarchy of metros in Western economies — driven over decades by service clusters and consumer- and communications-related technologies — is being reshuffled. A Next Economy Playbook will, by necessity, require new analytics that assess the starting position of places around national security spending (likely to rise in coming years) and critical technologies (AI for sure but also robotics, quantum computing and gene and cell therapy) that are creating the jobs and sectors of the future.

These Playbooks could become a tool that is used by a growing number of cities and metro areas to ascertain their starting position in the shifting economy and then devise and cost out projects that align growth strategies with disruptive market dynamics and public, private and civic capital. Next generation analytics in Atlanta, Hampton Roads, Kansas City and Pittsburgh could become early models for fast replication and adaptation.

Third, an Emergency Strike Team would necessitate radical collaboration, with a bias towards impact and action. As Jeremy Nowak and I laid out in The New Localism, cities and metropolitan areas, unlike the federal government, are powerful because they are networks of institutions and leaders. Spend one day in any given city or metropolis and you will be astounded by the wide array of public, private and civic entities that come together to solve hard problems and push remarkable solutions and projects.

But therein lies the challenge. Collaboration is an easy word but a hard act, particularly in periods of crisis when individual entities naturally focus on direct and specific threats to their own existence rather than threats to the metropolitan body as a whole. To some extent, the sheer immensity of the federal assault underway enables a divide-and-conquer strategy. And that’s before you add on top the rapid pace of economic restructuring and reshaping.

Cities and metropolitan areas may be the organizing units of the domestic and global economy, enabling agglomeration and ecosystem effects, but they are often less than the sum of their parts.

So, we need a new way of organizing, of solving for excessive fragmentation, both to build robust economies and enable growth that touches a broader segment of people and places. Cities and metropolitan areas already have an ample supply of elected officials, metropolitan public organizations and business and civic leadership groups on which to build. This gives communities the ability to steward their economies in a complex and chaotic period.

Each sector of a metropolitan community can be put to task. As Emergency Strike Teams get assembled, one can easily imagine mayors and country leaders leading the Stress Tests described above while metropolitan business/civic groups undertake efforts around leveraging a place’s economic position. The two, of course, are inextricably linked; a scale back in university research & development, for example, could fundamentally undermine a metropolitan economy’s assets and advantages.

Philanthropy will be critical to all this. They must come off the sidelines and fund the capacity surge that will be needed to drive how places respond to federal chaos and market dynamism. For many communities, the availability of capital is not the binding constraint; organizing and deploying that capital is the issue.

And solving for fragmentation will require new “hands on deck.” Let’s admit it. Many local governments and metropolitan organizations and associations are not sufficiently nimble or agile to act at the pace of federal disruption or the speed of markets. For that reason, we need to identify, elevate and support the exceptional people, who Kate Isaacs, Tom Giordano and I call network connectors, who can move fast, knit together fragmented constituencies and catalyze transformative change. These remarkable individuals can lead and drive the Emergency Strike Teams.

The national analysis of the first several weeks of the Trump administration has focused on the fact that the new administration is probing multiple sectors and systems simultaneously, to see whether constitutional checks and balances at the federal level will hold. Less well understood, profound shifts in federal policy and practice are also testing the power and resilience of the places (i.e., cities and metropolitan areas) where the bulk of our population resides, and the preponderance of our national economic dynamism is generated.

For the past 20 years, a growing number of corporations, financial institutions and philanthropies have celebrated the rise of cities and metropolitan areas and the mayors and other people who lead them. Now this celebration will be put to the test.

Will cities and metropolitan areas be able to rise to the moment and realize the full potential of local power and capital? Will they be able to aggregate their market and purchasing power and find new ways and structures to deliver goods and services — attainable housing, skilled workers, and essential infrastructure — that the federal government is likely to scale back? Will they be able to navigate the mega forces and technologies that are fundamentally altering the starting position of US cities and metropolitan areas in the global economy and their ability to prosper?

Make no mistake; continuing business as usual or enhancing a small set of peripheral innovations are not a recipe for success. The next four months, let alone four years, will require city and metropolitan leaders to go way outside their comfort zone and create collaborative mechanisms and make structural changes inconceivable just a short time ago.

As painful as it is and will be, cities and metropolitan areas need to adapt to the current threats and work harder, much harder, for themselves. The first step of many is to get moving, get organized and absorb the necessity for an urgent, emergency organizing effort, the metropolitan equivalent of a Wartime Consigliere.

This is America 2025. Ignore it at your peril.

Bruce Katz is the Founding Director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University.

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