Scenario. A federal ombudsman's office has been asked to evaluate whether three different agencies — the VA, a consumer protection bureau, and a community development fund — are living up to their public commitments. In each case, the ombudsman, Lucia, finds the same problem: the mandates are written at a level of abstraction that makes them impossible to test. "Serve veterans with dignity." "Protect consumers." "Strengthen communities." Each agency has meanwhile invented its own internal vocabulary for what it is actually doing. Lucia realizes she is writing the same memo three times. She wants a shared national standard for how mandates are articulated thickly enough to be tested — not one she has to reinvent for every agency.

Challenge: Design the shared public infrastructure — standards for articulating institutional mandates thickly enough to be contestable, standards for measuring fidelity to them, and channels for practitioner and stakeholder signal — and specify the standards body, its independence, and the revision procedure.

Evaluation. A strong design keeps mandate measurement from collapsing into a new thin-metric Goodhart regime and insulates the infrastructure from political cycles, all without erecting a national ministry of fidelity.