Phoenix Initiative

The Phoenix Initiative, initially known as the Reclamation Task Force, is a human intergovernmental organization and interim governing body created in late 2553, encompassing the United Earth Government and the governments and governments-in-exile of most of the surviving human colonies. Following the Human-Covenant War, it is the largest human civilian political body, though in practice, its authority remains relatively loose.

The United Nations Space Command exists in a complicated relationship with the Phoenix Initiative Government and the UEG, on one hand retaining its ties to the latter but effectively answering to the Steering Committee of the Phoenix Initiative. The UNSC also retains considerable autonomy, especially when it comes to operations outside the human sphere.

During the conceptual phase, the committee was known as the Reclamation Task Force (a working title coined by the committee set up for the task), but as the scope of the project grew, consultants from one of the consortia involved suggested "Phoenix Initiative" as a less bellicose, more uplifting alternative.

History
During the war, the UEG was not completely stripped of power, but its authority was largely restricted to SolCore. Outside Sol, the newly-formed UNSC Colonial Authority took over the functions of the absorbed CAA. While not as bloated with bureaucracy as its predecessor, the CA was underfunded and understaffed, which meant that outside the core Inner Colonies, the UNSC military called the shots; where the UNSC wasn't present, the colonies were mostly left to their own devices.

At the end of the war, the UNSC made a concerted effort to demilitarize power. The colonies were more estranged than ever from the UEG, which for all intents and purposes just huddled up in Sol throughout the war. However, the UNSC has also accrued goodwill among some colonial populations in exile for their defense efforts, though not all experiences were as amiable. During the war, there was always an assumption that the UNSC would hand back control to the UEG once the war was over. The UNSC's assumption of power was always described as an interim solution that was only happening in the first place because the Covenant was an existential threat that could not be negotiated or reasoned with. After the war, it was said, things would go back to normal. Unfortunately, nobody thought about what the end of the war would actually look like. In early 2553, Lord Hood met with the leaders of the UEG General Assembly and all but begged them to take back control, but there was a sharp disagreement as to whether the UNSC had finished its mandate. There was still largely-intact Brute forces occupying Human territory, including at least three battlegroups that could march on Earth. The UEG wasn't safe yet. Hood countered that the war was now one that required diplomatic solutions to solve. The UNSC has allies now, and if the UEG doesn't step up and take back control now, it never will. If the UNSC has to form a diplomatic corps, then it will have absorbed all the functions of a permanent government, and it will never give up that power. The president of the General Assembly refused, so Hood went back to negotiating with the Arbiter's coalition.

One factor in this was that the UEG had suffered a massive brain drain during the war. For twenty years, the best and brightest of humanity knew that the path to power and prestige lay in joining the UNSC's officer corps. The UEG was staffed by politicians and administrators who were either unwilling to serve, looking for a quiet post, or were willing to play the long game. But there were some who were still ambitious, or at least had a plan for the future. Unfortunately, they didn't necessarily work well together. After the UEG Secretary-General's refusal, members of the UEG General Assembly tried to reassert their authority, and did so in a haphazard and sometimes clumsy way. This made the UEG look bumbling and indecisive next to the UNSC's cool, directed diplomacy, and fueled resentment in the UNSC officer corps, in the general public, and in the eyes of the Arbiter's allies.

It became clear that handing power back to the UEG and demilitarizing the CA again was not desirable, and the UEG showed itself to be unwilling to take responsibility over the entire process. The UEG had demonstrated itself unable to adequately answer to the pressing challenges of that era such as rebuilding humanity's economic base and military power, relocating the millions of refugees displaced by the war, or establishing effective diplomatic bridges to sympathetic post-Covenant polities. On the other hand, the colonies and the UNSC agreed that a civilian governing body was required to oversee the process on a strategic level, and regulate the activities of the corporations facilitating the resettlement progress.

The UNSC and the Phoenix Initiative were able to dangle the carrot of FTL communications to the colonies who joined up, with the main draw that said communications will facilitate leaner, more responsive governance. The task of implementing those communications was handed over to a private consortium specifically set up for that purpose in the mid-2550s.

When the Phoenix Initiative comes around, the UEG General Assembly had consolidated, and was determined to regain the power it once held. But the window for regaining power had passed. All the UEG could do was join the Phoenix Initiative and throw its weight around as a senior member. In practice, the UEG would never regain its pre-war authority over the extrasolar territories. On the other hand, the control the UEG (along with many SolCore-based corporations) retained within the Phoenix Initiative caused disgruntlement among many colonial residents, with some seeing the Initiative merely as a re-branded Colonial Administration Authority.

Governance and politics
The Phoenix Initiative is a polity borne of compromise and will take time to find its identity. It is partly based on reform models already proposed by sociologists in the late 25th and early 26th centuries, and is considerably less centralized than the UEG-CAA arrangement in theory, but retains power to dictate policy and projects where they relate to the reconstruction process (which is very broadly defined on purpose). The parties involved generally agree that the Initiative is an interim solution to be replaced (or dissolved) when its purpose has been fulfilled.

There are traditionalists on Earth and SolCore who vehemently disagree with the new arrangement, and fall back heavily on romanticism of Earth's golden age. On the other hand, many colonials also take a dim view of the Phoenix Initiative, with frequent accusations of it merely being the CAA with "a new coat of paint". Other criticisms both without and within SolCore highlight corporate interests' key role in the organization, and some have voiced grievances regarding the increased role of AIs within the Initiative's decision-making.

The Phoenix Initiative uses superluminal communications and integrated AI networks for strategic planning, prediction, and simulation of outcomes of major decisions; this was partly informed by the use of such networks during the later years of the war to great effect.