Then again, this hasn’t been the first time the states have moved ahead of the federal administration - happened during Trump’s first term too. Maybe they’ll do it successfully again.

Wouldn’t it, essentially, become a giant sand bank of sorts?

I agree with you in that technocracy has a lot of potential and definitely sounds appealing, but I think it’d almost have to be socialist - both to atleast somewhat prevent the plutocratic devolution you speak of, as well as halting anti-intellectualism (‘you don’t need an education’) and post-truth (like you see with American social media now).

Then again, not having a free market would also require new guardrails (how do you ensure proper distribution beyond the formal mathematics?), which makes it more complicated.

Always better than a monarchy though.

This is not a technocracy: it’s not about expertise in a given area that decides leadership, but about plutocratic autocracy. I wouldn’t say ‘the rich’ are naturally the experts.

Not near-future science fiction alone, every time of sci-fi but the true far-future science fiction seems to be able to discuss this (if we take near-future to mean within decades), think for example of 2312 or the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.