The Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.” This fundamental Right to Counsel is essential to the functioning of an adversarial criminal justice system, ensuring that defendants have the means to assert their other rights and are not otherwise disadvantaged by their lack of finances. In its landmark 1963 decision, Gideon v. Wainwright, which fully applied the Sixth Amendment Right to Counsel to the states, the United States Supreme Court attempted to level the criminal playing field once and for all by ensuring indigent defendants charged with a crime have an attorney to render effective assistance of counsel. Yet more than fifty years later, the parity promised in Gideon has never been fully achieved. Persistent and numerous threats to the functioning of indigent defense systems, chiefly the politically‐derived issues of underfunding and excessive caseloads, have made indigent criminal defense a field under siege, in which most defenders work under conditions that make it impossible to satisfy the Sixth Amendment. This Article considers the current state and trajectory of the Right to Counsel under the assumption that effective, permanent efforts to achieve nationwide implementation will not realistically occur anytime soon. The Article focuses on proposing short‐term, ground‐level, smaller‐scale procedural optimizations that state public defense systems can make on their own to provide better service within the constraints of today’s hostile political environment. It explores the development of the Right to Counsel, analyzing significant past and potential reform efforts and why, for all the progress that has been made, full implementation of the Right still remains distant. The Article suggests several potential ways public defenders, state courts, bar associations, and other parties can improve defendants’ access to justice even without additional funding, a breakthrough ruling, or any legislative or executive action.