Thinking ahead, planning for what might happen — now it has a fancy name: strategic foresight. A group of people who do strategic foresight has formed an alliance to urge the government to form a strategic foresight agency. Former leadership processor and federal union president Bob Tobias said on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin that this might not be a bad idea.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin The fact is the idea of planning for contingencies is nothing new. And agencies have been supposed to have been doing this all along. Fair to say?

Bob Tobias It is, it is fair to say, but it’s also fair to say that nobody’s been doing it. And I came across, Tom, this organization called the Federal Foresight Agency Alliance. And this is a group of people from the public sector who have been engaged in budget planning and processes over the years and private sector people who do this kind of work in private companies. And what it seeks to do is to go beyond normally what agencies do in planning for the future. They say, well, you know, in 2025 we spent $100. In 2026, we need 3% more and maybe we’ll need 5% in the next year and so forth. Just sort of a gradual increase to keep the trains running on the tracks. But this Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance urges agencies to really think about things like pandemics and natural disasters and large scale security threats and significant economic crises where no single government agency can adequately respond to. Think about these events in the future. Plan for them in the future. Budget for them in the future. Which of course, I think makes sense because proactive planning is always better than reactive scrambling.

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Tom Temin Right. And I think that having read most of the white paper that this group put out, it’s mostly corporate and academic types. The one name I recognized closely on there was Chris Blackwood, who recently left the Partnership for Public Service and is now about to become the president of the National Academy of Public Administration. He had a long career at GAO before that. The rest are industry and academic types and they presuppose something I think that’s very difficult to accept, and that is that there is an ability for government to forge a total agreement across all sectors in the public on what should be done and what should happen should this something happen in the future. And that idea that there can be national agreement on anything is a little far fetched.

Bob Tobias Well, it is. It is Tom. And I think that’s why this alliance is focusing on things that we know are going to occur. We know there’s going to be future pandemics. We know that there are going to be natural disasters that require a whole-of-government response. We know this is going to happen. And so we ought to think about how agencies would coordinate, a whole-of-government would coordinate across the federal government to respond. And it’s a heavy lift because of what you suggest, it’s hard to get agreement about how to respond. But more fundamentally, it’s hard to get people to spend time to do it because our career budget planners and short term political appointees don’t think five or six years in advance because they’re thinking about tomorrow. They’re thinking about the next fiscal year. They’re not thinking and don’t have time to think about five or six years into the future. I mean, think about this year. October 1st has come and gone. Nobody knows when we’re going to get a final 2025 budget. So agencies are constantly thinking about, all right, we plan to spend on November 1st. We plan to spend on December 1st. Should we plan to spend in February or March or April or May? And they’re constantly recalculating their budgets to think about how to carry out their responsibilities to the public while Congress delays. And the fact is, Congress has only done a budget on time, you know, since this whole process was put in effect in 1977, four times: 1977, 1989, 1995 and 1997.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Bob Tobias, former federal management professor and union president. And yes, they do have a point. I mean, at the agency level or even the component level below the department or agency level, you do see people that understand in their narrow domains what are the next big challenges and how can we get around them? The Defense Innovation Unit. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health, for example. DARPA. These are different organizations that don’t think government wide. They think in the domain for which they have responsibility or some role to play. So there is good strategic foresight thinking going on. But at the stovepipe level, not at the national level. And I think that’s what this group is talking about. But as you point out, politicians live budget to budget, election to election. And beyond that, nobody agrees on anything.

Bob Tobias Well, that’s the challenge. That’s really, really the challenge: to have a whole of government response to incidents we know are going to occur. And this alliance suggests that there be a hub, they call it a hub in the [Office of Management and Budget] to coordinate and push agencies to do this.

Tom Temin Yes. Isn’t that called the deputy director for management?

Bob Tobias It is! The deputy director for management has been required to do this since 2016. But the deputy director for management hasn’t done it.

Tom Temin Right. And then there’s also the phenomenon that sometimes there are plans developed and then the next administration throws them away. I think famously, the George W. Bush administration was kind of smitten with the idea of a pandemic and developed a multi-hundred page plan. But it didn’t survive until the next administration. And by the administration after that, when the pandemic did hit, it was back to improvising.

Bob Tobias Tom, that is a quintessential example of good work being done and ignored by a subsequent administration. And it’s a quintessential example of why doing this is so darn hard, because people say, why should I expend all of my energy when nobody’s going to pay attention in the future? And who’s all at this? I’ve got all this stuff I’m doing today. Why? Why would I do it?

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Tom Temin Another example in the Obama administration, when Congress and the administration enacted gigantic packages to help the economy after the 2008 real estate crisis, there were control and auditing and anti-fraud measures developed to make sure that money got spent properly. And those measures now, in the subsequent crisis post pandemic, the inspectors general and so forth are fighting to keep alive the very tools that they need to keep spending under control and keep fraud from happening in the next event or the next event. Again, another mechanism created that’s on lifeline to keep going because it’s going to be needed in the future.

Bob Tobias And that process was something brand new. It was a reaction. It hadn’t been planned in response. And yet the Obama administration recognized that if they were going to spend all this money, there was going to be fraud. Inevitably, when you spend that kind of money, there’s going to be fraud. So how do we put into place a process to eliminate it or keep it at a minimum? And they did it. It was successful. And the people who did it go on to do other things. Political appointees disappear. The culture that created it evaporates. And as you suggest, the few who survive try to re-energize it and recreate it, and it doesn’t happen. So having a group who really was would be focused on these kinds of efforts would be of incredible value to taxpayers. We as taxpayers need the federal government to engage in strategic foresight, budget planning. We need more problems to be identified in the future and plans created in advance to save time and money and lives. We need that. And hopefully the deputy director for management in OMB will adopt what’s being suggested by the Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance and make it happen.

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