A new prescription for effective government from a long-time observer

The nation seems to have both more problems and more government than ever. Federal Drive with Tom Temin‘s interview guest makes the case in a new book, that more collaboration with what he calls bridge-builders will be more effective than the traditional approach. Build a new organization for each problem, then dump money on it. Bridgebuilders co-author Don Kettl is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Texas.

Interview Transcript:

 

Tom Temin And let’s acknowledge right away that your coauthor on this is Bill Eggers of Deloitte. Also been on the show. And so the two of you have created this book. What do you mean by Bridge Builders, which is both the title and the theme?

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Don Kettl Exactly. What we have in mind is not only a theme, but a new strategy for the way in which we think government ought to operate. The basic problem is that so often we think about government, and by we I mean sometimes people in the media, ordinary citizens, even policymakers in Congress and in the executive branch tend to think of government as a kind of vending machine. You put money in the top and pull the lever and wait for the services to come out the bottom. And not surprisingly, that doesn’t work very well anymore because government is no longer a kind of vertical machine where we can count on hierarchy, where we can count on authority, where we can count on a vertical control to make things happen. More and more problems, as you pointed out, Tom, are complex. They require actions across organizations, across all levels of government, across the sectors, even across national borders. And that really means that more and more of government is horizontal. And what we need, we argue in the book is a transition from this vending machine model to an approach that’s more horizontal, much more with government being like an orchestra conductor, trying to coordinate the music played by maybe as many as 100 different instruments into a concerted whole to make beautiful music and deliver far better policies and policy implementation for citizens out there.

Tom Temin Yeah, because right now some of the long standing programs that continue to be fraught with fraud instances and lack of accountability are some of the federally funded but state administered welfare programs, unemployment insurance, the food stamp program, all of these things that get smeared with the money through the states. But yet often they’re not that effective over the long run, and they are often very unaccountable. And when they get overwhelmed by the surges, we see how much fraud has taken place in SBA programs, unemployment insurance and so forth. So that does seem to argue in favor of that. This is not the answer.

Don Kettl We keep trying it and we keep discovering that it doesn’t work and it’s time to try to discover something else. And you’re right, Tom, so many of the problems, both of fraud, waste and abuse, but maybe even more importantly, the kind of effectiveness of government programs. But the problems come about because we just simply have the wrong model in our heads for how best to try to produce the results. One of things that’s fascinating, if you look at what’s going on in the Texas border, not too far from where I’m sitting here in Austin, is that there are tens of thousands of migrants coming across the border and everybody’s trying to figure out what to do. And it’s one thing to manage the flow at the border itself, but, well, what happens three blocks away from the border where people come, they need housing, they need food, they need efforts to try to find themselves jobs, especially need help to navigate the federal paperwork. And what’s happened is that a large collection of non-governmental entities have stepped up to try to fill the gap. The Office of Federal Refugee Resettlement, this is one of my favorite statistics about the federal government right now. The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement has a total of 150 employees that try to deal with tens of thousands of migrants coming in. So so what’s the strategy? And the answer is that there is a church about three or four blocks from the border that’s become the center for efforts to try to deal with the issue. It has put together a network of Catholic charities, of other nonprofits, of transportation systems, not only in El Paso, but across the country. And the success in trying to deal with this massive problem has really fallen to a very complex coordination among these different organizations, some governmental, many non-governmental. And the result has been something of remarkable effectiveness. But it’s the story that, for the most part, doesn’t get told.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Don Kettl. He’s coauthor of Bridge Builders, along with Deloitte’s Bill Eggers. And I wanted to ask you then, how does the accountability come into this? Because when you have all of these NGOs or local operators administering programs with the government orchestrating and you do have that small federal staff, yet that is the staff ultimately responsible for finance and performance. So how do you build that function in when you don’t have very many people?

Don Kettl The key here is not to try to reach out and grab the throats of everybody getting the money and shaking and squeezing until they do what you want. It’s rather a matter of coordinating them to try to understand what it is that each of them contributes to the process. And most importantly, instead of focusing on process, focusing on outcomes. It’s a lesson that we learned, on the other hand, and Houston, which succeeded in reducing its level of homelessness by 63% in about five years, 63%, in one of the nation’s most complicated problems. And the way that they did that was to create the Houston Coalition for the Homeless, which is essentially the orchestra conductor. They’re the bridge builder. And they brought together 100 different organizations that work collaboratively to try to help solve the problems of people who are experiencing homelessness and do it in a way to understand how what kind of problems and issues each individual experiencing homelessness has, What organization can step in to try to help solve the problem about how it is that individuals can be tracked through the system and then track the performance of the individual organizations as well. This is a coalition larger than any symphony orchestra out there. It’s a more complicated problem than any orchestra conductor ever has to try to deal with. But it’s worked successfully because of this effort that has happened in Houston with bridge builders who make the connections among the organizations where accountability is defined by the outcomes that they produce.

Tom Temin Do you think that the U.S. Agency for International Development is a good example of where that’s already happening? Because in the countries where they operate, it’s not USAID people actually administering the programs, but simply finding the non-governmental entities and sometimes charities and so on, contractors that do the work that they are developing in those countries. But it’s not USAID people themselves hammering nails and whatever.

Don Kettl That’s right. That’s that’s a hidden secret about the American foreign aid process these days, because the Agency for International Development is not so much the service deliverer out there, as you point out, but it’s the orchestra conductor to bring together nonprofits and other organizations that succeed in focusing on the problems ranging from trying to eradicate malaria to trying to deal with the fundamental problems of electricity generation and providing better homes for people out there. It’s not AID, but AID that provides some but not all funding. It’s a idea that proves an orchestra conductor to bring these different nonprofits and NGOs together to try to produce the results and where they focus on accountability, understood in their ability to be able to produce these outcomes. It’s the same way, actually, that Bill Gates has launched his major effort to try to eradicate malaria. It’s not Bill Gates personally out there providing mosquito nets, but rather it’s an effort to try to create this broad network that has had tremendous success in reducing malaria. And it’s a problem that Bill Gates thinks that may be possible to be solved in the next decade, but possible to be solved only in the way in which these organizations work together.

Tom Temin How might the distributed bridged concept have helped the nation through the pandemic more effectively, do you think?

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Don Kettl There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that the previous all time record for developing a vaccine to fight against the disease was the creation of the vaccine for mumps. That took four years. Instead, Operation Warp Speed managed to do it in nine months. That’s just a staggeringly good accomplishment. And it happened because the White House coordinated the efforts of a series of different drug producers, didn’t try to do it itself, but rather provided funding and provided support and provided a way to try to create quickly a market for distributing the vaccines. And so that worked with remarkable skill. But on the other hand, the effort to try to identify who it is, who was being affected by COVID, how fast it was spreading, what kind of strategies of public health might be needed, how to bring state and local governments on board. That was just a tough, tough situation and maybe not quite serious enough to call it a disaster, but it certainly didn’t work very well. And it’s the lesson of what not to do the next time around. And what I think is remarkable is that even to try to track the spread of COVID, everybody ended up relying on the system created by Johns Hopkins and their incredible data base that they created. And their dashboard was the the system that everybody used to guide it. But they did it because the federal government didn’t. And so it was a failure there of the federal government’s efforts to coordinate what is needed to be done when it came to fighting the disease in public health. But when it came to developing the vaccine, it was in many ways a miracle, the kind of bridge building strategy we’re talking about.

Tom Temin And so who are you hoping will read Bridge Builders the book?

Don Kettl We hope it’s a it’s a book that will be of interest to just about anybody who cares about improving government. But we put an appendix in the back for new leaders coming in with a 100 day plan for how new leaders can come in and try to not only get control of their agencies, but find out how to steer them in more effective ways. We have a syllabus in the back for instructors who say, Well, this is kind of interesting. How do I teach this? And so we have that. We have, I think, lessons for the many, many partners that government has in the private and nonprofit sectors that the federal, state and local governments understand what their roles are, and most importantly, to create a new mindset that focuses on accountability based on outcomes as opposed to accountability understood in terms of, I’m going to make you obey this rule or else.

 

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