Engaging more social scientists could help government programs work better and deliver more

Guest:	Alexander Hertel-Fernandez
Title:	Herbert H. Lehman professor of government, Columbia University
Summary:	From program design to policy evaluation, social scientists offer methods and insights that could strengthen federal decision-making. But institutional barriers and cultural divides still keep many of them on the sidelines.

The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton provides expert insights on current events in the federal community. Read more interviews to keep up with daily news and analysis that affect the federal workforce. Reach out to Terry and the Federal Drive producers with feedback and story ideas at FederalDrive@federalnewsnetwork.com.

Interview transcript:

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez Social scientists, and I count myself in this category, collect data to systematically test and develop theories about how the world works. And social scientists can include economists who study labor markets, financial markets. It can include sociologists who study inequality, how inequality is produced and reproduced in families and society. It can include political scientists like myself who think about the intersection of markets and governments, and it can include anthropologists who are trying to understand family and societal structures as well. But the through line is really collecting data in a systematic way to develop insights about how the world works.

Terry Gerton So you yourself, as you said, are a social scientist. You’ve worked in both the academic and the policy spaces. What do social scientists bring to the policy table that other experts might not?

        Federal and industry experts explain why visibility, crypto agility, and execution — not just new algorithms — will define quantum readiness in this new ebook. Download today!

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez Yeah, another great question. I think social science has long been an important tool for policymakers in a couple of different ways. Social scientists can collect data to help policymakers better understand problems in the world that they might want to address. For instance, particular groups in society that might be disadvantaged because of high rates of poverty or low access to economic mobility. Similarly, social scientists can think about ways to address those problems, and there’s a long tradition of social scientists thinking about policy interventions and then testing them to improve social and economic well-being. And social scientists can help better understand the world through particular lenses. They can come up with concepts or theories that help make sense of what’s happening. And all of those are ways in which social scientists can help policymakers when they’re designing policies and when they’re implementing policies. I had the privilege of seeing this firsthand when I served at the Department of Labor and the Office of Management and Budget, I think there was a lot of great work from social scientists that helped to inform those agencies and there’s a lot more that could be done, especially as we look to the potential rebuilding that, in my opinion, needs to happen after this current administration.

Terry Gerton You mentioned early on that social scientists collect data. Sometimes we think of social science as a more qualitative assessment or recommendations. How would you articulate that social science blends the qualitative and the quantitative?

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez In the social science tradition, you have some economists who think about much more quantitative measures, for instance, like the unemployment rate, for instance, is a quantitative number that we count every month. But there are also a vibrant tradition of qualitative data as well. You can think about, for instance, how social scientists like sociologists or anthropologists or political scientists might study people’s experiences with government. And when I think back to my time serving in the last administration, we drew very heavily on qualitative work that described people’s burdens and barriers to accessing government services and programs, like the stigma that they might feel when they show up to apply to food assistance or the kind of stress they might experience when they’re compiling the necessary documentation to apply for unemployment insurance benefits. Those are really important things for policymakers to know, but often aren’t as easily quantifiable as, say, a specific number like the unemployment rate.

Terry Gerton That’s really helpful. Just to test another theory, some critics say social science leans left. But there are conservative positions in social science, too. How do the approaches differ, and why does that diversity of thought matter?

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez Yeah, I want to highlight what you ended on, which is the importance of diversity of thought. That might be ideological or partisan, but many times it’s not. And I think what makes social science and academic research within social science so valuable is that you have competing perspectives, and each side comes with their own data and interpretation of the world and you see what fits the data better. And I think it’s that kind of robust debate that really advances the field. Like I said, it’s not always going to line up on ideological or partisan lines, but I do think it’s important that there is a diversity of perspectives in the social scientists, people who might focus on one institution versus another, or one type of market versus the other.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Alexander Hertel-Fernandez. He’s the Herbert H. Lehman professor of government at Columbia University. So give us some examples about how social science has improved government programs, regardless of which party was in power.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez Yeah, there’s a really rich tradition of the federal government relying on social science dating back to the New Deal, trying to understand during the New Deal, for instance, the depth of the Great Recession and possible responses by the federal government. More recently, to give a couple examples that I was involved with or saw during my time in the federal government at the Department of Labor, we relied on social science to better understand how unemployment insurance was and was not working during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, trying to understand what groups of workers were having trouble accessing unemployment benefits and why. So for instance, for some groups of people, it was that they didn’t know that they were eligible and they were failing to apply. For others, they knew that they eligible, but they were encountering long delays in trying to access benefits from their state UI agencies. And having that kind of picture from academic research that we commissioned at the Department of Labor really helped us think about the different interventions that we might want to make.

        Sign up for our daily newsletter so you never miss a beat on all things federal

Terry Gerton Sounds like it could be especially productive in program design and thinking through the experience of the intended beneficiary.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez Exactly. And it’s also relevant for programming implementation too, to better understand once a policy is up and running, how well it’s reaching the different populations that it’s intending to reach.

Terry Gerton You’ve suggested some particular ways where social scientists could be more intentionally engaged in government operations. Talk us through those.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez I’ve been thinking about this ever since leaving the administration, the last administration in 2023. But I think this question of how the federal government can better build on social science and social scientists has become all the more pressing given the really radical retrenchment we’ve seen of many agencies and core functions of the federal governments in recent months under the current presidential administration. All told, we’ve seen tens of thousands of federal workers either fired or pushed out, deciding to retire, and that’s a loss of real capacity. As I got to see and learn firsthand, many of these civil servants have spent their careers understanding deeply how government programs work and do not work and how to affect change within the federal government. And losing that expertise is a real crisis. I think as we try to think about an eventual rebuilding of the federal government, social scientists have an important role to play to work with former federal civil servants to try and capture that knowledge that we’re losing. When I think back to, for instance, my time at the Department of Labor, I remember folks who had been there for decades who knew intimately how programs like the registered apprenticeship programs that the Department Of Labor administers or unemployment insurance, how these programs work and losing those kinds of staff really makes it hard to think about administering those programs effectively. So right now, folks who are listening who are social scientists based at think tanks or universities have a role to play in trying to capture that knowledge by collaborating, for instance, with civil servants who have left government to be able to collect their experiences and reflect on how we might reform and rebuild in the future. But it’s not just about the current moment. It’s also thinking about what comes next after, say, this presidential administration. As I mentioned, there have been so many agencies and programs that have either been entirely shuttered or devastated by retirements and firings. And to rebuild, I think we can draw from the expertise of social scientists working together with former civil servants to design new ways that the federal government can work and potentially even pull in some of those folks and those social scientists into the rebuilding process. There are already laws on the books like the Intergovernmental Personnel Act that permit academics to spend short periods of time in government agencies. And if Congress were to amend that law, they could make it even easier. Right now, it’s just faculty members from universities who can spend time on government service leave under that law. But you could imagine amending it to allow graduate students or postdoctoral fellows to be able to help build the capacity and expertise in government. Similarly, over the longer term, you could imagine new structures that would be able to pull in academics into specific projects within agencies. This is something that some agencies already do, regularly recruiting academics to spend time working at, say, the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services. But you can imagine doing this much more at scale if Congress were, for instance, to create a new agency with funding that could provide fellowships to allow agencies to find academics that could support their work. You could imagine doing this in a way that recruited broadly all across the country and could really create a pipeline of folks from academia serving in government. And I think that has the potential to benefit both government, by bringing in folks with specialized expertise to be able to come in and serve in government agencies, and it also helps academics. Speaking for myself, I find that my research and teaching has been profoundly changed by having the experience to have worked in government. I feel that I’m able to communicate to students much better what it takes to be a potential civil servant or someone who’s trying to work within the federal government. And it’s also changed my research. It’s indicated places that more research could be helpful to unlock new policy. And I suspect that is likely to be true for many other academics.

Terry Gerton So you described there some programmatic solutions, some structural solutions. I just want to ask you about culture change. Do you feel like on the government side, it is an open and receptive environment? And do you feel on the academic side, it’s viewed as a career enhancement?

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez That’s a great question. And I think the answer is it varies a little bit by field. I think there are some fields, say within academia, where it’s much more common for academics to take time off and work in government. I think economics, for instance, and law, have done a much better job of nurturing that kind of culture. And it’s been helped on the government side through organizations within government, like the Council of Economic Advisors or the offices of chief economists. Now, many of the large CFO Act agencies have offices of chief economists that tend to recruit academic economists and graduate students to work in those agencies. So that creates a pipeline. It creates a culture where this is more common. For some of these other disciplines, though, like sociology, anthropology, political science, I think academics have just as much to offer as economists. And so it’d be worth thinking through, how do you create the structures within government that could pull those kinds of researchers in? And then also, how you create the incentives and culture within academia to say, this is a worthwhile thing to do? I’m not certainly saying by any stretch of the imagination that this is something every academic has to do, but I do think that we should create the opportunity for folks who have the skills and interests to be able to work in government to do so.

Copyright © 2026 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.