If democracy is going to survive, it has to deliver.
This week, Goldy and Civic Ventures president Zach Silk are joined by Hannah Garden-Monheit, a former senior official in the Biden-Harris administration, for a conversation about one of the most urgent questions in American politics: why our government so often fails to produce visible results for working people—and what that means for what comes next.
At a time when public institutions are being dismantled faster than they were ever built, this episode looks beyond easy cynicism and asks what it would take to rebuild a government people can trust, feel, and believe in again. Because the next governing moment won’t just be about having the right values or policies. It will hinge on whether leaders are willing to use democratic power to make government deliver in ways that are visible, tangible, and real.
Hannah Garden-Monheit is a Senior Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and co-author of Building a More Effective, Responsive Government, a report from the Roosevelt Institute. She previously served as Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission and as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy on the White House National Economic Council.
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldy:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative?
Nick Hanauer:
Middle-out economics is the answer because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence. That’s right.
Speaker 3:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Goldy:
Zach, oh my God. I get to talk to you in the office once in a while, but it’s been a long time since I’ve talked to you on the podcast.
Zach Silk:
Yeah, it has been a while. My name is Zach Silk, and I am the president of Civic Ventures. That means that I am Goldy’s boss technically, although no one’s really the boss of you.
Goldy:
That’s right. I am what’s known as unmanageable.
Zach Silk:
That’s absolutely true. And I’m excited for the conversation today. This is an area of real personal interest to me. When this report came out, which we’ll unpack a little bit more in a second, I actually said, “Hey, I would love to interview this lead writer. This is one of the more interesting reports we’ve seen come out this year.”
Goldy:
Yeah. And let’s be clear. We’ll start with the title of the report. It’s called Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration.
You can see why we might be interested in this based on everything we do at Civic Ventures, but also in this moment when, in fact, the current administration is intent on creating a less effective non-responsive government. That’s the lesson from the Trump administration. Also, you, in particular, me less so, Civic Ventures in general, policy and implementation is something we actually are concerned with.
Zach Silk:
Yeah, very concerned with. In fact, our long run here, we’ve been engaged with both the Obama years at the end of his term and then through all the preparation for the Biden years, and then a lot of time with the Biden administration to try to pass policy that was going to help working people and improve people’s lives. And just, I can’t tell you how hard it was. What was very clear is that there were a lot of hurdles for advocates like us, and frankly, advocates within the administration to get stuff done.
And this report really hits, I mean, even in a greater detail than I could have imagined, all of the various hurdles that have been place… put in place over decades and decades to prevent the government, our government, from improving our lives. It’s a very… It’s jarring to read it in such a comprehensive way. And yet it’s also satisfying because, I have to say, we felt like we were hitting our heads against the wall and couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t get all these things done, these obvious things, things to improve people’s lives. And here it all was laid out in an incredible format.
Goldy:
Right. So why don’t we talk to the report’s author? Hannah Garden-Monheit is a former senior official in the Biden-Harris administration. She served as director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission and as a special assistant to the President for Economic Policy at the National Economic Council. You can see how hard it is to get stuff done just with titles that long. And she wrote this report for the Roosevelt Institute. Let’s talk to Hannah.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Hi, I’m Hannah Garden-Monheit. I’m a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a former senior official in the Biden administration. I worked at both the Federal Trade Commission and also the White House during the administration.
And since then, I did a project with the Roosevelt Institute capturing lessons learned from folks who were in the Biden administration looking to really interrogate and have the courage to learn from why is it that even with some very good intentions and hard work, it can nevertheless be very hard for the federal government to deliver real world results on the ground for working people.
Goldy:
Well, let’s start with the big picture. What led you to write this report, and what problems do you think it’s you’re trying to solve?
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Sure. So I had the honor of working alongside so many dedicated public servants in the federal government who are trying to use government to make people’s lives better.
Goldy:
Oh my God. It’s so weird to even hear people talk about the federal government in those terms these days. I’m sorry to interrupt it. So, back when the federal government were filled with good guys.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Yes. Who are working very hard in trying to be good guys and trying to act within our legal authorities and consistent with the rule of law to improve the lives of working people. And yet, so many of us who were in there just saw time and again that even with good intentions and hard work, using the levers of power to actually deliver results for working people is incredibly challenging. Our institutions are not built for a focus on delivering outcomes, much less doing so quickly.
Now that said, since you mentioned the current moment, it is of course very easy and quick to destroy and dismantle, but using the leavers of powers to build things and to shift economic power in our economy is a very hard and challenging thing to do. And so we really wanted to move past the kind of vague sense that government is broken and start getting really specific about how particular design choices have drained public power and what’s known as state capacity over time. I was working on this report in those early days of the Trump administration when the DOGE dismantling efforts were in full force.
And so there were lots of people had just very freshly come off of the experience of having been frustrated with how hard it was to make meaningful change while in government. And then simultaneously watching this really rampant indiscriminate destruction of public institutions that really created this moment for a conversation about, okay, there were problems with government, but the way the Trump administration is going about it is completely counterproductive to solving them. What would it look like to actually solve them?
Zach Silk:
The report argues that the government is structurally underpowered, right. There’s something structural at play, and that there’s all these constraints to progress, which I think many regular voters or Americans would say, “Well, wait a minute, why doesn’t government work to solve my problems?” And it turns out there are a lot of really important reasons for that. And you outline quite a bit of that in the report.
I would love for you to kind of identify the top significant ways in which there’s been disinvestment, procedural hurdles, corporate influence. You point out how often this is a… corporations and their lobbyists have designed these systems to thwart progress and to overwhelm popular will with sort of private interest. Could you talk about the significant ways you outlined in the report, the kind of top lines for takeaways?
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
I think there’s a couple of different buckets. So you mentioned the underfunding and outsourcing, right. So it’s really important to recognize that governmental capacity didn’t vanish by accident, right. There is a 40-year project to systematically strip through decades of disinvestment and outsourcing that was advocated by folks who would prefer that the government not have the muscle to make sure our markets serve us rather than the other way around. And so that led to outsourcing of expertise, under funding.
One of the things that came up a bunch of times when we were talking to people for the report was that we now spend huge amounts of money hiring expensive and poor performing outside contractors. And then we’ve so whittled down our own capacity within government that we don’t even have the expertise and skills to meaningfully supervise those contractors, which is just wasteful. Another layer or bucket that you mentioned is the layering of process on top of process, on top of process, in the name of caution and compliance and risk aversion.
But that means that the system is optimized for delay rather than for outcomes. And certainly it’s good to think about what potential risks, what potential unintended consequences might arise, but you don’t want to be so crippled by that that you fail to recognize the very real risk of underdelivering and the consequences of underdelivering. I think we see in the erosion of trust in our democracy and faith that we, as a body politic, can solve problems together. What those processes are starts to get fairly specific and wonky, but the government is riddled with these.
For example, there’s been a lot of talk lately about something called the Paperwork Reduction Act, which has a great sounding name. Who couldn’t be for reducing paperwork? But ironically, the Paperwork Reduction Act itself creates a huge amount of paperwork because it requires the government to go through a six-month-plus-long process before it can collect information. Even if it’s just like a voluntary survey, you have to spend six months going through this whole process, which it’s just wild. And it is the kind of thing that undermines your ability to have the information you need to make smart decisions.
Another one is there’s something called the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, which requires agencies to publish a list of the costs and benefits of a policy, which great, fine. We should think about the costs and benefits of a policy in our decision-making. But instead of just sticking with that statutory structure, the Reagan administration layered on top of that statutory mandate, giving an agency called the Office of Information Regulatory Affairs oversight over all of the major policymaking of the government. But they did that with an ideological lens.
They did it to create a skeptical gatekeeper that serves to slow down, poke holes, second guess, and interrogate efforts to regulate the economy, right, to make sure that our markets are functioning in the public interest. And Democrats just left that in place. So it’s a self-own in which Democrats have kept in place a set of procedures that were designed to hobble the administrative state and their values and goals instead of repealing it and saying, “We’re going to adhere to the law, but we’re not going to go further in hamstringing it ourselves.”
The Administrative Procedure Act and Judicial Review is another example of this, in which the Administrative Procedure Act imposes all of this process on the government that, in theory, is supposed to help us ensure that it reaches the right outcome. I mean, that’s a charitable explanation, a different explanation of that. It also came from a lens of being very skeptical of the government and wanting to rein it in. But where we are now is that we’ve got this APA process that’s a huge amount of work, much of which doesn’t really improve decision-making and public input, and has become a process that’s very easily weaponized by corporate interests through litigation.
And the third bucket of things that I would say that you also mentioned, and that’s very closely related to that point, is that corporations and special interests have really professionalized their ability to influence, to litigate, to stall. And meanwhile, agencies are told the norms are that they’re supposed to be neutral or the prior norms, I should say, or that they’re supposed to be neutral and risk-averse and compliant and so forth.
And so it really starts to feel like the public interest has a teaspoon in a gunfight. That there are folks who have the time and resources and money and financial incentives to navigate and influence the federal government. And then normal people don’t. Normal people are busy leading their lives. They’re not, again, like the APA. It’s supposed to be this tool for getting public input and increasing democratic legitimacy. But the main tool that it uses for that is this very formalistic public comment.
Well, what normal working person is combing the federal register to look through the alphabet soup of agencies and propose regulations to think about, “Oh, how would this impact my life? And once I identify that, I’m going to write and submit a formal letter that’s point by point, going through a very legalistically drafted regulation to explain how it affects me.” It just has… It’s a crazy way to think about getting public input from actual normal people.
Goldy:
Are you telling me normal people don’t routinely provide comment to the rulemaking process? I thought, just, are we living in a weird world, Zach, where that’s a part of our daily lives?
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Is that… Have you guys ever done it?
Goldy:
Well…
Zach Silk:
Goldy is not normal people-
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
And you’re not normal.
Zach Silk:
… to be clear.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Okay.
Zach Silk:
Yes.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Fair enough. Fair enough.
Goldy:
I’m a little confused here because Ezra Klein assured me that it was progressives who did all this, and you’re saying that, actually, the Republican Party and corporate interests have played a role in trying to cripple the ability of the federal government to do the work of the federal government. I’m just totally surprised by this. How could that be?
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
I think sadly, there’s blame to go around here, unfortunately. The OIRA example that I gave is one where the original innovation came from Reagan, but the operative executive order that’s on the books today was by President Clinton, and administrations, Republican, Democratic alike have left it on the books.
Zach Silk:
Yeah, I think that’s an important point. I think we often… Well, first of all, we… I think Goldy was right to point out that many of the regulations that the abundance crowd, and Ezra among them, are frustrated by, were actually implemented or installed by Republican administrations. By the way, also at the state level, he obviously famously rails against the California Environmental Quality Act.
Of course, that was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. The point being is that these are often Republican ideas to install these things, but they have been equally supported by Democrats over the years. I thought your point about these shackles were put on, but then they were accepted and often reinforced by incoming Democratic administrations, whether that was Clinton or Obama. It reinforced the legitimacy of these programs, which is really problematic.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
That’s right.
Goldy:
You talk about, and it’s true, how quick and easy it is to dismantle institutions and agencies and how hard it is to build. I’m wondering if you and the people you talked to in putting together this report look at what the second Trump administration has done in one year and see that as an opportunity to start over from scratch.
Because a lot of the problems that the Biden administration faced was that you have all of this institutional baggage and existing regulations, and let’s be honest, existing norms that got in the way of getting things done. I know it’s not their intent, but if in fact our democracy survives and a party that believes in government actually takes back control, are we possibly in a better position to provide the things that the American public wants and needs?
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Yeah. So I certainly would have never wished this timeline upon us.
Goldy:
Right.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
But finding ourselves here in this moment, let’s not let a good crisis go to waste, right. It was a wake-up moment to realize that our governing institutions were not serving us in the sense of normal people, working people, people who don’t hire a lobbyist. Again, would never have wished what has happened on us. And the way that they’ve gone about things is horrible, but it is a bit of a reset moment in which the aperture for what is possible is different.
And also, it’s not just that there’s a window of opportunity there in a future governing moment. It’s that there’s an imperative necessity because if we want to save our democracy, we will have the onus on us to prove to people that a democracy can deliver for people. And it will be completely impossible to do that without some very concerted effort to stand up new capacity at the federal government.
And certainly for our experiences from the Biden administration suggest, don’t put it back the way it was. The way it was was not functioning great. Let’s take the moment to, instead of restoring things, instead think fresh about what does a modern governing state look like in a very complex modern economy.
Goldy:
And how important is it to be willing and able to make mistakes? A lot of what we had was created or started in, well, the Roosevelt administration, and there was a lot of experimentation, and they took a lot of risks, and a lot of things didn’t work.
And they just said, “Okay, we’ll try something else.” And because of the nature, the political nature of the times, he had the ability to do that. Is it possible modern politics to make mistakes and survive because making mistakes is part of how you learn how to get things right?
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Yeah. I mean, I would say I don’t think they’re getting things right for my worldview, but if you look at the current administration, I think that’s a pretty strong case that you can make mistakes and just move on if you make a mistake. There’s this line in the report from somebody that I interviewed that was like, “They throw a Hail Mary, and when it doesn’t work, they just throw another one.”
Goldy:
Yeah.
Zach Silk:
Yeah. Funny you should say that, Hannah. I actually appreciated the part of your report watching this administration. You had elements of your report that pointed to some of the failures that people had led them to be really cautious. So the launch of healthcare.gov or the grants to-
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Solyndra looming large.
Zach Silk:
… Solyndra. Yes.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Yeah.
Zach Silk:
There we go. So I noted that when I read the report, that these were specters haunting our friends in the Biden administration wanting to avoid those kind of mistakes. Yet now we’re living through, as you’re pointing out, Hail Mary after Hail Mary gets shot by this administration. Partially, they would probably also characterize it as, if you want to get to the moon, shoot for the stars, right. You may not end up in the stars, but you’re going to end up in a different place.
You’re going to end up forward and further, and instead of being cautious and focusing on past failures to be looking at ambition, there’s something in there. And I, of course, lived through the healthcare.gov and Solyndra examples, and I can understand its natural caution making that that creates because it feels like, “Well, they tried something, and it failed, and we should avoid failing, so we should avoid trying something.”
Goldy:
Solyndra is a sore point because, actually, that whole program was really, really successful. That was one you’re going to have failures and investments.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
And political failures get so much more attention than the wins. Another thing that came through in the report was we need to think about how we break through on the wins. Because one lesson about the current Trump administration and the media moment is that everything moves so fast that you can kind of make a mistake and move on. But how do we also break through in this very crowded algorithm-driven media or information ecosystem, I should say, not even media ecosystem, information ecosystem.
How do you break through the algorithm and also communicate the good stuff that you are doing for people? And I think that’s also a challenge for political leaders going forward. We had a little bit of pointing towards that in the report from folks who pointed to Secretary Buttigieg, Chair Khan, Director Chopra, who would pick a fight that they were picking on purpose, right.
So they were generating some controversy with a powerful actor, but they were doing it in an intentional way. They were picking a fight that they were thinking, “This is a fight worth having because I’m showing people, one, I want to deliver people the results of this fight, but also it’ll break through, and we’ll show people whose side we’re on.” And so I think that’s also an important thing to think about.
Zach Silk:
And in the report, when you outline those, some of the features of those fights, which I thought were really important examples, but they were things that, for example, were very easy for regular people to understand, right.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Yes.
Zach Silk:
Yeah, these unfair airline practices. Buttigieg really zeroed in on some of those reimbursements if your flight is really late or your inability to sit next to your family, things that are real pain points that are just an average person could understand, and then identifying a very clear solution. I think you also pointed out the junk fees, which everybody experiences junk fees, but again, really a point that is easy to explain what you’re doing for people on behalf of people.
And then, and I actually love this part of the people’s reflection, even if you lose, which we know our court system and a variety of other things are set up to not allow this progress to happen. So sometimes fights are worth picking just to show whose side you’re on, even if you think that it may ultimately not succeed. And I do think that that was a very important part. I think past administrations have been shy about picking fights they might lose, which makes sense. It’s a lot of energy to put into something you might end up losing, but-
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
No. No.
Zach Silk:
… it can leave the average person thinking, “Well, are you on my side? You picked no fights on my behalf.”
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Maybe don’t pick every fight, but pick some ones that are worth it and stick with them and see them through. Yeah.
Zach Silk:
We want to be fair about this. We were big fans of the Biden administration, and part of which was because there was so much major legislation that was passed. We went through a really long period where there was not major legislation passed, and to the Biden team’s everlasting credit, they managed to do major economic legislation.
But there were some reflections in the report around ways you might do that differently or think about it differently, which I think are very fair because most of the benefits in those major pieces of legislation are unfolding very slowly, sometimes literally invisibly. People have no idea what happened, where’s this coming from. And of course, in a sad twist of fate, Trump is now able to lay credit to a lot of these things because they are actually going to be implemented on his watch despite the fact that he had nothing to do with the legislation.
You have really interesting things to say in the report about this. I would love for you to just reflect on the inability to deliver quickly, how the next administration should think about design policies, how to front-load some of those wins so people can see them visibly in their communities, attach credit to the administration. Yeah, just-
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
One thing is to start from… I mean, this is going to sound so basic and obvious, but start from listening to people. A lot of times, policy priorities get sort of picked from DC, but to have the kind of resonant thing that can catch fire, you really have to have an understanding of what is going on in working people’s lives and what are the biggest problems that they’re facing and what are the things that they want the government to help them solve.
So step one is to really engage in proactive listening when you’re setting your policy agenda and thinking through, “What are the things I’m going to prioritize?” And you want to come in knowing what those priorities are on day one, ready to move out. Hopefully, you’ve done a lot of homework in advance to even pre-draft them, pre-negotiate with Congress, whatever it may be, so that you can launch immediately, not years in, because time is precious in a governing moment.
I think that’s one of the huge lessons learned we had, is that I think in many ways we’re operating as if the presidency is eight years, and it’s not a given. You have to earn that second term with things that are very tangible to people, of what improved in their lives within your electoral mandate. Choosing the right agenda, design features when you go about designing the policy solutions in those areas that you’re prioritizing. We’ve talked about having simple, crisp designs that people can really understand what they mean.
The $35 cap on insulin, for example, came up. You can explain it, people get it, you know what it is. Similarly, we’re seeing Mayor Mamdani, free childcare, free buses. You can say it in a TikTok or whatever, and people get it. Trump clearly gets this, right. No tax on tips. He understands this principle, not a 16-point bullet plan of submerged policy that may or may not show up in people’s lives, but something that they understand what they’re getting for the bargain.
Goldy:
So you don’t think that the term industrial policy resonates with the average American about how it all improves their lives?
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
We probably need it to focus on what is the thing that you will wake up in the morning and walk out your door and will have happened. To be clear, there are things that require more complex policies that require longer-term transformation. It’s not to say that we shouldn’t also do those things, but you got to have some anchor tenants that are proving to people that participating in a democracy matters and is worthwhile, because your life changes based on you expressing your preferences.
And then that timeframe, you need that political feedback loop for people to not lose trust. And so think about how do you design those policies so that they are executable, implementable, felt on the ground within that electoral mandate? Because a lot of times, the way we think about the federal government, we orient it around our job is to get the regulation out the door or to obligate a grant or to launch a program or to sign the legislation, but that’s not an actual outcome in people’s lives.
And so you need to think about the outcome and how are we going to get there in the timeframe we have. And depending on the context, there’ll be different strategies for how you go about this, but you want to think about where is their existing delivery infrastructure that works well that we should piggyback on as opposed to building something. Standing up an entirely new program takes a lot of time and effort and personnel. If you don’t have existing infrastructure, you can leverage what’s the most direct way to do the thing, right.
Sometimes states and local governments have special expertise that it’s valuable to flow money through them, but other times you’re just adding another bottleneck and source of delay if there’s not some locally grounded thing that they’re better equipped to do. And so the report talks about different policy design features like that that you might use to shave off time. And then thinking too about how are you actually going to mobilize the public around it? Can you build into the policy hooks for direct outreach to people? And this relates to the intermediary point too.
Because a lot of the times, the federal government will create a program and administer it, but it runs through some other entity such that the federal government actually has no relationship with the ultimate player on the ground, which means that there’s no one to tell you, “Hey, we didn’t… this thing came from us. Did you like it? Did you not like it? If you want to extend it, do you want to go tell your Congressman that?” A lot of times, things are routed through these very convoluted things where there just isn’t that kind of connectivity and engagement with people.
Mayor Mamdani will be an exciting one to watch to see whether he’s able to carry into governance this movement and mobilization because, to me, whether you’re as far left as him or not, this concept that building up your base is for governing as well as for a campaign can truly import. And then, on implementation, a lot of this is about picking the right priorities that mobilize people that resonate, that can be executed in the relevant timeframes.
But once you get into implementation, you also need to be really sure that you have legible goals that are key to those outcomes and that you’re putting political leadership and political will behind it. We should clear out as much of the procedural sledge as we can, but political will and political capital can break through a lot of it. But you got to make sure you’re setting the right goals so you know what are you trying to break through too. It’s not like we’re trying to get the notice of funding opportunity out the door.
It’s we’re trying to build universal broadband that connects these household trade or something like that. You really need to be able to communicate both externally and internally to government. “This is the thing that I want to happen, and my political capital as a leader is behind that” because it breaks down so many internal barriers that are thrown up if there’s just clear leadership of, “Here’s what I want to accomplish and here’s the degree of risk I’m willing to eat to do it.”
Zach Silk:
There must have been disagreements among these 45 that were contentious in some way, where you didn’t want to put it in the report because there was clearly like people were still kind of fighting about it, if that makes sense. Because you’re interviewing them, and undoubtedly, there was… I can appreciate the harmonization of a lot of different comments into this very clear report.
And by the way, I think it’s an excellent report, and it will be a real foundational document for the next administration. I really. Congratulations.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Thank you.
Zach Silk:
But there’s also undoubtedly some areas of friction. I know because we spent a lot of time with these administration officials, I know there were differences of opinion. And out of curiosity, among these 45 interviews, you must have also found some areas of disagreement that were illuminating in some way or kind of…
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
This isn’t like a statistically sampled-
Zach Silk:
Sure.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
… representation of the federal government. We talked to people who were engaged in innovative economic policymaking. And also, we intentionally teed this up in a way that we were very deliberate about not wanting to engage in the project of a consensus report. We wanted to create space to just put it all out there and create options. All that being said, I was very surprised how much we heard a lot of the same stuff over and-
Zach Silk:
Interesting.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
… over and over again, especially when it came to you need to have prioritization, and you need to have political will behind things. And also, there’s just like way too much process that’s not right-sized for what you’re actually… what you actually want that process to solve for.
It’s also, I’m seeing it more now, now that the report is out and people are interested in debating little bits of the particulars, but at the time that we were doing the interviews, a lot of it felt more like we were really poorly trained therapists who were just receiving the more high-level stuff.
But now there’s lots of conversation about like, “Oh, should we delete all of 12866 or should we revise?” It’s more like that sort of minutia. And there’s definitely a spectrum, obviously, within the Democratic Party. There’s such a spectrum-
Zach Silk:
Yes.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
… between like, “We should fight the corporate interests and lean into that” versus, “No, we need them. They fund everything or whatever.”
Zach Silk:
Yeah.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
But on this institutional stuff, there’s a shocking amount of alignment, I think.
Zach Silk:
Huh, that’s great to hear.
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Yeah.
Zach Silk:
Yeah, that’s great.
Goldy:
If you had no political or procedural constraints and we’re coming into a new administration and they’re going to make you the czar of fixing things, how government works, what is it that you would do?
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
Okay. So I think one would be court reform. We have arrived at a place where the courts are really captured by ideologically conservative folks. And now we’ve got a place where we’ve got courts as a veto gate on second-guessing economic policy judgments that are really better suited to the political process. We really should have courts in the role of making sure that government is acting within the bounds of its authority is valuable.
But going beyond that to kind of nitpick and second-guess, the policy judgment of elected leaders, I think, is not an appropriate role for the courts. So that’s one. Two, personnel. Personnel is everything. The government is made of humans, and having really top talent, it’s everything. You can’t do anything without that. And our personnel systems are just really not designed for this century, so it’s something that I think we really need to tackle.
And then a third, resourcing. And then, particularly on corporate accountability work, the enforcement agencies were so wildly under-resourced. If you think about the scale of the impact Chair Khan’s FTC was able to have, and then think about the fact that the entire budget of the FTC is like not even rounding error to something like the Department of Health and Human Services. We really have not calibrated our resources to where our most effective tools are in government.
Zach Silk:
Hey, Hannah, we ask all of our guests this. Why do you do this work?
Hannah Garden-Monheit:
I do this work because I have two little kids, and I think about, like, what do I want our country to look like in the future for them? And I can sure as hell tell you I don’t want it to look like this.
Zach Silk:
Amen.
Goldy:
That’s good. I can tell you that my generation didn’t do as good a job of protecting the future for our kids.
So I don’t know about you, Zach, but heading into the Biden administration, I expected there to be ideological hurdles coming from the Democratic Party and the people coming into the administration. Just knowing Democrats in general and how cautious they are and how still, and we’ve talked about this, how so many of them were still inculcated in the neoliberal ideology, I expected the ideological problems and that things would be slow.
What I did not understand was the extent of the bureaucratic, legal, and political hurdles to achieving real change in a presidential administration that actually obeys things like laws and norms.
Zach Silk:
Yeah. I mean, that’s the most amazing thing about this report is that we had, really, probably for the first time in certainly a generation, could even be two generations, an administration that was committed to using the federal government to improve working people’s lives, coming straight from the top. They wanted to build an economy that was built from the bottom up and the middle out. They wanted to improve people’s lives.
They identified it really dozens of levers, and they were willing to… as you point out, they were going to have to tussle with the wide ideological range of the Democratic Party, frankly, well represented in the Senate. Several centrists were willing to thwart them at all times. But this report points out that one of their biggest enemies was the structure of government itself to get things done. These were not bureaucrats and political appointees who were trying to stop progress. These were good civil servants and political appointees who were trying to make progress.
And their… one of their greatest enemies to progress was the structure, the inefficiency, the absurdity of a lot of these laws and rules and hurdles to get stuff done. And it’s painful, honestly, because we finally had an administration that was willing to lean so into that, and they were thwarted by many of the norms, but also regulatory design. And honestly, they could have gotten so much more done if they had had efficiency and speed and less of the sludge, I think she put it, stopping people from making progress.
Goldy:
Or less respect for the Constitution. If, like the current president, you just say, “I make the decisions and whatever I want goes, and there’s no constraints on me other than my own morality,” which, by the way, he doesn’t have-
Zach Silk:
Sure.
Goldy:
… you could get more stuff done. I think one of my other takeaways, other than that cynical response, is she dropped three names in there of effective administration officials. Buttigieg, Chopra, and Khan.
Zach Silk:
Yes.
Goldy:
And they… the three of them have something in common, which is they are excellent communicators.
Zach Silk:
That’s right.
Goldy:
They were three of the most effective communicators in the Biden administration. And it just highlights to me the importance of communication both internally and externally.
Zach Silk:
I think that’s right.
Goldy:
They were able to communicate internally what it is that they wanted to achieve and how to achieve it. And perhaps more importantly, we’re all very good at communicating externally. And that’s something that does not necessarily correlate to being an effective administrator or policymaker, but does correlate to being an effective politician.
Zach Silk:
Yeah. And the other feature is they are very comfortable in modern media spaces, very comfortable in social media, and equally comfortable in old-fashioned interviews like going on the Sunday talk show circuit. So they were able to communicate in those spaces so very well. And of course, a big part of it, too, is that they’re young, which I think was also helpful.
They understood, or at least seemed to understand, their role differently than the old guard. How the old guard understands those agency heads and how the old guard understands these very powerful cabinet offices is different than how this new guard does. And hopefully, when people are reflecting on the success they had, they will want to build future administrations based on those as their models going forward.
Goldy:
And the other thing that jumped out at me was when Hannah talked about the need to break through the algorithm in terms of communications, the news algorithm. I despair over that.
Zach Silk:
What we do know is there is still quite a lot of democratization of communications. And those characters we identified from the Biden administration, they circumvented these news sources quite a bit. And our recent successes, and frankly, the rising stars on the left all are very comfortable in these new spaces.
I do think one of the things that Hannah pointed out with these good communicators is that they recognize that this is now, as people call it, the attention economy also means that your communications have to play to that attention economy, which means picking fights that are easy to package, easy to digest, and clarifying rather than confusing or arcane.
I think that’s one of the interesting things when we reflect on those who were successful in those Biden years, they were really able to fight inside of this attention economy really well. And we’re living through a moment now where a lot of the most salient politicians, those who are capturing attention, are succeeding. They’re rising very quickly and all over the country. Well, this is great, Goldy. You got any other thoughts on this?
Goldy:
Yeah. Just the final thing. It’s the standard observation. Bureaucracy is absolutely necessary.
Zach Silk:
Sure.
Goldy:
Trump decried it as the deep state when really it’s just this is how you run large organizations. But the thing about bureaucracy is that it is self-perpetuating and needs to be constantly reformed. And that’s the thing we didn’t do over the past 40 years, rather than constantly reforming it.
For all the Republican cries about big government and wasteful government, whatever, they never reformed the bureaucracy, and they just allowed it to pile up layer on top of layer on top of layer because, really, they were never honest partners at the table.
They just wanted to dismantle and incapacitate the ability of the federal government to regulate corporate America. And so there is this opportunity here because the Trump administration has just blown everything up.
Zach Silk:
I completely agree. Inside of blowing it up, there is going to be a lot of rubble, but one of the things that that will provide is an opportunity to build new things and to do things completely differently. And rather than coming in, as both Clinton and Obama did, where they… frankly, and also Biden, they inherited a mess typically.
And as part of that, they were trying to rebuild, but rather than rebuilding from scratch, they were rebuilding on the structures that were presented to them, the structures they were then standing on. And that meant that they, in many ways, were only contributing to this inefficiencies and difficulties because they weren’t willing to do the hard work of tearing down. And now in the future, when we have a government-
Goldy:
If.
Zach Silk:
… that believes in government, if, if, if, I know, I know. But in our future, when that happens, they will start from a much clearer blank slate than we’ve had maybe in a hundred years. I mean, it’ll be very… it’ll be a lot of opportunity.
Goldy:
Well, from your lips to God’s ears, Zach, we’ll see. Again, if you want to read more from Hannah, the report is called Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration, and really, you should read it. It’s kind of like an exit interview of some of the most important people in the Biden administration. And so, it’s a really useful insight, and we will, of course, provide a link in the show notes.
Freddy:
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