← Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer
Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer
A Government Built to Stall—and What That Means for Democracy (with Hannah Garden-Monheit)
00:45:33
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- [00:02]
Zach Silk
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
- [00:11]
Goldie
The last five decades of trickle down economics haven't worked. But what's the alternative? Middle out economics is the answer because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
- [00:23]
Zach Silk
That's right.
- [00:29]
Hannah Garden Monheit
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer.
- [00:33]
Goldie
A podcast about how to build the.
- [00:35]
Hannah Garden Monheit
Economy from the middle out.
- [00:37]
Zach Silk
Welcome to the show.
- [00:43]
Goldie
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.
- [00:52]
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 Goldie's boss, technically, although no one's really the boss of you.
- [01:03]
Goldie
That's right. I am what's known as unmanageable.
- [01:08]
Zach Silk
That's absolutely true. And I'm excited for the conversation today. This is an area of real personal interest to me and to really, 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. Yeah.
- [01:30]
Goldie
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 know, you, you in particular me less so. Civic Ventures in general policy and implementation is something we actually are concerned with.
- [02:14]
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 placed, 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. Right.
- [03:28]
Goldie
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.
- [04:02]
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, 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?
- [04:40]
Goldie
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?
- [04:49]
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.
- [05:00]
Goldie
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.
- [05:12]
Hannah Garden Monheit
Yes. Who are working very hard and 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 out 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 levers 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 public power and what's known as state capacity over time. You know, I was working on this report in those early days of the Trump administration when, you know, the DOGE dismantling efforts were in full force. And so there were, you know, 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?
- [07:08]
Zach Silk
The report argues that the government is structurally underpowered. Right. Like 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. 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?
- [08:03]
Hannah Garden Monheit
I think there's a couple of different buckets. So you mentioned the underfunding and outsourcing. 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, underfunding. You know, 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. You know, another layer or bucket that you mentioned is, you know, 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 you know, certainly it's good to think about, you know, 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 under delivering and you know, the consequences of under delivering. I think we see in the erosion of trust in our democracy and faith that kind of we have a Bali 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 is, you know, 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. You know, 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, that's, you know, 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 policy making of the government. But they did that with an ideological lens, right? 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 you know, Democrats just left that in place. So it's, you know, 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 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. 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 you know, 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, right, 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, you know, it really starts to feel like the public interest, like 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. Like 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, like what normal working person is combing the Federal Register to look through the Alphabet soup of agencies and proposed 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 like, 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.
- [13:54]
Goldie
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?
- [14:06]
Hannah Garden Monheit
Have you guys ever done it?
- [14:07]
Zach Silk
Well, Goldie is not normal people. To be clear, yes.
- [14:11]
Hannah Garden Monheit
Fair enough.
- [14:14]
Goldie
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?
- [14:33]
Hannah Garden Monheit
I think, sadly you know, there's blame to go around here, unfortunately. Right. Like 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 of today was by President Clinton and administrations, Republican, Democratic alike have left it on the books.
- [14:56]
Zach Silk
Yeah, I think that's an important point. I think we often. Well, first of all, we. I think Goli 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.
- [15:50]
Hannah Garden Monheit
That's right.
- [15:51]
Goldie
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 talk 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, 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 in a possibly in a better position to provide the things that the American public wants and needs?
- [16:55]
Hannah Garden Monheit
Yeah. So I certainly would have never wished this timeline upon us.
- [16:59]
Goldie
Right.
- [17:00]
Hannah Garden Monheit
But finding ourselves here in this moment, let's not let a good crisis go to waste. Right. It is 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, 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, you know, our experiences from the Biden administration suggests, like, don't put it back the way it was. The way it was, was not functioning. Great. Like, 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.
- [18:19]
Goldie
Economy, and how important is it to be willing and able to make mistakes? You know, 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 in modern politics to make mistakes and survive? Because, you know, making mistakes is part of how you learn how to get things right.
- [18:59]
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. Right. If you make. You make a mistake, they. 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.
- [19:23]
Zach Silk
Yeah, yeah. You know, 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 grant Solyndra large. 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, you know, if you want to get to the moon, shoot for the stars. Right? Like, you're just. 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 it's natural caution making that that creates cause it feels like, well, they tried something and it failed and we should avoid failing. So we should avoid trying something.
- [20:35]
Goldie
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.
- [20:43]
Hannah Garden Monheit
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 like 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. Like how do you break through the algorithm and also communicate the good stuff that you are doing for people? 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, you know, Secretary Buttigieg, Chair Khan, Director Chopra, who would pick a fight that they were picking on purpose. 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, like 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.
- [22:05]
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? Like, yeah, these, these unfair airline practices. Buttigieg really zeroed in on some of those, like 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, a 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, 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 it can leave the average person thinking, well, are you on my side? Like, you picked no fights on my behalf.
- [23:24]
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.
- [23:30]
Zach Silk
Yeah, we want to be fair about this. You know, 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, those wins, so people can see them visibly in their communities, attach credit to the administration. Yeah.
- [24:39]
Hannah Garden Monheit
Just one thing is to start from. I mean, this is going to sound so basic and obvious, but like, start, start from listening to people. Right. 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, like, step one is to really engage in proactive listening when you're, when you're setting your policy agenda and thinking through, like, 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. That's that's one of the huge lessons learned we, we had, right, 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 Mandani free childcare, free buses, you can say it in a TikTok or whatever, right? And people get it. Trump clearly gets this right, like no tax on tips, right? 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.
- [26:43]
Goldie
So, so you don't, you don't think that the term industrial policy resonates with the average American about how it all.
- [26:50]
Hannah Garden Monheit
We probably needed to focus on like what is the thing that you will like wake up in the morning and walk out your door and will have happened. To be clear there, you know, 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 tenets 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 you know that time, that timeframe, right. 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 oriented 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. 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. 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, like, 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, Right. Can you build into the policy hooks for direct outreach to people? And this relates to the intermediary point too, right? Because a lot of the time 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, like we did, this thing came 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 Mandani will be an exciting one to watch to see whether he's able to carry into governance this movement and mobilization. Because to me, you know, whether, whether you're as far left as him or not, this concept that, you know, building up your, your base is for governing as well as for a campaign is really important. 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 time frames. But once you get into implementation, you also need to be really sure that you have legible goals that are keyed to those outcomes and that you're putting political leadership and political will behind it. We should clear out as much of the procedural sludge 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 to, Right? 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 in my political capital as A leader is behind that because it just, 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.
- [31:13]
Zach Silk
There must have been disagreements among these 45 that were like 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.
- [31:45]
Hannah Garden Monheit
Thank you.
- [31:46]
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, you know.
- [32:07]
Hannah Garden Monheit
This isn't like a statistically sampled representation of the federal government. Right. We talked to people who were engaged in innovative economic policy making. 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 kind of put it, 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 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, like now that the report is out and people are like interested in debating like 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 like receiving the. More like sort of high level stuff. But, you know, now there's lots of conversation about, like, oh, like should we Delete all of 12, 8, 6, 6, or should we revise? You know, like, it's more like that sort of minutiae. And there's definitely a spectrum, obviously, you know, within the Democratic Party, there's such a spectrum of between. Like, we should fight the corporate interests and lean into that versus no, we need them. They fund everything or whatever.
- [33:41]
Zach Silk
Yeah.
- [33:42]
Hannah Garden Monheit
But on this institutional stuff, there's. There's a shocking amount of alignment, I think.
- [33:47]
Zach Silk
Yeah, that's great.
- [33:49]
Goldie
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?
- [34:02]
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 town, the government is made of humans and having really top talent. It's just. 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. Right. And then particularly on corporate accountability work, the enforcement agencies were so wildly under resourced. If you think about, like the scale of the impact at Chair Khan's FTC was able to have, and then think about the fact that it's the entire budget of the FTC is like not even a 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.
- [35:41]
Zach Silk
Hey, Hannah. We ask all of our guests this. Why do you do this work?
- [35:45]
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.
- [35:55]
Zach Silk
Amen.
- [35:56]
Goldie
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.
- [36:59]
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 are trying to make progress. And 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, you know, many of the norms, but also regulatory design. And, you know, honestly, they could have gotten so much more done if they had had efficiency and speed and less. Less of the sludge, I think she put it, stopping people from making progress.
- [38:40]
Goldie
Or less respect for the constitution. If, like the current president, you just say, I make the decisions and, you know, whatever I want goes. And there's no constraints on me other than my own morality, which, by the way, he doesn't have. 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. And the three of them have something in common, which is they are excellent communicators. 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. 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.
- [40:00]
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.
- [40:55]
Goldie
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.
- [41:08]
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 and 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. Goldie, you got any other thoughts on this?
- [42:18]
Goldie
Yeah, just the final thing. There's, you know, it's the standard observation bureaucracy is absolutely necessary. You know, Trump decried it as the deep state, when really it's just this, 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. Cuz 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.
- [43:16]
Zach Silk
I completely agree. In tight of blowing it up, there is gonna 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 that believes in government, if, if, if. I know, I know it. 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's a, it'll be very, it's, it'll be a lot of opportunity.
- [44:18]
Goldie
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.
- [44:56]
Podcast Host / Narrator
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