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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. I'm Santi Ruiz and this is Statecraft. As a reminder, the full annotated transcript for this episode is at www.statecraft.pub. today I'm talking to James Anderson. James, welcome to Statecraft.
- [00:19]
B
Thank you. It's great to be here.
- [00:20]
A
I'm very glad to have you and there's a lot that we could cover and I'm worried we won't be able to get to it all in one conversation. You lead the Government Innovation Program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which is the umbrella for all the charitable giving of billionaire and former three term New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And you used to be Mayor Bloomberg's comms director. You served in a couple other roles in his mayoral administration. I want to start by saying I really like the way your team, this government Innovation Program, talks about its work. Tell me a little bit about how you describe the work you do.
- [00:56]
B
Very nice to be here. So I run a portfolio of capacity building programs called the Government Innovation Programs and Bloomberg Philanthropies has a really serious focus on city problem solving, really across our entire organization. The programs that we run are very focused on equipping mayors and their teams with the critical skills and capabilities they need to solve problems better. That work takes a bunch of different shapes. We run leadership programs that train everyone from the mayor to the chief of staff to the budget directors and more. We focus on great organizations equipping cities with better data practices, innovation practices and teams. We also help cities generate more ambitious urban solutions, test them. If they work, we help them spread to cities around the world. The fourth and final thing we do is we're building a better field, a field of organizations that are focused on strengthening the capacity of local government and building a tremendous amount of research that is focused on what works in city government, what is the science and the art of municipal leadership that helps localities produce outsized results for their residents. Across all of that, we focus on peer to peer learning and networking mayors and making sure that they're constantly learning from each other and building on one another's successes. So our program started, you know, in 2010 with the first five grants. Mayor Emanuel in Chicago, Mayor Landrieu in New Orleans got initial iTeams. Today, more than 900 cities are getting deep technical assistance grants, leadership development from us, with thousands more cities benefiting from our information and education programming as well.
- [02:45]
A
One of the things I like about the kind of framing that you guys use in your approach to this work is just that observation that I think you point out more Than half of the world's population for the first time in recorded history, lives in cities. It's a global trend and it's not slowing down anytime soon. So from here on out, the work that mayors do in the US and globally is going to matter more and more. Is one point. Something else that I think I've heard you say in the past is that at least in the American system, mayors have. They're some of the elected leaders with the most power over the domains they're elected to govern. A representative in the House doesn't have a huge amount of agency. They've got, you know, 1 400th more or less of decision making power over a given bill, whereas a mayor often has quite a broad range of tools available. Can you say a little bit about what mayors themselves in the American context actually have the power to do?
- [03:41]
B
When you're working in local government, state capacity variability is your best friend. Oftentimes two cities sitting across county lines have a different authorizing and operating environment because there are different labor regimes, different tax bases, different powers and authorities, and there's just extraordinary variability across the country. But in general, cities are responsible for municipal services such as waste management, parks, civic spaces, policing, sanitation, water, and they deliver the services that you and I depend upon every day. Keeping our sidewalks clear and clean, making sure that our local transport gets us to our destination, real impact over important quality of life indicators and issues for residents across the country.
- [04:34]
A
You mentioned the old operating model. You're talking about it at a high level a moment ago. Old operating model that many municipalities have. Before we get into the new operating model, can you just lay the groundwork and explain what you mean by that? What's the old operating model that in your view, too many city halls are running?
- [04:54]
B
I'll answer it on two levels. One level will be super familiar to your audience. Local governments, just like state and federal governments, tend to be highly siloed. They tend to operate well vertically and not so well horizontally. This is a leftover of the Fortist organizational model that we adopted and defined our public services around in the last century. I think perhaps a more useful way to think about it is that local governments in the US context are still construed both by federal funders and I think in our public discussion as service delivery organizations. As organizations that are responsible for delivering an on time, on budget service, not as problem solving entities that are often the most crucial problem solving entities operating at urban scale that are being asked by their constituents to solve emerging issues that often take them away from the the service delivery responsibilities that they have. So part of what we are promoting and what we help mayors and their teams develop are a suite of competencies focused on problem solving. How can you size up issues earlier and better? How can you adjust the way your resources are working in order to free people up, free money up to respond to those issues? How do you innovate and develop innovative ideas and test them and figure out which ones work, which ones don't? How do you build coalitions of support around new actions? And how do you deliver results that people can feel and see and have confidence in? Those are the capabilities that are almost never funded in most city halls. Most city hall mayors, when they come into office, the vast majority of their budgets are fixed or near fixed. So we're talking about pension costs, labor costs, fixed services. The smallest part of their budget are the parts of the budget that fund governance, improvement, strategic thinking, innovation, IT upgrades. And those of course, are the first areas cut in a downturn.
- [07:04]
A
Let me go back a second to the line you mentioned about the Fordist model of public sector governance. Obviously, the Fortis production model we mostly think about as the Ford company's production line. This idea that you can each step somebody's responsible for a specific piece of a process and you kind of output the model T right in the private sector and in management. That's how we think about it. When you say that was applied in the public sector, in city management, can you say a little bit more about what that looked like?
- [07:35]
B
What we're talking about with the Forges model is standardized services for a mass public, clear division of labor, rigid roles, hierarchical rules, driven bureaucracy. These are systems that are designed for stability, not for change. Success is measured by, by throughput, not necessarily by outcomes. And we now live in a world where every single day these mayors are dealing with transformation from pandemics to mass migration to the affordability crisis. And they're being asked by their residents to respond to these problems in real time. That requires people to work across sectors, across silos, to be more iterative. We don't know all of the answers. We actually have to find the answers. We have to test, learn, adapt. This is not the curriculum for the standard Master's of Public policy or a Master's of Public Administration. You know, so much of what the public sector, particularly at the local government level, has to do today is help communities navigate change and help people survive and thrive in spite of that change. And you can't look to a single federal funding stream to enable you to do that. And if your budgets are tied to those vertical funding streams, you know, I think on average, 50 to 75% of all municipal budgets are fixed or near fixed costs. So the amount that cities have to address change to develop the internal capacity to assess it and respond to it, it's out of that smaller slice. I think what we recognized is that there was a really distinct role that philanthropy could play to help show what's possible and set standards and create a different North Star around what it means to run an organization that is iterative and adaptive and that, yes, has to deliver services effectively. We all know a lot of cities don't get that right, but also has to be able to shift resources, adjust thinking, change direction in response to the change that a community is experiencing at any point in time. And what does it mean for me as a mayor? What do I need to have on my team in order to navigate that change? Well, that's the through line of our programming.
- [10:01]
A
This is a bit of a sidebar, but Michael Bloomberg as a mayor, I think the epithet that he was described with most often was technocratic. That was the a term that got used a lot. He was a Democrat, but was ran as a Republican as mayor. It's funny, people also use that language to describe that old Fortis model that, you know, the kind of managerial revolution and in American life was like a technocratic revolution. And it's kind of funny and I don't even know if I have a point here, but just that that word technocratic gets used to apply to both these very different kinds of models.
- [10:35]
B
I think it's a little bit of a lazy description of Mike. I think he was deeply values driven. Sometimes technocratic was applied because people didn't know what to do with a mayor who was not ideologically motivated. Mike was deeply interested in finding the best solution to each problem on its own terms. And he created the conditions for great entrepreneurship within government by choosing people who thought about the issues from every single side. And that was a part of the process that Mike went through to figure out what his public policy regime was going to be. And so I think that gets reduced to the word technocratic. But to me, there was a very clear sense of values that was driving the work that the Bloomberg administration got behind.
- [11:24]
A
That all makes sense to me, and I don't share all of Mayor Bloomberg's politics, but in our work at ifp, we also get the technocratic label. And I think I have a similar answer to you is that we have a specific set of things that we care about. And we're very public, these are our values. And then we just try to be very focused on what would success look like in each of those issue areas and how can we do it. I'm open to being convinced that we should use a different tool in the toolkit for each of those projects. If that's technocratic, then so be it.
- [11:53]
B
One such bad thing. One of the key lessons that I learned working for Mike Bloomberg and really the incredible deputy mayors that he surrounded himself with was really like, understand the problem deeply, circle that problem with data and with different perspectives before you generate a solution. I was recently speaking with Tim Kelly, the mayor of Chattanooga, and he came into the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. This is one of our flagship programs, trains 40 mayors every single year, emphasizes the role of managing well and what does it mean to manage these systems effectively? How do you squeeze more efficiency, more effectiveness out of the limited resources and assets that you've got? And Tim was telling me how he majored in innovation in the Bloomberg Harvard program. He sent a team, they got coached on evidence based strategies to understand a problem. And he was saying, you know, I'm a results mayor, I'm beating my chest, I'm asking for solutions. That process taught me to use data, to use resident experiences, the perspectives and the experiences of other cities to understand a problem in a way that I never would have understood it before. Once they did that, they realized that youth crime in their city at that moment in time was overwhelmingly about mental health. That unlocked a whole set of interventions they otherwise wouldn't have zeroed in on. And just a while ago, they celebrated a year of zero murders in one of the highest crime neighborhoods in their city as a result of those interventions. And his takeaway there is like these tools of understanding deeply before we jump to solutions. Finding expertise in diverse and different places, help them each and every time now think about the solution set that they're going to move forward with. And so that's the kind of capacity that we're trying to promote and develop in cities.
- [13:55]
A
Can I ask you to put a point on that? I always want more when people talk about evidence based policy making or decision making, because it's hard for me to find anyone who will stand up and say we're against evidence based policymaking. You know, no one cops to the opposite of that. So what is it that you guys are teaching people to do that is otherwise aversive or wouldn't happen without your, your impact?
- [14:21]
B
I actually didn't mention evidence based policymaking. I mentioned evidence based practices. So let me answer your question in a couple different ways. I think, number one, we're training mayors to be great managers and training their organizations to be learning organizations. I think a decade back that was not in the DNA, that was not the way that we thought about mayors. And certainly there was a pressure on city leaders to know all the answers and feel like they had to know all of the answers. We're helping create a different culture within city hall, which is, you're a learning organization, you may know some answers, you're not going to know them all. How do you get out into the community? Test different interventions, put down what doesn't work, scale up what does. That's number one. Number two, I think we've made huge gains in helping US Cities move up the ladder of sophistication in their use of data. One of our programs is called what Works Cities. It's a certification program. When we started this work 15 years ago, cities around the country said to us, I don't really know what good data looks like. They marveled and heard stories about what Mike did with big data and analytics and performance management. But for most cities, there was just not a clear sense of what the North Star is in terms of data use. Over the last decade, we've moved hundreds of cities up that ladder of sophisticated data use such that cities around the US are, are probably in the best position of many public institutions to embrace the AI era because they know they've got good data governance. They know that their data is clean, they know that it's well structured and timely because they've been doing that hard work for over a decade. And then third with Tim Kelly and with the innovation programming that we do. When we started, there were two or four chief innovation officers in the public sector in the world. It was a new field. Everyone you talked to had a different definition of what innovation even means. They were throwing spaghetti at the wall. Twelve, 15 years later, a field has emerged where people are using the same language. They understand what tools, help them understand problems better and produce more creative ideas, test those ideas and scale up the things that work. Those are the evidence based practices that we promote because they work, they work in the private sector, and many of them work also in the public sector. So scaling those practices and making them the norm in innovation offices has really taken innovation offices out of the periphery and brought them into the center of city halls where mayors are using those offices to advance their big priorities. I'll give you a really good example. Brandon Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, inherited an innovation team we were funding under the prior mayor. It was in the heart of the pandemic. When he took office. Cities around the country were hiring large management consultancies to stand up contact tracing firms for their cities. Mayor Scott had a deep belief that because local government in Baltimore had just experienced a crisis, the prior mayor had been indicted and was left office, that locals wouldn't trust outsiders, they wouldn't open their doors and provide that information. He took that innovation team and he said, let's create a homegrown version of a contact tracing firm. They were the only major municipality in the country that did it. And he outperformed his peers on every single indicator that mattered, vaccination rates and more. And now he's using his innovation team to address another top political priority for him, which is police recruitment and retention. And this year Baltimore has brought on more than they've lost. So they have a net increase in police officers this year for the first year in a decade. That comes back to this mayor Using these evidence based tools and techniques around how do we understand what's causing our attrition and retention problems and where do we find the points of leverage and intervention to fix them?
- [18:42]
A
Baltimore is a great example of, I think, some of the good work that you guys have done and also one that we've talked about a little bit on here. Well, I guess we didn't really talk about it so much with Peter Moscos, who's a guest on here, who had written a book about the 90s crime decline in New York, which I know you're familiar with. But before that, he served for two years in the Baltimore Police Department and wrote a very interesting book about his experience. He was doing his PhD and it was a kind of ethnographic. I'm going to go, I'm going to go actually do the work and then only then try and pontificate about what police officers are thinking and, and how they approach the job. I still have this lingering question about the data streams that you're talking about. Like let's say I'm the mayor of Baltimore from 20 years ago or 30 years ago. I assume the city gathers all kinds of fine grained data just in the course of its operation. Can you just explain what, what the weakness of those data systems was originally and what kinds of interventions you guys were encouraging or kind of practices to make sure that we've got a. We're able to use that cities are.
- [19:45]
B
Incredible generators and collectors of administrative data and performance data. That data is stored and structured in highly variable ways. Sometimes it takes the form of a number of handwritten forms stacked on top of each other and put into a filing cabinet. Other times it takes the form of being in an Excel spreadsheet. Other times it takes the form of being in a CRM system. So a huge part of what we've tried to do over the last decade is help cities structure that data in optimal ways, make sure the governance around that data is excellent, meaning trusted brokers are in charge of updating that data. They're checking to make sure that the data is timely. They're checking to make sure that it is safe and secure and it is governed in a way that aligns with the city's values. And then being able to use that data in ways that inform actual executive decision making, that's a whole nother set of activities and another set of of growth goals for cities. I hate to say it, but I still hear so many new mayors say, I'm coming into office and I'm still flying blind. I'm being asked to make decisions, and I'm not seeing the data that I need to feel comfortable with the decisions that I'm being asked to make.
- [21:16]
A
What kinds of decisions are they thinking about when they say that?
- [21:19]
B
All types of policy and daily programmatic decisions. Hey, Mayor, we want to shift our sanitation service from Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday to Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. And the reason for that is this. And the mayor says, well, show me the data. And they say, well, this is what we're hearing from the ground. This is what we're hearing from the workforce, those types of issues. Part of our management training for the mayors is really focused on what are your expectations for how you want the organization to use data? What are the kinds of questions that you can ask that get the organization to bring forward more data? How do you have some patience with the fact that the data at the beginning is not going to be the best data, but it'll improve over time and with ongoing use? What kind of people and roles do you need to have in place to make sure that yours is an organization that's well positioned to use data in an impactful sort of way? So it's everything from the people, the practices, the routines, the performance management, the governance, how data is being used with things like procurement, to issues like public engagement and communication?
- [22:34]
A
Educate me a little further here, though. Let's say I am that mayor. I just feel like I'm flying blind on when should the sanitation services run. All the data I'm getting is the sanitation department says, like, look, this is what we're hearing we need to do what kinds of things is your program telling me to start implementing? What kinds of practices do I need? Just from day one, I've realized this. This is a really big job and I need your help. What are we doing?
- [22:59]
B
One of the longest standing programs, and I think an extremely impactful program is called what Works City Certification. I mentioned that program to you earlier. Any city in the US of 30,000 or or more is eligible to participate in this program. We help the cities do at first an assessment let us understand what your existing data practices are. We then work closely with the mayor and the team on a set of priority interventions that help them improve their data practices one step at a time. I'll never forget the first mayor that we worked with was Tony Yarber. He was the then mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, and he came into the what Works Cities program and he said, I don't. I don't have a data person, but my comms guy is going to be our data point person. So we took that comms guy and we taught that comms guy the basics around how to help this mayor around his priorities, structure data so that he could ask it questions and get answers that helped to inform his decision making. Now, today, the data practices are in General, way advanced. 54% of US cities of 100,000 or more are moving up that ladder of sophistication towards certification in the what Works Cities program. So there's a real movement of data people and officers in cities around the country that are very focused people understand today in a very different way that data is really important. And particularly with AI, you cannot do good AI if you don't have good data governance in place. And so there's just extreme interest and demand in getting better.
- [24:41]
A
How do you develop these better sources of data and these better data flows without driving the people who are sourcing that data crazy? The example I'm thinking of is police officers talk a lot about how much paperwork they have to fill out. Seeing like a state perspective from the top. You'd like to get more data from officers on these details so that you could process that. How do you kind of balance making the jobs of the sanitation department workers or the cops or whoever it is who's sourcing your data. Not incredibly onerous and still get the kinds of robust data sets that you want to be using for these tough decisions.
- [25:17]
B
Almost all of the programs that we operate or fund are focused on priority problems. For the mayor. In Baltimore, it might be public safety. In San Diego, it Might be housing. You know, the data work follows a basic rhythm, which is, you know, what's the actual problem you're trying to solve? Do you have the data that you need to understand that problem? If not, what are the gaps? What is that data telling you? How often do you need to look at that data to understand where you're standing? What are your data flows? How can you make that predictable? In some ways, it's about structuring and organizing data that most of these institutions already have but typically aren't using as well. Again, I want to just make the point that cities have come a long way in this and data practices today look nothing like they did a decade back. But that's the general trajectory that this work takes.
- [26:11]
A
Let's go back to Baltimore and the violence prevention work that this mayor has done a lot on. It's certainly not just the mayor. The there's a new new da But Baltimore has seen a fantastic drop in violence post Covid. Tell me about the work you guys did with the mayor in support of that.
- [26:31]
B
All credit goes to Mayor Scott and his incredible team. This week they announced homicide levels at 50 year lows. And I think the data point beneath that is probably even more interesting. Violent crime and murders coming down in cities across the country, but Baltimore's driving it down fastest. And if you talk with Mayor Scott, I think, you know, he's done a couple of things, I think that are textbook examples of how a mayor solves complex problems effectively. The first is he made very clear that this is his number one priority. He put himself at the center of decision making, of public communication. He set a really ambitious goal. I know his team was nervous when he came out and said, we're going to have a 15% year on year reduction in murder. But he knew that if he didn't challenge the ambition of the system, if he didn't put an ambitious goal out there, the system would do less than it might otherwise. And then he's put data driven decision making and a really clear understanding that every dot on the map equals a young person whose life has been impacted at the center of everything that he's done. And he has been rigorous in that focus. We helped him stand up a world class data capability. We helped him find and hire a great chief data officer. That data capability has helped build, bring excellent data, excellent decision making intelligence into the mayor's office in an ongoing way every day so that Mayor Scott can wake up, pull up his dashboard, and really understand where things stand. And then he calls his police chief and they talk about real facts in real time and what the next strategies are going to be. So declaring a clear goal, making it his organizational priority and leaving no room for doubt on that, and continuously using data to inform the strategies that he's delivering, I think has just been his path to great progress.
- [28:40]
A
I'm curious how innovative you think that model actually is, because I think the counterargument would be Baltimore has been a fantastic success story, certainly for, I think, the reasons you mentioned, really careful and rigorous and serious kind of data approach, and a mayor who cares about it and is willing to stake some political credibility on it, as well as a bunch of other things that seem pretty similar to successful attempts to drive down violence in other major American cities. I think the Boston success story from a couple decades back had a lot of the same elements. I think CompStat in New York in a lot of ways was this kind of model. We're actually going to, you know, for the first time organize the data, be held politically accountable, and hold people down the chain accountable for their numbers and for knowing exactly what's going on, having a plan there. I guess my question is, and I don't mean this to denigrate Baltimore's achievements, but is this an example of taking a best practices playbook and applying it, or is there something new here?
- [29:39]
B
He's absolutely embraced evidence based strategies, group violence reduction, sort of being at the center of all of the success that he's done.
- [29:49]
A
Sure.
- [29:49]
B
You know, Baltimore's starting point, you know, they were suffering from one of the worst homicide rates in the country. Their socioeconomic challenges are profound. The lack of investment, the structural poverty. Baltimore starting point was a tough spot. And this is a mayor that has figured out how to produce the fastest declining murder rate in the country. It is a come from behind success story. And I think that speaks a lot to, to the mayor's management approach. Management in the public sector is not always the first thing we think about, but he has thought very carefully and very strategically about how he shows up as manager in chief of a system that's trying to produce a better result. And he's never taken his eye off of the prize. I think you're absolutely right. He'd be foolish not to avail himself of strategies and policies and programs that have worked in other places. His starting context was very different than most of those other places. And his level of execution success has been top notch. I think he's now taking those capabilities and taking that focus and applying it to housing vacancy, which is the second biggest problem in Baltimore, and we're really excited to see what they're starting to do there.
- [31:06]
A
Maybe what I'm really after here is not so much how much credit can we give the mayor for this work, which I think you can give him quite a bit, but more just at a more philosophical level. Thinking about municipal governance, how much is innovation an important thing? I think, I mean, like you said, there's a huge amount of evidence on how to drive crime down, how to drive violent crime down, and several American cities have really successfully done that. And, you know, it's been a kind of revolution in American urban life from when you think about, you know, 50 or 60 years ago, my impression is that that's often true for a bunch of other key things that we expect cities to do. That you can make improvements in sanitation or in other public service delivery, but often there is a playbook for how to do things well in urban life. I guess what's the balance between doing the evidence based here's what we know works thing and having a focus on innovation. Are they.
- [32:00]
B
I tend to define public innovation and government innovation pretty broadly. I think it's really about making one plus one equal three or more. Sometimes that takes the form of very radical system shocking ideas that bring a new paradigm into existence. I think the work that we're seeing around the care economy in cities around the world after the pandemic, where cities are deploying a full throated municipal response to care, which has been the invisible and underattended to underbelly of our economy forever, is a great example of that. But a lot of it is also just process and partnership reimagination. In Baltimore, there was a persistent challenge. The business community called it a quality of life challenge. The squeegee boys, young men who didn't have income, who were out on the streets offering to squeegee windows for pay. And this was something that the mayor was hearing a lot about from the business community. The innovation in his solution to the squeegee boy challenge was to get the private sector fully vested in the solution with him. They came to him and said, solve this problem. And he said, let's us solve this problem. And he set up a table where he shook the pockets of everyone at the table. What assets do you have to put towards this solution? How can we coordinate those interventions so that they really feel holistic and meaningful to these young men and we can create an inducement to get them off the streets? That challenge is no more in Baltimore. That's a process or governance innovation it's not a radical paradigm shift, but I think maybe it's just helpful to sort of lay out that we think of government innovation in that very broad way. There's room for both of your points in that definition. Sometimes it's stuff no city has ever done before. We have the mayor's challenge right now. We're about to name the 25 best breakthrough ideas that cities from around the globe surfaced. And there's some really thrilling paradigm busting stuff there. But most of the day to day innovation that we see in city halls is business model innovation, customer service innovations, efficiency innovations. And those are critically important. And they too require capacity. People need to understand how to squeeze more out of these systems and get these systems to produce more. And there's a science to it, and that's the science that we help cities connect to.
- [34:41]
A
Let me ask you about something you said about the role of external consultants, especially management consultants, in how cities are governed and run their practices. I talked recently with head of the Office of Personnel Management at the federal level, Scott Cooper, who although he had, you know, good things to say about a lot of these big federal contracts, similar contracts at the federal level, had an instinct that a lot of that work could be done better and cheaper in house and that it would serve political leaders better to have better data capacity, better it, et cetera, internally compare and contrast. Kind of the state of play at the municipal levels, the federal level is there like a management consultant bloat that you see at the municipal level.
- [35:24]
B
There's certainly an over dependency and municipalities are less able to afford expensive management consultants than are their state and federal counterparts for sure. But I am in total agreement. I think innovation work used to be contracted out to the McKinsey's and the IDOS data work used to be externalized. A huge, I think orientation for Bloomberg philanthropies and our work is that cities need to have internal capacity. They have to be able to own their own data. They have to be able to, you know, have the freedom of having technical expertise on the inside so that they can be adaptive and iterative in real time as new needs emerge. So that's a sentiment that I definitely see and feel strongly about. We did incredible work with the then mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Scheinbaum. They applied for an Innovation and Data team grant and her focus was making sure every single city service that a poor person in Mexico City could ever want to access was accessible on their phone and that the people least likely to be able to take a day off from work or pay an expediter was the poorest of her residents. And so she saw it as a, as a rights issue that all services need to be accessible on digital, on their phones. She internalized extraordinary capacity to make that happen. She created a technology factory within the municipality. That's a long way away from the US model where we are still very consultant and external vendor dependent. But I think we need to find something in the middle where many more of those capabilities are internalized because digitization and making services easier for people to access from their phones or their home computers. We're not far enough along and we need to get farther.
- [37:23]
A
Aside from the, you know, these big consultants who benefit from getting these big contracts, are there forces in city halls that you see that are really opposed to trying to bring that capacity in house?
- [37:34]
B
I think the major pushback is fiscal again. You know, the vast majority of city budgets are dedicated to relatively fixed costs. The amount of discretionary capacity that most mayors have is relatively small. This is the funding that goes to IT modernization, to beefing up your data, your sort of in house capabilities. These are difficult fiscal choices and decisions that mayors have to make. And so I think that that's really where the reluctance and the challenge is. It's a small amount of money and they have a lot of difficult choices to make. You know, we obviously try to make the case that these investments pay dividends over time. And I think there's growing evidence that they really do.
- [38:16]
A
Are there cases where you guys have helped mayors city halls stand up these internal capacities and then a fiscal crunch comes and those things are on the chopping block? Aside from just trying to build good tools that speak for themselves, how do you try and stop those things from being zeroed out when it's crunch time for the discretionary stuff?
- [38:37]
B
We've now been doing this work long enough that a number of different cycles, fiscal cycles have occurred. And there are definitely times when all of a sudden cities are reducing any and every cost that they think they can take. I think what, what's amazing about it is that 95% of the innovation grants that we've made, once those grants have stopped, city halls have maintained those people and those lines on city dollars and a growing number of them, a majority of them now, are lasting across administrative turnover. I think what happens is people understand when they see what this data capacity can do, what it means to have a dedicated problem solving team that helps a mayor put points on the board that their residents recognize and see and feel they want to keep that going and they Work really hard to keep it going once our grant dollars end. Not all the time, but certainly more and more of the time.
- [39:34]
A
We've talked a lot about data. Obviously that's a huge part of the work you guys do. And if listeners think back to Michael Bloomberg's origin story in the way he became one of the wealthiest men in the world, it was kind of an observation that data, you know, structured in the Bloomberg terminal was an incredibly valuable asset for a lot of people. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on some other facets of City hall organization and administration. So when Mayor Bloomberg came into New York City to the mayor's office there, he set up City hall on an open floor plan model. And that was a big deal at the time. And a lot of that's been retained through multiple mayors to now. Besides kind of building better data streams for mayors and being more evidence based in their practice, what other kinds of things in setting up your own, your city hall do you guys think of as best practice that you'd encourage basically any mayor in the country to pursue?
- [40:30]
B
You know, we focus on a couple of different things. Data is obviously one of them. Your point there around mechanisms and structures that allow people to work across silos are, are central to our capacity building programs. We just exported our mayoral leadership program which has been operating at Harvard and created a sibling program over in Europe. And I just got a note from the mayor of Izmir, Turkey who just set up a bullpen as he was so inspired by the way that that worked in Mike Bloomberg City Hall. But structures that facilitate cross sectoral collaboration, cross silo collaboration are another really important part of our pedagogy and our approach Innovation teams we've already mentioned and I also think, you know, public engagement and public communications. We are in a moment where city halls feel as much as anyone does that the lack of institutional trust is a real problem. And so how do you show the work? What does operational transparency look like? How do you let your residents understand where things are and what the black hole of local government is doing is actually a really important strategy to rebuild trust in government in this day and age. So maybe just double clicking on the collaboration piece. I think this is one of probably the most sought after aspects of our leadership development programming. Mayors get that there's almost no problem that they can solve on their own. I mentioned the Squeegee Boy initiative from Baltimore, but all mayors are focused on how local governments become platforms for problem solving, how they can create meaningful coalitions from the private sector, academia, civil Society, neighborhood groups that are all focused on solving the same problem and organize their resources so that they're all pushing in the same direction. That's very hard work to facilitate. If you're in a city hall and the vast majority of your resources are focused on existing service delivery, how do you staff and structure a capacity to do meaningful coalition work and driving towards impact? What are the tools and techniques that you need to use to get there? Those are some other examples of critical capacities that we help mayors master and their teams learn through our various programs.
- [42:51]
A
I was going to ask, are there common mistakes first term mayors make as they're setting up their own systems? But I'm sure there are. Maybe a better question would be to ask you to list some of the most common mistakes that you see, you know, well intentioned mayors just coming to the office making.
- [43:06]
B
We have a new mayor's program at Harvard as well where we bring brand new newly elected mayors together. We do this in partnership with the US Conference of Mayors. And the things that they need the most help with is how to think about a governing structure, how to build a team, how to organize their people and their priorities for optimal effect, how to think differently about time, how to use the time of the mayor in an impactful way. If Mike Bloomberg were here, he would tell you that the thing that matters more than anything is getting the team right at the outset. He has a very famous story where 100 days into office the press said, well, what did you do? What did you do? And he said, oh, I built a team. And they said, yeah, but what did you do? And so we really help mayors understand what does it mean to pull together a good team? What kind of people do you need around you? Do you have people who will say no to you? Do you have people who are not sycophantish and are willing to like really tell you hard truths? If you don't have that, you're in real trouble because pretty soon the waters get deep and you're swimming, you're swimming for your life. You know, it's a tough job.
- [44:16]
A
Are mayors too often inclined to pull together yes men and yes women around them? Because it's the kind of natural, human.
- [44:24]
B
Human inclination, human beings are a little too inclined to surround themselves with people who think like them. I think we, we've learned that lesson very well in today's social media world. I think this is also one of the great opportunities of the state capacity building movement is how do we put people at the center of how we develop policy and programming Again, we're still running on a model that values internal agency expertise above almost any other inputs. Part of what I think city leaders are showing is the value and the benefit of starting with residents and their problems and understanding them and building programs and policies backwards from that. So all of these are the things that we start talking to new mayors about at the outset. You know, everybody makes a million mistakes. There's no way to, to prevent that from happening. But those are the building blocks that you can build the foundation of a strong city hall off of.
- [45:25]
A
You mentioned the MBA for Mayors that you run that program in conjunction with the US Conference of Mayors. And I know there's a lot of collaboration between mayors. It's a lot of information sharing. Obviously there's a lot of best practices that you don't have to reinvent. And it turns out that, you know, the town a few miles away may be doing an excellent job of. I'm curious about competition among mayors, though. And the reason I'm curious is a few months ago I had a conversation with former Mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, who talked about how he was very motivated by the idea of competition of what are they doing and can we beat them? I'm curious how much you see that motivation or drive among the mayors you talk to of intra mayoral competition or intra mayoral competition.
- [46:10]
B
You know, I actually think this is an amazing force for public improvement. And mayors, uniquely, I think amongst elected officials, reject the not invented here syndrome. Mayor Landrieu is a, is a really excellent example of that, but that's pretty common. Mayors have a lot of FOMO when they hear one of their contemporaries doing something, achieving impact at a different level, organizing resources in ways that create efficiencies, they want to learn, they want to understand, and if appropriate, they want to import those lessons back home. What's interesting is like idea transfer between public sector organizations is a fraught enterprise. It's really hard for a mayor in one place or an elected in another place to sort of get the altitude necessary to find the working solutions in real time against a challenge that they're prioritizing, to assess whether or not the impact is legitimate, to understand what it would actually take to implement that initiative back home, whether it's even accessible and appropriate in the local context. And then to get that work started, we have a whole suite of programs from global convenings to peer networks to an ideas exchange where mayors get technical assistance and coaching to adapt ideas from other places. So we make it a lot easier for them to get a running Start. So that impulse, I think, is one of the most powerful things and powerful positive drivers that we've got going for us in the local capacity building space. I think figuring out how to make sure that mayors can really seize on that information and use it quickly is, is really the challenge.
- [47:58]
A
One of the criticisms that I get the most when I'm talking about state capacity, when I'm talking to guests on here, feedback I get on episodes is that this idea of state capacity or of evidence based practice is a little blind or blinkered to some of the zero sum nature of politics or some of the zero sum problems of governance, that sometimes you have to make decisions that will benefit some people and harm other people. And that's politics. That kind of clash of interests often is politics, I guess I'm curious at a high level, what do you make of that perspective? What are the limits of the kinds of interventions that you guys tackle? Are there kinds of problems that are not amenable to being solved or improved by Bloomberg Philanthropy's evidence based practices?
- [48:49]
B
For instance, we've learned a lot of lessons over the years in terms of how you build state capacity within local government organizations, how you make it stick, how you create spillover effects, how you get into the DNA of an organization. A few of those lessons. Incentives matter a lot. You know, there's no local government anywhere in this country that has the time or the luxury of doing anything that just feels medicinal and that doesn't feel driven towards impact and helping them address political priorities. So we make sure that mayors are bringing to us a political priority project and we build state capacity around that initiative so that they are seeing the results, so that their colleagues are understanding, wow. When you do the work of government in these better ways, government can produce outsized results. So incentives are really important. It is a long distance sprint. You know, I think about the work that we've done in places like Baltimore or Seattle over many, many years. It comes in fits and starts. Crises disrupt the work, turnover disrupts the work. You don't flick a switch and turn state capacity on. In the local government sector, it's a slow build. It revolves around people and ambassadors and then systems and routines and ultimately policies that help move this stuff into the mainstream. Leadership is decisive. If you're building state capacity and your executive in chief is not championing it, then you're working at the margin and the returns on your investment are not significant.
- [50:30]
A
That's a big lesson that we've heard here over the past couple years. It really does not matter if you don't have the big boss aligned.
- [50:38]
B
I think if you took the positive attention and the elevation that the Trump administration tried to place on Doge and connected it with that kind of capacity that was at 18F or US Digital Service, then you're in the business of transforming a government and that we certainly see play out at the local government level. When mayors are pushing this stuff into the DNA of their systems and their organizations, that's when great things transformation can happen. The systems and the processes and the practices that Mayor Scott is making the norm in Baltimore city government, they will stay around. They are getting into the DNA. They're moving well past the political appointees into the standing civilization service. So I think that stuff is really good. And the last thing I would say is that I think capacity is political. We are talking about making investments and choosing to invest our dollars and our resources in the state's capacity to do its work better and not in something else. And so we have to make the political case. When the music stops playing, you have to show that there's been real results that people care about. It is also not partisan. And I, I hope as this state capacity movement continues to grow and expand, that we remember that there is room aplenty for Republicans and Democrats at this table and that if we're going to be successful, it will only be because this is a bipartisan project. Any government under any leader needs to be able to point at certain things and achieve their objectives. The objectives may differ, but the underlying capacity is the same. And so in our work, I'm very proud to say we have Republican and independent mayors all come to the Bloomberg foundation and to our programs because we don't tell them what to do. We show them better ways to do the work they care about.
- [52:35]
A
Just a couple questions here as we wrap up. One is about how the work that you guys have done has changed over time and how it's been received in the political context. I think if you go back five or 10 years, you heard a lot more the language of smart cities. This was kind of a phrase that you saw a lot. And this was kind of in the pre LLM revolution before a lot of the capabilities now that let you process all this data. But there was still an idea of big data, this Internet of things instinct that we should wire up as many sensors as possible in the home or in the municipality, get a lot more data, use that data to drive evidence based practices. For instance, were there failures of that model or what are the ways you can go wrong if you're taking kind of all the stuff that you told me here for granted, that we want to get better evidence, better data and make our decisions based on that. What are the failure modes once you're in that paradigm?
- [53:30]
B
The smart cities movement, the really meaningful and I think appropriate critique is that it was focused on solutions, not problems. And, and our programming is focused on problems first and making sure that people in the executive branch of local government have the tools, the knowledge, the networks, the resources, the analytical skills, the creativity skills, the tolerance for risk taking. They need to go find the right answer and bring it to life. So I think we avoid so many of the traps of those earlier movements if we keep ourselves laser focused on the problems our representative democracy, our elected officials are trying to solve for the people that put them in office and make sure that they have access to the suite of capabilities internalized inside their institutions that allow them to do that and to do it repeatedly and strategically and in a way that produces impact that people can see and feel.
- [54:38]
A
Just to press you on that, when you say that maybe some of that smart cities movement was more focused on solutions than problems, what was that? Was that people getting really excited about the new tools before they thought about what are we using them for?
- [54:53]
B
I think we still hear some of that, but I'll say less of it. I think it's natural and normal and mayors can in some ways be the perpetrators of some of this. They see a shiny technology that another city has deployed and they hear that that technology is producing an impact and they say, we got to get one of those things back home. Hopefully we're building up the capacity of her staff to say, let's first understand what our problem looks like. Let's first understand whether that's the right solution to the problem that we have in our city. Because different cities problems manifest in different ways, giving mayors almost that protective layer of a staff that has the analyt and the wait, let's look at the problem more closely skill set before they jump in and replicate a smart city solution is more than half the battle. Local governments today are really challenged to procure emerging technology. There's a huge information asymmetry within between local governments and the tech providers in terms of what the externalities negative or positive of these program software services might be. There's still a whole host of issues that local government and government procurers need to wade through. But that problem of problem solution fit more and more. I think public organizations have sort of outgrown or have moved past it. Not enough, not all, but More over.
- [56:21]
A
The weekend I was using Claude code and, you know, coding my terminal for the first time, make a personal website and was really blown away. If you were giving advice to mayors who were looking at that shiny object of AI and thinking about how to integrate it, are there specific things that you'd warn them against jumping on too quickly or specific places that you try to direct their attention instead along the lines of, you know, try and identify the right problems and then pick the solutions.
- [56:44]
B
One of our programs is called the City Data alliance and it's taking some of the cities that have the best data capacity and helping them take a big step forward into the AI era and to create sort of lighthouse examples of human centered AI deployment. And a lot of great stuff is coming out of that. We've been advising mayors on generative AI ever since ChatGPT got onto their cell phones. Our approach to it has been number one, get yourself fluent with these technologies. Promote fluency and understanding on your staff, encourage them to learn. Bring in local assets from research universities and have them talk with your teams about the potential and the pitfalls. Don't lead with regulation, lead with low risk experimentation so that you can begin developing some competency and some, some confidence in deploying these technologies. The first phase and first wave was really around administrative use cases. Cities are now trying to to bring generative AI more and more into service delivery to produce better outcomes for residents. And we're seeing more risk aversion emerge at the same time. So get your data house in order. Has to be step number one, think carefully about your use cases and the amount of risk you're looking to take and then step into this new era understanding that bandwidth constraints are one of the major impediments to local government progress. And these are technologies that can help square the circle. You've got to build up your capacity, build up your confidence and walk carefully, but clearly into that future. And we do a lot of hand holding, we do a lot of technical assistance that help mayors and their teams take those steps.
- [58:33]
A
James, last question for you and then we can wrap. There's been a lot of conversation over the past few years, I think, especially since COVID about people voting with their feet. And this is typically a conversation about the state level people leaving California for Texas or the Sun Belt, people moving to Florida states having this challenge and retaining people post this big shock where people realize maybe I should move anyway. And a lot of people who might not have moved otherwise are now thinking about their options and evaluating accordingly. When you think about the Kind of the trends that you're seeing, maybe more at the city level. Which cities are losing population, which cities are gaining population. I want you to make a prediction for me and then we can come back to it in a year or two and, and test it. Are there cities that you would be especially bullish on because of the quality of their governance or the things that they're trying to do that you would expect to see booming in the coming year or two?
- [59:29]
B
I could give you a lot of examples of mayors that I think are making the right moves and building up the kind of capable local governments that can consistently deliver better services and create more value for the public. It is happening in many places around the country. You can't look past Daniel Lurie and the team in San Francisco. I think if you go back a year, that doom loop narrative was so dominant and the press and social media was so insistent on that narrative. And this guy closes out his first year in office with a 70% approval rating. And you know, he hasn't fixed the street homelessness crisis. He hasn't yet fixed the fentanyl issue, but he's out on the streets every single day speaking into his cell phone and showing people the work and showing people the steps that they're taking toward a better quality of life in San Francisco. I think the momentum and the vibe shift is really, I think it's really exciting and it's the kind of thing that makes me want to call our researchers at Harvard or in other places. And the power of a local leader to change the conversation about their place I think is a really potent tool in their toolbox. The prospects for his city and his morality look really good. But yeah, there's a lot of good stuff happening local. Anytime I start to feel depressed about what I'm reading in the international or national section, I go local and mayors are doing inspiring stuff.
- [61:16]
A
Well, James, this is a good place to leave it for now and we'll have to have you back on in a little while because I'm also pretty bullish on San Francisco's mayor and we'll have to check ourselves in a couple years and see if our expectations came true. But thank you so much for giving me so much of your time. This is fascinating.
- [61:33]
B
Thank you so much.