Between Two Dons - The Impact on Public Service after 100 Days of Trump with Don Moynihan and Don Kettl

After a brief hiatus, we're back! In this episode of the new and refreshed Management Matters, host and Academy President James-Christian Blockwood discusses the impact of President Trump's first 100 days on public management with experts and Academy Fellows Don Moynihan and Don Kettl. They cover the challenges and opportunities in efforts toward government efficiency, the role of civil servants, and the administration's highly controversial approach to "reform."

Find out who gave the administration a failing grade so far, and who wants civil servants to embody the spirit of John Wayne in this episode!

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Transcript

0:00: Welcome to the new and refreshed Management Matters. 

 0:02: I'm your host, Academy president and CEO James-Christian Blockwood. 

 0:07: At the Academy, we want to use our podcast to dive into the evolving infrastructure of democracy and have some interesting conversations with impactful people. 

 0:16: My guests today are two public policy and management experts with a lot to say about the 1st 100 days of President Trump's administration. 

 0:23: We unpacked the challenges and opportunities in public management. 

 0:27: The role of civil servants in this era and a lot more. 

 0:30: Don Moynihan is the Ford School's J Ira and Nicky Harris family professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. 

 0:38: He is a prolific writer and researcher as co-director of the Better Government Lab, and he writes at his substack, Can we still govern? 

 0:47: Don Kettle is a public management and public policy expert who is former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. 

 0:55: He is the author of numerous books on public management and government and has consulted for many government agencies, including the Department of Veteran Affairs. 

 1:04: Both are academy fellows as well. 

 1:07: We are nearing the end of the 1st 100 days of President Trump's second term. 

 1:12: It's been 4 months marked by fast-paced change for government. 

 1:16: I credit the president for spurring national dialogue on the role of government and how it serves the American public. 

 1:23: But more public administration thought leaders and practitioners should dive into that very question. 

 1:29: What do you think about the administration's impact on government institutions and public servants so far? 

 1:35: We'll start with you, Don Moynihan. 

 1:38: Stepping back and thinking about this from the perspective of government capacity, that is the ability of governments to achieve their core goals. 

 1:46: , I would give the Trump administration an F in terms of its performance so far, and I think this is because they came into town with big promises and high hopes and with a real possibility of finding a partnership with people who closely watched government were concerned about. 

 2:12: Delays and proceduralism within government itself. 

 2:16: We're looking forward maybe to a more tech-focused period of innovation, and I think they, they largely blew that opportunity. 

 2:26: I think Doge has been an unmitigated disaster. 

 2:30: I think it's failed to live up to the promise of using technology in skillful ways, and I can certainly give more examples as as we discuss this in greater detail. 

 2:43: Alongside the efforts of Doge, you also have this more aggressive politicization of the public sector in a way that, based on pretty much all of the research we have about politicization will make things worse in terms of capacity, performance, as well as loss of transparency. 

 3:05: So I think the 1st 100 days has been a period where President Trump has done a lot. 

 3:11: I don't think anyone could disagree that the degree of energy, the volume of executive orders has been anything less than really substantial and aggressive. 

 3:23: , I just happen to think most of that has been really detrimental for the capacity of the American government. 

 3:30: Let me pick up from where Don Moynihan left off and just simply try to check off some of the big changes that have happened. 

 3:39: First of all, we've had about 140 years. 

 3:43: Worth of American commitment to the merit system and to hiring, promoting, and then paying based on merit, and that just got tossed out the window because of the the massive amounts of layoffs and firings and rifts and other things that have happened. 

 4:00: So that's, that's the first thing. 

 4:01: The second thing is that all that happened in a way that was largely disconnected from the from the. 

 4:09: Basic mission of government that they decided that there were some things that they just didn't want the government to do any longer like foreign aid. 

 4:17: Like a major federal role in education, and we could have a separate debate over that, but most of the of the layoffs occurred in ways that were disconnected from what it is that they wanted and we want and Congress wants the government to do and so this, this disconnect is this pursuit of of of firing people for firing sake without thinking about how it is that we wanted to get government done. 

 4:42: There was an effort to try to shut down a number of federal departments, including, and we talked about agency for International Development, the Department of Education, and Consumer Finance Protection Board and other agencies, but the administration unilaterally shut down or virtually shut down or simply eviscerated a fair number of existing federal agencies and did that on their own. 

 5:08: There has been an effort to impound federal funds to try to change what it is that Congress had appropriated and to simply decide it wasn't going to spend the money that Congress had in fact approved and so that's changed a substantial amount of what it is that the government was in the business of doing. 

 5:27: It has changed the way in which the information technology process within government is working, including who has access to which pieces of confidential information. 

 5:38: There have been efforts to try to transfer big blocks of federal employees through big chunks of federal agencies outside Washington in the effort to try to get government closer to the people. 

 5:50: And the last piece, which I think hasn't gotten too much notice so far, but which I think is is terribly important, which is the effort to essentially unplug the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which has been the way in which the federal government has written regulations for a very long time. 

 6:07: The administration has issued a series of executive orders that say that existing regulations simply are no longer in effect, that agencies are instructed not to implement them, and so that the question of whether or not the federal government and whether the president in particular has the power to undo existing federal regulations is itself a very big deal as well. 

 6:28: So take your pick. 

 6:29: This has been a very, very eventful time as the administration has taken the saddle and figured out where it is that it wants to ride. 

 6:39: A tough grade from Don Moynihan and good background and context from Don Kettle. 

 6:45: let's just take one step back and look at many people and elected officials believe that experts who manage government are unaccountable. 

 6:54: Only around 42% think that government is accountable. 

 6:58: More than half, around 56%, believe that government is almost always wasteful and inefficient. 

 7:06: A majority of the public believes that it's too hard to get rid of poor performers in government. 

 7:12: Given all the context, Don Kettle that you just provided, and the grade that you just provided, Don Moynihan. 

 7:19: We can all agree that government can and should be able to do better to serve the American people, but how do you solve these issues and how would you recommend going about it? 

 7:28: So it's a really good question. 

 7:29: I think that there's always this issue of how do we take apart the public's view of what government is and what it does. 

 7:38: And so you, you pointed to some opinion polls there. 

 7:42: In general, people have a negative view of government, but there is a lot of nuance to that. 

 7:49: So for example, polls by the Partnership for Public Service have shown that people tend to have a more positive view of the least popular government agency, the IRS, than they have of government as a whole. 

 8:03: And so what that tells us is that people's perceptions of government as a whole is something of an abstraction. 

 8:10: It includes their perceptions of politicians and not just civil servants, and people tend to have more favorable views of civil servants than of the politicians that actually run government. 

 8:22: We also know from some polling last year, again, partly by the Partnership for Public Service, that if you ask people, do you want a more politically run administration versus a nonpartisan, a less political administration, about 9 out of 10 people from both parties will say they prefer the less politicized, more nonpartisan administration. 

 8:48: , and so I think there, there, we see some mixed messages in, in some of the polling there. 

 8:56: there is certainly, I think, frustration with government. 

 9:02: And I think partly this has gotten worse because of issues of misinformation. 

 9:09: And I don't want to say that misinformation is the only thing that's driving this, but for example, the new administration has been striking in the degree to which they've talked about fraud. 

 9:21: , all the time, for lots of different programs, but take Social Security as an example where they've made these very broad claims that there has been extensive fraud. 

 9:33: For example, Elon Musk said, and I believe the president repeated that 40% of phone calls that went to Social Security Administration was fraudulent, and that is simply not true. 

 9:44: That is, you know, not a factual statement. 

 9:47: , but if you generate those statements or other claims about people who are well over 100 years old, receiving Social Security benefits. 

 9:58: That does weaken people's faith and trust within the administration and within individual agencies. 

 10:05: And so I think there is a moment that we're living through now where people are experiencing an education about what it is that government actually does now that it is being put through, really stringent tests and criticism by the new administration. 

 10:23: And I think we start by, you know, being accurate in some of our claims here and calling the administration out when it makes claims that are actually erroneous about either rule of civil servants or of the the degree of quality of public service. 

 10:39: And I'll, I'll hand over to Don because I think he'll probably offer some really good insights about this issue about how difficult is it to remove civil servants and why that is sometimes sort of a stopping point for agencies when it comes to achieving their mission. 

 10:55: And I think that the word mission I think is the thing to come back to here that we need to think about ways of cutting this in two different respects. 

 11:05: One is that in one other public opinion poll, and actually it's one that Pew has been doing for some time, they, they go out and ask people which federal programs do you think that you'd like to spend less money on or more money on. 

 11:20: And it turns out that there is one loser consistently, that is people think that the government ought to spend much less on foreign aid, but they vastly overstate the amount of money that we were actually spending on it. 

 11:33: And if we were able to spend the money that people think we ought to spend, it'd be more than we already were. 

 11:38: And so there's, it's clear that people are against government spending and think the government spends too much. 

 11:45: But don't have a very good idea where the money actually spends and and if you go look at actually where what programs get funded, the things that the government actually spends money on are not things that people want to cut back on. 

 11:58: So that gets into the really difficult problem trying to figure out how to fix all of this. 

 12:02: And I think that the core is rediscovering what it is that the administration's largely lost so far. 

 12:09: It is, it's one thing to say that we think there's a lot of waste, fraud and abuse, and are there improper payments? 

 12:15: Yes. 

 12:16: Is it something that just lies there in the balance sheet for you to vacuum up with your stick back? 

 12:21: That, well, the answer is no because it's hard to find. 

 12:24: If you think that there are programs that are full of waste, are there some of them? 

 12:29: There's some things that are full of waste. 

 12:31: Are government employees unaccountable? 

 12:34: Well, it turns out that that's a lot more complicated because if you look at almost all federal employees, they are sitting in a set of cross pressures and yes the. 

 12:45: may want them to do something, but one of the things that you would not want to do is to have somebody in charge of launching a rocket who does it a certain kind of way because of political pressure and then have the rocket blow up that would be responsibility of people who are in charge of doing technical things and that's more and more what the government does have responsibilities of making sure the stuff actually works. 

 13:06: Is it hard to fire poor performers? 

 13:09: Yeah, absolutely. 

 13:10: That's a big problem with the system. 

 13:12: But it's even harder to hire good performers because at this point hiring the federal government takes 3 times longer than it does in the private sector and that's probably not a good thing. 

 13:23: So how would we fix this? 

 13:24: The one thing is that I think is some pining for on the part of some reformers of going back to the way that things were at the end of 2024. 

 13:34: And even if we could take that trip, which we can't, it's a trip that I don't think we should try to take because we have a system that was seriously damaged and that really did need fundamental reform, and I give the Trump administration credit for identifying the fact that we actually did need to make some changes. 

 13:53: But if we're going to try to make changes, what we need to do, especially when it comes to connecting the people who work for government, and what is the government does is finding a bridge that gets the capacity we need to do what it is we want to have done. 

 14:06: How can we accomplish the mission that the people want in a ways most effective? 

 14:11: And we're not going to want to have baby food in the aisles of supermarkets that turns out to be unsafe because we haven't had the right kind of inspections. 

 14:21: We don't want door plugs that blow off of airplanes because of inadequate inspections of manufacturing facilities. 

 14:27: We don't want Social Security checks being misdirected, and we want people who are getting Medicare and Medicaid to be able to get the care that they need. 

 14:35: We go on and on, but So much of what it is the government does is that people want to have done. 

 14:41: They don't believe it's being done as well as it should, and I'm first in line to say it's not. 

 14:45: But if we're going to try to improve that, we need to look first at the question of what the government's mission is and about how to try to build the capacity to do it well, and I think that's the basic building block that allows us to try to really do useful stuff from there. 

 15:01: John Kettle, you mentioned change. 

 15:03: You gave very colorful examples of where we would want to see change, but in ways we wouldn't necessarily want to see it. 

 15:12: given our current president's commitment to change, government may have one of the best opportunities in recent years for meaningful reform. 

 15:20: There are certainly ways to go about that reform, but Don Moynihan, given the current environment, what strategies would you advise the current administration to pursue? 

 15:30: To achieve some of these changes. 

 15:33: The play that the administration had probably doesn't exist anymore, but this, this was a play that they could have executed in January or February of this year. 

 15:44: It was basically talk to the technologists who are already in government. 

 15:50: People at ATF, people at the US Digital Service, tech people in units like the Social Security Administration's Office of Transformation. 

 16:02: Talk to those folks about what are the problems in modernizing the digital aspects of government, both the front end and the back end. 

 16:10: What are the barriers to making those changes real and what are the lessons that people working in those agencies have learned from the last 10 years. 

 16:20: , and I think there was a real fountain of knowledge there that just went unattended, where people who very much believed in using technology to make government work better, have been sort of toiling within government. 

 16:35: But they haven't had a real sense of momentum. 

 16:39: so for example, the US Digital Service, which is now the US Social Service, never had a government-wide champion with anything like the influence or standing of Elon Musk. 

 16:50: They're mostly called in for specific projects or to put out fires for projects that have gone wrong, rather than to take a broad government-wide role. 

 17:00: So I think the, if you could combine the Interest in change, the profile of someone like Musk, and the technological expertise that people from his world bring, as well as people who are already working in government alongside knowledge of policy problems and also just what does it take to get stuff done in the American government. 

 17:26: That that is its own form of knowledge, then you might have done something meaningful, but as it is now, the US digital service doesn't really exist. 

 17:36: Most of the people who used to work there have either been fired or resigned. 

 17:41: ATF doesn't exist any longer, offices like the Office of Transformation, are gone. 

 17:50: and so that tech muscle. 

 17:53: That was actually doing some meaningful things like building products like Direct file at the IRS. 

 17:59: Those folks are are pretty much gone. 

 18:02: That feels like the great missed opportunity for me, where, you know, there really was an avenue for change that I don't think that those people were patient enough or willing enough to explore before they decided that they knew better about how to fix government. 

 18:21: A missed opportunity as you called it, Don Moynihan. 

 18:25: Don Kettle, a question to you. 

 18:27: I believe that President Trump is one of the most consequential leaders of our time, and he has the opportunity to be one of the most transformational ones as well. 

 18:39: what would he have to do to achieve success in that way? 

 18:43: The key, I think, is first of all, to to to this a little bit broader community and the effort to try to make the changes that I think we all know that we need. 

 18:53: As I mentioned earlier, the idea of solving our problems by going back to what it was before he came in is simply a nonstarter. 

 19:01: If, if we could, we shouldn't. 

 19:03: And we can't do it anyway now. 

 19:06: I think that in addition to that, as Don Moynihan pointed out, there is an enormous amount of opportunity in bringing IT to bear on some of the most difficult problems that we have. 

 19:16: Some of that is modernizing existing IT systems. 

 19:20: There was an old and awful joke that if you wanted to try to find ways of fixing the the code in the IRS or Social Security computers very deep down the process, the important stuff, you'd have to begin visiting nursing homes because the only people who knew how to understand the code were people who had been trained way back in the 60s and 70s. 

 19:42: That's not too far from the truth because in fact the, the The Federal government contracted out to some universities to teach code that is not used anywhere else in the world except in the old legacy systems that we've got. 

 19:57: That's a great opportunity for updating this technology that we rely on. 

 20:01: We want to try to reduce waste, fraud and abuse, another great topic. 

 20:05: If we're going to try to get at that, what we need is really smart AI. 

 20:09: We need to be able to have good people who understand the programs. 

 20:12: Well enough to be able to aim AI engines at the transactions that happened and find where the problems are. 

 20:19: We could pick up literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year doing that. 

 20:23: And then finally what we need to do, I think, is to look at what previous administrations, Republican and Democrat, have called the customer service initiative that is trying to find ways to make government more customer focused, citizen centered. 

 20:39: And finding ways of making sure that it works for us, and that means, for example, making it easier to apply for passports, so being able to create the transactions for Social Security online to be able to make it easier to apply and to get up to date information about what's going on. 

 20:58: It means finding some way of making sense out of the. 

 21:01: The mess that is the blizzard of paper that comes along with Medicare that we have to struggle with that means finding ways of serving veterans more effectively by applying the technology that the government increasingly is developing, means updating the air traffic control system with a with something that actually works and it means if we can find the Of fixing the problem of connecting the veterans' injuries in war theaters abroad with the benefits that they're entitled to in the VA and finding ways of having those two computer systems talk to each other. 

 21:35: So we can go through case after case after case, but there are enormous opportunities out there for the administration both to shrink government. 

 21:44: And to save money and to use more technology and to reduce waste, fraud and abuse and in the process make government work better for Americans, and I think there is opportunity that still lies there in front of us and that the administration still has it, I think, in its grasp to be able to seize. 

 22:02: You mentioned a number of stakeholders and what you just outlined. 

 22:06: we all know that government and the work of government happens at all levels, in order for it to be effective and efficient, and the problems our country is facing right now require a whole of society response. 

 22:19: Don Moynihan, in your view, what do you think about the role of think tanks, nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, and other actors, and their role in helping to achieve success for our country, but helping government to manage better. 

 22:35: It's a really good question. 

 22:36: I think It's it's such a broad category of groups that it it it helps us to think through like specific groups of actors that fall within those categories. 

 22:50: And so there are some groups I think were providing. 

 22:55: really pretty useful support and input and value to the federal government that will actually be no longer in existence and very hard to reassemble. 

 23:08: So I I earlier mentioned The civic technologists who had worked in government at places like the US Digital Service and ATF, you also have people who have the sort of same tech for good mindset that work in the nonprofit and in the private sector, and I think they're interested and would like to work with government, so for example,, tangible example here, the organization Code for America, a nonprofit, had been helping state governments set up their versions of Direct file. 

 23:42: So it was piggybacking on this federal government effort, doing things that the federal government couldn't do. 

 23:49: And so I think that's a really nice example of how, the, the government could tap into, some nonprofit capacities. 

 23:58: You also have organizations that are sort of in the contractor space, and here I'm thinking about organizations like Newark or MDRC which run a lot of the, you know, analysis, basic contract implementation for some core services in government. 

 24:17: , sort of, are somewhere between a think tank and a consulting firm, and they're, I think, also feeling the pain in the same way that I think a lot of universities are about to feel the pain when it comes to research grants because they are primarily grant driven and reliant on federal support for much of what they do and are experiencing layoffs right now. 

 24:39: , one of the interesting aspects of Doge is that, I think they're broadly interested in privatization as an opportunity, and in some ways this is an echo I think of the Clinton era when we down downsized a lot more slowly. 

 24:57: And using primarily voluntary means, but there was a lot of downsizing, but the work of the federal government did not go away, which meant that a lot of that was then picked up by private actors. 

 25:10: My sense is, though, that mix of private actors might change and evolve over time. 

 25:16: Some of what you hear from folks. 

 25:18: and Doge is that they are more suspicious of legacy vendors and consultants, and they want to bring in more consultants, from the sort of world of Silicon Valley, the world that they're familiar with this sort of palantir type sets of private actors. 

 25:37: so that could mean a shift in who's at the table. 

 25:42: And the types of skills and perspectives that they bring to the table from groups that have sort of historically been working with governments for decades. 

 25:51: To groups that are going to be a little bit different here. 

 25:55: Regardless of any particular government, there is going to be sort of a large role for non-governmental organizations, including private actors or nonprofits, but it will be very interesting and revealing to see which of those actors play a growing role in the remaining time of the Trump administration. 

 26:17: Don Kettle, let's talk about another one of those really important, constituencies, the experts in public administration and public management. 

 26:26: Last year, at the end of the year in December, you wrote an open letter to these communities, and in that, you said it's time for a fundamental reexamination of the values that drive public administration, its work, and the governance of American political institutions. 

 26:43: Can you give a little bit more context to what you meant in that open letter by that question, and also, what would you suggest this community do at this time? 

 26:52: This is, I think, as close to an existential moment. 

 26:56: For the field of public administration and public management as it is had for for decades and decades, if not perhaps ever, at least since the founding of the field as a as a modern body of knowledge and a body of experts since the early part of the 20th century. 

 27:15: and especially since the founding of the National Academy itself. 

 27:20: What is it that we're in the business here for, and I think that there are important values of course that everybody brings to the table, and there are important values that shape the way in which we think about what public administration ought to look like, but more fundamentally I think it has to do with the The way in which we can use the expertise that we have to try to bring not so much our personal values per se, but the enduring values of the country to bear on making government work and making government work for the 21st century. 

 27:53: The mechanisms that we have, the tools that we use, the theory that often that we That we create and run with the kinds of research that we do is, I fear, increasingly disconnected from the kind of problems that the country needs to solve, and that's not good for experts, it's not good for the role of experts in universities, and it's not good for the impact that we hope to have. 

 28:19: In the way in which that the we don't only create expertise, but the way in which we, we use it. 

 28:25: Let me give just a couple of quick examples. 

 28:27: One is that, to follow up on one of the points that Don Moynihan just made, one of the things that's happening is that we're Relying more and more and more on non-federal partners for doing the federal government's work. 

 28:42: There are federal grants. 

 28:44: There are loan programs, or loan guarantees. 

 28:47: There is sort of partnerships with private contractors and with nonprofit organizations to the point that it's really impossible to draw clear boundary lines between who's responsible for what. 

 29:00: , that's going to be even more clear if it isn't already as the federal cuts that have already been made begin rippling throughout the entire rest of the system. 

 29:10: So my question is, in a world where the amount of responsibility is diffused throughout. 

 29:18: What does accountability mean? 

 29:19: Who's accountable to whom, for what for what these programs work? 

 29:23: And and I think that there certainly are ways of being able to sort that out, but we're not on top of our game, I think, in trying to deal with the questions of accountability in a system that is so mixed. 

 29:35: Related piece to that is that we tend to think of the Of all these partners for government as being essentially agents for the federal government as the basic principle, but in fact they're they're much more than that. 

 29:48: They are responsible for applying their own judgment, using their own ideas when it comes to the states and Medicaid. 

 29:55: The states are responsible for managing the program in their own way, and we don't have one Medicaid program in this country, but 51, if you count DC in the 50 states. 

 30:06: And so you look at that as a basic principle and then go further and understand that the states really don't manage Medicaid themselves, but they do that through a whole network of private contractors. 

 30:19: So what does accountability lie here? 

 30:22: How does the process of ensuring high levels of performance work in a system is so mixed when you we're thinking about the the public responsibilities of private actors and the ways in which the federal government brings private actors in the federal government's business. 

 30:40: And government's business in general, we have the problem of asking ourselves, just where does the line between public and private get drawn, and does that question even make sense any any longer. 

 30:51: We just simply haven't really poked our heads deeply into that just as one fundamental example. 

 30:58: It's a question of where does the public interest begin and end. 

 31:02: And what we have is a system where increasingly the the government is government is governmentalizing the private sector and the private sector is privatizing the governmental sector and the responsibilities are shared and we don't have a clear sense of accountability. 

 31:17: So if you want to just take it one more step, pop open the covers and look underneath the waste fraud and abuse and improper payment problem in Medicare and Medicaid, and that's the practical example of what it is that I've just said. 

 31:30: And so if we're really interested in trying to improve public administration, we're interested in trying to deal with the existential problems that we face, and those are just some of the challenges that we need to get out and, and I find those wildly exciting for us as a field, wildly exciting for those of us who have been in the field for a long time and for those just coming into the field, a tremendously interesting and important thing for them to invest their careers in. 

 31:55: I join you in that excitement. 

 31:56: Final question to Don Moynihan, your substack is called Can We Still govern? 

 32:02: give away the ending for us. 

 32:04: Can we? 

 32:05: , I've become increasingly pessimistic about that answer over the last several years. 

 32:12: I, I think, and I, let me tie my response back to the previous question and answer from from Don because I think this is really a fundamental question for the field. 

 32:24: I started writing the subst right around the start of the Biden administration, and it was partly was a reflection on where is governance now. 

 32:35: And writing a little bit about the end of the Trump administration and Schedule F, the proposed executive order to turn tens of thousands of civil servants into political appointees. 

 32:47: One reflection I had is that the world of public administration was irrelevant to the process that led to the creation of that executive order, that, that we played no role in terms of advising or consulting about it. 

 33:04: That there was a policymaking process about public administration that sold, I think, quite deliberately to exclude us as a field. 

 33:15: And what is a challenge for us is to think about. 

 33:20: What is our role in governance now? 

 33:22: How much are we helping? 

 33:24: How much are we taking a critical stance, given that as a reality. 

 33:29: And also how much is that a a moment for a mea culpa, that the field has failed in some fundamental ways that we need to think about and fix in the future, whether that's about the type of research questions that we ask or the type of communication that we engage in. 

 33:48: And and so partly it was also an effort to, you know, get public administration beyond academic journals and to a broader audience. 

 33:56: , and I think there one concern I have in balancing the moment of mea culpa here is also recognizing we are living in a time when there is, you know, simply less interest in research about government. 

 34:16: At least among one of the political parties. 

 34:20: And I think it, you know, generically politicians don't want to hear news that they disagree with. 

 34:26: They love evidence that confirms their prior beliefs, but not so much stuff that counters them. 

 34:34: One of the characteristics of the new administration is the degree to which it is defunding scientific research and also knowledge repositories and data that we have about multiple aspects of society, but also government itself. 

 34:50: and that goes beyond public administration to economics research, demography research, for example, Social Security Administration. 

 35:00: , defunded the, retirement and Disability Research Consortium, which, you know, basically for a fairly small amount of money, gives SSA some very talented researchers that that show whether the program is working well or not, where they could make improvements. 

 35:20: And so in that environment, it is difficult for us. 

 35:24: To be relevant if we think about ourselves as traditional positivists who are trying to generate evidence that policymakers will find useful and helpful. 

 35:36: And that that's confusing for us because just a few years ago we had an evidence-based policymaking act where we were told, generate more evidence, generate more credible evidence, make the data available, you know, do the best social science you can. 

 35:52: About important issues. 

 35:55: and I think the field has been moving in that direction, but there's also a question about whether there is currently an audience for that now in in parts of the administration. 

 36:06: Don Kettle, final, final question to you. 

 36:09: if you were to read the headlines right now, there's certainly a lot to worry about, and there's a lot of alarm bells that are going off and certainly ringing for you and many others. 

 36:18: I believe we're a resilient nation and still have our best days ahead. 

 36:22: Can you give us, the American public and the public administration community, something to be hopeful for and a reason to be optimistic about our future? 

 36:34: I certainly share Don Moynihan's concern about where we are and the difficulty of trying to make sure we get our our voices heard, but, let me try to deal with that puzzle in two different ways. 

 36:47: One is that I remember not in this administration, but in another administration, I walked into the office of a very, very, very senior management person. 

 36:57: And said that she, she said she walked in and was expected to find a big stack of papers by academic experts that would really help her try to figure out her job and she started looking and looking and that the papers just weren't there. 

 37:11: There just wasn't a very big stack at all, and that, as Don Moynihan said, is really on us. 

 37:17: I think it's a question of how Now we as a field and then as we as those trying to figure out how to nudge the policy in the right kind of direction, take our cues from the questions that we most need to ask. 

 37:31: And so I think that one of the things that we can most usefully do is to say, you know, let's let's let's back it up and figure out what problems and questions that we need to try to ask and how can we try to provide the right answers because I think we actually have have some good ones and that's where I'm hopeful. 

 37:46: The others on the other side. 

 37:48: If any any student of history knows that if you look at problems about complaints about big government and government performance, they'll go back a really long way, and one of the things that I'm always reassured by is that there always have been big revolutions and big problems and Complaints about government government power and if we realize that we're not, it's our first time at the rodeo at least not the first time of government at the rodeo we can understand that other people found ways of riding that bucking bronco in a way that can help us get to the other side. 

 38:23: I think it means going back to the basics and the fundamentals and emphasizing those developing those and realizing that as Don Moynihan suggested that that maybe we haven't been as effective as we hoped we're going to be because maybe we haven't been asking the right questions and providing the answers that most useful and I spent some time watching Great Westerns not too long ago and as the great public philosopher John Wayne said in one of the movies, it's time to set up and ride because we're burning daylight. 

 38:53: And that I think ought to be our our motto going forward. 

 38:57: Well, let's leave it there. 

 38:59: Don Moynihan, Ford Schools, Jay Ira and Nikki Harris, Family Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and Don Kettle, former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, thank you to you both. 

 39:13: Thanks so much.