Statecraft

Today, I’m joined by Anup Malani . He’s a professor of law at the University of Chicago, currently on leave, serving as the first Chief Economist at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services . This means he oversees economic analysis for the agency managing $2 trillion in annual healthcare spending — 23% of the entire federal budget. CMS runs Medicare for 70 million elderly Americans, Medicaid...

This episode was originally recorded on September 4th at the Abundance Conference in DC. " Zach Liscow , my guest today, is a professor of law at Yale Law School. In 2022-2023, he was the Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget . He's also now my colleague at IFP , as a non-resident senior fellow. I have a bit of a problem today, which is that while Zach may not be a national househ...

The full transcript for this conversation is at www.statecraft.pub . When I started this podcast a couple years ago, the idea was more constrained than it is today. We wanted to do exit interviews with civil servants, who were newly free to speak about their experiences and their learnings. The project has expanded: we talk to political scientists, economists, DC wonks, elected officials and peopl...

Today I'm talking to Dan Wang . He has a great new book, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future . Dan spent the better part of the last decade in China and published a yearly letter summarizing his thoughts, explorations, and eating. Breakneck is like those letters: it goes all over the place, as does our conversation. Topics include: * America's overabundance of lawyers * Whether our rul...

Today I'm talking to economic historian Judge Glock , Director of Research at the Manhattan Institute . Judge works on a lot of topics: if you enjoy this episode, I'd encourage you to read some of his work on housing markets and the Environmental Protection Agency . But I cornered him today to talk about civil service reform. Since the 1990s, over 20 red and blue states have made radical changes t...

Today we're joined by Dr. Rob Johnston . He's an anthropologist, an intelligence community veteran, and author of the cult classic Analytic Culture in the US Intelligence Community , a book so influential that it's required reading at DARPA. But first and foremost, Johnston is an ethnographer. His focus in that book is on how analysts actually produce intelligence analysis. Johnston answers a lot...

We’ve covered the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, pretty consistently on Statecraft , since our first interview on PEPFAR , the flagship anti-AIDS program, in 2023. When DOGE came to USAID, I was extremely critical of the cuts to lifesaving aid, and the abrupt, pointlessly harmful ways in which they were enacted. In March, I wrote , “The DOGE team has axed the most effective and...

At the end of April, the Transit Costs Project released a report: it’s called How to Build High-Speed Rail on the Northeast Corridor . As the name suggests, the authors of the report had a simple goal : the stretch of the US from DC and Baltimore through Philadelphia to New York and up to Boston, the densest stretch of the country. It’s an ideal location for high-speed rail. How could you actually...

Happy Fourth of July! I’m attending a wedding today, so this episode is from the vault, in a way, although it’s its first time on Statecraft. I originally published this essay in January of 2022 on Mirror , shortly after my wife had joined the core team of a DAO that was attempting to acquire a first-edition copy of the US Constitution. I had been reading a history of the constitutional convention...

The decisions that humans make can be extraordinarily costly. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were multi-trillion-dollar decisions. If you can improve the accuracy of forecasting individual strategies by just a percentage point, that would be worth tens of billions of dollars. Yet society does not invest tens of billions of dollars in figuring out how to improve the accuracy of human judgment. Th...

  There are many forces in policymaking (and in our lives generally) that push us towards the short term. Many of the most important measurements in political life are on extremely tight timelines: election cycles, monthly unemployment reports, even the President's daily intelligence briefing. The pressure to get results — and to show results — on a tight turnaround is incredible. One of my questi...

What can we learn from Estonia? It’s not a question you hear often — the nation of under two million residents doesn’t mean much to many. But for good governance advocates, it’s long been a touchpoint for its “e-government” model. The New Yorker wrote in 2017 that, “apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online.” Wired called Eston...

Today we talked to Randy Clarke , the head of DC’s Metro system, WMATA. If you’re a transit nerd, you probably know about Clarke — he’s become something of a celebrity for his public presence and disciplined improvement of a transit system that was facing disaster in the aftermath of COVID (and the decision to allow large swathes of federal employees to work from home). I’ve been a regular WMATA r...

  Santi: Hi, this is a special episode of Statecraft . I've got a wonderful guest host with me today. Kyla Scanlon: Hey, I’m Kyla Scanlon ! I'm the author of a book called In This Economy and an economic commentator. Santi: Kyla has joined me today for a couple reasons. One, I'm a big fan of her newsletter : it's about economics, among many other things. She had a great piece recently on what we c...

 Today, we’re taking a look at a predecessor to DOGE: The Reinventing Government project (officially known as the NPR, for National Partnership for Reinventing Government ). The NPR ran for almost the full duration of President Bill Clinton’s two terms, and led to the elimination of over 100 programs and over 250,000 federal jobs. Both NPR and DOGE are case studies in a long history of government...

Last week, we talked to Stephanie Pollack about salvaging a transit project in danger of failure — it was the first in a set of interviews we’re running on transit. Today, we’re zooming out further, and looking at how the federal government funds local transit. Peter Rogoff spent 22 years as a staffer on the most powerful Senate committee, the Appropriations Committee (on the Democratic side). “Ap...

This conversation, with transit guru Stephanie Pollack, is one of my favorite conversations we’ve recorded on here. For one, I had a blast recording — Stephanie’s funny, and she’s got a killer Boston accent. For another, she explains some of the ideas I care about incredibly well — how well-intentioned regulations turn bad, how political pressures make simple things hard to pull off, why building...

 At the end of January, the Trump administration pushed out a top Treasury department official after he refused to give DOGE access to the government's vast payment system. We're talking to him today. It's one of his first public interviews since leaving the civil service. David Lebryk was the highest ranking civil servant in the Treasury Department, and one of the most senior civil servants in th...

Today we talked to Alex Jutca; he leads analytics and technology at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, where his team’s mission is to build the country’s leading R&D lab for local government. Allegheny County is known for having the best integrated data of any state and local system in the country, and they’ve applied it effectively, like using predictive algorithms in child welfar...

Today’s guest is Narayan Subramanian . Under the Biden administration, he was a legal advisor, and then an advisor to the Secretary at the Department of Energy (DOE). Later, he was the Director for Energy Transition at the White House National Security Council. We’ve talked to previous guests about how to ensure government money flows fast and effectively. At the DOE, Subramanian helped ensure tha...

Today’s guest is Peter Moskos , a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice . He spent two years as a police officer in Baltimore. I asked him to come on and talk about his new book, Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop . It’s one of my favorite books I’ve read this year (and it was one of my three book recommendations on Ezra Klein’s show...

DOGE is the most interesting story in state capacity right now. Yet although we’ve talked around it on Statecraft , I haven’t covered it directly since the beginning of the administration. In part, that’s because of the whirlwind pace of news, but also because of the sense I get in talking to other DOGE watchers, that we’re like blind men feeling different parts of the elephant. And, frankly, beca...

Today’s guest is John Lechner , a writer and researcher. He's here today to talk about his new book about the Wagner Group, a Russian state-funded private military group, or PMC. The book is called Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare , and is out March 4th (you can preorder it here ). It’s a crazy read, and draws on multiple trips John took to frontlines i...

Friend-of-the-pod Nick Bagley joined us to explain judicial review: why it's not as confusing as it sounds, and why it's at the center of a political firestorm. Bagley is an expert in administrative law who served as special counsel and chief legal counsel to Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. We've had him on a couple times for conversations on how bureaucracy is breaking government a...

What happened in LA last month? On that, basically everyone agrees: devastating wildfires that killed at least 29 people and cost at least $100 billion. But why did those fires burn so intensely for so long? I had my own view, but I don’t follow fires closely. So I talked to Matt Weiner, CEO and founder of Megafire Action. We discuss: * California knows it has a fire problem. Why can’t it control...