Statecraft

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...

Today I'm talking with Jo Freeman: a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s, a civil rights campaigner, an attendee to every Democratic party convention since 1964, and a political scientist. She’s not the most typical Statecraft guest. But her work on how the two parties work - not just what they believe, but how they operate organizationally - is incredibly insightful. I...

This is the second in a two-part series with my dad, Diego Ruiz . In the first episode , we discussed his time helping run a political campaign in Nicaragua, and later his time staffing California Representative Chris Cox. Today, we jump ahead to his time as executive director of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during the 2008 financial crisis. In this episode, we discuss: * Why the S...

Today's guest is near and dear to my heart. It's my dad, Diego Ruiz . We recorded this in person, and we both had the same cold, which you may be able to hear. At some point, you may also hear my son in the background, which makes three generations of Ruizes on the podcast. Diego has helped win elections in the US and Central America, served as Executive Director of the Securities and Exchange Com...

Happy New Year! I went on the American Compass podcast last month to talk to American Compass chief economist Oren Cass about government efficiency, state capacity, and what Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is likely to tackle. We discuss: * Why is it so hard to fire federal employees? * Off-the-wall ways to save government money * The West Coast meets East Coast dynamic in DOGE...

Today, we talk to Jennifer Pahlka and Andrew Greenway about their new paper on state capacity. It’s called “ The How We Need Now: A Capacity Agenda for 2025 and Beyond .” We discuss: What is “state capacity?” Why is there fresh interest in the topic in the UK? How did the model of a “government digital service” spread to the US? How do you fix unemployment insurance? This is a public episode. If y...

Today, we’re diving into everyone’s favorite Statecraft topic: administrative law! The two court cases we’re discussing could have huge ramifications for how we build things in America. We brought three of our favorite administrative law professors together: James Coleman is a professor at the University of Minnesota, Adam White is the Executive Director of the Gray Center for the Study of the Adm...