Advice to the Next President: The Government Needs More 'Rocket Scientists'

If you had Barack Obama's ear, what advice would you give him?

The job of the president is a very complicated one. Most important is leadership and direction and strategy. The president doesn't have to spend all of his time worrying about the details, but he's got to worry that the details get done—and that was the problem that ate up the Bush administration in so many cases. One thing I recommend is a chief performance officer—either in the White House or Office of Management and Budget—whose job it is not to think about what ought to be done but how to get things done. If you're going to be pumping money into the banks, you make sure you figure out how to track it.

The key to getting things done is getting agencies to work together. It's the "5-year-olds-in-the-sandbox" problem, making sure the kids work and play well with each other. We can't allow the barriers and boundaries in government to get in the way of getting the government's work accomplished.

You accuse Congress of having tunnel vision and other shortcomings.

Congress's big problem is that it's really good at the routine process of reviewing and passing legislation, of engaging in long debates, of trying over the long term to build consensus. Congress is good at "gotcha" politics, but it's not so good at trying to deal with questions that cross the boundaries of the incredible number of congressional committees and subcommittees. We can see that in environmental policy, in homeland security, and in the economic response. It's not very good at forward-looking efforts to try to figure out what we ought to be doing in the future and shaping strategy, and it's especially not very good at looking more broadly at the performance of government. It's good at singling out individual people who may have done something wrong, individual agencies that may have made mistakes, [but] not very good at tracking the overall performance.

Why, despite today's big, looming problems, do you remain optimistic? And why more "rocket scientists" in government?

I am optimistic. When we've reached these historical points in the past, we've found ways of rising to the challenge, and I have high confidence that we'll do so again. What gives me extra confidence is the fact that I've just bumped into so many government officials at very, very, very high levels and at the grass-roots level who are out there doing truly remarkable jobs, some sometimes against very high odds. The fact that there's so many people out there working with these issues and finding good solutions gives me confidence that we'll be able to find the solutions that we need. The difficulty is that too often they have to do it the hard way instead of the easy way. What we need to find is a way to routinize the execution of government programs in truly extraordinary ways. That's in many ways our biggest challenge.

We often think of rocket science as being too complex for ordinary mortals to understand. But if you look at how rocket scientists launch rockets, what they do is they figure out what it is they're trying to accomplish, they pull together the people who are needed to try to do the job, they focus them on the objective, they give them what they need, and they hold them accountable for results.

And that, as it turns out, is the key to effective government, whether we're talking about the operation of nursing homes or the response to Hurricane Katrina or launching rockets.