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

Change is coming, and Barack Obama's campaign mantra isn't the driving force. So says the University of Pennsylvania's Donald Kettl, who has just written The Next Government of the United States: Why Our Institutions Fail Us and How to Fix Them.

The political scientist uses two seemingly unrelated but simultaneous case studies—the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the "extraordinary" care his 91-year-old mother-in-law received in an $85,000-a-year nursing home—to illustrate the same point: Today, many of the country's problems are so large and complex that none can be fixed by any single agency or group. Instead, it is government in partnership with private and nonprofit groups that can get the job done. And government, this expert in public administration argues, needs more "rocket scientists."

His mother-in-law, who died in 2007, left behind what Kettl calls the "Mildred paradox," since Medicare and Medicaid paid for most of her care over two years but she never encountered a single government employee. He's also drawn up the "Mildred corollary," which has it that even though taxpayers picked up a tab running into hundreds of thousands of dollars, no one was really in charge. Instead, Kettl and his wife made decisions with a mix of doctors and hospital and nursing home staff. No one budgeted for costs, kept track of the amount spent, or questioned whether the public got its money's worth, he says.

After Katrina struck, FEMA boss Michael Brown went down in infamy, but Kettl says leaders he likens to "rocket scientists" emerged. One is the Coast Guard's Thad Allen, now its commandant, who stepped in, defused squabbling between federal and state players, forged partnerships, and hewed to Coast Guard precepts. That meant giving field commanders a mission, an area of responsibility, and their own resources and assets, and leaving it up to them to do their jobs.

As for the coming change, Kettl says that since the late 1800s there have been regular shifts in the U.S. government's strategy with respect to federalism—the division of power between the federal and state governments—as well as its relationship with the private sector and world at large. He traces the shifts to the dawn of the industrial age in the 1880s, which led Progressives to demand a more robust government and new regulations to restrain the power of private industry.

Early in the 20th century came the Federal Reserve Bank, new cabinet departments, and the first comprehensive federal budget. Roosevelt ushered in the New Deal after the Great Depression. Eisenhower aimed to modernize and professionalize government. LBJ gave us the Great Society to attack poverty and racial injustice. Reagan pushed for privatization of government work.

Kettl recently spoke to U.S. News about the lessons his book holds for the new administration. Excerpts:

How do you assess the government's response to the economic crisis?

It's been exceptionally fast and hard hitting. The administration has not let a second go by, with the possible exception of the difficulty of getting Congress to act. We are in such uncharted waters it's been difficult to determine what the best strategy is. The administration has moved from the idea of [buying] toxic mortgages to infusing capital to taking ownership stakes in some organizations. For example, we have bought an insurance company, AIG. So the strategy has been evolving, and the question of which strategy makes the most sense is still up for grabs.

The challenge is trying to figure out how to mobilize government's resources to try to make the economic crisis as short and as shallow as possible, but it's folly to imagine by simply pushing money out, we're going to solve the problems. It's one thing to push money out; it's another thing to figure out how to track the money, ensure oversight of the money, ensure results and performance for the money—and that has been much harder.

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.