Forget smaller or bigger. If you want better government, invest.
Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the tough problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Intro (Elizabeth Linos): My worry is that things can get very, very bad before people make a causal link in their mind that this is because of a disinvestment in government that is historical. It’s not just the past five months, I would say it’s decades and decades of disinvestment or underinvestment in the pillars of a functioning public sector. And so it’s conceivable that these disinvestments, that have been happening over years, are feeding a negative narrative that government can never accomplish anything in a way that creates a vicious cycle. I hope that when we come out of whatever phase this phase is, we don’t leave with less of a sense of trust of what government should be able to accomplish, or less of a sense of a belief in what society should be able to expect from their government.
Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Welcome back to PolicyCast, I’m Ralph Ranalli. This is a time of historic upheaval for government in America. Massive personnel purges. Symbolic chain saws. Bitter arguments over everything from what things the government should or shouldn’t do, to whether less is more or simply less, to the meaning of the word efficiency. But Elizabeth Linos, a behavioral scientist and the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor for Public Policy and Management at HKS, says there’s another option that both the recent actions of the Trump administration and its so-called Department of Government Efficiency, as well as much of the partisan debate, are ignoring. She says believers in small government and robust government can potentially find common ground in making government—whatever size it is—function better for the people it serves. Linos says there are three pillars to a functioning public sector: people, which means working to recruit, retain and support talented workers; process, which involved making interactions between citizens and government into positive, trust-building experiences; and a feedback loop, where agencies are constantly using data to examine and improve how they’re doing their jobs. She’s here today to talk about how the real choice isn’t about big or small, but between function and dysfunction.
Ralph Ranalli: Well, Elizabeth, welcome. It’s great to have you on Policy Cast.
Elizabeth Linos: Thank you for having me.
Ralph Ranalli: So we are five months into the new Trump administration. We’ve seen some pretty eye-opening changes, I guess is a way to put it, in the federal government. And we’re about 50 years, I would say, into this narrative that’s been put out by people, a lot of whom purport to be in favor of smaller government, that government is sort of inherently bloated and inefficient. You had Ronald Reagan and his famous slogan “The nine most terrifying words in the English language, ’Are I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’” to Bill Clinton saying that “The era of big government is over.” I’m just curious, what have your impressions been, over the last five months, of what’s been happening? I know you primarily work with state and local governments, but you are an expert in how government works. What have your impressions been as you’ve seen this incredible pace of change over the last five months?
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah, I think, you know, one thing that you said that I want to highlight is that these ideas are not new ideas. They certainly started, at least in the eighties, as you said, with this narrative of waste, fraud, and abuse. And so in some ways the narrative is not new, but the execution of that narrative is unprecedented in so many different ways. I see two things happening. The first is what seems to be a, a deep misunderstanding of what government does and who works in government and what their jobs are. And so a lot of the swift kind of chainsaw-type reforms that we’ve seen over the past five months are now being altered or adjusted or people are being rehired. Which seems to me to be a signal that this wasn’t kind of a strategic, thought-out reform of government, but a reaction to a belief about government that ends up being incorrect.
And then the second question, I think, which we all need to grapple with is what do we mean by efficiency and what do we mean by waste, fraud, and abuse? So, when we usually think about efficiency, we’re really asking ourselves a fundamental question, which is: How are we using resources in a way that allows us to meet our goal, and how best can we use those resources to meet our goal more effectively? In this case, it sounds like we’ve missed out on critical components of that sentence. One, not a lot of clarity about what the goal is in terms of service delivery, in terms of delivering for the American public, but also, we haven’t really examined what resources exist and whether or not what we’re looking at as a failure in government or as a problem in service delivery is caused by an overinvestment or an underinvestment in government. And my research suggests that maybe we’re looking at an underinvestment in government.
Ralph Ranalli: Right. I think you’ve said that that trope about government being inherently wasteful has resulted mostly in indiscriminate spending cuts, which haven’t really succeeded, because it misdiagnoses the core challenge. How do you define that core challenge?
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah. So from my perspective, one way to think about the core challenge is in the nature of what we ask government to do. So when we think about the role of government, at its very core, we’re asking government to do what we think the markets can’t do. So the tasks that we ask of our government are difficult. They’re challenging. Sometimes they’re more long term. Other times you have to really focus on people who otherwise don’t have other opportunities. And so fundamentally what we’re asking of our government is really hard. And so when you take a lens that says: “Well, why doesn’t this work like the private sector?” Already, you’ve kind of missed the point because the private sector versus is not a monolith in the same way the public sector is not a monolith. But ultimately the nature of the challenge of government requires a level of complexity that we don’t usually associate with any one private sector firm.
Ralph Ranalli: I’m interested you brought that up, because sometimes I think that the name of this show should be, “We Can Do Counterintuitive Things,” you know? And I think a challenge for the Kennedy School and researchers like yourself is that, sometimes when you’re doing research and you’re presenting facts and they’ll go in a certain direction, and sometimes that direction is sort of what you would describe as maybe common sense. But other times it goes in the counterintuitive direction and it’s susceptible to being pushed aside by sloganeering. Things that, you know, that sound good, like government should be run like a business. That’s very succinct, and it makes a certain amount of sense to some people. And I want to focus on this counterintuitive thought for a second. You’re a behavioral scientist, right?
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: How do you get people to accept and adopt things that are counterintuitive, that may run counter to what they’ve been taught or what they’ve always heard, or what they’ve accepted as the truth? Is there a magic bullet to doing that?
Elizabeth Linos: Oh, if, if I had a magic bullet, I would be a, a very rich lady. I think you’re right. One of the beauties of doing research in human behavior is that we keep finding out how little we know about how humans behave. And if you intersect research on human behavior with public management, you’re faced with two levels of counterintuitiveness. One is that, in order to get a policy to work or to be implemented well, not only do you need to come up with a really good policy idea, you need to make sure that every step of that implementation—from the policy maker to the mid-level bureaucrat to the frontline worker, to the resident who’s going to experience that at each stage of those processes, people are behaving in a way that helps us meet a goal. And so there’s many points or pain points in that process where something can go wrong. And a lot of the research that I do asks how we can unlock those bottlenecks or adjust those pain points in a way that helps us meet our, our broader policy goals.
The counterintuitive component of that is either on the side of just really understanding how complex these challenges are and how cognitively loaded everybody is in that pipeline from coming up with an idea all the way through its implementation. But really there’s kind of a bigger, counterintuitive argument that I think this administration is going to have to grapple with, which is that these things that appear to be simple from the perspective of a resident, like I’m driving down a road and there’s a pothole and I want it fixed, or I would like to be able to turn on the tap and the water is clean, or I would like to be able to get my social security check on time. All of those things seem like they’re simple ideas. Counterintuitively, they are incredibly complex, and the more simple it seems from the perspective of the user, the more complex the backend system is in some ways.
Ralph Ranalli: Right, and I think you said it yourself—people to a large extent really want those things to operate in the background. They don’t want to have to think about the process by which my pothole is fixed or my water is clean.
Elizabeth Linos: There’s one version of the world that says people don’t want to know about these things. They don’t want to have to think about their water or the roads, or how schools are built or whether or not teachers are going to show up. There’s another way of framing that exact same point to say that people want to trust that somebody else is on it. And when we think about trust in government, there’s kind of three basic dimensions of trust. One is I trust that they are competent, that they’re going to accomplish their goals in a competent and efficient manner.
But there are two other dimensions of trust. One is I trust that the government is working in my interest. And so there’s a fundamental social contract that we have with our governments, especially in democratic societies, that they’re going to be doing things to benefit the population. And then there’s this third component of trust, which is around integrity and honesty. I trust that they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do and say what they’re going to do- all of which make up a relationship between residents and their government that can be broken if implementation doesn’t go well or if people don’t feel like they can trust their government to do things without them being held directly accountable and monitored in a kind of more direct way.
Ralph Ranalli: We are entering into …. I don’t want to seem alarmist, but you could describe it as sort of frightening era, or era where there’s a lot of trepidation in certain areas, like there’s a shortage of air traffic controllers, the people who make flying safe…
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: …and efficient. There’s a shortage of firefighters in the U.S. Forest Service and we’re heading into wildfire season. There have been deep cutbacks at NOAA and we’re heading into hurricane season. If things go spectacularly wrong with government failing people in those areas, which way do you see that cutting? I could see it cutting one of two ways. One is, you know, oh, here’s the big realization that this stuff really actually matters and we should, you know, reinvest in these things, or it’s going to reaffirm the lack of faith in some people that government doesn’t work. That government just fails. How do you see that shaking out and is it to some extent who’s putting that message out?
Elizabeth Linos: I think it’s a really worrisome question in either direction. So, in both of the versions that you suggested, things are going to be really hard for a lot of people. So regardless of who takes the blame or how we understand the bigger picture.
Ralph Ranalli: Right. I didn’t even mention Medicaid cuts.
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah. Exactly. One of the things that we need to grapple with is what does it look like if all the things that we have come to expect government to be able to do are no longer part of the day-to-day experience of living in the U.S. On all fronts, whether that’s public safety or the social safety net, or as you said, protection in kind of the more traditional sense. Feeling safe when you travel, feeling safe when you walk down the street, feeling safe if there’s a fire or a flood. So one question is: If that’s going to happen, how do we both quickly support people so that the least harm is done, but also how do we make sure that the link is clear between what is happening on the public management and policy implementation side and the outcomes?
And my worry is that things can get very, very bad before people make a causal link in their mind that this is because of a disinvestment in government that is historical. It’s not just the past five months, I would say it’s decades and decades of disinvestment or underinvestment, in the pillars of a functioning public sector. And so it’s conceivable that these disinvestments that have been happening over years are feeding a negative narrative that government can never accomplish anything, in a way that creates a vicious cycle. I hope that when we come out of whatever phase this phase is, we don’t leave with less of a sense of trust of what government should be able to accomplish, or less of a sense of a belief in what, uh, society should be able to expect from their government.
But if you look globally, oftentimes that is what happens, especially after an autocracy or when the pillars of democracy are weakened—people stop believing that government is part of the solution. And I think that would be problematic in the long term.
Ralph Ranalli: Like I said before, I really like this idea of investment versus cuts. That investment is what’s needed. Because to me, it makes sense. But it seems like you have to convince two groups of people. One is the small government people, that investment in government makes sense, which is…
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: …again, counterintuitive for them.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: And also the people who believe that government has a significant role to play…
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: …in civic life. What do those people have in common that you can say, look, we all believe in this, and here’s why investment is better than cutting.
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah. So my sense, and this might be an optimistic take, is that there’s actually a lot of commonality on the political left and the political right on wanting a functioning public sector. So when we think about the debates about big government and small government, it’s really an ideological debate about what we think should be under the purview of a public sector agency versus other players. But at the end of the day, regardless of whether or not you want a small government or a large government, or a lot of policies to be under government versus a few, for whatever subset we choose to focus government on, we want that subset to be functioning effectively.
And I would argue that that shouldn’t be a politically charged statement. So when we think about investments in the public sector, I like to take a step back and say: “You tell me what policy area you care about.” And that policy area could be anything from, you know, transportation to climate change, to public safety. Regardless of your political perspective, whichever issue you care about most, it depends either directly or indirectly on having a functioning public sector. And so my argument to both the political left and the political right is let’s think about what those pillars are of a functioning public sector first, and then we can decide whether government is too big or too small to meet those specific goals.
Ralph Ranalli: Right. So let’s get into the weeds on the pillars.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: Because I’ve heard you talk before, and you talk about the pillars a lot.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: What are the pillars? And can you just walk us through what they are and what their significance is?
Elizabeth Linos: Sure. So from my perspective, regardless of the policy area, a functioning public sector agency has to have the people who are going to be able to deliver the service or the program. And so one fundamental pillar of a functioning public sector is: Can you recruit, retain, and support the people who are going to be asked to deliver on this grandiose mission of serving the American public? Then there’s a second pillar, which has to do with the infrastructure or processes that are in place to deliver. Obviously those two things go hand in hand. You need the people to be able to design and maintain processes and infrastructure within government.
And then there’s this third pillar, which I think of as a feedback loop. We need to have a process in government where we can learn what’s working, what isn’t working, constantly test, adapt and adopt best practice, so that what is good government today is still functionally relevant 10 years from now. And so from my perspective, if we can invest deeply in strengthening the workforce, strengthening the processes so that people have a good experience when they interact with government, and strengthening the way in which government learns what works, we’ve built the basis upon which we can then make decisions on policy outcomes that a democratically elected government can deliver on.
Ralph Ranalli: Yeah. So let’s take people first.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: I think you’ve said that the Trump administration, and particularly DOGE and Elon Musk, blew the people thing right off the bat. They had this plan called deferred resignation, and the idea was basically, we’re going to pay you to self-select out if you’re a government employee, and that way we’ll reduce the workforce and we’ll have a smaller workforce, which is their idea of what efficiency is. But, in the end, only about 75,000 government employees took the deal.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: Put that number into perspective and talk a little bit about why that was not the approach that was going to come up with the result that everybody wanted.
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah. So let’s think about why DOGE might’ve thought that was a good idea. Right. So at a fundamental level, the assumption behind that type of approach is that there’s a bunch of public servants who do nothing all day, that are just sitting around collecting a paycheck. And so if you give them an opportunity to collect that paycheck, without coming to work, they will choose to. What became very clear, very quickly as soon as this was announced, is that that huge workforce doesn’t seem to exist, that it’s a hypothetical workforce. And that came out both in how a lot of federal workers reacted to the deferred resignation in their words and in their coalition building, but also in the numbers. So when we look at who actually took the offer—and of course in any organization some people are going to take the offer—that doesn’t look any different than regular annual turnover for the federal workforce.
And so from my perspective, and I think from their perspective too, this approach was a failure. My hope is that that also helped explain that the underlying assumption about who the government workforce is was incorrect. I don’t know if that’s the case, but at least the numbers don’t show any evidence that there is a widespread workforce that is only in government to collect a paycheck and not do any work.
Ralph Ranalli: And they also purged the probationary employees, people who were still in their probationary periods.
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah.
Ralph Ranalli: And we’ve heard the term silver tsunami.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: Can you talk about the interaction between those two things?
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah. So one thing I think that is very striking for public management scholars like myself is that even if you were to accept all the premise behind DOGE, the way you would accomplish that does not match what they actually did. So even if we believe that government needs to modernize, that we need to bring in new and diverse talent that has a different set of skills into government, the way you would go about doing that is not by cutting essentially all the people who have those skills. Who are new, or disproportionately new in their careers, who recently got promoted, who might’ve come in through these large talent pipeline programs that are specifically targeting people with, you know, advanced data skills or advanced strategy skills. The fact that they started by purging that group of people suggests that they were looking for a cut anywhere as opposed to looking for people.
Ralph Ranalli: It was low hanging fruit.
Elizabeth Linos: Exactly. So basically, they were the low hanging fruit. Now the challenge is that even before the Trump administration, we were facing a human capital crisis where the generation of baby boomers were retiring. And so we had a significant human capital problem with vacancies in so many parts of government. And the community of policy makers and practitioners and academics in this space were really working hard to find new strategies to bring in new blood.
What the Trump administration did with these cuts is essentially tell any person who is considering a job in government that it might not be worth it. So my fear is that we didn’t only lose this generation of probationary employees, but we’ve lost future generations of people who might have considered a job in government with these skills, who now don’t see a reasonable pathway to entering government and serving, while being able to use their skills and their talents in ways that are effective.
Ralph Ranalli: Yeah, there’s something like twice as many employees over the age of 60 as there are under 30 in government service. And those younger people, they’re the ones with the newer ideas, and the newer skills. And it would seem to be, counterintuitive, there’s that word again, to cut them first, very sort of shortsighted. But you’ve also done work on government employee retention.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: And also helping create work environments where those government employees can actually be at their best.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: And they can serve the public well. And you’ve said that for frontline workers, there’s an incredibly high rate of… I think the term is clinical burnout. Can you talk a little bit about what clinical burnout is? And the scale of that problem?
Elizabeth Linos: Absolutely. So burnout in the way that we define it now is surprisingly recent in the literature. It was only called out by the WHO, the World Health Organization, in 2019 as an occupational phenomenon. So one way to think about burnout is to think of it as, as kind of depression at work or depression that’s caused by work, and includes components that, I think many frontline workers see and experience themselves. So a sense of lack of self-efficacy, a sense that you’re feeling distant from your work. A sense that you’re emotionally exhausted every day and you just can’t think of another day at work.
What we saw even before the pandemic, but certainly during the pandemic as well, that for some types of frontline worker occupations, somewhere between like one and three and one in two employees were facing burnout. Now let’s think about what that means in terms of what we’re asking people to deliver. If you yourself are experiencing that level of burnout, your ability to function, and to stay in the job over time so that you stay long enough to be good at it and to be able to deliver in the way that you want is really, really difficult. So oftentimes what we’ll see, especially in a lot of those frontline worker occupations is a large effort to recruit new talent and many people are leaving in their first few years of service.
To me, that is an area where we really need to focus our attention and time. Because nobody’s good at their job in their first two years. So, the level of investment and training that is required to bring in someone who can then be a 911 dispatcher or a teacher or a social worker or a correctional officer—that’s a huge investment both for the individual and for the organization. And so to lose that investment because we didn’t follow through on what it’s like to actually be on the job, to me seems like a wasted opportunity.
Ralph Ranalli: Right. And a waste of money too. Training costs money. I mean, the more…
Elizabeth Linos: Absolutely
Ralph Ranalli: …turnover you have, the more employees you have to train. I think… Didn’t you say in one of your talks that you worked with one city and among their 911 operators, there was 100% turnover.
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah.
Ralph Ranalli: The 911 operators are sort of the tip of the spear of public safety.
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah.
Ralph Ranalli: And the last people you want to be an entirely inexperienced workforce, it seems to me it would be the 911 operators.
Elizabeth Linos: Absolutely.
Ralph Ranalli: But I think you also did a randomized control trial. Mm-hmm. Also on how do you respond to…
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah.
Ralph Ranalli: …burnout. What could be some strategies to respond and maybe help with that burnout. Can you talk a little bit about that trial?
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s take this example of 911 dispatchers, because it’s a good example and it’s one of the groups, with whom we’ve done randomized control trials. So, 911 dispatchers are in some ways the most important part of our broader public safety system. They’re the people who pick up the phone when you call the police. And so the nature of the job that we’re asking them to do is to make life or death decisions very, very quickly, with very limited information over and over again, oftentimes without breaks. And yet in so many different parts of the country, they’re considered call center workers. And so let’s think about what that means. If you’re a first responder, if you’re a firefighter, a police officer, and something terrible happens in your city, you get a lot of mental health support. You get the status and the thanks of your community. And the 911 dispatcher often doesn’t. And so it’s no wonder that we see really high levels of absenteeism and burnout and turnover in that population.
Now what’s interesting about this group is something that I think is true for, for the broader work in public management. You can’t really change the nature of the job. The job itself is hard, and you can’t really—at least with the level of investments that we’re willing to make—you can’t triple or quadruple the workforce in a way that would allow people to take more breaks or have fewer hours. And so what you’re left with is a much more complex challenge than you would in a private sector setting, where you need to man the lines 24 hours a day, that means a lot of mandatory overtime for 911 dispatchers. And we can’t change the nature of the job.
What the research suggests is that even if the job demands are really high, if you have the resources to cope with those high job demands you might be able to manage that stress and that anxiety in, in a more effective way. So what we did with nine cities across the US is said, okay. What can we change? We can’t change how people view 911 dispatchers in the short term. But one thing we do know from a lot of qualitative work is that dispatchers often feel like nobody knows what they’re going through except other dispatchers. So what we wanted to do is find a way for dispatchers to share experience and advice with each other about what it’s like on the job—not framed as a mental health intervention or as a burnout program, but really as an opportunity to support newbies, to tell them what it’s like. And that’s kind of what a lot of us do in our careers, we have a network of people who are in our occupation, and we share advice and experiences with each other.
Now, we know from the behavioral literature that sharing experiences and advice with each other and receiving that kind of story that says: “You’re actually not alone at this. If this is hard for you, it’s not because you are bad at the job, but because the job is hard…” is incredibly important for our sense of self-worth, our sense of belonging, our sense that we can cope with the challenges that come our way. And so what we find is that just setting up a program that was, you know, six weeks long and getting people to share advice and experience with each other once a week and receive a story from another dispatcher once a week, led to significant reductions in burnout six months later, and also reduced resignations by more than half in the post-intervention period.
So to me that’s an example of a tool that isn’t really about a large monetary investment but just being really thoughtful about how we give support to frontline workers and to government workers, that also requires respecting and acknowledging how difficult the work of a government worker is.
Ralph Ranalli: Right. So let’s move on to processes.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: I think you mentioned that one of the important aspects of having good process is to create positive interactions and non-interactions, I guess, between government and residents and the people who are served by government. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah. So, you know, one way to think about what good government looks like or what a good experience looks like is really taking the perspective of the resident or the citizen who has to interact with their government and saying, how do we make sure that this experience is building trust, feels positive, is easy, and streamlined. And if you take that approach, really starting with a user, that leads you down a path of thinking through what you know, at first glance seems like bureaucratic technocratic questions around processes and infrastructure, but I find quite interesting, around how do we reduce administrative burden within government and for residents.
Now, the concept of administrative burden has also exploded over the past few years, and I think is a really good conceptual framework for thinking through this and basically says: “Look, anytime you interact with your government, there’s some costs associated with trying to access a program or a service.” First there are learning costs, so I need to know that the program exists. I need to know if I’m eligible for it. I need to know where to go or what to do. Those are all kind of informational hurdles. There’s a second type of cost or hurdle, that are the compliance hurdles. So I need to figure out where my documentation is so that I can bring it in. I might have to show up for an interview in the middle of the day. I might need to, you know, prove my income or my citizenship in three different ways. All of those kinds of compliance hurdles that we add to programs. And then there’s a third set of costs and hurdles that are psychological. So a lot of times that’s framed around stigma, the stigma associated with government assistance or programs. But you could also think about it in terms of frustration or anxiety, or mistrust, that operate in exactly the same way that compliance hurdles operate, which is they make you not want to do it. They make you want to avoid putting yourself in that situation.
Now, a host of researchers and policymakers have said, how do we reduce those three forms of administrative burden in a way that improves outcomes? And we’ve made a lot of progress on that front. So in my research, we do a lot of work on the social safety net, and we think about how to make it easier for a low-income household to access programs for which they’re eligible. Sometimes the changes are simple, like making it easier to know that you’re eligible, using technology, using better outreach efforts, learning about navigator models and seeing whether or not those work as well. There are more complicated versions of this that involve actually simplifying the process itself. I know a lot of people in, in the country are working on that point.
But ultimately all of these approaches have one thing in common, which is that they take the experience of the resident as the center. I would add in my work, we also take the experience of the frontline worker into consideration and think about how we can make those interactions easier for people.
Ralph Ranalli: When you explain it like that, it just seems to make so much sense on a couple different levels. One is that people learn experientially.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: You can tell somebody that the government is your friend…
Elizabeth Linos: Right.
Ralph Ranalli: But if you walk out of an experience, say, at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, and the person was nice to you and it was easy and you got out of there quickly so you could, you know, go have lunch. That I think goes a lot deeper than just having someone tell you something. So it’s experiential. But how do you bake that, attitudinally, into government and how do you bake this kind of service-oriented approach into government using process?
Elizabeth Linos: Yeah, it’s a great question. So oftentimes, where things go awry is when someone isn’t complying with the process. And the question that I ask myself when I go into these situations is, do we have a good understanding of why people aren’t complying? It’s very easy on both sides to say people aren’t complying because there is mal intent, right? So you can hear from a frustrated government worker, like I told them to fill out the forms and they didn’t fill them out correctly. The question to ask is, how difficult was it to figure out what form to fill out? Is the language appropriate? Is it easy to find that information if you’re not a bureaucrat with 30 years of experience? Sometimes it’s as simple as taking that perspective to find that compliance is not really about a rational decision to try to break the law, but actually a function of the complexity of the administrative service to begin with.
The same applies on the other side. So you walk into a DMV and you’re annoyed because the lines are too long and the person isn’t helping you. Oftentimes the person on the other end of that interaction is also annoyed because that means that they are probably understaffed and that they have to follow a process that has some procedural rule that we don’t understand on the front end. And they haven’t been given the opportunity to share their feedback with their leadership about how to make those improvements. So to me, a lot of changing the attitude here is really understanding the cause of the frustration but also creating opportunities for frontline workers and residents to share what’s working and what isn’t working with leadership. And when, when that happens, you can see immense improvements with seemingly small tweaks to existing processes.
Ralph Ranalli: Yeah, it seems like the people in the process, they can have either a virtuous spiral, or sort of a non-virtuous spiral. Like bad processes can make bad employees feel worse, and good processes can make good ones, good employees work much better.
Elizabeth Linos: Absolutely.
Ralph Ranalli: So moving on to policy. The feedback loop…
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: …you talked about, which is wonderful because it is what we do—evidence-based policy design—here at the Kennedy School. Talk a little bit about how you, again, can bake that process of ongoing evaluation, and policy formation based on that evidence that you’re constantly gathering, and then adopting positive change in a meaningful, significant way instead of just letting inertia carry your old processes along. How do you bake that into government and are there any examples that you can point to where you’ve seen that successfully done?
Elizabeth Linos: It’s a great question. I think it’s one that if, if HKS can’t grapple with this question, the Kennedy School can’t grapple with it, then what are we all doing here to begin with? I feel like the evidence-based policy making movement has gone through various phases.
So there was a first stage some years ago where the thing that we needed to convince people of is that data and evidence has any role to play in public service delivery. I think that battle has been won. There are data and evaluation experts in governments, certainly across the US but across the world. We have built labs like my own and other labs across the country that work directly with government partners to evaluate programs and figure out what works. And so there was one kind of period in the evidence-based policy making movement where we were working really hard to figure out whether it would even be possible to run, say, a randomized control trial with a government or to have a mayor talk about data and evidence and effectiveness in their state of the city speech. We’ve made immense progress on that front, in my opinion and my sense is that, at all levels of government, whether it’s the federal level or state and local level, there is a belief that we should figure out what works if we’re going to deliver.
The new challenge that I think we all have to grapple with as a community is why we haven’t seen the spread of evidence-based practices take hold across the country. So if we figured out what works in one place, why isn’t there kind of a natural scale up of good practice across other government agencies? And while that seems like a kind of puzzle, if you think about it for a little bit, if you dig one layer deeply, you realize that that’s not how we think about any other problem. So there’s no behavioral scientists in the world that says: “Well, we told people to eat more healthy food and they didn’t. So that’s a them problem. That’s not an us problem,” or: “Well, we told people that they should save more money for retirement and they didn’t. So they must not want it enough.” And yet when we talk about policymaking and policymakers and practitioners, you often hear a narrative even from the most well-intentioned, applied, socially- oriented researchers that says: “Well, we figured out what works, but they just didn’t do it, so therefore they either don’t care about evidence or they didn’t understand it.”
My sense is that the problem is much deeper. And that we should think of it as a behavioral research challenge to figure out what are the bottlenecks to evidence adoption that are happening at the organizational level and at the person level- such that we rethink the entire process of evidence-based policy making to ask ourselves: Are we even answering questions that a government has asked at a fundamental level? Who gets to decide on what topics we have in evidence? And then once we have a little bit of evidence, how do we make sure that that evidence is in fact translatable and useful to policymakers across the country or practitioners across the country?
In reality, for a lot of really key policy outcomes, we actually don’t know. We don’t know if what worked in Chicago or L.A. or New York is going to work in Minneapolis or in Fort Worth, because we haven’t tested. And so there’s a really big need to replicate things that we think are good ideas with the same level of rigor in a much wider range of government agencies.
But let’s imagine we get those two things, right? Then the question becomes: What is it about our organizational structures that makes it less likely that good evidence is adopted? We’ve started to study that question, and what we find is if you just let things be and you don’t really invest deeply in this question. The only things that seem to make it, are adopted at scale—if you look some years after some evidence is produced—are the things that are essentially small tweaks to an existing infrastructure. What we call organizational inertia in our research is really the idea that, if it’s a small tweak to an existing process and procedure and infrastructure, then yeah, maybe the best version of that tweak will make it through and will stick. But if we’re talking about larger systemic changes or larger innovations, it’s not about the strength of the evidence or how good of an idea it is, that is really the blocker. So if we keep pounding the idea that, oh, we just need to explain the idea better to people, or we’d need to present it with clear graphics, we’ve kind of missed the point because the problem is not convincing people that it’s a good idea, but doing the hard work of figuring out how to implement that into the day-to-day infrastructure of a government that still needs to function, that doesn’t have the time to take a step back and pause their programs and services to integrate this big new idea.
So what I’ve come to believe, and I certainly didn’t start off this way, is that actually thinking through the incremental improvements in the capacity of government to make these types of changes is where we really need to invest our time. Now, I’ve seen this happen with a lot of our government partners. We’ve done a lot of work, for example, with the California Department of Social Services. And with every project that we do, not only are we learning what works for this department, but we’re also building an infrastructure that can be used for other things—whether that’s building a new hotline that can provide navigation assistance for people across programs, or really supporting an excellent team that exists in that agency to run randomized control trials themselves without the support, of academics.
Ralph Ranalli: And this is The People Lab that you’re doing this work through?
Elizabeth Linos: This is The People Lab, right. And we see that in a bunch of different settings. My proudest moments, I should say, as the founder and director of the People Lab, is not when we come up with a good idea that works with a government agency, but when a government partner says to us: “Oh, well we have this new program, don’t you think we could randomize how we roll that out so that we can learn what works?” Or when they say: “Well, we tried that, it didn’t work, let’s test something else but really figure out whether or not it works.” Because to me, that’s building the capacity of government to do what it was meant to do, which is to constantly strive to improve the lives of people, with the capacity and the strength and the skillset staying in government, as opposed to finding kind of creative ways to work around government.
Ralph Ranalli: Right. So as we wrap up, we’ve talked about low hanging fruit—maybe in a non-optimal way—but let’s turn to good, tasty, low hanging fruit…
Elizabeth Linos: Sure.
Ralph Ranalli: …for a second. So I’m a state or local government…
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: …official.
Elizabeth Linos: Mm-hmm.
Ralph Ranalli: What’s my low hanging fruit? If I want to go down this road of better people process, policy, where do I start?
Elizabeth Linos: It’s a great question. I think the place to start—and it’s more of a process answer than a silver bullet—is trying to do the thing that you’re asking others to do. And it sounds quite simple, but in fact, it’s a step we often forget. So if the challenge you’re facing is that people are’’t showing up on time to fill out their forms, try to follow the process of booking an appointment. If your problem is that you have so many vacancies in your public safety department, try applying for a job in public safety. So I think there’s a fundamental orientation towards the user journey that I think is a great, easy place to start that really elevates where the low hanging fruit are.
So once you start that process, for some agencies you find that actually it took you 15 minutes to find the form on the website. Oh, it’s a relatively low hanging fruit to make that easier and more salient on a website or you figure out that actually the challenge that people are facing is that they really want to participate in a program or a town hall, but there’s no childcare available. And so if you’re a parent, you’re not going to be able to show up. The process of trying to do the thing that you’re asking others to do, points to some easy fixes. It also might point to more structural changes that are required.
But, at least for most of the governments that I work with, there’s so much still to do on the low hanging fruit that we’re not close to the margin of saying we’ve accomplished everything we can do on that front, and we can only focus on large, expensive, and structural changes to government. My sense is we can do both at the same time, but I’m always surprised at how those small adjustments to existing processes can make a real big difference in people’s lives and in people’s willingness to give government the benefit of the doubt.
Ralph Ranalli: Well, Elizabeth Linos, thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Elizabeth Linos: Thanks so much again for having me.
Outro: (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please check out some of our other great HKS podcasts, including Justice Matters from the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy and the new Terms of Engagement livecast from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. And as we conclude this episode, I have some news for our listeners. This will be the last HKS PolicyCast episode for the time being. It is also my final episode as host. It has been my genuine pleasure producing and hosting this podcast for the last several years, and it has been an honor to discuss policy issues and solutions with HKS faculty members, experts, and dignitaries from across the globe. You can revisit past episodes on your favorite podcasting app, or by visiting our website at www.hks.harvard.edu/policycast. You can also follow the Kennedy School on our social media channels or subscribe to our newsletter via the link in this episode’s description. And, as always, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.