Why Government Makes Things Hard: Don Moynihan on Administrative Burden

In this episode, I chat with Don Moynihan, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and author of the Substack newsletter Can We Still Govern? Don’s research focuses on administrative burdens—the learning, compliance, and psychological costs people experience when interacting with government—and how those frictions erode public trust. We cover the data challenges in measuring these experiences, how the move to digital services changes things, and why bureaucracies historically ignored the costs they imposed on the public. We also get into Don’s evolution as a public communicator: what sparked the newsletter (a rejected Joe Manchin op-ed), how he retrained himself to write for a general audience, and how he thinks about when to publish directly versus pitching to the Times or the Atlantic.

Resources

Don Moynihan’s newsletter: Can We Still Govern? | Book: Administrative Burden (with Pamela Herd)

Guest Bio

Don Moynihan is a professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. His research centers on public administration, state capacity, and the concept of administrative burden—the learning, compliance, and psychological costs citizens encounter when interacting with government programs. He co-authored the book Administrative Burden with sociologist Pamela Herd and co-founded the Better Government Lab at Georgetown University. He writes the Substack newsletter Can We Still Govern?, which examines governance, democratic backsliding, and public administration for a general audience. He received his PhD from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and has held positions at Georgetown, Oxford, Wisconsin-Madison, and Texas A&M.

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Transcript

00:02.04
Jon
Hey, Don. There we go. Let’s try that starting again. Hey, Don. Good to see you.

00:08.28
DonaldMoynihan
Hey, John, how are you?

00:09.91
Jon
um Well, it looks lovely there. You’ve got the like nearing, seeing spring in the future.

00:13.75
DonaldMoynihan
Thank you.

00:16.04
Jon
So like green above, but snow crusted lawn below. Right.

00:21.94
DonaldMoynihan
Yes, yeah the camera is strategically placed so you don’t see the months of snow accumulation.

00:27.13
Jon
right

00:27.48
DonaldMoynihan
we live We live in hope of spring here in Michigan.

00:29.78
Jon
Yeah. um Well, it’s it’s coming. i’m I’m confident we will. I’m confident of one thing in this world that spring will will come. I’m i’m confident of that.

00:39.54
DonaldMoynihan
In most years it does.

00:40.98
Jon
Yeah, yeah. um So I’m excited to chat with you. We’ve got a lot of talk about, um I’m guessing that a lot of folks who listen to the show who are like in the data viz world, probably not familiar with with you and your work. So maybe if you could do like quick introduction and then we can talk about like why I thought it’d interesting to have you on this particular show.

01:01.24
DonaldMoynihan
Sure. um So I’m Don Moynihan. I’m a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. My background and interest is in the area of public administration.

01:13.78
DonaldMoynihan
So I’m a proud graduate of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. I’ve worked in various universities. Before coming to Michigan, I spent time at Georgetown, University of Oxford,

01:27.22
DonaldMoynihan
for for a year and University Wisconsin-Madison, Texas A&M University. My interests are increasingly about how citizens experience the state in their interactions um and what the state can do to improve those experiences. And so I frame that in terms of the idea of administrative burdens, the types of frictions or costs we encounter when we engage with the state.

01:55.45
DonaldMoynihan
And I’ve spent a lot of time theorizing about that with Pam Hurd. And then um when we moved to Georgetown with Sebastian Yelke, we set up a lab called the Better Government Lab, whose goal was really to do more empirical research on that topic.

02:13.85
DonaldMoynihan
um Over time, the lab has grown. um We have sort of worked with governments or with nonprofits who are interested in this idea of how do you make services more accessible and better. increasingly interested in state capacity as well as a question. And so broadly, i was sort of delighted to come across this idea and develop this idea because it also gave me an excuse to talk to lots of smart people in lots of other areas. And so, you know,

02:43.60
DonaldMoynihan
Pam is a sociologist. My background is public administration, but there are lots of folks in political science, economics, many other fields and disciplines, including increasingly data science, who have a shared interest in this in this big question.

02:58.77
Jon
Yeah. So can you give folks an example of of administrative burden and what that means for for people?

03:07.93
DonaldMoynihan
Sure. um So we think about it as the experience of policy implementation as onerous. And so if you’ve ever interacted with the government and you have a sense that you waited too long or the process was inexplicable, confusing, or frustrating and stressful, those are all administrative burdens. And we sort of build the idea around these three linked costs um Learning costs, so figuring out about the existence of a service, how it is relevant to you, what do you have to do to engage with it.

03:44.54
DonaldMoynihan
ah Compliance costs, sort of filling out ah forms, the time and effort, sometimes money also that you might spend in engaging with service. And then the psychological costs, and this is, I think, where we’ve probably opened the most questions and contributed more, is to think about, like, how are you emotionally experiencing these interactions?

04:01.73
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

04:08.94
DonaldMoynihan
Sometimes it’s stress, sometimes it’s frustration. um We’re also thinking about this in maybe coercive situations, like if you interact with a police officer or an immigration official, there sometimes the emotions might be about fear.

04:24.47
DonaldMoynihan
um So these these experiences can be as banal as applying for a new driver’s license to being pulled over by a cop or to enrolling your kid in your like public school locally. And we think they’re important because we think they sort of inform how people think about the state. the degree of sort of trust ah that they have in the state. And then if they have bad experiences, cement these sort of negative views of government in a way that’s really just deeply unhelpful in the democracy.

05:04.50
Jon
and And one question I have is, what is the data like for this? I mean, I would suspect it’s hard to measure a lot of, i mean, especially the psychological base, but even just like wait times. like so and And do you find that the data quality is and the amount of data is just not quite there for what we need to do a better assessment of of these burdens?

05:25.62
DonaldMoynihan
Yeah, no, you’re exactly right. um The data challenges are much more intense than I think most folks might anticipate.

05:28.90
Jon
Yeah.

05:36.02
DonaldMoynihan
And so, like, conceptually, the question is, you how do you measure this? um And for many of the the sort of frictions I talked about, you might think about, like, wait times, time spent on processes, um or sort of the equivalent of financial investments.

05:55.10
DonaldMoynihan
And if you look historically in the US, since the 1980s, we had the Paperwork Reduction Act. And thanks to that act, you had this sort of little indicator at the bottom of all federal forms telling you how many minutes the federal government thought it would take you to fill out that form.

06:13.27
DonaldMoynihan
um Over time, and especially during the Biden administration, there was new interpretation of the Paperwork Reduction Act, where OMB told agencies, you need to think not just about how much time it takes to fill out the forms, but also the the learning and psychological costs.

06:33.29
Jon
Right. Mm.

06:34.51
DonaldMoynihan
generally governments are not tracking these things and they are not measuring how people feel about these experiences we’ve done some work where we’ve developed scales that you could ah drop into user surveys alongside sort of customer satisfaction items and and those work pretty well and so often one of the things we’ve sort of indexed on instead is looking at take-up rates And so looking not directly at the experiences, but does that cause people to withdraw from a process?

07:09.01
DonaldMoynihan
And governments are a little bit better at thinking about take-up rates than they are experiences, um but we think both are important.

07:09.48
Jon
Yeah.

07:18.33
DonaldMoynihan
And you know and our our sort of dream long-term vision here is that governments just routinely measure experience experiences obsessively, then think about how do we improve those experiences all the time.

07:33.76
Jon
Right. And do you focus, I mean, I think, ah you know, I wonder if people, when they when they hear you talk about this, where they think about standing in line at the DMV with their papers, with their, you know, their birth certificate or whatever, versus being at home on their computer, applying for SNAP or WIC benefits through the through the computer. So how do you measure those two types of behaviors and processes differently?

08:00.86
DonaldMoynihan
i I think like you can ask people very broad questions about whether the experience was easy or and then identify if if you know you see measurable differences on those.

08:11.51
Jon
Yeah.

08:18.72
DonaldMoynihan
um i mean, you’re you’re right in that but we’re also embarking on this project at a time when increasingly the spaces that people encounter in administrative settings are not physical spaces.

08:32.33
DonaldMoynihan
They’re not actually encountering people except as a last resort. They’re mostly engaged in digital spaces where they’re interacting with a a machine, probably in AI or in the future, and very rarely with people.

08:44.79
Jon
Mm-hmm.

08:46.68
DonaldMoynihan
um There are some advantages in that move to digital spaces. You know, one is you you remove sort of physical barriers. It’s also easier to embed the tracking of those experiences. Like you can see how many people got on the website and then withdrew. You can observe directly how long they’re waiting. and So government should be taking advantage of that. um But generally, if people come away from those experiences feeling like, okay, that was pretty easy or that was pretty hard, it’s ah it’s a good way of gauging, is this working or not?

09:25.75
DonaldMoynihan
um There are gonna be some exceptions to this, right? Like if if you’re veterans if you’re in veterans health, a lot of the work you do is still gonna involve getting physical people to physical spaces, getting a human being in front of them to help them.

09:43.38
DonaldMoynihan
And so there’s some parts of these encounters that are going to be colored by and shaped by and helped by training people to just think through the burdens that they’re imposing upon others.

09:55.08
DonaldMoynihan
and And that’s part of the point is that just historically bureaucracies haven’t thought about this as a negative externality that they’re imposing on the public.

09:55.75
Jon
Mm-hmm.

10:05.82
DonaldMoynihan
Like they they worry about political blame. They worry about like failing in some big and obvious ways, but they don’t really account for these low level frictions that they generate on the people that they’re trying to serve.

10:18.83
Jon
Right. So let’s move from frictions that affect people and their interaction with government to frictions in a researcher, scientist, academic communicating their work. So you’ve published lots of different articles, lots of different places. And now you have this sub stack newsletter, Can We Still Govern?, that you know has tens of thousands of of subscribers.

10:39.99
Jon
And I’m curious, um what was the motivation behind it? And you know are Do you find that ah these sorts of newsletters sort of generally, but these sorts of non-standard outside the sort of ivory tower are being seen as more valuable to the academic communication experience?

11:06.14
DonaldMoynihan
um So you knowll I’ll reveal the sort of origin moment for my newsletter now, which i which I’ve never shared with anyone before.

11:10.87
Jon
Yeah.

11:13.54
DonaldMoynihan
This is an exclusive.

11:14.04
Jon
Okay. Breaking news. yeah

11:16.06
DonaldMoynihan
um So the the origin story is ah you should blame Joe Manchin. um So in 2021, was trying to place an op-ed about…

11:22.14
Jon
Okay.

11:29.43
DonaldMoynihan
um the ways in which Joe Manchin wanted to add more burdens into an extension of the child tax credit. And I i thought it was a terrible idea.

11:38.05
Jon
Mm-hmm.

11:41.43
DonaldMoynihan
you know it it was a classic case of administrative burden. He was motivated to add a lot of barriers to chase down, I think it was parents who were taking drugs on time and might get this benefit in a way that predictably would undercut the success of the policy. um And I think I sent it to a couple of standard outlets like the, you know, the the ones you would suspect, the Times, the Post, which back then was still a respectable newspaper. um Things have changed. um and And, you know, at all of those ah efforts have their own frictions. You wait a few days, the editor gets back and says we take a pass. And I sort of thought to myself, well, this this is silly. i like

12:27.49
DonaldMoynihan
it’s the 21st century, I can just take these words and put it out there and people will find it and it won’t have the same reach as the times, but the the group of people who are really interested in this topic will see it.

12:32.24
Jon
Mm-hmm.

12:43.16
DonaldMoynihan
And so that was the first thing I wrote. I was also at the time really concerned about the potential of some of the actions at the end of the first Trump administration coming back for a potential second Trump administration. So I was i was basically saying, if there was a second Trump administration, you should expect it to look very differently because of some of the things we saw in the last year of the first Trump administration, including a lot of politicization of the government.

13:15.90
DonaldMoynihan
And there wasn’t that an obvious audience for that because it was very Cassandra like sort of warnings that people you know didn’t necessarily believe were relevant or didn’t want to hear.

13:19.96
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

13:27.86
DonaldMoynihan
And so that got me posting on this topic. And like I was mostly just chipping away at this, writing something once a week or once every couple of weeks for the last few years.

13:42.20
DonaldMoynihan
Then when Trump got back into office, um you know, I think interest and in a lot of what I was writing exploded. um

13:53.21
DonaldMoynihan
And i think, you know, how this all relates to academic standing and the value that’s placed upon it, it’s a really hard question. And like partly I can remember when I was at one point in my career, I was chair of the tenure review committee for social science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And, you know, I remember one case where a candidate was thinking about well like i post a lot online that should be captured and we we didn’t have we never means to value that like anyone can post stuff online there’s no peer review so how do you value the quality or impact of that work um

14:25.37
Jon
Right, that’s account, right?

14:34.33
Jon
Right.

14:39.19
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

14:40.06
DonaldMoynihan
I broadly today think of this as a form of service and as an effort to communicate broadly to the public in a way where you’re taking your knowledge and expertise that you might spend on one more paper, but instead using it mostly to explain to the public what is going on and provide sort of a layer of analysis that they might not get elsewhere.

15:05.66
Jon
e

15:10.28
Jon
Right.

15:10.42
DonaldMoynihan
And so I do think that has value and I do think that is probably undervalued in um in academic circles, but I think it is much easier for someone like me who’s a full professor and where there’s no additional rungs on the ladder for me.

15:30.52
DonaldMoynihan
So, you know, I can do slightly riskier things.

15:30.55
Jon
right

15:34.60
DonaldMoynihan
It’s easier for me to say this than it would be for PhD student or an assistant professor. That said, i you know i i just published an essay from a phd student from university toronto last week if i see their cv in the pool a job applicant and i see oh this person has some public communication skills this person is comfortable speaking to different audiences they’re not afraid of trying to be relevant

16:01.25
Jon
Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

16:08.98
DonaldMoynihan
that to me is a good sign and i think if you’re if you’re sort of savvy enough you can persuade your institution that this actually does have value

16:11.03
Jon
e

16:20.31
DonaldMoynihan
And I say all of this very cautiously because at exactly the same moment where you have more um academics like me writing public facing work, you also have more academics getting canceled and punished for words that they put online.

16:34.26
Jon
Right. Right.

16:37.75
DonaldMoynihan
And so there, you know, In some respects, the safest strategy is to stay in the foxhole and never to sort of express a public word of utterance because it’ll be deemed political or too controversial.

16:52.60
DonaldMoynihan
But it’s an important moment and i do think we need more voices out there.

16:56.86
Jon
yeah Do you think, well, let me ask it this way. When you started writing your newsletter or, or yeah, I mean, I guess when you were started writing your newsletter, did you find it challenging to write for that different kind of audience? I mean, it’s very, the way you write in a newsletter is very different than you would write for the journal of economic perspectives.

17:20.09
DonaldMoynihan
Yes, I absolutely did. um And I think, you know, probably if you read the earlier pieces that I wrote at compared to the current pieces, theres there’s been some style and tonal changes.

17:22.47
Jon
Yeah.

17:34.84
DonaldMoynihan
And I think this is a challenge for any academic where we’re trained. but We’re not trained terribly well in a lot of things, right?

17:43.90
Jon
Right.

17:44.36
DonaldMoynihan
As you know, we’re like not trained in data visualization.

17:46.65
Jon
Yeah. the Right.

17:49.51
DonaldMoynihan
we’re not really trained to teach.

17:49.60
Jon
right

17:51.63
DonaldMoynihan
um

17:51.74
Jon
Right. Right. Order right.

17:53.23
DonaldMoynihan
we’re not we’re We’re not trained to write, except for it is like one weird form of specific technical writing where we sort of learn by doing, which is to write for a journal article.

18:00.31
Jon
Yeah.

18:05.56
Jon
Yeah.

18:06.26
DonaldMoynihan
Like that is the one thing where… Maybe we’re not given a lot of instruction, but we just have to learn. And that is a form of technical writing then that becomes stuck in your head and becomes your default mode. And so then when you stop and say, i need to write 1,200 words that someone who is not ah an academic will want to read, that’s a challenge, right? You have to sort of rela relearn your writing skills.

18:33.75
DonaldMoynihan
Um, and I think like now I’ve been doing this long enough that I almost have the opposite problem, which is that when I go back and try to write an article, i have to watch for the informality.

18:42.36
Jon
Right.

18:46.97
DonaldMoynihan
i have to, you know, add more 50 cent words. i have to impose a few more add on sentence, run on sentences in order to yeah reestablish my academic bona fides.

18:50.39
Jon
Right.

18:57.75
Jon
right

18:58.17
DonaldMoynihan
Um, um So I like, i think, as with a lot of stuff, just like doing it a lot, watching people that you like and who do it well and say, what are they doing that I could do?

19:11.38
DonaldMoynihan
Like over time, you just internalize some of these sort of skills.

19:15.83
Jon
Yeah. So you don’t, so if I were to say what would be your like, you know, top tips to making complex social science research, you know, more understandable, relatable to a broader audience, would you not have the top things or you just be like, you just like, you just keep trying and throwing, I mean, there’s enough content out there where you just keep trying and see what hits and what doesn’t.

19:38.23
DonaldMoynihan
Yeah. Yeah. And and you can you can do that, right? You can like, i mean, in and Substack now, you can A, B test your headlines and they’ll tell you which ones get the you know the most feedback.

19:48.70
Jon
Yeah.

19:51.90
DonaldMoynihan
So you can even automate some of this stuff. um I think there are you know some generic tips, like what is the hook?

20:01.52
Jon
Yeah.

20:02.04
DonaldMoynihan
we don’t we we think about hooks somewhat in academic writing but like you know what is the thing in the first paragraph that is going to cause someone to read the next paragraph or what is the what is the question in the headline that is going to be motivational for someone who probably has ah hundred other options to read to draw from at that moment And so there’s there’s a level of sort of, can you communicate clearly directly about the stakes that will capture an audience?

20:27.04
Jon
Yeah.

20:38.49
DonaldMoynihan
And again, this is not always something academics are good at. Like we sometimes sort of present things like a mystery story. Like we’ll tell you at the end what the solution is rather than sort of you know, punching someone in the nose and saying, you have to pay attention to this.

20:46.26
Jon
Yeah, right. Yeah.

20:53.94
Jon
Yeah.

20:54.29
DonaldMoynihan
And I think having simpler language

20:58.03
Jon
and

20:58.17
DonaldMoynihan
um does matter a lot. um I also think, you know, for better or worse, and mostly for worse, if you’re on social media, you do pick up a sense of what is the narrative? How are people thinking about this issue? And that causes you to think about, well, how do I respond to that? Or how would I frame that?

21:19.77
DonaldMoynihan
Or how would I engage with that? And so you’re no longer just ah writing your ideas on your laptop in a room by yourself, but you’re also taking in other people’s perspectives. And so I’ll often start drafting an idea by seeing a post someone has written or a reply someone has given to me on social media and say, oh, that’s interesting.

21:42.24
Jon
Mm-hmm.

21:42.36
DonaldMoynihan
Maybe there’s something there. I’ll just like cut and paste that into a Google Doc and maybe I’ll come back to it or maybe I won’t. But I do think that sort of engagement with a set of alternative voices outside of your own head does help to sharpen the sharpen the way in which you communicate.

22:03.03
Jon
Yeah, for sure. um you You mentioned this um this post from a student at University Toronto. You had Pam Hurd write, or Pam wrote ah a, what I think was a great article this week. um I’m curious, at what point did you say, this is not just going to be me writing every week or twice a week or and and bring in other voices? Were you just like, I just can’t keep up the pace and just need someone to take the load off? Or was it as more of a strategic, like, let’s broaden the the voices in this one place that people are going to come to?

22:41.05
DonaldMoynihan
I mean, I think it’s a little from column A and a little from column B there.

22:45.43
Jon
Yeah.

22:45.81
DonaldMoynihan
um like it It typically you know takes me a good chunk of time to write a piece. um And I also think for my audience, the people who have subscribed to get this newsletter, it probably gets tiresome to hear the same voice. And so there’s something valuable about getting like a ah mix of perspectives in there.

23:09.88
DonaldMoynihan
um And so partly, you know, out of consideration for them, um plus the workload for myself, um I have solicited other voices.

23:21.10
DonaldMoynihan
And, you know, ah a lot of the early work was also with Pam, which because we already have this working relationship, we might write a paper or we might have a discussion and say, oh, that’s that’s a post like.

23:33.05
DonaldMoynihan
Right. So I remember we, you know, we were traveling together last year and, you know, full disclosure, Pam and I are married.

23:33.30
Jon
e

23:39.28
DonaldMoynihan
so you know this this this is not There’s all sorts of bombshells being released on this podcast.

23:45.56
Jon
yeah

23:47.22
DonaldMoynihan
we We may have to censor some of this afterwards.

23:47.48
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

23:49.82
DonaldMoynihan
but But like yeah we’re we’re driving through, I think it was Utah going to visit the national park and we were thinking about, oh, the ways in which the Trump administration is engaged in discussions of fraud and the safety net is really different from the past. Like as always, there’s some continuities, but there are some profound differences. And we just started drafting something in the car With other authors that I’m not married to, it was a little bit more of um sometimes I would see an article that I thought was really interesting and say, are you interested in trying to summarize this?

24:26.37
DonaldMoynihan
Or increasingly, if someone’s written a book, you know, it would we would um just had a couple of really nice summaries of new books come out, one from Giulia Zari, for example.

24:29.69
Jon
Yeah.

24:39.38
DonaldMoynihan
um Will Howell and Terry Moe just had the book come out on the presidency. ah People invest so much effort in books that you you should absolutely find every opportunity to communicate to every different possible audience.

24:51.77
Jon
yeah

24:55.16
DonaldMoynihan
And again, as academics, we invest so much in production and we invest very little in marketing, right?

25:03.16
Jon
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

25:03.37
DonaldMoynihan
Like communicating the the work we’ve done. Not you, you’re you’re great at that. But like generally, like we just think, oh, I got something published.

25:14.10
DonaldMoynihan
I can go home now. Like I can you know switch off.

25:15.80
Jon
Yeah.

25:16.66
DonaldMoynihan
where But if you want people to actually read the thing you’ve invested your life in, you have to do a little bit more.

25:17.30
Jon
Right.

25:23.34
DonaldMoynihan
um And now occasionally I will get, you know, people will reach out to me and say, i have an idea. do you think this would be a fit?

25:31.51
Jon
Right.

25:31.58
DonaldMoynihan
And so now I spend a little bit more time editing those ideas. And sometimes it’s not a fit. And sometimes it’s something where it’s, oh, this is really different. And I would never have thought of this. And it’s incredibly valuable to have that perspective.

25:46.96
Jon
Yeah. On the communication side, do you think it’s the incentives in, I mean, not every researcher, not every scientist is in academia, obviously, but do you think it’s the incentives that are built into academia? Do you think it’s the lack of training? I mean, it’s not a lack of opportunities, right? Like you can start a Substack newsletter for free and it’s like, so is it is it just not wanting to, is it just the type of personality that scientists tend to be?

26:17.37
DonaldMoynihan
i I think it’s probably a combination ah of of many of those things.

26:22.68
Jon
Yeah.

26:23.03
DonaldMoynihan
um Like, I think I was probably close to a full professor before before I realized, oh, there are communications staff on campus who, if I wanted to help

26:32.70
Jon
Yeah. Right.

26:36.09
DonaldMoynihan
If I want to help ah pitching an op ed to a newspaper, they would help me with that.

26:41.08
Jon
Mm-hmm.

26:41.38
DonaldMoynihan
Right. Because I had been so focused early in my career just on like writing the next research article. and And that is that’s a rational response to incentives where that is the basis by which you get tenure or which you don’t.

26:48.74
Jon
Right.

26:56.34
DonaldMoynihan
And so I think it’s also the case that the environment is such that public relevance has never been more important, but also more risky.

26:56.81
Jon
Right. Mm-hmm.

27:07.44
DonaldMoynihan
And so if you’re a dean at a policy school, um do you tell your junior faculty, go out, you know, be bold, be aggressive?

27:18.68
DonaldMoynihan
tell the world what you want to do. I think a lot of deans would be cautious about that um because they, they worry about the stories where,

27:24.66
Jon
he

27:30.17
DonaldMoynihan
you know, some academic is deemed to have gone too far and written something that generates tremendous pushback from, you know, what is also micro industry of blogging about academia, right? so one huge difference from when I started working as a professor until today is that there is now multiple venues that just cover academics screwing up.

27:58.55
DonaldMoynihan
Like I’m thinking about campus reform is one example where they have embedded student reporters in every campus.

27:59.13
Jon
Yeah.

28:07.63
DonaldMoynihan
And if you you know say something wrong or do something wrong, they will try to turn that into a news story. And so you’re also surveilled for errors in a way that we never were before.

28:20.25
DonaldMoynihan
So I think part of the training is not just how do you put the words on screen, but also how do you protect yourself so that you don’t just sort of respond to um an inflammatory comment with an ah equally inflammatory comment.

28:29.16
Jon
Right.

28:38.26
DonaldMoynihan
um So I think the ah um again, like having been someone who was on a tenure or review committee at a university, i think using service as the avenue and saying this is service, this is public communication. This is sort of like publishing something in The New York Times, maybe less prestigious, but it has value.

29:00.09
DonaldMoynihan
And then maybe asking faculty, help us to understand that value.

29:00.58
Jon
Yeah. Right. Right.

29:05.71
DonaldMoynihan
Like how many page counts did you get? right Did someone pick this up? right Help us you know to convey that impact in a way that historically we just haven’t really thought about.

29:17.14
DonaldMoynihan
um i think there is an avenue there to change the incentives and to change the culture um and also to to help protect people from from being targeted.

29:27.51
Jon
Yeah. Do you today, if um if Joe Manchin were still in, still I mean, there’s plenty of apologies, but Joe Manchin’s still there. Would you today reach out to New York Times with an op-ed or would you just go to your own publication at this point?

29:45.43
DonaldMoynihan
Increasingly, i would just publish it. and And partly the issue is timeliness, which is, um you know, if someone says something today, i will get more of a response if I’m able to engage with that by tomorrow’s a.m.

29:47.38
Jon
Yeah.

29:50.42
Jon
Right.

30:05.81
Jon
Mm hmm. Right.

30:05.98
DonaldMoynihan
Whereas if I have to wait like, you know, five or 10 days for it to go through an editorial process, it loses a little bit of juice. um I will still every so often um pick up an idea and say this is less about the immediate response.

30:23.99
DonaldMoynihan
And this is more a sort of deeper idea that I think would be relevant for these sort of elite um ah journalism outlets.

30:36.78
DonaldMoynihan
Sometimes I’m wrong about that.

30:37.20
Jon
Right.

30:38.10
DonaldMoynihan
Like, so i’ll I’ll give you two examples. So last year I wrote something about what’s the checklist for authoritarianism, like, and how far are we on that checklist?

30:45.94
Jon
Mm-hmm.

30:47.99
DonaldMoynihan
And I thought, okay, this is a big thing piece. And I pitched it to someone in the Atlantic and they, you know took a pass. I think they were wrong.

30:56.73
Jon
Mm-hmm.

30:58.65
DonaldMoynihan
But ah there’s a reason why they’re are working at The Atlantic and I’m writing like an online blog. um ah But, it you know, that ended up being one of my most read pieces last year.

31:11.03
Jon
Mm-hmm.

31:11.45
DonaldMoynihan
um This year I wrote like a blog about what I labeled the clicktatorship, the the sort of intersection between online social media presence and modes of governing.

31:26.23
Jon
e

31:26.23
DonaldMoynihan
And again, you know the premise is there’s something new and different here with the Trump administration that we’ve seen in the past. um And I posted that on my website and then someone from the Atlantic reached out and said, would you be interested in doing a version of this for for our online version of the magazine?

31:42.91
Jon
y y

31:46.94
DonaldMoynihan
And I did. Right. And so I think sometimes like just getting the idea out there is a different pathway to these more traditional media outlets, because someone, an editor, an editor a reporter in these outlets might see that and say, Oh, I think that’s smart.

32:06.30
DonaldMoynihan
Is there a way that we can incorporate this into into what we’re doing?

32:10.56
Jon
Right. Right. um Okay. um So um um folks can check out the the newsletter. I’ll put a link in the and the notes. If someone wants to pitch you something, do you just have a ton of people pitching you stuff? Should they email you? Like, what’s the best way?

32:26.94
DonaldMoynihan
Yeah, ah shoot me an email. I mean, basically, I’m interested in broad questions of governance. I think if you can sort of communicate ah pressing issues that are occurring right now in in a good way, i’m I’m looking for examples like that. Just shoot me an email. My email is dmoyn at umich.edu. Go blue.

32:48.41
DonaldMoynihan
um And, you know, I have some sort of standard advice for folks who try to to publish, which I’m happy to share. um But yeah, I’m happy to happy to hear ah pitches.

33:01.26
DonaldMoynihan
yeah get You know, ah probably i would at this stage, maybe once every couple of weeks.

33:02.15
Jon
Love

33:05.74
DonaldMoynihan
So someone will say, is this an idea you’d be interested in?

33:09.91
Jon
love it. Great. Don, thanks so much for coming on the show. Appreciate it. Always good to see you.

33:15.03
DonaldMoynihan
My pleasure, John. Thank you.