Welcome back to the show! In this week’s episode, I sit down with Doug Elmendorf, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, to talk about the impact of government shutdowns, the challenges of fiscal sustainability, and the importance of independent statistical agencies. We discuss how shutdowns ripple through the economy and people’s lives, the tough choices facing policymakers on entitlements and deficits, and why compromise is vital to our democracy. Doug also shares his perspective on the independence of federal statistical agencies, the role of private sector data, and the optimism he sees in today’s policy students. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about economics, governance, and the future of public service.
Guest Bio
Douglas Elmendorf is a professor of public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He was named dean of the Kennedy School in June 2015 and stepped down from that role in June 2024. He had served previously as director of the US Congressional Budget Office from January 2009 through March 2015.
Earlier, Doug Elmendorf had been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, assistant director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board, deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the US Treasury Department, senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, and assistant professor at Harvard University. In those positions, he worked on budget policy, monetary policy, macroeconomic analysis and forecasting, health care, Social Security, income security programs, financial markets, and other topics. He earned his PhD and AM in economics from Harvard University and his AB summa cum laude from Princeton University.
Different Ways to Listen to the Show!
New Ways to Support the Show!
With more than 250 guests and 10 seasons of episodes, the PolicyViz Podcast is one of the longest-running data visualization podcasts around. You can support the show by downloading and listening, following the work of my guests, and sharing the show with your networks. If you’re interested in financially supporting the show, you can sign up for my Patreon platform, make a one-time payment via PayPal, or shop one of the show’s sponsors.
Transcript
00:01.79
Jon
Hi, Doug. ah Good to see you.
00:04.13
Doug Elmendorf
Hi, John. Good to be with you.
00:05.78
Jon
not in the halls of CBO. It’s been s been been a while.
00:08.79
Doug Elmendorf
I know. It’s been a few years.
00:11.87
Jon
Um, so let’s just, let’s just get right into it. So it’s, uh, it’s Monday the 29th. We’re coming up into the, uh, good old CBO, uh, end of fiscal new year party, uh, which will occur tomorrow night, regardless.
00:28.08
Jon
Um, of course this thread about, about shutting the, uh, shutting the government down and, um, you know, we don’t need to talk about the politics really. What I’m curious is to get your take on, how a shutdown can impact the economy and and really how it affects people’s lives day to day.
00:45.34
Doug Elmendorf
Yeah, so i find shutdowns to be about the most frustrating thing that the government can do. um It’s bad for the economy to have a bunch of people not working.
00:59.60
Doug Elmendorf
And that includes both people who are direct employees of the government and also in many cases, contractors working in government contracts where it’s often not clear if they should be working or not. That’s bad for the economy.
01:11.23
Doug Elmendorf
It’s bad for the people who are affected by this.
01:13.34
Jon
Yeah.
01:14.63
Doug Elmendorf
both the people who are working for the government or for contractors and the people who are expecting government services like going to a national park or something else um but the most of all it bothers me because it destroys the operations of the government It actually matters the government’s open every day and the and that working normally continue and pretending that doesn’t matter, which I think is what happens sometimes shutdowns, a view that it’s no big deal if the government is closed, I think is dismissive, inappropriately, wrongly dismissive of the value of the work that’s being done for the government in terms of the services and benefits being received by all Americans.
01:33.71
Jon
yeah
01:58.35
Jon
So if I’m i’m living in you know Des Moines or Omaha or Dallas or wherever, the government shuts down Tuesday night, what what should I be preparing myself for?
02:13.68
Doug Elmendorf
Well, it’s not totally clear because since a decision back in the Reagan administration, the view of people running the government has been that only essential services can continue.
02:25.66
Jon
Yeah.
02:25.94
Doug Elmendorf
But what constitutes essential is really left up to an administration to decide. even in normal times, and this particular administration has been, has taken a very expansive view of its authorities.
02:38.66
Jon
go
02:38.82
Doug Elmendorf
And so it really is up to the administration to decide what will happen and what won’t happen. For example, I read there was a letter from a number of retired national park administrators urging the government, if it sends home the workers for national parks, to actually close the parks.
02:56.68
Jon
who
02:56.88
Doug Elmendorf
Without the people there protect the park, protect the people in the park, bad things can happen and have happened before.
03:03.45
Jon
Right.
03:03.62
Doug Elmendorf
So we don’t know if a national park will be open on Wednesday.
03:06.06
Jon
e
03:06.94
Doug Elmendorf
We don’t know if those workers will be there.
03:07.33
Jon
Right.
03:09.31
Doug Elmendorf
ah People can have confidence that the military will remain at its posts, that the air traffic control system will work. So there are some things that are pretty clearly viewed as essential.
03:20.00
Doug Elmendorf
Beyond that, it’s a it’s a judgment call. But the point is that for all Americans, the government is providing services and providing benefits that should be provided well.
03:23.16
Jon
Right.
03:31.14
Doug Elmendorf
And we can disagree, and people do, of course, about how big the government should be, what all it should be taking on. But to just arbitrarily cut off activities without discussion
03:40.44
Jon
yeah
03:42.03
Doug Elmendorf
um is not the way to resolve that. We should also want ah an effective government. Some of us will want it bigger than others. We also want it to work well and to just close it as just an interruption in its ability to work well for all of us.
03:57.10
Jon
So you were CBO director during at least one very long shutdown, as I recall. There might’ve been another shorter one as well. ah How in that role,
04:09.27
Jon
how do you manage the the the folks who are working at the organization? Like how how do you prepare people for, at least I remember the the maybe the first one, which I think was 2012, 2013, something like that, was like 21 days or something like that. Like how do you prepare the staff to be like, you you literally cannot work, you cannot check your email. People who are doing all sorts of projects who want to work, how do you as a manager sort of prepare people for that?
04:37.78
Doug Elmendorf
I found it very hard. ah One thing I did was I checked around because I was concerned that some people wouldn’t be able to make their rent payments um and or buy food, do things they needed to do.
04:45.77
Jon
Yeah.
04:49.46
Doug Elmendorf
And I checked in an informal way to make sure people, particularly that the younger people who I thought might be living more paycheck to paycheck, actually had plans for keeping themselves afloat.
05:01.22
Doug Elmendorf
um But then you can’t communicate with people. It’s particularly tricky at the Congressional Budget Office because reopening the government required some budget-oriented legislation.
05:10.07
Jon
Yeah.
05:10.61
Doug Elmendorf
but Some people at CBO were clearly essential or you would never have been able to open the government at all.
05:10.75
Jon
yeah
05:15.22
Jon
Right. Yeah.
05:16.42
Doug Elmendorf
um Others were less essential. That was complicated itself but they were all important people working on budget issues, but some were essential at that moment. And the others we had to say, we’ll miss you.
05:27.05
Doug Elmendorf
And then when when people could come back, we brought donuts and things and met people at the elevators and said,
05:27.19
Jon
Yeah.
05:33.49
Doug Elmendorf
Welcome back. We’ve missed you.
05:34.51
Jon
Right. Right. Yeah. i I remember that essential, but that, that, that, and that word essential being sort of triggering for many of us who were like, well, i’m I’m important too.
05:44.95
Jon
It’s that, it’s, but then it’s that, it’s that word that, that really, I think means something to people.
05:48.34
Doug Elmendorf
Right. Right. Well, I think it has to do with time sensitivity is how you should think about it.
05:54.07
Jon
e
05:54.36
Doug Elmendorf
to say um Lots of things are very important to do over the next month. They may not be important to do at this moment.
06:01.79
Jon
Right.
06:02.36
Doug Elmendorf
Air traffic control, that’s important to do at every moment. So you can’t wait with that.
06:07.65
Jon
Right.
06:07.73
Doug Elmendorf
And so essential in this sense is not a measure of underlying importance over time.
06:13.35
Jon
Yeah.
06:13.46
Doug Elmendorf
It’s more a matter of, are you at the post at every moment of the day?
06:18.29
Jon
Yeah.
06:18.91
Doug Elmendorf
And some of us were more in that category than others. It wasn’t clear the director of CBO was actually so essential. What we needed was the analysts who actually understood the numbers of the various government accounts.
06:29.57
Jon
ah Right.
06:30.52
Doug Elmendorf
to be there, but i i my own reasoning was, well, they were there, then I, as the manager, ought to be there too.
06:35.16
Jon
Yeah. Someone needs to steer the ship, right? Yeah. um so So you’ve mentioned this debate that we could have about the size of government and the spending of government. And and one of the things you’ve done the last, you know, well, this year has published several papers and several chapters on federal budget deficits, sustainable federal fiscal policy.
06:58.02
Jon
And I’m curious, from your perspective, in our current era, hyper- politics, do you think there is a path forward for policymakers to come together and resolve the long, well, short-term and long-term fiscal unsustainability of the federal budget?
07:16.86
Doug Elmendorf
I think a path is there. And I’m an optimist that our leaders will ultimately take that path. But it’s uphill from here.
07:27.69
Jon
Yeah.
07:27.75
Doug Elmendorf
um I think we have gotten as a country so dug in in opposing positions that it’s harder for people to compromise.
07:39.47
Jon
Mm-hmm.
07:39.65
Doug Elmendorf
But compromise is essential in a democracy. We’re not all going to agree. We have pledged to live together and build a society together and govern together. So compromise is essential.
07:52.06
Doug Elmendorf
And I think we can get back to that. And one reason I think we can get back to that is when you look at groups of people at think tanks, um they semi-regularly will have some paper, so they will say, here are the principles we can agree on.
08:08.39
Doug Elmendorf
And here’s how we would carry that out in terms of putting the budget on a sustainable path. And I’ve seen a number of those over time and not everybody agrees with every particular outcome, but they all are a lot better than just having our budget situation our or our economy just slide down some endless slope.
08:15.65
Jon
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
08:29.59
Doug Elmendorf
And I think people will ultimately recognize that it will require ah leadership. Meaning people who are in key positions will have to stand up and say, I’m not going to get everything I want out of this agreement, but it’s worth trying to forge an agreement.
08:48.60
Jon
And do you think that the conversation to date, the conversation to, I’ll put it this by the conversation to date, especially over the last you know four or five months with the with the big beautiful act, right?
08:59.43
Jon
Seem to focus on discretionary spending, relatively speaking, small numbers. And do you think to date that that conversation about the long-term health of the budget has just failed to focus on our entitlement programs that are that are the big drivers?
09:17.16
Doug Elmendorf
Yes, mostly. i mean, the one big beautiful bill act, so-called, the cut Medicaid ah significantly.
09:23.19
Jon
Mm hmm.
09:24.36
Doug Elmendorf
So ah as our former colleagues at CBO have estimated, millions of Americans will lose health insurance because of that bill.
09:24.54
Jon
Right.
09:33.23
Doug Elmendorf
But it’s still only a small approach to the big issue of entitlements. If you look back to when I was born, in 1962, which happens to be the first year that the budget data are broken out in the way they are today.
09:48.12
Doug Elmendorf
so Medicare and Medicaid did not exist, and Social Security cost about 2.5% of GDP. Then we established Medicare and Medicaid and then expanded them over time. Healthcare care costs have grown.
10:02.39
Doug Elmendorf
Most importantly, many more Americans are now over the age of 65 and collecting benefits. So the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid bundle now costs, instead of that 2.5% of GDP, GDP.
10:14.01
Doug Elmendorf
So 8% of GDP extra spending.
10:18.77
Jon
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
10:19.40
Doug Elmendorf
But defense spending has fallen by 6% of GDP over that time. So in some ways, we’ve freed up most of the budget room to pay for those benefits through the evolution of our foreign policy.
10:34.88
Doug Elmendorf
And we haven’t really had to face up to how to support spending for an aging population um without raising taxes or cutting something else.
10:46.99
Doug Elmendorf
And we’ve been able to duck that much more than we deserved in some sense over the last 60 years because of defense spending going down.
10:52.59
Jon
Yeah.
10:54.53
Doug Elmendorf
We think about the peace dividend as being a big deal in the late 1990s, but there’s a longer peace dividend from the end of the Vietnam War period, really.
11:00.44
Jon
Mm-hmm.
11:02.82
Jon
Yeah.
11:03.31
Doug Elmendorf
we’ve We’ve been able to duck this. And lots of individual Americans feel that they are only going to collect the benefits that they deserve and have paid in to. But there are way more of them.
11:16.26
Doug Elmendorf
And the cost of health care per person is way higher.
11:16.53
Jon
Mm-hmm.
11:19.44
Doug Elmendorf
That’s got to be borne by taxpayers paying more or each of us as older Americans, a group I’m entering, getting a little less per person.
11:26.66
Jon
ah Yeah.
11:28.47
Doug Elmendorf
And we just haven’t, those are hard choices and we haven’t faced them.
11:32.93
Jon
So I think there’s, I think there’s a few pieces of this that, you know, regular Americans who are not, you know, looking at CBO at o and OMB budget, you know, spreadsheets ah don’t quite fully grasp. I think there’s parts of different programs that people don’t fully grasp, but let me ask you this.
11:56.00
Jon
Why should people care? Like, yeah, I mean, at its core, like, why should people care? I mean, to date, like, what are the impacts of having of of that additional 8-10 percentage points going to these programs? What’s the impact on a what a homeowner? Like, what are they thinking? Like, how does does this really matter to me?
12:15.83
Jon
The government seems to just borrow whatever they want, and it doesn’t really matter.
12:19.95
Doug Elmendorf
Well, so as you say, if if you or I and our families try to keep borrowing money, um the lenders are going to say, wait a second, we just don’t believe that Elmendorf and Schwabisch are really going to pay this back.
12:25.86
Jon
Right.
12:31.19
Jon
Right.
12:31.87
Doug Elmendorf
Now, the U.S. government’s in a better position um because the country is fundamentally so strong economically and because it will last forever and the government will last forever.
12:44.32
Doug Elmendorf
um Lenders have had a lot of confidence that the U.S. government will ultimately ah pay back what they owe.
12:50.22
Jon
Mm hmm.
12:50.30
Doug Elmendorf
And in fact, today, interest rates paid by the government um are about the same as they were before the financial crisis, so 20 years ago, say, um even though our debt is three times as large relative to the size of the economy.
13:04.74
Doug Elmendorf
So lenders are still pretty comfortable lending money to the US government. um But that can’t go on forever. Eventually, as debt rises and it keeps rising relative to the size of the economy, lenders will get more spooked and will start paying higher and higher rates.
13:19.92
Doug Elmendorf
But also, you don’t want it to go on forever, even if it could, because that’s money that could be used to pay for the programs and services that we care about today. So ultimately, we do have to make choices about this.
13:33.94
Doug Elmendorf
And people care. I know they care about the choice. They care about the benefits they receive and they care about the taxes they pay. I think the biggest single misunderstanding is the view that all this money goes into Washington and gets kind of consumed in Washington by bureaucrats.
13:50.27
Doug Elmendorf
um and doesn’t find its way back out there. And as we you and I know from looking at the CPO data, and in fact, most of the money just comes into a government bank account and is paid out in checks to beneficiaries or contractors all around the country.
14:02.30
Jon
Yeah.
14:05.97
Doug Elmendorf
And so we may have a government that is too big for some purposes. That’s what we can debate. That’s not where the money lies.
14:13.08
Jon
Yeah.
14:13.14
Doug Elmendorf
And so that’s a But it’s a natural thing, though, for people who should read CBO reports. i mean people have have their lives to lead, right?
14:20.00
Jon
Yeah.
14:20.80
Doug Elmendorf
For a few of us, it sort of counts almost as recreation.
14:20.84
Jon
yeah
14:24.23
Doug Elmendorf
But for most people, like, why would they take this on? They shouldn’t have to.
14:28.53
Jon
yeah
14:28.97
Doug Elmendorf
I don’t blame people for not knowing they shouldn’t study economics. They’re doing what they do. um but that But that does mean that our leaders are important, that people need to have members of Congress, um presidents, vice presidents,
14:45.03
Doug Elmendorf
And at the state level and local level, governors, mayors, legislature, city councils, communicating with them honestly about the the choices and and the trade-offs.
14:54.93
Jon
Yeah. um You mentioned being ah reading CBO reports for fun, which I admit I may have done a couple of times in the past. And so want to switch gears for a moment and talk about um federal data statistical agencies.
15:11.18
Jon
So you ah you’re now at Harvard, obviously, ah just for folks who aren’t aware, you were at Treasury Department, Council of Economic Advisers, Federal Reserve Board, ah led the CBO for eight years.
15:22.72
Jon
Is that right?
15:22.94
Doug Elmendorf
Six.
15:23.69
Jon
Six years. Six years.
15:24.23
Doug Elmendorf
like
15:24.97
Jon
um So I wanted to ask to give folks a sense, you know, how important is the independence of, of these, of particular agencies? You know, some of them have obviously roles supporting certain parties or the president, but, but for, for a lot of the organization, the agencies that you’ve worked at, how, how important is the independence of the agencies? And, you know, do you have, ah you know, any thoughts that you have on some of the attacks that, you know, CBO, OMB census have been getting over the last,
15:56.05
Jon
Well, not just nine months, but, you know, years.
15:58.61
Doug Elmendorf
Yeah, thank you, John. This is a great topic. I think there’s an inevitable tension in the way the government works. So on one hand, if you ask people, when we elect a president, should that president be able to tell people in the executive branch what to do?
16:12.91
Doug Elmendorf
And the answer seems like it ought to be yes. That’s what it means to have elected the person to lead the executive branch. They get to lead it. But at the same time, it turns out as a practical matter, it is very important for a country that the president not be able to dictate everything that the government does.
16:31.60
Doug Elmendorf
The way to have a rule of law in a country is that the president also has to follow the law. And that means then that the people who are bringing lawsuits on behalf of the government, who are representing the US government in court, ought to be somewhat independent and bringing their own legal judgments.
16:49.56
Doug Elmendorf
If you want to have good data about how the economy is performing, Whether that’s good or bad for the people currently in power, you to have statistical agencies that are generating data without being told what it should show.
17:06.73
Doug Elmendorf
you want to have good decision making, you need to have objective analysis like that done at CBO about the possible effects of different choices without that analysis being actually dictated
17:16.10
Jon
Mm-hmm.
17:20.23
Doug Elmendorf
by whoever has the majority in the House or the Senate at that point in time. So I’m not a um constitutional lawyer, and I can’t tell you what the Constitution says, but the evidence is very clear, and I think the intuition is clear, that we need to have important parts of the government that can be influenced in their overall direction over time by our duly elected leaders, but can’t be controlled on a day-to-day basis that way.
17:48.70
Jon
who
17:48.72
Doug Elmendorf
and The evidence comes from looking at countries over time, the countries is where the data are under the influence of the person in charge. Data tend to look pretty good, but people were trying to make actual business decisions or household decisions or government decisions, need to find some other private secret sources of data.
18:09.80
Doug Elmendorf
That’s just not an efficient way to organize the country.
18:14.01
Jon
yeah
18:14.14
Doug Elmendorf
And the people who are trying to make contracts, sign contracts or make investments need to trust that those investments will stand up unless they really are against the law and not just against the wishes of whoever is in political power at the moment.
18:29.74
Doug Elmendorf
And that means that they need to believe that the government won’t just take their investments away. And if you start knocking that down, that will over time have a much bigger negative effect in our economy than many of the more ah individual policies that get a lot of attention.
18:35.49
Jon
e
18:46.49
Jon
e Can you give us a little kind of behind the scenes, a taste of the behind the scenes of you’re in any of those roles, treasury, where you know ah lots lots of places you’ve worked, what are the discussions or conversations like between heads of different agencies?
19:09.04
Jon
Like as as director of CBO, would you talk to OMB and talk to CRS and BLS? And you know what were those, how would you have those conversations specifically about you know data and and getting things out the door that people could understand, especially obviously you know folks on the Hill?
19:25.16
Doug Elmendorf
I was very careful not to call the leaders of other agencies if I could help it.
19:31.60
Jon
Yeah.
19:34.42
Doug Elmendorf
So I never called the director of the Office of Management Budget. And I think I was only called once or twice. And I did that precisely because of a worry that people would perceive that kind of call even if it was on a very technical accounting matter as some sort of political collaboration.
19:53.33
Jon
yeah
19:57.79
Doug Elmendorf
And the striking thing for me when I was being interviewed to be director of CBO in late 2008, I had friends who were going into the um new Obama administration.
20:08.96
Doug Elmendorf
And the people interviewing me from the Congress wanted to be sure that I was not going to be talking, working with those people. but instead understood the jobs that worked for the Congress. and That question came as hard from the Democratic staff members as from the Republican staff members.
20:25.69
Doug Elmendorf
The Democratic staff members expected to work in some ways with the administration, but they viewed themselves as working for an independent branch of government. Article 1 of the Constitution, as people often said,
20:37.76
Jon
yeah
20:38.20
Doug Elmendorf
And they wanted to be sure that I was going to take that seriously, which I did, of course. So I was very careful not to reach out. Now, I think analysts at CBO would talk with their counterparts at OMB or at the various executive agencies to learn what was happening in the government.
20:53.22
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
20:53.47
Doug Elmendorf
You may remember Bob Sunshine, the longtime person at CBO, the deputy director, when I was there, used to say the most important tool analysts had was the telephone. Because you could call somebody who actually was watching what was happening on the ground in some program in something other part of the budget and learn about it.
21:12.00
Doug Elmendorf
But that was deliberately kept at a very sort of analyst to analyst level, very technical, not involving the director in any way.
21:20.07
Jon
Right. So with these challenges to data, um you had mentioned that investors, homeowners, businesses, they might need to and they have in other countries turned to other sources.
21:36.22
Jon
Do you see a future where the, and and let’s let’s assume we get back to a kind of a steady state um where we have, ah you know, BLS administrators not not fired for, for,
21:51.47
Jon
we’ll we’ll call it cause, but we’ll we’ll put that in quotes. Do you see a future where there’s more private sector data being brought to bear and sort of processed through the federal government and then you know kind of released in that more government objective companion to the public data that they collect?
22:13.15
Doug Elmendorf
Well, I think that private data should be used more in constructing government statistics than is the case so far.
22:17.16
Jon
Hmm.
22:20.94
Jon
Hmm.
22:21.08
Doug Elmendorf
um There’s a lot of private data collection going on, a lot more than was a few decades or a decade even ago. i think the government agencies have not taken up that much.
22:32.24
Doug Elmendorf
We need to fund the agencies. If we’re serious about this business, it’s independence for the agencies, but also enough funding to do the hard technical work. And I think with sufficient funding, they would and should bring more private data to bear.
22:48.51
Jon
Mm-hmm.
22:48.54
Doug Elmendorf
But people need to recognize that the private data we have that exist today um are often benchmarked to the official government data.
22:48.65
Jon
Hmm.
22:58.99
Doug Elmendorf
And so the private data can can provide sometimes faster information, but it’s not generally as systematic, as comprehensive. as statistically grounded as the government data.
23:09.95
Doug Elmendorf
So you talk to people making, putting together a private sector datasets, they often say they need the government statistics to do their own work.
23:19.38
Jon
So let me um let let me sort of ah finish this up with a question about your current role where you’ve been since leaving CBO more or less at at Harvard.
23:31.24
Jon
What do you see policy students or what has the change been in the in the policy students? What are they talking about? What are they worried about? what are Where do they see themselves now that maybe was different a few years ago when people would come into the to the program?
23:48.91
Doug Elmendorf
um Well, I think our students are fired up to make a positive difference in the world.
23:55.50
Jon
Yeah.
23:55.85
Doug Elmendorf
And they bring incredible talent and energy and dedication. And part of why I’m optimistic about the future is working with our students.
24:09.10
Doug Elmendorf
um I do think they are concerned, practically speaking, about where they can get work. um And the fact that a whole lot of people who work with the federal government and particularly recently hired people um were thrown out of their jobs this year
24:25.04
Jon
yeah
24:25.43
Doug Elmendorf
um is disturbing to today’s people yeah today’s students who want to go into government. um And it’s not that they expect that government jobs are ah birthright of theirs in any sense at all.
24:41.66
Doug Elmendorf
but they want at least some confidence that if they are offered a job and accept it, that they won’t be um dismissed out of hand.
24:50.67
Jon
Right.
24:50.92
Doug Elmendorf
And the fact that the government’s now had rehire some of the people who’ve been dismissed just makes the whole thing look even worse as a sort of chaotic mess.
24:54.33
Jon
Yeah.
24:58.25
Jon
Mm-hmm.
25:01.33
Jon
Hmm.
25:01.40
Doug Elmendorf
Now, partly that’s offset by a lot of interest, growing interest, I think, in state governments, local governments. um which do incredibly important work, right?
25:10.82
Jon
Yeah.
25:10.91
Doug Elmendorf
You and I have tended to be federal government focused. um And I think people tend to be in some ways, but I think maybe are too much that way. And I think our students are actually recalibrating correctly to understand how much important
25:20.51
Jon
yeah
25:26.65
Doug Elmendorf
how many important decisions are being taken in Albany and Sacramento and Austin and so on. And that’s great to see.
25:37.40
Jon
yeah
25:38.13
Doug Elmendorf
um But I think we need to find a way to put our smart, energetic ah people committed to public, young people committed to public service to work in public service.
25:50.13
Jon
Yeah.
25:50.97
Doug Elmendorf
for us.
25:51.13
Jon
Mm hmm. Yeah.
25:51.80
Doug Elmendorf
And the government should be actively trying to recruit, not just the students of Kennedy School, of course, but but people young people who, and older people, who have decided they want to commit themselves to public purpose.
26:04.11
Doug Elmendorf
That’s so valuable, and there’s so much talent there that we need to put to work.
26:04.13
Jon
Mm hmm.
26:08.19
Doug Elmendorf
And again, in in a big government or a small government, but the government that attracts good people and does its work effectively.
26:17.45
Jon
Yeah. Well, on that note, on the optimistic note, the Doug Elmendorf optimism. ah Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show. um We’ll see what happens in the next 24, 48 hours, ah but appreciate you taking the time chat with me.
26:31.03
Doug Elmendorf
Thank you for having me, John. It’s always good to talk with you.