Jennifer Pahlka: evaluation

Transcript context

…What would be your first target? The discrimination is you’re in charge. We all listen to you. You’re dictator of the bureaucracy. Other than DOD, you can cut something by 50 percent, and we’re all going to do it. My metaphor is basically that we are imbalanced between brake and gas. In any given agency right now, you could talk to someone who’s trying to create something new, stand up a new . . . I’ll talk about the Direct File team for instance. They were building something that was better, that works for people. They did it cheaper. They did it faster than how things normally go. I’ll call them, the go energy. Around them, you have 10 times as much infrastructure, people, rules that are stopping them. That’s the stop energy. I don’t believe we should have no stop energy. I just think that the balance between those two things is way, way off. If you’re going to come in and change and what you want is government to be more effective, go faster, build stuff, and I mean build things in government like direct file, but I also mean enable the building of housing and energy infrastructure and transportation that we desperately need in this country. You’ve got to go identify, where is that stop energy? And how do you reduce or remove that so that you can enable the go energy and the people whose job it is to get the thing done? You have to go do that analysis, or you’re just getting rid of the go energy first. A lot is the New Deal — it happened very quickly. There wasn’t always much analysis behind it. It’s like, “Let’s set up a bunch of things.” A lot of them did not run well at the beginning. I don’t mean that as a criticism. It’s just inevitable, like who’s on the staff? If we’re going to recreate government, doesn’t it have to be at least as chaotic?…

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