Jennifer Pahlka: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do we have a way of getting Congress to be less passive? I’m hopeful that these various strands of disruption that are happening right now will push them in some direction. I think the challenge is to shape that direction. Certainly, you have something like the Loper Bright decision, which is going to disrupt a lot of the way they have done work. If you really want to write a law, have it passed, and then have it have the impact in the real world that you intended, you can’t really do what you used to do. What that change will look like — it’s a very big question. I don’t have any simple answers, but I do think it’s a moment where you can say, “Look, we have been living in this essentially waterfall world.” The Waterfall process is, you do this thing and then it goes into this stepwise procedure and gets handed off to others. It’s really a one-way trip. It descends now through the hierarchy of the bureaucracy to get implemented. That’s not how stuff that works well in our real lives works. It works in a much more iterative way in which you’re coming back to the intent, checking on how it’s going. It’s more of a quick feedback loop than this long waterfall that descends away from you and away from any control that you have over it. Some element of the change, if it ends up being positive, I think, will be away from a waterfall process into something that’s much more agile, iterative, and closing the feedback loop. I do think that speaks to some of Congress’s anxiety. They are anxious because they feel like the bureaucracy doesn’t do what they told them to do. It’s not a surprise that they don’t because of the structures, but the change that we’re talking about, I think, is really profound. It’s moving from one paradigm that is very, very ingrained in how Congress operates, how the executive branch agencies operate, but also just how everybody thinks. It’s such a profound change, we are going to need a fair amount of disruption to make that change happen. Now, we’re talking in March 2025. To the extent Congress stays passive, that residual authority — where do you want to see that reallocated to? To the executive branch? To the courts? Because a lot of what you write is very critical about the courts. There’s too much of the judiciary, but this is March 2025. Where should that power go?…

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