Interview transcript

Eric White Loren, thank you so much for joining us.

Loren DeJonge Schulman Eric, I am so excited to be here. This is the key question to me that we should all be thinking about and answering, certainly on a regular basis, but most urgently now, of rethinking what it is we want to design government around, and how can we get there.

Eric White Alright, so let’s back up a little bit and just go to the project itself. How did this all come about? And what were you all hoping to obtain from it? And are you finding that you’re getting some good ideas for that future government?

Loren DeJonge Schulman This project came about as I was leaving government and recognized that, while we got a tremendous amount done in the Biden administration, there were a lot of things left on the table that I just realized we were not thinking big enough [about]. We were doing incremental change around the margins because that’s all that we thought was possible in some absolutely critical areas. Since then, we have seen the Trump administration come in and do some pretty significant, radical transformations of government. At the same time, we are looking at the advent of artificial intelligence, the enormous challenge of climate change and so many more big trends that are shaping how we think about governments. So I wanted to step back and say, like, all right, if all of this is happening anyway; if we could step back and say, how might we redesign government in the future to what we want it to be? Not just based on where it is today and how we make changes on the margins, but around a set of principles that work for us as Americans, how would we get both? What would that look like? What would it look like in practice? And then also what are the ingredients that help us get there? And so with a project that I started with the Federation of American Scientists, we did a series of exercises over the summer. It started with just that core question, everybody sitting in a room closing their eyes and saying, if you could design government around one thing by 2050, what would that be and what change would you want that to bring about? And we use that visioning exercise to then go much deeper on not only what would that government deliver and how, and how would that different than today, but really critically. What are the ingredients that we need to help us get there? Not just magically, we snap our fingers and it comes about, but what are the processes, the management ingredients, the organizations, the institutions that make that possible?

Eric White All right, so you host this discussion group and it included up to 50 participants. Who was involved? And then we can kind of get into what was the process like, and then we can get into those ingredients that they did come up with.

Loren DeJonge Schulman Absolutely. So I lucked out by having a lot of people who are very passionate about the question, which to me was more important than having people who were specifically experts on the nitty gritty. But we had anywhere between people who’ve been thinking about government reform for their entire careers — whether that be around workforce issues, procurement, institutional design — to people who have been on the front lines of service delivery, thinking about how we do better disaster response or veterans benefits for Americans, to people who are themselves policy experts or organizers who have been thinking about how to bring better outcomes to their communities. I really wanted to make this to be a diverse group who weren’t just going to think in traditional increments like, well, let’s make government more digital, which is great, don’t get me wrong, or let’s make government hiring better. All of those are great things. But I wanted to shift the conversation around, if government was designed on a particular value, a principle, an organizing factor that drove everything — how we buy, how we hire, how we deliver for Americans, that our relationships and our communication strategy with Americans, what would that look like? And really importantly, what trade-offs would that require? Because it’s a really easy — some of us are natural optimists, some of us are natural pessimists. It’s really easy to think, my idea will just make everything better. But almost certainly, it’s going to come with trade-offs associated with it, and designing around those is that next level of criticality in terms of this whole process.

Eric White Yeah, I got to say, you know, reading through the first summary that you all put out, [as] somebody who covers this, [there’s] not a lot of Gov speak, which can be a lot — which can be almost as bad as corporate speak. Very plain language. It wasn’t hard to understand. So kudos to that and breaking things down and coming up with a group that, like you said, is sort is knowledgeable, but not too far into the weeds. So let’s do that here. Let’s get into some of the ingredients that you all came up with, because that was one of my surprises, that you’re thinking of an otherworldly future government. This is all stuff that is perfectly attainable and isn’t going to require some major new innovation. That was at least my takeaway. I’m interested to hear what you have to say.

Loren DeJonge Schulman That was so striking to me as well. So we had over a few different workshops, we had groups that were thinking about, what if we design around abundance? What if we designed around equity or dignity? What if we were very place-based or focused on burden reduction? They had many different models and all have really different ways that they went about the challenge. Afterwards I did the usual researcher thing, [asking] what are the common themes we found throughout? What is distinct? And What was really striking to me is that despite them going off in really radically different directions, a lot of the ingredients that they came up with that they said were crucial to the success of their models were both common — and I’ll talk about those in a second — but also things that you look around today and say like, all right, that fits into my model today too. That said, a few things stood out to me. One is that even if government in 2050 is just radically different and there’s many different possibilities to get there, we can and should start working towards that. Like, the design of government  — it may be radically different at that point in time — has a lot of commonalities with the specifics that we may want to pursue today. So those are some of those common ingredients, things that are going to be very familiar to your listeners. So in terms of — [I’ll] focus on talent — you need a workforce that is more flexible, where we are able to bring in different forms of talent on a different basis according to the needs of government. You need to be able to have different sorts of skillsets and roles in government, whether that be less oriented towards compliance or legal focuses and much more oriented towards delivery, community engagement, or design. In terms of procurement, there’s a lot of interesting commonalities around wanting to make sure that we had specific kinds of talent and resources and capacities in-house in the federal government in order to allow more flexibility in terms of how that operated. And to be able to do so with public value in mind, and moving more towards outcomes-based contracting rather than some of the models that we see today. No surprise, [there was] a lot of interest in having better data, not only improving data collection, but having it be more seamlessly and securely accessible across problem sets. And that data was not just sitting in a silo somewhere, that it was able to deliver better feedback loops to policymakers to know, is what we’re doing actually working overall. And on service delivery, all of my former customer experience colleagues will recognize a lot of these ingredients. People thought that the services designed by the federal government need to be far more frictionless, proactive, and available immediately for people who are in need. There could be more one-stop shops where people are able to solve particular challenges on one website or one consultation rather than having to deal with multiple agencies. And overall, our entire concept of government should be much more people-focused in terms of not only the design — not just like the website you go to — but in terms of the intent that you are starting with the end of the outcome for people and not just looking at the bureaucracies at hand. So none of those are like completely radical. And actually, I probably would have liked it if the groups got more radical. But it was striking to me how much all of those things are just as relevant to a government that is designed around something completely different than it is today as the government that we see before us at this moment.

Eric White We’re speaking with Loren DeJonge Schulman, senior advisor for government capacity at the Federation of American Scientists. One of my main takeaways from all of this as well was the focus on having more in-house services rather than relying on contractors. And that would actually probably fix a lot of the things that you mentioned, you know, having a one-stop shop, having more consistency and customer experience. This is a chicken-under-the-egg kind of thing, though, right? I mean, which couldn’t come first? Can you build a system within the government without relying on several different contractors that are going to give you a sort of a hodgepodge sort of mix of services? Or do you have to rely on them first to help create that one-stop shop and you know all government entities?

Loren DeJonge Schulman This is a great question, and I think it comes back to what I was wanting to relentlessly seek after in these workshops, but also [what] I would love all Americans to be able to think through is, what is it we genuinely want government and uniquely government to deliver and provide for us? Where the government is the one who is generating the value, that is understanding and building the process and that is in charge of making sure that it delivers effectively for Americans. That doesn’t mean that procurement or partnership doesn’t exist. It’s absolutely vital. But it’s more thinking about — it is more valuable for us to have a public orientation, [an] outcomes focus, a public sector mindset behind certain functions versus ones that are going to be more transient, short-term or not-as-consistently-necessary for public services. And that doesn’t happen — exactly as you say — that doesn’t happen overnight. You have to start small or start with specific areas. You’ve seen this in previous administrations and thinking about how to integrate digital services into the federal government, to be able to serve better as integrators and designers and technologists for federal systems. There may be other functions that we want to think about more actively in terms of, where does it make sense to have government be the owner and driver and deliverer versus partnering or relying on contractors on the outside? There’s transitions with that, and it’s also the sort of thing that may shift over time, but it comes back to this question of where is it that we want government to be responsible and accountable and have the internal skills to be able to know and manage these challenges versus they can reasonably rely on partners on the outside.

Eric White All right, so let’s zero in on one particular thing hanging over all this, and that’s the advent of AI. It’s here, whether any of us want it or not. And supposedly, it will make things more efficient and easier. That remains to be seen. But what is the role that you see it playing overall in government services? I swear, if you tell me I have to talk to another chatbot, I’m not going to be happy.

Loren DeJonge Schulman [S]omething critical to understand for all of us is that … absolutely, just like any other kind of software advancement, artificial intelligence is going to be a part of how we manage government and how citizens interact with government and how services are delivered and designed in the future. We need to have a better sense of where we are both comfortable with that, what are the values and norms associated with it, and where we’re finding actual improvements for outcomes. And that requires some comfort with experimentation, piloting, and testing things out that government is not always great at. So it’s gonna have to get more comfortable with seeing, where does this work, where does it not work. I think there’s a lot of potential in artificial intelligence being able to take on functions that may be more rote and have potential for automation. Where I think that we want to be cautious is making sure that we are able to preserve public service, public servants. In that outcome, citizen, American-focused, people-focused mindset where AI may not be able to best implement, or AI may not be able to protect the rights and norms that we want to be associated with how we deliver government. It can be a great tool for burden reduction. It could be a tool for being able to augment our workforce and free up a lot of the time that we want to devoted to better things. But I also think it requires us being very purposeful around — coming back to this question of what government does versus what it doesn’t — what is it we want public servants to take the lead on versus where we are comfortable with AI taking a burden away? I think that is a great conversation to be able to have, probably not with a chatbot, but maybe to consult them would be interesting to see.

Eric White Yeah, did the folks involved kind of take into consideration what the attitudes and feelings would be of the governed people in the future? You know, you talk about increased trust. A lot of people have a lot of distrust in AI right now. That probably will change as things progress and more and more folks get comfortable with it. I mean, I’m just curious if that came into play as you all were focusing on what people will actually desire from the government in the future as well.

Loren DeJonge Schulman Absolutely. So across all of the models that we generated — and they are summarized in a more recent publication that came out this morning, “Blue sky Thinking to Reimagine Government” — across all of them, a big part of our work was talking about, what are … the best possible world[s] associated with this, but also what’s the worst possible version of this where things have gone terribly wrong? We have designed around abundance or AI or burden reduction, and we realized, no, actually, incentives have gone about it the wrong way. We’ve also used that as an opportunity to think through first, second and third order effects of, what are the positive ones that may be associated with this sort of design model, but also potentially what are some of the negative ones or the ones that are not coming as naturally to us. We did that with the intent of trying to better understand the trade-offs associated with these models and also to try to think about what are they guard rails that we would want to set up if we worked towards designing around these goals. What’s the talent we would need to bring in in order to preserve the best possible versions? And how do we structure some of these management and operational ingredients that we’re talking about such that the intent of these design functions are preserved and we don’t kind of move into more of a compliance model where we’re trying to seek better outcomes. So you asked exactly the right question. In all of the models where people are thinking about different kinds of use of AI or data integration — and so the consequences they imagined were… If this goes wrong, then Americans will rightly question whether or not government is in place to secure their data privately, to manage their security, and to trust that government is the best integrator of this. So having those sorts of considerations up front, but doing so in a way that is both outcome-focused rather than compliance-focused, is going to be critical to any kind of redesign initiative.

Eric White Looking towards the future of your futurist project, what is it that you all have in mind? Right now, like I said, I’ve only seen the very broad strokes that you painted out for us. What are you looking to do with this information that you’ve obtained and any other future events that you have coming up or anything like that.

Loren DeJonge Schulman I think the biggest thing I’m excited about is expanding the conversation. We had a wonderful series of events over the summer. I wanna be able to take the conversation of what is it that we want from government … and broaden that to different audiences outside of D.C., whether that be students, folks around the country, community groups, organizers, and others, to be able drive a better conversation. Instead of what it is that we don’t like about government today, what bothers us, what’s annoying, to what is it we want instead? So that’s the next era of this. But then the second piece will be very critically, all those building blocks that we talked about that are common for those 2050 visions, we’re gonna be working at FAS with our partners across the ecosystem to help make those more in reality today, whether that be talent or digital services or more burden reduction in government services. We can start that and are starting that at this moment, no matter what that government looks like in 2050, we have the ability to make progress today.

Eric White And I want to finish up here by kind of bringing the focus back to you yourself. You were in government, you saw how the sausage was made. Now you’re on the outside kind of taking a more observational approach. Are you optimistic? Should we be optimistic here, Loren? you know, a lot of the stories that I get to report on daily are, you know, Inspector General reports on government failures. What is there to be hopeful for?

Loren DeJonge Schulman I think there are two things that I’m hopeful about. One is that I think there’s an entire generation of leaders who are excited to look at the potential of government as a deliverer of opportunity and a manager of risk that nobody else can — and it’s less that those leaders didn’t exist before and more that so many of us are seeing this like this is the moment that we need to be able to take this challenge on. The second thing I’m excited about is for all the changes that have taken place in government over the last nine months. It’s made Americans much more aware of what government does in their day-to-day lives, what it doesn’t do, and hopefully gotten them to think more about this question that drives me, which is, what is it they actually want out of it? … There’s been some challenges over the last several months, I want to use that as an opportunity to get a better national conversation going. That gives me hope.

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