Statecraft

 At the end of January, the Trump administration pushed out a top Treasury department official after he refused to give DOGE access to the government's vast payment system. We're talking to him today. It's one of his first public interviews since leaving the civil service.David Lebryk was the highest ranking civil servant in the Treasury Department, and one of the most senior civil servants in the federal government. He was responsible for overseeing the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which. Puts out more than 90% of federal payments every year, more than a billion transactions, more than $5 trillion.One note for listeners: Lebryk did not want to go into the blow by blow of his leaving the administration early this year. Instead, we talk about a bunch of other things that I think you'll find highly relevant, how the Bureau of the Fiscal Service works, how it should work, and why Lebryk thinks DOGE’s plans for it won't work out the way they intend. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today we talked to Alex Jutca; he leads analytics and technology at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, where his team’s mission is to build the country’s leading R&D lab for local government. Allegheny County is known for having the best integrated data of any state and local system in the country, and they’ve applied it effectively, like using predictive algorithms in child welfare.We discussed:* What issues are consistent across Pittsburgh, Philly, and Baltimore?* How does a local CPS actually work?* When shouldn’t you involuntarily commit people with severe mental disorders?* Why has anti-addiction drug development stalled out? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today’s guest is Narayan Subramanian. Under the Biden administration, he was a legal advisor, and then an advisor to the Secretary at the Department of Energy (DOE). Later, he was the Director for Energy Transition at the White House National Security Council.We’ve talked to previous guests about how to ensure government money flows fast and effectively. At the DOE, Subramanian helped ensure that a big influx of money could best be used to support innovative energy projects. If you’ve followed Statecraft a while, you know we’re very interested in how to actually deploy taxpayer dollars most effectively. Narayan played a key role in making sure that DOE could do just that.We Discuss:* How the DOE took its modern form* Why don’t tools for funding R&D work for funding deployment?* Does the federal interest in IP stop banks from supporting new tech?* What kinds of technologies can you support with “other transactions authority”?The full transcript is available at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today’s guest is Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He spent two years as a police officer in Baltimore. I asked him to come on and talk about his new book, Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. It’s one of my favorite books I’ve read this year (and it was one of my three book recommendations on Ezra Klein’s show last week).Peter spoke with hundreds of police officers and NYC officials to understand and describe exactly how the city’s leaders in the early 1990s managed to drive down crime so successfully.We discussed:* How bad did things get in the 1970s?* Why did processing an arrest take so long?* What did Bill Bratton and other key leaders do differently?* How did police get rid of the squeegee men?I’ve included my reading list at the bottom of this piece. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious transcript edits.Subscribe for one new interview a week.Peter, how would you describe yourself?I would say I'm a criminologist: my background is sociology, but I am not in the sociology department. I'm not so big on theory, and sociology has a lot of theory. I was a grad student at Harvard in sociology and worked as a police officer [in Baltimore] and that became my dissertation and first book, Cop in the Hood. I’ve somewhat banked my career on those 20 months in the police department.Not a lot of sociologists spend a couple of years working a police beat.It's generally frowned upon, both for methodological reasons and issues of bias. But there is also an ideological opposition in a lot of academia to policing. It's seen as going to the dark side and something to be condemned, not understood.Sociologists said crime can't go down unless we fix society first. It’s caused by poverty, racism, unemployment, and social and economic factors — they’re called the root causes. But they don't seem to have a great impact on crime, as important as they are. When I'm in grad school, murders dropped 30-40% in New York City. At the same time, Mayor Giuliani is slashing social spending, and poverty is increasing. The whole academic field is just wrong. I thought it an interesting field to get into.We're going to talk about your new book, which is called Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. I had a blast reading it. Tell me about the process of writing it.A lot of this is oral history, basically. But supposedly people don’t like buying books that are called oral histories. It is told entirely from the perspective of police officers who were on the job at the time. I would not pretend I talked to everyone, because there were 30,000+ cops around, but I spoke to many cops and to all the major players involved in the 1990s crime drop in New York City.I was born in the ‘90s, and I had no idea about a crazy statistic you cite: 25% of the entire national crime decline was attributable to New York City's crime decline.In one year, yeah. One of the things people say to diminish the role of policing is that the crime drop happened everywhere — and it did end up happening almost everywhere. But I think that is partly because what happened in New York City was a lot of hard work, but it wasn't that complicated. It was very easy to propagate, and people came to New York to find out what was going on. You could see results, literally in a matter of months.It happened first in New York City. Really, it happened first in the subways and that's interesting, because if crime goes down in the subways [which, at the time, fell under the separate New York City Transit Police] and not in the rest of the city, you say, “What is going on in the subways that is unique?” It was the exact same strategies and leadership that later transformed the NYPD [New York Police Department].Set the scene: What was the state of crime and disorder in New York in the ‘70s and into the ‘80s?Long story short, it was bad. Crime in New York was a big problem from the late ‘60s up to the mid ‘90s, and the ‘70s is when the people who became the leaders started their careers. So these were defining moments. The city was almost bankrupt in 1975 and laid off 5,000 cops; 3,000 for a long period of time. That was arguably the nadir. It scarred the police department and the city.Eventually, the city got its finances in order and came to the realization that “we've got a big crime problem too.” That crime problem really came to a head with crack cocaine. Robberies peaked in New York City in 1980. There were above 100,000 robberies in 1981, and those are just reported robberies. A lot of people get robbed and just say, “It's not worth it to report,” or, “I'm going to work,” or, “Cops aren't going to do anything.” The number of robberies and car thefts was amazingly high. The trauma, the impact on the city and on urban space, and people's perception of fear, all comes from that. If you're afraid of crime, it's high up on the hierarchy of needs.To some extent, those lessons have been lost or forgotten. Last year there were 16,600 [robberies], which is a huge increase from a few years ago, but we're still talking an 85% reduction compared to the worst years. It supposedly wasn't possible. What I wanted to get into in Back from the Brink was the actual mechanisms of the crime drop. I did about fifty formal interviews and hundreds of informal interviews building the story. By and large, people were telling the same story.In 1975, the city almost goes bankrupt. It's cutting costs everywhere, and it lays off more than 5,000 cops, about 20% of the force, in one day. There's not a new police academy class until 1979, four years later. Talk to me about where the NYPD was at that time.They were retrenched, and the cops were demoralized because “This is how the city treats us?” The actual process of laying off the cops itself was just brutal: they went to work, and were told once they got to work that they were no longer cops. “Give me your badge, give me your gun."The city also was dealing with crime, disorder, and racial unrest. The police department was worried about corruption, which was a legacy of the Knapp Commission [which investigated NYPD corruption] and [Frank] Serpico [a whistleblowing officer]. It's an old police adage, that if you don't work, you can't get in trouble. That became very much the standard way of doing things. Keep your head low, stay out of trouble, and you'll collect your paycheck and go home.You talk about the blackout in 1977, when much of the city lost power and you have widespread looting and arson. 13,000 off-duty cops get called in during the emergency, and only about 5,000 show up, which is a remarkable sign of the state of morale.The person in my book who's talking about that is Louis Anemone. He showed up because his neighbor and friend and partner was there, and he's got to help him. It was very much an in-the-foxholes experience. I contrast that with the more recent blackout, in which the city went and had a big block party instead. That is reflective of the change that happened in the city.In the mid-80s you get the crack cocaine epidemic. Talk to me about how police respond.From a political perspective, that era coincided with David Dinkins as [New York City’s first black] mayor. He was universally disliked, to put it mildly, by white and black police officers alike. He was seen as hands off. He was elected in part to improve racial relations in New York City, to mitigate racial strife, but in Crown Heights and Washington Heights, there were riots, and racial relations got worse. He failed at the level he was supposed to be good at. Crime and quality of life were the major issues in that election.Dinkins’s approach to the violence is centered around what they called “community policing.” Will you describe how Dinkins and political leaders in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s thought about policing?This is under Ben Ward, the [NYPD] Commissioner at the time. The mayor appoints the police commissioner — and the buck does stop with the mayor — but the mayor is not actively involved in day-to-day operations. That part does go down to the police department.Community policing was seen as an attempt to improve relations between the police and the community. The real goal was to lessen racial strife and unrest between black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) communities and the NYPD. Going back to the ‘60s, New York had been rocked by continued unrest in neighborhoods like Central Harlem, East New York, and Bushwick. Community policing was seen as saying that police are partly to blame, and we want to improve relations. Some of it was an attempt to get the community more involved in crime fighting.It's tough. It involves a certain rosy view of the community, but that part of the community isn't causing the problems. It avoids the fact there are people who are actively criming and are willing to hurt people who get in their way. Community policing doesn't really address the active criminal element, that is a small part of any community, including high-crime communities.Arrests increased drastically during this era, more than in the ‘90s with broken windows policing. If the idea is to have fewer arrests, it didn't happen in the ‘80s. Some good came out of it, because it did encourage cops to be a bit more active and cops are incentivized by overtime. Arrests were so incredibly time-consuming, which kind of defeated the purpose of community policing. If you made an arrest in that era, there was a good chance you might spend literally 24 hours processing the arrest.Will you describe what goes into that 24 hours?From my experience policing in Baltimore, I knew arrests were time-consuming and paperwork redundant, but I could process a simple arrest in an hour or two. Even a complicated one that involved juveniles and guns and drugs, we're talking six to eight hours.In the ‘80s, Bob Davin, [in the] Transit Police, would say they'd make an

DOGE is the most interesting story in state capacity right now. Yet although we’ve talked around it on Statecraft, I haven’t covered it directly since the beginning of the administration. In part, that’s because of the whirlwind pace of news, but also because of the sense I get in talking to other DOGE watchers, that we’re like blind men feeling different parts of the elephant. And, frankly, because it’s the most polarizing issue in public discourse right now.But we’re far enough into the administration that some things are clear, and I think it’s relevant for Statecraft readers to hear how I’m personally modeling DOGE. We’re also far enough along that it’s worth taking stock of what we expected and forecasted about DOGE, and where we were wrong. So here are 50 thoughts on DOGE, as concisely as possible. You can read the full thing, as always, at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today’s guest is John Lechner, a writer and researcher. He's here today to talk about his new book about the Wagner Group, a Russian state-funded private military group, or PMC. The book is called Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare, and is out March 4th (you can preorder it here). It’s a crazy read, and draws on multiple trips John took to frontlines in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and Mali. As a mutual friend told me, “John knows more about the Wagner Group than anyone not in the Wagner Group.” I asked John to help me better understand how state capacity works, through the lens of private military companies.Some questions I came into our conversation with:* How does a private military company (PMC) work? What’s the bureaucratic structure of a PMC?* How does a successful PMC operate? How does it scale?* How does a state like Russia use a PMC for its own ends (and how do PMCs use states for their own ends)?* How do Russian PMCs like Wagner compare to American PMCs like Blackwater?Read the full transcript of this episode at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Friend-of-the-pod Nick Bagley joined us to explain judicial review: why it's not as confusing as it sounds, and why it's at the center of a political firestorm.Bagley is an expert in administrative law who served as special counsel and chief legal counsel to Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. We've had him on a couple times for conversations on how bureaucracy is breaking government and whether the courts broke environmental review with a recent decision.You can read the full transcript for this conversation and many others at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

What happened in LA last month? On that, basically everyone agrees: devastating wildfires that killed at least 29 people and cost at least $100 billion.But why did those fires burn so intensely for so long? I had my own view, but I don’t follow fires closely. So I talked to Matt Weiner, CEO and founder of Megafire Action.We discuss:* California knows it has a fire problem. Why can’t it control it?* Where does mechanical thinning work, and where doesn’t it?* What tools from the Department of Defense should we be using in firefighting?* Do we need more money to fight fires?* Why do the country’s biggest environmental groups oppose fire mitigation?For the full transcript of this conversation and others, visit www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today I'm talking with Jo Freeman: a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s, a civil rights campaigner, an attendee to every Democratic party convention since 1964, and a political scientist. She’s not the most typical Statecraft guest. But her work on how the two parties work - not just what they believe, but how they operate organizationally - is incredibly insightful. In this conversation, we dig into:* Why do the two parties fight so differently?* What makes someone powerful in each party?* How did the women's movement transform the Democratic Party?* What happened to convention caucuses? Did they stop mattering?* What does it mean when a movement starts "trashing" its own leaders?Reading list:Who You Know Versus Who You Represent: Feminist Influence in the Democratic and Republican PartiesThe Political Culture of the Democratic and Republican PartiesWhy Republican Party Leaders Matter More Than Democratic Ones (by Tanner Greer)Trashing: The Dark Side of SisterhoodThe Tyranny of Structurelessness This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

This is the second in a two-part series with my dad, Diego Ruiz. In the first episode, we discussed his time helping run a political campaign in Nicaragua, and later his time staffing California Representative Chris Cox. Today, we jump ahead to his time as executive director of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during the 2008 financial crisis.In this episode, we discuss:* Why the SEC can’t fund itself* What not to say to congressional appropriators* How the SEC missed the Bernie Madoff scandal* Why it’s so hard to staff up an agency* What agency rulemaking will look like in the futureRead the full transcript at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today's guest is near and dear to my heart. It's my dad, Diego Ruiz. We recorded this in person, and we both had the same cold, which you may be able to hear. At some point, you may also hear my son in the background, which makes three generations of Ruizes on the podcast.Diego has helped win elections in the US and Central America, served as Executive Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), was a senior advisor in the House of Representatives, and was Deputy Chief for Strategy and Policy at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), managing a multidisciplinary “in-house think tank.”In this episode, we discuss:* How to win a congressional election in Miami* What “burrowing in” to the civil service means* How to win a presidential election in communist Nicaragua* How the Sandinistas used Michael Keaton and Mike Tyson to dampen voter turnout* Why the Base Realignment and Closure Commission may be a model for DOGEYou can find the full transcript at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Happy New Year! I went on the American Compass podcast last month to talk to American Compass chief economist Oren Cass about government efficiency, state capacity, and what Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is likely to tackle.We discuss:* Why is it so hard to fire federal employees?* Off-the-wall ways to save government money* The West Coast meets East Coast dynamic in DOGE* The secret to a successful blue ribbon commissionNotes: This interview was originally published here. When used the phrase “fired for cause,” when I should have said “fired for performance.” SMEQA stands for Subject Matter Expert Qualification Assessments. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today, we talk to Jennifer Pahlka and Andrew Greenway about their new paper on state capacity. It’s called “The How We Need Now: A Capacity Agenda for 2025 and Beyond.”We discuss:What is “state capacity?”Why is there fresh interest in the topic in the UK?How did the model of a “government digital service” spread to the US?How do you fix unemployment insurance? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today, we’re diving into everyone’s favorite Statecraft topic: administrative law! The two court cases we’re discussing could have huge ramifications for how we build things in America.We brought three of our favorite administrative law professors together: James Coleman is a professor at the University of Minnesota, Adam White is the Executive Director of the Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University, and Nicholas Bagley is a professor at the University of Michigan and was Chief General Counsel to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.We discussed:* Why the National Environmental Policy Act is a problem* How a small White House office grew to wield power Congress never gave it* Why a seemingly simple environmental case has thrown environmental regulations into doubt* Why D.C. appellate lawyers don’t challenge laws they believe are wrong* The potential for reforming environmental review This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today's interviewee has been my white whale for a while. Edward Luttwak was born in 1942, and since then he's lived a wilder life than anyone I know. From Chairman Mao's funeral to late nights drinking with Putin, Luttwak's seen it all.Timestamps:(00:00) Introduction(1:30) How to stage a coup in the 21st century(8:21) Why Luttwak is responsible for a global decline in coups(16:57) Iran’s real goals in the Middle East(27:30) Why the CIA can’t go undercover or recruit talent(41:11) Staffing Reagan’s presidential transition team(44:03) Why we need more waste at the Pentagon(57:31) How the war in Ukraine will end(1:03:47) China’s great military challenge(1:07:46) Snorkeling in French Polynesia(1:09:48) Working for a Kazakh dictatorFor the full transcript, visit www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Brief intros: Nicholas Bagley was General Counsel to Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Kathy Stack served almost three decades at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Jenny Mattingley also served at the OMB, focusing on hiring reform and workforce efforts.Timestamps:(00:00) Introduction(04:42) “I think all three of you have something to say about the Paperwork Reduction Act.”(12:38) A one-way ratchet(22:16) How to get a new form approved(32:04) Why is there no natural constituency to improve this?(42:14) Inheriting judicial review from the Civil Rights era(59:13) What should be on the new administration’s agenda? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

I’ve been trying to get a conversation with today’s interviewee, Eric Van Gieson, PhD, since March. Van Gieson is a remarkable character, with a crazy CV: more than 25 years of experience in developing medical technology, and stints at multiple federal agencies including DARPA.A lot of people have spilled a lot of ink discussing what went wrong during COVID, but I think what Van Gieson lays out here is close to a comprehensive account of the reasons we blew it, and how not to blow it in the future.We discuss:* Why is the federal “pandemic preparedness” apparatus so sprawling?* Why haven’t we learned from COVID mistakes, or even run reviews on what went wrong?* How would you revamp the federal apparatus to be ready for the next pandemic?* We don’t test whether generic drugs can fight pathogens. Why not??* How did Van Gieson and colleagues ship a flying Ebola hospital in 6 weeks?* How can we make sure DARPA-developed biotech doesn’t end up in the hands of adversaries? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today’s interviewee is Chris Anderson. Anderson’s a former DoD program manager who served in a unique organization called the US Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG). Anderson is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Troika Solutions, a defense consulting firm based in Virginia.  We discussed:The birth of the Asymmetric Warfare GroupWhy American troops in Afghanistan couldn’t strike Taliban operativesWhy the military avoids risky technology, even when it would save livesWhat we’ve learned about drones from UkraineThe difference between drone use in Ukraine and in the Indo-PacificYou can read the full interview transcript and find sources at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

I had the distinct pleasure of hosting Trae Stephens and Michael Kratsios on a panel in San Francisco in September on the topic of “Rebuilding the arsenal of democracy.” Trae Stephens is a general partner at Founders Fund and a Co-Founder of Anduril, a defense tech company that specializes in advanced autonomous systems.Michael Kratsios served as Chief Technology Officer of the United States in the Trump White House. He also served as acting undersecretary of defense, where he was responsible for research and engineering efforts at the Defense Department. These days, he’s managing director of Scale AI.We discussed:* What’s wrong with the defense industrial base?* How can we use tools like the Export-Import Bank to beat China?* Can cutting Chinese tech out of supply chains hurt American companies?* Will we see more tech talent in the next administration?You can subscribe to Statecraft at www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today’s episode is an interview with a colleague of mine at the Institute for Progress. Ben Jones is an economist who focuses on the sources of economic growth in advanced economies, and he’s a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at IFP.We recorded this conversation at the second #EconTwitterIRL Conference last month in Lancaster, PA, which IFP hosted alongside the Economic Innovation Group). The other interview at that conference was excellent too: Cardiff Garcia interviewing Paul Krugman.Jones has served in more than one executive branch role, including as the Senior Economist for Macroeconomics for the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), during the first Obama administration. But what we spent most of our time talking about here was a broader question: What role does federal spending on science play in productivity growth?Timestamps:(00:00) Introduction(2:03) Shadowing Larry Summers at Treasury(3:46) Do national leaders actually affect economic growth?(9:22) Whose job is it in the federal government to think about productivity?(14:12) What market failure is solved by public R&D funding?(19:45) What does the rise of team science mean for young scientists?(32:47) Should we be bearish about the entire scientific enterprise?(51:50) What levers can we pull to increase productivity growth?(43:53) Audience questions This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub