Three Principles for Running a White House Office
Tom Kalil and his famous whiteboard.
Today’s guest is a special one for Statecraft: Tom Kalil gave me the idea for this newsletter back in 2023. Tom has a special gift for formalizing implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge, and he was the one who initially suggested that we conduct exit interviews with administration officials to capture their insights the moment they were free to speak.
Some background on Tom: After a career in public policy, Tom served as Deputy Director for Policy in the Obama administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The OSTP is a department in the Executive Office of the President, and the head of OSTP serves as the president’s Science Advisor. Tom was also the Senior Advisor for Science, Technology, and Innovation for the National Economic Council (NEC). Since then, he’s supported science and tech innovation as Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures, and now does the same as CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy.
The OSTP has relatively little formal authority; its power is mainly advisory. But Tom’s team was remarkably effective under President Obama. The team developed a rich set of mottos and maxims, which were kept on the whiteboard (see below) of Tom’s deputy Kumar Garg. In our conversation, we discuss three of these mottos for working with people:
Three Kalil mottos:
“People never follow up.”
“Talk to who owns the paper.”
“If you want people to do something, make it easy.”
We spoke to the head of Trump’s OSTP, Michael Kratsios, a few months ago. That conversation is here:
Thanks to my colleague Beez for her judicious transcript edits.
#1: People never follow up.
Here’s one of the failure modes that I saw: the White House would have a meeting with someone and assume that progress was going to be made. That person would try to follow up, but run into some obstacle, and wouldn’t tell us — so we’d be left blissfully thinking that progress was being made. So if an agency just hears from the White House once about something, they might say, “Oh, this isn't a priority.”
How do you make that a practice? Was it just about scheduling the next few times you'll be checking in?
Save plenty of time in the meeting for, “Do we agree on what the very next step is?”
Does that person feel comfortable? Are you telegraphing to them, “Hey, if for whatever reason you're having problems on your end, please contact me?”
And then, if you don't hear from them, reach out and say, “Hey, I just wanted to check in on the thing that we discussed. Is that something that you were able to make progress on? If not, is there something that I can do to be helpful?”
#2: Who owns the paper?
People would ask me, “How did you get this or that line in the State of the Union address?” And I would say, “I talked to the White House speechwriter.”
It's like when someone asked Sherlock Holmes, “How did you make this deduction?” And then people are disappointed, because it seems trivial, but the hard part was developing the relationship with the White House speechwriter.
The broader point is that policymakers do things with words in the same way that when a priest says, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” he has literally changed the state of affairs in the world through what philosophers call a speech act. That is often the way policy works; you have to write multiple types of documents.
One type of document frames and makes a decision, and another is a document that implements that decision. These documents have different names, depending on who signs off on them. So when the president does it, we call it an Executive Order. When Congress does it, we call it legislation. When a regulatory agency does it, we call it a notice of proposed rulemaking. When a funding agency does it, we might call it a Request for Proposal (RFP) or Broad Agency Announcement (BAA).
Often, policy entrepreneurs benefit from asking themselves what document or documents would need to be created or edited in order to frame and make a decision or to implement it. It’s worth asking, “Who has that document on their screen?”
If it’s the policy entrepreneur themselves, that's the best situation. If we're trying to influence the budget, we have to convince the Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) to include something in the president's budget.
Do people often go to solve a problem with someone who does not own the paper?
People will mistake activity for progress. A canonical example of this is when someone comes into the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and says, “I'm interested in this particular area of research, and how science and technology can help solve this problem. I will write a report that identifies the biggest and most important gaps in the federal research portfolio in this area.”
Then they will spend a lot of time bringing everyone together to organize workshops, draft a report, get interagency clearance for that report, and put it on the Internet.
What happens next? I always used to insist that members of my team think of the end at the beginning. There might be some value to having a research agenda. I'm not saying don't do that. But I'm saying that the existence of that publication by itself does not necessarily solve a problem, just because the report exists.
#3: If you want people to do something, make it easy.
One of the things we did was recruit people for other organizations. Let's say that there was something that I wanted an agency to do. We might have asked them, “Do you have someone who is an expert in this particular area, who could work with on this initiative?”
If they said no, we might have said, “Do you have the budget to hire somebody?” And if they said no to that, then we might have said, “If we got you someone for free, would you find them a desk and a phone?”
We’d go down the list: we’d want someone to do something, and we’d want there to be someone in this particular agency working on it. If it turned out that they didn’t have someone, or lacked the ability to recruit and hire someone, then we tried to make it as easy as possible for them to say yes.
Or in my case, if I wanted Dr. Holdren [then-head of OSTP] to do something, I didn't say, “I have this monkey on my back and I want to transfer that monkey from my back to your back. I have this really hard problem. Will you figure out what to do? Will you do it for me?”
Instead, I would say, “Hey, would you be willing to send an email to the Secretary of X if I drafted it for you?” And then he would look at it and add something about the last time they had dinner or whatever. It's like the person who needs a letter of recommendation and is willing to give you the first draft of it.
It required us to understand what different types of constraints organizations were under — what was relatively easy for them to do and what was hard for them to do.
For instance, if you go to the director of DARPA and say, “Wouldn't it be cool if you had an R&D program designed to solve this problem?” The DARPA director would likely say, “Is there someone already at DARPA who could successfully pitch this, and who would be world-class at coming up with the program?” So if you've taken the time to look through the Rolodex first, you're making it easier for the director to sign off.
The key is to have cognitive empathy for that particular person in that organization. You need to know the answers to these questions: What is easy for them to do? What is hard for them to do? Is there anything that you can do or someone else can do to relax whatever constraints they're operating under?
As someone early career (still in college) this is gold.
Is it correct that there is no podcast episode associated with this? Because I will listen to anything with Kalil, but nothing has appeared in my feed.