How Tony Evers could make government work
Congratulations, Tony Evers. You just won the Wisconsin governor’s race. You promised to “focus on solving problems” and to “invest in our schools, grow the economy and rebuild the middle class.” And now you have to deliver. We have a suggestion: Make Wisconsin a leader among the states in results-focused, evidence-based government.
We’re not saying that new policies and reforms won’t be important, but with the opposing party controlling the Legislature, passing new legislation is likely to prove contentious. Instead, the best way for you to produce better results and taxpayer value for people in Wisconsin would be to focus on strengthening the performance of state agencies. In other words, make existing programs and policies work better.
To do that, you should first identify your top 10 priority areas. In fact, you should identify them now, before taking office.
Those priorities might relate to
education, the state economy, the economic well-being of families, veterans’ homelessness, opioid addiction, health, and clean air and water. One priority could even focus on your call for greater civility, as measured by the share of Wisconsinites who believe their state embodies the values of respect and dignity for all.
Second, you should create a structure of accountability, with cross-agency teams responsible for coordinating efforts in each priority area and for achieving concrete results. The teams should also create learning agendas that identify priority research and evaluation questions related to each priority so that evidence-building strategies can be focused on the most important issues.
Third, you should make evidence and innovation key themes of your administration. That could include launching pilot projects to test and evaluate new policy approaches or using low-cost rapid experimentation (what the private sector calls “A/B tests”) to try out customer-service improvements within programs.
It could also include creating innovative partnerships with local governments and university researchers to design and implement more effective programs — the kind of efforts that the Kettl Commission called for almost two decades ago.
Finally, you should hold regular performance reviews, including monthly meetings on your top priorities that bring together the teams responsible for producing results. The meetings, led by a senior member of your staff, would ensure accountability for results, promote real-time discussions of what’s working and what’s not, and create opportunities to think strategically across programs. The meetings would send a clear signal to the executive branch that achieving meaningful progress on your administration’s priorities is urgent and important.
Our approach could draw on best practices used by other states. In 2015, for example, Colorado set a goal to ensure that at least 95 percent of applications for food assistance were processed in a timely manner. When the goal was set, no counties were achieving that standard consistently. The effort’s focused, data-driven strategy — including regular performance reviews — led to significant improvements: By 2017, all counties were meeting the goal. Examples like this underscore that making government work better means making people’s lives better.
More broadly, the approach we recommend would strengthen a culture of learning and continuous improvement within Wisconsin state government. That type of culture is rooted in humility and the acknowledgment that, in many areas of public policy, we have more questions than answers about what works. That means we need to keep building rigorous, credible evidence to inform future decisions. We also need better ways of communicating with citizens about the results that government produces for them.
You won the majority of votes in part because of your life-long commitment to education. Who better to lead the effort to strengthen a culture of learning and improvement within Wisconsin state government? The approach we suggest would be a focused effort to produce improved results and cost-effectiveness. It would also send a valuable message to the nation: Check out the Badger State, a place leading the way in building a culture of government that works for its citizens.
Andrew Feldman, a Milwaukee native, is a director in the public-sector practice at Grant Thornton. He was a special adviser on the evidence team at the White House Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration and also served as a senior policy adviser in the office of Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle.
Donald Kettl is a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and the former dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He taught at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UWMadison for 14 years. He chaired two gubernatorial blue-ribbon commissions for the Wisconsin state government.