The GPRA at 30: Assessing Past and Current Federal Management Initiatives

hello um good afternoon my name is Jim capretta I am a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and I'm very pleased to welcome you to today's virtual event on performance assessment and Improvement efforts within the federal government more specifically we will be looking at Federal and performance Improvement efforts 30 years after the Congress approved the government performance and results act or gipra for those who may be unfamiliar with Gipper it was a groundbreaking measure that put into permanent law the expectation that all federal agencies would develop and update clear strategic plans and performance objectives it also established an annual goal setting and tracking process my guest for this conversation is Robert Shea a co-founder of the government relations firm gov Navigators and an expert on strategies for improving management of federal agencies we are fortunate to have Robert with us today as he has both public and private sector experience relevant to these questions and also understands the significant challenges that have made it difficult to achieve all that was hoped for when gipra was first conceived the plan for today is to have Robert provide some short introductory comments uh and about gipra and the the legacy of that law after Robert finishes uh I will engage him in conversation with questions and perhaps making a few observations myself uh there's certainly plenty to discuss here with about eight to ten minutes left I will turn to a number of audience questions we have received if we do receive them during the course of the event and pose them to Robert so if you would like to have a question considered for this part of the event you have two options you can send a your suggested question by email to jack.rowing at aei.org that is jack.rowing r-o-w-i-n-g at aei.org or alternatively you can send Jack a question via Twitter by using the hashtag ask AEI health okay so on to Robert let me make a few comments about him his career and then we'll turn it over to him for a few minutes Robert has more than 25 years of experience in support of federal policy making and public management initiatives for seven years he helped to lead and implement the management Improvement agenda for the Bush Administration while serving as an associate director for the for management at the Office of Management and budget and that role he was part of the team that implemented numerous changes to improve Federal performance including the part program which we'll talk about today and other Innovations I was pleased to be able to serve with Robert as our time in service at OMB crossed over during those a portion of those years Robert is a fellow and a former chairman of the National Academy for public administration he was also appointed to the commission on evidence-based policy making which made important recommendations for better integration of evidence into policy making prior to starting gov Navigator Robert spent 14 years at Grant Thornton managing various components of its public sector business practice and that role he had extensive contact with management teams at numerous large federal agencies Robert began his Washington career by working for several years in various staff roles in the House and Senate including at the Senate government Affairs governmental Affairs committee um where he got to work with the late Senator Fred Thompson which has oversight of federal management questions and was a source of much of the energy for passing gipra back in 1993. Robert has a law degree from South Texas College of Law and earned his ba in government at Connecticut College so Robert sorry to hold you up I want to get right to you at this point and thank you very much for giving us the time today go ahead and make some initial remarks and after you're done with those I'll I'll I'll jump into our questions Jim I miss our time working together so thanks so much for having me on it's good to be with you thank you and thank you even more for that to overly generous introduction so uh I know you had a hard time finding somebody to talk on this subject but uh it has been something I followed since soon after the law was passed it really represented a seminal moment in government management history for decades oversight entities in the Congress jao were lamenting the lack of real clear outcome goals with which to assess government agency and program success so you know for the first time gpra established the requirement the agencies set long-term outcome oriented goals and Report annually on the extent to which they were accomplishing them and the the implementation law was slow to get started as everyone really understood these Concepts that has matured significantly I would say there's always a balance between you know simply complying with the requirements of a management Improvement effort versus really embracing the spirit of the thing and you can see pockets of agencies some whole agencies have really embraced this others are checking the box or have moved on to different management Improvement initiatives uh but with the government performance and results like modernization act the revision uh that took place uh during the Obama Administration and then the foundations for evidence-based policy making act among others you can really see some of the lessons learned through implementation adopted in law and and and embedded in various regulations and management Improvement efforts that are in place today um so you know if if my major reflection is that the the executive branch Congress have improved their literacy in Performance Management they know the difference between an outcome an output an input and that's really core to all of this we want agencies and programs focused on what outcomes they're trying to accomplish not the activities they're performing but whether or not those activities are contributing to solving some of the country's biggest problems so uh it's something I followed closely I've worked with many agencies on and look forward to this discussion great thank you that's a good way to tee this up and get going on it um let's go back to um your time uh at in the Bush Administration Gipper had been in place for a little bit less than a decade at that point and uh the the new Administration came in and there was a lot of energy around trying to take Concepts and and manage the you know we had an MBA President right President Bush had gotten his MBA so there's a lot of focus on how are we going to manage this fast Enterprise a little better and it wasn't that they set aside Gipper you know per se but there was a lot of focus on their own version of how to do go about this and I want to talk about that for just a minute so when you joined that was when uh the part program was first rolled out for those who don't remember it it was something called the performance assessment rating tool and it was a way of kind of systematizing in a more scorecard kind of a way um the same basic idea of the Gipper is trying to get at but in a more summery version maybe uh it's sort of quick quick look at it questions and um a scoring system and the idea was to try to be able to measure I guess you know different programs against each other based on the score they received how do you well just tell our audience a little bit more about part that time yeah and how do you how do you view it's it's implementation and Legacy so I had worked closely with the Bush campaign and then transition effort to sort of figure out which were the biggest management challenges facing government and with the help of GAO and the oversight committees settled on five major buckets financial management procurement human Capital Management I.T management and performance so those were the five biggest gaps at least From gao's perspective in the executive Branch's management efforts and so when the Bush Administration came in they designed their management agenda along those pillars performance Improvement being one of them the thought was at the time while gpra had Advanced the Performance Management maturity of the government generally we didn't really have adequate information to help make decisions at the program level and so uh the the new Folks at OMB and the career staff huddled to figure out how to crack that nut and arrived at the program assessment rating tool and it was a simple device of 25 questions that attempted to ascertain to what extent do you have a clear vision and Mission and or is your program well designed to accomplish it do you have uh outcome oriented long and short-term goals are you well managed and to what extent do you have data that tells you whether or not you're accomplishing your goals so over a five-year period we assessed every program in the government assigned a rating to you know um I should have reminded myself before this meeting but basically the the lowest ready you get results not demonstrated or ineffective but other programs generally um were you know High performing performing or not yet able to tell so it was very controversial because nobody wanted their programs to be assessed so um starkly objectively uh but over time you did get a body of evidence a first inventory of the government's programs a single collection of the data it had on whether or not it was performing and it also um you know sort of was the Catalyst for things like uh what you see today in the evidence agenda or the the foundations for evidence-based policy making Act but at the time um you know the the whole machine of OMB and the agencies were focused on Gathering the data necessary to answer these key questions about every single program in the in the executive branch and I can't say I run into a lot of people who remember that period fondly but I am proud that um that we really were able to uh accomplish that feat in in a five-year plus period um and and really set the stage for some of the advancements that we're enjoying today what's the follow-on to that I think is to ask a little bit your perspective on maybe this aspect of performance assessment has always been Troublesome and difficult to kind of get at which is integrating this kind of concept into an incentive system basically through the budgeting process um you know the the lament really is that the political process tends to budget and provide funding for programs and agencies almost irrespective of what they're how well they're doing and of course that's due to a maybe a very good reason which is that these are public agencies doing a public purpose and you can't judge them on the same standard that you would judge like a private business which is profitability right so there are other reasons to support something even if maybe it's not working great right there it might just be have an important Mission whatever it is um so the question is can going back to those years my recollection was that Congress wasn't all that enthusiastic either and maybe the fact that part wasn't part of and never was approved by Congress maybe it was part of the reason it was had some challenges also how do you think about this question of of I mean in fact I think we called it at the time integration of performance and budgeting right I mean how do you think about that given all the experience you've had in the last quarter Century trying to look at these questions is that even a feasible possibility or what what could be done to maybe make that work a little better we we did yeoman's efforts to integrate this process into the budget so agencies submitted their part assessment results with their budget justifications to OMB and they were obligated to integrate the information into their budget justification to Congress um you know institutionally speaking you're right that Congress was not on board with the park process um there were some enthusiasts pockets of enthusiasm usually among Republicans appropriators in particular were resistant even hostile to it um we you know we asked agencies to incorporate the part results uh as they were requesting funding for certain uh programs and the appropriators in in one case in particular I remember said you know this that document is our document appropriators see the budget justification as their domain and for us to dictate a format even with something so Noble is trying to use results to justify Investments um they instructed us not to do that um so it that but nonetheless Congress continues to enact reforms that seek to uh lift up the kind of information we were trying to send them but just not in an Institutional way they're they're it's not integrating the Appropriations process not in the created in into the the budget process overall authorizers in fact um are particularly focused on this the oversight committees remain interested and periodically will hold hearings or enact legislation to tweak these efforts uh ultimately um I think you'll you you need a a change in the culture that values to a greater degree rigors evidence of what works and I said at the time though nobody believed me just because you get a failing grade doesn't mean your money should be cut necessarily it may mean you need more resources likewise a high performing program that's not a priority maybe teed up for a cut but you generally see one you want to see money move away from low performing programs and into higher performing ones we were able to eliminate some programs that year after year showed poor results showed under the scrutiny of a rigorous evaluation that they were not only not having the intended impact but in some cases doing more poorly that if they weren't being served by the program so in those cases I think you really are armed with some information that can help you redirect budgets to um to better ends does that help yeah that does um you know one just anecdotally from my own experience working in the budgeting process and then the executive branch there was that that um any information that ever came in that that set a program was not hitting its metrics or its performance goals generally was a reason for the agency to argue they needed more money right so so the idea that they were going to turn around say yeah you're right we're not doing great let's cut our budget that's that was not generally how it how it played out at least internally in the executive branch and and frankly irrespective uh of of the program um little constituencies build up oh yeah around them uh and those constituencies uh so long as they're benefiting in some way from the program don't really care that there's some sort of green eye shade data about ineffectiveness um and and so so those those interests sometimes fight pretty hard to protect programs again notwithstanding their ineffectiveness right uh the other thing I want to get at that it has to do with um just sort of the Revolution that the private sector has gone through in the last three decades with information technology really transforming many Industries and businesses and like Grant Thornton you probably had some window into kind of both a public and a private sector kind of window which is a good perspective maybe to also have for this conversation um but my question really gets to I think sometimes people don't really understand the scale the federal Enterprise and all the things it's doing it's uh I think two two million or so direct employees and you know another six or eight million contractors so you know you're talking maybe 10 million people out there working in and around the federal Enterprise um and you know it just almost every aspect of American life there's some federal agency or program that's intersecting with with what's going on and so it's a big operation out there and many agencies with big I.T budgets too you know trying to serve the public in the various ways they're doing but you know our experience I know you remember it from those days it's a challenge sometimes in the federal Contracting world to do these projects right and one just just objectively looking back looking at the federal government relative to the private sector and how it's changed in the last 30 30 years or so I guess one would say that it seems like private businesses have been more revolutionized by Information Technology changes underway then interacting with the public services in the federal government that would be my impression which is obviously an impression not not hard evidence how do you see that I mean is the federal government fully taking advantage of the possibilities of serving the public better through Information Technology are things that could be streamlined and made easier for people that just are not happening for various reasons how what is your perspective on all that um that's a that's a pretty easy question uh in although although the bottom line is the the private sector is not taking adequate advantage of these Innovations but but but it's true that the federal government is even slower um I will say the advancements that the American people have made uh with the help of the federal government are incredible our you know human health uh innovation in the health industry um the technology advancements you talk about uh you know in Industry over industry in area of our society the contributions that the federal government has made are incredible but um it's also true that they are very slow to adopt reforms and inefficiency waste are still major challenges major barriers to Greater success you know it's much harder to hire someone in the federal government it's an intractable problem that I can't fathom why it hasn't been solved at least to a better degree it's harder still to hold someone accountable for their performance um firing you know the survey every annual survey of federal employees shows that the the employees themselves think that we're not doing a good job holding individuals accountable holding poor performers accountable for their performance but also acquisition is slow uh and you know it's important to note that an industry doing business with the federal government has to guarantee that it's offering the government the lowest price so uh it makes it less attractive frankly to do business with the federal government not to mention the um the the Myriad requirements that you have to comply with in order just to enter just a bid on a project um and you mentioned I.T projects the if you can get over the ability to hire a Workforce able to manage them and then get the contract signed to purchase them implementing them uh is not a strength of the federal government uh time and time again uh we pull the plug after billions have been invested for some Innovation those are areas that remain those are management challenges that have not been solved for the federal government and we should continue to hack away at those things it doesn't mean these aren't getting done I think when they do get done when when a you know when a robotic process automation initiative unleashes hours of time saved then we really ought to step back and say what distinguished that from others uh I'm actively involved with the agile Government Center at the National Academy of public administration that's exactly what that intends to do really highlight what are the agile practices that distinguish successful projects from unsuccessful ones and how do we share more quickly those kinds of practices so so that they can really you know help in a culture change across government to be more Adept more Nimble at getting some of these things done that's just very helpful what uh get to a high I'm getting to a hypothetical here which is imagine if you're a federal manager and you're running something that takes a thousand people right now and and then you know an I.T Innovation comes along allows you to interface with your customers in a way that makes it possible you just objectively you could have 500 people doing the same thing instead of a thousand is there is there a fundamental problem here where that manager or that agency overseeing that manager and those workers you know they obviously have a little bit of a disincentive to downsize their agency from a thousand to 500 workers even if the it does serve the the customer better is there a way to solve that is there how could we incentivize in the agencies I'm not and this is not intended to be disparaging of what the agencies are up to it's just a human nature question of can we ever incentivize the agencies to substitute a little bit of technology for Manpower is that something that's even easy to do at this point well you know one of the things the federal government has going for it I'm sure that's the right way to catch that but is that there's a lot more mission to be accomplished than we have people or money to do it with so if you can find if you can free up resources there's more to be done elsewhere I think it's a real question of leadership and you know this better than most that a lot of Executives intergovernment not interested in the Machinery of government but more in the policy or the mission of the organizations but they should we you know a leader that wants those missions accomplished um is well served by focusing or investing in the right people the ability to crack that nut to focus on fixing government I'm aware of an initiative at the general Services Administration where they established a automation center of excellence and they said there was a competition basically by uh who could save the most hours by improving operations um and and you see there uh much greater success at automation than in other places across government because the the leadership made it a priority they assigned responsibility to the project the people with the background and skills to oversee it and then they sort of radiated accountability for it not saying precisely how you ought to accomplish these efficiency goals but nonetheless setting targets and asking everyone to Pony up uh and so you've got the results of those show you know just tremendous Savings in time and money um GSA is a small agency probably not um you know a good uh comparison to the Department of Defense or Homeland Security nonetheless I think that's sort of uh centralized governance um accountability but also uh tailored approach letting letting the people who know the business the most figure out how to adopt how to accomplish those efficiency goals is a good way to get it done you're right to point out that um a savings in hours might mean the ability to do it with fewer people and it takes a committed management leadership to undertake that and take the hard steps to reassign or or reduce those workforces that's interesting uh going back just very quickly on this on on sort of the same concept going back a few years um there was something along these lines um in the Clinton era that vice president Gore at that time headed up as people might remember the national performance review which was really a concerted effort to take a lot of these ideas and put them into practice and Test new things and uh you know give that Administration credit for taking a lot of these questions pretty seriously um and they came up with a concept that was trying to get this thing sort of the idea you had with the GSA there sort of a performance-based incentive system for an agency to try to encourage people to Pony up and and uh take on some of these management challenges save the money and then maybe redeploy it elsewhere basically inside an agency is that is that a concept they might people who might run a resurrect is that or is it I know it takes a lot of control out of the hands of Congress and they don't like that but um because it maybe makes the annual appropriation process a little bit less uh by you know binding but what do you think of that whole idea well I I mean I think it's a great idea and you see this at uh Student Financial Aid uh they they're a high performing organization and you've got various flexibilities that other agencies don't enjoy you know I talked about the difficulty hiring holding people accountable the difficulty in acquisition difficulty implementing I.T an organization that uh had flexibility outside of those existing requirements should be able to operate more efficiently you see the same thing at v-funded organizations those organizations that have to survive on the fees they collect are incented to operate as efficiently as possible um and so I do think those introducing those business Concepts were appropriate can unlock efficiencies and I think you could get into a situation where those organizations have to earn those flexibilities on a regular basis demonstrate that they're operating them they're leveraging them first of all often when you give organizations flexibility they don't take advantage of them you don't want to excuse somebody from the strictures of uh title V and then not see them improve hiring and accountability um then then you want to see that those flexibilities are being used to good result uh and if not I think that's a good argument for um removing them so maybe a periodic sun setting of those flexibilities in a um sort of a reflection on whether or not they deserve to be renewed as you know I like that idea because I'm kind of communicated about it and so yeah thank you for sucking up to my hosts not too obviously but of course it does require going to Congress and that's that is of course another thing which is that I do I do think um and get your reaction to this that having Congress being engaged in this a little bit more and to take uh management of the the vast Enterprise that's been created by laws over the years as seriously as possible no one's looking for miracles here but uh because it is a public Enterprise and it has lots of pressures on it that go beyond just sort of profit making so to speak I mean there are reasons why the government has to have the rules it has and so on um because it's serving everybody um so I get that everybody gets that but the question is can can we get our Congress to even be more a little bit more interested in this and create these kinds of creative ideas inside the apparatus so that the public has served a little better um by uh you know Innovations right and so the question is who did you go to in a congress I yeah this is maybe cutting against your your history on the hill which is the government Affairs committee the government oversight committee working with GAO they tended to be the Committees that were most interested in this and they did a lot have done a lot of good work over the years can we get the appropriators and the ways and means and finance committee where all the money is uh how do we get those maybe we could try to go to those communities and see if we can get them interested is that is that an idea I mean especially the appropriators well I think the way the Clinton Administration did it was there was an Omnibus uh piece of legislation that authorized them to pick Pilots um and that way you know Pilot's not very scary term yeah right away quickly um the the and so that's an idea um it's incumbent on the organizations seeking the flexibility to argue the basis for it I I loathe the fact that Congress and the executive branch don't have a better working relationship um and you know if there's a barrier of the legislative affairs offices and agencies um hopefully we can dissolve that and create some Forum by which there can be an open sharing of challenges and solutions right if checks and balances doesn't need to mean uh you know complete dysfunction right there should be a little bit more cooperation right exactly right and just you know more more conversation I think is gonna mean for a much better working relationship yeah I think on a on an authorizing committee by authorizing committee you're probably going to have a better chance of doing that you'll have to overcome uh jurisdictional objections um which is why it's probably important to bring the oversight committees along because it's sort of their domain yeah um but but I think having these conversations um and make making sure you've got adequate justification you know during the Trump Administration they had a great initiative uh to uh proliferate um reorganizations and unfortunately the justifications that were used to drive those were just grossly inadequate not not collaborating with congress not having good justifications for why they needed these organizations or flexibilities it's just death um and it's not it's not rocket science basically stepping back what are you trying to accomplish how is what you're requesting going to help you accomplish that and by what measure are you going to report your success yeah um so Congress never took any of them up basically that's right that's right and and when when the when the administration was called to argue for their um approval it was kind of embarrassing yeah right right right well let's get let's bring ourselves uh up to uh the next the follow-on administration the Biden Administration um which is sort of where we are right now and uh obviously they've had you know like any Administration this is true the Bush Administration you and I worked in and every Administration their their priority is policy right and so management isn't very you know can be very important but it's not something that they you're going to have a president or even the vice president speaking on very often right right they're focused on trying to change some of the major policies of the country um so having said that though every every new Administration and maybe somewhat give ours give yourself a little credit uh the president's management agenda that was rolled out in the early Bush years kind of became a template every Administration tries to do some things now where are we with the Biden Administration what are they trying to do in this area of improved Federal performance so uh you know the Biden Administration uh has a three-ponged president's management agenda and you're right they did keep that that frame framing concept uh and announced within a year of their uh the president's inauguration a three-pronged agenda focused on improving the customer experience so that and we make it easier especially for the traditionally underserved populations to access government's benefits and services um the human capital is the main priority initiative trying to fix some of the major human capital challenges we discussed and then a broader umbrella business of government so acquisition financial management fall into that bucket and according to reforms amendments to the government performance results called the government's performance ACT results act modernization act they report quarterly on the extent to which they're achieving some big goals both government-wide priority goals cross-agency priority goals they're called or high priority goals what are the big goals agencies are trying to accomplish they report that quarterly on performance.gov uh I'm not sure it's at the level of Clarity or transparency that I would hope but nonetheless a lot of the things that you and I were working on back in the day I don't I don't mean to raise our age again but uh have been sustained across administrations the thing I'm most excited about is evidence-based policy making this focus on rigorous evaluation of programs to ascertain what works best and lifting those up there's been a major transformation in the governance of those activities that's a terrific development we haven't really touched on it very much today and but very much related to this whole performance focus is is uh you know there's certain things going on that maybe are just not you know delivering much by way of results at all that's not to say that the goal that they set out in Congress when they created it wasn't worthy question is whether continuing with the the program that's sitting there is really going to do it and whether maybe something else might work a little better and getting the policy Community to shift it around and focus on a different avenue toward the same goal we do have a question that's come in from the audience I want to ask you right now and then I'll have a couple more from for myself but the question is who is ultimately responsible for implementing this is a great question for those who are just not as familiar with the law for implementing the mandates of the government performance and results act and Reporting on its results who's who's in charge of making this happen so to speak and making sure it's done according to the law and then what involvement does GAO and OMB have with implementing and overseeing the gipra so at each agency there's a performance Improvement officer with responsibility for implementing the government performance and results Act generally small staffs that coordinate across the Departments and agencies collecting and Reporting the data required under the ACT the overall requirements for implementation are found in OMB circular a11 which should be coming out any day now it sets the requirements for agencies annual performance planning and Reporting and the integration of that information into Congressional budget justifications uh that the office that oversees that effort at OMB is called the performance and office of performance and personnel management oppm and then of course GAO very helpfully reviews agency and OMB implementation the requirements of gpra and reports regularly one of my one of the favorite things of the GAO does in this arena is a periodic survey of program managers um and and we haven't seen good results um in uh program manager use of performance data to make decisions it has crept up but not at a pace that I think would allow us to call this success and so but it's a very good Benchmark in in requiring us to assess where we are and what tweaks we can make to sort of embed Performance Management more and more into the culture of agencies great uh I want to go to uh um a question a little bit more um philosophical from your perspective and then also by a biographical questions I got two really teed up here one one is um like I should lie down yeah exactly yeah uh you know given where you've been you know sort of what if you had to list three things that Congress might want to want to take on and think about uh or and maybe OMB the next you know the current OMB director maybe the next one in 2025. what kind of things would you say might make a big difference if we could kind of get political agreement around moving forward on something are there are any things that are on your wish list of things we should put into law or just you know beyond I mean of course commitment by the leadership is important but what what do we need to do to change systematically to kind of maybe make improvements on all the different laws that are already there right um it's a great question uh I you know at the end of the Trump Administration they ripped up all of these performance management requirements by The Roots which I think was a little dramatic but I do think a reflection on whether or not the requirements we impose on agencies that flow from these laws are actually producing the desired results or whether some greater flexibility might be in order so I think that reflection um is in order greater flexibility for agencies OMB and the Congress impose more and more management Improvement requirements on agencies and generally apply them across the board in a pretty tricky cutter approach I I think a more flexible way uh would be to allow agencies to pick and choose which initiatives are most applicable which ones are most necessary to address their genuine challenges what's keeping them from accomplishing their mission um might be a better way to accomplish what we're trying to achieve and then finally this might make you laugh but uh everybody should be asking more and more whether it's in a strategic planning session at the beginning of administration or at an everyday staff meeting what are we trying to accomplish [Laughter] and I'm surprisingly how little that question is asked I'm parroting my old boss Clay Johnson but um we really don't do it enough what are we trying to accomplish and how do we know we're going to get there yeah right um that Congress ought to ask it more oh and be able to ask it more agency leadership managers ought to be asking it more that's a great point uh back to some biographical type question which I did I waited till the end for it which is you probably you know like many of us you come to Washington you started the government Affairs committee um how do you how did you end up doing this how how uh I know it's been satisfying um but to give us a little sense of um whether the work has turned out as you thought it would when you got started and and how do you reflect back on working in this area you know that that's it I I can't imagine but this is where uh this this is the script I would have written yeah but I do remember as a kid it's gonna make you roll your eyes reading the president's private sector survey on the cost for those who don't know that that was the Reagan Administration my grandfather was a longtime W Grace employee and he sent us all copies of the grace commission report and I did a report on it in Junior High School um so I I do think this sort of gave me a slight interest in this area and then fast forward to the 90s where I landed on the uh committee house committee on government reform and oversight yeah um and that was right as GAO was getting reauthorized and gpra was first being implemented both those initiatives sort of gave me a PhD in the operation executive branch that um that that kept it interesting since that day great it's a great way to get into this whole business yeah yeah good I didn't know the story about the uh about the grace before it so you you're many people probably read it in the 1980s but I can say you probably are one of the few that uh and working in this area now who is Reddit that's that's terrific um well we are at time and uh I want to end right on time with our guest um Robert um thank you very much I hope the conversation has been uh as useful to our audience as it was to me and I do I am very grateful that you were willing to join me for this uh event thank you very much thanks for having me you're welcome

Channel: American Enterprise Institute

Views: 1,167

Keywords: AEI, American Enterprise Institute, politics, news, education

Id: dr5dUjhXPvY

Length: 45min 27sec (2727 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023