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Joint with Sarah Thompson, a new piece on Mission Driven Bureaucrats & agency performance now live here: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…. Even - or especially - when agency missions are under threat, Mission Driven Bureaucrats are critical to success. They are also a reason for hope.

Dear Secretary Rubio: a thread of quotes from South African mothers who lost babies to AIDS. You can prevent more by waiving PEPFAR from the stopwork order. “What stressed me so much is that I did not know how to help her. To see her in pain was the most painful thing to me”

RIP USAID. Charles Kenny Ian Mitchell Ranil Dissanayake I think there would be lots of public good in tracking projected deaths, lost QUALYs, job losses by district (as contractors across US lay people off) etc. over the coming months. No better place for this than Center for Global Development

Most sensible and important thing you will read on foreign aid and USAID.

In partnership with Schmidt Sciences, David Autor, Simon Johnson and I are seeking funding proposals from early career researchers conducting innovative field experiments on the labor economics of frontier AI. Expressions of interest are due March 31. shapingwork.mit.edu/call-for-propo…

A lovely piece by Alex Snider (strategy lead for the US President's Management Agenda) about the challenges #MissionDrivenBureaucrats in the US federal Gov't face; it's a marathon not a sprint.. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/human-…

The social contract is fraying. Our states oft can't "deliver" - & when they do that doesn't seem to satisfy, with democratic backsliding and populism the result. We argue this is because 'capacity' is not just technical - it is also relationships between citizen & the state.👇

SNF Agora’s first working paper, Relational State Capacity, written by SNF Faculty Affiliate Dan Honig Dan Honig (DanHonig.bsky), Rahul Karnamadakala Sharma, and Mekhala Krishnamurthy, explores how trust between citizens and the state shapes governance. Read more: buff.ly/4bDHLdn

If you're in Ann Arbor this Monday (3/31, 4-5:30; free & open to the public) would be wonderful to see you Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy as Don Moynihan and I talk about empowering bureaucrats and the current political moment: fordschool.umich.edu/event/2025/emp…. Hope to see you there!

5 years ago today my family and I took a US Gov't evacuation flight as COVID swept the globe. Today USG is doing all it can not to help citizens, but to undermine the bureaucracy. To the #MissionDrivenBureaucrats who work for all of us around the globe: stay strong. We need you.

with Dan Honig (DanHonig.bsky) Efficiency isn't everything: Delivering public services well requires judgment not chainsaws foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/07/dog…