“I actually left my experience at the White House much less cynical about government than when I came in. People are basically trying to do their best in the face of extremely challenging circumstances, make hard decisions in the right way, and they’re drinking from a fire hose, they’re reacting to events that are not under their control. And so it left me with some more patience for what happens at the White House.”

That’s Yuval Levin, this week’s guest on Why Public Service?, speaking about lessons he learned from serving in George W. Bush’s White House.

Today, Levin is director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Under President George W. Bush, he served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff and was also executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is the founding and current editor of National Affairs and is also the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. Follow National Affairs on Twitter @nationalaffairs.

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Transcript: 

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Why Public Service?, a podcast of the R Street Institute, a free market think tank in Washington, DC. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar and each episode, I speak with an individual who made the choice to participate in governing our nation. Some of my guests have worked for the government, others have toiled in various private sector organizations, including think tanks, philanthropies, and political groups. All of them share the same goal, however, which is to improve our country through public service.

Kevin Kosar:

Today’s guest is Yuval Levin, who presently is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC. Dr. Levin is the founding and current editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor of the New Atlantis and a contributing editor to National Review. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy. Most recently, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to our Institutions can Revive the American Dream. Dr. Levin has held other positions in public service, including working for the White House and Congress. You can learn more about him by visiting aei.org.

Kevin Kosar:

Thank you for speaking with me today.

Yuval Levin:

Thanks very much for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

As our listeners have heard, you’ve held many different positions in public service. For today’s episode, I want to speak to you about your time as a special assistant to the president for domestic policy. So my first question is, how did you end up working in that high position in the administration of George W. Bush?

Yuval Levin:

I often asked myself that same question in that period. I was fairly young, I was in my late twenties when I worked in the Bush [43] White House. One way to think about it is that I had been working in and around government for a while by then, I’d worked on Capitol Hill for a member and then a committee, and then for the leadership, mostly on budget and healthcare issues. After that, I’d gone to graduate school and then come back to work for a professor of mine who ran a presidential commission on bioethics. And it was through that commission and the first term of the Bush administration that I got to know some folks in the White House.

Yuval Levin:

And because of that, and because I had worked on healthcare and related things on the Hill, when there was an opening in the domestic policy council in the very end of Bush’s first term, they approached me about applying. And basically the way these jobs often work, especially at the White House is it’s a matter of knowing people and being known by them. And I got that job and started working there at the very end of Bush’s first term and worked through most of his second term on the domestic policy team. It’s a very small staff and if you like public policy, it’s really the place to be. It was wonderful.

Kevin Kosar:

That leads to my second question which is, as a special assistant to the president for domestic policy, what were your responsibilities?

Yuval Levin:

The titles in the White House are often just about the reverse of the importance of the people at the White House. So a special assistant to the president is basically the lowest rung of the policy ladder. And the White House policy staff is divided, has been since about 2001, divided in three parts. It used to be just two, but there is an economic policy staff, which is called a council, Economic Policy Council, or the National Economic Council, NEC. There’s a domestic policy staff and there’s a national security staff. In the Bush White House there also for the first time was a Homeland Security Staff, that was basically a kind of extension of the NSC. But as a result of 9/11, grew out as its own team.

Yuval Levin:

The Domestic Policy Team is the smallest of these, it’s generally about a dozen people. We had maybe 10 people in Bush’s second term. Each is a subject matter expert in some area in one way or another. And you get a kind of portfolio of issues that you’re in charge of for the White House Policy Team. Mine was healthcare and veterans issues and some portions of the welfare portfolio. I also worked on what we called culture of life issues, which is basically the social conservative issues. And the team is quite small, as I say, you in a way, work on everything.

Yuval Levin:

And the work itself involves managing the policy process, moving information up and down. The goal is ultimately to inform the president’s decision making process. And so you’re helping the president get informed both from within the government, we’re building on the expertise of career people in various departments. And from outside the government, drawing people in. Organizing the decision process so that it ultimately reaches the president as a concrete question with a set of options and some information on each side. And then channeling presidential decisions outward. Once the president makes a decision on a key issue, the job is to make sure that it’s implemented, that it’s carried out by the rest of the government.

Yuval Levin:

So in effect the work is a lot of meetings. But what it really means is that you have to think very concretely, unusually concretely about the structure of decision making. That’s really the job of the policy team around the president.

Kevin Kosar:

Interesting. What did the average day look like? Was it full of drama like West Wing, or was it more of a kind of research grind or something else?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. In a weird way there was no average day. It always depends on what the big issues are and if one of my issues was in the news or on the president’s agenda, then a day could be quite hectic and crazy. And might involve a meeting with the president, I didn’t spend a lot of time with President Bush. But now and then when my issues came up, I might find myself in the Oval Office at a meeting that I had organized to help the president make a decision. But I would say most of the time, the work involved a lot of meetings, it involves coordinating a policy process, bringing people from the relevant government departments together, coming to understand the nature of a particular problem that had to be resolved, and allowing people to be heard and ultimately driving a decision process upward.

Yuval Levin:

In a way the purpose of the job, like the one I had, is actually to avoid needing the president’s time, to allow a decision to be made at lower levels of government. And it’s only when those couldn’t be made, when there was a difference of opinion among cabinet departments or when an issue was so prominent and significant that it really needed the president’s attention, that it would rise all the way to the top. That meant that an average day involves a lot of coordination meetings, a lot of conversations, a lot of reading, some policy research. The job also involves working a lot with the office of management and budget, to look over proposed rules, to look over various things happening in your area of expertise.

Yuval Levin:

It’s very interesting work if you like public policy, you’re really in the middle of a process. So everything kind of goes through the White House in one way or another, that happens in the executive branch. That means that it’s intense, even in an area that I worked in, there were no emergencies. Everything always felt like a very intense process, everything always felt like it needed to be done right away. Days were long, my day would begin before the senior staff meeting that my boss would attend, the president domestic policy advisor. So I would start the day at about 6:30 in the morning, I’d be lucky if I went home before 6:30 at night. And then you’re exhausted and start over the next day.

Kevin Kosar:

Wow. In your stint in the executive branch, what were some of the lessons you took away about governance?

Yuval Levin:

There are a couple of things that I really learned by working at the White House, that would have been very hard to learn any other way. One lesson, which I had already begun to learn just from working on Capitol Hill, is that most of what happens in Washington is reactive and responsive. Very rarely do people have a multistage plan that they’re following through on. And no one is playing three dimensional chess, no one is carrying out a complex multi-phase strategy over a long period of time. It left me unable to believe conspiracy theories about government.

Yuval Levin:

Conspiracies are basically impossible, no one’s got the competence to pull them off, and there’s just way too much happening to imagine that in a kind of house of cards way, somebody could be carrying out a complicated conspiracy strategy and getting it to work. That doesn’t happen, that’s not what government is. Most of the time, no one really knows what’s going to happen next and people are reacting to unexpected events.

Yuval Levin:

Another lesson I learned is that everything that confronts the president is a painful and complicated trade-off. Easy decisions are made at lower levels of government, the president’s job is horrible, it is a nightmare where one meeting after another, over the course of a long day. Involves people who know a lot more than you do about a subject, disagreeing in front of you, and then you have to make a decision. It’s extremely challenging and complicated. Most of the time it’s a matter of trade offs, there’s no winning. And half the country is going to hate what you do and you just have to hope that it’s the better of two bad options.

Yuval Levin:

And that’s just a lot of what governing is. So I would say between those two lessons, I actually left my experience at the White House much less cynical about government than when I came in. People are basically trying to do their best in the face of extremely challenging circumstances, make hard decisions in the right way. And they’re drinking from a fire hose, they’re reacting to events that are not under their control. And so it left me with some more patience for what happens at the White House, and even looking at this administration where I think things are less competent than they could be. I do have some sympathy for the challenge that people in the White House face and the people in government in general face. And I think Americans would do well to recognize just how hard that job is that we assigned to the president and to the people who work for him.

Kevin Kosar:

What was the toughest part of your job? Was it getting to learn the position? Was it the pace? Was it inter White House politics? Was it something else or everything?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. In some ways it was all of that. There wasn’t all that much inter White House politics in the Bush administration, we frankly could have used more in some ways. But I would say that the pace and pressure, especially … I started that job, I was 27 or 28. And you find yourself in weird situations where there’s just an enormous amount of responsibility on you in some cases. Big decisions are getting made and you’re just left hoping that you haven’t missed something. So there’s a lot of pressure, the pace is pretty intense and it matters. A lot depends on how things get decided. And so one way in which working at the White House is very different from working on Capitol Hill, is that there are some really high stakes decisions being made. And you can find yourself in the middle of that process in a way that just feels like a very, very heavy burden of responsibility.

Kevin Kosar:

So it was a demanding job, long hours, tough decisions to make, you felt like you were drinking through a fire hose. Were you happy you did it? Were you happy you chose this position in public service?

Yuval Levin:

I loved it, absolutely. I mean, I think if you care about public policy, there’s no alternative to being in the middle of things like that, and really seeing how things get done, how that process works, how the agenda gets set, what the president’s job involves. I’m very, very glad I did that. For all that it was challenging and difficult, I also enjoyed it every day.

Kevin Kosar:

And let’s close with this broader question on this same theme. You’ve had a broad career in public service, many different positions, why public service? You could have chosen another career path, you could have been an academic with your PhD and advanced credentials.

Yuval Levin:

In a way, the answer I would love to give is just well it’s surface and it’s giving, and it’s a way of serving the country. And sometimes that is what it is and that is part of the appeal, no question about it. But I also have to say that I love politics and policy, I’m very interested in what happens at the intersection of theory and practice and public life. And there’s no alternative if you want to understand government and think about the life of our society, there’s no alternative to the experience you get working on the inside. And getting to see how government really functions, what the kinds of challenges and pressures and decisions that have to get made are.

Yuval Levin:

So some of it was certainly a desire to serve at some level, but the kind of service I did was no great sacrifice. A lot of it was really a matter of an intense interest in how government works, what policy and politics involves. And the work was very gratifying and very satisfying and very interesting. It was its own reward in a lot of ways.

Kevin Kosar:

Dr. Yuval Levin, thank you for sharing your experience in public service with us. And thank you for joining me today.

Yuval Levin:

Thank you.

Kevin Kosar:

Thank you for listening to Why Public Service?, a podcast of the R Street Institute. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better, rate and review us on iTunes so we can reach more listeners. Tell us what you thought about it and who we should interview next by finding us on Twitter @RSI. If you want to know more about R Street, sign up for our newsletters at www.rstreet.org. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, thank you to producer William Gray and editor Parker Tant from parkerpodcasting.com.

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