Statecraft

Baillee Brown is Head of Government and External Affairs at Inclusive Abundance, which works to help members of Congress get more interested in abundance-policy areas, principally housing, energy, science, innovation, and good governance.
She worked on Capitol Hill for 10 years, for Congressman Scott Peters from San Diego. She began as scheduler, moved to the legislative team, and was most recently his chief of staff in the DC office.
For the full transcript of this conversation, go to www.statecraft.pub.


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James Anderson leads the Government Innovation Program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, the umbrella for the charitable giving of billionaire and former three-term New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
He was Mayor Bloomberg’s communications director, leading on the design of NYC Service and on public engagement for a number of Bloomberg reforms.
James has paid more attention than almost anyone to how cities work, and how they learn from each other. But is the Bloomberg model for making cities better “technocratic”? What can it do, and what can’t it do? And should mayors be “innovative”? Or are the best practices, at the end of the day, pretty straightforward? We get into these questions and more.
Read this conversation transcript at www.statecraft.pub.


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Today’s guest is Greg Berman, and we talk about nonprofits — Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGOs. Greg’s got a new book out called The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars, which I enjoyed. I asked him to explain his diagnosis of the nonprofit sector. What’s happened to nonprofits this century? What’s happened to how people perceive nonprofits? And are “NGOs the bad guys”? As critics from both ends of the political spectrum will argue.
Greg was part of the founding team responsible for creating the Center for Justice Innovation, serving as Director from 2002 to 2020, and helping to guide it from a start-up to an org with an annual budget of more than $80 million. Alongside that, he:
* Has written multiple books, mostly on reducing mass incarceration, including Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform and Good Courts: The Case for Problem-Solving Justice.
* Has been at the center of left-liberal attempts to do criminal justice reform, especially in New York City, over the past two decades.
* Was on the Board of Correction for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the public safety transition team for Mayor Bill de Blasio and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance.
* Is the co-editor of a publication called Vital City, which I enjoy — it’s one part New York journalism, one part policy journal.
* Is the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, investigating various topics related to violence.
Thanks to Charles Lehman, Sean Sullivan, Oliver Traldi, Park MacDougald, Rafa Mangual, Ari Schulman, and many others for their contributions to my thinking on this piece.
We discuss:
* Why nonprofits matter to government service delivery
* Critiques of nonprofits from the left, the right, and both sides
* How the Center for Justice Innovation reduced incarceration, and why funding that work got harder
* What nonprofits should do to regain public trust
The full transcript for this conversation is at www.statecraft.pub.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

When I got this episode on the calendar a month ago, my vision was, “Let’s get three of the smartest, most thoughtful liberals I can find on the topic of economic statecraft, and we’ll do a full assessment of the first year of Trump’s second term.” The idea was to take each of the domains — tariffs and the trade war, export controls, industrial policy — and do two things: get an accurate picture of what’s actually happened, and hear how Biden admin insiders and Democratic thinkers see them. Where are there continuities between administrations? Where have their expectations been overturned? And what lessons are they incorporating into their own worldviews?
Then, in a totally novel example of economic statecraft, we grabbed Maduro and seized Venezuelan oil; we had to discuss that too.
As a result, we’re doing a lot in this episode, and we leave some important questions out: the legal challenges to the current tariff regime, for example. But I think readers will come away from this episode with a clear view of the old and new tools of US policy in the realm of economic statecraft.
Our guests
Daleep Singh is an economist who served in two separate periods in the Biden Administration as Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics.
Peter Harrell served as Senior Director for International Economics at the White House, jointly appointed to the National Security Council and the National Economic Council.
My colleague, Arnab Datta is Director of Policy Implementation at IFP. He’s also the Managing Director of Policy Implementation at Employ America.
We cover a lot of ground in this episode. Here’s our table of contents:
We discuss
* What is economic statecraft?
* Venezuela
* China and tariffs
* Trade deals
* Industrial policy
* Lessons learned
The full transcript for this conversation is at www.statecraft.pub


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Mike Lauer is the former Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health. A cardiologist and researcher, he joined the NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in 2007 as the Director of the Division of Prevention and Population Science. From 2015, he oversaw the NIH’s $32 billion funding program for external research. Since leaving NIH in 2025, he has become an outspoken advocate for fundamental reform in how the federal government supports biomedical research.
We discuss:
* Why the NIH used to fund 60% of grant applications — and now funds just 10%
* How “soft money” forces researchers to fund their own salaries
* How distributing lots of small grants wastes everyone’s time
* How block grants could fund more breakthrough science
* Why researchers don’t get their first independent award until their mid-40s
The full transcript for this conversation is at www.statecraft.pub


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub