Don Moynihan: Burdens do have a certain set of advantages for politicians. So if I were to go in front of the state legislature and say I want to reduce the size of this social program and we are going to kick 20,000 people off rolls, or we’re going to change eligibility so fewer people can get it, that draws a lot of negative attention. On the other hand, if I go to the state legislature and I say we’re simply going to ask people to provide more evidence of their identity or their qualifications or their eligibility, we’re going to make the process slightly longer but it’ll improve integrity, that does not draw the same level of attention.

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit.

Democracy is complicated. For government to respond to citizens’ interests, we need both elected officials who enact those interests into law and functional public institutions who can efficiently and humanely translate those laws into regulations and services. This episode is about how bureaucracies can get in the way of those goals of efficiency and humanity.

One concept that helps to think about this is administrative burden. That term describes the costs of interacting with government: learning administrative rules, filling out forms, and the frustrations of dealing with obtuse bureaucracies. Government doesn’t have a monopoly on these sorts of burdens, as anyone who’s ever interacted with a for-profit private health insurer knows, but administrative burdens are widespread in government.

Today’s guest, Donald Moynihan, thinks that’s a big problem, and one that politicians, administrators, and citizens should pay more attention to. Changing the design of an application form or requiring different documentation can have major effects on how many people apply for a program or whether people who qualify for a benefit are actually able to take advantage of it.

Sometimes administrative burdens are accidental, just a result of a government agency or department not thinking critically about how its procedures will affect people in the real world. But sometimes burdens are purposeful, a way for politicians to limit programs or direct the behavior of citizens without openly admitting their goals.

Donald Moynihan is a Professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, codirects the Better Government Lab at Georgetown University, and is the President of the Association for Public Policy and Management. If you didn’t hear our last episode with him about Project 2025, you should check it out. Now that Trump is returning to the White House, it’s even more relevant now than it was in October when we first shared it.

Here at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, our mission is to advance inclusive democracies by fostering citizen engagement, promoting government accountability, and countering authoritarianism. For citizens to engage in politics and hold their governments accountable, they need to be able to understand the processes and decisions of public institutions. Inclusive democracy means that you shouldn’t need a Ph.D. in public administration to interact with your government. Public institutions, after all, belong to all of us, and administrative burdens should not get in the way of obtaining the services that are supposed to be guaranteed to us.

Don Moynihan, welcome to The Context.

Don Moynihan: Thanks for having me, Alex.

Alex Lovit: So we’re going to be talking about the concept of administrative burdens, but just as a way to start the conversation, how do you define this term administrative burdens?

Don Moynihan: So I and my coauthor Pamela Herd, who’ve written about this topic, define administrative burdens as the experience of policy implementation as onerous. And more specifically, we think about what are the costs that people encounter when they interact with government or government services. And in particular, we think about three types of costs. The first is learning costs—so let’s say you’re applying for some sort of program. You have to know about it, you have to understand if it’s relevant for you, when are you eligible for it, how to apply for it. This is not knowledge we’re born with, so you have to acquire that knowledge.

The second type of cost is compliance cost, so filling out forms, responding to bureaucratic requests, providing documentation, maybe traveling to an administrative office, the time you spend waiting online or on the phone. We group those in the context of compliance costs.

And then the third category is psychological costs, and these are the emotional responses we have from these experiences. This could be a sense of frustration, could be a sense of stress, in some cases it could be a sense of a loss of your personal autonomy or even fear depending on the nature of the interaction. And collectively, we think these capture most of the frictions that people encounter when they interact with the state.

Alex Lovit: What does that look like in practice? What is an example of for administrative burden to fall on a citizen or for a government to take on those burdens?

Don Moynihan: Sure. I’ll give a couple of examples in the context of just citizenship itself. So I am an immigrant to the United States. I grew up in Ireland, I moved here when I was 21, and then a couple years after that I applied for citizenship. And the amount of forms I had to complete and to process what the forms actually meant was a tremendous challenge. Providing the necessary information to the government required that I first understand what they were asking of me—that was also a big challenge. And it was also incredibly stressful, because there were periods of time when I couldn’t leave the country, or there were times when I wasn’t sure I was going to get citizenship here. So it had all those elements of learning, compliance, and psychological costs.

And I remember at one point in particular when I was looking at some of these forms thinking I have a Ph.D. in Public Administration, I should be very qualified to go through these documents and answer them, but I feel completely bewildered. So what is it like for people who don’t have those skills or those experiences? So that’s a very basic and big administrative burden you see in almost any setting.

A more positive example of burden reduction is that recently the Biden administration has allowed citizens to apply to get their passports renewed online, which I think has been a multiyear project, but significantly reduces the time and cost hassles of getting your passport renewed. You don’t have to go to a post office, you don’t have to go get your photos taken—you can get a digital photo. It reduces a lot of the paperwork involved, and it speeds up the process.

That’s also I think an example of where reducing burdens on citizens through technology can also be an opportunity to reduce burdens on the state. So rather than physically handing this paperwork to someone at the post office who then brings it to the Department of State, you’re going directly to the Department of State. There’ simply less physical paper. It’s going to be easier and quicker to process electronic documentation. And so it should make it more efficient and easier for the Department of State to do their jobs to issue those passports.

Alex Lovit: You mentioned the book you cowrote with another political scientist, Pamela Herd, and the subtitle of that book—the title of that book is Administrative Burdens, the subtitle is Policymaking by Other Means. So if I understand this right, if I’m a politician and I want to cut a program, I want to cut federal food assistance for example, I could do that directly, I could cut funding for that program, I could put new limits on who qualifies. But another way I can do that is by increasing the administrative burdens, by making it more complicated and difficult to register for the program. And I can be pretty confident that that’s going to reduce the number of applicants, reduce the number of successful applicants anyway.

So my question is, why would politicians or other political actors choose to do policy-making through administrative burdens rather than through more traditional legislating? What are the advantages or disadvantages of that?

Don Moynihan: Yeah. I should point out that Pam is a sociologist. I’ll get in trouble if she gets mischaracterized as a political scientist. So this idea of burdens as policy-making by other means came to us when we started to writ ethe book and looked closely at burdens in a variety of policy settings. So we write about different social policies like SNAP or health policies like Medicaid, but also about access to abortion or access to voting rights.

And one consistent theme we saw is that burdens do have a certain set of advantages for politicians. So if I were to go in front of the state legislature and say I want to reduce the size of this social program and we are going to kick 20,000 people off rolls, or we’re going to change eligibility so fewer people can get it, that draws a lot of negative attention. So that explicit statement that I’m going to reduce access to public services has generally negative connotations to it.

On the other hand, if I go to the state legislature and I say we’re simply going to ask people to provide more evidence of their identity or their qualifications or their eligibility, we’re going to make the process slightly longer but it’ll improve integrity, that does not draw the same level of attention. And in fact, you’re probably not going to the state legislature to make that statement. You’re working within the executive branch maybe to add questions or requirements. And so, there’s a degree to which this is less public, less apparent to journalists or advocates, but would have the same direct effect on policy outcomes. So you would still kick 20,000 people off the program, but you’re just doing it through a different route, one where you’re removing people by making the process harder, but you’re also avoiding some of the political blame you would get if you were more explicit about your true intentions to remove those people from the program.

So if you’re a politician, it can be an attractive way of trying to from your perspective maybe manage the size of a program, or to shore up the integrity of a program, but with the effect of reducing access to public services.

Alex Lovit: So is the solution for this just sunlight, if people are listening to this and think I’m a little nervous about politicians limiting social programs without explicitly doing so, or is this just something where there needs to be more media attention, more public attention?

Don Moynihan: I think so. At the broadest level, I think moving these discussions of administrative processes from the invisible to the visible, getting the public to pay attention to them, makes it harder for elected officials or other policymakers to add more burdensome processes they would otherwise be able to do.

And there are a couple policy areas where we do see this. And so, I think also in the area of voting, there is much more explicit political fights about making the process of voting easier or harder in practice. It’s not something you can do quietly. And so there are certain areas where advocates are quite aware of the fact that adding more burdens will change the nature of the way in which a policy works. And then I think there are other areas where it’s simply less obvious, or feels a lot less contentious to do things like add requirements to administrative processes.

But a certain point is just being aware of the fact that burdens exist, and that even relatively small burdens can have big consequences for people that experience them. So doing something that might sound banal, like asking people to mail in one more form or getting a signature from their employer to verify that they have healthcare at their employer, in practice we find these extra steps can have really large effects on whether people complete administrative process and get the services they desire and they need in the way that I think policymakers sometimes understand but maybe sometimes underestimate too.

You mentioned earlier the title of our book was Policymakers: Using Burdens to Engage in Policymaking by Other Means. There is another source of burdens, which is sometimes policymakers and bureaucrats are clueless about the negative effects of additional rules and requirements and processes they’re imposing upon the public. And so in addition to sunlight being the best disinfectant here, and just having more awareness of burdens, having more measurement of the effects of burdens, or having more research on the effects of burdens, so when someone says we’re just going to add one or two questions, it won’t be a big deal, that there is an ability to say let’s see if that’s true, or let’s look at what happened when this other state did this, and what were the consequences in terms of take-up, I think would be another really effective means to stop policymakers from making mistakes around this.

Alex Lovit: Let me ask a couple questions about one aspect of administration, the US tax code, and this is something you’ve written a lot about. If I have this right, it’s more difficult, which is to say more burdensome, to file taxes in the US than in most comparable countries. And there’s some political forces that keep it that way—so part of this is the lobbying power of tax preparation companies who want to keep taxes confusing so they can make a profit charging Americans to help figure it out. And perhaps conservative politicians have an incentive too to keep the tax code confusion because the more painful it is to pay taxes, voters might be inclined to support lower taxes.

But it’s really frustrating on the one side of this you have the interests of basically every American taxpayer, and on the other side you have the lobbying power of H&R Block. Is that basically how you see things, and is there anything you can do about it?

Don Moynihan: Yeah, that’s a great example. The IRS is the federal agency that I think pretty much all of us if you’re a taxpayer have to interact with. And so we have this very big collective shared interest in reducing the pain of paying our taxes. We already pay our taxes. We shouldn’t also have to experience a second form of payment in terms of loss of time and effort and even more money when it comes to actually sending that information back to the IRS.

And for a lot of taxpayers, the IRS already has all of the relevant information it needs. We’re not seeing it any new information. And so there’s a case to be made for simplifying tax reporting in a way that would make it easier for many taxpayers to just look at the information the IRS has and say okay, that’s correct, and I will just submit that.

This has been a 20-plus year battle within the American government. As early as going back to the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration, there was discussion about can the federal government create a free electronic filing system where instead of mailing something to the IRS you can simply give a direct electronic report of your taxes.

What happened after that I think is an incredible case of agency capture and rent-seeking. So eventually, members of Congress who were supported by a private tax preparation industry nudged the IRS towards creating a partnership with that private tax preparation industry where the promise was we’re going to use the expertise of the private sector to help design a product the IRS will share and roll out.

And what happened in fact is that product was poorly designed, poorly advertised. It existed, but it was far subpar to the products that private industry itself was providing. And there’s some evidence that private industry basically colluded to make a worse product that most people didn’t even know existed and would not use.

So we get to I think it was 2019 or 2030, and the private tax preparation industry is lobbying to make this partnership permanent. What happens at that point is good media journalism I think by ProPublica uncovered this effort to put this really broken partnership into law and make it permanent, exposed the conflicts of interest that were involved, and the partnership fell apart.

Now we are at the point where the federal government is finally putting out what it’s calling Direct File. So it piloted it last year in I think just over 12 states and is going to expand it this year, where you can submit your taxes online for free directly with the IRS. And it’s come despite an immense amount of lobbying and spending by the private tax preparation industry to kill this product, which would benefit an enormous number of people but from their perspective would eat at their bottom line.

And so this is a case of where administrative burdens arise because of rent-seeking, because there are private actors who benefit from more hassles that we all collectively have to endure when we pay our $50 or whatever we pay to TurboTax. And so as long as the burdens exist, they profit.

One hope for government is that it takes a broader collective public interest perspective on frictions and looks for ways to say, we know what’s best for Intuit and TurboTax and H&R Block, what’s actually best for the public as a whole? We have seen some of that coming from the Biden administration, including this Direct File product.

Alex Lovit: Maybe more positive story—or you tell me if it’s a more positive story—about the tax code is the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit. You’ve written about these as examples of programs that effectively distribute money to low-income Americans but have fewer burdens than traditional welfare programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families when in fact the amount of money going into those tax credit programs is now much larger than the budget of TANF or traditional welfare. So fi we ended welfare as we know it in the ‘90s, maybe we kind of rebuilt it under the IRS. Do you see that as a positive story, and is that a story of reducing burdens for provision of funding for low-income Americans?

Don Moynihan: I think it’s mostly a positive story with some caveats. As you point out, we shifted more and more of the welfare state into the tax system, and I think this has some real positives. So welfare, former cash welfare, TANF, is much smaller than it used to be. It also was never tremendously popular, and it came with an enormous number of hassles. And something like 20 percent of spending on traditional cash welfare programs went not to the public but went to the bureaucracy to maintain and deliver those services. And so there was an efficiency loss there.

Whereas when you’re distributing these monies through IRS, there isn’t a separate bureaucracy that needs to be hired to manage the program. So you’re saving money and delivering more of those dollars directly to the clients.

The second advantage from an administrative burden perspective is the client doesn’t have to negotiate and figure out what the program is or which office they need to visit to the same extent when they’re dealing with the tax code. They already have to return taxes, so they’re dealing with this entity called the IRS already, and hopefully through their tax preparation service or whether they’re doing it themselves, they can figure out how to claim benefits. So it’s a little bit of extra work, but it’s not like starting a whole separate process. And so from that perspective, it reduces burdens on clients.

Then there are separate specific policy arguments for the Child Tax Credit and for the EITX that I won’t get into. But there are a couple caveats. And so, one caveat is that about 10 percent of people do not engage with the tax system because their income is low enough they legally are not required to file taxes, or they simply don’t report their taxes. And we know that group is disproportionately going to be incredibly poor people, people with very low incomes. And so one concern is that as you move more needs-based supports to the tax code, how are you going to capture those people with the greatest needs?

And this became an issue during the expansion of the Child Tax Credit over the last couple years. And so folks remember, during the pandemic we saw an expansion of the Child Tax Credit, and that expansion ended, so it was sort of a one-off experiment. And a couple aspects of the experiment were notable. The credit became more generous, but also IRS sought to automate the delivery of the credit. And so if they could figure out that you qualified based on your income and based on your number of dependents, you didn’t have to fill out any additional paperwork, they would simply send you the money.

And so that was an opportunity the IRS took where it said we have the administrative data, why are we asking people to document information we already have, where I think you can take that lesson and maybe apply it more broadly going forward.

The second part of the experiment that was I think very interesting is that the IRS realized, and lots of policymakers realized afterwards, there’s a whole lot of people who are not getting this benefit because they’re not engaged with the tax system. And this became more relevant because the CTC became fully refundable, meaning that even if your income was very low, you would still get it, whereas in normal times the CTC, you have to have minimal income in order to get the benefit.

And so I think going forward the two things you would think the IRS should be aware of is how do we automate more of these delivery of benefits if we have the data to reduce burdens and make sure we’re getting to the large number of people, and number two how do we reach the most difficult to reach population? How do we get them engaged in the tax system? Because if you are going to start relying on the IRS as an incredibly important deliverer of welfare services, then that implies they are going to try to reach the people with the most needs.

And this does require a culture change at IRS. If you look at their mission statement, there’s no mention of the fact that they are this incredibly important deliverer of welfare services. It still focuses on tax collection. And I think historically there has been some discomfort within the agency at moving towards this broader and more expansive mission of engaging with the welfare system.

Alex Lovit: Well, let me ask you a couple questions about the administrative state and how government works. So let’s start with a civics textbook overview. Like a lot of Americans, I actually never had a proper civics class, so tell me if I get this wrong. In our system of government, the legislative branch is supposed to write the laws and the executive branch is supposed to execute the laws. So when the legislate decides to do a new thing—we’re going to provide pensions for elderly Americans, we’re going to protect the environment, we’re going to regulate how banks interact with consumers—we’re going to create a new agency to do those things, that agency is usually housed under the executive branch overseen by the President. Do I have that right?

Don Moynihan: That’s correct.

Alex Lovit: Okay, so these executive branch departments and agencies are overseen by political appointees, and a President has some power to direct policy. So EPA regulations might look a little different from one administration to the next, but the President still has to operate within the bounds of the law. He or she can’t just say okay, now the EPA stands for Energy Production Agency and we’re just going to drill for oil, that’s what they do now. They have to operate within the bounds of what the legislation said that agency should do.

In a broad scope of things, can you help us understand where the boundaries of what the legislature establishes as policy for executive agencies, and how much power does the executive have to control those agencies?

Don Moynihan: Yeah, so the legislature writes the statute that creates the agencies. They write the statute that creates new programs. Embedded within that statute, there are going to be directives about what the mission of the program should be. And they also write the statute about how public employees are supposed to work. And so historically, the legislature, Congress has had a lot of control over the way in which public organizations work.

Even beyond writing the original laws, they also have an oversight function, where if they think you are not doing what they asked you to do, they can haul you in front of Congress and yell at you and tell you to do better.

So within that context, the executive branch also has a lot of authority. Much of it is in interpreting laws. And so when a President runs for office, if you watch them at a stump speech or if you see them in the debates, they will make all sorts of promises, and it’s always worth asking yourself, how many of these promises are ones that the President can impose unilaterally, versus how many are they simply promising to say I’m going to ask Congress to pass a law to implement my policies?

That’s always a fine line, and so for example when a President says I’m going to get rid of the Department of Education, the President cannot do that without Congress saying that’s okay. If the President is going to say pass a rule about how education policy should operate, or say what sort of training should be provide on campuses that receive federal grants, that’s probably within Presidential power.

And when I say rule here, that has a formal meaning. So the business of government is enormous, and Congress right around the end of World War II said we are unable to keep up here, so we’re just going to formally delegate much more power, including rulemaking authority, which is to say we’re going to pass a law—we realize a bunch of what’s needed to interpret the law is going to be decided by the executive branch. And they are going to issue a public rule that says here’s how we’re interpreting the law. That is an enormous power that the executive branch took on and expanded and used in the latter part of the 20th century, and continues to have.

And that’s until recently been pretty much the equilibrium. The executive branch has gained somewhat more power over time, partly through the power to interpret the law, partly through centralizing more policymaking power in the White House, partly through the way it uses political appointees. And this worked I think reasonably well, but we’re also at the point now where you see fierce debates about the role of the administrative state, and I think maybe more than any time in the last 100 years or since World War II at least, there is a reconfiguration or at least a desire for a reconfiguration of the administrative state to work in quite a different way.

Alex Lovit: We were talking about administrative burdens earlier, and those can come either from the legislature as part of the statute, or they can come from the rulemaking authority, as you were talking about earlier, which would be part of the executive branch. Do you have a sense of how often roughly, are administrative burdens more often coming from Congress or are they more often coming from the executive branch?

Don Moynihan: Boy, that’s a hard one to put a number on. What I’d say is, one very easy target to reduce burdens is to look at the interpretations that agencies make which are effectively pro-burden but are not required by law. Some of the work we do is to work directly with government at the federal level or at the state level, and they will have some specification or requirement that’s in place that we know makes it burdensome for people to access service, and we will ask about the origin of that rule and requirement.

And quite often the answer you will get is that it’s required by law. And then you will ask, which law, or where does it specific in the law that you’re supposed to do this? And you frequently find that it isn’t actually required by law, it’s an interpretation by the agency to put a regulation in place that isn’t strictly required by law but which can meaningfully restrict access to public services.

And so I think getting at the tactic of forcing agencies to go back to the statute to look at the existing rules and requirements they have put in place over time and ask is this actually legally necessary, or why are we doing this—that’s an incredible avenue for reducing burdens in government.

The problem is though, once these rules and requirements are in place, they’re taken for granted, and governments typically do not have a mechanism to go back and revisit why we do things a certain way. We just assume that because they’re already in place, they must be there for legitimate reasons, and so we’re going to leave them as-is.

Alex Lovit: You’re saying there it’s maybe a little bit easier to attack these through the executive branch, because it doesn’t require writing new legislation. And I know you’ve done some work with the Biden administration to reduce administrative burdens. What grade would you give the Biden administration or other recent administrations for attacking this problem?

Don Moynihan: I think I would—I’m a harsh grader.

Alex Lovit: Bad news for University of Michigan students.

Don Moynihan: I would give the Biden administration an A-, maybe B+, A-, in that range. And put that in perspective, I think any preceding administration I would give at best a C. And so they are head and shoulders above any prior administration when it comes to thinking about the citizens’ experience of the state.

If you look back at say the Clinton administration or Bush, Obama, even Trump, there’s always some mention of customer service and how can the federal government improve customer service, but those initiatives didn’t go very far, and they didn’t think about questions like who are the people who are not turning up to apply for services, and why are they not turning up? So who are the citizens that haven’t become customers, and how can we reach those?

And the Biden administration very much has been asking those questions. It signed an executive order on customer experience that includes a lot of attention to administrative burdens. The Office of Management and Budget also issued new guidance to federal agencies in a variety of places—through budget directives, also through new guidance about this law called Paperwork Reduction Act which is already on the books which tells agencies hey, we have to think more seriously about how people are experiencing their interactions with us. How much time does it take to interact with us? Are there ways we can make it easier? Are there learning and compliance and psychological costs, and can we manage to measure those? And then we’d like you to report back on the progress you’re making. And none of those was happening before in prior administrations.

Alex Lovit: We’ve been talking about the executive branch and the legislative branch, and we haven’t mentioned the third branch of government here, the judicial branch. There’s been some recent developments here, so let’s bring them in. This year in the decision Loper Bright vs. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference. For the last 40 years, Chevron meant that if there were ambiguities in the law passed by the legislature, the executive branch got to determine the ambiguities in those statutes and the courts would defer to those interpretations.

Now the Court is saying, overturning Chevron, that the judicial branch takes over the responsibility for interpreting unclear statutes. Do I have that right, and what impact do you expect that to have going forward?

Don Moynihan: Yeah, no, you described it perfectly. I think it creates a great deal of uncertainty about policymaking. And so when Chevron was passed, that was a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court where the Court said it makes sense that federal regulators are better placed to interpret how to fill in the gaps when it comes to statute on some sort of scientific issue than it makes sense for judges to play that role.

Fast forward 20 years, there’s much less agreement on that. And so even as early as the early aughts, you had Clarence Thomas still making the case for Chevron deference, until then relatively recently it became clear there was enough support on the conservative side of the bench to overturn that.

And so I think it reflects a really dramatic shift happening within the Court and broader conservative circles about the ways in which the administrative state should operate. And it’s premised on the assumption that the administrative state has gotten too big and too powerful, and so we are going to clip its wings.

The problem with that theory is I don’t think they’ve offered a workable alternative theory of how the United States governs in the absence of something like Chevron deference. I think it’s problematic to have judges who are not experts in specific regulatory areas or scientific fields to become the arbiter of how policy decisions are made there. So I think it’s a significant expansion of judicial power that is inconsistent with judicial training and judicial qualifications.

Now, if you were talking to someone who was supportive of the Loper Bright decision, what they’ll say is what we’re really doing is re-empowering Congress. We’re telling Congress, effectively you’ve been too lazy, you need to write more specific legislation, you need to fill in the gaps rather than rely on these unelected bureaucrats to do so. And I think there is some justice to the critique that at times Congress does defer too much to the administrative state.

On the other hand, I think there are often very good reasons for that deference. There’s simply in some cases uncertainties about the way in which law should be implemented that you’re not going to be able to figure out in legislation unless you want legislation that’s already much longer than it would be and legislation that tries to predict the future. Deference to the administrative state also, it’s an unwieldy process because it takes often a year or more to put a new rule in place, but that’s often much easier than trying to pass new legislation. And so it gives a little bit more flexibility for the state to update its thinking about how to interpret policy and how to implement legislation than simply passing new legislation does.

The second concern is that Congress has not equipped itself to be the type of legislative branch that the Loper Bright decision imagines. It struggles to get budgets passed on time, so it’s hard to see it developing even more detailed legislation or being willing to revisit that legislation as the circumstances change. And Congress does not have capacity to do this. It simply doesn’t have enough human beings with the expertise to really write this incredibly detailed legislation. And if you look at the number of people who are experts on the topic in the executive branch versus Congress, there’s no comparison.

And so you would have to imagine a much better stocked Congress with more skills on its side of the table to be able to do this, and I think there’s no harm if Congress builds up more capacity—I think that’s overdue—but it would have to be an order different to effectively replace a lot of the work that historically has been happening within the executive branch.

Alex Lovit: Well, thank you, Don Moynihan, for joining me on The Context.

Don Moynihan: My pleasure, thank you so much for talking.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.

I’m Alex Lovit, a Senior Program Officer and Historian with the Foundation. Melinda Gilmore is our Director of Communications. George Drake Jr. produced this episode.

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