Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Why Government Makes Things Hard: Don Moynihan on Administrative Burden image

Why Government Makes Things Hard: Don Moynihan on Administrative Burden

S12 E306 · The PolicyViz Podcast
Avatar
174 Plays45 minutes ago

In this episode, I chat with Don Moynihan, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and author of the widely-read Substack newsletter Can We Still Govern? Don’s research focuses on administrative burdens—the learning, compliance, and psychological costs people experience when interacting with government—and how those frictions shape public trust. We talk about the data challenges involved in measuring these experiences, how the shift to digital services changes the picture, and why governments historically have ignored the costs they impose on the people they serve. We also get into Don’s own journey as a public communicator: how a rejected op-ed about Joe Manchin and the child tax credit sparked his newsletter, what it took to retrain himself to write for a general audience, and how he thinks about balancing timeliness with depth. If you’re a researcher wondering whether public communication is worth the risk—or just curious about what makes government work (or not)—this one is for you.

Keywords

administrative burden, public policy, government services, bureaucracy, policy communication, Substack newsletter, academic writing, public administration, government trust, policy research, data visualization, civic engagement, open government, policy podcast

Subscribe to the PolicyViz Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Become a patron of the PolicyViz Podcast for as little as a buck a month

Read Don’s newsletter Can We Still Govern?

Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, Substack, Twitter, Website, YouTube

Email: jon@policyviz.com

Recommended
Transcript

Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome back to the policy of this podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I hope you are well and spring has started wherever you may be.

Discussion on Substack and Administrative Burdens

00:00:21
Speaker
On this week's episode of the show, i am very happy to welcome Don Moynihan from the University of Michigan to the show. We talk about his sub stack. Can we still govern one of my favorite sub stacks out there talking about public policy and particular oftentimes administrative burdens. And what that means is how hard is it for people to interact with their government? How difficult is it to
00:00:43
Speaker
apply for benefits in a program. How hard is it to vote, for example? Lots of great stuff that we talk about in this episode about what it takes to build a newsletter, what it takes to visualize data and communicate data to a very broad audience, um and what it would mean for academics and for researchers to communicate their work to broader audiences.
00:01:07
Speaker
And on that note, before we get to the actual interview, I would like to ask you to check out my YouTube channel, I have created a number of videos about the social security system here in the US. In case you don't know, the US s social security trust fund for the retirement portion of social security is set to be exhausted now in 2032, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So that places it squarely in the next presidential administration. So I created a bunch of videos just trying some things out in visual communication to explain what the social security is
00:01:42
Speaker
how it works and some of the risks that are coming up in the next few years. So if you are interested in that, wanna see how I'm thinking about communicating data in very different ways, I hope you'll check that out. It is on my YouTube channel.

Podcast Promotion and Interview Introduction

00:01:56
Speaker
And of course, i would be remiss if I didn't ask you to please rate, review the show on iTunes, Spotify, or subscribe. Give me a thumbs up on YouTube, wherever you listen to it or watch it.
00:02:08
Speaker
I, of course, would appreciate the feedback and it helps me get other guests on the show to bring this to you every other week. All right. Enough of all those promos. Let's get over to this week's interview.

Don Moynihan's Background and Research

00:02:21
Speaker
Here's my conversation with Don Moynihan from the University of Michigan on communicating data from researchers, academia, and public policy.
00:02:31
Speaker
Hey, Don. Good to see you. Hey, John. How are you? um Well, it looks lovely there. You've got the like nearing looking seeing spring in the future. So like green above, but snow crusted lawn below.
00:02:47
Speaker
Yes, yeah the camera is strategically placed so you don't see the months of snow accumulation. We live we live in hope of spring here in Michigan. ah um Well, it's it's coming. i'm I'm confident we will. I'm confident of one thing in this world that spring will will come. i um In most years it does. Yeah, yeah. um So I'm excited to chat with you. We've got a lot of talk about.
00:03:11
Speaker
I'm guessing that a lot of folks who listen to the show who are like in the data viz world, probably not familiar with you and your work. So maybe if you could do like quick introduction and then we can talk about like why I thought it wouldd be interesting to have you on this particular show.

Understanding Administrative Burdens

00:03:23
Speaker
Sure. So I'm Don Moynihan. I'm a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. My background and interest is in the area of public administration.
00:03:36
Speaker
So I'm a proud graduate of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. I've worked in various universities. Before coming to Michigan, I spent time at Georgetown, University of Oxford,
00:03:50
Speaker
for for a year and University Wisconsin-Madison, Texas A&M University. My interests are increasingly about how citizens experience the state in their interactions um and what the state can do to improve those experiences. And so I frame that in terms of the idea of administrative burdens, the types of frictions or costs we encounter when we engage with the state. um And I've spent a lot of time theorizing about that with Pam Hurd.
00:04:24
Speaker
And then when we moved to Georgetown with Sebastian Jelka, we set up a lab called the Better Government Lab, whose goal was really to do more empirical research on that topic.
00:04:36
Speaker
Over time, the lab has grown. um we have sort of worked with governments or with nonprofits who are interested in this idea of how do you make services more accessible and better, increasingly interested in state capacity as well as a question. And so broadly, I was sort of delighted to come across this idea and develop this idea because it also gave me an excuse to talk to lots of smart people in lots of other areas. And so, you know, Pam is a sociologist.
00:05:08
Speaker
My background is public administration, but there are lots of folks in political science, economics, many other fields and disciplines, including increasingly data science, who have a shared interest in this in this big question.
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah. So can you give folks um an example of of administrative burden and what that means for for people? Sure. um So we think about it as the experience of policy implementation as onerous. And so if you've ever interacted with the government and you have a sense that you waited too long or the process was inexplicable, confusing or frustrating and stressful, those are all administrative burdens.

Digital Solutions for Government Interactions

00:05:54
Speaker
And we sort of build the idea around these three linked costs
00:05:58
Speaker
um Learning costs, so figuring out about the existence of a service, how it is relevant to you, what do you have to do to engage with it. ah Compliance costs, sort of filling out forms, the time and effort, sometimes money also that you might spend in engaging with service. And then the psychological costs. And and this is, i think, where we've probably opened the most questions and contributed more is to think about, like, how are you emotionally experiencing these interactions? Sometimes it's stress. Sometimes it's frustration. um
00:06:36
Speaker
We're also thinking about this in maybe coercive situations, like if you interact with a police officer or an immigration official, there sometimes the emotions might be about fear um So these these experiences can be as banal as applying for a new driver's license to being pulled over by a cop or to enrolling your kid in your like public school locally.
00:07:05
Speaker
And we think they're important because we think they sort of inform how people think about the state. the degree of sort of trust that they have in the state. And then if they have bad experiences, cement these sort of negative views of government in a way that's really just deeply unhelpful in the democracy.

The Role and Impact of Newsletters in Academia

00:07:26
Speaker
Mm hmm. And one question I have is, what is the data like for this? I mean, I would suspect it's hard to measure a lot of, i mean, especially the psychological piece, but even just like wait times. like so and And do you find that the data quality is and the amount of data is just not quite there for what we need to do a better assessment of of these burdens?
00:07:48
Speaker
Yeah, no, you're exactly right. um The data challenges are much more intense than I think most folks might anticipate. And so, like, conceptually, the question is you know, how do you measure this? um And for many of the the sort of frictions I talked about, you might think about, like, wait times, time spent on processes, um or sort of the equivalent of financial investments. And if you look historically in the US, since the 1980s, we had the Paperwork Reduction Act. And thanks to that act, you had this sort of little indicator at the bottom of all federal forms telling you how many minutes the federal government thought it would take you to fill out that form.
00:08:36
Speaker
Over time, and especially during the Biden administration, there was new interpretation of the Paperwork Reduction Act, where OMB told agencies, you need to think not just about how much time it takes to fill out the forms, but also the the learning and psychological costs.
00:08:56
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Generally, governments are not tracking these things. And they are not measuring how people feel about these experiences. We've done some work where we've developed scales that you could ah drop into user surveys alongside sort of customer satisfaction items, and and those work pretty well.
00:09:17
Speaker
um And so often, one of the things we've sort of indexed on instead is looking at take up rates. And so looking not directly at the experiences, but does that cause people to withdraw from a process? yeah And governments are a little bit better at thinking about take up rates than they are experiences.
00:09:39
Speaker
um But we think both are important. And, you know, and our our sort of dream long term vision here is that governments just routinely measure experiences obsessively, then think about how do we improve those experiences all the time.
00:09:55
Speaker
Right. And do you focus on, I mean, I think, ah you know, I wonder if people, when they, when they hear you talk about this, where they think about standing in line at the DMV with their papers, with their, you know, their birth certificate or whatever, versus being at home on their computer, applying for SNAP or WIC benefits through the, through the computer. So how do you measure those two types of behaviors and processes differently?
00:10:22
Speaker
I think like you can ask people very broad questions about whether the experience was easy or Yeah.
00:10:34
Speaker
And then identify if if you know you see measurable differences on those. I mean, you're you're right in that but we're also embarking on this project at a time when increasingly the spaces that people encounter in administrative settings are not physical spaces. They're not actually encountering people except as a last resort. They're mostly engaged in digital spaces where they're interacting with a a machine, probably in AI or in the future, and very rarely with people.
00:11:08
Speaker
um There are some advantages in that move to digital spaces. you know One is you you remove sort of physical barriers. It's also easier to embed the tracking of those experiences. like You can see how many people got on the website and then withdrew. You can observe directly how long they're waiting.
00:11:30
Speaker
So government should be taking advantage of that. um But generally, if people come away from those experiences feeling like, okay, that was pretty easy or that was pretty hard, it's ah it's a good way of gauging, is this working or not?
00:11:47
Speaker
um There are gonna be some exceptions to this, right? Like if you're in veterans health, a lot of the work you do is still gonna involve getting physical people, physical spaces, getting a human being in front of them to help them.
00:12:02
Speaker
And so there's some parts of these encounters that are going to be colored by and shaped by and helped by Training people to just think through the burdens that they're imposing upon others. and And that's part of the point is that just historically bureaucracies haven't thought about this as a negative

Writing for Broader Audiences

00:12:22
Speaker
externality that they're imposing on the public.
00:12:24
Speaker
They worry about political blame. They worry about like failing in some big and obvious ways, but they don't really account for these low level frictions that they generate on the people that they're trying to serve.
00:12:37
Speaker
Right. So let's move from frictions that affect people and their interaction with government to frictions in a researcher, scientist, academic communicating their work. So you've published lots of different articles, lots of different places, and now you have this sub stack newsletter. Can we still govern that, you know, has tens of thousands of subscribers.
00:12:58
Speaker
And I'm curious, what was the motivation behind it and you know are Do you find that ah these sorts of newsletters sort of generally, but these sorts sort of non-standard outside the sort of ivory tower are being seen as more valuable to the academic communication experience?
00:13:23
Speaker
So ah you knowll I'll reveal the sort of origin moment for my newsletter now, which i which I've never shared with anyone before. This is an exclusive. Breaking news. yeah So the the origin story is you should blame Joe Manchin.
00:13:38
Speaker
so in was trying to place an op-ed about um the ways in which Joe Manchin wanted to add more burdens into an extension of the child tax credit. And I i thought it was a terrible idea.
00:13:58
Speaker
you know it it was a classic case of administrative burden. he was motivated to add a lot of barriers to chase down, I think it was parents who were taking drugs on time and might get this benefit. in a way that predictably would undercut the success of the policy. um And I think I sent it to a couple of standard outlets, like the you know the the ones you would suspect, The Times, The Post, which back then was still a respectable newspaper. um Things have changed. um and And, you know, at all of those ah efforts have their own frictions. You wait a few days, the editor gets back and says we take a pass. And I sort of thought to myself, well, this this is silly. i Like, it's...
00:14:45
Speaker
the 21st century i can just take these words and put it out there and people will find it and it won't have the same reach as the times but the the group of people who are really interested in this topic will see it and so that was the first thing i wrote um i was also at the time really concerned about the potential of some of the actions at the end of the first Trump administration coming back for a potential second Trump administration. so I was I was basically saying if there was a second Trump administration, you should expect it to look very differently because of some of the things we saw in the last year of the first Trump administration, including a lot of politicization of the government. And there wasn't that an obvious audience for that because it was very Cassandra-like set of warnings that people you know didn't necessarily believe were relevant or didn't want to hear.
00:15:45
Speaker
And so that got me posting on this topic. And like I was mostly just chipping away at this writing something once a week or once every couple of weeks for the last few years.
00:15:59
Speaker
Then when Trump got back into office, you know, I think interest and in a lot of what I was writing exploded. um And I think you know how this all relates to academic standing and the value that's placed upon it, it's a really hard question. And like partly I can remember when I was at one point in my career, I was chair of the tenure review committee for social science at the University Wisconsin-Madison. And you know I remember one case where
00:16:35
Speaker
a candidate was thinking about, well, like I post a lot online that should be captured. And we we didn't have, we never means to value that.
00:16:46
Speaker
Like anyone can post stuff online. There's no peer review. Right. So how do you value the quality or impact of that work? um I broadly today think of this as a form of service and as effort to communicate broadly to the public in a way where you're taking your knowledge and expertise that you might spend on one more paper, but instead using it mostly to explain to the public what is going on and provide sort of a layer of analysis that they might not get elsewhere.
00:17:26
Speaker
And so I do think that has value and I do think that is probably undervalued in in academic circles, but I think it is much easier for someone like me who's a full professor and where there's no additional rungs on the ladder for me. So, you know, I can do slightly riskier things. It's easier for me to say this than it would be for PhD student or an assistant professor.
00:17:56
Speaker
That said, i You know, i I just published an essay from a PhD student from University of Toronto last week. If I see their CV in the pool a job applicant and I see, oh, this person has some public communication skills.
00:18:17
Speaker
This person is comfortable speaking to different audiences. They're not afraid of trying to be relevant. That to me is a good sign. And I think if you're if you're sort of savvy enough, you can persuade your institution that this actually does have value.
00:18:36
Speaker
And I say all of this very cautiously because at exactly the same moment where you have more academics like me writing public facing work, you also have more academics getting canceled and punished for words that they put online.
00:18:53
Speaker
And so there, you know, In some respects, the safest strategy is to stay in the foxhole and never to sort of express a public word of utterance because it'll be deemed political or too controversial.
00:19:08
Speaker
But it's an important moment. And I do think we need more voices out there. Yeah. Do you think, well, let me ask it this way. When you started writing your newsletter um or or, yeah, I mean, I guess when you were started writing a newsletter, did you find it challenging to write for that different kind of audience? I mean, it's very, the way you write in a newsletter is very different than you would write for the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yes, I absolutely did. And I think, you know, probably if you read the earlier pieces that I wrote at compared to the current pieces, theres there's been some style and tonal changes. And I think this is a challenge for any academic where we're trained.
00:19:56
Speaker
but We're not trained terribly well in a lot of things, right right? As you know, we're like not trained in data visualization. We're not really trained to teach. right um were we're not we're We're not trained to write, except for it is like one weird form of specific technical writing where we sort of learn by doing, which is to write for a journal article. yeah Like that is the one thing where...
00:20:24
Speaker
Maybe we're not given a lot of instruction, but we just have to learn. And that is a form of technical writing then that you know becomes stuck in your head and becomes your default mode. And so then when you stop and say, i need to write 1,200 words that someone who is not ah an academic will want to read, that's a challenge, right? You have to sort of rela relearn your writing skills.
00:20:49
Speaker
um and i think like now i've been doing this long enough that i almost have the opposite problem which is that when i go back and try to write an article i have to watch for the informality i have to you know add more 50 cent words i have to impose a few more add-on sentence run-on sentences in order to yeah re-establish my academic bona fides right um So i like i think as with a lot of stuff, just like doing it a lot, watching people that you like and who do it well and say, what are they doing that I could do?
00:21:26
Speaker
Like over time, you just internalize some of these sort of skills. So if I were to say, what would be your like, you know, top tips to making complex social science research work?
00:21:40
Speaker
you know, more understandable, relatable to a broader audience? Would you not have the top things or you just be like, you just like, you just keep trying and throw, I mean, there's enough content out there where you just keep trying and see what hits and what doesn't.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah. and And you can, you can do that. Right. You can like, i mean, and sub stack now you can AB test your headlines and they'll tell you which ones get, the you know, the most feedback. So you can even automate some of this stuff.
00:22:08
Speaker
um I think there are you know some generic tips, like what is the hook? We don't, we we think about hooks somewhat in academic writing, but like, you know, what is the thing in the first paragraph that is going to cause someone to read the next paragraph?
00:22:27
Speaker
Or what is the what is the question in the headline that is going to be motivational for someone who probably has ah hundred other options to read, to draw from at that moment?

Academics Communicating Publicly: Challenges and Risks

00:22:40
Speaker
And so there's there's a level of sort of, can you communicate clearly directly about the stakes that will capture an audience?
00:22:50
Speaker
um And again, this is not always something in academics are good at. Like we sometimes sort of present things like a mystery story, like we'll tell you at the end yeah what the solution is rather than sort of you know, punching someone in the nose and saying, you have to pay attention to this. yeah um And I think having simpler language um does matter a lot.
00:23:13
Speaker
um I also think, you know, for better or worse, and mostly for worse, if you're on social media, you do pick up a sense of what is the narrative? How are people thinking about this issue?
00:23:27
Speaker
And that causes you to think about, well, how do I respond to that? Or how would I frame that? Or how would I engage with that? And so you're no longer just ah writing your ideas on your laptop in a room by yourself, but you're also taking in other people's perspectives. And so I'll often start drafting an idea by seeing a post someone has written or a reply someone has given to me on social media and say, oh, that's interesting.
00:23:55
Speaker
Maybe there's something there. I'll just like cut and paste that into a Google Doc and maybe I'll come back to it or maybe I won't. But I do think that sort of engagement with a set of alternative voices outside of your own head does help to sharpen the way in which you communicate.
00:24:15
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. um you You mentioned this um this post from a student at University of Toronto. You had Pam Hurd wrote ah what I think was a great article this week. um I'm curious, at what point did you say, this is not just going to be me writing every week or twice a week or... and and bring in other voices? Were you just like, I just can't keep up the pace and just need someone to take the load off? Or was it as more of a strategic, like, let's broaden the the voices in this one place that people are going to come to?
00:24:50
Speaker
I mean, I think it's a little from column A and a little from column B there. um like it It typically you know takes me a good chunk of time to write a piece.
00:25:02
Speaker
um And I also think for my audience, the people who have subscribed to get this newsletter, it probably gets tiresome to hear the same voice. And so there's something valuable about getting like a ah mix of perspectives in there.
00:25:19
Speaker
And so partly, you know, out of consideration for them, um plus the workload for myself, I have solicited other voices. And, you know, ah a lot of the early work was also with Pam, which because we already have this working relationship, we might write a paper or we might have a discussion and say, oh, that's that's a post like, right. So I remember we, you know, we were traveling together her last year and, you know, full disclosure, Pam and I are married. so
00:25:50
Speaker
you know, this this this is not, there's all sorts of bombshells being released on this podcast. we We may have to censor some of this afterwards. But but like we're we're driving through, I think it was Utah going to visit the national park and we were thinking about, oh, the ways in which the Trump administration is engaged in discussions of fraud and the safety net is really different from the past. Like as always, there's some continuities, but there are some profound differences. And we just started drafting something in the car
00:26:23
Speaker
With other authors that I'm not married to, it was a little bit more of sometimes I would see an article that I thought was really interesting and say, are you interested in trying to summarize this? Or increasingly, if someone's written a book, you know it we would um just had a couple of really nice summaries of new books come out, one from Giulia Zari, for example. um Will Howell and Terry Moe just had the book come out on the presidency.
00:26:55
Speaker
ah People invest so much effort in books that you you should absolutely find every opportunity yeah communicate to every different possible audience. And again, as academics, we invest so much in production and we invest very little in marketing right like communicating the uh the the work we've done um not you you're you're great at that but like generally like we just think oh i got something published i can go home now like i can you know switch off where but if you want people to actually read the thing you've invested your life and you have to do a little bit more And now occasionally I will get, you know, people will reach out to me and say, i have an idea. do you think this would be a fit?
00:27:41
Speaker
Right. And so now I spend a little bit more time editing those ideas. And sometimes it's not a fit. And sometimes it's something where it's, oh, this is really different. And I would never have thought of this. And it's incredibly valuable to have that perspective.
00:27:56
Speaker
Yeah. on the On the communication side, do you think it's The incentives in academia, mean, not every researcher, not every scientist is in academia, obviously, but do you think it's the incentives that are built into academia? Do you think it's the lack of training? I mean, it's not a lack of opportunities, right? Like you can start a Substack newsletter for free and it's like, is it just the type of personality that scientists tend to be?
00:28:23
Speaker
i I think it's probably a combination ah of of many of those things. yeah um like I think I was probably close to a full professor before I realized, oh, there are communications staff on campus who, write if I want to help pitching an op-ed to a newspaper, they would help me with that.
00:28:44
Speaker
right um Because I had been so focused early in my career just on like writing the next research article. And and that is that's a rational response to incentives where that is the basis by which you get tenure or which you don't.
00:28:59
Speaker
um And so I think it's also the case that the environment is such that public relevance has never been more important, but also more risky. And so if you're a dean at a policy school, um do you tell your junior faculty, go out, you know be bold, be aggressive?
00:29:22
Speaker
tell the world what you want to do. I think a lot of deans would be cautious about that because they they worry about the stories where you know, some academic is deemed to have gone too far and written something that generates tremendous pushback from, you know, what is also micro industry of blogging about academia, right? so one huge difference from when I started working as a professor until today is that there is now multiple venues that just cover academics screwing up.
00:30:02
Speaker
Like I'm thinking about campus reform is one example where they have embedded student reporters in every campus. And if you you know say something wrong or do something wrong, they will try to turn that into a news story. And so you're also surveilled for errors in a way that we never were before.

Publishing Choices and Media Engagement

00:30:23
Speaker
So I think part of the training is not just how do you put the words on screen, but also how do you protect yourself so that you don't just sort of respond to um an inflammatory comment with an ah equally inflammatory comment.
00:30:41
Speaker
Right. um So I think the um again, like having been someone who was on a tenure or review committee at a university, i think using service as the avenue and saying this is service, this is public communication. This is sort of like publishing something in The New York Times, maybe less prestigious, but it has value.
00:31:03
Speaker
yeah And then maybe asking faculty, help us to understand that value. Like how many page counts did you get? Did someone pick this up? right Help us you know to convey that impact in a way that historically we just haven't really thought about.
00:31:20
Speaker
i think there is an avenue there to change the incentives and to change the culture um and also to to help protect people from from being targeted. yeah Do you today, if um if Joe Manchin were still in, still I mean, there's plenty of other apologies, but Joe Manchin's still there. Would you today reach out to New York Times with an op-ed or would you just go to your own publication at this point? ah Increasingly, I would just publish it. and And partly the issue is timeliness, which is, um you know, if someone says something,
00:31:59
Speaker
today, i will get more of a response if I'm able to engage with that by tomorrow's AM. Whereas if I have to wait like you know five or 10 days for it to go through an editorial process, it loses a little bit of juice.
00:32:16
Speaker
Right. um I will still every so often um pick up an idea and say this is less about the immediate response. And this is more a sort of deeper idea that I think would be relevant for these sort of elite people.
00:32:38
Speaker
uh journalism outlets sometimes i'm wrong about that like so i'll i'll give you two examples so last year i wrote something about what's the checklist for authoritarianism and how far are we on that checklist and i thought okay this is a big thing piece and i pitched it to someone in the atlantic and they you know took a pass i think they were wrong But there's a reason why they're working at the Atlantic and I'm writing like an online blog. um ah But, it you know, that ended up being one of my most read pieces last year. Yeah.
00:33:16
Speaker
This year I wrote like a blog about what I labeled the clicktatorship, the sort of intersection between online social media presence and modes of governing.
00:33:29
Speaker
And again, you know the premise is there's something new and different here with the Trump administration that we've seen in the past. um And I posted that on my website and then someone from the Atlantic reached out and said, would you be interested in doing a version of this for for our online version of the magazine? And I did.
00:33:52
Speaker
Right. And so I think sometimes like just getting the idea out there is a different pathway to these more traditional media outlets because someone, an editor, editor or a reporter in these outlets might see that and say, oh, I think that's smart.
00:34:09
Speaker
Is there a way that we can incorporate this into into what we're doing? Right, right. So folks can check out the newsletter. I'll put a link in the and the notes. If someone wants to pitch you something, do you just have a ton of people pitching you stuff? Should they email you? Like, what's the best way?
00:34:27
Speaker
Yeah, ah shoot me an email. I mean, basically, I'm interested in broad questions of governance. I think if you can sort of communicate pressing issues that are occurring right now in in a good way, i'm I'm looking for examples like that. Just shoot me an email. My email is dmoyn at umich.edu.
00:34:47
Speaker
Go blue.
00:34:50
Speaker
And, know, I have some sort standard advice for folks who try to to publish, which I'm happy to share.

Conclusion and Promotions

00:34:58
Speaker
yep, I'm happy to happy to hear a pitches. yeahp get You know, ah probably i would at this stage maybe once every couple of weeks. So i someone will say, is this an idea you'd be interested in?
00:35:09
Speaker
Don, thanks so much for coming on the show. Appreciate it. Always good to see you. My pleasure, John. Thank you.
00:35:19
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in everyone. Hope you enjoyed that episode. I hope you'll check out, can we still govern Don Moynihan's great sub stack newsletter. I really do think it's worth your time to subscribe to that one and check it out.
00:35:29
Speaker
Great articles coming out all the time. And of course, once again, if you'd like to check out my YouTube series on social security, I also have series on Excel flourish and lots of other things on there. i hope you'll enjoy all of them. So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast.
00:35:46
Speaker
Thanks so much for listening.