Statecraft

My guest today is Will Howell, the inaugural dean of the School of Government & Policy at Johns Hopkins, which welcomes its first class in fall 2028. His argument is that the standard policy masters degree is no longer fit for purpose. I happen to agree.
Two disclaimers: I took Will’s class as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and I’m a Journalist-in-Residence at his school now.
Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood and Shadrach Strehle for their support in producing this episode.


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

A while back, Edward Luttwak explained to us how to stage a coup. Julian Waller focuses on the next step: how authoritarian regimes are built and maintained.
We discuss:
* Authoritarian regimes as the historical norm
* Why military juntas don’t last and party states do
* Autocracies: Iran, North Korea, and the Papacy
* How the Kremlin has reacted to the Wagner mutiny
* What a “pacted transition” looks like in Venezuela
* Why the US shouldn’t worry about authoritarianism


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

Today, my guest is writer, thinker, and friend Dan Wang. He was on Statecraft a year ago, but this time, we're talking about a scholar who has shaped both of our thinking: the late great James C. Scott, author of (among many other classics) Seeing Like a State.
We discuss:
* How Scott’s fieldwork helped him understand peasant life and state capacity
* How mountains impede state power, in Southeast Asia and the USA
* How peasants and civil servants resist authority
* The advantages of tubers over rice
* Dan’s guiding principles for a career in an era of large language models
For the full transcript of this conversation, go to 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

Today we have a special repeat guest, Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The OPM is the people function in the federal government — the department that sets the rules for the various HR departments in other agencies. Director Kupor was on Statecraft six months ago, and is now a little more seasoned in the federal government.
We discuss:
* How veterans’ preference works in federal hiring
* Who gets fired first when an agency conducts a Reduction In Force (RIF)
* Proposed changes to prioritize performance during RIFs
* Kupor’s progress in recruiting early career and tech talent to government
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

On today’s episode, we’re continuing a conversation about presidential power that we broached a couple of weeks ago on Statecraft in an essay called, “What Trump Can Learn From Nixon.” It was about the attempts, in Richard Nixon‘s one and a half presidential terms, to build what observers called the “administrative presidency” — the presidency that actually fully controlled the administrative state.
My guests today have thought very deeply about presidential attempts to control the administrative state. William Howell and Terry Moe are co-authors of a book called, Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. They’re both political scientists. Terry is a professor of political science at Stanford, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Will is the Dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University.
We discuss:
* Why most federal employees in the 1800s were mailmen, and what changed
* How presidents have tried to control the administrative state
* Whether Republicans have used presidential power to rein in agencies they object to
* Whether the Supreme Court has been a firewall against Trump
For the full transcript of this conversation, go to 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