Kennedy School Review

Agile, iterative, pilot, scrum—these phrases may be common in the world of software development, but one would hardly expect to hear them tossed around the austere marble corridors of state government.  Yet they are common parlance in the Massachusetts Governor’s Office, where a nimble squad of problem-solvers is using every cutting-edge tool in the toolbox […]

BY LAURA WHITE Workforce development had been a frequent news topic in the months preceding my summer at the Governor’s Office in Pennsylvania—from announcements about an executive order on apprenticeships, to predictions about the automation of large swaths of the workforce. Yet I rarely saw in the media the one place where I would find […]

BY MICHELLE LIU The placards are subtle. I missed the first small signs with dates on the Exit Glacier Trail. I was rushing to hike the Harding Ice Field and I was preoccupied anticipating Alaska’s unpredictable weather and my next eight miles. However, even I noticed placards with random numbers 1891, 1899, 1917…along the rainforest […]

BY ANDREW SUGRUE More than most states, Nevada suffered greatly during the recent recession. Unemployment peaked at 14 percent in 2010, housing prices had fallen 60 percent by 2011, and as of last year, GDP per capita remained at 20 percent below its pre-recession high. The state’s economy relies heavily on gaming, tourism, entertainment, hospitality […]

BY CHUCK ARRSAUYAQ HERMAN Montana is home to the world’s first national park and also home to a toxic man-made lake, a mile-long and 1,800 feet deep, created by a now defunct copper mine. The state is well-acquainted with the traditional clash between resource-extraction and conservation. But that may be changing. I spent the summer […]

Paul LePage (R-ME) is America’s most conservative governor, and a reliable headline. For ten weeks this summer, he was also my boss. After years of talking the bipartisan talk, I was ready to walk the bipartisan walk as Maine’s inaugural Dukakis Fellow. Beyond building a résumé that joins Michael Dukakis (D-MA) and Paul LePage in […]

BY MAGGIE SALINGER The morning seemed like any other in the Rhode Island State House until my team received a chilling email. It was a note from a local father, whom I’ll call John, still reeling from the loss of his son. Days before his son died of an opioid overdose, John had dragged him […]

BY AMY ZHOU Even non-Californians took notice of what Governor Jerry Brown has been up to this summer. Following through on his public denouncement of President Trump’s stance on climate change, Brown traveled to China for a high-profile meeting with Xi Jinping and signed an extension of his landmark cap-and-trade program to 2030 into law. […]

BY JAMES PAGANO To kick off the Kennedy School Review’s special series In the Statehouse, Governor Dukakis spoke with me about what drew him to politics, how racial attitudes in Massachusetts have changed over time, his own advice for policy students interested in state government, and his aspirations for a more united Democratic Party. Michael […]

BY KATHERINE MANSTED Benjamin Clayton’s recent post is another outing in a long line of U.S. power pessimism, which history will ultimately prove wrong. The world has a penchant for predicting U.S. decline. Indeed, reports of U.S. decline predated its rise. Charles Dickens famously wrote that, to its 19th century citizens, America “always is stagnated, […]

BY ANGELICA QUICKSEY   “Explore. Experiment. Evaluate. Be delightful!” These words, beside a dry-erase drawing of a double-sided funnel, are scrawled across one of many whiteboard-coated walls in an office full of sticky notes, markers, and a quiet buzz of activity. The office sits on the fifth floor of Boston city hall and hosts a […]

BY MADISON CHAPMAN After a tumultuous August in Washington, one thing is certain: the Trump Administration will amend the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). President Trump met with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto at the July 7th G20 Summit, where each expressed a desire to conclude any NAFTA discussion by year-end. According to a […]