'The governor of Maryland is a long shot for the White House—and the best manager in government today.
The idea is to use data like a scalpel to dissect how a government program works, to pinpoint where, exactly, it’s breaking down, and then to use these collaborative meetings to solve the problem at hand. . .
Malley is not the kind of person who’s afraid to take over a meeting. “I’m an operations guy,” he tells me afterward, partly by way of explanation. “I’ve always liked digging into the numbers, figuring out what’s going on and doing the kind of analysis that the other guys won’t do.” In the hallway after the meeting, two staffers corroborate the point. He seems so much more relaxed in meetings like that, they say, when he’s not “doing all the politician stuff.” . .
Instead, what makes O’Malley unique as a politician is precisely the skill that was on display in that windowless conference room in downtown Annapolis: he is arguably the best manager working in government today.
That may not seem like a very flashy title—at first blush, “Best Manager” sounds more like a booby prize than a claim a politician might ride to the White House. But in an era where the very idea of government is under assault, a politician’s capacity to deliver on his or her promises, to actually make the bureaucracy work, is an underappreciated skill.
Of course, it was a conservative president who most recently demonstrated his woeful lack of such expertise (see George W. Bush, administration of), but it is the liberal and progressive bloc that stakes its identity on a belief in government, and therefore has a higher stake in getting government management right.
In 2012 Barack Obama cobbled together a motley majority, unified by a shared belief that the federal government can and should play a larger role in solving the country’s common problems. The best way to ensure that voting bloc’s enthusiasm for the Democrats lasts—and the best hope to reduce some of the antigovernment anger on the other side—is for government to deliver results. That means not only passing big legislation, but also making sure that the programs that result, and the rest of the government’s far-flung endeavors, actually work. . .
The idea of closely monitoring data and tracking weekly and biweekly progress toward explicit goals appealed to him. It was a way to break down daunting problems into bite-sized pieces, to move, incrementally, in the right direction. It must have felt, in some ways, like a game. In June 2000, just six months after becoming mayor, O’Malley and his team launched a new city-wide program. . .
In the summer of 2000, O’Malley and his team had started with just one hunk of the government, the Bureau of Solid Waste Management, and by the end of O’Malley’s first term every department in the city had a CitiStat meeting. By 2003, they had also revamped Baltimore’s 311 call center so city officials could compile a list of citizens’ needs and complaints, track the time it took different departments to deliver services, and improve the response, agency by agency. In 2002, if a citizen complained about a missed trash pickup, he was likely to wait for days. By 2004, the trash would be whisked away within twenty-four hours 82 percent of the time. In 2002, it took more than a week to remove an abandoned vehicle; by 2004, it took five days. “It became this game of limbo,” Gallagher says. “Say it took two weeks to clean a dirty alley. Once we got to an 80 percent completion rate within two weeks, we would drop the bar and say we’re going to do it in ten days, and then seven. Productivity increased, but people also started seeing it as a challenge. How low can we go?” . .
Then, like a hundred reporters before me, I broached the subject of 2016. If he were to go to Washington, D.C., I asked, would he be the one to implement “FedStat”? His face broke into a broad grin.
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know any other way to govern.”'
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