Policymakers spend enormous energy debating what government should do. But who’s paying attention to whether it actually gets done? Gloria Gong runs Harvard’s Government Performance Lab, where she’s spent 11 years sending teams into more than 100 state and local agencies to work on that exact question. Gong explains why government defaults to process over outcomes, how a Detroit violence intervention program cracked the code on results-driven contracting, and why her lab mostly skips New York City — which she says has the best government talent bench in the country but makes a terrible model for everywhere else. She also tells the story of how her husband’s carefully maintained list of her passions saved her from a career in corporate law.
For more solutions-oriented thinking on urban life, visit the Vital City website at https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/.
