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On “The Strategerist” Podcast, Ryan talks about leadership, finding common ground, and reflects on his time as Speaker of the House

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By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Earlier this Spring, American Idea Foundation President and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was featured on the President George W. Bush Center’s The Strategerist podcast. During the wide-ranging conversation, Ryan reflected on President Bush’s time in office, shared his advice for the next generation of American leaders, and offered perspectives on his time in Congress.

Ryan also touched on the work being done by the American Idea Foundation to promote evidence-based public policies that expand economic opportunities and alleviate poverty. On the podcast, whose name comes from a 2000 Saturday Night Live skit featuring Will Ferrell, Ryan elaborated on some of the solutions he outlined in an interview entitled: Keeping the American Dream Alive, which was featured in the most recent edition of the Bush Center’s online magazine, The Catalyst.

Listen to Ryan’s interview on The Strategerist by clicking here.

On the styles of a successful leader:

“I think there are two styles: There’s intimidation or motivation. There’s inspiration or fear. I’m a big believer in motivating through inspiration and motivation and I have always sort of felt this way….

The best way to organize and motivate people is to get people to pre-agree to a course of action, to agree to an agenda, to agree on a policy course that we are going to implement and run on. And then, if people elect us, we will hold ourselves accountable for doing it. That’s what we did [when I was Speaker of the House] and that made it so much easier to run Congress because I could hold people accountable for keeping their own word that they had made to their constituents. So, when it came time to pass tough legislation and to do difficult things in the majority, we were able to point to the fact that you ran on this and we all agreed we were going to support this agenda and now is the time to execute this piece of this agenda.

It’s the best way to organize and motivate people: Make them a participant. Make people participate in the formation of the idea so they have a stake in it. Stakeholder-legislating, common vision, and getting people to agree to a common vision at the beginning of the process so that the process actually occurs when there is demand for the process, that’s basically my whole theory.”

On what being Speaker of the House really entails:
“It’s a combination between school principal, warden, and traffic cop. It’s very much a management job and it has a great policy meaning. I mean, you decide what goes to the [House] floor and how the floor works and what Congress works on. You’re also basically like a conductor of the symphony because you’re sitting at the rostrum telling these committees to get those bills going through those committees and to get these bills going on the track and then you’re building the pipeline to the floor.

You want to choreograph, over a two-year period, all the various legislation that’s going to happen and you have to choreograph every committee and all the members who are moving that process through based on your timeline. Then events and circumstances blow it up and you have to adapt to things like a terrorist attack or some natural disaster and you have to just bob and weave.

And then, you have to go deal with the other governments. And then you deal with the enemy, which is the Senate! The Democrats are adversaries!  That’s the joke we always say, and sorry, it just had to be told because you told me you were Senate staff. We always say that the Democrats are our adversary and the enemy are those guys in the Senate but you just have to deal with the Senate and have to get Congress working to get things done.

You also manage a lot of people. Everybody, basically, has their hopes and their aspirations and their ambitions in Congress whether it be the bill that they want to champion or the amendment they want made in order or the committee they want to get on. It all goes to the Speaker’s office and you have to do all that so you can basically manage people. If somebody does something wrong, you’re the enforcer. I regrettably had to ask four or five people to leave Congress and on a day’s notice. You have to discipline. You basically have to guard the institution and preserve the institution and run the institution and keep the institution’s prerogatives going.

And so, when I took over from John Boehner, we knew each other very well. I didn’t really need a policy brief from John but what he basically said was: “You’ve been a Committee Chair of two committees. You just think about getting your legislation passed and that’s what a Committee Chair thinks like. Now your job is to preserve this institution and most times you want to advance your party’s goals and you want to advance the legislation that your party cares about and you want to keep your majority but at all times, your job is to preserve this institution and you have got to start thinking like that.” It was literally the last thing he said to me as he left the office and then I had to get the office repainted to get the smell of smoke out.”

On serving as Speaker under Democrat and Republican Presidents:

“I think if I went from a conventional Democratic President to a conventional Republican President, it would have been much more similar, but it was just radically different, dramatically different. With President Obama, I ran against the guy in the last election so he felt like I definitely had reasons for not liking his program but we actually had a pretty good relationship. We had mutual respect for one another. We personally liked each other but I pretty much disagreed with him on about 80% of what he was trying to do and we had very big conversations about what those were. We would try to quickly figure out what is it that we could do and [identify] what we agree on and then we did those things.

I actually tried to do criminal justice reform with [President Obama] at the end but it was just too tight and trade was the other thing. He just started too late on trade but I really tried to get that through. There are a couple things that we really agreed on and that we worked very well together on. He just started the effort too late on trade and we couldn’t get over the finish line, but there were things that I passed with him like Puerto Rico legislation and the CURES Act, which is the cancer research legislation. And then, when we disagreed, we just sort of fought it out and then negotiated and got agreements like on omnibus appropriations. I got the ban on crude oil exports lifted and I had to give him something to get
that and it was fairly run of the mill adversarial….

With Trump, it was like four times the job because in his particular case, he was short-staffed and under-manned and then the staff that he brought on were so new and so green. He didn’t bring a lot of people who had been around or who had done these things, so we were the most experienced people in
government at the time….

We felt, and I felt, the deep obligation and this is one of the reasons why the day after the election, I felt obligated to do a press conference just showing that the government was still here and it had three branches. People didn’t expect the 2016 election to turn out the way it did, I personally didn’t either but we’re just going to  work it out and we wanted to kind of calm the country down. And so, we sent some staffers over there…. and we tried to get them help right away to get the government up and running. And so, we were much more involved in day-to-day things with the Trump Administration on policy and planning and execution in addition to running the legislature.

We had a pathway to executing our agenda which we called “The Better Way” and I produced this giant Gantt chart that was almost the size of this table. I figured President Trump has been in the construction business and has been building skyscrapers so he knows what a Gantt chart is, which is a workflow chart with the entire agenda that we ran on. And so, we brought it over there at the White House…. and it’s the only time I think I had [President Trump’s] undivided attention for three hours. Knowing now what I know, I’m amazed…

And so, with President Trump, the exciting activity was the ability to get our agenda passed. We passed around 1,172 bills, which is double what we typically pass and half of them made it into law through the Senate… Obviously, the President drove me nuts sometimes with just the things he does, but nevertheless it was a remarkably productive time.”

On how America can positively respond to a globalized economy & why the Biden infrastructure plan would hurt economic competitiveness:

“It’s technology, it’s education, it’s lifelong learning and it’s getting an economy that continues to produce good, high-growth jobs in cutting-edge industries, which we’re working on [in Janesville] and we’re doing in Wisconsin. We have got to stay ahead of it. Globalization is here: It’s bringing like a billion people out of poverty and done right, we can still have the best jobs [in America]. We can still have high school educated people work in manufacturing and get great jobs. And frankly, we were starting to see those policies that were put in place in 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic hit. take hold. I think we had some really good policies put in place. More are needed, but our agenda [under President Trump] was working….

We fixed job training a lot. We consolidated and streamlined job training, giving it back to the states so they could focus on their economic development strategies and allowed states to build those programs out. I think there needs to be another wave of job training reforms. I think there are tech-enabled reforms that can occur and make our economy work much better.

[I think you] shouldn’t pass the Biden infrastructure tax. It’s horrendous and what I mean is that President Biden will take us back to being the worst tax code in the industrialized world for businesses. We were the worst and in 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made us one of the best and this will literally, technically, economically, and statutorily bring us back to the worst and that will just drive more inversions. It will drive businesses overseas and it will slow down wages and productivity. So, I think you need to make sure you don’t do that.

I think there are some things that you need to make permanent in the tax code, like full expensing for plant and equipment that will increase productivity, increase wages, and increase living standards. We were beginning to see that for the Janesville-type person and for the blue-collar industrial worker, they were starting to see true living standard increases, where wages increase faster than inflation. And then we got hit with the pandemic so I think we had a good plan in place and I would go back and accelerate that.”

On the state of the Republican Party:

“The state of the party is good. We had a great election down-ballot in 2020 but we lost the presidency. I mean, we also should’ve won the Georgia [Senate elections]. We didn’t. I think Trump blew that one for us, but we did far better in the Senate than we expected. We did really well in the House, which we didn’t expect. I think we’ll get the House majority in 2022 partly because of history and partly because of Biden’s overreach and the progressive agenda, so I think we’ll get the majority because of that. On paper, we’re strong but philosophically, I am greatly worried. We cannot be a cult of personality or a party built around any personality — let alone Donald Trump, but any personality. We’ve got to be an ideas party and the problem is we’re sort of a reactionary party right now.We’re basically playing cultural war, reactionary politics which is kind of like cotton candy and it gives people the sugar high for the moment. It gives immediate satisfaction but it’s not a coherent vision and agenda. It’s not based on a moral code or a coherent philosophy. Now having said that, there are lots of Republicans who have that coherent philosophy but it’s not what we’re really identified with as a party and we’re just going to have to go through some growing pains to get there.”

On “Hold These Truths” Podcast, Speaker Ryan details federal policies to fight poverty & expand opportunity with Rep. Dan Crenshaw

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By: AIF STAFF

Washington, DC – Last week, American Idea Foundation President and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan joined Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw on his podcast, Hold These Truths, to discuss how the federal government can better lift Americans out of poverty. Speaker Ryan detailed the work that the American Idea Foundation is engaged in to promote evidence-based public policies and to scale programs with demonstrated track records of improving outcomes.

The entire podcast is accessible here and some notable excerpts from Speaker Ryan and Rep. Crenshaw’s conversation follow.

Civil Society, not Socialism, is the way to expand economic opportunity:

“My argument is that free enterprise is the best weapon against poverty and that’s a timely conversation, given the fact that we have this sort of fetish with socialism. We have, and young persons have in particular, this sort of romantic attachment [and] fashionable [view toward] the idea of socialism. But when you actually scrape below the surface of socialism, you realize it is just basically conformity with no choices, enforced poverty, and misery….”

“The American creed and the American Idea is the most revolutionary thing we’ve ever had as human beings. It is the one thing that ran contrary to all other ways that societies had previously organized themselves – which was mostly through the coercion or collectivism. The progressive left is trying to pull [our nation] back toward the same old tired ideas of collectivism and socialism, which created a lot of rot and problems.”

“To have a free society like we designed — a Constitutional republic, it does require morality. You know, Washington basically said in his farewell address: We built a system of natural law and natural rights and a Constitutional republic with individual rights, which sort of requires a moral society and moral country. And so, it’s important that we, as individuals, keep civil society big and growing so that we can keep ourselves tethered to truth and to individual moral codes and so that we can enjoy the gifts of freedom that this country has given us and that you fought for in the Navy SEALS.”

Promoting policies that create opportunities for all Americans to succeed:

“The question is: Do we have a country that is wired to produce or promote equality of opportunities or do we want to change this country to promote equality of outcomes, which is really socialism and which is antithetical to our founding creed and to our Constitution?

“I would argue strongly that promoting equality of opportunity is the goal of America and that is the goal of our government in our society. We should maintain that and not substitute it for equality of outcomes because the kind of government you have to have to [achieve equality of outcomes] is radically different than what we have….

“We can strive for a system of dynamic upper mobility, where we promote the equality of opportunities, so everybody gets a shot at living the best version of their life and rising to wherever they want to go and wherever they can go, limited only by their God-given talents and their own efforts. That’s the kind of society we want to achieve. That’s what America is wired for. And so, there are lots of techniques and programs and policies that can do that but they also must respect the inherent dignity of each individual person. They must respect the dignity of local government, of local people and communities.

“De Tocqueville did a great job of looking at how America was so successful and unique by having a civil society where you had local, connective tissue where people helped each other because we respected people having more control of their lives and [we respected that] communities could do more with each other and [we respected] that civil society made people better people because they help each other voluntarily and by choice.

“And so, going into tax credits and tax policies and all of these things, all of these policies have proven to be effective because they capture this dynamic which enables people to make better lives for themselves, to help each other to rise and to rise up the income scale, to pursue this beautiful notion of upward mobility where you can be better off than your parents.”

A lifetime of learning how to best fight poverty in America & using evidence to achieve progress: 

“I spent some time as a young guy staffer going through public housing projects like Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor homes in Chicago and seeing how the poverty-industrial complex and the War on Poverty actually backfires in so many amazing and bad ways. Then I spent years running around the country with my friend Bob Woodson, learning about poverty, thinking about poverty, exploring poverty, and getting out of Janesville and Kenosha, Wisconsin where I’m from, and learning about poverty in poor, rural areas and in poor, inner cities. I did it for a number of years to just educate myself, to understand this issue better, to come up with better solutions that will get at the different types of poverty….

“What I learned in my career as a policymaker is that there are areas that have only known poverty for many generations, where poverty was passed on from one generation to the next. And in a lot of places, the problem is bad government policy.

“What I also learned in my career as a policymaker, not just in Washington but also touring the country studying poverty, is we are measuring [poverty] in the wrong way. When I was head of the Budget Committee, I did a year-long study commemorating the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty and I wanted to learn if we spent trillions on lots of different [poverty-fighting] programs, what are we getting for it?

“We concluded, after running the numbers, we spent about a trillion dollars a year on anti-poverty programs. The federal government has a little less than 100 programs and we never measure success based on results or outcomes.

“We measure success based on input and effort: How much money are we spending on the programs we have? How many people are on those programs? And we never studied evidence or outcomes or asked is it working? Are we getting people out of poverty? Are we breaking the cycle of generational poverty? Those questions weren’t even asked. And so, what we tried to do is switch the debate to a results-oriented debate.

“And as I got into this fight, I found myself in a bunch of ideological clashes that were left versus right…. And we basically had stalemates. So, I decided: Let’s go use the field of economics, which is something I’ve spent my career on, and see if we can get past the stalemate by using something that is a little less ideological, which is the field of evidence.”

Outcomes should drive spending decisions on fighting poverty;

“I’m a confident conservative, I believe our principles work. I believe in work. I believe in incentives and helping families. All those things work to get people out of poverty. If you have your high school diploma and if parents are staying together raising their kids, statistically, that helps keep you out of poverty.

“I’m a person who believes in submitting these programs to a raw, clinical analysis, an economically rigorous analysis and I think it will validate our principles. And that will make it easier for us to have policy fights that are settled by data and evidence versus ideology and partisanship…

“My hope is we start measuring success in the War on Poverty based on outcome and results, not based on inputs and dollars, so that we can actually transition dollars from ineffective, wasteful programs that are counterproductive to efforts that actually get people out of poverty. My hope is we start breaking the cycle of poverty by going at root causes of poverty. That’s the whole goal.”

Simplifying poverty-fighting efforts so they are easier to use and access:

“I believe you can collapse the various poverty programs into a radically simplified version of what they are. A version that is so much easier to navigate for an individual and you can do it so it’s designed in the right way, so that it’s not complex, and so it doesn’t have benefit cliffs that stop you from advancing in life.

“These benefit cliffs actually make it harder to incentivize the right kind of behavior like savings, personal responsibility, work, family formation, things like that. There are tools in front of us like the EITC and the CTC, I think that can be used to do that….

“The point of it all is I believe that there are new techniques to fighting poverty, that give us better tools, that encompass our principles, and that make good on the American Idea. I really do believe with technology, with digital money, programmable money, and with the kinds of technologies that are out there now, we can design a safety net — a property safety net, that truly helps people make better choices in life and become the best versions of themselves and not have a cohort of dependencies… “We want to give you the best chance at the best life that you can have for yourself and [we want to] give you equality of opportunity so you can make the most of your life. That’s the tool we want to equip you with so that you can stand on your own two feet and be proud of what you can achieve and have a life where your kids can do even greater than you did. This is the whole American Idea in a nutshell.”

On “Workforce Realigned” Podcast: Speaker Ryan & Gov. Deval Patrick discuss using Performance-Based Contracting to Improve Outcomes

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Washington, DC – Earlier this spring, American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan (R-WI) took part in a podcast with former Governor Deval Patrick (D-MA) focused on mobilizing capital to improve the lives of Americans in need.

The “Workforce Realigned” podcast , which was produced by Social Finance and the Federal Reserves of Atlanta, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, is part of a larger initiative promoting outcome-based financing strategies that effectively “Pay for Success” and drawing attention to those initiatives that are demonstrating tangible results for the people they serve.

In connection with the podcast, Social Finance also published a book, available here, containing a series of case studies about how results-based financing can create benefits to the government, employers, service providers, and participants, which ultimately expand economic opportunity.

Speaker Ryan authored a chapter focused specifically on the mixed results of past performance-based programs and on a promising new innovation in this space, Social Impact Bonds. Ryan also touched on a 2018 law, the Social Impact Partnership to Pay for Results Act (SIPPRA), which in his view is an encouraging federal tool to tackle specific challenges like recidivism, homeless, and early childhood development.

Speaker Ryan’s chapter is accessible here: Buying Outcomes: Lessons from the Past and some highlights from the podcast interview with Governor Patrick follow. To listen to the podcast in its entirety, click  here.  

The mixed history of performance-based contracting & reasons for optimism:

“The truth is there’s a pretty long history of performance-based contracting in American civic life and, you know, a lot of it hasn’t really worked all that well. We looked at a few examples over the past 40 years of programs that we were trying to achieve these kinds of goals: linking payments and performance, and frankly, we found that there was a lot of struggle. This is a little harder than it seems it should be.

“There seems to be some repeated issues though, when you dig into this. Many [performance-based contracting programs] don’t do a good job of differentiating between the different risk levels and the people being served so what happens is providers get penalized for serving people with greater needs.

“Program providers basically want to cook the books by picking the best-performing people in their pool so that they can look good and that does not give us the right kind of data that we want to rely on to make sound decisions and create the right kind of goals. Other people were allowed in evaluations that weren’t really trustworthy or they paid for outcomes that didn’t really reflect policy goals. So, I think what we can take away from this and what we’ve learned from this and what the Pay for Success movement has tried to solve is that like very many other tools, you can build performance-based contracts well or you can build them poorly.

“You have to be careful with how you design these things and you’ve got to be mindful of just the typical human errors and the mistakes of the past. If you take that into consideration, then I really believe you can build a really good Pay-for-Performance model and then we can get evidence and we can get outcomes. Then, we can use those to scale and replicate [solutions] and really move the needle on poverty.”

Developing an Evidence-Based Clearinghouse to spread awareness about successful solutions:

“One initiative that I’m really excited about is a project we are launching at the American idea Foundation, which is the non-profit foundation that I started, and that is the Evidence-Based Clearinghouse.

“What you have is all these disparate efforts around the country that are engaged in evidence-based policymaking and are using data and analytics and randomized controlled trials to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and to find evidence on how best to fight poverty. The problem is there is so much evidence and data out there and it’s in all these disparate places. It’s in various universities, in various think tanks, in various non-profit centers.

“And so, what the American Idea foundation is going to do is create a clearinghouse for all of the evidence-based policy on poverty programs so that you have a one-stop shop. So, if you’re sitting in Spokane, Washington, or Houston, Texas, or Janesville, Wisconsin, or Brooklyn, New York, and you want to design a program to solve some problem related to juvenile justice, recidivism, homelessness, addiction, or job training, you go to the American idea Foundation’s Clearinghouse on Evidence Based Policy and you find out what’s been done, what trial and error has already occurred, how you learn from the mistakes that other people made so that you don’t repeat those mistakes, and [how you] can build a successful poverty fighting effort based upon all the latest available data and science that has been conducted in America so that you can move forward with success.

“In our view, this is how you scale solutions: You measure, you replicate, and you move. And that is what the American idea Foundation’s Data Clearinghouse on Evidence-Based Policymaking is going to do. It’s never been done before. It’s one of its kind, and I’m really excited about the impact it’s going to have on fighting poverty.”

SIPPRA can bridge partisan divides and improve outcomes for people in need:

“The federal government has sort of dipped their toe in the water here a little bit. It has sporadically supported Pay for Success projects. I can think of projects at the Department of Labor, Justice, HUD, and I think even USAID. I think they all have dipped their toes in this space in the last five years. But in 2018, we started to try to chart a more unified approach towards strengthening this tool and as part of one of the bills I passed back in that year, Congress passed the Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act that we call “SIPPRA.”

“It has a $100 million fund, administered by the Treasury Department, to support state and local pay-for-success projects. This was a huge part of a bipartisan bill and it turns out there is a constituency for making government smarter or more effective. Republicans and Democrats agree on this!

“The idea behind SIPPRA is to get more states and counties to experiment with outcome-based funding. If they develop projects with strong, evidence-based interventions that are evaluated properly and evaluated well, then the federal government will do its fair share, paying for part of the social outcomes achieved and for part of the cost of evaluation. I’m really excited and I think we’re turning the corner. We’re getting better at this.”

Removing partisanship from poverty-fighting, focusing on evidence and outcomes:

“I’m hopeful that the Biden Administration will focus on this and get this right….so that we truly are using SIPPRA as a tool to leverage local Pay for Success programs. We’ve learned from trial and error in the past. We’ve got lots of takeaways about how to build these things successfully now. We know how to build pay-for-success models and I really believe that this law will be the seed corn that can grow and germinate into replicating pay-for-success programs across the country, at all levels of government, and in the private sector.

“Frankly, I think we’re on the cusp of something new and big which is to move towards evidence-based, outcome-based policymaking and what we will learn is what needs to be scaled and replicated so we can build it out.

“As a person who fought these [partisan fights in Congress], you end up getting into these ideological, partisan battles over how to get people out of poverty and there’s a status quo that wants to keep things the way there are. There are ideologues that want to make these programs and fights political and ideological.

“What Evidence-Based policymaking and pay-for-success does is it bypasses all of that. It leapfrogs the partisanship, the status quo, the ideological battles, and just goes with what works. Are we getting people out of poverty or not? And by getting to that level of debate, I really believe we’re going to move the needle on poverty.

“We’re more or less on the cusp of a new sense of social science and economics, which is evidence-based policymaking and outcome-based policymaking. We shouldn’t measure success based on effort and input; we should measure success based on outcome and results. This can help reduce partisanship and polarization in America and get people of both sides of the aisle — people of goodwill, focusing on the actual objective, which is getting people out of poverty. I’m excited about this work. I’m excited about the outcomes. I’m excited about this phase of this debate and I really think we’re on the cusp of something big here.”