Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 111

on political books
and disseminating information. Collaborators are a diverse group of executives whose organizations wield limited power on their own but punch above
their weight, in terms of affecting outcomes, by their influence within networks of other public and private actors.
And then there are Deputy Secretaries, a
group that is, unlike the others, defined
by title rather than function. But Lawrence and Abramson argue persuasively
that a Deputy Secretary's work is sufficiently different from that of other political executives, and sufficiently similar to that of other Deputy Secretaries,
to warrant a category all its own.
Each category gets a chapter, and each
chapter is dense with details about the
work carried out by specific executives-
as few as four and as many as eleven
individual profiles giving depth and
concreteness to each type. These case
histories are based on an exhaustive series of interviews with forty-two senior
Obama administration executives who
cooperated in this project. It is a prodigiously impressive list. Many of the
forty-two I already knew by reputation,
six I am acquainted with personally, and
one is a reasonably close friend. That
said, the list reflects nothing like the systematic selection process that can yield
the kind of generalizable evidence you
can take to the bank. One gets the sense
that these people are the subset of those,
from a longer list initially contacted,
who said yes to a request for researchers to watch as they did their work while
promising not to get underfoot. No matter. Lawrence and Abramson aren't after
social-science generalizations but something that is far more powerful for their
purposes: fine-grained accounts of what
it's like to actually take on these tasks
for the American public.

fter a stratospheric rise through the
engineering ranks in his native India, Arum Majumdar earned a prestigious engineering professorship at the
University of California, Berkeley. Nobody would have begrudged him the
chance to revel in his accomplishments,
settling in to churn out a career's worth
of research papers and train a genera-

tion of graduate students. But when Energy Secretary Steven Chu asked him to
launch the Advanced Research Projects
Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which Congress had just funded, Majumdar did not
hesitate. The time was right-way past
right, in fact-to get serious about hustling carbon-sparing technologies out of
the labs and into the economy. The day
he took the job he boarded a red-eye from
California to D.C. and set to work soliciting and assessing proposals. Since then,
ARPA-E has funded around 360 research
projects, each aimed at producing a
game-changing energy innovation: a
silicon-carbine transistor that can channel a full megawatt through a fingernailsized device; a device that uses compressed air to store energy when there's
a time gap between supply and demand;
genetically engineered microorganisms
that eat climate-fouling carbon dioxide and turn it into liquid fuel. Not all of
these ideas will turn out to be workable,
or scalable, or even sound. But that's
okay. To raise realistic hopes of bending
the curve of climate change we only need
a few of them, and ARPA-E is on the job.
David J. Kappos was confirmed as undersecretary of commerce one April Friday, and the following Monday left his
comfortable job as an IBM vice president
for the far less lucrative, far more demanding task of running the Patent and
Trademark Office. This was an organization with a mission hardwired into the
Constitution-and it was not going well.
As the number of inventions churned
out in American labs, workshops, and
garages soared, and as austerity shrank
Patent Office head counts, the backlog
of patent applications awaiting action
soared past 700,000. Inventors weren't
interested in hearing why it was hard-
they wanted their rightful claims on intellectual property recognized before
they grew old. And Kappos set to work
to make it happen. As he led his team in
doing the hundred things that needed to
be done-none of them esoteric, some
of them obvious, all of them requiring persistence and grit-the backlog
stopped its rise and headed downward.
Beneath the inevitable alphabet soup
and occasional bureaucratese, these

tales make for instructive, often sobering, and frequently inspiring reading.
Deputy Secretary Seth Harris of the Department of Labor provides what could
be an epigram for the overall book: "You
have to get into the systems of government. You can change government, but
it takes time." Change that is all too urgent; time that is all too scarce.
No review would be complete without
the "to be sure" paragraph, so here goes:
To be sure, there is a great deal of poetic license in the title. What Government
Does is essentially a set of cameo profiles of senior political appointees at the
Washington headquarters of major federal organizations. But such individuals
make up less than 1 percent of the public workforce. The vast majority of federal employees work outside Washington,
and even the full roster of federal civil
servants comes to fewer than three million people. This is not to say that federal work-regulating, exploring space,
tending to defense, spying and catching
spies, and all the rest-is unimportant.
It is just that these activities represent
a relatively small piece of what government does.
That terminological quibble dispensed with, I can end with the heartfelt hope that What Government Does has
a healthy initial readership and (maybe
more important) a long life on Rowman
& Littlefield's backlist. With every new
administration over the years to come
there will be a fresh crop of political
executives in dire need-whether they
know it or not-of the lessons, cautionary tales, and pep talks from their predecessors assembled here. The rest of us
can treasure it now as a reminder of how
exquisitely important these jobs are;
how lucky we are to have such talented,
patriotic people taking up these brutally hard and often thankless tasks; and
what a pickle we will be in if public leaders of this caliber ever stop raising their
hands to do the difficult work on which
our welfare depends.
John D. Donahue is the Raymond Vernon Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and faculty
chair of the Master's in Public Policy program
at Harvard's Kennedy School.
Washington Monthly

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Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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