Fill out mynt into paperwork, i inquired about it. So if you wonder where our Social Security money is going, who wants tobody be on Social Security needs to go down and take a look at the waiting room. They will see where this social purity money goes. Host that does it for todays washington journal. To anl bring you now event happening here in washington on president ial transitions. The secretary of Commerce Penny pritzker and the former housing and urban Development Secretary steve reston is sharing their thoughts on what they take on what they think it takes to succeed as a smooth president ial transition. Think of for watching. We will be back here tomorrow at 7 00 a. M. Eastern. We are showing coverage of the discussion this morning about president ial transitions. It features commerce secretary from theer and partnership of public service, one of the organizations leading the transition into the next president , less than five weeks now and told election day. We understand they are delayed just a little bit but should get underway shortly. We will have that here live on cspan. You want to let you know about the live coverage we have later on. We will hear from mike pence in harrisonburg virginia coming up us morning around 11 30 eastern and tim kaine is in philadelphia at 6 00 eastern. Some reaction now from Longwood University students and cspan viewers from this mornings washington journal. Tell us your name and what you thought about the debate . I am a jr. At longwood and i thought the debate was pretty good. A lot different from the president ial debate, obviously. They actually talked about policies. There wasnt as much back and forth occurring. And when it did happen, it was in good humor. So that was great to see. And just to be inside the debate hall, the atmosphere was nice and quiet and respectful of everything going on. So i got that was a great opportunity for me as a student. Host and Longwood University, this is the first debate. A small school. And one thousand students according to this article are taking classes to look at the campaign. What its like for you and the other students there to be hosting last nights debate . Caller well definitely, i think we have 30 debate related courses. I am a Digital Media major and i am in an advanced media reporting class. And for us, we layer we were firsto go to the president ial debate as an all expense paid trip to Hofstra University we got to go with media passes and that is another onceinalifetime opportunity. It really helped us prepared to cover this debate yesterday. Host what are you learning about the Digital Media and covering campaigns that you saw play out last night . Well, i had access to the media center. So that was a huge aspect. I didnt realize how chaotic it could be. We will leave this now and take you back life to the discussion this morning on the transitions, president ial transitions at the podium is max syre. My name is max dyer i am the president of the ceo for public service. We focus on our work rankings. Ranking agencies against themselves, as well as against. Agencies and the private sector. We do a lot of leadership training and we get good talent into government and we look to improve the systems of government. And the final these we focus on is how to create a constituency government on the outside. So one of the great challenges for the federal government that withe is one that comes in the 4000 political appointees and a lot of them are not committed to the longterm organizations. On a crisisused management but not fundamentally making the organization run more effectively. And that is quite related to the conversation we having here today. But our goal is to promote key stakeholder communities. Philanthropy, inverse cities, nonprofit. To help them understand that whatever their views are, they have something at stake in seeing that the government itself functions more effectively. Would havehat we better government. So one element that is newer for us is that we have launched the center on president ial transition. Things we recognized eight or nine years ago was the difficulty for the government in the transition process. It is an irony. As children, we are taught about the peaceful transfer of power making us a great nation and its true. It is peaceful, but it is ugly. And our goal is to change that. President ialr for transition is focused on creating a learning system such that the transition teams can actually build off the activists of the past rather than going through a groundhog day exercise. So we have collected information from the romney team and the obama team and we made that available to the new teams that are operating today on the clinton and trump side and we are trying to make that process better. From an operational perspective and also legislatively as well. And we are seeing in arms progress in that respect. It is fascinating to me when you think about the transition itself. Because the federal government is the largest and most complex organization on the planet and in history. Trillion 4 million employees. Hundreds of different operating units. Phenomenally complex. And its vital that you start than the inauguration and certainly than the election day if you are able to take over the organization. By way of contrast, if you think about the largest of the private sector organizations, it would be walmart, i believe. And that has over 2 million employees with an annual revenue of 485 billion. Contrast that to 4 trillion. Of directorsboard rather than the 535 that the president of the United States has to deal with. So quite a bit different. So were very excited. Key people here. I no longer have to tap dance. This will be a great conversation. I thought it would be provocative and and my comments by pointing out a quote from Carly Fiorina that she made in 2008 as an advisor to the mccain team. I dont think john mccain could run a major corporation. I dont think proper bomb a or joe biden could run a major organization. She was trying to make a political point but i think the question, comparing leadership large private sector organizations and large governmental organizations is an important comparison to make. We need to learn what is similar and what is different if we are going to see our government work more effectively. And we have two extreme are people who have done effective leadership in both sectors to hear from today and a wonderful moderator as well. Before turning to them, i didnt want to point out one person on the partnership team. She hopefully is here. This event was a gleam in her eye for five months ago and she has made this happen so thank you, courtney, for your great work. With that, i introduce our panel for the conversation today. It pullsmazing her prizewinning journalist who writes on politics for the Washington Post and he serves with the Public Affairs for the shore school at george mason university. And then we also have a phenomenal Public Servant in penny pritzker. Currently the secretary of commerce. She has been in her position since 2013 following her cochair ship of the obama for america 2012 team. And a very distinguished career in the private sector. She has led several private enterprises including the Pritzker Realty group and joining her is Steve Preston, he served as the 14thcentury of the housing and urban development division. Bush. Ved under president in these roles he work to enact large reforms during the financial collapse. And at housing and urban development he led a 39 million budget. Before entering public service, he spent nearly 25 years in financial and operational leadership positions. He returned to the private sector after his tenure in washington and is the ceo of livingston international, north americas Largest Company provider of logistic services. And i cant help a close on the note that he also serves on the partnership for Public Services board. A challenge in itself that hopefully we dont talk about today. So with that, our panelists will come up. And you so much. [laughter] [applause] good morning. Lets get right to it. A common refrain you hear is part of the speech of the chamber of commerce, government should be run more like private enterprise. It sounds good but is it realistic . I think thatr there are things we can learn from the private sector. But i also think that there are differences that need to be noted. , from my standpoint, pace is different in government. Slower and faster, in a funny way. But trying to get things done and move through the system is more difficult. But you have to acknowledge, there are more stakeholders. So in some respects, maybe we dont want government to move as fast as other types of organizations. Because we have checks and balances. We have more people who members of Congress Interest groups. All thesestration, various players you have to come together to say, this is the path we actually proceed on. I think that is true in the policymaking. Limitation,s to a actually figuring out how to implement more quickly and more effectively, that is something we could learn from the private sector from. That there again, more checks and balances. If you think about procurement as a ceo, iocesses, can go out and make a decision to buy something. And i dont need all the various processes. Or if i want to hire someone, the process of hiring the federal government is so compensated. And i have to confess that even after 3. 5 years i have not mastered that at all. Unnecessarily so, do you think . Penny pritzker i think we make it difficult. I think part of the challenge there is the fear of mistake. Orthe intolerance of mistake the repercussions that come from mistakes. And i dont know any manager who doesnt make mistakes. This balancing act between over scrutinizing something, so that everyone is on board, even wrong if we all make mistakes together, who can be mad at you versus ok, we are going to give managers more authority, that is the bouncing act and that is the difference in government. Do using the balance is right now or have we gone too far in the direction of no mistakes, nofault, no tolerance . Weny pritzker i think that should have more latitude and flexibility. As a manager i certainly see the challenges with that. So take for example Cyber Security. A huge priority of this administration. A huge priority for the country. Tocant get the people in fill the positions and we dont have the flexibility in how to hire, we dont have the flexibility in terms of paying, because we compete with the private sector, and there are ofe 200,000 a shortage Cyber Security specialists in the United States at large and we are competing with every company in america to try to attract talent to defend the Largest Organization in the country, the federal government. Be you know, there needs to provisions, in my opinion for changes that would allow you to address what is, frankly, in my mind, a crisis. Is eight oversimplified and overstated to say that government should run more like a business . Steve preston i dont think it is overstated, but i think what is said i was remembering those high range of procurement, we do have a much more complex Stakeholder Group for reason. Theres a reason you have congressional oversight and now, if i had 20 congressional hearings in my first 15 months on the job, which was a little bit more than i wanted. But there is a reason for that. I would say, from the other side , sometimes things are too difficult to get done because the system is wriggled with system is riddled with old regulations. Or there is not a construct that fastes reasonably decisionmaking. I cant tell you how may times ive tried to get something done and i would talk to my staff and they would explain to me be steps that we have to go through and i would say, that cant possibly be the case. Theres nothing intuitive about that. Right . Answer isently, the oh theres a regulation from 20 years ago that is still in place and it requires us to do this and it just seems crazy. Law, if ieed a little need legislation to get done, it is a crapshoot. You dont know if you get it or not. Need change, it will be a long and complex process. Ironically, if i had the budget to make an operational change, i had almost no oversight. Find, it is an important thing to understand this. Because many Government Agencies have large business. D, wei was leading hu had direct programs for disaster victims and guarantee programs. First of all, businesses with in them. That in manyund is cases, we didnt have the skills to drive change or improvements, there wasnt the expectation that we would achieve a particular outcome on the other end. Into the smalle Business Administration a year after katrina and the direct loan process to homeowners had gotten shut down, they actually make home loans to people who have had their own home damaged in a disaster. Had gottenw people loans. And the whole system had kind of collapse. So we can men and teams were brought in with process design experts. We engaged in teams. We look at the issues. And within six weeks, we had double production and in five months we had every thing cleared out. Ok . People thought we were magic. But we didnt do anything that people with Good Business skills or process skills could do. So what i found, on the business side is that a lot of the people , a lot of the leadership, it didnt have the tools to think that way. They were terrific leaders in other ways but they didnt have the tool to say, i want to try that out. I want to get this document it. And a lot of people in the agency didnt have the skills to work through the issues. They didnt have processes in place that looks at effectiveness or how did you do it . Steve preston we brought in people with the skills. You were able to do that quickly . Steve preston well [laughter] Steve Preston i had a lot of people on my staff who were terrific. I think one is in the audience back there. We were able to bring in small teams to help. That really, what we were able to do was take the career workforce that saw all the issues at the frontline and understood what was going on in the mix and pair them with people who had skills to basically redesign processes. We worked with them to help them be more effective. To replace organizational structures that help them a more effective. The said he gets a lot of agencies,but at both we had such incredible success working with people in the career workforce and care deeply about what they did and wanted nothing more than to win every day and serve the american people. Like lot of times i felt the road to do that was blocked because we didnt have a lot of their competencies. With traditional business competencies that help you get this thing done. Penny pritzker so one of those things, taking your question about learning from the private sector, one of the things were doing at the department of commerce is to put in shared services on a cure meant, hr, i. T. Processr ability to procurements or process new people that we are bringing on board. To to do that, you have reprogram money. You have to get approval from congress. You had to say look, we want to run ourselves better. We are 47 thousand people. We have Many Services that we provide to the private sector and to others. Us, in order to be more effective and flexible in terms of adjusting with the we ares we are providing trying to take a page from the private sector. And really bring in the Capacity Services andshared specific functions within our organization. And we are quite excited about that. It is quite a way to facilitate moreer ability to address quickly the challenges that we are facing. So if the new president were to call each of you up and say, my instincts is to say, i want someone with significant public and private experience to be cabinet officers. Maybe state department and maybe is, but wherever management it will go. Would you recommend that . Say, lifelong Public Servants can be just as good cabinet members as someone who has no experience from myitzker standpoint, it is all about the team. It is the team you put together. And i think you need folks who are wired on the hill. Who understand the politics of what you are dealing with. You didnt give us a particular department to her talk about but we folks who can manage well. You need folks who can problem solve. And you need and ability to communicate innovations. That is a significant part so building a team and the people who make up the team, some good have a lifelong career in the federal government and be absolute assets to the team, and some could be mixed and some could be from the private sector. What ive learned is that this is someone, i would be a disaster if all i had were people from the private sector. So you think it is the team. It doesnt matter whatever the weakness is of the people at the argue, letuld also me push back on this. People who are not happy with all the way the government is working, if the person at the top is a lifelong washington never, they will understand the urgency or the attitude that the public has, which is, we dont want you to do the same thing. We want you to do something differently and you are too much part of the system . Id i would say look, maybe have experience outside this bubble here called washington . Steve preston i agree 100 . People not you need only with different skill sets but also people who look at problems differently. Its the same thing if you put together a board, a Leadership Team or a business or anything else. On what theepends agencys mandate is. Right . If you are in the department of congress and you are looking at how to fix trade and deal with the issues of trade, you need people who can look at the policy issues because they are highly complex. Im probably going to get out of my depth pretty soon. Who can people negotiate effectively and who can do a number of different things. And also those who can track progress in the department. I was very involved with the transitioning of my agency in the case of housing and urban development. We recommendation i gave knew that sean was going to housing and urban development. My recommendation was, if you are having a policy in some areas a great business person. So sean came out of the new york housing authority. Very deep knowledge on all sorts of issues. Priority housing and Public Housing. But they also need somebody who can run it. So you really need complement terry issues at the top. It doesnt have to be the head of the agency because if you are dealing with health care policy, that is a necessarily a person who needs to understand how to , that iticare program is up and down the organization. And itll think it is just the person at the top who drives that. I agree at that standpoint that you need a team to ultimately drive it but i do believe you need sensitivity of the top that these departments need to be run and engaged and you need some capacity in the and drivember to lead strong management. They dont have to execute on a daytoday basis. They may have a chief administrative officer. There are many ways and multiple ways you can address this. Headsy have really strong of your different agencies. But my experience has been that ofagement skills everyone the management skills ive ever used in my life, i have had to use in this job. In addition to developing policy skills and other skills that i didnt have. Because these departments are huge. They are huge. Bigger. Instances, much your budgets are very significant. I would say someone coming from the public and private sector to run a department or a new cabinet secretary, you will want to dive into your budget before you start, or the minute you arrive. Your budget he comes your policy. Becomes your policy. Your ability to effectuate serious policy change, you need budget approval or budget flexibility. With congressional oversight detailed,ore and more that means you need audience ins for what you want to do. If you dont have that, it is hard to effectuate the programs and policies you want to. There is some flexibility, but not as much as you would think. The budget becomes your policy. It is alsoon important, and i think this is where the last three president s have attempted to have a management agenda, typically d. Rough om they have not focused on this issue, they have. It is very important to have a clear perspective on the outcomes you are trying to drive in the programs in your agency. What is the current state, where he want to get, how do you want to get there, what defines success . What we found is that in a lot of cases it was challenging either to say this is what good looks like, this is what good feels like to the citizens benefiting from the programs, and this is the pathway to get there, this is how we believe the way. One thing that we did at both agencies is we went through a very extensive Engagement Process where we put pull many of the leaders from various offices to understand where they saw opportunity. If they had a view the program could get significantly better if only we could do a couple of things. We turned those into very ,pecific management agendas with goals and scorecards. We communicated across the agency. It became a full agency Engagement Process. I would do town halls periodically and say this project is green, we are on track, helping people. This one is red. Were not doing what we thought we would. We have these challenges. What we found was it really sort of, it was a great tool to engage the agency and help people understand the outcomes. Also, having them participate in business tools. Many of them were on the teams in sessions, but they never used them before peavy use that to train them on the tools so that Going Forward if they had issues projects or other , they had other tools and templates to used a help them think through how to do that in the future. You. Is ties to both of that ifess, it is said you keep a relentless customer focus, Everything Else takes care of itself. Shareholders are happy, the public is happy, if you have a relentless focus on your customer. Small businesses who get loans, advice, or is your customer the taxpayer . Is your customer and the white house that has a certain political agenda . Steve preston your customer is either recipient of a disaster loan or a Small Business loan. Your Distribution Source is the banking network. There are policy issues. Give you an example of the customer and what it meant for us. Because i think often in large agencies, i can go to my Customer Service managers and say, what are you hearing from customers . Can they get the metric . Their sensibility around are we effective, are we not effective, what are we hearing . And we were trying to fix the disaster loan programs i realized if you were in new orleans trying to get a loan to me you are sending your documents to a po box, you would get a call number back, you would call buffalo, a call center and as a customer all you so was a government thing. In the Processing Center not getting the loans out in time, you felt like you were failing. Put people in Client Service teams. Here, financial people here, call center here. Every american gets a Client Service representative with a name, phone number, and that person has goals to get these loans complete. Goals to make the loan spear that would have negative financial incentives. When someone was approved, you have to get the loan out. By giving our people a direct link to the people they were serving, giving americans in need a direct name, you have this really productive interchange. We started to see where our people are getting problems to get the loans done. The impediments. A customer loan agency say she is supposed to be closing on a house in two weeks. If we dont get this done, she will not get her house. The whole sense about what people were doing, their ability to serve people in need, was completely transformed. Customer wase the no longer theoretical. It was a tremendous amount of chatter across the agency. I was able to use those Customer Service representatives to send daily information on what we were hearing. The client is very important. Specially in government so often, you are dealing with people in need. They have no other place to go. By making that connection, it is a powerful thing. Secretaries,inet what is the most overrated and underrated criteria that president s tend to have . Sec. Pritzker i have no idea. [laughter] think in taking cabinet secretaries my advice to a sident would the would be, you need balance between someone that can be a job. Nger, as part of your be a negotiator, as part of your job. The manager as part of your job. So, youre looking for people who can effectuate that, but assemble teams that can actually execute it. Do president s let people execute teams, or do they send them a list of people that worked in the campaign or were associated with the here isation and say a list of people you pick for assistant secretary. Does that hamper your ability to pick teams . Sec. Pritzker i was given the flexibility within certain parameters to assemble the team that we wanted and needed. Certain parameters being what . Sec. Pritzker making sure we had gender balance, good diversity, things like that. Which was actually to the benefit of our department. Those were the parameters i was comfortable with. I felt i had a lot of flexibility to assemble the team we needed. The thing about hiring is that sometimes it is hard to get it right, particularly when you are hiring when i came in we had 80 of the leadership vacant. 22 senateconfirmed positions were vacant or becoming vacant. When you hire that any people at the same time, that is an enormous undertaking in a short time. Do not always get it all right. Having the flexibility to say i made a mistake or you would be better in this job than that job, that flexibility you do not have as much of. Let me be skeptical. I have not observed, at least on the basis of the results, looking back, that if you were hired and you had 15 positions , my guess is you would have looked across the world for the best people you could get, recruit them, and higher than. I have summation is in the federal government, secretaries or white house personnel office, do not say i have a assistant secretary position and i want to find the very best person in the world to recruit and hire that person. Sec. Pritzker you only have available to you if it is in a company or in the Government People who want to be in those positions. Government we have to pick among the people who want to serve in the federal government. Youre not necessarily able to go get anyone from anywhere around the world. You can find anyone from the United States. Sec. Pritzker i was not hampered by the administration in terms of the ability to hire, and bird by the reality of who wants to come into government in terms of the ability to hire. I was hampered by the reality of who wants to come into government and the limitations of that hereto wants to go through confirmation. Limitations of that. Who wants to go through confirmation. Steve preston we could cast a wider net, but my experience is similar to the secretaries. I always thought that they did a great job of screening candidates, giving me candidates to look at. Following my guidance in terms of what i thought would be effective, listening when i say i need someone with these skills. Is mechanism to find people different. I does it have to be different . Steve preston the physicians are kind of different the positions are the are kind of different. Sec. Pritzker we did not always find our candidates from the list given by ppo. , obviouslyking for if you found someone that who wanted to go into a position they had to have the screening and vetting process. I found one of the greatest assets was the network of people working with us. They knew other folks who may want to come in. We were triangulating to figure out what are the skill sets we need and to wants to serve . Think, definitely, we do not have the world to choose from. You have the people who are interested in serving, trying to attract the best to those positions available to you. Listselt i saw candidate faster than the private sector in many cases, because in many cases where did the lists come from . Steve preston from ppo, but it is not that they said these are people that worked on campaigns. They found someone who was a senior attorney at a Large Financial Services firm that ed in the door understanding the issues. Similar to your experience i was able to hire people i had experience with in the private sector. Open to looking at a new role, fits the role perfectly, it will you look at them . I had no problem with that. In your agencies, did you find the top Civil Servants were primarily topnotch . Or were they uneven . Thought they i were uneven. I thought they were across the board extremely knowledgeable in their area. They were across the board great resources. Some of the most remarkable things that we got done were because people in those levels ea, a passion, and we were able to knock down the walls and support them to do that. 2 examples. I served in the last year of the bush presidency in hud. Major Public Housing developments in new orleans had been destroyed. The rebuilding of those looked virtually impossible. There was no funding. The taxpayer programs were gone. Some congressional and hud money had been squirreled away in other places. We were looking at vacant land and no place to get there. A woman said, i see how we can get these out of the ground. In a short time we worked with her and several federal agencies. We supported her weird we got 2 of those developments ground broken. When the new administration came in, i worked with the new head secretary to say this is where we are. He was terrific. Would we handed over to him was not 80 like i thought, it was more 20 in some cases. Not much later he called me and said we broke ground on the fourth or that is because a career Civil Servant had a vision that we could get it done if we could support her in the right way. Those are 4 communities in new orleans that are beautiful. What was uneven . There were good ones. If you gave it to them they could do great things. Steve preston vision for an opportunity, change. If only we could do a, b, c, if only i could get sponsorship. Or a leader, that is gold in other cases, it felt it people were in their position for a long time, managing their area, but things could have been better. It is tough for these guys are the leadership changes. The mandate changes. It is hard to get things done sometimes if you are a couple of levels down. The important thing, which is something that i have advised every person is to say, other than i am sure policy issues that come from the political viewpoint, forget about the political divide. Forget about it. Get the most competent people in the room. I rankled the career people, because i put people over top of them if they were more competent. It was healthier for the organization, we got more done, etc. , etc. Sec. Pritzker the organization that was under led and under directed. One of the Biggest Challenges wasthat i walked in and it secretary, what are your priorities . As opposed to looking at the organization. We do everything from the patent and trademark office, the weather service, to the National Institute of safety and technology, to National Telecommunications administration. We have a broad array of things that we do, services we provide. , what do you mean what are my Top Priorities . What should was, the organization be focused on . Political andnior senior career people, and we 70 of us, and we put together a Strategic Plan for the department based on five pillars trade and investment, innovation, data, climate intelligence or environmental intelligence, and organizational excellence. And there were three or four things under each color that we would under each pillar that we would try to accomplish. It was not, you are career and political. We had career people go into political jobs, and we mixed them up. It was about helping people set of and giving a good directions. The directions were developed together. The point of view that i took was in for the pyramid invert the pyramid. My job is to support you executing the Strategic Plan that you developed. That helped us as an understand what we are trying to accomplish and for people, what is the secretarys job . Jam wherereak the log no one else can do that. Whether it is capitol hill, a log jam with the business community, a log jam with the administration, and interagency challenge, use the secretary to help us accomplish what we set , whichre the objectives was consistent with what the president asked us to do. That transparency of objectives where we areform focused. It has informed all of our communication. It informs how the various agencies define what theyre doing on a daytoday basis. In,evised it 18months updated the plan to be reflective of what we had learned. Things we thought needed different attention or greater clarification. I think that that has been a great tool. The idea that the secretarys agenda is over here, the department is over there, and run the dep sec department. Gotpiece of advice that i was you be over here and you do what you want to do. That was crazy to me. The kind of leadership that you need and want, particularly in a day and age where we are facing challenges like Cyber Security, the secretaries are going to be held accountable. Basic management, websites if they break down, things like that. Those are not happening there can be serious consequences all the way to the top. We made a nofault if something is going wrong. We tried to create a culture where a few raise your hand and Say Something is not going right , you got more resources and support. , whichown to the wolves is what everyone is afraid of. If youmade clear, is want to see the secretary unhappy is if she has to read something going wrong in the newspaper rather than being warned so we can address and get ahead of the problem. Problems happen in any large or small organization. What you want as a leader is to get ahead of the problem, to address problems faced. That is what we as a team has tried to manage. , iyou started off by saying think the perception of running something more like a business would say that you will make more decisions. What we heard was running it like a business is about engaging organizations. I think the issue that people keep saying, you cannot make decisions, you cannot there is a sense that you have a leader coming in with an agenda. I had the same experience, what is your plan and agenda . The issue is, let me finish, the issue is you have a massive workforce with great ideas that needs to be engaged. The secretary was describing tells you the organization will be able to leave those initiatives after the election. He have been engaging with the plan and will carry it forward because they do not need to wait for the next person to tell them what to do. It is clear. A question, let me start with you. I will ask. True or false, so much decisionmaking, especially in the area of policy, has migrated to eight bloated white house and executive office of the president to the point that it has rob agent robbed agencies of their sense of purpose. The government would be better if that was reversed. The you agree or disagree . Sixe preston you put like statements in there. I cannot agree with them all. I never thought the white house was bloated. I thought it was thin and had terrifically talented people. There is often confusion as to who makes decisions. No confusion at the white house about that. Steve preston part of the issue is if your cabinet is communicating well with the nec in the right going direction. The problem is when you have the white house in one place and then agency on camera saying some emails. You have to understand saying something else. You have to understand there is one president and we serve at the pleasure of the president. The one thing you have to understand is whether or not the arees relating your agency aligned with the president , that is the agenda you are driving. The other thing that i sperry and was that there was an assumption that as a junior person called and said you had to do this, we had to jump up and salute. The president hired me to run this agency. We have a policy person called d you had to do this, we had to staff. Do we agree or disagree . If we disagree i call and say i understand you are going in this direction. I think it is important to think about it this way. How did that turn out . Steve preston usually extremely well. If we did not get to where we were going, we talked about the issues and got aligned. Importanteam, it is to have alignment and communication, a process you understand. I think it is important to have agency heads that are competent that can communicate a vision and advocate at the white house. Hat is what we are hired to do if there is not communication, it can be complicated. These groups are not that big in the white house. The idea that there are thousands of people there are 1700 people, actually. All the councils, 1700 people. Steve preston we were dealing with a senior person, or a number one or two person. We pick up the phone if there were issues, they pick up the phone. If you have the right relationship you work through the issues efficiently. We could also offer the leverage our staff for their benefit. The issue comes when there is not communication and people are not working together. Do you think you drove housing policy from your department, or do you think housing policy is driven by the white house . Steve preston i came in the middle of the housing crisis. There was already a bill on the hill. What i ended up driving, i was involved in many policies around mortgage modifications and processes to help homeowners. On a number of occasions i called the white house and ,eversed issues on budgeting prevailed on a number of issues that ended up being unpopular for the administration that i felt was important to advance the integrity of the operation. Was this a problem for you . An overly involved and suffocating white house staff that saps the policymaking of your own agency and discourages them, drives away talent because they cannot do anything . Sec. Pritzker no. I dont think you can give that uniform i know. I am a journalist. Sec. Pritzker of course you are. Experience has been not 100 of the time it has been a collaborative process of developing policy. At the end of the day the white house cannot implement. I need to work with the departments. Often the biggest challenge is onedepartment is not department executing. It is often interagency. Therefore, you need white house engagement. We are working on all kinds of things. Nsc,ked with the nec, dpc. Often i need them to work interagency and theres not a mechanism set up to deal with certain issues. Sometimes there is, sometimes there is not. I have found it very collaborative. I found it depends on who is leading those policy councils in the white house. Are they an honest broker . It depends on the person and are stuffoing to drive their or going to run an honest process . My experience has been predominantly honest process. At the end of the day, is there its getting reflected on the president and he ultimately decides and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Your opinion prevails or doesnt but that the president prerogative to do that. It 85 of the time or more, its been an absolutely fair process and collaborative to try to get to an out come we are trying to achieve. Periodically, someone will drive something because either the president has decided already or that someone else, its their style. Sometimes thats needed to drive an agenda for the president. This is where the president needs to go and we need to get in line and figured that out and then what you might be doing is saying how do we shape that in a productive fort all of the stakeholders that could be affected by a decision. That what you get the best outcome. At the end of the day, you have to acknowledge that that is the system. What should the size of the white house be in the white house staff . I dont have an opinion about that. I have found the most important thing is what you said which is relationships and is it collaborative or not. There is also perspective that you may not have. We think as we run our departments that we have a relatively decent handle on whats going on in our department but there are many that thengs going on president is trying to balance. Can we keep going . [indiscernible] ok. I have more questions. Madam secretary, you said policy is driven by budget. In the last several years, we have not seen a budget passed by congress. How does that affect policy . I dont really see budgets eating past the way they used to. That was my question as well. [laughter] whats the impact of congressional legit dysfunction on the impact of your agency . Its a huge challenge. Likefunny way, often shared services we are trying to implement to run our organization more efficiently and more effectively get more value for the taxpayer. Its not that much money in the of a multibilliondollar budget. Having a budget really matters because this is a change from the way we have operated before. You need approval and appropriations for that. It is huge in terms of being able to run more effectively and efficiently and get the best value for the taxpayer. Did you have any problems with that muc. Each year looks different. Maybe your agency has hundreds of millions of dollars. Is different and the opportunities are different and if you have a static budget and cases, and in many the line items are designated specifically. At the small Business Administration, i had latitude with my budget and when i went to hud, every penny was designated to line items. The budget process goes early and goes long. Get a budget,u the world has changed and you dont have flexibility to make good decisions. I need training dollars for my people because ive got an issue they need to learn about. In duald to put authentication. Stuff thatts simple you just it could be a million dollars. Thats a lot of money, dont get me wrong, but in the context of the multibilliondollar budget we are running, the ability to move 1 million should not mean you should do back flips to take care of an urgent need. Another question how about over there . The concern i have in the transition process is that we go to deep in appointing people. In some cases, we go down to the Office Director level, well below deputies and secretaries and that seems to me to make the transition that much harder. It touldnt we limit assistant secretary or higher . I think that would make the transition easier. I dont disagree with you but i do think if you have a policy agenda as president , you need to go down to a certain level of leadership to effectuate that. I think there is a reality to that. I think the bigger problem the other thing is, the career team keeps things going and the lights stay on. Bring thetrying to agency in a different direction, you need the leadership down to a particular level. If that covers all 6000 or whatever the number is. It takes too long for people to get through. Itgress has continually used as a lever to do other things. Theyre really has to be you elected a president and you need to let him or her bring in their team and get them and get on with running the country. Its fundamentally detrimental to the country not to have leadership in these roles. I couldnt agree more. Right here this question is for both of you. Back in theto go First Six Months of your tenure, how would you approach it . How would you spend your time . Adviseow would you career Civil Servants the first six month of a new leaders tenure . I will start. The biggest thing i would say for the new person coming in is listen very hard and figure out what needs to happen. Understand what the white house expectations are. Ultimately, your priority needs to be their priorities. How your agency can be more effective and listen hard to your people to do it. Is so much that we do that has nothing to do with politics and everything there are great programs out there that are not effective because they are not run well or dont have the tools or technology or whatever. My advice would be to listen hard to your people pulling together in a very organized way and develop an agenda. Tellers and communicated out to your people and let them know they are part of it just the five pillars. One of the things that surprised ie most when i came in have always been in in formal situations and i have never been called anything but my first name and i started walking to meeting some people referred to me in the third person and they were sitting next to me and it was a strange thing. Whichwas a degree to people did not address you. Get emails from employees every day will stop i call them up and i get them to the right place and thats how i learn. Its hard to tap into that. See an openness as a career person, figure out how to be creative in getting your recommendations to the new leader. Its great stuff in a really helps. I want to build on that. You have heard me talk about the budget and Strategic Planning and things like that. Down this to break very stratified structure and , in aity that exists is day and age when organizations need to be flatter and information needs to travel more quickly, these departments are structured in a way where you walk in and everybody stands up and then they call you. Its like they are there is somebody else they are talking to. They dont tell you anything. They have to go through 16 other people before the information gets to you. By the time against you, its so old its out of date. Its crazy. One of the challenges we found was how to streamline all of that and how to break all of that down. You dont want to break all of it down because you need the organizations are too large to just have a completely flat organization. You do need to break down enough of it and as a leader, you can set that tone. You can responsiveness i do everything from we take great pride if you bring an issue to us, we know how many days it is until we have responded on an issue as a thirdparty. We know how many days it takes to get a letter out and how my days it takes to respond to members of congress. It is interesting when the white house calls and says what about that letter and we say we already responded. Trying we think of ourselves in a service business. As part of what we do. Sometimes you need 16 other people to come together in order to respond to some very complicate questions. It takes more time but the stuff the more you can do to develop trust and greater transparency, i think in this city, buys you more credibility and buys you more credit flexibility. Thats hard to earn. You have to earn it. Nobody just gives it to you because you show up. That becomes the most valuable thing you have is your reliability and your dependability, i think. Its the moderators prerogative for the last question. Its often said that you guys operate in a fishbowl. The funny thing about the fishbowl, its true anyone can look in but for the public, they dont Pay Attention to a lot of the things you do day to day. But there are groups either special interest or constituencies that pay incredible attention. How can you make sure your department is not get pushed around by the special interests who make a lot of noise and can make a lot of trouble for you to the detriment of what you consider to be the Public Interest . You have to be a leader. At some point, you have to stand up and say no, we are not going in that direction and understand the consequences. Often, you may not get to make that choice by yourself. You may have to convince others to go along. As a secretary, as a cabinet member and the leader of a department, i can weigh in and say we are trying to deal with between the health of our fish population and the fact that we have no water for growing food in california. We have to figure out how do we solve those problems . Political. Ake it you are basically saying we have a responsibility. Lets look at where our responsibility is an balance that. Issues. In on different they are hard. To keep thehallenge in theircial interests places . Is that a big challenge of the job . Yes, it can be. Absolutely. These are folks lets assume are sincere. They you have to try often balancing. When you are in the leadership position, you are trying to deal with, i hear you and if you think its a legitimate issue, often you are trying to deal with things that may be semiirreconcilable. The other challenge of course is you dont want to you need to make sure you really understand the fact or the science or whatever is at stake so that and theitimate decisionmaking that goes on. The Organization Needs clarity on what youre doing and why you are doing it and i agree that you need to be out front of these issues. Reassuring for the broader team to see you out front. Easyer, its very especially on political issues for the team to lineup against the good guys and the bad guys and you have to take that off the table. Agree if they dont with you politically, it does not make them a bad guy and you have to meet with those people and listen to them and say im not going to go down this path and let me tell you why. I want to keep the dialogue and if we go down this path, maybe we can modify it. I cant get to a lot of the issues. There has to be an openness and a willingness to realize that you are serving in your capacity the whole country. You are serving all of these interests and to some degree, there are ways you can work with almost everybody. What i found a some of the people when you walk into those situations who are the most charged