My Experience with Bureaucracy in America
Public attention gets the government's attention. Attention to the right details improves results. It's our responsibility to put public attention on the right details.
After teaching high school algebra in Baltimore, I served three tours of duty in local government—Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Denver—working on every major policy and operational area at the city level: crime and policing, fire and emergency services, water and sewer infrastructure, transportation infrastructure and investment, utilities, homelessness, public health, housing development and permitting, 911 call center operations, disaster response, election integrity, and solid waste collection. If it was part of city operations, I probably worked on it in some form.
One thing became clear: public pressure can drive productive change, but only if it’s applied to the right levers.
Public attention is the primary force behind action in City Hall. When leadership senses that the public is paying attention—often via the press—it creates a strong incentive to overcome bureaucratic inertia. But if attention is focused on the wrong issue, or the right issue in an ineffective way, the result isn’t meaningful reform—but a flurry of performative action that ultimately changes nothing.
Too often, that’s exactly what happens.
I saw it firsthand. Many times, the issue dominating public discussion was something I was actively working on behind the scenes, and the way it was framed was almost always a distortion of the reality. This worked to the bureaucracy’s advantage: if the conversation misses the core problem, the bureaucracy avoids real accountability. Sometimes, it’s even worse—City Hall pushes agencies to create the appearance of responsiveness, wasting resources on efforts that don’t improve outcomes. Citizens see movement but no real results. Over time, they begin to question everything: Does public pressure even matter? Do officials care? Can government actually change?
The answer is yes—but only when pressure is informed and sustained.
Government performs better when agencies are required to answer rigorous, well-informed questions. I know this because I was the one inside government asking them.
Lessons from CitiStat: The Power of the Right Questions
My first experience with this was in Baltimore as an analyst in the Office of CitiStat. People hear that CitiStat is a “data-driven management program” and think it is a software program consisting of a bunch of dashboards displaying agency performance. That is incorrect. Instead, it is a continuous improvement cycle where data plays a central role - encapsulated by the four tenets of the program.
It’s not a data dashboard but a process that gives the organization the opportunity to ask and answer questions such as:
How many times did a resident complain about missing trash pick-up this past week? What procedural breakdown occurred to cause those misses?
Why is the process designed this way if we know it leads to dissatisfaction?
Can we adjust that internal regulation since it is no longer relevant and prevents us from delivering this service effectively?
My role was to collect data, set the agenda, and prepare departments for these discussions. Every two weeks, department leadership stood at a podium facing a panel including the Mayor, Chief of Staff, and other department heads, answering direct questions about the current state of department operations based on the brief that I compiled.
I had enormous power in this process, and there was an easy way of doing the job by taking a shallow approach. I could make a big deal about a single service request that the department failed to complete properly. I could throw a picture on the screen of something done poorly, the Chief of Staff could ask, “What happened here?”, and the department head would have to stand there and answer for it regardless of whether it was illustrative of a larger issue or just a one-off mistake. I could put an agenda together one week that covered three or four particular issues, and then jump to a set of completely different issues a few weeks later. This approach would piss off the department head, but after suffering through it for an hour, the department could carry on largely unaffected by what we had discussed.
Fortunately, I had a humbling experience as a teacher prior to this, so my sympathy for front-line public servants led me to take a different approach.1 I wanted to know what I was talking about before taking anyone to task for failing to perform.
So I set out to learn the system from the inside. I got out of my office at every opportunity to understand how my assigned departments functioned. I went on ride-alongs with parking agents and police officers, picked through trash with code enforcement officers, visited the central garage where city vehicles were maintained and repaired, and sat with division chiefs, supervisors, and clerical staff countless times to understand and map processes.
Yes, this process was still intrusive for the departments. They had to answer my calls, give me access to data, make time to discuss their processes with me, and let me attend internal management meetings. I was relentless at chasing down information. But I was operating in good faith to fully understand city operations and translate those operational realities into actionable insights.
In this way, I used the venue as a way to educate myself and everyone else in the room on the operational and policy issues impacting performance. By doing that well, the tougher conversations about what was broken and how to fix it came naturally, increasing the odds that the departments would take action. The best department heads recognized this and used the process as a way to manage their own teams better. If I asked the right questions, they could use the venue to get the right solutions.
The Path Forward: Holding Ourselves Accountable
If we want government to work better, we need to ask the right questions.
That requires understanding how bureaucracy actually works—its structure, its incentives, and its operational challenges. If citizens and journalists don’t understand these details, they won’t know what to ask, and public pressure will continue to be misapplied, leading to more frustration and inertia.
We need to hold ourselves accountable for learning how government works so we can hold public officials accountable in ways that drive real change.
I don’t want to pretend that I was the only CitiStat analyst to figure out this approach. My boss and Deputy Mayor at the time, Christopher Thomaskutty, sent me in the right direction. Peter O’Malley, and several other mentors, also graciously showed me the proper way to approach the role.