Watching government at work makes your head hurt. I unfortunately torture myself this way due to my interest in public education and public service in general. One of many examples, and perhaps the proverbial straw, was watching my colleague—now chair in UC Berkeley EECS—testify at the state legislature regarding math standards. It’s truly bizarre to see the dishonesty that he combated repeatedly from the same people as the issue wound its way through various legislative committees. He proved their statements false repeatedly, and yet the dishonesty continued from the very same advocates and legislators. This is, unfortunately, too often the norm in these systems. Everyone begs for the ear of someone more powerful, and the most insistent and motivated (not necessarily for the right reasons) eventually get through.
To be sure, I experienced the same thing with my 10-year efforts to address the administrative bloat at UC Berkeley, which just continually grew to over $30,000 per student per year—totaling $1.3 billion for non-academic salaries alone at Berkeley. Direct teaching support runs less than half of that! We were awful ten years ago—even the CFO agreed that if we were merely comparable to UCSB in overhead, we would save hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet, our administration only grew. See Administrative Bloat.
Those at the top are more interested in “leading”—whatever that means—rather than actually running things. This “leadership” seems primarily to yield high salaries for executives and, more importantly, vast armies of subordinates around them. This also happens in government, where running efficiently for the public good is lost in a sea of political posturing and special interests. Indeed, as a candidate, one gets position questionnaires from loads of interest groups: gun groups, anti-gun groups, farm groups, ecological groups, etc. I personally am not exposed to the corporate pressures (yet), but they certainly play the game even more centrally - representatives are outnumbered by lobbyists (themselves often former representatives) 20 to 1. There is nothing better than democracy, but it’s messy, and such things create the candidates we have.
One shouldn’t lose sight of the duty to just run things as well as possible, carefully balancing concerns and tradeoffs. California is a single party state and the governor can actually focus on carefully balancing tradeoffs rather than make poor compromises (or purely political plays). I know tradeoff and compromise sound the same, but somehow they often work out differently. In theory, democracy serves the various stakeholders but in practice isn’t working here in California as politics, professional manipulators, and special interests reward style over the boring work of actually running things.
In this context, I noticed that you could get on the ballot for some relatively modest fees and was joking to my friends about it. The campaign slogan would be simple: “Anybody is better than those guys.”
But actual governance is better characterized as: efficient, effective, and humane.
I’m a fairly normal guy—and I care deeply about my students. But I am also a numbers, algorithms, and optimization guy; efficiency, effectiveness, and the purpose of it all drive me. I read academic and policy papers on what actually works, primarily in education and health, but also nerd out on whatever topic I encounter. I use data to analyze systems—to help run programs, to expose the excesses of our bureaucracies, or to understand the effectiveness of policies in K-12 education. I am awed by government’s power and responsibility to keep things running and help people. Indeed, my obsession with systems and their efficiency is a bit weird, but it is useful for governance.
So I pulled the trigger. Starting with forms, then payments. I started taking it seriously, because the stakes are so high, and I really do believe that we can do better. There is no Obama here. The current slogans being slung around are pandering and don’t reveal an understanding of the complexity of the tradeoffs.
While I was gathering signatures, I asked a young man to sign my nomination papers noting the rate of new laws passed in California.
He signed and told me about his father, who had pieced together a living doing multiple part-time jobs, like street sweeping. But when the state passed AB5—a massive new law attempting to force companies to give part-time contractors full benefits—his father didn’t get benefits. He just lost his work. The law’s massive, sprawling provisions effectively destroyed his livelihood. The law delivers benefits to some and harm to others. We must honestly acknowledge that harm, and actively work to minimize it.
For the record, the Governor signed 794 bills into law just last year. The sheer volume of new laws means that legislation is often rushed, poorly vetted, and drafted by special interests. We are drowning under unchecked legislative volume that crushes regular people.
Just Say No
Why 794 bills? Reasons include full-time legislators, motivations to please voters with 12-year limits to move up, the lobbyists (often enough former legislators) outnumbering legislators, and to be fair, some idiosyncrasies like naming a park requiring a bill.
A powerful tool for the Governor is to just say no. The legislature’s built-in incentive is always to pass more bills, but ultimately, the Governor has the power to stop them—or to demand legislation that authentically simplifies and improves life in California. Because California is effectively a single-party state, the Governor owes no political debt to constant partisan compromise. This should grant the executive the freedom to simply do what is best for the state. Instead, what seems to have happened is a constant pandering to the wackiest, loudest elements of the political base rather than serving the public good.
To be sure, pragmatic governance is possible. In his second stint, Governor Jerry Brown proceeded thusly: he asked voters to pass taxes when revenues were down to support schools, yet, in general, he spent less and held the line against endless legislative expansion. More recently, Governor Gavin Newsom demonstrated similar pragmatism by aggressively pushing exemptions to correct the systemic misuse of CEQA, which had historically been weaponized to make housing development prohibitively expensive without delivering actual environmental benefits.
The governor should use the veto aggressively to restore that balance: veto bills that create sprawling new regulatory frameworks without fully offsetting the burden by repealing outdated regulations. The default stance of the executive must be a relentless search to simplify and reduce regulatory burdens.
We must raise the threshold for adding complexity to the State of California. Indeed, we should work to reduce it. It’s possible that the problems of our own creation can be addressed as Newsom has shown with CEQA (to an extent). There is more to do.
Execution
But government is not just about blocking bad laws; it is about administering the ones we have and handling 300B dollars in expenses and managing 260000 state employees, 300000 contractors, and relationships with a slew of other organizations ranging from local governments to the University systems. The state government is a massive operational and organizational apparatus.
Technical experts - working with civil servants - must relentlessly understand the moving parts and how to optimize them to better serve the people of California. It’s not about political wins but hard, even painstaking work to understand how to provide benefit and care to people as effectively and efficiently as reasonably possible.
Specific Examples
Here we discuss three important examples:
1. Resolving the Learning Crisis (Education): Currently, only about 36% of our K-12 education budget is spent directly on teaching within the classroom. California has failed vulnerable students at the most basic task: learning to read. We must aggressively reallocate funding away from bureaucratic overhead and directly into the pockets of the teachers working with students. At the same time, we need to strip away ideological fads from our teaching methods and mandate evidence-based reading and mathematics instruction statewide (see my School Partisan Analysis for detailed numbers on district performance with regard to where things work better in California). A specific problem is the State Board of Education, which is occupied by advocates who have failed repeatedly and yet continue to inject failed and expensive approaches into our schools. Really, paying the teachers more seems more just and likely effective than the monies spent on these magical ideas which delivered worse reading performance for our most vulnerable kids than that of Missisippi and other extremely poor states.
2. Public Sector Accountability (Administrative Bloat):
The State Government has 260000 employees and 300000 contractors, careful accounting of the costs and the services provided is warranted. For example, the prison system itself employs 60000 people and costs roughly 15B to run, amid a (thankfully) declining prison population (and thus a 160K/prisoner cost). There are opportunities here to save. To be sure, our recividism rate is not good, with these costs, one should examine every technique (even expensive ones) to reduce it.
In education as well, one needs to make the hard choices to enact cuts when certain roles are no longer needed. For example, with declining K-12 enrollment, we should take the opportunity to move funds elsewhere, or at the very least pay our remaining K-12 teachers more while reducing other costs.
We refer the reader to this question, where we summarize the expenditures of the state government. It’s an interesting read.
3. Regulations as Drag: We need to reduce the crippling regulatory friction that blocks both public infrastructure and private development of housing. There has been progress made recently, and that that needs to continue. We must make it vastly easier and cheaper to build robust power grids, upgrade water reservoirs, and expand housing capacity so that basic utilities and housing are affordable for regular Californians. There has been recent progress (e.g., CEQA abuses that prevent housing from being built), but it needs to continue and be monitored. Regulations should continue to be reviewed and streamlined.
To be sure, optimization across the vast areas of government (300 Billion in expenditures) is a massive undertaking and to be fair, many people are working on them. But too often entrenched interests drown out those common sense voices that ask the obvious questions when magical and complex solutions are proposed and implemented. Ultimately, the Governor must answer and act for these people.
Professional Bio
Government requires practical experience, such as managing a job site, running a small business, or organizing a community group. My experience is in public education, as a professor at UC Berkeley. (I like you, have done other things. See my bio.)
When people think of a university professor, they may picture someone giving a lecture and retreating to an office. But at a massive public institution like UC Berkeley, the reality is much more hands-on. I have taught Discrete Math, Probability, Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Programming, and Pedagogy. Generally, the courses I teach are very large—typically 500 to 800 students at a time. Running a class at that scale requires far more than just giving a lecture; it requires active, daily interaction with students—ranging from teaching, to administrivia, to accommodating various crises. It means constantly designing and revising materials and policies to meet their broad, diverse needs. To make that happen, I hire, supervise, and frankly, learn from dozens of vibrant young people on my course staff.
We also must handle whatever comes our way. During COVID, we built new tools from scratch to handle remote exams, catch misconduct, and grade massive numbers of papers fairly. During labor actions, I have to thread the needle—respecting course staff while still serving my students.
My academic work focuses on designing algorithms—with a particular focus on optimization. Algorithms are essentially provably efficient, effective methods for solving problems. Addition is an example of an algorithm, and without it, monetary systems don’t work. Of course, my work is far less central (see Google Scholar). In academia, being “world famous” can mean some guy in Japan read one of your papers once. That being said, my knowledge is reasonably complete with respect to techniques in algorithms and optimization.
For professors at public institutions, public service is a core part of the job. Over the years, I have conducted extensive data analysis on university budgets and public school performance. I am a student of K-12 education policy, drawing heavily from my time serving on the Berkeley High School Site Council, and, of course, I am intimately familiar with higher education through my decades of work as a college instructor and teaching Pedagogy.
Beyond the classroom and the lab, professors across the UC and State University systems are active in running the institutions themselves. We participate in the design of new majors, set admissions standards, and establish the broader academic policies that govern these universities—overseeing everything from student discipline and faculty conflicts of interest, to the evaluation of peers and the rigorous review of scientific results. We are constantly forced to weigh the dual mandates of public education: maintaining elite, world-class standards while ensuring the broadest possible access for the public.
That experience—managing large teams, building systems to adapt to sudden crises, rigorously analyzing data to understand what actually works, and navigating trade-offs between competing interests—is all driven fundamentally by a dedication to public service, rather than to a company’s bottom line.